There Are No Rules, Only Love

Athens, 399 BC. A young man named Euthyphro is climbing the courthouse steps to prosecute his own father for murder.

The story behind it is ugly and ordinary. One of the family’s hired men got drunk and killed a household slave. Euthyphro’s father tied the man up, threw him in a ditch, and sent a messenger to the city to ask what the law required. The messenger took his time. The man died in the ditch of cold and hunger before the answer came back, and now the son is bringing charges against the father, and the whole family is appalled at him for it.

Euthyphro is not troubled. He is serene. The gods, he says, would want it.

On the steps he runs into Socrates, who is delighted to meet a man so sure of what the gods want. He asks him to explain it. What is piety? Euthyphro answers the way most of us would. Piety is what the gods love. Then Socrates asks the question of questions:

If a thing is good only because it was commanded, then goodness is arbitrary. Cruelty would have been virtue had the command gone the other way, and calling a god good means nothing more than that the god agrees with himself.

If it is commanded because it was already good, then goodness is a standard the command answers to. The command is not the source. It is a report.

Twenty-four centuries later nobody has climbed off that fork cleanly. Every serious defender of divine command has had to pick a tine and live on it. The best they offer is a game of exceptions. But you don’t have to be a philosopher to think through this, you can find it in your own kitchen.

Is it wrong to steal?

Your neighbor keeps his bike on the porch, a good one, never locked, because it is that kind of neighborhood. One afternoon you walk over, swing a leg across it, and ride it home. That is theft, and everyone reading this agrees.

Fast forward five years, the evacuation order came four days ago. Your neighbor packed the car in twenty minutes and has not been back. The power went out the second night, the one store still open is down to canned beets, and there is food in his refrigerator going soft in the dark. The spare key is under the planter. He told you once, laughing, in case you ever needed it. You go in and take the food. Almost nobody calls that theft. Almost everybody would do it to survive. And most of the people who would eat their neighbors’ food were raised in an absolutist commandment culture with no exception clauses, except for gods.

Is it wrong to lie?

Your father is eighty-four and his memory is going, and three or four times a day he asks where your mother is. She died six years ago. The first few times you told him the truth, and each time he heard it as news and grieved her from the beginning, and by evening he had forgotten and asked again. Now you tell him she ran to the store. He nods and goes back to the crossword. You have never once felt like a liar doing it. Nobody handed you a second rule to settle it. There was only him, and what the truth was doing to him.

Is it wrong to break a promise?

You promised your daughter you would be at the recital, front row, phone off. On the way there you come over a rise and find a car on its roof in the ditch with someone still inside. You stop. You miss the recital. The promise is broken, and your daughter, when she is old enough to understand, would have been ashamed of you had you kept it.

Is it wrong to kill?

Then a man comes through your back door at two in the morning with a knife, and he is moving toward the room where your children sleep. The commandment did not carve out an exception for him. Every court on earth did, and so does everyone who has ever been a parent. The defenders will tell you the Hebrew says murder, not kill, so the exception was always there. Fine. Then the exception lives in the word and not on the tablet, and somebody had to decide what counted, and that somebody was consulting the same thing you were.

Is it wrong to defy your father?

Every tradition says so, and some say it in stone. And then there is a daughter who grew up in a house where the honoring went one direction and the fists went the other, who at nineteen changes the locks and stops taking his calls, and who is, by any account worth listening to, doing the honorable thing.

Which is where Euthyphro was standing.

Same rule each time. Same words. Different verdict, and the verdict did not come from the rule, because the rule said the same thing both times. It came from somewhere else.

The harm.
The relationship.

What the person in front of you needed and what a reasonable person could believe they would want. Care for one particular person in one particular situation.

That is what you were consulting. The rule was never the thing itself. It was a compression of the thing, useful because it is fast, and lossy in exactly the way every compression is lossy.

The map is enormously useful right up until the day it disagrees with the ground, and on that day the ground governs, because the ground is what the map was drawn to describe. Most people go a whole life without seeing the seam, because on an ordinary Tuesday the map and the ground agree. It takes a hurricane, or a father in a ditch, to show you which one you were following.

People have been noticing this for a long time, and the people who noticed it first were not the enemies of religion. They were insiders.

The oldest of them is the founder. Asked why his men were breaking the Sabbath, Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, which is the refrigerator question asked in the first century by the person the rules were named after. Paul went further and said it outright: love is the fulfilling of the law, and the whole law hangs on two commands, both of which are love. Augustine boiled it to five words. Love, and do what you will. The rulebook, in its own most quoted lines, puts love upstream of the rules. I am not arguing against the tradition. I am quoting its center back to the people who guard its margins.

