CTR Rings: The Embodiment of a Misguided Categorical
Imperative
In this piece I intend to critique the LDS concept of CTR
(Choose the Right) by suggesting that it poorly mimics the Categorical
Imperative. This is not to suggest that the authors of the LDS Sunday School
curriculum had Kantian moral theory in mind while producing their lessons. I
suspect the convergence of ideas is accidental. I will briefly elaborate what
the Categorical Imperative is, and argue that although CTR might attempt, at a
surface level, to function in the same way as the Categorical Imperative, it
fails to meet the basic requirements of the concept, largely because CTR
reduces to a form of Divine Command theory, which can be described as analogous
to a harmful authoritarian parenting style.
If, as I did, you grew up LDS, you may well understand
when I say that I was thrilled to receive my CTR ring (and CTR Box—is that even
a thing anymore?). In my family and congregation it was a minor rite of
passage, the final mile marker before that all important rite of passage coming
at the age of eight—Baptism.
If you did not grow up LDS, a brief note of
explanation. CTR was the name of the LDS Sunday School class for children aged
(if I recall correctly) 6 or 7 years old, and CTR Sunday School class was
partially intended as a baptism preparation class.
40-ish years later, I’m not nearly as enamoured with
the whole CTR concept as I was in those formative years. Significantly, I find
myself not as enamoured as so many of my adult
CTR ring wearing friends and neighbors seem to be.
The acronym “CTR” stands for Choose the Right, and my non-enamourement is rooted in the sort of conceptual
statement that “choose the right” is intended to be. The short version is that
the phrase “Choose the right” is intended to be overarching words to live by; an
all-encompassing moral guideline to apply at all times.
“Choose the Right” is, in my estimation, a weak
attempt at something like a Kantian Categorical Imperative. I say “something
like…” because I suspect that it is somewhat less than probable that the people
who applied the phrase “choose the right” to the Sunday School curriculum were
grounded in Kantian moral theory. Although CTR and the Categorical Imperative
might share a superficial resemblance, the thought processes that lead to them
are entirely different.
The idea of the Categorical Imperative is the
centerpiece of Immanuel Kant’s (1785) theory of ethics. Kant held that morality
shouldn’t be subject to changing circumstances or calculations. His focus was
on duties and obligations. And he thought, rightly or wrongly, that it ought to
be possible to distill all moral duties and obligations into a single principle.
If it is possible, as Kant hoped, to sum all of morality into one single
statement, then that statement would necessarily be a moral principle that can
be applied by everybody in every circumstance. If it did not apply to every person
and every circumstance, then the attempted distillation could not be said to
capture all of morality. A statement that
succeeds in capturing all of morality
would be an imperative (instruction, directive, order, rule) and it
would be categorical (without exception, universal, “always…”)—A
Categorical Imperative.
This, in a nutshell, is what “Choose the Right” tries
to be—an all-embracing moral guideline that we ought to apply throughout our
lives in all circumstances.
To illustrate the notion of the Categorical
Imperative, do a little thought experiment.
If you, gentle reader, were to gather all of your
moral rules and principles and intuitions and guidelines, and you tried to
encapsulate them into a single statement, what would that statement be? You’d
probably end up with something akin to the Golden Rule (i.e. do unto others as
you’d have done unto you). That is the sort of thing that Kant was looking for.
Regardless of the ethical predicament, one can apply the Golden Rule. Steal the
candy bar? Report a tax dodger? Give a fiver to the homeless guy who approached
you outside McDonald’s? In virtually any situation you can answer your ethical
question by consulting the Golden Rule. That, in a nutshell, is what the idea
of the Categorical Imperative is trying to do. Is there a moral principal (the
imperative) that can be applied without exception (categorical)?
For reasons beyond the scope of this piece, Kant
didn’t think that the Golden Rule quite worked as the Categorical Imperative. I
use it simply for the purpose of illustrating the sort of thing he was trying
to arrive at.
In trying to formulate the Categorical Imperative,
there were some basic errors that Kant wanted to avoid. It is necessary, on one
hand, to avoid making the rule too specific. If the imperative was too
specific, it could not be categorical. Principles like “always say please and
thank you,” or “don’t beat your children,” or “honesty is the best policy”
might be great rules to live by, but because they have specific content, they
only apply in certain situations and to specific persons. They are not
universally applicable, i.e. they are not categorical.
