Who's Your Zombie?

 ZOMBIES DEFINED

What an awful lot of zombies there are on film lately. There’s a world of them in World War Z which I won’t be watching. It looks like every other American-saves-the-day blockbuster. I might read the book though.

I’m much more tempted to watch Warm Bodies which came out recently. I loved Zombieland, enjoyed Shaun of the Dead, didn't hate I am Legend and thought 28 days later was inspired (28 weeks later, less so).

My personal favorite however is Land of the Dead (2008) At this point I should confess that while I've seen other zombie flicks (Resident Evil, Undead and others) Land of the Dead is the only one of Romero’s works (original or remake) that I have ever seen.

George A. Romero’s status as the greatest zombie film maker of all time means this might disqualify me in some peoples mind from writing on this topic. On the one hand I agree. On the other hand I remind people that this is the internet and I am undaunted by my ignorance. Perhaps my brother Tim, as the family’s horror champion, could add his own thoughts.

What I loved about Land of the Dead is that it explored the meaning of zombie from the outside rather than the inside. Other films do this too but Land of the Dead prioritized it. To explain, consider the following definitions for a zombie;

1. Mindless, rage-filled, diseased, unholy, not really alive, hungry!

2. Expendable, can be mowed down freely as they are not a citizen in any way, too many, threatening,

The first definition includes actual qualities of the zombie. That is the zombie is treated as an actual thing. I use the word actual quite deliberately. Of course zombies are not events in the real world but that doesn’t mean that they are not treated as real in the fictions that discuss them. They are genuinely distinct from non-zombies. That genuine distinction is of the realm of objective qualities rather than merely how they are perceived. I use the word “actual” to describe this.

The second definition is different. It contains not the qualities of the zombie itself but the qualities of the gaze that produces the category of zombie. It is in fact more of a definition of the human ethics by which zombies, deserving or not, are recognized and treated as such.

Land of the Dead is interesting for emphasizing the second definition because while actual zombies don’t exist outside of fiction (or do they?), the category of zombie (the second definition) is very much a part of the real world. There are many people who are considered expendable, too populous and a threat. Tragically refugees in the Australian political context come to mind. What makes a zombie a good metaphor for how these people are being viewed is the idea of “depth of personhood”.

THE DEPTH OF PERSONHOOD.

Our minds can extend out of our bodies. Just imagine your own back yard. Upon imagining it you may well have projected yourself into that space. You are possibly there now (mentally) looking at the yard work that needs doing. In this way we can virtually “see” around corners. Zombies in movies do this too. They hear a noise (not just any noise but the noise of people) and go to investigate. Sometimes they smell living flesh many miles away and travel to it in order to feed. To do this they must be able to project themselves mentally to the source of the sound or smell, to anticipate what they will find when they get there.

My mind and with it my sense of self also extends internally. In the form of my hopes and fears and pain sensations, identity conflicts and so on, I have depth. In fact I would say that most of the time this internal world is a trillion times larger than my external one. The yard work I need to do is dwarfed by the internal feelings of pride and shame that accompany completing it or not.

My self-hood may be infinitely deep. I can, after all, reflect on my reflections. Whole worlds of thought can become enveloped in another world of greater scale by mere pondering. When my heart breaks it feels like the universe ruptures and then from a later vantage point that universe of heartbreak will seem like a single satellite. Over my life there are galaxies and galaxies of internal life created and explored inside of me.

We can’t directly observe this internal world of others and unlike how our minds extend externally we don’t have any great evidence of its processes. It’s not easy to even infer the full depth of another person’s internal word from what we can casually observe of them. Art can be a way to communicate it, intimacy can reveal it, but mostly we have to hypothesize from our own experience of life and our external similarities that we are internally (roughly) the same as other people.

This reasoning process is so ingrained that its conclusions feel intuitive. In fact this is probably the best example of intuition I can think of. We realize that other people go as deep as ourselves because they are otherwise like us. It’s very much the basis of empathy which I believe is in turn the soundest basis for morality.

A zombie despite appearing superficially similar to humans is afforded none of this depth to their personhood. Their internal life is gone (or imagined gone). They don’t hope or fear or attach meaning to events. They certainly don’t reflect on their reflections as deeply as you or I. They are essentially going through the motions of being human. They are “soulless” (or are they?).

Once people are put in this category of Zombie it’s easy to see how they can be indefinitely detained or killed. They are completely expendable because even when they experience pain it just isn’t as meaningful as the pain we experience. It’s a purely sensory thing not the deep universe-rupturing event of our own or another humans suffering.

ZOMBIES EVERYWHERE!

In a much more subtle way than what is happening politically in Australia with refugees I think we are always creating these sorts of zombies around us. That is we are always forgetting or dismissing other people’s equal internal depth.

Perhaps it’s almost impossible to equally appreciate the depth of personhood that others possess as we do our own. We may achieve it occasionally with our family and close friends but it seems to me that we struggle to sustain it even there. Genuinely living with the knowledge of other people’s depth of personhood as infinitely large as my own seems similar to Buddhist concepts of enlightenment. In other words some distance away from my current state of wisdom.

Powerful forces encourage us to perceive people as Zombies – not everyone, as that would make us a psychopath, but certainly neither is everyone supposed to be a human person to us. As I discussed in a post titled "A current cry for help", the perpetrators of violence and our own fear are not the only voices dissuading us from hearing cries of help. Every part of life that simply has another agenda for us – another way for us to spend our time and money – is also interested in us ignoring other people’s situations of need.

To do this we must create our philosophical zombies. Philosophical zombie is an established term which means specifically “a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks …sentience.” I’m using it only slightly differently. I don’t think we care that a zombie possesses the external mind I spoke about that enables it to hunt effectively. That’s sentience too and we anticipate such a mind in those we place in the zombie category.

