Is this man an autonomous moral actor?
A few days back I had an entertaining discussion with Mori Theil on Twitter about morality, individuals, and the public. Mori’s basic argument, as I understand it (and hopefully he’ll correct me if I’m wrong), is that ethics and morality are based in individual autonomy. Here’s a bit of his twitter discussion:
Moral decisions arise from principles. Other people should not be your morality; that is slapdash. w/others, you’re not dealing with morality at all, just feelings and goodwill – politics. If, say, I should have to justify my morality to you, that is a tool of societal control.
In what was perhaps his clearest statement of principle, he said, “…morality is the application of ideals to reality. You seem to say that we should twist our morality around to serve reality. That’s backwards.
Like I said, I enjoyed this conversation — and part of the reason I enjoyed it is that Mori so clearly and forthrightly states the basic Enlightenment presuppositions and beliefs about moral experience. For Mori, morality involves an almost Cartesian process. You do not listen to others; you do not learn from others. Instead, you turn inward, discovering there pure ideals beyond the reach of a corrupting and confusing society. Once you have found them, you apply those ideals to reality. Morality, then, is an essentially imperial endeavor. Ethics conquers the world. If the world conquers ethics — or even, it sounds like, if the world affects ethics — then you are doing it wrong.
Obviously, Mori’s vision of morality resonates to some extent. Our touchstones for moral worth, I think, are often people who go against social consensus or social norms; who do the right thing despite pressure to do the wrong. So, for example, Galileo’s commitment to truth despite the opposition of the Church is seen as a quintessential moral moment. Conscientious objectors refusing to fight during the Vietnam War despite the coercion of the state might be another example. Or, to cite one of my personal heroes, Khruschev’s decision to expose Stalin’s crimes despite massive opposition within the Soviet bureaucracy, and indeed arguably despite his own Communist ideological commitments, seems like one of the bravest and most moral acts of a world leader in the last 100 years — certainly braver than anything I can think of any American president doing in my lifetime.
The question is, though: are these examples of moral ideals imposed upon the world? Were these people autonomous moral actors? If they weren’t, does that make them less moral?
I would say that the answers in each case I give above are pretty complicated. Galileo, of course, actually renounced his findings; he caved to social pressure. Conscientious objectors, on the other hand, are not in many cases autonomous actors. They certainly are placing themselves against the broader society — but many of them do so because of their communal commitments to peace churches. They certainly have ideals, but those ideals are not autonomous or generated outside of a social context. And as for Khruschev — his indictment of Stalin was done in the name of ideals, certainly — but those ideals were specifically Communist, and therefore by definition communal and social. From the accounts I’ve read, he was most angry at Stalin for his failures of courage and leadership during World War II — for failures to Russia specifically, in other words, rather than for failures to live up to a particular abstract vision.
Mori might say that each of these instances is, in fact, a poor example — that none of them are adequate examples of true morality. None, he might argue, show a moral actor as sufficiently autonomous; none are sufficiently pure. To which I guess my response would be that I can’t think of any moral situations which are not complicated like this. Martin Luther King drew his ideals from his church and his community. So did Gandhi. Matilde de la Sierra‘s activism against torture is based in her own personal experience of torture — but it’s sustained by her relationship with her husband and her work with other activists, not by some isolated commitment.
Moral actions are never autonomous — which makes sense, I think, because morality is mostly about how you treat other creatures. If you’re stranded on a desert island all alone, without even any animals in sight, morality is going to be largely beside the point. Rather than an ideal we impose on the world, morality, then, is an experience that the presence of others imposes on us. Morality doesn’t occur despite society; it occurs only because of society. Which means that, if our moral selves are our truest selves, then in a real sense our truest selves are other people.
That may seem counter-intuitive but, for me, at least, it fits my moral experience much better than Mori’s account does. Morality for me isn’t formulating abstract principles and then following them. Instead, it’s, say, volunteering when my son’s school needs volunteers, or giving a friend a ride when he needs a ride, or even (as happened last week) taking down inappropriate scanlated images when a colleague tells me I should.
At one point Mori asked “do you think the Internet should perch like an angel of conscience on your shoulder?” My response is — sure, why not? The internet is just other people — and, like most folks, I’ve relied on other people to teach me to be a good person since my parents first started telling me to say “please”. Morality isn’t something I was born with. Rather, it’s a gift, granted by those I love, or respect, or live with. And the gift is, precisely, to teach me to love, to respect, and to live. If we are ethical, or human, it’s by each other’s grace — and if we’re unworthy of it, that’s all the more reason to be thankful when it is granted.