On the other hand, it would be easy to broaden the
scope of your imperative in such a way as to be content-less. If your rule is
“always do the right thing” it really doesn’t help you decide what the right thing actually is. If
your guideline is (as in the immortal words of St. Bill and St. Ted) “be
excellent to each other” you still need to specify what such interpersonal
excellence would amount to before the guideline has any force as an imperative.
Compare and contrast “always do the right thing” and
“be excellent to each other” with the Golden Rule and you’ll spot the
difference. The Golden Rule is instructive because it suggests what your choice
or action ought to be, whereas the former statements are not suggestive because
they require you to add in extra
content defining the right thing and interpersonal excellence. Because
statements like “always do the right thing” and “be excellent to each other”
are not in and of themselves suggestive of correct morality, we could consider
them to be without content, or vacuous.
Therein lies my issue with “Choose the Right.” It has the
form of a Categorical Imperative, but it suffers from the latter of the two
errors described above. Because it is not suggestive of what “the right” is,
“Choose the Right” is, at best, a vacuous Categorical Imperative.
If one adopts “choose the right” as a rule to live by,
then one is left with a content-less moral guideline, and in order to
“choose the right” one will consequently necessarily be dependent upon an
outside source to supply that content. Those of us who grew up LDS and accepted
the maxim “choose the right” became dependent upon the LDS church to supply us
with the knowledge of what our correct and moral choices and actions ought to
be. We externalized our moral locus of control.
Normal psychological development follows a fairly
standard pattern. Jean Piaget (1932) and Lawrence Kohlberg (1958), for example,
describe moral psychological development as a set of stages. In the earliest
stages, our source of morality is the rules that are imposed upon us by an
authority. To the developing mind of a child, such rules are objective, fixed
and unchanging, and the moral worth of an action can be determined by the resultant
reward or punishment. Initially right and wrong is determined by punishment and
reward, and a “what’s in it for me” way of looking at the consequences of behaviors.
In the very egocentric mind of a child, the wrongness of hitting your sister
amounts to nothing more than the fact that the child gets a time-out.
In normal healthy moral development, constraint by
external sources of control is our primary source of morality only during
the earliest stages—typically while we are still in the single digits. As we
are steeped in a moral environment, those lessons from childhood become an
internalized 2nd nature, and we no longer ask ourselves “will I be
punished if I get caught; what is the rule on this?” as we have internalized
our ideas of right and wrong (our conscience), and act accordingly. One’s
motivation is no longer avoidance of punishment or shaming, but an internalized
understanding of right and wrong. As our childhood egocentrism is replaced by
an understanding that others have their own perspectives, we begin to derive
morality from social emotions such as empathy. As horizons broaden from self to
family to society, we learn to derive morality from duties and obligations,
from social emotions, and from calculations of what will maximize the good and
minimize harm and suffering.
Good “authoritative” parenting involves moving a child
away from such obedience based morality through induction—sort of “inducting” a developing child into the club of
adulthood. Authoritative parents explain why an act is good or bad, encouraging
a child to reason through processes (considering consequences, duties, empathy,
calculations of happiness v. suffering) that lead them to arrive at good moral
conclusions. Those raised in an inductive family environment learn the skills
to reason through future ethical challenges.
“Authoritarian” parenting, on the other hand, does not
move a child away from an obedience type morality. The authoritarian parent
simply dictates the rules, and the child is expected to comply because the
rules are the rules. Good and correct behavior does not flow from an
internalized developing moral capacity, but from a desire to avoid the punitive
consequences from the authoritarian parent. Without the ability to reason
through moral issues, someone from the authoritarian home is less equipped to
face future unique ethical dilemmas.
