Monday, April 26, 2010

Comfort and Morality

I am so sick of hearing people say, "I'm not comfortable with X," when the statement concerns a moral issue. Comfort has absolutely nothing to do with it. My subjective feeling does not determine objective moral rightness of wrongness--although if I were perfectly virtuous I would rejoice in the good and abominate the evil.

But not being perfectly sanctified, I am (and so are you) sometimes uncomfortable with what is right and true and comfortable with what is wrong and false. As such, the comfort language is inept, inadequate, and even misleading.

2 comments:

Brandon B. said...

Unfortunately, in our gluttonous age, comfort tends to be one of the defining features of many people's worldview.

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Perhaps the term "comfort" refers to behavior one feels intutitively is wrong or inappropriate, but for which one can advance no rational basis to disapprove?