It’s the internal mind – the depth of feeling and meaning and significance – that we truncate in order to ignore our zombies potential suffering. We don’t even need to truncate it entirely. We only need to shorten it sufficiently to outweigh their needs with our own. Given the infinite size of our own internal life, any finite space for others may even be enough. While we contain galaxies, our zombies can still hold something like oceans of thought without it perturbing us too much if we step on their heads to get past.

Everyday if we live in a major city a million such zombies may get in our way. They clearly have no idea of the magnitude of our internal world when they stagger in front of us, congest our car’s path or buy the last white choc muffin. Certainly they are not actually zombies we might tell ourselves in a quiet voice but louder voices will insist that they must be.

Our tribal leaders, be they radio-shock jocks, pop-stars, preachers, advertisers and even academics thrive on declaring other people outside their fold as un-thinking and/or heartless. In other words, a zombie. And we are constantly stretching our mercy to forgive them. Haters of the graphic novel, watchers of Big Brother, executive and corporate types, Liberal voters, regurgitators of The Secret, are some of my own different tribe’s zombies. Your tribe’s zombies might include atheists or it might include Christians or it might include people who vaccinate or people who refuse to, or fans of Justin Beiber or people who don’t understand how amazing he is. How indulgent we all are to put up with them….just.

HOW THE VIRUS SPREADS.

In most zombie movies becoming a zombie oneself is the critical fear for the hold-out humans. Unlike picky Vampires or Werewolves who pass on vampirism or lycanthropy selectively, zombies tend to come in an overwhelming plague. This threat level of contagion justifies extreme measures in the containment and elimination of zombies. All the civil restrictions and military authority required are justified. The future of the human race is at stake.

Even some humans may have to be cut loose if they drop behind. That’s the thinking of the member of the human party in zombie movies who ends up betraying the others. This person looks at people well before they get bitten as “likely” zombies anyway. They may even have had that attitude before any “actual” zombies showed up. They were always alone in how they understood the unique depth of their own person hood.

Because movies are wonderful the sneaky backstabber who looks out for themselves or who exploits the zombie plague for personal gain will inevitably get bitten. When they do they are seldom that different as a zombie from how they were before. This is because the truncation of their internal life – the zombification of themselves – has already occurred for the audience. They are and were a villain.

While human the villains mind extended externally as far as anyone else’s if not further. They never had a problem tactically projecting themselves where they needed to be to look after their own interests. But then a zombie can do that too. A zombie’s problem is their singlemindedness, the lack of greater significance to their actions and ultimately their reduction of even their loved ones to food. This is exactly (substitute food for target practice) the mindset of the zombie persecutor.

(Whereas the fear the heroes have of turning into zombies is often about not recognizing their loved ones if they do, the villains' fear seems to be of being killed once zombified. They don't recognise any “loved ones” while still human. What humanity are they preserving then?)

It’s a paradox. The very gaze that determines others as zombies turns us into actual zombies. Great films of this genre explore this concept. In the real world we all have to grapple with it too. Whenever we cultivate empathy we deepen our internal life. Whenever we give up on or dismiss the depth of reality for others we shrink who we are; As we see zombies around us we become more and more zombie-like ourselves.

(Note: After watching fifteen minutes on youtube of Survival of theDead (2009) I am hugely impressed. I have a lot of research to do but bandwidth restricts me from using the internet to do it. If you have the movies, I'll make the popcorn.)

Let justice be done though the world perish.

There are many different ways to resolve ethical questions. Two ways in particular appear similar. We can identify them by their golden rule; 

• “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or;
• “Act only in accordance with what you would want to be a universal law.”

The similarities are there because the first is credited to Jesus and the second to Immanuel Kant, a Christian philosopher, whose main goal was to show a rational foundation to all things including Christianity. Although he was almost eighteen centuries after Jesus, Kant did not see his rule as borrowed from Christianity. Instead he saw Jesus’ golden rule as derived from his categorical imperative (as Kant called his rule). Before we scoff at this hubris, Kant was only saying that he was articulating a more fundamental principle in the background of all human rationality – not that Jesus copied him!  Kant also felt his categorical imperative gave clearer direction to more ethical problems than Jesus' golden rule.

It can be difficult to apply “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to problems like environmental damage. In most cases dropping a piece of rubbish on the ground or pumping out smog from car use has a very diffuse effect. We can ignore that it is somehow affecting any “others” because it only has a tiny effect on any specific other person. The concept of “others” is also confused because the effect on others is usually shared with the polluter themselves.

Kant’s rule does seem to be a better way of expressing the spirit of what Jesus was talking about for problems like environmental damage. Early Kantian’s concerns weren’t the same as the green movements of today. However Kantian ethics is likewise concerned with promoting social behaviour that can govern large groups of people living together without external authority. Kant wrote in the infancy of the modern nation state. His ethics describes the internal policeman that we expect national citizens to carry with them. This inner cop reminds us not to drop litter, or speed, or steal by asking us to imagine what our town/country/world would be like if everyone did the same.

Many professing Christians would agree with Kant that his rule is merely a clearer expression of Jesus’ former one. There is no culture war with Kantians on one side and Jesusians on the other. To have ethics grounded in Kant’s rule is so common now that it can be difficult for some people to imagine that it is not the only possible way to discuss ethics even if they are Christian.  However Kant has not merely clarified Jesus’ rule with his own. He marks a significant departure.

Firstly, the two rules are addressed to different audiences. Imagine a person who is about to be hung for theft and is trying to escape. Jesus’ rule makes more sense if we say it to the hangmen. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to apply it to the person trying to avoid punishment. If we ask the thief to do unto others as they would have done to them they could well reply “ok” and keep escaping. They thief could be happy not to have to hang anyone in the hangmans place.