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Update: Mori replies here. I understand where he’s coming from much more clearly now, I think. Just quickly I’d say that when I talk about morality coming from communities, I don’t necessarily mean states or the law (I’m not ruling those out, but I wouldn’t see those as the only or best sources in every circumstance.)
I’d also just point out quickly that it wasn’t just society which saw slavery as acceptable for hundreds and hundreds of years (at least) — it was individuals who saw it that way too. Nor was the change against slavery a matter of lone individuals standing up against society; abolitionism was a movement and a community (composed of individuals, of course.)
It’s interesting how you link Mori’s argument to “Enlightenment presuppositions.” Your ideas could be linked to ideas from a much earlier age. The Confucian concept of “Ren” (or Jen – Humaneness/Benevolence) for example, and the way it relates to the Golden Rule. From an online translation:
XII.22: Fan-ch’ih asked about jen. The Master said, “It is to love all men.” He asked about knowledge. “It is to know all men.” Fan ch’ih did not immediately understand these answers. The Master said, “Employ the upright and put aside all the crooked; in this way, the crooked can be made to be upright.”
VI.28: Tzu-kung said, “Suppose I put the case of a man who extensively confers benefits on the people, and is able to assist everyone, what would you say about him? Might he be called perfectly humane?” The Master said, “Why speak only of humaneness in connection with him? Must he not have the qualities of a sage? . . . Now the man of perfect humaneness, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others. To be able to judge of others by what is nearby in ourselves, that is what we might call the art of humaneness.”
XV.23: Tzu-kung asked, saying, “Is there one world which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?” The Master said, “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”
IV.25: The Master said, “Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.”
Yep; it’s a conservative critique of enlightenment ideals; definitely backwards looking.
You’ll like Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding. It’s basically moral masochism (he denies this, of course). He’s currently one of those academic anarchists along with Judith Butler. Levinas is a big influence. I’m not a fan, but I did read his book.
You know, “what does the “Other” demand of me?” even when we can’t know what the Other wants.
I certainly don’t think you can just follow some personal moral principles in a vacuum, there has to be a regard for how they affect people around you, otherwise one risks simply justifying one’s own prejudices. Besides no one will behave perfectly in accordance with one’s ideals at all times.
What worries me most though about applying morality is not taking a principled stand when the institutions and groups you are a part of doing something wrong. Whether it’s collusion with the Nazi party, keeping quiet about child abuse or not calling your friends out. Those seems like situation where one would benefit from having principles independent of the society you keep.
Those approaches are also hardly mutually exclusive. I think the most worthwhile moral principles revolve around how you treat and interact with other people.
As I know Krushev had offense to Stalin.
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding about what Mori was saying, regardless of one’s stance on the matter. It does not seem to me that he was making a claim that all moral principles must be derived a priori, “pure” of the influence of other people and the effects of your actions on them.
Mori seems, instead, to be simply arguing that, in justifying one’s moral actions or stances, one cannot — and (to avoid bad faith) should not — have recourse to a higher tribunal than oneself. The “generation of morals” (Mori’s words) is a secondary consideration at best.
This is, I suspect, why he repeatedly called his stances “existentialist” (as opposed to Kantian, rationalist, etc.). In the end, the existentialist says, must come to terms with the we give value to things through our actions. It is a belief based, at ground level, on the incapability of human freedom. (This is what Mori means, I gather, when he says that societies cannot make moral decisions; only individuals can.) In the end, all moral responsibility — including the “principles” upon which one acts — is thrown back upon the self. There is no appeal.
Of course, the problem comes when Mori refers to this positions in terms of autonomous duty-compelling principles. Sartre would say that all such principles — Biblical, rationalist, utilitarian — are always unusable, too broad in scope, when faced with particular concrete situations. The decisions about which principles to “apply” and how to “apply” them (and to what extent) fall back on the individual.
As Sartre puts it: “There are no means of judging. The content is always concrete, and therefore unpredictable; it has always to be invented. The one thing that counts, is to know whether the invention is made in the name of freedom.” To say that one acts because one is “committed to a principle” is, from the existentialist’s point of view, an attempt to deny this ultimate responsibility.
Personally, I think that there is a lot in common between this view and Noah’s pragmatist perspective. Our ethical decision-making is always taking shape in reaction to the particular kinds of multi-valent and incompatible concrete demands that Sartre describes. There is no moral position outside this web of politics. We simply try to muddle through, creating the best world we can — deploying not principles, but what Charles Taylor called “inspired adhoccery.”
But this vision of the morally muddy world does not eject the idea of autonomous self. Some might say that it requires it, in part because there is no better or more foundational position outside the “you” that must act.
Or as Emerson puts it, much better than I:
“You may fulfill your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.”
I’m not sure this position is entirely logically consistent. But I do find it, nonetheless, inspirational.
