Soccer Dad

Secular Morality

Biur Chametz quotes at length from an article making a liberal case against gay marriage. At the center of the argument is, as Zman Biur puts it:

Along the way, she makes what one might call a secular liberal argument for sanctity, and for recognition by the secular state of what one might call sacred events.

She doesn't call it that at all, but she effectively argues that certain life experiences, such as birth and death, are so inherently invested with transcendent significance that any society, no matter how secular or rationalist, must accord them special treatment. Sounds like sanctity to me.

I haven't spent the time reading the original article, but I remember an essay from a while back that seemed to make a similar argument. The essay was actually a chapter (I think) from James Q. Wilson's "The Moral Sense" that appeared in Commentary (June 1993) under the name "What is Moral?". Wilson explains that our commitments may define morality:

Though the moral senses make partially competing claims upon us, they all share--in their origin and their maintenance--the notion of commitment. Marriage differs from sexual congress because the former involves a commitment. Raising children in a family differs from raising them in a foster home or an orphanage in that the parents do so out of a commitment to the welfare of the child, whereas surrogate parents, however fond they may become of the child, are in part motivated by financial advantage.

The child instinctively wishes to please its parents but in time must learn that it is not enough to please them when they are watching; he is expected to please them when they are not watching as well, which will only occur if he is committed to them. When a child forms friendships, he takes on commitments to peers and expects commitments in return; they test these commitments with games and teasings that challenge one another's self-control, sense of fair play, and obligation to honor the group and its members.

Similarly, employees are hired not simply in the expectation that every day their productivity will exceed their costs, but out of a desire to bring them into a commitment. Since the boss cannot closely supervise more than a few workers all of the time, he wants the workers to make a commitment that when he is not watching they will, up to a point, make his interests their interests. By the same token, employees do not view their employers simply as entities that pay wages, but also as people who have assumed obligations.

I'm surely not doing Wilson any justice. I just remember being very favorably impressed by Wilson's arguments at the time, though I haven't re-read the essay recently. I probably should.
And since the subject of Zman Biur's interest was homosexual marriage, Wilson has written "Against Homosexual Marriage." I don't remember the essay so I can't recommend it. But Zman Biur might be interested still.

Posted by SoccerDad at August 19, 2004 03:20 AM | TrackBack