Changes in Morality

It was harder than I expected to find religion on the Urban Experience in Chicago website, but luckily, I eventually came across something relevant. In Jane Addams' piece, "Filial Relations," she discusses how different people have different opinions on what's morally right and what isn't. These moral consciences are the result of different experiences and environments. Even in the same place, not everyone experiences the same things, and this causes people to have different moralities. Addams references the story of St. Francis of Assisi, who rejected his inheritance in order to become an ascetic for his faith and offended his father in the process. St. Francis' father didn't understand that this calling from God to become ascetic was a "higher claim" than for Francis to fulfill his duties as a son. He would've had to be "touched by the fire of the same revival" as St. Francis was in order to change his moral values like that. As it was, St. Francis' father was highly offended by his son's behavior even though he, too, lived in the same cultural environment. Addams asserts that "the notion of a larger obligation can only come through the response to an enlarged interest in life and in the social movements around us." The social movements of the religius revival that brought St. Francis to his asceticism did not affect his father; his father didn't have that "response."

Addams compares St. Francis to college-educated women who want to make a difference in the world through social work instead of holding house-keeping as their life goal. These women have experienced something that changes their morals--adjusts them to the current time period. She sees this adjustment in morality to see social justice as more important than uphold the family name as "progress" in the institution of the famliy: "The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress. " Morals depend on the historical context, and for Addams, the ethical code which holds the family above all else is outdated--"a most flagrant example of the ill-adjustment and misery arising when an ethical code is applied too rigorously and too conscientiously to conditions which are no longer the same as when the code was instituted, and for which it was never designed."

This is exactly like what historical Biblical critics do: they look back in history to see the specific contexts of different Biblical passages and use that historical background to try to find the real meaning that passages and commandments had for their original, intended readers. Although Addams is using historical criticism for an ethical code and not a text, it's the same process. With the plant analogy she uses above, the meaning of the text/moral code would be the seed, the context the sheath, and the current form the growing plant itself. Therefore, moral codes can change with time as the contexts in which they're used change. However, the basic core (seed) of them--arguably--remains the same. Also, these contexts are not just dependent on time, but also on the individuals who are hearing the message--people listen differently.