Deep Questions

We have deep questionings within ourselves. They are the essential and unavoidable questions of everyday life. They include what is good and what is evil. They are questions about morality and ethics, ultimately for believers they are also about God.

God is the only Good. God is unchanging, moral concepts change as social life changes. The ancient Homeric Greeks saw good as kingly, powerful, courageous, clever and wealthy. It basically came down to pleasure and pain. It is very different to our ideas of good in many contexts with our more modern beliefs in self interest and altruism, utility, justice and rights, human nature and freedom. Our beliefs about good also include the belief that only God knows good and we can never know for sure by ourselves what good is but can do our best with our gifts of conscience and reason. We have moral autonomy, the freedom to act and be responsible for our actions. The voice of conscience speaks to our hearts in a kind of interior dialogue. The errors of conscience can be put down to ignorance. It may be a culpable ignorance. We must make an effort to be sure, to be more perfect. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is forbidden to us. According to the story, Adam and Eve were told they could not know good and evil and become like gods and live. When they overstepped the mark, their wilful pride was punished with the nemesis God warned them about.

We may not think we are called to perfection but we are. In our relationships and work we are expected to do our best, to strive for perfection. Our employers and clients want the best we can give. They expect us to perform to the best of our abilities and so we should. Extended to everyone as it is meant for everyone, it involves a kind of teleology, wanting something better from urge or necessity, but the ends do not justify the means.

The conditions for moral growth include maturity in self giving to which freedom is called. They also include interiorising the demands of the moral life. The moral life is demanding as new questions and problems arise in social and cultural life, politics, science and technology which affect the future for us all.