What Is Right? - A Definition Lost - Craig Lounsbrough

What is ‘right?’  What provides our guiding function?  What is our “north star?”  Our constant?  Our set of rules that keep us civil?  Our code?  Or… is our code the commitment to the absence of a code?  What is ‘right?’

The Question…

The question, “What is right,” must be asked without our efforts to choose what is ‘right,’ or to think that we actually have the power to do that in the first place.  The question, “What is right” needs to be probed without exercising some sort of non-existent license that leads us to believe that we have the right to decide that ‘everything’ is right.  It is a question not of opinion, or bias, or cultural trends, or vogue ideals.  Rather, it is a deeper question.  Much deeper.

What It’s Not

It is not a question of how we grant ourselves the greatest leeway by building the widest moral highway we can possibly build.  It’s not about scripting out the boundaries for ourselves that are boundaries in name only, so that we might delude ourselves into thinking that we are walking the high road, when we are, in fact, mucking our way through the lowest path.  It’s not about the kind of life that we want to live, but the kind of life that we should live.  It’s not about declaring all things ‘right’ so that we can finally relieve ourselves of the guilt of having done so much that is wrong.  And that involves submitting our greed to the weight of principle.  And in the mind of many a life traveler, that trade demands far, far too much.  Yet should we decide against the trade, we will soon realize that the cost is far, far too high.

Right Is Something That “Is”

And so, we might consider that ‘right’ is something that ‘is,’ not something that we create.  Its existence pre-dates our own and will extend beyond our own.  It is a collection of building blocks that when gathered, form the foundation of existence itself.  It’s a natural set of laws and principles that keeps things regulated, in balance, ever-steady, and gently positioned in order that we might enjoy the maximum of this existence.

This thing called ‘right’ is an ingenious compilation of the values that keep us safe from others, but mostly safe from ourselves…for on our own we do not seem to do either very well.  ‘Right’ is the daily working out of the ethics that allow none of us to abuse all the others of us.  Instead, it allows us to enrich those with whom we share the privilege of this journey.  ‘Right’ is that fragile collection of morals and values that are so easily broken, but never destroyed.  But hard as we try, we cannot break them without deeply, and possibly permanently, breaking ourselves.

‘Right’ Is Within Us

And are these things not embedded in us, so much so that we immediately know when we have violated them?  And does not the frantic need to douse the guilt explain why we in a rogue culture are incessantly attempting to make ‘right’ that which we cannot for no other reason than that which we are fighting against has always been, and will always be, bigger than us?  Will we be so foolish as to upset the gentle balance of ethics, morals and values to the point that we will never be able to reset a world that we sent careening?  And so, the question is, “What is ‘right?”  And my answer is, “What God built, and how He instructed us to manage it.”  There is nothing, there is nothing that will ever be more right than that.  Ever.

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

• Micah 6:8