PyramidHead
Contributor
There are three ways I can see in which the possibility of being minimally ethical in life is actually untenable.
To be minimally ethical, I mean something like: not placing one's own interests above somebody else's just because they are one's own, taking other people's interests into account and not just one's own interests, leaving open the potential for putting the others' interests first even if they run counter to one's own, etc. I take this to be the basic feature of ethical action, apart from the justifications that are added later (duty, utility, or social cohesion).
We can see this intuitively if we consider some examples. A person who saves a woman in danger can be judged in a lot of ways, depending on the motivation and the outcome. If he did it because he felt the woman could contribute something of worth to society if she survived, that's a fair way of looking at things. If she was someone he loved and wanted to protect so they could be together in the future, that may be touching, but something is still missing. If he weighed the logic of Kant and decided that there was no logical way he could allow her to remain in danger without creating a universal maxim that could hurt him later, he might be congratulated for his philosophical acumen.
But if she was someone who had no social standing, was otherwise hated by him, and there was no other reason he gave for rescuing her, then most people would at least agree his behavior was exceptionally moral. Putting himself in harm's way spontaneously to help someone else, without consideration of anything other than their shared status as conscious beings, strikes us as a compassionate, selfless act rather than a calculated one. And if, in rescuing the woman, he lost his own life (and especially if he knew this would happen before doing it), the moral character of his action comes into even sharper focus. In other words, despite the fact that moral theories all purport to justify actions by some objective criterion such as maximizing happiness or fulfilling a transcendent obligation, ethics is most obviously found in cases where someone surrenders their self-interest in spite of any objective criterion.
Taken in isolation, acts like these can be admirable, but they reveal something about the world we live in. Having witnessed a self-sacrificing act and deeming it ethical, we can now ask the extent to which being ethical in this way is within our grasp as living beings.
As I mentioned earlier, there are at least three impediments to acting ethically that seem insurmountable to me as long as we remain alive.
1. The way I maintain my existence is to find or create things that are valuable to me, and everybody else in the world is engaged in the same enterprise.
2. At any moment, I am capable of feeling physical pain that is so extreme, all of my ethical responsibilities are immediately discarded so that the pain can stop.
3. As a generalization of the previous two points, I cannot help but to harbor an instinctive idea of "self-defense" that guides my behavior.
Regardless of the empirical state of my surrounding ethical environment, these impediments exert a permanent subversive effect on my ethical aspirations.
From the moment I wake up, every action I perform is done in defiance of the minimal ethical principle I spoke of: in order to survive, I have to consume food and water, but not everyone in the world has enough food and water, so I must already disrespect the hungry and thirsty by not surrendering my breakfast. Having resolved to have breakfast, I create additional demand for the plants and animals that died so I could have this meal, but they didn't wish to die. The technology I use converts energy into heat, and makes the planet less hospitable for everyone. Even when I do good deeds such as helping a woman in danger, I cannot help but step on the toes of others, either those I didn't help because I directed my efforts in another direction, or those who will later be harmed by whoever benefits from my charity. By the light of these and other conflicts, we can see how the ongoing existence of beings who are compelled to maintain their livelihood presents an obstacle to ethics.
Someone who is under torture or suffering from wasting disease, in agony, has no ethical obligations. For all our philosophizing about living a moral life and being charitable to others, we concede that an exception is always permissible if we will be hurt too badly. Even though what we hold up as the paragon of a moral act involves sacrificing self-interest, there is no sense in which someone enduring unbearable pain is expected to put the interests of others before stopping the pain. This kind of pain might never happen to us (or it might be waiting for us all as we near decrepitude), but as an avenue of moral escape it remains a permanent possibility. I can never say with full confidence that I will always shelter you from evil, because I know that there is a threshold of physical discomfort beyond which I will intentionally flee from that promise.
Combined, these two forces create the ethical blockade called "self-defense". In every way, the doctrine of self-defense is an admission of the impossibility of ethical behavior. If we always reserve the right to continue our survival, pursue our projects, and avoid serious pain, then we are already operating in a zone where the minimal ethical requirement is at all times being transgressed. Within this zone, we can judge some actions as "ethical" and others as "not ethical", but this takes place inside the larger violation of ethics that is constituted by actions per se. The ethics of philosophers and social theorists are all situated in this deflated, compromised space while claiming to be primary and authentic.
One might attempt to justify the compromise by invoking something like the survival of mankind, or picking the best out of a set of bad options. In this line of reasoning, though, ethical responsibility is made subservient to incidental concerns; why should it have ever been true that being ethical was always compatible with species survival? We have tried to convince ourselves that ethics is primarily an evolved set of responses to pressures faced by our ancestors, and that the ones who thrived long enough to reproduce were those with this innate sense of selflessness. But doesn't that imply, with just as much strength, that we may be descended from a line of humans that did not regard ethical concerns as primary, that had some sense of selflessness but not enough to prevent them from reproducing? Why must we assume that the lineage we belong to is the one that evolved the most compassion, rather than the one that evolved a compassion that was suitable for propagating their DNA? Isn't it plausible that a branch of humans, committed to ethical responsibility in the minimal, basic sense described here, expressed their ethics by abstaining from reproduction--or by committing suicide?
The fact that our partial morality has preserved the species is evidence for nothing more than the mundane fact that the impossibility of ethical behavior is ancient, established long before any of us were born.