On literally every measure, those who grow up in
authoritative (inductive) homes outperform those who grow up in authoritarian
(obedience and punishment), whether it’s psychological health (Lamborn, et al,
1991; Shucksmith, Hendrey & Glemdinning, 1995), grades and school success
(Steinberg, et al, 1991), or healthy relationship with parents (Mackay, Arnold
& Pratt, 2001). Those who grow up in authoritarian (obedience, punishment)
suffered in academic performance (Melby & Conger, 1996); an authoritarian
punitive style of discipline is linked with stress and depression (Wagner,
Cohen & Brook, 1996; Turner & Finkelhor, 1996), substance abuse
(Dobkin, Trembley, & Sacchitelle, 1997), delinquency (Peiser & Heaven.
1996), and future marital violence (Straus & Yodanis, 1996). There may not
be many (any?) absolutes in the social sciences, but the superiority of
authoritative to authoritarian parenting by every standard is as close to a
universal as you will find.
A salient difference deriving from inductive vs.
obedience parenting has to do with the behavior that occurs when there is no
longer a threat of punishment or shame.
To offer a simple hypothetical example, let’s say that
you desire that your children have a healthy attitude toward alcohol. The
authoritative parent can start out simply forbidding a child from drinking, as
the child starts to question, the parent can explain that drinking is a
grown-up decision, advancing to explaining the biological, psychological, and
social consequences of consumption. The authoritarian parent might simply
forbid consumption, then when the child starts to ask why, explain that it’s
because “you will be grounded if you drink.”
Now, the hypothetical adolescents from the above
scenarios leave home for the first time to go to university. Which one of them
is most likely to engage in risky drinking behaviors? It ought to be virtually self-evident
that when friends try to get the young persons to engage in risky behaviors,
the one raised in the authoritative inductive home is equipped with the
internal skillset to make a wise decision, while the one raised in the
authoritarian obedience home is no longer constrained by fear of consequences
from their parents.
So although the authoritarian parent might act in good
faith, fully believing that they are doing right by their child, instilling
morality by enforcing strict rules through punishment for non-compliance, in
effect, their actions have the opposite effect to what they hope. They are more
likely than the authoritative parent to raise children lacking an internal
moral compass, and are consequently more likely to follow paths that the parent
would judge to be immoral.
I hope that the reader is at this point drawing an
analogy between authoritarian parenting, and “Heavenly Father’s” CTR obedience
based morality. Just as the child’s morality is derived entirely from the
parental lawgiver, many a true believer explicitly believes that if there is no
heavenly lawgiver, there is simply no morality(Alma 42); and just as the child
equates the moral worth of an action with the reward or punishment, so the
believer believes that without the threat of punishment in the afterlife then
“anything goes” in mortality. Instead of moving us through the normal healthy
stages of moral development, the LDS church repeatedly tells us that in our
“Heavenly Father’s” plan “Obedience is the first law of heaven.” (for example: Chapter
17 of Doctrines of the Gospel Student Manual.)
If one willfully cedes his or her morality to an
external source to which one must be obedient, then by default, morality is not
internalized. One’s normal moral development is stunted, and one’s morality is
akin to that of the child who requires an adult to tell them not to take the
toy from the other child, and who requires threat of punishment to not take the
toy from the other child.
By instilling “Choose the Right,” the Church hijacks and
diverts an individual’s moral development, substituting one’s moral compass
with obedience to the Church.
Because “Choose the Right” externalizes the source of
morality to the Church, and so ostensibly to God, it in fact reduces to a
version of the Divine Command theory of morality in which the moral worth of an
action is derived from whether the act is done in compliance to the supposed
will of God. For the CTR graduate, morality does not flow from an internalized
moral standard (or conscience), but from an externalized set of relatively
arbitrary rules. Instead of developing a set of moral intuitions, feelings, and
guidelines, the CTR graduate acts out of obedience to the extant rules of the Church.
Let’s momentarily concede, for the purposes of
argument, that God indeed exists, that the LDS Church is His church, and that
the current rules of the Church are indeed the divine command of God.
How many times have you heard (or said) something
along the lines of “if there is no such thing as God there is no such thing as
right or wrong” or “if there is no threat of punishment in the afterlife, then
anything is permissible?” I reject this explicitly and am of the considered
opinion that even if God exists, His divine command is utterly irrelevant to
morality (Bellrock, 2019).
