On 23 September 2026, ten speakers from very different intellectual and professional backgrounds met in the Knights’ Hall of Križanke in Ljubljana to discuss a seemingly simple question: Do we still need morality today?

The question was deliberately provocative. At first glance, talking about morality in 2026 can seem almost anachronistic. We are much more comfortable speaking about ethics. We have medical ethics, business ethics, bioethics, media ethics, professional ethics, research ethics and countless ethical commissions. We have laws, regulations, standards, codes of conduct, compliance procedures and systems of accountability.

Why, then, should we still need morality?

This was the starting point of the symposium Morality for the Twenty-First Century?, organized by the Grand Lodge of Slovenia. The question mark in the title was important. The purpose was not to defend morality, still less to prescribe a particular morality. It was to investigate whether morality remains a meaningful category at all—and, if it does, what it might mean for a twenty-first-century human being.

The format itself was part of the experiment. Instead of a sequence of conventional lectures, we returned to the ancient principle of deliberation. A participant presented a thesis; others responded briefly; the original speaker then had an opportunity to respond. The aim was not to win an argument but to allow the argument to evolve through others’ interventions.

That distinction became increasingly important as the afternoon progressed. And what is even more interesting: participants remained extremely focused for four hours without a break!

From morality to ethics

My introductory provocation began with an observation supported by the Ngram chart.

During the twentieth century, ethics increasingly displaced morality in public discourse. Morality became associated with authority, religion, prohibition and inherited norms. Ethics, by contrast, appeared rational, secular, professional and negotiable.

This distinction may tell us more about ourselves than about either morality or ethics.

One could describe the transformation almost schematically. Morality tells me what I ought to do. Ethics appears to offer a procedure for deciding what I should do.

The former therefore appears heteronomous; the latter autonomous.

But is that distinction real?

During the deliberations, another possibility gradually emerged: ethics might be understood precisely as a form of negotiation with morality. Ethics begins when an abstract moral demand encounters a concrete human situation.

This would explain why we need medical ethics, for example. The commandment “do not kill” is morally clear precisely because it is abstract. The moment a physician encounters a terminally ill patient, unbearable suffering, competing obligations, uncertain prognosis, and the patient’s own autonomy, clarity disappears. The moral imperative has not necessarily disappeared. It has entered a situation.

Ethics may therefore be less an alternative to morality than an interface between moral universals and particular circumstances.

And if this is so, eliminating morality would not liberate ethics. It would deprive ethics of one of the poles between which ethical deliberation takes place.

Can morality be universal?

This immediately leads to a more difficult problem.

Whose morality?

Cultures have produced different moral systems. Religious traditions disagree. Philosophical traditions disagree. Even individuals belonging to the same society frequently disagree about fundamental moral questions.

Does this diversity demonstrate that morality is relative?

Not necessarily.

One recurring theme in the discussion was the peculiar coexistence of difference and universality. Human societies construct different moral codes, yet they repeatedly ground morality in remarkably similar problems: murder, theft, sexuality, loyalty, responsibility, care, reciprocity, truth, authority, family, obligations toward strangers, and obligations toward the community.

The answers differ. The questions are strangely persistent.

Perhaps universality does not mean that a historically existing moral code must be imposed universally. Kant’s problem remains: how can the particular act be related to something that claims universal validity?

The paradox might be called singular universality. Morality always occurs through a particular person, in a particular culture, facing a particular situation—and yet moral judgment seems impossible without some appeal beyond the particularity of that situation. Morality is interpersonal, intersubjective.

The moment I say, “This is wrong,” I have already said something more than “I do not like this.”

That “more” is the problem of morality.

Morality makes society predictable

Another important line of deliberation concerned predictability.

Society is possible only if human behavior is to some degree predictable. I must be able to assume that you will normally keep your promise, that you will not arbitrarily attack me, that property will normally be respected, that parents will care for children, that agreements carry obligations and that words have some relation to intentions.

Law contributes to this predictability. But law cannot regulate every interaction between human beings. Nor would we want it to.

A society in which every interpersonal relationship required a contract, every promise a legal enforcement mechanism and every act of trust external supervision would hardly constitute a functioning human community.

Morality therefore performs something that law cannot fully perform. It creates an invisible infrastructure of expectations.

This may also explain the extraordinary historical persistence of the Decalogue and analogous moral codes. Their significance lies not merely in divine command or prohibition. They make social relations intelligible and tell us what can normally be expected from another human being.

Morality, viewed in this way, is not primarily a catalog of prohibitions. It is a technology of social trust.

Authority after the death of authority

But morality introduces another uncomfortable word: authority.

Who has the authority to say what is right?

Modernity has progressively dismantled traditional authorities. The authority of God has weakened. The authority of the Church has weakened. The authority of the father has weakened. The authority of institutions has weakened. Even the authority of expertise has become increasingly contested.

There were sound historical reasons for many of these developments. Authority can become domination. Foucault taught us to recognize how institutions, discourses, and apparently neutral categories can exercise power.

Yet removing authority does not automatically remove power. Nor does it answer the moral question.

The deliberations repeatedly returned to responsibility. If no external authority can finally absolve us from judgment, responsibility does not disappear. On the contrary, it moves closer to the individual.

But here we encounter a paradox.

The more subjective morality becomes, the harder it is to explain why my moral judgment should bind anyone except myself. If everyone becomes his own ultimate moral authority, morality risks dissolving into preference. “I believe this is good” quietly becomes “this is good for me.” And from there it is only a short step to “I want this.”

