CTR Rings: The Embodiment of a Misguided Categorical Imperative

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 2^nd 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.

 

Bellrock, S. R. 2019. Sin Does Not Exist: And Believing That It Does Is Ruining Us. In Sunstone (188) https://sunstone.org/sin-does-not-exist/

Dobkin, P. L., Trembley, R. E., & Sacchitelle, C. (1997). Predicting boys early on-set substance abuse from father’s alcoholism, son’s disruptiveness, and mother’s parenting behavior. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 65, 86-92.

Doctrines of the Gospel Student Manual: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrines-of-the-gospel-student-manual/17-obedience?lang=eng

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