Right from Wrong

Since my college days, I've considered Franz Jaggerstatter, an Austrian who was among the millions killed by the Nazis in World War II, one of my heroes.

Jaggerstatter was a farmer and miner, born out-of-wedlock to a peasant family at about the time many of our grandparents or great grandparents were born. Said to be on the “wild” side in his youth, he had an out-of-wedlock daughter himself before marrying and settling down. He underwent a religious conversion, and when the Nazis invaded Austria and set up a sham election to gain the forced acceptance of Austrians, Jaggerstatter – recognizing the great evil posed by the Nazis – was the only one in his village to oppose it.

He was drafted into the Nazi army and with no special education or training came to conclude – contrary to the views of his bishop and priests that counseled him and bucking criticism from fellow Catholics who had joined the army  – that joining the fight on behalf of an evil regime would be morally wrong. At 36 years old, he was executed by guillotine in a Nazi prison.

Jaggerstatter knew in his heart that no matter what the vast majority of his co-religionists and others believed, the Nazi regime was a moral evil that had to be resisted. Only God knows, literally, how many of us would have such courage of our convictions. So, how did Jaggerstatter know, and how do we know what’s right?

Recently I’ve been quoting the book, “Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults,” by sociologist Christian Smith. His research of emerging adults shows that most believe the choices between right and wrong are easy and that they usually follow what feels right or wrong. They don’t embrace objective moral standards or ethics “experts.”

Routine decisions we make every day, choices such as whether to return money we’re overpaid in a checkout line; whether to let someone know when we’ve dinged their car; whether to help a friend, may be relatively easy. And I believe most people - young or old, whether aware of it or not – are guided by the objective moral standards they learned at home and/or by the faith they may no longer profess.

It’s the bigger moral and ethical questions that aren’t always easy. Take moral/social issues like abortion, assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, the death penalty, the use of military drones, etc. The solutions to these problems are not obvious, at least they shouldn’t be. With good reason, rational and moral people have differing views on these subjects. And it’s when considering these kinds of issues that people may consciously need to turn to objective moral standards.

In these cases, it’s often too hard to decide on our own among the alternatives and too easy to be swayed by others’ or our own biases. You may be tempted to think of them as just opinions with no real impact. “Who cares what I think?” you may ask. “My opinion isn’t going to matter in the great scheme of things.” But shouldn’t you act on your convictions? Doesn’t your integrity and society’s future depend on it?

The controversy about abortion is a good example. The objective moral standards here are the right of human beings to live and the prohibition against a human taking life. The standards aren’t absolute. Ethicists have traditionally accepted taking a life in participation of a just war or in self defense. But the right-to-life standard should be applied before determining if exceptions are justified. (I believe the right to live, of a human being or potential human being, trumps the other considerations in deciding whether abortion is right or wrong.)

This is an example of the use of objective moral standards as opposed to autonomous decisions. What I believe to be unacceptable is basing moral decisions on “liberal” or “conservative” biases. Deciding whether a fetus should live or die shouldn’t be a matter of bias or political correctness.  

Finally, my religion, Catholicism, and other faiths believe in the primacy of conscience, that you should follow it no matter what but that you must also form your conscience correctly. That includes thoughtfulness and prayer, study and use - consciously or unconsciously - of objective moral standards.

Catholics also believe in the “natural law.” That roughly means that humans come wired with general and basic moral standards. The U.S. Declaration of Independence had a similar notion in its “We hold these truths to be self-evident” phrase, and the idea was at the heart of the famous Nuremburg trials that condemned Nazi leaders who claimed they were merely following orders in murdering millions of Jews and others.  

There’s so much more that could be written on these subjects, and I’ll return to them in future blogs. The point here is that we should, as much as possible, be other Franz Jaggerstatters.