Tag Archives: form

Pears in a Tree
Morality
0

Morality Part 4: Form, Inform, and Follow

When I do laundry, after washing and drying, I’ll transport the clean clothes to the couch.  The couch and coffee table are my folding zone, a task I’ll tackle while watching Netflix, talking on the phone, or visiting with a close friend (one whom I am secure enough to expose my family’s laundry to).  The reality is that the folding does not happen immediately.  Often the couch is buried amid several loads of clean laundry.  Yes, I’ll get to it.  Eventually.  The thing is that my kids will want to actually use the couch to sit on, despite the piles of clean laundry.  Sometimes I take a little too long to get around to folding; I take responsibility for this.

Other times, like today, I’m within the margin of acceptable laundry-folding time. Regardless, the clean laundry got knocked off the couch by one of my kids.

Me: Who knocked the laundry basket off the couch and onto the floor?

Max: I fink I did it.  I’m sowwy, Mommy.  I didn’t mean to.


I know that he didn’t intentionally, maliciously knock my laundry on the floor, but still.  He could’ve been more careful.  And even if it was an accident, he could’ve fixed it.

photo

While laundry on the couch isn’t one of the most pressing moral issues of our time, this conversation with my 6 year-old does provide a framework for examining moral responsibility.

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Molding clay
Morality
1

Morality Part 3: Forming Your Conscience

I have my Grandmom’s chin.  So does my mother, my aunts and uncles, most of my cousins, and my younger son.  When I was a teen, I noticed that Grandmom’s sister, Aunt Helen has this same chin, and when she agrees with you on something, she sticks out that pointy chin, presses her lips together, and v-e-r-y slowly nods her head three or four times.  Then I noticed that Grandmom often does the same thing.  And so does my Mom.  And now I even do it.

Grandmom and Aunt Helen

There are things we pick up from our family of origin whether we like it or not.  Some of them are innocuous and make us smile.  Other times, it’s a bad habit–or worse an immoral behavior.

What if a person was raised in a racist home?  How can we say that’s wrong if that’s what they were taught?

When discussing morality, lots of attention is given to the importance of following one’s conscience.  In Morality Part 2, I explained the difference between conscience and superego.

Conscience and Superego

Superego has its place in forming our conscience, but they are not the same thing.  From childhood to adulthood, we must transition from an external voice of moral authority to listening to the inner voice of our conscience.  The Greek philosopher Plato explored this idea in both The Republic and Meno.  Recognizing that one’s conscience reflects genuine internal decision, he asked:

Can you teach someone to be virtuous?

You can teach someone what is right, but for them to be truly virtuous, they must actually choose it for themselves.  So how do we actually teach virtue?  We teach virtue in three different ways, during three different stages of life.

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