Ethics
ETHICS
Lost in all the instruction across campus except perhaps in
philosophy… the virtues. But over my 30+ years of teaching, I have refused to
ignore certain teachings the classical masters considered most important, even
as they have been discarded by others. Are they “subjective,” and therefore obsolete?
Our theories presume, often uncritically, ideals that we think we should strive
for such as “competent communication.” If all you strive for is “functional
fitness,” then the notch you wedge yourself into is presented to you as a fait
accompli. There is no reason for you to be, except as a plastic medium for
filling holes. Piety, obedience, submission were not virtues for the Classical
thinkers. For Confucius maybe but not Socrates. Ethics in science? Science presumes
honesty in reporting outcomes. Humility in accepting results that disagree with
your predictions. These constitute nobility. The virtues are essential to
understanding the values cultures manifest and consequently conflicts among cultures
as well as what, how, and why we communicate as we do (the intercourse of
life). But in so many circles, value has been restricted to monetary exchange. Reading
Spinoza, Kant, Levinas, Habermas, Rawls, Bentham, et cetera… on ethics is restricted
to a single class in philosophy and a few erudite scholars in law schools. Rigorous
understanding and comparisons of role ethics, pragmatism, deontological ethics,
virtue ethics, discourse ethics (ala Habermas contra-Derrida)? Missing. For instance,
deontological ethics hold that an action is itself right or wrong regardless of
the consequences. You can do a bad thing that ends up leading to a good outcome
but that does not excuse the bad act. I shot her in the stomach. She was taken
to the hospital where they consequently discovered that she had bladder cancer
and so if I had not shot her, this would not have been discovered and cured. I
saved her life by shooting her. This is called consequentialism, which Kant
rejected. For ethics to have value they must be fairly applied… consistent
regardless of consequences which are another matter.
Most “ethics books” are akin to the prescriptive statements
one used to see on Oprah – self-ordained “life-coaches.” What is ethical is
whatever a group says it is. Actions justified by groupthink (“cohesion”). In
this case, the overarching moral precept is to never disagree with the popular
position. Under such conditions, surveillance and mind-guarding become moral actions
and mindguards, self-appointed, self-righteous moral police. Some even root our
morality in neuroscience. This is the meta-ethics, akin to the work of G. E.
Moore’s Principia Ethica or Hume’s naturalistic fallacy (the equation of a
moral property with a nonmoral one – equating the value of “goodness” with a
certain configuration of contingent brain cells for instance) and the modus
tollens of the open-question argument. Well, obviously you need a brain to
think. Larry Churchill has argued that “Ethics, understood as the capacity to
think critically about moral values and direct our action in terms of such
values is a generic human capacity.” Dah, yeah, we are able to do this but that
does not touch on the judgment being about moral values. That’s uncritically
presumed. Nor does it touch on how one assessed an action to be good or bad.
Just using the word “critical” does not mean anything. How do you assess? Are
criteria used? How do you choose the criteria? Do circumstances affect the application
of criteria? Yes, we have a “capacity,”
but again what does that mean? What constitutes good and bad remains untouched
by Churchills’ “capacity” claim. It also
does not address how one thought is a value and another is not. Cogitation is cognition.
Capacity does not even begin to tell me the essential differences between reflecting
on the existence of a rock in my shoe or whether something constitutes a war
crime. I can reflect on anything. What constitutes the capacity to reflect
critically does not address the nature of the thing Churchill uncritically
presumes, moral values. This does not beg the question. It misses the entire
ballpark. That’s the problem with
reductionism. If I reduce morality or beauty or justice to biophysics, then I’m
literally in a different academic department studying an entirely different phenomenon.
