Can You be Your Own Moral Standard?

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Trying to be your own standard

When people turn their backs on God as the source of value, of moral goodness, and as the standard of right and wrong they always try to find something they can substitute, some new basis for morality. Often enough, the basis is simply themselves.

You’ll hear this sort of thing today, as if each of us gets to invent our own set of commandments. You hear things like, “Only you can determine what’s right for you.” Or, “It’s your life, only you get to decide how you should live it.”

So all of a sudden, we are the supreme lawgivers for ourselves, we don’t need God to tell us what we should be, or what we should do. We’ll each of us come up with our own standards, tailor-made for our own preferences and goals. But does that really work?

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Impulses or Preferences

To begin with, there’s no way you can base morality on your own impulses and urges. After all, some of your impulses and urges need to be resisted. For instance, your impulse to punch somebody who’s irritating you. Or your impulse to eat or drink anything and everything you want. Certainly certain sexual impulses have to be resisted, and the impulse to say exactly what you think, or exactly what you’re feeling is one you’re going to have to resist in plenty of cases.

Now if we all know that the right thing in many situations is to resist certain impulses, then our impulses can’t be the basis for what’s right. It must be something else, some other standard, some other criterion which tells us which impulses we can gratify and which ones we shouldn’t.

What is that other standard? How do we know which impulses are okay, and which ones aren’t?

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Goals

Sometimes you see books about success, and they tell you that the only thing that matters in life is to set a goal for yourself and then pursue it relentlessly. That all sounds nice, until you ask yourself, “How do I go about setting a goal for my life?” Because not all goals are equal. In fact, not all goals are moral

Serial killers, for instance, set themselves goals, and some of them are pretty successful in achieving those goals. But does it make them good persons, moral persons, excellent persons? Is it a good thing that they set themselves these goals and then decided to relentlessly accomplish them? Nope. Because the goals they set themselves in the first place were horrible.

So it’s not enough to “have goals in life.” You have to have the right goals. Which means you have to submit your goals to some further moral standard, to see if your goals are morally worthy. But if your goals need to be evaluated according to some further moral standard, then that shows that the goals themselves are not the basis of morality.

You have to get your sense of right and wrong from somewhere else, and then you can go about setting the goals for your life.

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Morality doesn’t Come from You

We’ve said that impulses aren’t the basis of morality – because some impulses are bad. We’ve also said goals aren’t the basis for morality, because some goals are bad. But that means that morality doesn’t come from you. It doesn’t come from the impulses you feel. And it doesn’t come from the goals you choose. Morality isn’t the result of your feelings, or the result of your choices.

Right and Wrong is something that comes from outside of you, something that sets the standard for evaluating your feelings and choices. You don’t get to make the standard, it’s not something you create. The moral standard isn’t something any creature creates. It’s something that was created along with creatures. It’s a standard that comes from God.

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How Should I Live?

The idea of morality, of right and wrong, presumes that there’s a way we’re supposed to live, and a way we’re not supposed to live. But there’s no way we can know how we’re supposed to live, if we don’t know what our purpose in life is. There’s no way to know our purpose unless we know the one who gave us that purpose. And the one who made us is the one who gave us our purpose. That’s why it doesn’t work to try to give ourselves purpose, because we didn’t make ourselves.

These three things are inseparably intertwined: morality, purpose, and our Maker.

So if you want to know the right way to live you must know your purpose, then you must know your Maker. That’s why prayer gives us both a greater understanding of our own lives and a deeper knowledge of the Lord, because in Him and Him alone our ultimate purpose is found.