Baby Steps - The 10 Commandments As An Ethics Primer
God has never been shy about telling people how to behave. The first example was probably his instructions to Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Another early example is the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments[1]:
I. You shall not have other gods besides me.II. You shall not carve idols for yourselves.III. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.IV. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.V. Honor your father and your mother.VI. You shall not kill.VII. You shall not commit adultery.VIII. You shall not steal.IX. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.X. You shall not covet.A lawyer asked Jesus to rank these ten: “Which commandment is the first of all?” The answer? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” In short: Love God. Look for it in the list of ten, and you will not find it. Which commandment ranked number two? “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Again, it did not make the list. If you study the Ten Commandments, though, you will see that it can be divided into two groups: the first four commandments have to do with our relationship with God; the last six with our relationships with each other. How do we love God? As a starting point, by not having other gods, carving idols, misusing the divine name, and disregarding the Sabbath. Honoring those four injunctions is perhaps a long way from loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, but it is a starting point. We love our neighbor by not killing him, stealing from him, sleeping with his wife, or defaming him. We should refrain not only from stealing, but from even wanting things that are not ours, a demand that focuses inward, as does the command to love. These are all negative commands, things we are to refrain from doing. The only positive demand has to do with our parents. There we are expected to go further than refraining from harm; we have to honor. With our parents we must go a step further than we need to go with anyone else. The first four commandments are the focus of religion, the relationship between a person and his creator. Ethics has to do with human interaction, the bottom six. The Golden Rule, often cited as a model for ethical business decisions, has the same focus. “Do as you would be done by.” That was, loosely, the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”[2] To put it in a form similar to that of the Golden Rule: I should never do what I would not want everyone else to do as well.
Jesus gave the Golden Rule as part of his Sermon on the Mount. Confucius and Aristotle had said it even earlier, though Aristotle applied the instruction only to friends, and Confucius stated it negatively: “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”[3] Jesus, in imposing on us positive obligation and applying it universally, was more ambitious.
The Golden Rule is uncannily useful as a moral guide. The application of Aristotle’s theory of justice, with its requirements of consistency treating similarly situated people the same–and proportionality -treating different people differently in proportion to their relevant differences may require a philosophical turn of mind and a good deal of intelligence. More importantly, its application may give rise to significant dispute. Does equal treatment mean equal opportunity or equal outcome? What differences are relevant? Differences in ability? That standard would reward the gifted, but lazy. Differences in effort? It has been argued. I once had a student contest his grade, arguing that his grade did not reflect the effort he had put into the course. Capitalism tends to base rewards on differences in achievement. A Marxist would argue that need was the relevant difference on which to base rewards: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”[4]
After identifying the relevant differences (a problem Aristotle did not address), Aristotle would have us allocate rewards and burdens in proportion to those differences. It might seem that an employee who works twice as many hours as somebody else should receive twice the pay. If so, then the Fair Labor Standards Act is unjust in requiring time-and-a-half for overtime, because time-and-a-half compensates the harder working employee more than twice as much. The rewards of labor are not proportional to the hours worked.
The theory of rights has its own difficulties, in that it is necessary to identify which rights are worthy of protection and to prioritize those rights to aid in decision-making when the rights of some come into conflict with the rights of others.
The Golden Rule bypasses all such difficulties. We may have difficulty in deciding when the rights of others are violated; we know instantly when our own are. We know instinctively how we want to be treated, even if we do not always want to treat others the same way. The Golden Rule would have us apply this same guide to others. Kant described the advantages this way:
I do not, therefore, need any far-reaching penetration to discern what I have to do in order that my will may be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for all its contingencies, I only ask myself: Canst thou also will that thy maxim should be a universal law? If not, then it must be rejected, and that not because of a disadvantage accruing from it to myself or even to others, but because it cannot enter as a principle into a possible universal legislation…[5]Not only do we know how we want to be treated, we want to be treated how we want to be treated. Put this way, the observation may seem trivial, but it is another way of saying that we love ourselves. Because we love ourselves, we protect our rights as best we can, and we insist on justice. Jesus, quoting a passage in Leviticus,[6] said that the greatest commandment governing interpersonal relationships was the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Note that we already love ourselves. This was not a call to increase our self-esteem so that we could better love others. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.[7]When great good befalls us, do we resent it? Do we rejoice in the wrongs done to us? Do we hope for disease, disgrace, or financial ruin? No. We do not because we love ourselves. We may not think much of ourselves sometimes, but our love for ourselves is as close to perfect as anything human can be. “[I]t is for himself most of all that each man wishes what is good.”[8] The word “love” in this passage from the apostle Paul is a translation of the Greek word “agape.” It refers not to emotion, but to an act of the will. This is important. It is in this manner, undoubtedly, that we are to understand those passages of Scripture also in which we are commanded to love our neighbour, even our enemy. For love, as an affection, cannot be commanded, but beneficence for duty’s sake may; even though we are not impelled to it by any inclination nay, are even repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion. This is practical love and not pathological a love which is seated in the will, and not in the propensions of sense in principles of action and not of tender sympathy; and it is this love alone which can be commanded.[9] The Greeks had other words for love: in addition to agape, eros, philios, and storge. Eros is what we usually call “in love.” It is romantic love. With it comes longing and intense feelings of all sorts. It is more than mere lust. We do not merely want to use the one we love for sexual gratification. We want the best for the one we love. We want to protect and nurture the one we love. We are happy when good things come to the one we love, and we are resentful of wrongs. Philios is friendship. Storge is affection, especially that affection that exists between a parent and a child. Eros, philios, and storge are lesser loves, which we can extend only to a few and only intermittently. If unaccompanied by agape, all would corrupt us. We would resent anything and anybody that turned our beloved’s attention away from us. We might do great injustice to others to protect our friends. We might despise those outside our own circle. Our love for our children must sometimes take on a stern cast. We cannot always indulge our affection, if we want what is best for them.
