Craig Dykstra

UNDERSTANDING THE PLACE OF “UNDERSTANDING”∗

∗This essay is a response to Charles Melcherts essay “ ‘Understanding’ as a Purpose of Religious Education”.

Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents by Jeffrey Stout. Boston, Beacon, 1988. 338 pp.

We recognize in the “confounding of language” and the “scattering abroad” of the people of the earth that take place in the story of Babel (Gen. 1l:l-9) conditions of chaos and confusion that pertain to our own situation, not only in language but also in the moral life. The story may make us nostalgic for a time when “the whole earth had one language and few words,” moral pluralism, too, frightens us. It’s not that we don’t appreciate variety in human life (though some of us seem able to tolerate it only in small doses). But coming into contact with significantly different moral beliefs, norms, and ways of interpreting, speaking, and acting-distinct “moral languages,” to use the shor thand4an make us worry whether any morality can be relied upon as true. Does the diversity of moral languages condemn us to a relativism that leads inexorably to nihilism? Is morality undermined by its own multiplici-