[subversiveasset]

Roy wrote:

Your authority as parents only goes so far. Soon enough kids will discover that “because I said so” doesn’t hold water. Teaching kids to think about consequences and make good decisions is good but is not absolute – sometimes two good choices are competing etc. For example suppose that you child is in college and wants to move in with their girlfriend/boyfriend as a trial marriage. There are benefits to such an arrangement and it seems that the two love each other – yet there are also potential pitfall and drawbacks. Your child may consider your advice, determine that they can manage and mitigate the drawbacks and choose to move forward. In the church you can rely on divine authority to bolster your own, it is no longer “because I said so” but also “because the Prophet (and God) said so.”

While we might be willing to accept the consequences of having college kids move in together, what happens if the decision is whether or not to do drugs or strip for extra cash in a night club. Letting kids make their own choices can be scary. OTOH, that is how they grow up…

Note that by the time your kids are in that position (e.g., college), you shouldn’t be using *either* parental or church/God authority. In other words, if the only way to communicate to your children is “because x said so,” that’s precisely the deficit in moral reasoning that I’m referring to.

Believe it or not, but you can make a case against doing drugs, stripping at a night club, etc., that doesn’t ever rely upon “because x said so”.

Roy wrote:

Back to the OP

Quote:

At the very least, I would want any institution (whether it is family, church, school, military, work, etc.,) to teach people that a basis of our morality is harm/care — moral questions are questions about harm being caused to others, or a responsibility to care for others.)

I agree that this is probably the better way, but it also allows the individual to interpret and define “harm” and allows for them to make choices based upon their personal definition that I might not agree with. Sometimes Satan’s plan sounds appealing. Coercion??? Control??? Do I get to be the one doing the coercing?

This is entirely part of the process, though. The thing though is that a harm/care morality relies upon a cultivation of empathy. At this point, i kinda get scared, but I suspect that some people may just not have a minimal sense of empathy (which is why the concept of basing morality around it seems to them like folly.)

Like, if my decision affects another person, then all of a sudden it’s not just my personal definition of harm that matters…it’s my understanding of the other person‘s definition.

It seems to me that if you’re struggling with temptations that you will say are from Satan, you are going to struggle with those regardless of if you have a rule that claims to be “from God” or you have principles about treating people with care and fairness. I would suggest that if the locus of morality is external for you (e.g., “because God said so”) rather than internal (e.g., “because I personally feel pained to see someone else hurt, especially by my hands”), then you’re probably going to be more at risk of making immoral, insensitive choices, because you don’t have anything personal behind your choice (whereas the internally driven person has to live with *themselves*)

[subversiveasset]

Roy wrote:

Quote:

In a 1988 interview Elder Oaks was asked about the priesthood restriction and how the sudden reversal seems to confuse some members.

Elder Oaks said, “If you read the scriptures with this question in mind, “Why did the Lord Command this or why did the Lord command that?” you find that in less than one in a hundred commands was any reason given. It’s not the pattern of the Lord to give reasons. We can put reason to revelation. We can put reasons to commandments. When we do we are on our own. Some people put reasons to the one we’re talking about here, and they turned out to be spectacularly wrong. There is a lesson in that. The lesson I’ve drawn is that I decided a long time ago that I had faith in the command and I had no faith in the reasons that had been suggested for it.”

When asked if the reasons he was talking about include reasons given by GA’s, Elder Oaks responded in part, “The reasons turn out to be man-made to a great extent.”

A) Elder Oaks seem to be discouraging this form of moral reasoning after the fact and rather solely supports “divine will” moral reasoning.

Church in general tends to put forward obedience without knowing why as a virtue. When even formulating apologetic reasoning behind God’s commands can get you into trouble – then the safest route for the faithful member is to obey without question.

C) Now that the new Headings express the priesthood ban as an unispired policy. Doesn’t this throw us back in the conundrum of basing our moral reasoning solely on divine will only later to discover that God might have had nothing to do with it and we were [to use Elder Oaks’ phrasing] “spectacularly wrong?”

I think all of these things are quite troubling, precisely because of point C. Follow divine will — but since we don’t even know how to discern divine will, it’s entirely possible that what you are taught is divine will has nothing to do with it.

As you point out, even formulating apologetic reasoning behind God’s commands is not fool-proof…I don’t want to use that old phrase cynically, but “when the Prophet has spoken, the [moral] thinking is done.”

[subversiveasset]

Thanks, hawkgrrrl, for making this topic.

