Today's cult of the autonomous self
Dr. Thomas Finegan is Lecturer in Theology, Mary Immaculate College.
Exit polls in the abortion referendum indicated that roughly 80% of people under 50 voted to delete the right to life of the unborn from the Constitution.
These are the children and grandchildren of a society that voted 2:1 to enshrine the unborn’s right to life in the Constitution in 1983.
In 2018, citizens were told clearly what total deletion of the unborn’s right to life would entail: they stared abortion-on-demand in the eyes, and said “yes”.
This cultural about-face occurred in little more than a generation. One generation generally understood that life at all stages is sacred and worthy of protection, the next didn’t.
This paradigm shift occurred on a core element of Christian moral teaching, the sanctity of life.
Why such a radical move away from Christian morality? A primary reason is that today's culture is not neutral as regards the Gospel – it is antagonistic towards it.
Our culture is dominated by the cult of the self-created, autonomous self. It says the individual’s autonomy is the supreme value that ought to govern all political and moral decision making.
Service, sacrifice and self-emptying love have little place here; there is little tolerance of dependency and vulnerability when the dependent and vulnerable drastically limit our autonomy; there is little sense that the sacredness of life does not depend on whether or not we happen to value life.
This culture is fascinated with the power of the autonomous self to self-create and achieve. It is suspicious of anything that limits an individual’s autonomy, especially when the limits are understood to come from virtue, morality or God.
The cult of the autonomous self cannot see how true fulfilment of our God-given nature involves virtuous living and moral development. Our culture is only comfortable with a God who is understood as irrelevant and anodyne.
But if God is presented as he truly is, who calls us to a life of difficult majesty and gifts us the grace to live it, who created our nature according to a wisdom that no autonomous act of ours can overturn, our culture mocks him and his followers as conspirators against autonomy.
The second creation story in Genesis, ending with Adam and Eve’s juvenile rebellion, contains deep truths particularly relevant to our present context.
We cannot remain faithful to both present culture and to the God revealed by that awkward, prophetic and selfless Nazarene 2,000 years ago.
We either live as radical Catholics and Christians unwilling to capitulate to the cult of the self, or we die to a culture that, while beguiling, is ultimately antagonistic towards anything higher than the self and its desires.
There is no neutral, middle ground: our current generation shows this.
Compassion: an absolute moral norm?
Should we act with compassion? Yes. Is acting with compassion a free-standing moral norm unrelated to other moral principles? No.
In the 1930s and 40s the killing of disabled people was justified on the basis of compassion.
Compassion, like empathy, gives us access to the lived reality of another. But by itself it doesn’t tell us what we should do in a given situation. It only ensures that our actions aren’t guided purely by self-interest.
Compassion alone can’t tell us who deserves compassion; nor how we should act towards those deserving compassion in a way consistent with their dignity and our duties towards them.
For a compassionate act to be moral it must abide by various moral truths. One of these truths is that to intentionally kill an innocent person is to fail to treat their life as worth protecting and as equal in dignity to one’s own.
In other words, to intentionally kill another, even if motivated by compassion, is to act as if he or she has no personal value, as if their death is better than their life.
Morally integrated compassion understands that caring is very different from killing.
Seductive secularist slogans
The extent to which Christians adopt secularist slogans and presuppositions when engaging in public debate shows how tempting secularist culture is, even for believers.
A current example is the right to conscientious objection for doctors in the context of legalised abortion. Pro-lifers sometimes defend this right on the basis of a “right to choose”.
They argue that if society believes in the right to procure abortion on the basis of a right to choose, then, for the sake of consistency, it should also uphold a doctor's right not to choose abortion.
But the real basis for the right to conscientious objection is very different from this so-called “right to choose”.
Conscientious objection is the right to honour what one sees as moral truth, particularly in cases where obedience to moral truth prevents one from performing or co-operating with something intrinsically and seriously wrong.
The “right to choose”, on the other hand, is an attempt to define the meaning and outcome of one’s life, even to the extent of choosing things that can be reasonably regarded as intrinsically and seriously wrong.