To be minimally ethical, I mean something like: not placing one's own interests above somebody else's just because they are one's own, taking other people's interests into account and not just one's own interests, leaving open the potential for putting the others' interests first even if they run counter to one's own, etc. I take this to be the basic feature of ethical action, apart from the justifications that are added later (duty, utility, or social cohesion).
We can see this intuitively if we consider some examples. A person who saves a woman in danger can be judged in a lot of ways, depending on the motivation and the outcome. If he did it because he felt the woman could contribute something of worth to society if she survived, that's a fair way of looking at things. If she was someone he loved and wanted to protect so they could be together in the future, that may be touching, but something is still missing. If he weighed the logic of Kant and decided that there was no logical way he could allow her to remain in danger without creating a universal maxim that could hurt him later, he might be congratulated for his philosophical acumen.
But if she was someone who had no social standing, was otherwise hated by him, and there was no other reason he gave for rescuing her, then most people would at least agree his behavior was exceptionally moral. Putting himself in harm's way spontaneously to help someone else, without consideration of anything other than their shared status as conscious beings, strikes us as a compassionate, selfless act rather than a calculated one. And if, in rescuing the woman, he lost his own life (and especially if he knew this would happen before doing it), the moral character of his action comes into even sharper focus. In other words, despite the fact that moral theories all purport to justify actions by some objective criterion such as maximizing happiness or fulfilling a transcendent obligation, ethics is most obviously found in cases where someone surrenders their self-interest in spite of any objective criterion.
Taken in isolation, acts like these can be admirable, but they reveal something about the world we live in. Having witnessed a self-sacrificing act and deeming it ethical, we can now ask the extent to which being ethical in this way is within our grasp as living beings.
As I mentioned earlier, there are at least three impediments to acting ethically that seem insurmountable to me as long as we remain alive.
1. The way I maintain my existence is to find or create things that are valuable to me, and everybody else in the world is engaged in the same enterprise.
2. At any moment, I am capable of feeling physical pain that is so extreme, all of my ethical responsibilities are immediately discarded so that the pain can stop.
3. As a generalization of the previous two points, I cannot help but to harbor an instinctive idea of "self-defense" that guides my behavior.
Regardless of the empirical state of my surrounding ethical environment, these impediments exert a permanent subversive effect on my ethical aspirations.
From the moment I wake up, every action I perform is done in defiance of the minimal ethical principle I spoke of: in order to survive, I have to consume food and water, but not everyone in the world has enough food and water, so I must already disrespect the hungry and thirsty by not surrendering my breakfast. Having resolved to have breakfast, I create additional demand for the plants and animals that died so I could have this meal, but they didn't wish to die. The technology I use converts energy into heat, and makes the planet less hospitable for everyone. Even when I do good deeds such as helping a woman in danger, I cannot help but step on the toes of others, either those I didn't help because I directed my efforts in another direction, or those who will later be harmed by whoever benefits from my charity. By the light of these and other conflicts, we can see how the ongoing existence of beings who are compelled to maintain their livelihood presents an obstacle to ethics.
Someone who is under torture or suffering from wasting disease, in agony, has no ethical obligations. For all our philosophizing about living a moral life and being charitable to others, we concede that an exception is always permissible if we will be hurt too badly. Even though what we hold up as the paragon of a moral act involves sacrificing self-interest, there is no sense in which someone enduring unbearable pain is expected to put the interests of others before stopping the pain. This kind of pain might never happen to us (or it might be waiting for us all as we near decrepitude), but as an avenue of moral escape it remains a permanent possibility. I can never say with full confidence that I will always shelter you from evil, because I know that there is a threshold of physical discomfort beyond which I will intentionally flee from that promise.
Combined, these two forces create the ethical blockade called "self-defense". In every way, the doctrine of self-defense is an admission of the impossibility of ethical behavior. If we always reserve the right to continue our survival, pursue our projects, and avoid serious pain, then we are already operating in a zone where the minimal ethical requirement is at all times being transgressed. Within this zone, we can judge some actions as "ethical" and others as "not ethical", but this takes place inside the larger violation of ethics that is constituted by actions per se. The ethics of philosophers and social theorists are all situated in this deflated, compromised space while claiming to be primary and authentic.
One might attempt to justify the compromise by invoking something like the survival of mankind, or picking the best out of a set of bad options. In this line of reasoning, though, ethical responsibility is made subservient to incidental concerns; why should it have ever been true that being ethical was always compatible with species survival? We have tried to convince ourselves that ethics is primarily an evolved set of responses to pressures faced by our ancestors, and that the ones who thrived long enough to reproduce were those with this innate sense of selflessness. But doesn't that imply, with just as much strength, that we may be descended from a line of humans that did not regard ethical concerns as primary, that had some sense of selflessness but not enough to prevent them from reproducing? Why must we assume that the lineage we belong to is the one that evolved the most compassion, rather than the one that evolved a compassion that was suitable for propagating their DNA? Isn't it plausible that a branch of humans, committed to ethical responsibility in the minimal, basic sense described here, expressed their ethics by abstaining from reproduction--or by committing suicide?
The fact that our partial morality has preserved the species is evidence for nothing more than the mundane fact that the impossibility of ethical behavior is ancient, established long before any of us were born.