(I’m Andrew S, the article author, just to clear that up). I just wanted to address some of Roadrunner’s comment:

Roadrunner wrote:

I agreed with and followed the article until the end where he talks about moral reasoning. I read the article twice and the entire point #3 five times and I have to say I don’t quite understand what he considers moral reasoning. I think lots of people in and out of the church are rigid and from what I see its often innate rather than learned. I feel left hanging with end statement about “there has to be a way of thinking about those rules.”

I’m not sure many institutions teach people how to think about morality. Seems you have to take a philosophy course in college to do that. Ive lived a pretty worldly life surrounded by lots of good non LDS folks and they seem as likely as not to have similar moral philosophies. Maybe its a criticism of Christianity rather than Mormonism.

Ill say I like and agree with the three broad points but didn’t quite follow the reasoning especially about rigidity and moral reasoning.

My over simplified view is that many disaffected – certainly not all – don’t believe the doctrines or history. Therefore no reason to live by those doctrines or history. Not much else changes. Maybe that’s the point., that morality isn’t the primary consideration.

In the discussion on the site, someone pointed out (and I concede) that the LDS church does teach a form of moral reasoning — I just find it utterly inadequate. That reasoning basically equates to, “Moral rules exist as God’s commandments. Things are moral or immoral ultimately because God says so.”

The reason why I find this to be inadequate is because if one stops believing in God or stops believing what the LDS church says are God’s words about what is right and wrong, then there is no way to account for that person’s morality after that point. So, for a believer who adopts this moral reasoning, it is incomprehensible how a non-member or non-believer could be moral. If a believer who has adopted this reasoning as his/her sole or primary form of thinking about morality, then when s/he has a crisis of faith, then perhaps s/he really won’t have a solid moral foundation afterward.

I think there are plenty of ways to think about morality other than in a “divine command theory” sort of way. I didn’t want to support specific formulations (although broadly, I probably would support any moral foundation that talks about harm/care and fairness…which, as commenters pointed out in the discussion, that’s a narrow range of the moral foundations actually available to people…see Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations research for more information on that), precisely because I don’t want to give the impression that you need to have a formal philosophy education to think about morality in a systematic way. If that is the case, I find that to be extremely sad, since most people will never take a formal philosophy class.

I should hope that more institutions than a liberal arts philosophy department at universities teach how to think and reason about morality, in contrast to what Roadrunner says that many institutions might not teach how to think about morality.

At the very least, I would want any institution (whether it is family, church, school, military, work, etc.,) to teach people that a basis of our morality is harm/care — moral questions are questions about harm being caused to others, or a responsibility to care for others.)

(As I noted before, this can be problematic, since this is just one foundation possible. But I think it’s a better start than to base morality purely or primarily on the authority of God. In other words, if God tells you to kill your son or to kill the guy keeping your records, the main/primary/only relevant question is not, “Well, is God a valid authority?” or “Am I actually listening to God?” One should have an internal dialogue based on care and harm. I think that many people have reservations against scriptural stories such as this precisely because they do understand that their moral sense takes these things into consideration. And one should recognize that this sort of internal dialogue can occur when one is not part of the church, or when one does not believe in God, or even in spite of one believing in God or being in the church.)

So, to try to bring this around to your last point:

Quote:

My over simplified view is that many disaffected – certainly not all – don’t believe the doctrines or history. Therefore no reason to live by those doctrines or history. Not much else changes. Maybe that’s the point., that morality isn’t the primary consideration.

Where my 3rd point about moral reasoning comes in is here. If one’s only understanding of morality is, “What God has revealed through the church,” then they are believing in moral because of the doctrines. It would then follow that if “many disaffected…don’t believe the doctrines” and have “no reason to live by those doctrines,” then that would lead to a collapse in morality!

I think the reason that you can say, “morality isn’t the primary consideration” (when someone doesn’t believe the doctrines or history) is because you implicitly ground morality in something other than church doctrine. This is my point about moral reasoning — when you have a way of thinking about morality, it doesn’t have to be grounded in church doctrines. If you seek to stay loyal to your significant other , it’s not because you are “following the Law of Chastity,” but because you recognize independently that infidelity causes interpersonal harm, etc., I fear that when people say that disaffected Mormons will lose their morality, what they are actually admitting is that they don’t think such disaffected members have independently reasoned about why various moral rules exist in the first place. If that is the case, why is that? I don’t think that’s an “innate” thing.

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