I don’t beat my kids. Regardless of whether God is
real or not, I don’t beat my kids. Does my non-abusiveness have anything to do
with fear of punishment in the afterlife? Nope. I suspect that there is no
afterlife, yet still I don’t beat the kids. Why not? Because I have an internalized
morality that is entirely independent of obedience and fear of punishment. I
have empathy. If I caused my children suffering I would feel their suffering
with them. I have a sense of duty, to violate that sense to duty to my children
feels wrong. It feels wrong independently of whether or not there is a God who
has commanded me to not abuse my children.
Why does God tell us not to beat our kids?
The very fact that that question makes sense spells
trouble for the Divine Command theory of morality. A believer may say that God
says not beat our kids because it would cause them suffering, or because we
have a duty to raise healthy happy individuals. The fact that there is an
answer to the question means that the believer is saying that the wrongness of
child abuse is not derived from the divine command, but the divine command is issued
due to the wrongness of child abuse.
Similarly, God says “Thou shalt not kill.”
Why?
Because
killing is wrong.
Therefore God says killing is wrong because it’s wrong. Murder is intrinsically wrong. Its wrongness is
not because God says it. Murder is wrong independent
of and prior to the will of God.
It is possible that the Israelites of the Exodus were so amoral that they needed God to tell
them that murder (and stealing, and adultery, etc.) is wrong. And God,
observing that they could not figure out the wrongness of murder for themselves,
commanded them to not kill. The morality of murder is still not derived from the commandment, per se; rather, the
commandment is given because of the wrongness of murder.
If it is true that the rightness or wrongness of
murder or child abuse stems entirely from the will of God, then any intrinsic
value in empathy or duty is irrelevant to the immorality of those actions.
Furthermore, if the rightness or wrongness of murder
or child abuse is derived only from the will of God, then God could say
precisely the opposite (Beat your kids, murder is peachy, shag thy neighbor),
and the exact opposite would be equally moral (because it would be the divine
command). However, this possibility seems somehow self-evidently nonsensical.
How could God give the opposite 10 Commandments, and yet they be on equal moral
footing with the first set? It offends one’s sense of reason. It is absurd.
Consequently, I suggest we ought not recognize any
moral value in anything that God says that is not of value independently of His
saying it. If God says thou shalt tie thine right shoe before thine left, or
thou shalt not see the inside of heaven, it means that He is multiplying
unnecessary arbitrary rules for the sake of exacting obedience, and it makes
God capricious.
So it seems that God’s divine commands can fall into
two categories:
First: God gives a divine command because of the rightness or wrongness of an action. If so, then the
rightness or wrongness of an action is prior to and independent of the divine
command, in which case the command is irrelevant to the rightness or wrongness
of that action.
Second: God gives a divine command that is not derived
from the rightness or wrongness of an action, in which case the command is
arbitrary and capricious.
In either case, the divine command is irrelevant to
morality.
Therefore God is irrelevant to morality.
The above discussion takes roughly the same tack as
Socrates who famously asked, in Plato’s Euthyphro (350 BCE), whether it is good
because the Gods command it, or whether the Gods command it because it is good.
When I was a child, I ate vegetables because my mother
made me eat them. Now that I am an adult, I have learned that there is a value
to eating vegetables that is not dependent on whether I am rewarded for eating
them or punished for not eating them. I eat them independent of what my mother
says. My mother might continue to say “eat your veggies” but her saying so adds
no value to my healthy diet. Likewise, I don’t kill, I don’t beat my kids, I
give to the homeless, etc., I do all of these things independently of whether
God will punish or reward me for doing them. God’s command adds no value to my
moral life.
What happens if you, a person with normal moral
development, violates your sense of morality? You have internalized a moral
emotion that tells you that what you did was wrong. You feel guilt. Guilt is
the healthy moral emotion that is derived from your internalized sense of
morality.
On the other hand, what if the person who has not
internalized morality violates one of the moral rules that he or she tries to
live by? Because they have not internalized their sense of right and wrong,
that sense cannot produce the appropriate guilt. Instead, the moral emotion
stems from the fear of punishment or of being found out. The person with an
external locus of morality would be motivated by the avoidance of shame instead
of the avoidance of guilt.
