As I write this, our country deals with another tragic incident, this time the mass killings of worshippers in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. This follows the Las Vegas shooting on Oct. 1, a shooting in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, not two years ago, the Orlando night club shooting in 2016, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, as well as countless others across the country that have received less media and political attention. Some of these occurred in religious institutions, some in schools, some in public arenas. Our public outlets are filled with near-constant discussion focusing in various ways—and with widely varying quality and integrity—upon the hows and whys of these events, often including who is directly or indirectly culpable and what could have been done to prevent them.
It is, of course, natural to want answers—and perhaps even more natural to want immediate and/or basic solutions. Firearms regulation is only one area that receives constant scrutiny in this regard, as individuals representing varied constituencies, with a wide range of interests, argue in the public arena as to what precisely should be done, almost always with the purpose of persuading others to accept their point of view. These include elected officials, mental health experts, researchers and academics, “opinion” radio and television and social media hosts, as well as entertainers.
All of them will tell you what they want you to believe or what they feel you should believe. Many are well-informed and well-intentioned. But many are not (or at least less than open about their own intentionality). What almost none of them will tell you is how you should decide upon what is our best course of action. And that’s because we are in a constant spin cycle of opinion—and Opinion is itself a marketable and valuable commodity. I intentionally capitalize the “O” in Opinion in that last clause, as there is a vast distinction between commodified Opinion in culture and society and an informed and engaged opinion that is framed and developed by you, the individual. And, frankly, the latter is the one that truly counts.
There are, of course, no easy answers, no magic solutions that elegantly solve complex social and socio-economic and cultural crises. Solutions to issues of such magnitude, ones that took decades—sometimes even centuries—to develop, may very likely need multiple points of engagement, require significant shifts in a society’s allotment of its resources (both manufactured and cultural) and, above all, take time to see results.
Of all the of work I have done in my life, my most rewarding—certainly my favorite—has been teaching. Indeed, I can only begin to imagine myself as successful in my current role as viewing it as an extension of teaching and learning (which is what a real educator must always be—someone who is teaching and learning with others simultaneously, all of the time). It’s a privilege, and pleasure, to be teaching a class this semester—although I continually seem to be apologizing to the class for playing catch-up with them these last several weeks (something that I prided myself for years as never having to do).
We are currently reading an essay by Rosalind Hursthouse, a contemporary philosopher and ethicist, who writes about the complexities of solving moral dilemmas (and fire arm rights versus fire arm regulations is just one contemporary example). A “normative ethical theory” is the concept that a set of general guiding principles can provide a decision procedure for all questions about how to act morally. Hursthouse argues that the best moral systems have to leave space for the discussion between those who want to believe that there is always an immediate resolution to a conflict and those who argue that a resolution may be impossible. Or, rather, it needs to leave a space for discussion that starts from the common ground that people who believe A is a solution to a problem are equally virtuous as those who believe B. The crucial point is to work continually to build upon what both individuals have in common—namely, a solution to a problem. We need to explain why we believe in certain courses of action as solutions rather than why we don’t believe in a different course of action. Living a virtuous life for Hursthouse means thinking through the connection between our beliefs and the consequences upon both ourselves and others. And that starts and ends with the virtue of engaging others’ beliefs and learning from that engagement.
And this is why education—college and university education—is so important. Because moral virtue, and the ability to engage the complexity of conflicting responses and presumed answers to societal problems, requires not just passion (and there is surely no end to passion displayed in social media about these issues), but reflection. And reflection starts with the acknowledgement that there is (generally) more than one possible solution or position—and only through engagement and mutual respect can we recognize the full complexity of those positions and how different individuals are or might be differently affected. The start of resolving any moral dilemma is to agree upon our differences—and then to begin to understand how we each came to believe what we do. As Hursthouse concludes, the greatest virtue is desiring to be virtuous—and that is a lifelong educational project for which we must hold ourselves, and others, equally responsible.
