Elementarz etyczyny (“The Ethics Primer”) is an underappreciated part of Karol Wojtyła’s pre-papal corpus. Which is unfortunate, because it says much that’s quite important for us to hear today. It’s a collection of twenty essays – really columns – he wrote in 1957-58 for the Kraków Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny. They deal with a range of philosophical questions, from the source of morality to the role of struggle in social ethics, from asceticism to the compatibility of Christian ethics with authentic humanism. Many of the essays are Christian jabs at the postulates of Marxism, though no small number also criticize Kant, whose ethics were then taken quite seriously in various European quarters.
Philosophical assumptions guide a culture, and Wojtyła examined several that were regularly served up in Communist-occupied Poland. But Wojtyła also identified the deeper truth that philosophy can lead (or mislead) a culture. And so – unlike superficial American dismissals of “philosophizing” as an abstract waste of time – he showed that philosophy, real philosophy, is worth the time and effort.
Several of the essays probe a basic human experience: the experience of obligation. We all feel “obliged” at some point in life to someone or something. What significance, what meaning, does that experience have?
Wojtyła observes that we all experience that there are things we should do and things we should not. He adds another thing we all experience: some of the things we should do we don’t, while those we shouldn’t we do.
His point is to insist that man is not the author, the auto-creator of moral norms. If that were true, Wojtyła argues, man could waive his self-imposed rules. But we all also have the experience that our sense of obligation endures even when we engage in (vain) self-dispensation. That suggests we are not the source of those moral norms or the sense of obligation flowing from them.
Wojtyła was writing in a particular context; his immediate opponent was the oxymoronic “socialist morality.” But his observations are still very pertinent to our current condition in the free societies of the West. Let me offer three relevant contemporary applications.
First, the sense of obligation of which Wojtyła speaks is not a time-and-culture-conditioned phenomenon unique to some people behind the Iron Curtain a decade or so after World War II. Any person honest with himself must admit that the experience Wojtyła analyzes is a universal one: all human beings at some point in their lives experience “I ought to do that,” even when they really don’t want to. Even when they confess that they cannot circumvent its demand.
But that experience stands in direct opposition to the many variants of “self-autonomy” Western societies worship. The sense of an obligation not of my authorship challenges all claims of “rights” to “define meaning, the universe, and human life.” It therefore calls into question every project built on assumptions of self-made morality, “autonomous ethics,” “self-definition,” or a subjective vision of moral norms that are neither grounded in nor needing any objective anchor.
A deeper reckoning with the truth of that insight would save us, not just from a lot of superficial sloganeering but especially from the disastrous policies masquerading as deep “thought” – the laws and cultural expectations that flow as a result from those shibboleths. And that reckoning does not require a profound and learned ethical analysis. It just requires us to examine a basic and common experience: “I ought.”
Second, the nagging persistence of the sense of “obligation,” despite our attempts to talk ourselves out of it, or our “autonomous” will trying to dispense with it, leads to another experience: responsibility. If in good faith I find I really can’t rationalize that obligation away and still feel accountable to its demands, it means I have a responsibility towards it. It’s a responsibility not of my making because – as with obligation – if it really was just my own doing, I could dismiss it. But I can’t.
I sense that responsibility comes not from me but from the obligation, and that it holds me – perhaps even against my will – to account.
Responsibility, then, is not just a self-assumed yoke, the mark of the morally “mature” (but autonomous) actor. Even when I don’t embrace them out of principle, I recognize there are “shoulds” that hold me to account. Responsibility, then, is not just a matter of my choice.
That leads us to a third insight, especially valuable for our times: the value of guilt. Contrary to current assumptions: “guilt can be good.” That’s not to say it’s good if it’s paralyzing or obsessive, but it is to say that not every manifestation of guilt is paralyzing, much less obsessive.
Guilt is not always pathological, something to suppress or flee. Humans sense obligation – a “should” – towards which they are responsible. They also have the experience of not being responsible, of not having done what they “should” or done what they “shouldn’t.” That non-self-imposed responsibility then assumes a new form: guilt. I failed my responsibility by betraying my obligation. That experience is not simply bad, because it reveals an accountability to the good, independent of my will.
In traditional Catholic terms, it recognizes conscience. Conscience is a source of moral guidance before we act and of judgment after we act. Conscience is a healthy sense of recognition that not all my acts comport with what I “should” do, failings for which I bear obligation. It is healthy because it acknowledges that first principles lie outside my sovereign will: “good is to be done and evil avoided.”
Wojtyła’s analysis of obligation certainly aligned with an older Catholic understanding of conscience, but it broke fresh ground in forcing everyone to reckon with the implications of primordial and universal human experiences – that we have obligations for which we are responsible towards which we can fail – which leads to a state of affairs that requires fixing. As a common human experience, it grounds objective morality independently of particular religious commitments.
Isn’t that a very relevant need of the contemporary West?
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