Twitter’s kind of a horrible place to have philosophical discussions; Mori’s point may well be what you say it is Peter.
Still…I don’t necessarily find your interpretation any more convincing, really. Maybe part of the problem is that I don’t see the view I’ve put forward as pragmatist? More as communitarian. The issue isn’t that you pragmatically balance different moral systems and different moral claims. The issue is that you need a specific community, or a specific society, to teach you how to be moral. Someone has to teach the child to say, “please”. Someone has to teach me how to be a good person. There is no moral existential I; the moral self is only created by a moral community. The claim that individuals are the only ones who can make moral choices is therefore completely ass backwards…which, I’d argue, is why our moral thinking at the moment is so deeply confused.
I think both Charles and Ormur also seem to not quite be following me in this regard. The point isn’t that you have moral obligations to the other; the point is that your own morals are dependent on moral communities. Moral practice has no meaning outside a moral community; you need someone to teach you the practice.
Most of this is based on MacIntyre by way of Stanley Hauerwas. As Suat says, it’s an explicitly conservative vision of morality (MacIntyre is an Aristotelian, I believe.) It’s very much not existentialist or transcendentalist — both modernist philosophies which in somewhat different ways elevate individual autonomy as the quintessential moral and human experience.
In terms of the Omur’s Nazi discussion — I think the point is not so much that individuals need to resist social morality so much as that you need a community which isn’t evil in the first place. There was a lot of faith-based resistance to the Nazis, for example; it doesn’t really make sense to see that as individuals vs. social, right? It’s good society vs. bad society.
Of course, you could ask how you figure out which societies are good and which are bad…and I’d say you refer to your teachers; the people you love and respect and who inspire you. That’s subjective in some sense I guess…but it’s an embedded subjectivity, a subjectivity with context, not an isolated autonomous isolate. In other words, I’m saying that there is a more foundational self than the autonomous self, and that self is the social self, or the communal self. The part of us that is human, the part of us that is moral, is the society, not the individual. That doesn’t mean that all societies are moral, but it does suggest that modernity’s panicked anxiety about social corruption is deeply confused, and part of modernity’s moral unmooring, not of its greater moral vision.
A very quick comment, in between food prep.
By pragmatist, in the Rortian vein, I mean that you seem to find morality and moral principle to be “only” a strong way of saying, “the kinds of things that people like us value.” Nothing more, nothing less.
In my view, it’s kind of like your pragmatic definition of comics: Comics are the kinds of things that people who talk about comics mean when they say “comics.” “Comics” are what other members of your comics community let you get away with.
Hmmm…. I’m not familiar with Rorty, so I can’t categorically say no…. But I don’t know that I’d necessarily put it that way quite.
The comics example might help with the distinction a little. I really do feel like comics are nothing but what people decide comics are. It’s really a pretty much entirely arbitrary category. It’s just categorizing.
There’s a lot more at stake when you’re talking about ethics. I don’t agree with Kant on everything, but I’d agree with him that the moral self is the truest self. When you’re talking about ethics, you’re not just talking about how you divide genres up; you’re talking about how you divide *you* up; how you decide who you are, and what that means. I think there’s a qualitative difference there. With comics, I’m willing to say, “it’s about community standards, nothing more, nothing less,” and it makes sense to see that as a pragmatic matter. With morality, I think you have to say, “it’s about bonds of love and reverence,” and that’s definitely a nothing less…but I’m not sure that there is, or could be, anything more. Love’s pretty important — and it seems weird to see that as a pragmatist insight.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mori’s basic argument, as I understand it (and hopefully he’ll correct me if I’m wrong), is that ethics and morality are based in individual autonomy. Here’s a bit of his twitter discussion:
Moral decisions arise from principles. Other people should not be your morality; that is slapdash. w/others, you’re not dealing with morality at all, just feelings and goodwill – politics. If, say, I should have to justify my morality to you, that is a tool of societal control.
In what was perhaps his clearest statement of principle, he said, “…morality is the application of ideals to reality. You seem to say that we should twist our morality around to serve reality. That’s backwards.”
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Hmmph! If that’s a fair understanding and summation, whatta load of pernicious nonsense!
“Individual autonomy” is, though real, an idiotically pumped-up phenomenon. Ideologically inflated to further right-wing ideas of Rugged Individualism, Margaret Thatcher’s “society does not exist,” and such. And also appealing to the spoiled pursuers of instant gratification and self-indulgence: “If it feels good, do it!”
We are subject to highly substantial biological forces and drives motivating us; subconscious programming from infancy and society affecting our attitudes and actions.
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Scientists studying animal behaviour believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans.
…Prof Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are “hard-wired” into the brains of all mammals and provide the “social glue” that allow often aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups.
