![[assets/covers/moral-knowledge.jpg]] Moral knowledge is the claim that there are right answers to ethical questions: that ‘what is good?’ is a subject of knowledge in the same way that ‘what is true?’ is. Western intellectual culture has largely abandoned this claim, treating ethics as a domain of personal preference or social negotiation rather than genuine knowledge. The consequences are not theoretical: once moral knowledge is off the table, the question ‘how do you teach people to be good?’ has no institutional answer. ## The governing assumption of the university Derek Bok’s presidential report to Harvard acknowledged moral failures among the highly educated and wondered what universities could do about them; it then concluded that higher education had ‘not demonstrated a deep concern for the problem.’ The reason is structural. The dominant assumption in elite educational institutions is that there are no right answers to moral questions, only better and worse processes for thinking about them. Applied ethics courses no longer aim to convey moral truths; they aim to make students ‘more perceptive in detecting ethical problems.’ Students learn to detect, not to answer.[^dc-p2] The problem is that this governing assumption is itself never subjected to the test it applies to everything else. It circulates as unspoken dogma. The result: there is now no recognised moral knowledge upon which projects of fostering moral development could be based. A teacher would be reported for telling a student their behaviour was wrong; they could only invite reflection. ‘Not allowed to say should’ captures the institutional position exactly.[^dc-p3] ## The Coles question A young woman working her way through Harvard (cleaning student rooms) confronted Robert Coles with the practical collapse of this arrangement. She had watched students who excelled in moral reasoning courses treat her with contempt, proposition her, demean her. She asked: ‘What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?’ Coles had no answer. He was conscience-stricken but could not tell his students they should treat her differently, because no one can claim to know about such matters.[^dc-p3] This is Willard’s diagnosis in miniature. The problem is not insufficient will to teach goodness but the prior assumption that there is nothing to know. Cleverness is a subject of knowledge; character is not. The young man who propositioned her had received the highest of grades in moral reasoning.[^dc-p4] ## Rights without responsibilities The downstream effect appears in how rights language functions without any accompanying vocabulary of responsibility. ‘What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities?’ Rights language survives in a post-moral-knowledge world because it makes no claim about what is actually good; it only asserts entitlement. Responsibility language requires a prior claim about what ought to be done, precisely the kind of claim that cannot be made once moral knowledge has been denied.[^dc-p10] ## The knowledge no one teaches ==The institutional suppression of moral knowledge extends to the most concrete available resources.== ==The Ten Commandments and Jesus's teaching in the [[Sermon on the Mount]] are, Willard argues, 'God's best information on how to lead a basically decent human existence.'== ==They are not religious items dressed up as ethical ones; they are genuine moral knowledge: information about what human life requires.== ==Yet neither conservative nor liberal Christianity actually teaches from them in any sustained way.==[^dc-p57] ==The Ten Commandments, despite appearing in political controversies about courthouse displays, 'really aren't very popular anywhere' in practice.== ==Their absence from serious institutional teaching is not accidental; it reflects the collapse of the prior assumption that there is moral knowledge to transmit.== ==Once moral knowledge has been removed from the category of knowledge, the question of what to teach has no answer.== ==The commandments and the Sermon sit in a devotional space, read but not applied, celebrated but not taught.== ## Selected passages > ‘There now is no recognized moral knowledge upon which projects of fostering moral development could be based.’ > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. 2 > ‘There is now no body of moral knowledge in our culture.’ > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. 3 ## Appearances - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Ch. 1 ‘Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now’, pp. 2–4, 10 - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Ch. 2 ‘Gospels of Sin Management’, p. 57 ## Related [[Power of Ideas]] · [[Consumer Culture]] · [[Discipleship]] · [[Dallas Willard]] [^dc-p2]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 2 · *‘there now is no recognized moral knowledge upon which projects of fostering moral development could be based.’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 21.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p3]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 3 · *‘there now is no body of moral knowledge in our culture’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 22.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p4]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 4 · *‘What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 23.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p57]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 57 · *'They are God\'s best information on how to lead a basically decent human existence.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 76.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p10]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 10 · *‘What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities?’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 29.jpg|↗]]