The former right affirms objective moral truth; the latter rejects it. The former recognises that conscience responds to moral truth; the latter claims that an individual’s conscience creates its own private moral truths.
These are the children and grandchildren of a society that voted 2:1 to enshrine the unborn’s right to life in the Constitution in 1983.
In 2018, citizens were told clearly what total deletion of the unborn’s right to life would entail: they stared abortion-on-demand in the eyes, and said “yes”.
This cultural about-face occurred in little more than a generation. One generation generally understood that life at all stages is sacred and worthy of protection, the next didn’t.
This paradigm shift occurred on a core element of Christian moral teaching, the sanctity of life.
Why such a radical move away from Christian morality? A primary reason is that today's culture is not neutral as regards the Gospel – it is antagonistic towards it.
Our culture is dominated by the cult of the self-created, autonomous self. It says the individual’s autonomy is the supreme value that ought to govern all political and moral decision making.
Service, sacrifice and self-emptying love have little place here; there is little tolerance of dependency and vulnerability when the dependent and vulnerable drastically limit our autonomy; there is little sense that the sacredness of life does not depend on whether or not we happen to value life.
This culture is fascinated with the power of the autonomous self to self-create and achieve. It is suspicious of anything that limits an individual’s autonomy, especially when the limits are understood to come from virtue, morality or God.
The cult of the autonomous self cannot see how true fulfilment of our God-given nature involves virtuous living and moral development. Our culture is only comfortable with a God who is understood as irrelevant and anodyne.
But if God is presented as he truly is, who calls us to a life of difficult majesty and gifts us the grace to live it, who created our nature according to a wisdom that no autonomous act of ours can overturn, our culture mocks him and his followers as conspirators against autonomy.
The second creation story in Genesis, ending with Adam and Eve’s juvenile rebellion, contains deep truths particularly relevant to our present context.
We cannot remain faithful to both present culture and to the God revealed by that awkward, prophetic and selfless Nazarene 2,000 years ago.
We either live as radical Catholics and Christians unwilling to capitulate to the cult of the self, or we die to a culture that, while beguiling, is ultimately antagonistic towards anything higher than the self and its desires.
There is no neutral, middle ground: our current generation shows this.
Compassion: an absolute moral norm?
Should we act with compassion? Yes. Is acting with compassion a free-standing moral norm unrelated to other moral principles? No.
In the 1930s and 40s the killing of disabled people was justified on the basis of compassion.
Compassion, like empathy, gives us access to the lived reality of another. But by itself it doesn’t tell us what we should do in a given situation. It only ensures that our actions aren’t guided purely by self-interest.
Compassion alone can’t tell us who deserves compassion; nor how we should act towards those deserving compassion in a way consistent with their dignity and our duties towards them.
For a compassionate act to be moral it must abide by various moral truths. One of these truths is that to intentionally kill an innocent person is to fail to treat their life as worth protecting and as equal in dignity to one’s own.
In other words, to intentionally kill another, even if motivated by compassion, is to act as if he or she has no personal value, as if their death is better than their life.
Morally integrated compassion understands that caring is very different from killing.
Seductive secularist slogans
The extent to which Christians adopt secularist slogans and presuppositions when engaging in public debate shows how tempting secularist culture is, even for believers.
A current example is the right to conscientious objection for doctors in the context of legalised abortion. Pro-lifers sometimes defend this right on the basis of a “right to choose”.
They argue that if society believes in the right to procure abortion on the basis of a right to choose, then, for the sake of consistency, it should also uphold a doctor's right not to choose abortion.
But the real basis for the right to conscientious objection is very different from this so-called “right to choose”.
Conscientious objection is the right to honour what one sees as moral truth, particularly in cases where obedience to moral truth prevents one from performing or co-operating with something intrinsically and seriously wrong.
The “right to choose”, on the other hand, is an attempt to define the meaning and outcome of one’s life, even to the extent of choosing things that can be reasonably regarded as intrinsically and seriously wrong.
The former right affirms objective moral truth; the latter rejects it. The former recognises that conscience responds to moral truth; the latter claims that an individual’s conscience creates its own private moral truths.