On the other hand “do unto others…” has great implications for the hangman. They are being asked to sympathise with the thief and to put themselves in their place. That’s going to spell the end of the hanging, I would guess.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is power leveling. If a King and their subject required this of themselves they would end up like equals because if the King was mistaken for a commoner they would still want respect. If the wealthy and the poor required this of each other they would end up more like equals too. The implications of this commandment were far more costly for the men of Jesus’ time than the women. It asks more of judges than prisoners and conquering armies than the vanquished. This is Jesus primarily directing his moral discipline to those in power or rather to each of us in our positions of power whatever they may be, parent over child for example.

Kant’s categorical imperative works differently. Kant’s message is deliberately indifferent to the power or other circumstances of the audience. “Act only in accordance with that maxim which you would want to become a universal law” makes sense when spoken to our condemned thief and the hangman both. It is indifferent to their relative positions. Kant asks all equally, hangmen, thief and cook whether we think all thieves everywhere should escape. If the answer is no then the thief should stop escaping.

At first we might think that it also equalizes people. After all if a person should hang someone then this, universalized, would lead to hanging everyone, which no-one would want. The hangman, specifically, by not wanting the good of hanging people to be a universal law is thus restrained from hanging anyone. So the same result can be achieved by Kant’s rule as by Jesus’.  However it’s easy to have the maxim say all convicted thieves, not all people, should hang.  This rule allows the hangman to practice hanging with moral consistency under Kant’s law while they would have difficulty doing so under Jesus’ rule.

Although it is indifferent to power, Kant’s rule is often more costly to those without power. Refugees for example suffer when we apply Kant’s principle of universalism. We cannot cut one family a break because there are millions behind them who we would then have to give the same break to. In Australian migration debates we are regularly asked to imagine “what if every single person who wanted to come into Australia was let in?” That is a very Kantian question.

Refugees fare much better under Jesus’ rule where we are asked to do unto them as we would have them do unto us. I believe I would have them make room for me if our situations were changed and they were (as I am now) sitting on a quarter-acre block. Jesus rule doesn’t speak to me and the refugee equally. It speaks to us in our positions of power which I clearly hold over the refugee.

Kant’s rule seems to operate in a conservative fashion. It preserves the status quo more effectively than it delivers justice through change. It is more power maintaining than power leveling. Amongst modern and unwitting Kantians this is actually the defense of universalism that they put forward. Kant’s rule is seen as pragmatic, reasonable, workable and so on in comparison to what Jesus’ rule requires of us. Jesus is a radical while Kant makes common sense. Again that can be heard in refugee policy debates in Australia; not the specific mention of Immanuel Kant but the ideas.

However Kant was no conservative or pragmatic person. He saw himself as an opponent of pragmatism and once wrote “let justice be done though the world perish.” His ethics have very radical implications which we are seeing in their application today.

One of the most commonly cited examples of the logical and radical implications of Kant’s rule is the dilemma of the hangman and the thief on an island. Kant held that if it is right to hang the thief (in his example it was a murderer) in a city of millions then it is also right to hang them when there is no-one else around. If the hangman doesn’t hang their only companion on the island then they are also saying that all hangings of all thieves are wrong everywhere else too. Kant is radically indifferent to circumstances. That is in fact the pride of his ethics.

This thinking, (enforced by a global military alliance for profit), is what is creating many millions of economic refugees the world over by trapping countries inside spiraling debt. The argument is that people must repay debts because if we were to universalize defaulting on a debt then we would have no basis for borrowing in the first place. Hence under Kant’s rule no country can default regardless of the insanity of their economic situation. Even if a country’s debt was created by a previous dictator who used it to torture their people those very people must service that debt. Even if a country’s debt is only able to be serviced by unsustainable strip mining that must be what is done. Otherwise, under Kant’s rule, all debts, even all contracts of any kind would be meaningless. The circumstances of individual cases cannot be taken into account.

This is leading to an untenable world order. Whole nations of people are in debt prisons and if they attempt to flee then they are placed in life-long limbo in refugee camps. This is generating massive profits for a few. Kant however wouldn’t care. He never proposed that his rule would produce a better society. In fact his main opponents were utilitarians whose ethical philosophy evaluated actions by their benefits and harms. Kant appears to be reasonable and even pragmatic with an emphasis on conservativism but his ethics is in fact profoundly uninterested in any of that. His ethical system is a system of absolutes. And it’s killing many of us.

It probably seems odd to suggest that any solution to the world’s refugee crisis needs to challenge Immanuel Kant. That’s only the sort of irrelevant suggestion a philosopher could make. However I believe everything we do is ethical and that our ethical philosophy ultimately decides how this world works. (That’s another blog post I’m working on at the moment).  

Ask yourself, how differently would just your next day be under Kant’s golden rule or Jesus’? Ask yourself soon what difference each rule would make when applied to our world economy and our treatment of refugees? As melodramatic as it sounds it is true that many millions of people are extremely and endlessly suffering under Kant. What would we have them do unto us if we were in their position?

Are we evil? - A response to Paul Washer.

 

The above video shows a preacher, Paul Washer, responding to a young mans’ open query about the doctrine of election (transcript here) The doctrine of election is the belief some Christians have that people are chosen solely by God’s free will (from before their birth) to be made able to be true Christians and thus to be spared the fate of the rest of humanity, hell. In fact Paul Washers explanation takes a while to get to election specifically. He is almost entirely focused on describing the complete evil of humanity. That’s his take* on a connected doctrine called total depravity and it’s also what I want to focus on in this post.

When I watched this clip I was fascinated. I was fascinated because there are statements made in this video which are excruciatingly difficult to refute. That isn’t because they are supported by a mountain of evidence or any evidence. Instead they are hard to refute because although the video shows those statements being made and being agreed to they are the sorts of statements I can’t figure out the how of disagreeing or agreeing with them. They are not nonsense but neither are they proper conclusions.

