When Plato wrote about living a good life, he used the Allegory of the Cave. The philosopher, instead of being chained inside and believing that the shadows thrown upon the wall by a fire are 'reality' makes his way out of the darkness. Sees the fire that creates the shadows, the beings whose shadows are thrown upon the wall, and beyond, the sun - a transcendent glare that even the philosopher cannot comprehend.
Iris Murdoch makes much use of this, seeing the sun as the 'form' of the Good, the True. The task of the human is to break away from false ideas of the good and seek to get closer to this ideal. In her conception, morality is both an inner education or fine-tuning and outward action.
For Aristotle, in the Nichomachean Ethics, there's a similar theme. By modeling oneself on ideals of virtue, and acting truthfully, generously, courageously and so on, one comes to inhabit those values, or they inhabit one. Again, there is inner and outer transformation. The difference, I suppose, is that in the Platonic version perhaps there's more stress on the inner drive toward goodness rather than the initial drive there seems to be in Aristotle toward outer conformity.
Confucianism seems quite closely aligned with Aristotelianism is that it is a socially or societally directed progress; while Buddhism perhaps places more value - rather like Stoicism - on the inner state, though both value right action.
I had misunderstood Kant, I think, in suggesting that motive doesn't matter - at least, so my present reading of Mary Midgley's Heart and Mind suggests. She says that he stressed freedom and reason as guides because he was writing against a tradition of German Romanticism which valued extreme emotion to such a pathological extent that he wanted to make a case for a rational foundation to morality. And he does place great value on 'good will'. As Midgley writes,
'Good will' is not the power to do the right thing suddenly while still wallowing in habitual malice, envy, self-pity or the fear of life. It is the power to change such emotional habits, over time, through vigorous attending and imagining, into better ones, which will incidentally be ones from which doing the right thing becomes natural.
She goes on to say that for Kant, good will is not a matter of mere intention, it is a forceful striving of every sinew to do what is good. We are still in a domain where the inner and the outer matter.
Now: Mill and utilitarianism, which I have claimed is performative rather than expressive. Valuable in that it does assert the seriousness of its claim, but at the level of the individual, in some sense, bankrupt. A harsh view. But there is cause. He claimed that is only when there is danger of damage to others that 'the case is taken out of the province of liberty and placed in that of morality or law'. And for Mill, too, punishment is a sure mark of the moral. 'We do not call anything wrong unless we mean that a person ought to be punished in some way for doing it.' (The quotes are taken from Heart and Mind where Midgley discusses Mill.)
This does suggest that the inner person is untouchable unless they confer harm to others. As a political system, that seems to me to be incontrovertible, but as an ethical guide, I have doubts. It could be argued that where a person is motivated to use the utilitarian calculus in making her decisions, then she has a moral sense. She is recognising the seriousness of her decisions and that supposes an ethical awareness. Indeed, can we imagine a person who makes these decisions without already having some framework of ethical belief to encourage them to perform the calculations? Could a person be motivated entirely by social conformity, by the fear of shame and punishment? It seems possible, but unlikely. Thus, one has to assume that something else, something inherited or habituated, or arising for natural human feeling, is already there.
For Christians, or, probably, anyone brought up in a Judeo-Christian society or indeed a liberal democracy, there will be some kind of 'taken for granted' ethical system in place. For most of us, there will be deep sense in much of utilitarianism - in that one should 'love one's neighbour' or that one should recognise all people as having equal rights. It offers a useful means of resolving many issues. But it fails to capture, in my view, the totality of morality. And I believe that this failure - combined with the decline of religion as a moral guide and the lack of any real alternative - is ultimately damaging for society.
I believe, like Midgley, that ethics is part of 'the whole person'. Not a matter for just heart or just mind. Not 'just' about utility or freedom (as in the existentialist view) or aesthetics (as G. E. Moore sort of seemed to be claiming). It is not 'just' about conduct, behaviour and duties. It is central to who we are, who we become, to our character.
The stress that the existentialists placed on autonomy and integrity, on acting to assert one's freedom, seems to hijack morality from the other side - removing the social connections, the social responsibility. This can hardly be what was intended - Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply concerned with justice; so too Simone de Beauvoir. And indeed both claim that the individual should see that in order for her to be free, everyone else has to be free, as well. I don't quite understand this argument, although I've heard it several times, but, rest assured, it's what they proposed. And freedom surely is a 'good'; but I can imagine a world where we are all free to be selfish consumers lacking any sense of social responsibility. Indeed, sometimes I feel like I am in that world.
For past societies, punishment for moral infractions were imposed by the tribe or the polis, as we have seen with hunter-gatherers and indeed with the death of Socrates, who was deemed to have led young men astray in their thoughts. Christianity - leave aside the Church per se and the Inquisition, which enacted punishment in a very physical and temporal sense - put punishment in the hands of God, who knew what you were thinking, on Judgement Day.
Think about it: where is punishment now? Laws and police and prisons are not strictly about morality - and certainly the judiciary are not worried about what we think outside of its impact on behaviour and sentencing (following on from Mill).
Punishment is on social media, it seems, more than anywhere else. Punishment comes, again, in the form of blaming and shaming. But what is condemned is how people behave and what they say - whether those speech acts are interpreted as they were intended or not. None of this digs into the real heart and soul, the mind and matter of the person or the character. Not really. It is performative. It is a game - a game that can have very damaging consequences; a game that is enacted by offense, outrage and virtue signalling; a game in which moral language - policed by a very small cadre - has become all important, or at least, of excessive importance. So much energy is put into this game that the seriousness of what is being considered can often be lost.
In addition, people can participate in the game with an understanding only of the superficialities, the linguistics, the performative acts of the game instead of a deep understanding of the issues. Not does the game encompass the whole of life, but only a small selection of critically important parts of life - which it further demeans by turning them into a narrow conceptualisation of what they are. Justice and equality are essential components of a moral system, and of a political system too; but so are freedom and compassion, so are truth and maximising well-being, so are issues of security and privacy, so are responsibility and duty.
My father is right, as is Thomas Snyder, in stressing the value of learning from history. Steven Pinker is right in stressing the importance of empirical data. Rutger Bregman is right in stressing that human nature is not entirely self-serving. Mary Midgley is right in emphasising the importance of seeing the moral being as a whole, human, rational and feeling, with certain tendencies, aptitudes and interests arising from the nature of the species. Susan Neiman is right in asserting the importance of growing up as moral subjects. Iris Murdoch is right in emphasising the complexity of morality and the importance of developing the self as well as respecting duties, axioms and calculations.
All of them stress, with conviction, that we must learn to look outside ourselves. Not just rely on our feelings and intuitions, our adopted codes of conduct and inherited beliefs. Sure, we work on self-improvement through education, refining our ethical systems by learning more about science, about nature, about art, history, politics, evolution, biology, philosophy, theology, literature, anthropology, sport, even. But this process is about the other, not the self. We reason better and feel more reliably, by knowing more about the world - not by making pronouncements on Twitter.
And nor can any one of these pursuits offer the whole picture. We need to be interdisciplinarian. We need to be generalists. We need to challenge ourselves. We need to grow - and grow outwards, rather than inwards.
Right now, we have it wrong, badly wrong. Morality has been slimmed down to a list of sayings and performative acts that are acceptable and unacceptable, judged with inquisitorial harshness across a tiny fraction of what a full conception of an ethical framework should contain. Guidance is done by the stick and education is done by shouting louder. Feelings have become unbound from reason and reason functions without feeling.
We have lost our way.
Commentaires