Is-ness and ought-ness

When it comes to moral judgments, it seems to me there are two ditches on either side of right thinking that one can fall into. The first is to equate “is-ness” with “ought-ness,” that is, to sanction whatever happens to be as the way it always should have been and should continue to be. This is the error deterministic naturalists and fatalists make. The more reprehensible aspects of this approach can be seen in evolutionary psychologists who would, for instance, justify the behavior of an unchaste man with multiple sexual partners because he is merely following his ancestral instincts; or who would excuse a pedophile because he cannot help but obey some inborn orientation.

Of course, anyone who has ever been justly upset with someone else rejects this moral approach, at least functionally. The words “right” and “wrong” still communicate something in our increasingly profligate age.

As C.S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity, we all have an innate sense of right and wrong that doesn’t always square with the way the world happens to be. And this moral sense, when we are not suppressing it in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18), drives us to search for a system grounded outside of ourselves, if morality is to have any communicable meaning, and also outside of what simply happens to be.

But there is another pitfall on the other side that is equally dangerous. This is the error that concludes, upon observing the incongruity between the “is-ness” of the world and the “ought-ness” of our moral sense, that nothing is the way it should be, and that all reality is misleading us. If true, then everything that happens to be must be rejected for some other way that it could be or should be.

This error can be seen in extreme forms of progressivism, utopianism, and techno-futurism. It can also be observed in conscious (and unconscious) Gnosticism that seeks a platonic spirituality transcending the material world, which is seen as irredeemably compromised or evil. Of course, this radical approach to “ought-ness,” untethered as it is from “is-ness,” carries one to very subjective places. Everything is up for redefinition. Nothing is a “good” to be conserved, because nothing is “good” to begin with. Try finding your bearing in what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity.” Or when “all that is solid melts into air,” as Karl Marx opined.

In other words, on either side is nihilism all the way down: deterministic nihilism on the one hand, collapsing the distinction between “is-ness” and “oughtness,” and indeterminate nihilism on the other, arbitrarily separating “is-ness” and “oughtness” altogether.

What then? The Christian doctrine of Creation and the Fall is the only sound foundation that can ground a sane and satisfying approach to the moral question of “is-ness” versus “ought-ness.”

What do I mean? The Christian faith teaches that God created the world originally good (is-ness) according to His design and purposes (ought-ness) in line with His character and revelation as recorded in Genesis 1 and 2. But in Genesis 3, sin entered the world through man when he disobeyed God’s command, which resulted in the original goodness of the world being marred and defaced—but, importantly, not completely erased.

In this way, the Christian approach to “ought-ness” is grounded in the “is-ness” of Genesis 1 and 2 and God’s original purposes and revelation according to His nature, not simply in the “is-ness” of a post-Genesis 3 world. We expect to find in the world some aspects of “is-ness” that carry over from God’s original design, before sin entered the world—what theologians call “goodness” or “Nature,” depending on the moral frame—and some aspects of “is-ness” that are the result of the Fall—what theologians refer to as “fallenness” or “evil,” again, depending on the moral frame. Herein lies the Christian “ought.” There are some things that are that should be embraced and encouraged to continue (like marriage, family, sunrises, and laughter), and there are some things that are that should be rejected, opposed, or lamented (like murder, falsehood, tsunamis, and LGBT ideology).

I believe this is what Jesus modeled when confronted in Matthew 19 on the question of divorce. Initially, Jesus responds to his challengers by quoting from Genesis 1 and 2, thus grounding his ethical vision in pre-Fall creation. But his opponents were ready for this, and they wanted to see if he would contradict Moses, even as they recognized the distance between this moral vision and the way the world is, even the “is-ness” of Moses’s administration in the Scriptures. Jesus’ response in Matthew 19:8 is perfect, and it contains a whole world of ethical consideration:

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”

We live in a post-Genesis 3 world, where sin has compromised God’s original design. But “from the beginning it was not so.” Which means, we ought to appeal to the “beginning,” to God’s original creation, the original “is-ness,” in order to ground our moral “ought-ness,” which we know through God’s revelation. Without an original vision of the good, we do not know the good to pursue. Thankfully, the Christian faith gives us both vision and purpose in God’s revelation, an “is” and an “ought” worth living for.