These lesser loves, though, are important warm-ups for agape, for love itself. By nature we love ourselves. When we fall in love, nature allows us, at least for a time, to love one other as we love ourselves. When we have children, the circle of those we are able to love as we love ourselves expands. Friendship expands the circle of caring in the same way, if not to the same degree. As we work to be good lovers, good parents, and good friends, we are increasing our capacity to love, just as exercise increases our ability to push and pull.
The Ten Commandments are also beginning exercises. We start on the road to loving our neighbor by refraining from doing them active harm. “Our neighbor” refers first to those closest to us. “[I]t is a more terrible thing to defraud a comrade than a fellow-citizen, more terrible not to help a brother than a stranger, and more terrible to wound a father than any one else.”[10] The parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus told in answer to the question “Who is my neighbor,” indicates that our duty to love is ultimately universal.[11]
When we steal from someone or tell vicious lies, we are feeding our hatred, just as doing good to someone will feed our affection, which is always an aid to wishing them well. As Aristotle noted, “Benefactors are thought to love those they have benefited…for that which they have treated well is their handiwork…[A benefactor] delights in the object of his action.”[12] When we refrain from doing harm, we are at least keeping the soil free from weeds so that love concern for our fellow human beings can grow.
The commandments do not take us as far as we need to go. We must do more than refrain from doing active harm. A rich young ruler approached Jesus and asked him how to have eternal life. The answer: “If you would enter life, keep the commandments.”[13] Which ones? Jesus listed five of the last six commandments (leaving out the prohibition of coveting) and concluded, “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young ruler claimed to have done all these things, but we may doubt him as to the last, because he was unwilling to sell what he possessed and give it to the poor. If he and his neighbor had been equally concerns of his, his riches would have satisfied him as much in the hands of his neighbor as in his own.
Like the Ten Commandments, man made law imposes few positive obligations. We are required to support our children, just as we are enjoined to honor our parents. As to strangers, though, we have no obligation to render aid, even in emergencies, even when the cost or risk to ourselves is slight.
The law has on occasion required more of us, and it would be nice to think that we, as human beings and as citizens, were ready to do more for each other than simply refrain from doing harm. Soldano v. O’Daniels[14] involved a barroom altercation. A gun was pulled, and a barroom patron ran across the street and into another bar to call for help. The bartender refused to let him use the phone. The altercation escalated, and Darrell Soldano was shot to death. In holding the bartender liable, the Court of Appeal of California, Fifth Appellate District, noted that the burden the bartender refused to assume was minimal and involved no risk.
The Soldano opinion stands alone. No other court in any other jurisdiction or even in California has accepted this apparent modification of the no-duty-to-aid rule. Soldano turned out to have been merely “an aberration in American tort jurisprudence.”[15]
The law asks no more of us than a wise parent asks of a toddler. The parent may expect the child to refrain from making crayon drawings on the walls or throwing his plate of food to the floor. Help with the dishes is too much to hope for. When the child is older and more mature, he can assume those responsibilities.
Like our children, business people cannot remain forever infants. They must go beyond the dictates of the law to where the law was never meant to take them. The first step is to do no harm. At the end of the journey is love.
[1] Exodus 20:3-17; Deuteronomy 5:7-21.
[2] Kant, Fundamental Principles Of The Metaphysic Of Morals
[3] John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations
[4] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program
[5] Kant, Fundamental Principles Of The Metaphysic Of Morals
[6] Leviticus. 19:18
[7] I Corinthians 13: 4-7
[8] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter 7
[9] Kant, Fundamental Principles Of The Metaphysic Of Morals
[10] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter 9
[11] Luke 10:29-37
[12] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX, Chapter 7
[13] Matthew 19:17
[14] 141 Cal.App.3d 443, 190 CalRptr. 310 (1983)
[15] Eric J. v. Betty M., 76 Cal. App. 4th 715; 90 Cal. Rptr. 2d 549 (1999)
Michael Monhollon is the dean of the business school at Hardin-Simmons University. His novel based on the adult career of Jesus Christ is being serialized at http://www.bookserial.com.
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Written by info on December 30th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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