To help you get what I mean here, I suggest the scene in Dead Poets Society
where Mr. Keating instructs the students to “rip out” a reductionistic
explanation of what makes a “great poem,” with “Begone Dr. J. Evans Pritchard,
Ph.D.!” This is, appropriately, the virtuous
effort opening minds. But again, reducing a category to contingency is a fatal
mistake. Furthermore, and more bluntly, even the physical brain is a
consequence of nurture, of social and environmental influences. For instance, malnutrition
in the mother or child will affect brain growth. Why were they malnourished? Structural
poverty? Drug abuse can affect the physical brain. A bullet to the head can affect
the physical brain but it does not alter the morality of being shot in the
head. The human brain (forget the mind),
will not develop without social interaction. In short, even the physical organ
is a product of symbolic interaction and that leads to the type of mind and
morality one has. You do resistance-training, and your muscles develop. Same with
the brain. No interaction, no development. Those who punt and say morality is
hardwired don’t even understand how the brain grows let alone understand Frege’s
critique of reductionism. But even if we give this point, the feral human is
unknowable because a human infant without extensive social support cannot
survive beyond a few hours alone. Beyond that obvious fact, if we reduce ethics
to neurophysiology, we have another issue. If this is true, then since my brain
chemistry changes after eating lunch, I guess my moral bearings also change
from pre-lunch ethics to post-lunch ethics. Neuronal networking takes lots of
time and reinforcing messaging to develop stable structures. Socialization. Finally,
if my morality is genetically hardwired, then there is no point in talking
about it or writing books about it. I can’t change. If we allow for
neuroplasticity, then again, we are back in the realm of social interaction and
reduction to neurophysiology is reduced to mere rhetoric that adds nothing to
the discussion because my physical brain, again, is decidedly a product of
social interaction. Reductionism demonstrates a lack of understanding of the essential
nature of the physical brain, let alone ethics and indeed communication. Basic
hermeneutics aka structuration theory holds that social structures exist only
so long as they are reproduced through behavior and that the reinforcement is itself
according to the norms of the system. But the hermeneutic circle is not “vicious”
because in the process of replication both endogenous and exogenous anomalies create
small (sometimes large) variances (plasticity). Bluntly, I am not the program.
I can follow it but we are not identical. I am able to step out of the program and
reflect on it. Instead of endlessly repeating the same pattern, a human can
access the value of the pattern itself. While a computer may run in an infinite
loop until it burns out, even a mule will get tired of walking in the same circle
and go lay down in the shade. Intelligence is the ability to access the program,
not merely follow it blindly. Insofar as
the brain is a system of neuronal connections, it is never the same twice. But
ethical principles are transcendental which means they exist as part of the
semantic field that does not belong to me. This gives them stability but also
plasticity. We can change our principles. But if we do it too often they are
not “principles.” And if we do it without collective knowledge, they hold no
normative force. I can have my own private morality, but that is not morality.
It is instead my opinion. And people get these mixed up all the time. Because I
think, or want something to be good and right does not make it so. And just because
the majority believes something is good or right (the consensus theory of truth
and right), does not make it so. Popular belief is not the same as objective
truth. I participate in a semantic
system (a culture) and thus, by participating, I maintain it. At the same time, it gives me identity. And so we have shared sense. But it does not “belong” to
me. Nor do I to it. This would be the worst form of fatalism. Morality is not “in
my genes.” Thwarting biological urges is part of collective preservation. It is
social. “My principles,” are not mine alone just as English is not a private language
of mine. And as Hegel pondered, complex systems contain contradictions that
allow me to be part of it while also allowing me to question it. I can reflect on the ethics and morality of
behavior and structures. I can change and change it. Thus, despite profound
brain trauma, indeed even if I am utterly incinerated and vanish, as long as
others exist, ethical and moral principles are untouched (in fact if you adhere
to the command theory of morality – divine laws, then we are talking
otherworldly super-nature, which I do not personally believe in). We share
moral and ethical beliefs and we do that through symbolic interaction, not through
a common brain. Hence, we can sincerely disagree. People in a “group,” or “culture,”
by definition share values and beliefs. They also sometimes disagree. Group-members share moral and ethical
standards. At the same time, there is greater variance from group to group than
there is within a “group” community by definition. Of course, this is possible not because we are
different species with differing brains, but because we grow up in, are shaped
by, and reproduce our respective cultures. Only since I was in graduate school has
a concerted effort been mounted by scholars across the globe to create an
ongoing project to establish and monitor values and beliefs; the World Values
Survey conducted in over 100 countries.
And I do not mean Hofstede’s cultural dimensions which he borrowed from
Talcott Parsons. But even the WVS misses some important points. For instance, each
culture has its ideal person, and this is important to know. Ethics is
fundamental to understand human behavior and the application of
technique/technology. Plato would not teach the dialectic until and unless his
students had first passed his ethics because τέχνη technē without φρόνησις phrónēsis (prudence), and science without
morality, are very dangerous. Husserl made this clear in his last book The Crisis
of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology which he wrote in part as
an act of mourning the loss of his son in World War I. Naïve science at the
turn of the twentieth century suggested that philosophy was useless, and ethics
did not exist. Husserl bracketed the metaphysical exclusion of ethics and morality
from “reality,” insisting that they were not merely real but paramount in human
existence, that the mechanical might of modern technology demanded ethical
oversight. Habermas discusses this also in his classic Knowledge and Human
Understanding, as our common teacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer taught us both. To
claim that ethics are not real, because they are not empirical objects is to
then abandon responsibility for our empirical actions. And to claim they are
real because they are neuronal-physical objects is to reduce them again out-of-existence
because all the “building blocks” of the material universe have no qualitative
differences. Eventually, through reduction, according to material metaphysics,
everything becomes wave/particles, “in reality.” So much for the human lifeworld. Nothing of
human existence is real. It is all epiphenomenon. Color is an illusion. Sound,
illusion. Taste… imagination, beauty, ethics, all illusions. Reality is just wave/particles
governed by…??? Something not material…???
