March 1, 2009
Damned if I do - or don't
I don't think I need to be afraid of the Seven Deadly Sins as long as I am guided by my own moral compass
By Ignatius Low
About two weeks ago, I read an interesting article in the newspapers.
It reported the results of a Vatican-backed study of people's church confessions and how they struggled with the Seven Deadly Sins of pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth.
The study, conducted by a 96-year-old Vatican scholar, concluded that men and women sin differently. Men are prone to lust, gluttony and sloth; whereas women tend to commit sins of pride, envy and anger.
The conclusion didn't surprise me, even though I thought it bordered on being sexist. Rather, what got me thinking was whether some of the so-called seven deadly sins are really still sins in this day and age.
Take sloth, for instance.
'Doesn't that just mean that you like to sleep a lot?' I asked a friend the other day. 'I like to sleep, especially on weekends. Isn't sleep supposed to be good for you?'
And then there's gluttony. Very dodgy.
To me, the only gluttons who keep feeling guilty about their sins are those obsessed with losing weight. And there, the real sin is arguably pride or envy, anyway.
In fact, come to think of it, many of my friends are guilty many times over of the deadly sins of sloth and gluttony.
I don't think of them as immoral at all.
In fact, most of them are very nice, thank you very much, and many are chubby, happy and well-adjusted precisely because they eat and sleep so much.
'Oi, don't be so flippant,' said my friend in a loud whisper, as she jabbed my ever-expanding tummy with her finger. 'God can hear you, you know!'
In any case, I was taking the definitions of the deadly sins way too literally, she argued.
The sin of sloth isn't just about sleeping, she said. It's about being lazy and wasting your talent, slouching around and bitching about age-old religious concepts.
And gluttony is really about liking something to the point that you consume beyond what you need, she added. It could be food, shopping or golf. Applied to the entire planet, it could be fossil fuels.
'But that's overlapping into greed!' I exclaimed, clearly missing her warning about divine retribution.
Thinking more about it later, I realised that my real objection to the idea of the seven deadly sins wasn't its apparent conceptual inelegance, or even its age (it dates back to the 6th century).
It just doesn't jive with my own moral code. I believe something is a sin if it hurts others, or has an impact that's bad.
In the language of moral philosophers, I'm what you call a 'consequentialist' - a person who judges an action to be right and wrong purely by its consequences.
By that measure, only five of the seven sins pass muster, with lust being a borderline case.
Sloth doesn't seem to be much of a sin, even by my friend's liberal definition. Lazy or slothful people don't really hurt anyone but themselves.
And gluttony is not much worse, unless you somehow count its nebulous impact on the 'starving millions in Africa' that mourn the wastage of food or resources that you don't really need.
But, of course, there are other ways to think about morality.
There are people who believe in 'situational ethics', which abstains altogether from making judgments about whether something is right or wrong.
It really depends on the context of the action, they say, and this includes factors such as social and cultural norms, etiquette rules and so on.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, are 'deontologists', who believe that something is right or wrong simply because it is. In other words, there is intrinsically right or wrong about something.
Some deontologists believe that rationality dictates what is right or wrong, but it is more common for such thinkers to abide by religious principles.
For these people, I guess, the seven deadly sins have always been sins and will always be.
Which side of the debate you are on really depends on whether or not you believe in absolute and unchangeable truths.
I clearly don't, so I went around polling friends and colleagues on what sins they would consider adding to the list.
Now, many of my friends are non-religious, bleeding-heart liberals. Unsurprisingly, their answers converged on two particular 'sins' which I agree are excellent additions, if only for the fact that they are often moral blind spots for religious conservatives.
The first is the sin of prejudice, which causes people to become biased against others on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation, class, culture or nationality.
Prejudice occurs when people become so attached to established codes or edicts that they refuse to make the more human gesture of understanding individuals for who they are, not what they are.
These bigots refuse to accept that people can be different, both physically and mentally, and evolve through different cultures and subcultures.
And often, they can have a real impact on other people's lives - whether it's bullying behaviour in schools and offices, hate crimes against minorities or the enactment of laws that stop other people from leading the lives they want to lead.
The second deadly sin that I would add to the list is the sin of hypocrisy.
That refers to people who say one thing and do another. The fact that they are seen to hold to codes and laws is more important than holding to the codes and laws themselves.
The problem with hypocrisy is that it really is a kind of deception.
More often than not, it's used to make someone out to be a better person than he or she really is, and some sort of injustice normally results.
What else would you add to the list originally conceived by Pope Gregory the Great and popularised in the Middle Ages?
I'd love to stay and pontificate, but I have some sinning to do at a Japanese buffet restaurant.
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