The Highest Rational Moral Authority: An Allegory

(originally published Sept. 22, 2012)
Imagine yourself on a mountain overlooking a vast endless expanse.  You stand upon the summit.  Before you lay every unborn human child stretching onward into the end of time.  See their young faces.  Examine their expressions.  Feel their hearts.

Now look deeper.  Sense the trees.  Appreciate the animals.  Feel the fish as they flutter past your limbs.  Breathe.

Now, tell them.  Tell them yes.  They should never suffer a maybe.

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A couple of months ago, my old head facilitator for my most recent men's group at Changing Ways asked an intriguing question for check-in.  We usually have a 'check-in' in order to get an idea of where our clients are emotionally and psychologically at the beginning and at the end of a session. We have them tell the group their name, how they're feeling (using actual feeling words), and then have them answer a question related to the topic of the day.  He asked the group, "what's the most important thing?"

Most people can answer the former question without any hesitation.  As I've stated in my previous notes, (see Experientialism - "What is the Matrix?"), people's values are crystallizations of their biopsychology and of the sum of their experiences at any given moment.  Asking a person what he/she believes to be the most important thing is to ask him/her about the current state of his/her values.

Therefore, I, like everyone else in the room, had my answer ready before he even asked the question.  My answer?  The future.

I've spent my whole life seeking out the highest moral authority (HMA), the most important thing, and naturally my definition has shifted with my experiences and reflection.  I, like so many, (including a guy in the group at the time), originally believed that God is the HMA.  I believed this for much of my life.  However, by grade 11, I was completely questioning God's authority.  It was around that time that I endured something of an existential crisis.  It also happened, not incidentally, that at the time I was intensely reading the existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.  I started asking questions like "why did God restrict heaven to the saved or the elect?"  "If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why would he allow the Nazis to exert so much suffering?"  I know believers would immediately turn to free will when "attacked" by this line of questioning.  But even in the presence of free will, if one was actually omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then the world would be so much better than it is by definition.

By grade 11, I started to develop my own ideas as to the highest rational moral authority.

Here's what I have so far.

We are given life, the greatest gift of all.  Without life there would be nothingness.  By our innate nature we are responsible to protect life, our own first and foremost.  But no man is an island unto himself.  We are a species with a shared past and future. As life was given to us graciously, we have the responsibility to graciously give to and maintain the lives of others.
We are given life and give life. As such, the most morally reprehensible act that we are capable of perpetrating is to take life, especially that of our own species.
Moreover, we are a part of a continuous stream of life through time. Being part of a stream we are also responsible for the unborn as our ancestors were responsible for us.
Therefore, rationally speaking, the highest moral authority of every generation is all possible generations to follow.

There's a caveat here.  I still value the current generation as it is the seed from which all future generations spring.  However, humanity as a collective has the capacity to sacrifice its own elements in order to ensure its continuity and, more importantly, its self-actualization.  Those with the greatest capacity to ensure the future have the greatest responsibility to maintain and to improve it.

Also, I know that the future is abstract by definition and arguably in the same way that we are ontologically disconnected with God, we are ontologically disconnected with the future.  However, we feel.  A will-be mother with a first trimester fetus in her womb may believe that it feels even if she may not yet think of it as human.  We may not yet think of the unborn as human but we know that they feel; that they will feel.  The greatest, most powerful, form of empathy is to empathize with those who can potentially exist.  "All those lives..."

My faith in humanity stems from how few would give the unborn a "no."  However, the reality is that today most of our species gave and continues to give them a maybe.  There's just too many maybes.  It is my goal to give those potential lives a yes.  A resounding yes.  As the unborn, like myself, will never accept "maybe."

The poster at the top of this post depicts my only political allegiance and doubles as one of my prayers.  It's duct taped to the wall directly above my computer.