Laws??? The one thing even physicists
cannot break. And what then of the ultimate goal of science, namely, to
discover the laws that govern the wave/particles? Aristotle, as the champion of
inductive reasoning and the inventor of modern empiricism, worked on his
greatest book for many years, never completing it to his satisfaction and
naming it after his son Nicomachus to underscore how precious his ethical
studies were to him over and above his logics and physics (The Nicomachean
Ethics).
There’s an old saying, “What Peter says about Paul, tells me
more about Peter than it does Paul.” I think you can learn something about a
person by those they admire, who their heroes are. Here’s just a couple of people I admire. Also,
I find people confuse admiration with envy. They are very different things. So
what does Eric have to say about Rachel, Jacques, and John? They had integrity.
They did what they wanted to do and what they thought needed to be done. They
had courage and tried to make good differences. Okay so then what is “good?” Well,
I tend to believe that Plato and Aristotle were on the right path and that
others who copied them such as Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, and Aquinas were
right to do so. They relate to the ancient quadrivium. When you combine the
trivium with the quadrivium you have the liberal arts founding on “thinking
skills.” We can thank Proclus for the combination of the values of classical
antiquity to later additions (repeated later by Boethius and Cassiodorus). The
original four virtues enumerated by Plato were (1) Prudence (careful judgment
-- wisdom). Next (2), Justice “Dikaiosýnē” Dike, one of the Horae along with Eunomia
(“order”), and Eirene (“peace”). Dike is the spirit of moral order and fair
judgment, also associated with Astraea, innocence, the warrior escort to Athena,
or a manifestation of Athena (similar to Nike). We call her “lady justice.” Justice
is widely seen as fairness. Without wise judgment or “prudence” justice may be
missed especially if the third virtue (3), Fortitude is missing. Plato said
that of the four Virtues, Fortitude which combines courage with endurance, the
other three would falter. Fortitude is not blind bravado. Finally, we have (4),
temperance or restraint. Discretion is the better part of valor and
self-control is the first discipline. These formed the cardo or hinge to how we
respond to the choices we face. Freedom is how we respond to what has been done
to us. To understand human behavior “character,” we must observe these in our
own and others actions. Socrates sought to discover what is courage, wisdom,
justice, tolerance. Not easy. Once identified, then more critical questions come
into focus. Why can I not have more
courage? Why can I not be more wise? Why can I not be more fair? More tolerant?
If I can, how? These are the critical questions. No great ethicists are young.
It takes a long time and much experience to just get this far.
To these Aristotle added often overlapping values; magnanimity,
which is a mixture of generosity, benevolence, kindness, and fairness), liberality
(open-mindedness, tolerance), gentleness (a combination of calmness and mildness),
and curiously (to me) magnificence, which may have spawned the corruption that
became the megalomaniac, his student, Alexander (who Aristotle may have had a hand
in poisoning lest he return to Greece as a tyrant). Here we have the foundations of the Western
notions of chivalry, the gentleman with piety (something missing from the Classical
nomenclature). The Greco-Romans were people of little faith or blind
submission, but the courage to be curious and demand proof of claims. This is a
fundamental divergence in the Western world. Just as I have published about,
the history of the West is not “the” history. It is complicated and like the profound
and sudden flipping of the magnetic poles that occur once in a while, the
Western world has metaphysical flips. For a time spirit is real and the physical
world is illusion. Then flip, the physical world is all that is real and the
spiritual is an illusion. Then flip back.
The tension is fundamental. It affects everything from politics to
values. What is real, matters.
I once asked a fellow at his retirement party, a man who had
spent his life in academic administration with great success (which is rarer
than you think), what was the secret. He said no secret. “Assume nothing, listen carefully, learn, and
reflect.” Active listening, we might call it. Sophia or wisdom is not jumping
to conclusions. The truth is not always obvious. Who is right might surprise
you. Your friend might be in the wrong while your enemy is right. This is the temporal part of reflection and
the self-discipline of suspending prejudice. Take the time to listen, learn,
reflect before you act. Assume nothing. Plato makes this clear. Some are good at
making the lesser argument appear the better. We all can be fooled. Ask questions. Interrogate all sides, all
angles, all presumptions. And act with temperance.
