Global Dialogues

Every semester I ask students to write a short essay on the causes of goodness in their life. They invariably speak of family and friends. When I ask about the role of the state in making them good, they laugh, but when I probe, they acknowledge that laws and institutions ensure conditions for all to flourish. Still, their first response is moral subjectivism. Morals boil down to personal relations.

Despite doubts about democracy, people want authority over their destinies without state intervention, yet the consequences are devastating when we lead with moral subjectivism. Is a president to be regulated if markets and life decisions are not? How can we forge a common life with no common morals?

We no longer trust institutions, but moral subjectivism only leads to culture wars. Are we caught in a false dichotomy, between decisionism, where all call the shots unregulated, from college students to bitcoin entrepreneurs, and normativism, where elites call for overlapping consensus, but the norms they lay down only create a false meritocracy?

Saint Augustine decried those who allege that moral truth is a mirage, since cultures disagree on morals. Such relativists ignore the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you wish to be treated.” This principle, he argued, is unalterable and universal. No group can claim supremacy in its name without other groups pushing back in its name. The Creator has written it on the hearts of all. In that sense, all are moral authorities.

Modern thinkers trivialize the Golden Rule but miss its background. Jesus said it sums up divine revelation (“the law and the prophets,” Matthew 7:12). The church fathers associated it with the wisdom of the Creator, who shines the sun, sends down rain, on good and bad alike. The Creator is kind to all, and so should we be. It’s narcissistic to think our morals boil down to personal relations. We are moral authorities only when we treat all—all—as we wish to be treated.

The Cold War gave us moral clarity, but even in post-religious circles, it’d be wrong to say there’s no moral authority over all. Our own nature calls us to a kind of mutuality, where we treat all with dignity, as we’d wish. When we do, we enjoy a moral authority, and so, too, do our laws and institutions, when they create the conditions for all to flourish, as the Golden Rule dictates.

Paul Heck is a professor of theology and Islamic studies at Georgetown University.