I can't figure out how to remove the underlining, so bear with me.  I've tried a bunch of different things.

UNIVERSAL MORALITY: the standards that tend to apply across cultures

Rev. Kit Ketcham, March 10/2019, PUUF

Who remembers the Seven Deadly Sins?  (cong resp::  Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride)  These seven particular categories of wrongdoing were labeled Sin and debated and argued about and prioritized and originally listed way back in early Roman Catholicism.

They’ve been adapted several times over the years.  A post on Facebook listed the Real 7 Deadly sins as Apathy, Cruelty, Duplicity, Hypocrisy, False Morality, Abuse of Power, and Cultivated ignorance.

I’m reminded of Mahatma Gandhi’s wise words about Sin.  He described wrongdoing in this way:

 It is Knowledge without Character, Commerce without Morality, Science without Humanity, Worship without Sacrifice, Politics without Principle, Wealth without Work, and Pleasure without Conscience.

And what about the Seven Noble Virtues?  These would be the flip side of the sins. (cong resp:  Chastity (LUST), as in purity and abstinence, temperance (GLUTTONY), as in moderation, charity (GREED), as in generosity, diligence (SLOTH), as in persistence and effortfulness, patience (WRATH), as in forgiveness and mercy, kindness (ENVY), as in compassion, and humility (PRIDE) as in reverence and modesty).

As we’ve endured the past two plus years of an unethical, even sinful, if not downright evil president and his cabinet and cronies, we’ve had a real, maybe too real, glimpse into what the seven deadly sins can look like in action, even if we’re not crazy about the word Sin.

How do you make decisions about what is right and what is wrong?   Do you have an inner yardstick or plumb line that guides you?  (cong. Resp)

I remember learning a song as a kid that has guided me for a long time.  It doesn’t cover everything but it works most of the time:

“I would be true, for there are those who trust me; I would be pure, for there are those who care; I would be strong, for there is much to suffer; I would be brave, for there is much to dare. 

I would be friend of all, the foe, the friendless; I would be giving and forget the gift; I would be humble, for I know my weakness, I would look up, and laugh and love and lift.”

This is not to say that I haven’t had my moments of untruth or impurity, weakness and all the rest, but it has served me well over the past many years, even with many lapses.

I recognize that the word Sin comes laden with heavy religiosity and many of us reject the word for that reason, but all of us, I think, recognize that there is a great deal of wrongdoing in this life and some of it is harmful enough that it requires punitive consequences.

When I first saw an article about the topic of morality I decided to do a little research about the ideas of sin and virtue and as I did, I wandered into the realm of moral relativity which contrasts with our theme of moral universalism.

Moral relativity generally argues that given the same set of circumstances, some societies or individuals will have a fundamental disagreement about what a person ought to do or ought to prefer, based on societal or individual norms.  What’s more, they argue that one cannot judge these disagreements as right or wrong because they are tied to a culture or time in history that is so different from our own that we do not have the right to deem them moral or immoral.

This view contrasts with moral universalism, which argues that, even though well-intentioned individuals disagree and may even be unpersuadable, there is still a meaningful sense in which one action could be deemed morally preferable to another.  Moral universalism says that there are objective standards of evaluation that are worthy of being called “moral facts”, regardless of whether or not they are universally accepted.

But how do we define “morality”?  In an article published in the journal Current Anthropology, three researchers (Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse) defined morality in this way in their work which tests the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 similar but independent societies:  This is their precis’.

What is morality? And to what extent does it vary around the world? The theory of “morality-as-cooperation” argues that morality consists of a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life.
Morality-as-cooperation… predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior—including helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession—will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures.
To test these predictions, we investigate the moral valence of these seven cooperative behaviors in the ethnographic records of 60 societies. We find that the moral valence of these behaviors is uniformly positive, and the majority of these cooperative morals are observed in the majority of cultures, with equal frequency across all regions of the world.
We conclude that these seven cooperative behaviors are plausible candidates for universal moral rules, and that morality-as-cooperation could provide the unified theory of morality that anthropology has hitherto lacked.

