In Praise of Sin

On moral order

My question was a direct one: “Do you believe that your actions are good or bad?”

“My therapist says that we shouldn’t ask that question. Instead, she asks whether actions are productive or unproductive.”

"I can appreciate that, but I’m not your therapist, so I’m not going to treat you like my patient. And I am asking if they’re good or bad.”

“I cannot answer that,” she says.

“You mean you can’t discern the moral content of your actions?”

“No. I mean that I believe that doctors and therapists know best how to talk to me, and they don’t ask me that. Morals are irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant? Are you saying that you don’t believe in good or bad, or that you’re personally not capable of badness, or of goodness?”

“I am saying I find this conversation to be unproductive.”

Someone close to me has been wrestling with her mental health for years. In spite of interventions from psychologists, doctors, and therapists, things seem to be getting worse. There is no code of polite silence around her sickness. Her illness is discussed and rediscussed constantly, with new diagnoses, new trauma histories, new therapists, new meds and new treatment plans occurring with increasing frequency. In tragic form, the more interventions into her mental health, the worse things seem to become. L’s view is that as her condition is one of illness, the treatment is in the hands of doctors and therapists. They are professionals.

She is right, of course. They are professionals. The therapeutic treatments she receives are all administered from the hands of health professionals, and as such they treat her as their professions dictate, which is to say with clinical diagnoses. But from my front-seat view it feels as though her reliance on the medical-therapeutic establishment is a therapy of despair, for it treats her as only half-human. The medical system cannot treat her soul-sickness, for this suffering falls outside the parameters of science. Worse, she sees herself only as a patient, a walking illness, but not as a fully formed human. Without a sense of her own capacity for badness or goodness, the human being is viewed as a kind of neuro-plastic system that can be molded to better or worse health through chemical and cognitive adjustments. L sees herself as a set of symptoms, but not as a soul.

In saying this I don’t mean to diminish the work of psychiatrists and psychologists, nor the genuine suffering caused by mental illness. There is no question that physicians prescribe medications that can regulate chemical imbalances, and that therapists offer re-framing narratives that contribute towards healing. One’s brain can get as broken as any other part of one’s body, and very often good medicine is the cure. But a medical professional is bound within the duties of her profession, and as such any question of morals are, as L says, irrelevant. Morals are judgmental, not therapeutic. But to withhold moral agency from a person is in itself a form of judgement: one has judged them either incapable of full human action or has judged morals themselves to be irrelevant, not a real part of the world we inhabit.

Philosopher James Mumford, in his beautiful and thought-provoking essay, “Therapy Beyond Good and Evil,” writes of just this moral relativism that underpins contemporary psychiatric practice. “To say values are subjective is to say there is nothing independent of our own minds that answers to our talk of right and wrong,” Mumford writes. According to psychiatric practice, “values are determined, not discovered, and selfhood – what it means to be a person – is therefore fundamentally about choice, not vision. It is about picking a course of action arbitrarily, not about seeing a reality that transcends you – goodness – and integrating with it” (30).

Mumford’s essay has two main ideas: the first is that contemporary models of mental wellness programs are founded on a philosophy of profound moral relativism. As he says of psychologists:

I think they really believe they’ve got straight on what is and is not the case in the world, that they’ve really uncovered the truth of the matter, which is that there are no moral facts, that good and evil are not part of the fabric of the world. This is not just wariness on psychology’s part. It’s radical skepticism. The idea that ‘we as therapists shouldn’t talk about right and wrong’ has become very different idea that there is no right and wrong in the first place. (31)

His second point follows from the first: it is that in a world of moral relativism, where everyone chooses her or his own values, who is to say that the chosen values are good or bad? In the case of depression, he argues, an individual feels worthless. Wouldn’t it follow, then, that a psychiatrist must affirm that self-given value? Mumford points out the inconsistency of contemporary psychology and the cognitive dissonance that ironically underpins most therapies: practitioners say, and really do seem to believe, that only subjective values are relevant, yet what they do in practice is value the lives of individual patients, objectively and often in contradiction to their patients, as they help them to move towards something, again it would seem, objectively good. The words “productive” and “unproductive” are essentially cop-out words, words which have the veneer of therapeutic authority and truth without committing to any metaphysical reality.

This kind of practice, known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), writes Mumford, “whets patients’ appetite for meaning only to deprive them of real nourishment by extracting the very substance on which meaning depends: its orientation toward the absolute” (35). L, who insists that her actions have no moral content aside from “productive or unproductive,” might want to consider to what end her productivity is aimed. How can there be a good she is moving towards if the goal is not to be good, but productive? She has fallen into the trap set for her by the mental health professionals on which she places all her hope: her goal is to productively move towards the feeling that her self-fulfilling feelings are productive. If this seems both like circular reasoning and extreme solipsism, that is only because your thinking is unproductive, clearly.

Mumford’s essay makes a powerful case for the need for objective good. What I am going to attempt is to make a case for objective bad. Nobody sins anymore. Of course, I don’t mean that people don’t do bad, horrible, nasty, cruel things. We of course do. It’s just that we don’t like to call what we do a sin. Other people are bad. I am just emotionally traumatized, conditioned by my upbringing, stressed and anxious, and most of all, misunderstood. Why would I consider myself a sinner? It implies a failure on my part, which doesn’t accord well with the validation I feel I’m entitled to. Calling myself a sinner makes me feel shame. And besides, it sounds unsophisticated and religiousy, neither modern nor enlightened.