Moral certainty destined to fail

■ The forthcoming referendum on abortion is already generating a torrent of assertion and counter assertion, as the protagonists persist in exchanging conflicting, and seemingly irreconcilable, views.

However, more debilitating to reasoned reflection, is the suggestion, in some quarters, that we have privileged access to the will of God, who determines how we ought to act in relation to one another.

Unfortunately, there are as many views about the will of God as there are people.

What has weakened the Catholic Church in Ireland has been the regular discouragement of critical engagement with its teaching; unwittingly, presenting itself as an autocratic, despotic institution, sustained by the alluring myth that it is uniquely right.

The failure to release the intelligence of its people – particularly that of the young – has sustained the Church’s lazy habit of trumping all that is deemed to be deviant or subversive by the counter-productive practice of formal silencing.

Views on morality are invariably driven more by fervour than by reason.

We have no secure rational take-off point from which we can deduce our moral principles.

All attempts to reach moral certainty are destined to fail.

Nevertheless, we are all constrained to make moral decisions with all the ambiguity that this engenders, supported by the hope that these decisions will be greeted more by compassion than by dismissive judgment.

Philip O’Neill Oxford, England