The moral subject has gained freedom—but perhaps at the price of losing the ground on which moral claims can be made.

Family, boundaries and the formation of the moral subject

The discussion consequently moved from abstract philosophy toward the family.

Morality is not learned first through philosophy. A child does not encounter Kant before encountering a boundary.

Long before we can formulate ethical propositions, we experience permission and prohibition, care and frustration, dependence and reciprocity. We discover that other people exist and that their presence limits our desires. This is one of the places where authority becomes unavoidable.

The problem is therefore not simply whether authority is good or bad. The question is what kind of authority allows a person eventually to become an autonomous moral subject.

An authority that never allows autonomy produces obedience.

An autonomy that has never encountered authority may produce something quite different: the inability to recognize limits.

The family thus becomes one of the first laboratories of morality.

This also casts the contemporary crisis of authority in a different light. If boundaries are eliminated in the name of freedom, we may not necessarily produce freer subjects. We may produce subjects less capable of exercising freedom, because freedom itself requires the ability to recognize another person, a boundary, and responsibility.

Guilt is not necessarily the enemy

This brought another, almost-prohibited concept into the discussion: guilt.

Modern therapeutic culture often treats guilt primarily as something from which a person should be liberated. And pathological guilt undoubtedly exists.

But guilt also has another function.

To feel guilt means recognizing a discrepancy between what I did and what I believe I ought to have done. Without that discrepancy, there is no moral self-reflection.

The complete elimination of guilt would therefore not necessarily produce psychological health. It could also eliminate one of the mechanisms through which the moral subject recognizes responsibility. It seems that at least Western civilization lost its sense of guilt and, with that, the possibility of morality. Thus the prevailing neurosis from the beginning of the 20^th century disappeared, being replaced by narcissism and other types of borderline pathologies.

The crucial distinction may be between guilt that destroys the subject and guilt that calls the subject back into relationship with others.

Here morality again reveals its fundamentally relational character.

Morality resists the lie

Perhaps one of the simplest formulations to emerge during the symposium was also one of the strongest: morality resists the lie.

A lie is not merely a false statement. It is an intervention into the shared symbolic space in which human beings coordinate their actions. If I deliberately deceive you, I manipulate your representation of reality in order to alter your behavior.

Truthfulness is therefore not merely an epistemological virtue. It is a social one.

A society can survive many disagreements about the good. It becomes far more fragile when its members cease to believe that words are meant to correspond, however imperfectly, to reality.

Morality in this sense is embodied. It is not simply a theory of the good. It is the repeated practice through which people make the good socially possible.

Freedom requires boundaries

One of the most productive tensions of the afternoon concerned freedom and security.

We often imagine them as opposites. More security means less freedom; more freedom requires accepting less security. Morality, however, complicates this duality.

Freedom without boundaries can destroy the conditions under which freedom is possible. Absolute freedom of one individual inevitably encounters the freedom of another. The boundary is therefore not merely the enemy of freedom. It can be its precondition.

This is why law alone cannot solve the problem. Law establishes external boundaries. Morality creates internal ones.

The morally autonomous individual is not the person without limits. It is the person capable of recognizing limits without needing a policeman to stand permanently beside him.

Virtue and sin

The symposium began with two deliberately old-fashioned words: virtue and sin.

What could they mean today?

Perhaps virtue is not simply obedience to a catalog of inherited rules. It might instead describe a disposition: the cultivated capacity to act in ways that sustain oneself, other people and the community.

Sin, correspondingly, might be understood not merely as violation of a religious commandment but as an act that ruptures these relationships.

This interpretation does not abolish the theological meanings of either concept. But it may reveal why both concepts survived for so long. The symposium clearly supported the need for a transcendence that is the only force that can productively saturate human individual and social life. It provides an orientation.

Ethics asks: What should I do in this situation?

Morality asks something more disturbing:

What kind of person should I become?

Do we need a new morality?

At the beginning of the symposium, I asked whether the twenty-first century needs a new morality.

After more than four hours of deliberation, I am less convinced that this is the correct question.

Perhaps we do not need to invent a new morality at all.

The remarkable persistence of moral questions across civilizations suggests that the basic problem has changed much less than our vocabulary for describing it.

Human beings still need to negotiate desire and obligation, self and other, freedom and boundary, truth and deception, authority and autonomy, individual interest and communal survival.

The circumstances change radically.

The moral problem does not.

Perhaps this is also why morality never quite disappeared. Even after the extraordinary twentieth-century expansion of ethics, the language of morality began slowly returning to public discourse after the Second World War.

That return may itself deserve attention.

The twentieth century demonstrated with unusual brutality what technologically advanced, rationally organized and legally structured societies are capable of doing. Rationality does not automatically produce goodness. Procedure does not guarantee virtue. Law does not exhaust responsibility.

Ethics remains indispensable precisely because human situations are particular, complex and frequently tragic.

Law remains indispensable because communities require explicit and enforceable rules.

But neither can completely replace morality.

The most interesting conclusion of the symposium may therefore be that morality, ethics and law should not be understood as competing systems. They operate at different levels.

Law establishes the enforceable boundary.

Ethics deliberates about difficult situations.

Morality asks what ultimately makes either of them worth having.

And behind all three remains the question with which we began:

How should human beings live together?

There was no final answer in Križanke on 23 September.

That may be precisely the point.

Morality begins where the question remains alive.