In 1966 an Episcopal priest named Joseph Fletcher published a book called Situation Ethics arguing that there is exactly one absolute, love, and that every other rule is subordinate to it. He was trying to hold a position between two he thought were both wrong: the absolutism that says the rules bind regardless of who gets hurt, and the relativism that says there is nothing to consult at all. The church branded him a relativist almost before the book was in stores. If you were raised in this kind of faith culture and you now suspect love outranks the rulebook, you have not defected. You are standing where a priest stood, inside the tradition, holding its own central commandment, and the tradition mostly declined the invitation.

Around the same time a psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg was sitting with children and adolescents and asking them moral questions, then asking them why. What he found was a progression, not a possession. Early on, wrong means punished. Later, wrong means against the rules, and the rules are what hold everything together. Later still, and he thought few people got fully there, reasoning moves underneath the rules to the principles they were made to serve, and a person becomes able to look at a law and say it is unjust, and explain why. The mature stage was not lawlessness. It was the ability to see the law’s intent, in spirit.

Then Carol Gilligan, who had worked alongside him, went back through the interviews and found something his scale had been scoring as immaturity. There was a second moral language in those transcripts, and it showed up most often in the girls and women. Not justice and abstract rights. Relationship, responsibility, the particulars of who is going to get hurt. An ethic of care. Kohlberg’s ladder had been quietly ranking it below the ethic of rules, and Gilligan’s argument, in 1982, was that it belonged beside it.

Jonathan Haidt finished the picture. His work on moral judgment showed that the reasoning comes second. The intuition fires first, fast and bodily, and the reasons arrive afterward, like a press secretary explaining a decision the president already made. That is a description of how the machine runs, not a permission slip. Which intuitions deserve to govern is a separate question, and it is the question the rest of this essay is about. And the intuitions are not random. They run on a handful of evolved systems, and the oldest of them is care and harm. That system grew out of a long mammalian history of attachment. Creatures that responded to the distress of their young left more descendants than creatures that did not, so sensitivity to suffering got selected for, and so did the machinery for reciprocity and the sharp eye for cheaters, because animals that could hold cooperation together outlasted the ones that could not.

Haidt counts more than one system, and the careful reader will know it. Care and harm is the oldest, but alongside it he finds fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty, each selected for, each firing before thought, each with its own rules compressed on top of it. Honor the flag. Respect your elders. Keep the body pure. Those are real drives and they are as evolved as care. So the question is not which drive is older. It is which one the others are for. Ask loyalty what it is for and it answers: the group that keeps you alive. Ask authority and it answers: the order that keeps the group from tearing itself apart. Ask sanctity and it answers: the disgust that kept your ancestors away from the rotten meat and the sick stranger. Every one of them is protecting someone, and every one of them can be pointed at someone. Loyalty runs a gang as well as it runs a family. Authority runs a tyranny as well as a household. Sanctity has drawn the line around every out-group in history. They are drives, and a drive does not know what it is serving.

Care is the one that does. A loyalty that harms is still loyalty. An authority that crushes is still authority. A love that harms has stopped being love, and everyone in the room can feel the moment it stopped. It is the only one of the six that corrects itself, because it is the only one whose definition already contains the person on the other end. That is what I mean when I say the highest of our human experience is love. Not the oldest drive. The one the other drives have to answer to when they are asked what they are for.

And the compressions exist because you cannot run a full care-and-harm calculation for every situation in real time. It is too slow, and you are too biased in your own favor. So the group encodes what it has learned into short, memorable, portable rules that get the answer right in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Do not kill.
Do not steal.
Keep your word.
Do not…

Those are not decrees. They are compressed wisdom about what reliably harms people, and they earn their authority by being usually correct calculations, which also tells you exactly when to distrust them. They do not exist outside of the social. They are artifacts of the relational, remnants of natural selection. Every rule on that list can be asked what it is for, and every one of them answers with a person. Do not steal is for the one who would be robbed. Keep your word is for the one who is counting on you. Run the question the other direction and it goes nowhere. Ask what care is for and there is no rule underneath it, only more people. That asymmetry is the whole argument. Rules point at care. Care does not point at anything but itself.