We could call these statements “first principles”; original premises we simply have to accept or not. First principles frame our discussion but they themselves are virtually impossible to actually talk about. An example of a first principle in rationalism might be that “Truth is constant.” If one person accepts that and another doesn’t then their conversation is going to be deeply difficult. It’s the sort of statement that defines the frame of conversation rather than exists within it.

A greater concern than how can two people with different first principles communicate is a question for our selves alone; How can we decide to accept or not “first principles” if we can’t say anything about them?; Are we obliged to just choose randomly between frames of conversation?; Or can we have a means of choosing one over another?

All this philoso-waffle about these statements doesn’t remove from us the responsibility of responding to them. Here they are filmed being received by a young man. I feel a moral responsibility to have something to say to that young man myself. Repeatedly they are being led to confess in this video that humanity is evil. My instinctual desire is to protect this young man from these ideas. To know oneself as evil seems to me to be a very primal harm. At least I want him to know he is not being given clear and obvious “facts”. Can I justify myself?

The claim that humanity is evil is also being received by me in viewing the video. What do I do with it? Is there really no way to test this? If I reject it am I doing so arbitrarily? Where does my disagreement come from?

Is the statement “humanity is evil” actually uncriticisable?

Are we all evil? This is a bit like asking if E.T. is a terrible movie. On the one hand, of course it isn’t. I can’t think of anyone who would say it is all that bad. It’s a bit cheesy but as a kid’s film it’s definitely not Care Bears 2. However what exactly is a terrible movie? Imagine that a perfect children’s film exists in the ideal although it has never been actually made. If my standard of a decent film is that high then even E.T. becomes terrible.

Arguing over whether humans are evil stands on similar shifting sand. If we define evil as incapable of any goodness then it’s hard to say all humans are evil. Fred Hollows comes to mind. If we define evil by some higher standard ie. you are evil if you ever told a lie then probably not even Fred Hollows isn’t evil. If our intent is to say that all humans are evil then we can simply achieve that by claming that an ideal standard exists which is both just a measure of decentness and which no-one has achieved.

Furthermore what if the very nature of our evil is to not think we are evil! What if that pride alone is sufficient to be evil? This would put us in a neat Catch 22 situation; either we think we are evil or we are being evil. My own experience of evangelical Christianity included just such a scenario.

The problem with defining evil by any specific criteria is that evil is a moral word. Moral words don’t translate to IS statements so much as they translate to SHOULD statements. So although some of us might think that Evil is committing murder without remorse, or that Evil is having told a single lie, someone else could just as easily say Evil is not worshipping God or Evil is not thinking you are evil. We are only trading measures not true definitions. The only common definition that we could ever establish for evil is something like evil is what should be condemned and shouldn’t be praised.

What “should” does humanity’s evil refer to? And what that uncovers.

Paul Washer is very specific about the type of should he is talking about with human evil. Paul provides an explanation of humanity as the orcs in The Lord of the Rings. Sauruman makes orcs come out of the ground evil.** Aragon and the others slaughter those orcs “like insects” and this is always to be celebrated because those orcs are always evil. Paul says his listener’s problem with the doctrine of election is because he doesn’t think that people are truly evil. It follows that treating human destruction as anything less celebratory than the destruction of orcs is an error based on that. That’s what human evil means when Paul is talking about it; we should celebrate humanities destruction.

The problem with this definition is that “should” is a word with its own variety of meanings. Usually we use “should” to indicate chains of positive consequences with a moral end. A common moral end is the quality of life for intelligent beings, particularly humans, and even more particularly “innocent” humans.

Eg. You “shouldn’t” drive while drunk. It could lead to hitting a pedestrian. They could end up brain-damaged or dead.

(Note: Killing the pedestrian is given more moral weight than killing yourself who as the drink driver is not innocent. However killing yourself and thus bereaving your child who is innocent has a similar moral weight as it also involves an innocent.)

Paul Washers “evil” employs a very different type of should to the common use above. Firstly in Paul Washers scenario there are no innocents; All people are evil by nature and this makes all peoples welfare an unimportant moral end. Here Paul has conflated a general badness with non-innocence. This is something which we all do.

Eg. You “shouldn’t” drive while drunk past a wanton child abusers house. It could lead to hitting them. They could end up brain-damaged or dead. Actually who cares?

However it is also something which we are wary about doing. The wanton child abuser may be generally evil (as in the orc/human of Paul Washers theology) however they are not specifically responsible for the drink driving so in regard to this crime they are an innocent (ie. just a pedestrian). Maintaining the relevance of specific innocence is a key way to maintain moral actions. Losing that distinction can be the basis for committing terrible acts precisely because people lose their status as moral ends.

Eg. The people in the world trade towers may have shared in a (very) loose collective responsibility for the policies of the United States, also they were possibly consumers of pornography and no doubt late returners of library books. Only the first of those points and even then by a huge stretch could be said to make them non-innocents in regard to any terrorist attack – no matter how “evil” they were.

Paul Washer doesn’t just stop with the erosion of the category of specific innocence however. For Paul it is not even a tally of peoples unrelated crimes that make them deserving of any destruction but their very nature. This means that even people who have yet to earn their destruction, such as children, already warrant it. This is a moral reasoning that goes far beyond that of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Towers. It is actually more akin to the rationale behind the Holocaust.

None of this necessarily shows us that Paul is wrong. It merely shows us the historical implications of referring to a group of people as “evil” (on the basis of a broad tally of their crimes or worse on the basis of their nature). In Paul Washers defence he is not talking about a Holocaust of Jews only, but of Jews and Germans and all people equally. All we can really say is that Paul Washer is saying that we should delight in the coming holocaust against all humanity by God. And that’s where we were at the beginning.