What is the takeaway from these seven forms of cooperative behavior?  Helping our kinfolk, helping our group, doing favors for one another, bravery, respect for superiors and others, dividing resources rather than hoarding, respecting prior possession. 

These are good guidelines for societal behavior, but I notice that there are some gaps.  And quibbles about some of the terms used can throw us off the track----universal?  Can anything be truly universal and apply to every human being?

Or morality-as-cooperation?  Who dreamed that up?  Isn’t cooperation just a way of legitimizing the coercion often involved in securing a compromise? You can tell that my inner critic is exercising its judgmental muscles.

And then there’s art and music and other forms of creativity----where do all those come in?  I realized I was STUCK!

            I was having trouble finding a way to go on from this point.  Virtue and morality all of a sudden seemed much less interesting than the many ways a person can sin!

            Memories of growing up in a virtuous pastor’s family swirled in my mind:  all the Bible verses, the religious music, the ways preacher’s kids were supposed to behave, so as not to shame their father in the community.  No movies, no dancing, no card-playing, what’s a girl to do in a high school of 75 kids in the middle of nowhere?   And I have to tell you, I just about quit writing about virtue at that point.  It seemed so boring!

            I didn’t have an unhappy childhood or adolescence.  Limited in some ways, yes, but I was a bookworm and I had a horse.  What else did I need?  I had too much of a smartaleck streak to be a homecoming queen or other small-town heroine.  My job was to get a scholarship and make my parents happy with my grades so I could get out of town.

            Sin was something to be avoided, of course, but some of the sins we were prevented from doing, like going to the movies, seemed circumventable.  In the summer, our family packed up the Pepsis, the popcorn, and a few friends and went to a nearby town to the drive-in theater, to see cartoons, epics like The Robe, and the occasional Humphrey Bogart movie like Key Largo.

            Square dancing in P.E. was okay but other dancing was out.  I guessed it was because people touched each other, but later I learned the real reason Baptists don’t dance---it’s because it’s like making love standing up.  Of course!  But at that point I knew almost nothing about making love OR dancing.

            Sex---that was another shadowy area.  I was probably about 10 or 11 when I learned the facts of life and moved from total imagination regarding sexuality and babies to a crude understanding of the topic.  And counted up the number of times my parents must have done “IT” to produce five children.  Oh, and once on their wedding night, of course.

            In 1966, a book entitled “Situation Ethics:  the new morality” by Anglican theologian Joseph F Fletcher was published, just as I was entering my life in Denver as a Baptist home missionary at the Denver Christian Center.

As you probably know, situation ethics take into account the particular context of an act when evaluating it ethically, rather than judging it according to absolute moral standards.  Sort of like moral relativity.  Now that was more up my alley.  So I experimented with it in my new life in Denver.  No longer the preacher’s kid, I was in a big city where my behavior could be more anonymous.  And nobody was keeping track of the new missionary at the Christian Center---me!

A brief fling with a lovely fellow missionary pastor who lived in Chicago but traveled through Denver on occasion gave me a taste of exciting but forbidden romance and I realized I was not emancipated enough to marry a man who would have shocked my parents because of his liberality---and his skin color.  I grieved---and then found someone else a little less shocking to marry:  white, a teacher, and not yet noticeably an alcoholic.

Our marriage lasted 13 years, produced one wonderful and unique child, and gave me many chances to stray from the boring virtues I’d absorbed:  marijuana, hangovers, illegal hunting and fishing, all these characterized my life as a married woman.  Eventually, the marriage crashed and burned, and it was time to reevaluate my life and my standards.

But post-divorce was just too much fun to spend time on re-evaluation right away.  I sowed my rather tame oats in my search for free expression of myself as a liberated woman in the 80’s, dated A LOT, even learned to dance rather well with one boyfriend, and became a person brave enough to actually sing in front of a mic. 

One morning, a few years out from divorce, I was awakened by a friend I knew through Mensa, which I had joined at the urging of my mother.  On the phone my friend said to me, “Kit, we’re going to lunch today and we’re going to talk about why you keep getting mixed up with all those alcoholic losers. My treat.”  Nobody had ever mentioned my penchant for guys with a drinking problem, until then.  I hadn’t even noticed.