Even the best defense of the rules concedes this. The philosopher Robert Adams saw the fork and tried to build a third tine. The dilemma only bites, he argued, if we mean the commands of just any god. Specify a loving God and it dissolves. Goodness is not arbitrary, because it flows from a nature that is unchangingly loving, and it is not a standard floating outside of God, because the nature is God’s own. Goodness is what God is, and things are good to the degree they resemble him. That is the version you will hear from every careful apologist working today. Not the commands. The character.

It is a better answer than the one Euthyphro gave. But it just moves the problem one step back.

Ask about the character what Socrates asked about the commands. Is God’s nature good because it has some property we call goodness, or is goodness just the name for whatever God’s nature happens to be? If the first, then goodness is prior. God’s nature is being measured against it and passing, and the standard is not God after all. If the second, then God is good says only that God is like God. A cruel god would have a cruel nature, cruelty would be good, and the sentence would still come out true. The arbitrariness we were trying to escape is back, moved from the will to the character, wearing a robe.

The defenders have a reply, and it is that God’s nature is necessary. It could not have been otherwise, so the cruel god is not a live possibility and the objection is idle. But necessity is not goodness. A necessarily cruel god would make cruelty necessarily good, and we would be no better off. We would only have lost the exit. That a thing could not have been different does not tell you why it exists in its current form. It just tells you that you are stuck with it. They will tell you, you’re not allowed to examine this map. Please assimilate.

But to say that goodness is God’s nature, you first need the word good to mean something. If it means nothing more than like God, the claim is empty. If it means what it means in every other sentence we speak, care, and the refusal of cruelty, and the welfare of the person in front of you, then that content is doing all the work and the theology is riding its coattails. Adams knew this. He conceded that if God commanded cruelty for its own sake, the commands would not bind, which is another way of saying that love, not divinity, is the test, and that he had written the test into the definition of the only God he would accept.

There is one more reply, and it is the one the careful apologists actually use. People knew what water was for ten thousand years before anyone knew it was two hydrogens and an oxygen. Learning the chemistry did not mean the old word had smuggled anything in. The order of knowing is not the order of being. So, the argument goes, we can know goodness through care and still have it grounded in God’s nature, the way water was always H2O whether or not anyone had a microscope.

It is a good analogy and it breaks in one place. The chemistry earned its keep. Once you knew water was H2O you could predict things the old word could not, split it, make it, tell it from something that only looked like water. Now ask what the claim goodness is God’s nature lets you do that the word care did not already do. Which verdict does it change? Which of the six cases above comes out differently? None. A grounding that alters no judgment in any case is not a discovery. It is a label pasted on the bottle after the water was already drunk.

Follow the best defense of the rules all the way down and you land where the refrigerator landed. Love, the common relational good is the working criterion. The rule keepers are using it too. They just keep pushing it upstream, where nobody has to look at it.

I defended the commands this way for years. Youth pastor. Music pastor. Church planter. I stood in front of rooms and taught them as the thing itself, and I believed it, and I was good at it. But my spider sense was always going off. I began to understand what outsourced morality does to a person over time. It does not make them good. It makes them compliant, obedient, which masquerades as goodness. It strips them of their instrument of natural intuition, in a costume of transformation. So I keep examining the map and when it finally tore, I found that love, not commands nor decrees, was sufficient. It moves from this abstract cold outside of compulsion to the warm inside of motivational ethics. I knew instinctively that I didn’t need a command to do good. To be good. To love and let love turn into wisdom and wisdom turn into prudent contextualized behavior. It’s better than the absolute, because it’s deeply personal. It’s a life lived, not borrowed.

But what about when love fails? What about when it is absent, or exhausted, or has been quietly replaced by self-interest wearing love’s face. Every abuser who ever crossed a line had a loving explanation ready, every institution that buried something did it to protect the community it loved, and fixed rules are, among other things, a defense of the weak against the improvisation of the strong. Every villain thinks they are good. Aren’t intuitions themselves parochial? Doesn’t natural selection fire care and social good the hardest for people who look like us?

Yes, all of that is true. All of that is an argument for keeping the rules, and I agree. Wisdom in the hands of the immature or underdeveloped can be dangerous. Aristotle said the same thing twenty-three centuries ago. Rules are for the learner. The person of practical wisdom sees the particulars of the case in front of him and acts from what he sees, and you do not get there by memorizing the rules. You get there by living long enough, and paying attention long enough, that the rules dissolve into judgment. We don’t have to let each person reinvent the wheel. Not everyone operates from love. Not everyone develops socially and sees themselves in their neighborhood. But none of it is an argument that the rules themselves are the source. They are the servants. They are not good judgment. They are not discernment. They are not behavior. They are the result of the subjective lived experiences of our ancestors.