Although we’ve added very little, if anything, to our understanding, we have uncovered along the way a means of provoking our self to disagree with Paul. That is the reason why even the death of a drink driver in their own accident can’t be celebrated; our children. There were eight children killed on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York. That’s a surprisingly low number given the total deaths. The youngest was two and a half. In the Holocaust 1.5 million children were killed. The circumstances of some of those deaths are what I would recognize as evil. The children however were not. They were innocents in the truest sense.

Another way of looking at morality.

By focusing on children we can recognize that there are two (amongst many) very different ways of looking at morality. Paul Washers use of “should” is a super-rational approach which imposes right and wrong over our instincts. If all are evil like Suaramon’s orcs then Aragon’s murder of them is to be enjoyed. That enjoyment is something Paul Washer encourages his young listener to identify with even though they are an orc (metaphorically speaking)! After all if something is right then it is right from all perspectives. Or rather if something is from Gods perspective then we should share it.

A very different way of looking at morality would notice that what is key to Tolkiens’ orcs is not that they come out of the ground universally evil but universally adult. There are no children orcs. If there were, then the adult orcs would need to look after them. That would create a dilemma because even if an adult is “evil” and their child is “evil” we would recognize the looking after the child by the adult as good. If we are orcs ourselves then we have such a moral responsibility to our children. This does not change if our children “are” evil in nature by any criteria ie. a propensity to lie or a taste for Hobbit flesh. We should never delight in their destruction. Essentially we should never see our children as evil (meaning that which we should condemn) even if they actually meet some objective measure of evil such as not wanting to worship God. Why? Because we should never condemn our children.

This second way of looking at morality doesn’t imbed it in a universal perspective but a parental perspective. The basis of morality is a tribal love of our children rather than a super structure of absolute truths. This is then universalized to others. Everyone is someone’s child and thus falls under a broadening umbrella of our love based on our sympathy with other parents.

This second way of looking at morality also presents us with a very different way of critiquing immorality. Immorality is not so much a matter of incorrect reasoning but of an incorrect intuitive, emotional and even physical response to a situation – such as a child’s destruction. No matter how sound a string of moral reasoning might be, if it contradicts a loving response to a child then the reasoning is itself immoral.

What I would say to the young man in the video.

I would encourage the young man to realize that what he has been told by Paul Washer should be forgotten if he ever holds a child, especially his own. The only definition of evil that we can all share is that evil is that which ought to be condemned. Paul takes that to mean the celebration of evils destruction. That child however is deserving of not being condemned, especially by their own father, not because of any innate meeting of good or bad criteria, but because of our right role as adults. Quite frankly if you aren’t prepared to feel that way then the rest of us are morally obliged to keep you away from children.

The very basis of morality is not our opinion about the opinions of a supreme being towards us. No matter how adamantly those opinions can be asserted (or how long ago they were written down even) this is clearly a shaky ground to stand on. The very basis of morality is our right response to our children, whether they are orcs or not.

*Paul Washers take on total depravity is not the same as everyone who uses that phrase. Paul Washers spends time on actually legitimising humanities destruction whereas others might merely mean total depravity as the human incapacity to know God or do good for the purposes of salvation. The two are connected but the latter leaves alone any actual justification for judgement. More importantly, Paul Washer is NOT representative of every Christian, many of whom do not even believe in any variation of total depravity.

 **If we take this metaphor to its logical conclusion, then God who supposedly created humans is Sauramon. I suspect that wasn't Paul Washers intent. As I mentioned in this old blog post if we are going to say humans are evil we have the problem of sourcing that evil in humans.

 

A moral world.

This is a somewhat wacky post. People who know me will realise that feeling the need to disclaim that must mean we have a doozer of a wacky post. I hope you enjoy it.

What does an ethical realm look like?

I’ve been pondering lately the idea of morality or ethics as a language that describes an entire world in a similar way to how physical descriptions describe a physical world. Morality would describe a world composed of moral objects rather than physical objects. Moral descriptions would have certain characteristics just as physical descriptions do.  The fun of this exercise for me is that it illuminates certain assumptions I hold about morality or ethics and it raises some intriguing questions.

What are moral objects?

Physical objects are three dimensional, four if you count time. By that I don’t mean that physical objects really are four dimensional. I’m not talking about reality here. I am talking about a model or a grammar and vocabulary. A physical description of something draws on four dimensions; height, length, breadth and duration. To physically describe a table I might also describe its weight, density, the strength of its molecular bonds and so on. I wouldn’t describe the tables’ kitchness or quaintness. Those qualities lie outside the language of a physical description.  Physical objects are what you create by describing a world by its physical qualities only. In fact I’m happy to treat description and object as effectively interchangeable for this post.

Moral objects then are what we get when we describe the world by moral characteristics only. Can this include things? Can a table for example be good or bad? Can it be honest, righteous, valid, justifiable? Or for that matter can it be evil, wanton, invalid or wrong? My instinctual feeling is it can’t be. My instinctual feeling is that moral objects are acts – the act of building a table or destroying one or sitting on one can be moral – but the table itself is amoral. As an amoral object the table itself has no existence in a morally defined world in the same way that non-physical objects have no existence in a physically defined world. So the first rule of a moral world is that verbs are the new nouns – acts are objects here.

What are moral characteristics?

How do we measure or describe morality? What are its fundamental dimensions? I’m going to propose three. Just like the physical descriptors mentioned above there can be many more characteristics (weight, density, combustability even) so this isn’t the limit of our conversation.

Further its possible to just use one of these descriptors, just as its possible to describe a table by just its height. Such a description is just a poorer definition of the object but as no description is totally complete there can be no objective minimum either.