He has compiled evidence from around the world that shows how different species of animals appear to have an innate sense of fairness, display empathy and help other animals that are in distress. ..
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/5373379/Animals-can-tell-right-from-wrong.html
To show how powerfully societal programming on obedience to authority figures is, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment showed how even college students — supposedly more intellectual and independent-minded than the masses — were willing to go the “I was just following orders” route. So much for the much-vaunted “individual autonomy”; only a very few refused to proceed to the experiment’s conclusion. One might add religion to the factors to blame: where being like sheep, having blind, unquestioning faith in all matter of absurd assertions are highly praised.
As for “…morality is the application of ideals to reality,” rather appropriate that Communism is brought up here. I was startled to have heard Stalin described as an “idealist,” but indeed here was someone who would not “twist [his] morality around to serve reality,” but create a Workers’ Paradise, no matter what hardship or death he’d inflict upon millions of workers; embrace the idiotic genetic ideas of the vile Lysenko…
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Lysenkoism refers to an episode in Russian science featuring a non-scientific peasant plant-breeder named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko…
It was due to Lysenko’s efforts that many real scientists…were sent to the gulags…Lysenko…denounc[ed] Mendelian [genetic] thought as “reactionary and decadent” and declared such thinkers to be “enemies of the Soviet people”…
Under Lysenko’s guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology. Lysenko’s methods were not condemned by the Soviet scientific community until 1965, more than a decade after Stalin’s death.
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http://www.skepdic.com/lysenko.html
Surely that long-overdue rejection a side-effect of the loosening-up due to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev_Thaw .
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Noah Berlatsky says:
For Mori, morality involves an almost Cartesian process. You do not listen to others; you do not learn from others. Instead, you turn inward, discovering there pure ideals beyond the reach of a corrupting and confusing society. Once you have found them, you apply those ideals to reality.
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Any child-abuser, fanatic, or serial killer would heartily agree! Ayn Rand, champion of the Individual over the despised Collective, swooned over a murderer who kidnapped and dismembered a 12-year-old girl:
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“Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”
…Rand denounced[his] hanging as, “The mob’s murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against the man who dared to be alone.”
…“If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.”
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/12/1119294/-Ryan-s-Hero-Ayn-Rand-Worshiped-A-Serial-Killing-Psychopath
(More details about Hickman’s horrendous crime: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/mark-ames-paul-ryans-guru-ayn-rand-worshipped-a-serial-killer-who-kidnapped-and-dismembered-little-girls.html )
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Charles Reece says:
You know, “what does the “Other” demand of me?” even when we can’t know what the Other wants.
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A Fox News-head would have no problem answering that; “The Other wants his welfare check!”
Regarding these moral questions, someone over at tcj.com brought up Ken Wilber in a discussion of Ron Rege’s latest, magic/mysticism-oriented, book. I’m familiar with his work, but seeking further info, in the Wikipedia entry about this brilliant, learned and perceptive genius of spirituality ran along some stuff that relates to the discussion here.
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A key idea of Wilber’s is to study and categorize items in terms of their nature as a holon, a term deriving from the writings of Arthur Koestler. He observed that it seems every entity and concept shares a dual role: being both an autonomous, self-reliant unit (whole entity) unto itself, and also a part of one (or more) other wholes. Examples include the way in which a cell in an organism is both a whole as a cell and and at the same time a part of another whole, the organism…The relation between individuals and society is not the same as between cells and organisms though, because individual holons can be members but not parts of social holons. …
As an inevitable corollary of their nature as a simultaneous part and whole, each holon inherently has an interior and an exterior perspective (the perception or equivalent of the holon and the perspective of other separate entities), and also may be considered in the sense of an individual or as a plurality or collective.
According to Wilber, this means that multiple viewpoints are inherent in the nature and existence of holons, as a natural consequence of holon-ness and each of the four approaches has a valid perspective to offer. …
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(Emphasis added)
Bearing in mind Noah’s long-ago plea to just post a link to a site rather than massively copy-and pasting from it, check out the sections on “Holons” and “Quadrants” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber . Which explain how the four basic perspectives should all be considered “as valid, as all are needed for real appreciation of a matter. To collapse them all together or dismiss one of these perspectives is often a serious mistake.”
And these perspectives, needless to say, give rise to different systems of morality; say (to simplify), one in which what is good for the Many is what is truly important, another in which what is good for the Individual is what matters.
Where of course it’s a mistake to simplistically choose one and dismiss/downgrade the other.
Founding an institute to teach your own grand theory of everything is as sure a sign of a crackpot as there could be (see also: Freud, Reich, Hubbard…)
…Tax benefits!