In modern society, one claim to progress is the alleged triumph of reason in many realms of daily living.  But the truth is that while reason allows humans to behave sensibly according to the world they are presented with, it completely loses function and ironically presents itself as a regressive danger in one of two areas: when it is used to [1] explain the origins of the universe, and when it is considered supreme in the dictation of morality.  This essay will focus on the latter problem.

When the “rational” person considers reason to be the foundation of morality, what they find is known as the [2] Heinz Dilemma.  In this dilemma, a man has a wife who gets cancer, and he has the option of either stealing from a selfish person to pay for her surgery, or letting her die while not stealing from someone else.  According to the rational person, Heinz has six moral directions to compare (thanks to Wikipedia):

“#1 (obedience): Heinz should not steal the medicine because he will consequently be put in prison which will mean he is a bad person. Or: Heinz should steal the medicine because it is only worth $200 and not how much the druggist wanted for it; Heinz had even offered to pay for it and was not stealing anything else.

#2 (self-interest): Heinz should steal the medicine because he will be much happier if he saves his wife, even if he will have to serve a prison sentence. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine because prison is an awful place, and he would more likely languish in a jail cell than over his wife’s death.

#3 (conformity): Heinz should steal the medicine because his wife expects it; he wants to be a good husband. Or: Heinz should not steal the drug because stealing is bad and he is not a criminal; he has tried to do everything he can without breaking the law, you cannot blame him.

#4 (law-and-order): Heinz should not steal the medicine because the law prohibits stealing, making it illegal. Or: Heinz should steal the drug for his wife but also take the prescribed punishment for the crime as well as paying the druggist what he is owed. Criminals cannot just run around without regard for the law; actions have consequences.

#5 (human rights): Heinz should steal the medicine because everyone has a right to choose life, regardless of the law. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine because the scientist has a right to fair compensation. Even if his wife is sick, it does not make his actions right.

#6 (universal human ethics): Heinz should steal the medicine, because saving a human life is a more fundamental value than the property rights of another person. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine, because others may need the medicine just as badly, and their lives are equally significant.”

As one can see, every single reason achieves some sort of tangible good while enduring some sort of “bad,” leaving the participant to subjectively weigh the results of his actions and choose which answer is right for him.  But the truly comical aspect of this dilemma is that the dilemma exists in every moral circumstance, regardless of the extremity of the outcome.  For instance, [3] C.S. Lewis would say that “in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons–either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it–money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.”

So in short, even pretending that the Heinz Dilemma is a dilemma reveals a severe disregard for the very existence of any morality: in a world which weighs good and bad outcomes against one another to determine morality, society will have a difficult time being able to determine if anything is right or wrong, since all evil actions present moral benefits (if we can even call them that).  This realization led Martin Luther to call reason “The Devil’s Whore.” 

Any way we choose, without being able to understand how each person truly feels or accurately predict a resulting amount of happiness before an action takes place, we cannot use reason to make adequate judgments about moral behavior, and thus cannot seek justice.   We cannot make adequate moral judgments because any pain and pleasure involved can only be weighted on a subjective and potential basis, making social structure virtually impossible for the “reasonable” person (which is why the postmodern media focuses on suffering poster-children to motivate their constituents). We cannot seek justice because “reasonable” justice cannot be predicated upon either subjectivity or the supremacy of one moral reason over all others.  To put this another way, an allegedly moral action which openly disregards many other universally moral options cannot itself be moral.

This is why true morality is tough to follow: because bypassing your own biological whims can feel very counter-intuitive, and you can always reason around honest morality by using other moral codes.  For instance, which of the six reasons presented above is universally more important than the others?  Is conformity always more important than self-interest, obedience, human rights, and law-and-order?  If morality does exist and we can be moral, this morality must specifically and unwaveringly exist beyond the human sensory unit, or society will slide into chaos.  

We must also understand that reason can only be used to apply the universal moral standard in the cause-and-effect universe, because reason does not create truth: it concerns itself with and is responsible for the physical application of known truth (truth being a statement which is in harmony with creation and its Creator).  This makes the placement of reason as a source of moral truth ironically unreasonable, as you must first have truth to have reason and not visa-versa.  Try to reason without truth, and what you will find is that reason does not exist, along with morality.

So when a bishop in the Anglican church [4] recently told his parishioners that they could steal from large grocery chains if they were hungry, Christians with brains were correct to cause a ruckus.  It should seem silly to explain this to a Bishop, but sometimes cliche statements shouldn’t be forgotten: the road to hell is absolutely paved with good intentions.  Then again, maybe we shouldn’t expect too much from the church that began because an overweight buffoon of a dictator wanted to divorce his wife.

In final response to Heinz, there is really only one moral answer to the Heinz Dilemma: stealing is wrong, so don’t steal.