1. Harm and beneficence.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post Harm and beneficence has to be measured against some sense of the ideal. Building a casino on the top of Ayers rock for example or chopping off my healthy leg seem obviously harmful only because we have an obvious ideal. This makes this characteristic interestingly dependant on a broader context and ideas. Also as I mentioned in another post it is necessary to have a sense of a moral person (which could be an environment as well) to establish where chains of harms and benefits end.

2. Honesty or Sincerity and Duplicity

The notion that a person is trying to do the right thing is deeply fundamental to our conversations about moral actions. This comes up when adults try and understand their parents who in a different time may have had different ideas of right parenting. We can say that their choices were wrong (to us) but still moral given the knowledge they had. Likewise we can recognize that in our own parenting we can only try and do the right thing.

In making that attempt we can be honest with ourselves or we can try and sell ourselves a line. It can be hard to know which we are doing but I think we still want to and need to talk about it. The words we use are honesty, sincerity and integrity.

3. Humility

It seems strange to hang humility out there on its own however I couldn’t quite describe the broader category it belongs to. It may be that it can be covered in the first two descriptors as well. For me though it does stand alone as a necessary corrective to both unfettered beneficence and sincerity.

Sincerity on its own has produced such romantic excesses as philosophers called crimes of pure reason. Those who flew into the world trade towers committed acts of absolute sincerity. Humility could have stopped them.

Likewise the worst tyrannies justify themselves on the basis of looking after others. The victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution can attest it is a terrible thing to live in a proposed utopia. Even in smaller matters humility prevents beneficence from being something immoral. Beneficence without humility is when your mum puts holes in your condoms because you’d make a great dad.

How stable are moral objects?

We understand that physical characteristics are relative. The weight of a table is not inherent but a consequence of gravity acting on the tables mass. That’s pretty simple; on the moon the table weighs less. More confusing Einstein showed that the tables’ existence in time stretches and contracts depending on its movement relative to its surrounds. Do I know what this means? Not entirely. My guess is that it means the tables’ duration, just like its weight, is a perception that only makes sense in a context in which we too are present. When you think about it it’s not that surprising that duration (time) is basically a relationship between the table and the rest of our perception. 

The upshot of this is that our physical description of the table is not consistent for all situations. However as long as we don’t take it to the moon or launch the table at light speed we should be able to infer a particular table from the same physical description reliably and repeatedly. We can say that the words used to physically describe a table usually stay meaningful most of the time.

Subatomic particles however are much less stable physical objects. The physical characteristics of one of these tricky blighters are (so I’ve heard) “all over the shop.” Weight, speed, location and even existence change constantly. Each characteristic is highly interdependent on the rest and on the very act of observation. We are still trying out new vocabularies in order to have meaningful conversations about these objects.

It seems to me that the moral descriptors I have proposed produce moral objects that are also inherently unstable. Beneficence and harm are very situational while honesty and duplicity are subjective and evolving with our own self-awareness. Humility is the worst of all because it is interdependent with what we imagine we don’t know. That’s a floating parameter of the floatingest degree.

I’m about to cook up a piece of chicken for my lunch. Is that a moral, immoral or amoral action? How permanent is that description? It’s very likely battery hen chicken (no label either way) and purchased quite cheaply. I was intending to give it all to the dog but now intend to shallow fry a piece for myself. It’s very unhealthy and dirties a whole pan. Is this clearly a red light bad thing or does it flicker? Does it matter that I am sooo hungry and I’m finishing off something open in the fridge. Does it matter that having written this paragraph I am more aware than I would have been about my action? If a butterfly flaps its wings in an Amazon rainforest would we have to recalculate the moral weight of my action or am I just being silly?

How do moral objects relate to each other?

In physical descriptions we try to understand how one physical object impacts on another. In fact it’s worth recognizing that physical objects only make sense inside a lattice or web of forces that produce those objects. There is no table in isolation because without its current temperature and atmospheric pressure its atoms would behave differently. At least on a subatomic level there are constant exchanges between the table and the surrounding environment. Physical objects are not distinct or independent phenomenon.

Having now eaten the chicken what does my entire moral world look like? What is the impact from one moral object to another? If moral objects have the instability I mentioned earlier then it’s sensible to imagine that proximity to each other will result in shaping and reshaping of each other. If anything as I’ve described them moral objects are more interdependent and indistinct than physical ones. We can imagine a relationship between them.

The first word I think of to speak of a relationship between moral actions is karma. However karma is not a moral word itself. In fact karma is a way of talking in a particularly amoral way about moral actions. Karma isn’t “right”, it just is. Given that amoral objects are excluded from our moral world then amoral forces like karma would seem to have no place either. Karma, although it is about moral objects, belongs in a physical or metaphysical world rather than a moral one.

Particularly moral forces that tie together moral objects might include duty or obligation or debt. If an action can produce a debt which changes the morality of other actions then this is as if a moral object has affected the characteristics of another moral object.  That’s like a physics of morality. “How are debts between actions produced and cancelled?” is a fascinating question (not for this post though).

We don’t have to make the leap to assume that all debts must be cancelled. Maybe debt is the fundamental energy of a moral universe and if it gets extinguished then we obtain stasis – only an ideal state if you like it. It might be more interesting at least to pass debts on and around – to create states of high moral energy as well as low moral energy.

An artists challenge.

There are many points at which you may disagree with how I’ve pictured this ethical realm. Just like when we talk about physical objects two people can see two very different tables based on what’s important to them. You might even disagree that moral objects are only actions. Perhaps certain physical objects are for you sacred or profane in and of themselves.

An even more pivotal point of disagreement is on the usefulness of imagining an exclusively moral realm at all. I personally have enjoyed this as a thought exercise. I’m not committed to a moral realm as anything other than a way of exposing to myself my own moral language.

