“Morals are slippery little things,” a reader writes. “That's why, when I was a visiting prison chaplain for my area, I put them aside in favor of standards. This seemed to be greeted with much better understanding and even the psychopaths in the prison population could understand the principles.” 

That got me thinking. Of course, standards are more efficacious and practical: obey the rules or else. Why bother with the ideas from which rules sprout? Mightn’t morality be a mind-game, the intellectual equivalent of crosswords? 

Morality is the science of the why beneath the ought. Humans are the only creatures that distinguish between ought and must. That’s because we alone can envision various outcomes. Dog-pal Henry wastes no time debating alternatives. Faced with a choice – to give chase, say – he hesitates half a second, then off he goes – or not. 

Rules relieve us of the responsibility of deciding. They turn ought into must. That’s easier but for most humans inadequate. We fumble in the dark for reasons for our choice. “To be or not to be,” Hamlet asked, “that is the question.”  We want to do – a bizarre concept to Henry – “the right thing.” 

Most of my life I obey rules, explicit and implicit. It’s easier to don my mufti, say “Yes, officer,” and march in the parade. Obedience saves time and thought, which I reserve for the work I’m doing now, thinking aloud. Morality fascinates me. I too want to know whether to be or not. If I can think my way to what’s right, it’s likelier I’ll steer in that direction. So with my communities. Consensus about what’s right causes a tribe to cohere. 

When I was a boy there seemed no doubt about right and wrong. Our dad reminded us – at length! – about the rules. Naturally, I rebelled from his absolutism. I would decide what was right, thank you. Blame Thoreau. 

My career as a newspaper editor demanded non-stop adjudication – every word we published affected someone – but who had time to ponder? I still remember from decades of nonstop decision-making the few times I paused. 

Then our nation, in which I’d taken fervent pride, tumbled into a moral sewer. I still can’t believe how fast we turned bad. We elected not a mediocre soul to lead us – we’ve had plenty of those – but the worst human imaginable – and we did it twice – and many of our wannabe worthies seemed not to notice or care. Lies, theft, injustice, cruelty, slander, crudity, cheating became permissible norms not despicable exceptions. We the people shrugged off abominations – and a hefty contingent of so-called religious leaders bellowed Amen. Democracy suddenly needed morality as a life-preserver. In our zeal for pelf and power, we’d forgotten the difference between right and wrong.

My thoughtful reader – and, I’m guessing, loving pastor – is right: obedience is easier than understanding: even a psychopath “gets” a rule. But in America, we’ve got a big job ahead, if our democracy survives: to relearn morality, to know why it’s better to be than not, to speak truth than lie, to be kind not cruel, to heed the Golden Rule, to comprehend Kant’s conclusion that we should make our individual behavior an example to all. We must be good – not to make Santa more bounteous, but to prevent the loss of our precious freedom, without which life is hardly worth the bother. 

Yes, “morals are slippery little things,” often hard to grasp and defend. Expediency, practicality, efficiency are persuasive tutors. But if we are not good, we are good for nothing. Our dire danger has made that my urgent theme.