[We] Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

[We] Made….

Like the Step before it, the primary action of Step Four is creation: “to make.”  Very early on, the Steps bring us recovery from our previous actions: construction instead of destruction.  We relearn how to make things other than a mess.

There is some insistence on writing when it comes to this Step, especially given the example in the Big Book.  I admit I’m a proponent.  My recommendation has long been: you are excused from writing for this Step if you are illiterate—and only if you are illiterate.  Nevertheless, this Step does not say: wrote a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

[We] Made a searching and fearless….

Searching is used, here, as an adjective.  Along with fearless, it describes “inventory.”  Searching, the adjective, conveys the sense of intense, minute examination.  We did not, therefore, undertake this task in a cursory or desultory manner; we are meant to discover and catalog each and every item, leaving out nothing.  We are to do this unhampered by—completely without—fear.

[We] Made a searching and fearless moral inventory….

Perhaps the most unclear terms of this Step are “moral” and “inventory.”

“Inventory,” is generally used in business as either a noun—meaning the stock on hand—or a verb—meaning to count and itemize the stock on hand.  “Inventory,” in this Step is a noun, but it doesn’t refer to our business’s stock or goods for sale at all, or our household goods at home.  In fact, it doesn’t refer to anything physical.  In this instance, the storeroom is the mind, and the things to be counted and itemized are “morals.”

Unlike inventory as a noun when it’s generally used, moral is not a conglomerate of physical items.  One doesn’t buy a box of them at the market, or hunt them in the woods, or store them at home on a shelf.  Suddenly, we have what seems like an impossible task.  “Morals,” exist in the mind.  How does one begin to inventory (the verb) one’s restless, constantly chattering maze of a mind and its endless thoughts and ideas?

Moral can take two forms: noun, or adjective. In this instance, moral appears to be an adjective modifying inventory—but it is not modifying in the sense that “searching and fearless” are. Those terms describe how the inventory will be made. “Moral” describes what the inventory will be made of. It will be an inventory of “the principles or rules of right conduct,” which we hold for ourselves.

The use of moral as an adjective to describe inventory, here, is much the same as we would use an item’s name to describe a physical inventory in a business.  If the business were a restaurant we might make a dessert inventory, a utensil inventory, or a linen inventory.  In each of these, we are searching for and delineating certain items.  Do we have desserts?  Yes.  What kind?  Frozen, fresh?  How many of each?  How many spoons, how many knives; which spoons, which knives?  Are some of the napkins worn?  Are a few tablecloths stained?  Do they need to be removed from inventory and discarded?

Most of us are accustomed to the phrase, “and the moral of the story is…,” where moral is a noun.  The moral of the story is its lesson on conduct, on behavior that is advantageous (aka good, right) or disadvantageous (aka bad, wrong) for us or others in our relationship with them.

If there are ten bags of flour in stock and, when you inventory them you find three torn open by mice and leaking most of their contents, and two are soaking wet, you no longer have ten bags of flour in stock, only five.  This quality check is part of the inventory process.

Most of us don’t find such a process intimidating.  We do it in our households constantly.  Even in the throes of our unmanageable existences, we could often ascertain with great speed and clarity exactly how much alcohol, and what kind, we had on hand.

Now, however, we cross over into a realm where items have no physicality.  When Bill W. writes, “Maybe this all sounds mysterious and remote, something like Einstein’s theory of relativity or a proposition in nuclear physics,” he’s referring to the Third Step, but perhaps he should be talking about Step Four.  How do we count and qualify things without a physical existence?  How can we answer a question that seems to ask, “How many thoughts did you have, today?”

The directions and examples we’ve been given make this far less difficult than it sounds.  Interestingly, not many of us find it “a proposition in nuclear physics” to relay our resentments!  Just press a button: mention a name, a place, an incident, and –bam!—we can tell you exactly what we think and feel about it “with all the earnestness at our command,” to use a famous AA line.

Opening the discussion on what’s moral (the adjective) is a pretty big deal.  It’s every bit as complicated as the discussion about a Supreme Being; the main difference, however, is the relationship.  A relationship with a “Higher Power” is entirely personal, in many ways.  Not until we enter the realm of religion does that relationship involve others.  The Program of AA leaves that relationship in the individual realm.

Morals (the noun, plural) are concerned with our relationship to others.  One might even posit that morals are concerned with our relationship to all other life-forms.  It is now considered unethical (similar to immoral) to abuse animals, and that abuse has an evolving definition.  Indeed, the fine print, the details, of what action is moral (right/good/just) is also evolving.  Owning a slave is no longer moral or ethical.  It is not farfetched to conclude that an individual’s morals, one’s “personal morals,” may also change and evolve.

Step Four is a snapshot, rather than a video.  It wants to know what our morals are right now, at the moment of inventory.  What do we hold—in inventory—as right behavior and wrong behavior?  These are not fleeting thoughts: these are cognitions about the way the world around us works, tantamount to our knowledge of gravity, motion, thermodynamics, and other physical laws.

Before we consign these latter examples strictly to scientists, let’s be quick to remember how we know very well which way we will travel when we jump from a building, or how it feels to run rather than walk, or what happens to our hot meal when we wait long to eat it.

In the case of morals, we’re concerned with the way the human world around us works.  Morals are dependent on “the social weal,” the well-being of humans in society, in civilization.  Behavior we have discovered to be beneficial to the social weal, we call good or right; behavior we have discovered to be harmful to the social weal, we label bad, wrong, or evil.

Is this distinction the same for all individuals, or for all cultures, today?  Is it, to any degree, intrinsic?  In the details, no.  For the most part, however, all cultures seem to have evolved to an agreement on many behaviors, and the evolution continues.

The translation of an ancient story from the Middle East says the first humans, contrary to a divine dictate, ate “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” What this means, precisely, is lost in the mists of myth.  Immediately after this, the story tells that agriculture and animal husbandry began, two pillars on which civilization still depends.  If nothing else, this juxtaposition seems to say that human knowledge of morality preceded human knowledge of cultivation: civilization requires something more than enough to eat, it requires cooperation.