If you also found this a fun exercise I would love to receive links to pictures of how you see the moral world. If you want you can send me the pic itself and I’ll put it up alongside any others in this blog. I’ve been thinking lately the visuals of this site are a bit poor and I know too many talented artists for that to continue, surely.

So what do you think, can we do it? Can we picture moral objects interacting with each other and thus creating their world, a world we operate on in parallel to our physical one? Can we show each other what we see? Or has this blog finally gone off the deep end after a little too much Dr. Who? I’m not completely sure myself.

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Kudos to my friend Daniel for thinking outside the box and suggesting the following representation of a moral world. Also fluffy.

It's O.K. to kill.

To kill is OK. It is almost universally permitted, sanctioned and even rewarded. Even outside of war. Even without any genuine self defence. Death can be cruel and prolonged if that’s what it takes. Convenience is the only concern.

What’s interesting is how some minds effectively leave the room in complete disinterest when I explain what I mean by this. Objectively we have to consider that one possible reason for taking the door of disinterest on this issue is a flight from responsibility. That alone should cause us to pause to justify ourselves. Yes, I am trying to keep you reading by insinuation here, but I am also referring to myself and my motivation for writing this post.

The killing I am describing in my first paragraph is the killing of mice. I’ve killed mice, you’ve probably killed mice. We kill mice routinely and in droves merely in order to protect the large scale farming of grains that sustain our concentrated human populations. So unlike whales and cows and pigs even vegans and vegetarians are responsible (albeit indirectly) for killing mice.

Because of our general complicity “Is it actually OK to kill mice?” is probably not going to be a popular question to ask, but it is a pertinent one. At least, it is if we are interested in doing what is right, being good and all of that.

To begin, we should probably establish if it is wrong or right (or anything moral) either way to kill anything. This really isn’t that easy to do in a strictly logical fashion; death comes to us all after all. It’s absolutely impossible to call good or bad in terms of broad effects the death of all the people in the world trade towers in 2001, in the tsunami of 2004 or of smoking related diseases in the last week. No matter how profound each persons dying was, once we leave our solar system or our century the ripple of those deaths vanishes. While we gauge from empathy that those deaths were probably bad for them (the dead) and for their families we can’t really say they were bad in an absolute permanent sense. This is one of the ways consequentialism has always failed me as a moral system. Take a long enough or wide enough view and any actions consequences are swallowed by sand.

How much more so when we think of the death of mice, which reproduce so rapidly that to kill two hundred in a plague is to make a sword cut in the wind. There really seems to be a negligible impact only one year on from whether we kill a single mouse. The universe doesn’t shudder. Nobody eulogizes another nameless extinction. But if consequentialism is useless when applied to humanity I can’t see why it is acceptable when applied to mice.

Ethical systems make more sense when they elevate to a greater than numerically deserved significance the effects of an action on an individual. This is still consequential but not eternally so. Instead we stop our chain of consequences at the person whom we declare to be an end and not a means. The issue we have here is whether we stop only at human persons or if the mouse is a “person” in the same regard. If the former is the case then killing mice is only an issue in its effect on humans. We have then rejected all language to say why the slow torture of a mouse, the gleeful killing of mice or the extermination of all mice might be wrong. When we say morality assumes humans as the only moral end then all bets are off regarding the non-human mice.

Yet there is no clear reason why any difference between a human and a mouse renders one a moral end and the other a mere means. Whatever differences we draw between us and mice it is obvious they are merely self-serving. Mice are less intelligent than us but only if we define intelligence so that it is represented by our own strengths like symbolic representation. If we measure intelligence by maze solving then many humans are dumber than mice. Further, within the human population we consider degrees of intelligence (however measured) to be unrelated to whether you are a moral ends or a means. It is therefore just a convenience to apply this distinction to mice. There’s certainly no easy logical connection.

One attempt to make a logical connection between a human type of intelligence and moral personhood is in our ability to reflect on and be “spiritually” affected by our suffering. That is to say that we have the capacity to feel degraded, humiliated, or otherwise wronged by the thought of being killed by another human. A mouse merely feels they will be dead. I think this makes for a very interesting moral philosophy. I think if we follow it carefully it leads us away from any distinction between killing people and non-people into a distinction based on different types of killing. Consider a human that is killed by a lion versus a human that is betrayed by a friend. Both victims have the moral status of people and both are killed but only one is actually “wronged.”

One problem is that we are completely presuming that we are incapable of “wronging” the mice. Basically we are claiming to be able to be “moral lions” to them. That would be fair in as much as we do nothing to encourage a theory of mind in the mouse regarding us. However what if we don’t? What if the mouse is a pet or a lab mouse that we feed?  Could such a mouse feel betrayed by us?

Furthermore whatever the mouse believes, we know that we are not lions. We have a theory of our own mind. It seems to me that once we actually allow ourselves to voluntarily occupy the position of a wild beast without moral guidance then we are no longer in possession of a morality at all. Unless we retain moral responsibility for acting amorally (which negates the amorality of that state) then we are essentially “moral lions” at all times. To have a morality is also take responsibility for switching it off.  Then we still have to decide why we can become lions with mice and not with people.

When I’ve posed the question of “Is it OK to kill mice?” people have often struggled to answer (no doubt unaided by me giving them no warning). Generally they have reflected my own sheepish feeling that we stand on shaky ground around this issue. The most confident responses have been unsurprised by the lack of any neat systematic justification for killing mice but not humans. For them this is an unremarkable consequence of what morality actually is.

Indeed our problems answering this question are a good argument that morality isn’t any kind of system at all. By system I mean something where each law within it reinforces each other law in a logically consistent way. Instead morality looks like something hobbled together to suit various agendas; an improvised social contract. In such a picture our own genetic interest is at the core. This puts our children first, followed by the rest of our species, followed by those animals that are useful to our species. Morality only pretends to have universal laws because such pretence is more effective propaganda for itself. Essentially it is O.K. to kill mice because we are not mice. If that doesn’t sound like much of a morality to us it’s because we are aiming for a false standard of absolute moral truth.