And the villain problem has an answer that does not require a rule. Every abuser has a loving explanation, yes. Ask the person he abused. Whether an act was loving is not settled by the one who did it. It is settled, most of the time, by the one it was done to, and the abuser’s story fails that test every single time, without a commandment in the room. Love is not a feeling in the actor. It is something that lands, or does not land, in another person, and that person gets a vote. That is what makes it safe to use as a standard. Self-interest wearing love’s face can fool the wearer forever. It rarely fools the face across the table.

Rules are real, useful, and mostly binding, and they are second-order. Keep them. Teach them to your children. Follow them on the days you are tired, precisely because you are tired. But when a rule and the welfare of an actual person collide, the rule is not the higher court and I trust your human intuition, checked against the person in front of you, to lead you.

You may remember my love for Star Trek.

Is it wrong to cheat on a test?

In Star-date fiction, there is a cadet at Starfleet Academy named James Kirk. The Kobayashi Maru is a simulation. A freighter sends a distress call from inside the Neutral Zone, the cadet takes the ship in to rescue it, and whatever the cadet does after that, the enemy arrives in force, the freighter is lost, and everyone under the cadet’s command dies. It is built that way on purpose. There is no move that wins. Cadets take it once. Kirk took it three times, and before the third he broke into the simulator and rewrote the program so the freighter could be saved. He was called, ironically by Spock, in front of the faculty for it, accused of cheating. But instead of expelling him they gave him a commendation for original thinking.

He did not beat the test, he asked what it was for and followed his human intuitions.

The test was never about the freighter. Starfleet wanted to see who a person becomes when the map runs out, and Kirk’s answer was that he did not accept the premise, that a scenario with no way out was a design flaw and not a law of nature. The faculty looked at the rule against cheating, asked what it was protecting, and decided that a cadet who rewrites the conditions of a no-win scenario was exactly the officer they had been trying to find.

To live this way will cost you something. It asks more of the person holding it than the rulebook ever did. You will have to think. You have to be able to tell love from appetite. You will have to know that love is better for survival than hate. You will have to live with intention.

Which is why the Kobayashi Maru has a second half.

It’s thirty years later, Kirk is an admiral. Spock, now a captain himself is the ultimate rule-keeper. Vulcan, logician, the one who could recite the regulation before you finished asking about it. He had watched his friend Kirk cheat the no-win scenario but had never taken the test himself. Then the ship is dying, the engines are gone, and the only way to save everyone aboard is for someone to walk into a chamber full of radiation and do the repair by hand. Spock enters that chamber alone. He does the work, and he dies behind the glass, and with what breath he has left he tells Kirk that he never took the Kobayashi Maru until now, and asks what Kirk thinks of his solution.

His solution was not a rule, law or command. It was the guiding principle of love. He whispers it, The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Notice the order. The act came first. The sentence came after, the way Haidt said it would, a logician’s press secretary explaining what love had already done. Spoken by a man about other men it is the coldest sentence in the galaxy, and it has justified every purge in history. Spoken by a man about himself, walking into the chamber, it is the rule in its proper place. Downstream. Serving. The needs of the many did not send Spock through that door. Spock sent himself, and then handed Kirk the sentence so Kirk would have something to hold. Spock transcends the need for any command to be good. His love is the source. The elegance completes with Kirk eulogizing Spock by saying, Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.

The next film runs the sentence backward. Kirk gives up his ship, his rank, and very nearly his son to bring Spock home, and when Spock asks why, Kirk hands him his own words turned over. The needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many. Same words. Opposite verdict. Nobody who has watched both scenes thinks either man got it wrong, because neither man was following the sentence. Both were following the thing the sentence was for.

You are running rules right now that you have never examined.

I mean the inherited ones, the ones that arrived before you could evaluate them, from people who mostly meant well, encoding conditions that may not exist anymore. What a good wife does. What a man is allowed to feel. What you owe your parents. What counts as selfish. Whether rest has to be earned. What loyalty requires, and who it requires it toward.

Every one of those is a map, and it functions in your life exactly like a commandment. It fires before you think. It feels like conscience. But have you ever once been asked what it is for? Where did that map come from, and whose hand drew it, and what were they protecting when they drew it?

Examining maps is liberating, even if you end up keeping it. Because until you make it yours, your life is borrowed. Examine it. Deconstruct it. Cast it off if it doesn’t fit and you will be free to transform. To transcend the need for any rules. Not because you will have none. Because you will finally know what every one of them was for. You can be ruled by love.