We went to lunch, she told me about AlAnon and that was the beginning of my re-evaluation of my life and my standards.  I learned a whole new way of being myself, being honest and true and happy.

            The most useful thing about doing a 12 step program like AlAnon was that I learned to be honest with myself, responsible for MY behavior not others’, and to make amends for the hurt I caused.  During my years “working the program” as they say, my views on good and evil evolved and I saw those issues in a new light.

            It was also useful to take a hard, long look at what I considered to be the Higher Power in my universe.  I was always uncomfortable with typical depictions of God and more of a naturalist than a theist, so I went with Gravity as the most powerful force in my life.

            Well, rather than more True Confessions, let’s go back to the issue of morality.

A study on morality-as-cooperation is interesting and probably useful, but as I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t cover enough ground for me.

            As a longtime Unitarian Universalist, I have come to realize that the rules and strictures of the Baptist church, based as they undoubtedly were on sources like the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins, are prohibitions against extreme behaviors like murder and sexual misconduct.  Most of us aren’t inclined to commit murder or sexual assault.

            Our failings are not on that scale.  Our failings as human beings are more like the flip side of the seven universal virtues of the study:  we are fearful, we are neglectful of our human kin, not just our family members, we are disrespectful, we are stingy, and resentful of others’ good fortune.  Pretty boring sins, in my opinion!

            But Situational Ethics doesn’t really cover the waterfront either.  It’s too easy to say, as I remember saying, “well, we’re using the meat for our family, not selling it” or “just one more margarita won’t hurt”.  Too easy to overlook the likely consequences if the behavior continues, too easy to shrug off any danger to others, too easy to make excuses for ourselves.

            So how can we describe acts of wrongdoing?  What really is a Sin or an act that must not be dismissed as harmless?

            David Brooks, columnist for the NYT, wrote this recently about sin, especially as it applies to our treatment of others, notably racism, but can be applied to sexism, classism, ableism, anti-semitism, ageism, and homophobia.

First, there is a natural moral order to the universe. There is a way things are supposed to be — more important than economic wealth or even a person’s life.

Second, moral actions are connected to each other. If somebody tears at the moral order by drawing blood through the lash of slavery, then that wrong will have to be paid for by the blood of the sword. History has meaning. It’s not just random events.

Third, sin is anything that assaults the moral order. Slavery doesn’t merely cause pain and suffering to the slave. It is a corruption that infects the whole society. It is a collective debt that will have to be paid.

Fourth, sin travels down society through the centuries. Lincoln was saying that sometimes the costs of repairing sin have to be borne generations after the sin was first committed.

From these thoughts we can appreciate the truth that while there have been many types of discrimination in our history, the African-American (and the Native American) experiences are unique and different. Theirs are not immigrant experiences but involve a moral injury that simply isn’t there for other groups.

Slavery and the continuing pattern of discrimination aren’t only an attempt to steal labor; they are an attempt to cover over a person’s soul, a whole people’s soul.

            I would add that any discrimination against a group is damaging to a person’s soul, and to a whole group’s soul, be it people of color, women, the poor, the disabled, semitic peoples, the elderly, and the Q community.

            Our UU 7 principles are clear about what we UUs consider right behavior, from affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every being, a commitment to justice, equity and compassion in our relationships, an  acceptance of one another and encouragement to grow spiritually, while searching for truth and meaning, affirming the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process, with the goal of world community featuring peace, liberty, and justice for all, including the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are one part.

            Better than the 7 deadly sins, less boring than the morality as cooperation model, and an expansion on the Golden Rule in its many iterations, our 7 principles are a guideline for the kind of behavior that actually can make the world a better place.

            Let’s pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer.

CLOSING HYMN #311, LET IT BE A DANCE

BENEDICTION:  As Cary extinguishes our chalice, let’s pause for our benediction.

Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place.  Let us go in peace, remembering that we have religious and spiritual principles to guide us in our effort to live honestly and compassionately.  May we strive each day to live out our principles in service to our world, each other, and ourselves.  Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

CLOSING CIRCLE