An Editorial at the NY Times Asserts our Children Don’t Believe in Moral Facts

Last updated on: March 20, 2015 at 12:08 am by Mark Shea

An Editorial at the NY Times Asserts our Children Don’t Believe in Moral Facts 2015-03-11T08:01:38-07:00 Mark Shea

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I’m skeptical. While it’s true our children are coming to believe that a very different set of things are patient of ambiguity than we are, I don’t see much in the way of disbelief in moral facts when it comes to things they see as right and wrong. My kids evince the same sense of simple idealistic justice about those they regard as downtrodden as my generation did about those we regarded as downtrodden. Like all young people, they have a sharp sense of outraged justice when they see injustice. What they lack (like most young people) is the philosophical equipment to explain that sense of injustice, as well as the training to tell the difference between real and apparent injustice.

That’s not terribly surprising to me, since even (and indeed especially) those in my generation who have, for years, claimed to be the true defenders of the Church’s moral teaching vs. those Damn Libruls have, in the past ten years, made extremely clear that they have, by and large, no more interest in that teaching when it gets in their way then the Damn Libruls. It should not stun us when our children (who generally have excellent BS detectors) grow up watching “prolife” people talking about fidelity to God’s revelation and the Church suddenly flip out and start attacking the pope for such crimes as not being sufficiently brutal to the poor, not supporting unjust war, failing to be eager to euthanize prisoners, not cheering for the nuclear abortion of children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and fighting tooth and claw to defend the torture and murder of prisoners with little concern even for such questions as their innocence. If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?

Children raised in that environment don’t seem to me to disbelieve in moral facts so much as to be searching for them and finding them in either certitude of relativism or in certitude of fanaticism (or in becoming comfortably number).

But those who do speak to moral issues seem to me to show that Chesterton is probably closer to the mark when he says, “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” Idealism will always belong to the young. But merely being idealistic and longing to throw oneself body and soul into a cause is not enough. Bolsheviks and Nazis did that. What is needed is real moral formation. God help us give it.

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