Missions Resources - Bibliography
Talking about Good and Bad Without Getting Ugly: A Guide to Moral Persuasion
Authors: Paul Chamberlain
ISBN: 0830832688
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Number of pages: 126
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
reviewed by Paul Grant
Good and bad are all around us—the human universe we inhabit is unabashedly moral. Good is easier to define than bad, of course, because no one wants to be on the wrong side of intolerant.
Despite the prominence of moral relativism on TV and on the playground, relativism is a temporary condition in a society that doubts itself. We aren’t sure if absolutes are somehow racist, sexist, speciesist, ageist, homophobic, capitalist, imperialist, or undesirable in some other manner. We are, however, fairly sure that moral certainty is impolite.
It’s a state of affairs that started several generations ago in the philosophical world, penetrated to the student world during the 1970s, went mainstream in the 1990s: we are tolerant—we don’t know why—of nearly any sexual, religious, political, or lifestyle decision.
Of course, tolerance is a non-value, a refusal to make a moral distinction. It’s not a possible anchor for a culture, at least for the long run. Even now we’re beginning to see the return of morality—albeit in strange and sometimes contradictory incarnations. Assisted Suicide is being advocated as a humane, moral development. The stem cell research debates are largely conducted at the moral level (with competing moralities at stake). At the same time, as Paul Chamberlain, a professor in British Columbia, points out in his book Talking about Good and Bad without getting Ugly, technological change is taking place far faster than a moral framework can keep up.
Chamberlain points out that our society is confused. In fact, our morals often contradict themselves, even in our own heads. No wonder then, that we don’t frequently discuss moral issues with others. We don’t know how—we’ve lost the skill for moral persuasion and deliberation.
No wonder we avoid serious discussions about things that matter: if we know of no way out of the thicket, we are only asking for an unpleasant time to enter the thicket in the first place.
Fortunately, there are ways forward. Paul Chamberlain’s pleasantly clear guide to conversation should help. The book is full of brief dialogues between two characters, Michael and Isaac, whose struggles to engage with each other illustrate better than pure rhetorical theory. Chamberlain gives us believable examples.
But he doesn’t leave us with simple rules for debate. As he says at the beginning of the last chapter,
“It’s fair to assume that you wouldn’t have read this far unless you felt a passion for your culture. You’ve seen the injustices and moral lapses, and you can’t turn a blind eye to them. You want to do something about what you see.”
In the end, Christian power to change the world is inextricable from the Christian belief in absolute right and wrong; that what happens in Liberia is somehow morally related to what happens in Levittown, and a morality that concerns itself exclusively with sexual purity, or the like, is an incomplete morality. Chamberlain leaves us with some ideas out of practice, from keeping a sense of humor to developing a faculty for partnerships and patience. We aren’t left with tools for winning arguments; we’re left with tools to change the world.
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