Imagine Objective Morality

Last July, Bishop Robert Barron wrote an op/ed piece for the New York Post bemoaning the singing of John Lennon’s utopian manifesto pop song “Imagine” at the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympics. Quoth His Grace:

While its melody and arrangement are ­indeed beautiful, the lyrics are an invitation to moral and political chaos. 

Consider the opening verse: “Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us, above us only sky / Imagine all the people livin’ for today.” 

I frankly can’t imagine anything worse. To say that there is no heaven or hell is to say that there is no absolute criterion of good and evil — no way of meaningfully determining the difference ­between right and wrong, no standard outside of the subjectivities of each moral actor by which to say any one agent is better than any other. 

In his YouTube video on the same topic, Barron makes a connection to God more explicit. He declares at 2:41 that Lennon’s imagining is “an invitation into a very dangerous place, the place described by Dostoyevsky: Once you stop believing in God, anything is permitted.”

Overall, I agree with Barron; I have never liked Lennon’s song once I started paying attention to the lyrics, and generally along the same lines that Barron lays out in his op/ed and video: it is naïve, utopian, hypocritical and condemnatory of a caricature of patriotism and religion.

I do, however, have a couple of points of divergence with Barron’s analysis, one a quibble and one more substantive.

The crux of Barron’s denunciation of the message of “Imagine” is that the song advocates a rejection of an “absolute criterion of good and evil,” i.e., an objective moral standard which is to be found in belief in God. Imagining there is no heaven or hell, according to Barron, is denying objective right and wrong. Lennon may have (and probably did) not believe in God or objective right and wrong (see his song "God"). But as an interpretation of "Imagine," one does not have to take the song so far as to be challenging objective morality as such.

"Imagine no heaven ... no hell below us," etc. seems to be Lennon's critique of the carrot and stick of religion: the self-interested hope for heaven and fear of hell. He seems to me to be saying, instead, that we ought to be good, not to gain rewards and avoid punishments -- pie in the sky/fire insurance -- but for its own sake: "Imagine all the people/Livin' for today." I agree that Lennon sees religion, nations, wealth and acquisitiveness as sources of conflict, war and misery, but he shows this by contrasting these 'evils' with "Livin' life in peace" and "Sharing all the world." I agree that such contrasts are naïve, simplistic and based on libelous caricatures, but these are the contrasts on which Lennon structured his song. Likewise, Lennon's contrast is not heaven/hell vs. no moral absolutes, but rather heaven/hell (self-interest) vs. here-and-now morality (altruism). And his here-and-now morality is built on a narrow kind of objective morality: war, poverty, etc. are objectively evil, for Lennon.

The more substantive point has to do with the sentiment expressed by Dostoyevsky’s dictum “without God, all things are permitted.” One aspect of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas that has had a deep and lasting impact on Western thought and culture is his account of Natural Law. But recently, given that St. Thomas says that the Natural Law is the participation by human reason in the Eternal Law (the rational ordering of creation in the mind of God as He creates and sustains that creation), many dismiss the Thomistic account as being hopelessly dependent on the Christian commitments of Aquinas and his followers. Bishop Barron’s invocation of Dostoyevsky against Lennon, I fear, reinforces this mistaken view. I fear that those who see the Natural Law as an objective, universal moral standard but which, nevertheless, depends on a belief in God in general or the Christian God in particular are confusing two different senses of ‘depends on’ in its justification or explanation an absolute criterion of good and evil.

On the one hand, one can say that an objective moral standard of right or wrong depends on God in an epistemological sense: without religious faith (in a divine Lawgiver), anything is permitted (nothing is forbidden). That is, unless one believes there is a God who commands and forbids specific actions (and rewards good behavior and punishes the bad), human beings will not be restrained, but indulge anything and everything. I am inclined to think that, since the eclipse of God from modern life, is what Dostoyevsky had in mind. The extreme in viewing God as the epistemic ground for objective morality is often today called “Divine Command Theory,” which asserts that moral good and evil, right and wrong, are just what God commands (love your enemies) or forbids (do not steal) in his explicit and public revelation (the Bible). One only knows (and so can follow) objective moral norms is if they are spelled out in a public and explicit set of scriptures, and one has to have religious faith to accept them as divine revelation. (Thus, those without religious faith wrongly believe they can do anything their heart desires – without God, all things are permitted.) This epistemological dependence of morality on belief in God is an intellectual outgrowth and implication of nominalism that has haunted Western civilization since the 14th century. This is decidedly not what Saint Thomas means by Natural Law or its dependence on God.

On the other hand, one can say that an objective moral standard of right or wrong depends on God in a metaphysical sense: the natural inclinations inherent within rational human nature comprise a Natural Law as an objective, universal standard for morally good behavior, but without a governor (one who gives order and direction) of nature, there would be no order and direction in nature, and so no moral order to be derived from nature by rational human creatures. I agree with Barron that one needs a transcendent ground for moral absolutes, and absent that, all things become permissible; good and evil would only have subjective meaning. An objective, fixed human nature with inherent and immutable natural ends and purposes, however, can and does serves as that transcendent ground, even for those without any religious faith. Though it naturally points to God as the cause of nature and natural ends, one can discover and be bound by Natural Law without concluding to (or even inquiring after) the Divine Lawgiver as Author and Governor of nature.

This, indeed, is the value of the whole notion of Natural Law for Aquinas, and why his understanding of it has had the deep and lasting influence it has had.  For Aquinas explicitly explains that the Natural Law applies to all people, at all times, cannot be changed and cannot be abolished from the human heart. It is truly universal and objective, as much for atheist or non-Christians, as for theists and Christians. Furthermore, the Natural Law, for Aquinas, serves as the standard against which to judge whether positive human law (the ordinances and rules passed by legislators or enacted by other civil authorities) is just or unjust; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. makes especially fit use of this idea in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

Hopefully, having a more complete understanding of Thomistic Natural Law, one can see that there is a transcendent foundation of objective right and wrong, and that not everything is permitted even for those who, as Dostoyevsky says, are without God. It is true that the objective moral order can and indeed should to lead one to belief in God as the source of that order, but, epistemologically, belief in Him is not necessary, even if metaphysically, His providence is. So, while Bishop Barron’s intentions, as John Lennon’s, are in the right place, I think we do not have to go all the way of Dostoyevsky in order to proclaim, even to atheists, that not all things are permitted.