What I see in
Mormonism (though this is by no means limited to Mormonism) is a conflation of
goodness and obedience. Although the external actions of a good person and an
obedient person might be indistinguishable, the moral status of the actions of
the obedient person are not the same as the moral status of the good person.
When making decisions
regarding moral questions, I might be motivated by a calculation of what might
bring the most happiness or minimize suffering for the most people, or I might
be motivated by my sense of compassion or empathy, or by any number of noble
reasons. If, however, I’m motivated by obedience, or by fear of punishment, I
don’t seem quite as honorable. To use the example once again of not beating my
kids, what would you think of me if you knew that the reason I didn’t beat my
kids was that I believed God would punish me in the afterlife if I did? Clearly
the corollary of this is that if I didn’t fear eternal punishment, then there
would be nothing to dissuade me of abusing my little ones. Surely you would
judge me, at best, amoral.
Let’s tie this back
to the authoritarian parents, who, by insisting on obedience and punishment,
fail to instill grown-up moral capacities in their children, and so
accidentally raise children who are more likely
to rebel, as it were, against their parents standards. “Heavenly Father’s” CTR
obedience based morality is likely to have the same effect. If, in the
foundational (CTR attending) years, one is convinced that morality can only be
achieved by acting according to the Church’s dictates, then what happens upon
learning that the LDS church is not as it appears to be?
If the only options
are A and B, and A is wrong, then it must be B. If one hears their entire life
that the only options are (A) morality is derived from the commands of God (LDS
dictates), or (B) without the dictates of the LDS church there is no morality, and
then that person loses faith in the LDS church, they are likely to left with an
insecure sense of morality.
How many have left
the Church, and discovered a void where their moral sensibilities ought to
reside? How many of us have had to struggle, as adults, through developmental
stages that ought to have been navigated during our childhood and adolescence?
How many have had an internal ethical struggle regarding what our attitudes
should be toward perfectly normal consumption of coffee or alcohol? Or figure
out, almost from scratch, what a normal healthy attitude toward sexuality is
supposed to be? Or struggled with eliminating an unhealthy and unproductive
sense of shame because we grew up believing that shame was a noble and primary
moral emotion? As adults, we have had to examine ethical dilemmas—which most
emphatically should not be dilemmas
for an adult—and adjudicate whether our moral attitude toward it is due simply
to being told what our attitude should be, and whether we have to rethink it
through considering duties, obligations, consequences, and normal healthy moral
emotions.
If a person believes
that the only way to be moral is be obedient to the will of God, then there are
some interesting corollaries.
If a person believes
her only reason for not killing, stealing, etc. is the threat of punishment in
the hereafter, she is essentially admitting that she has no intrinsic internal
moral compass, and that consequently if God were not telling her not to, she
would see no reason to not engage in such activities.
Furthermore, it
stands to reason that if the only way to be moral is to be obedient to the will
of God, then the true believer would believe those who lack such a belief to be
morally inferior. You have learned to empathize, to act according to duties, to
calculate suffering and happiness, yet you are morally inferior to one who is
only moral out of fear of punishment? I think not.
So when you attend
that family event at the local chapel and bump into Sister Judgy McJudgypants,
and you tell her that you have left the faith, she just may be literally
incapable of understanding that you have not lost the ability to be a good
person.
So to bring this all
back to the discussion of CTR rings, I despise what they represent:
- A poor attempt at
the categorical imperative
- that makes one
dependent on external sources of morality,
- convincing
individuals that they are incapable of morality in the absence of the Church
- causing dependency
upon the Church
- implying that a
person is capable of a morality that is limited to the extent that they want to
avoid being caught and shamed;
- An external locus
of moral control
- indicating stunted
moral growth;
- The priority of
obedience over intrinsic goodness
- making independent
moral reasoning improbable.
So, when I see an
adult wearing a CTR ring, I see a person with a stunted moral development, who
thinks, like a child, that morality is derived from obedience, that the worth
of an action is determined by whether they are punished for it, who does not
see the intrinsic wrongness of murder and rape and child abuse and lying and
theft, and who thinks that they are morally superior to me because I have
developed past the earliest developmental stages while they have not.
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