I agree with this assessment however I also believe that morality is something else at the same time. This something else helps us to explain why sometimes less efficient social contracts are more appealing to us than others, and why morality includes many rules which don’t seem to benefit our species directly. It also helps us understand why any part of us might consider killing mice wrong in contradiction of our self-interest.

There are ways of seeing that cannot be reached by study or argument but that come out of ways of doing. This can raise the suspicions of a rational and empirical mindset which prefers to evaluate statements in an objective fashion. However there’s nothing miraculous in this idea. What we fret over when we are anxious is rarely removed as effectively by discussion as it is by cutting down the caffeine and getting some sleep. What we see when we are depressed may be altered by company and exercise and a willful rejection of self-loathing thoughts. It is seldom altered by a depressed person just thinking from their depression.

Perhaps due to our general utilitarian culture we tend to think in terms of X leads to Y. This would be a mistake when we think of how ways of seeing and ways of doing relate. We don’t just do in order to see like buying a pair of glasses. We don’t just relax in order to cure anxiety. That’s kind of impossible. We can only relax because it is the natural expression of having given up on anxiety already. You can’t do differently except from already seeing differently. Then your actions lead to seeing differently then back to doing differently and so forth. It’s an all-involving process.

Ways of doing that lead to and from ways of seeing have often been called “spiritual disciplines”. Buddhists call them practices. A practice may be meditation. A practice may be making a regular donation of income to charity. A practice may even be abstaining from killing mice. It is not right or wrong to meditate in any absolute sense. It is merely consistent with cherishing immediate reality. It is not right or wrong to kill mice either. It is merely a practice consistent with declaring a mouse a moral means.

Now I kill mice. I am however attracted to ways of seeing where a mouse is a moral end rather than a means; something with the status of a person or at least a kind of person. If I want to see in that way clearer then I have to treat the mouse as a moral end. There isn’t any other way to properly do this. I either occupy that vantage point or I don’t. A moral prescription regarding killing mice is simultaneously both the means to and path from such a sight.

Why is the way of seeing that doesn’t kill mice attractive to me? I’ve been pondering lately our search for intelligent life. Our efforts to find intelligent life in space are for me justified simply by the hope of marveling at it. It doesn’t need any further justification. It certainly isn’t justified in terms of benefit to my own genes. Yet it seems to me we should worry that we are not equipped to find our peers in space. Unless they are also human we are going to miss them.

Meanwhile we are potentially surrounded by such “persons” as magnificently different to us as the usually imagined creatures from outer space. If I want the delight of marveling at those persons I have to treat them as such. If I want to see them instead of continuing to miss them, I need to do as seeing them would entail. I wonder what considering other animals as more my moral peers might bring. I’m not sure this means that I mustn’t kill mice. That might even be impossible to avoid indirectly. But trying to avoid killing them when I don't even need to seems like a small start.

I’m going to leave it to you to consider how viewing morality as a practice might help illuminate other issues of killing. Obviously our attitude to killing mice can relate to our attitude to killing other animals whether for food or sport or to protect our lifestyle. I also think most discussions of the termination of a pregnancy or euthanasia have suffered for viewing morality as a system of consistent laws rather than a spiritual discipline. Indeed not just killing but all moral choices can be understood as ways of doing which take us to and come from ways of seeing.

Telling the difference between "good" and "bad" morality.

Moral or not it would be kinda cool to punch the sun.

In my last post on moralising I may have left the impression that I believe we can’t tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate moral speech. I may have given the impression that all morality is merely a struggle of raw power in the fancy dress of logic. That’s not my conclusion and I want to take risks to spell out what the difference really is between proper morality and just bad “moralising”, as I see it.

I need to digress and just quickly say by “see it” that I don’t mean “see it.” Moral philosophy is not the practice of describing the world as it is. For example, you can’t dispute someone’s moral statement that beef is morally the same as whale meat in the same way as you can their belief that a cow is (in behaviour and form) just like a whale. The relevance for this discussion is that of course moral philosophy is “just” my opinion of how we should conduct ourselves in the world. You can pull it apart and argue against it on the basis of where such conduct could lead or its impossibility or its contradictory motives but neither of us can just hold up something and say, “see” (though we might be able to say “intuit”). Equally there’s no easy referral to common sense or experimentation.

The question of what morality is legitimate can be understood in three related ways. Firstly we can ask ourselves about what topic of morality is genuinely moral versus what is a nonsensical one. Is what hand you wipe your arse with and what species of animal (if any) you eat and what gender your partner is and what’s your carbon footprint all universally valid or invalid topics of moral discussion? Or is there some basis on which we can say one topic is worth considering as moral and another is not? I resolve this aspect of the question by answering the following two.

Secondly we need to consider what information is relevant. This feeds into and flows from the first question because certain topics lack certain information whereas others lend themselves heavily towards it. I believe that for an action to be moral it must either have a harm or a benefit to enacting it. Something like swearing as you fall into the sun is amoral. In space no-one can hear you say “Bugger” after all. Unfortunately this test it isn’t as helpful as it first might appear. It raises a very difficult question.

How are we to identify harms and benefits? Harms are not self-evident but have to be found in contrast to an ideal. Or rather only if the ideal is self-evident can you then have self-evident harms.  A polluted stream is harmed only if we considered the streams capacity to sustain life to be important. That’s seldom in doubt but self-evident could be a stretch. How about when a person is patronisingly flattered to; they may be happier (a benefit) but their dignity is harmed is one way to describe why we might consider this a moral no-no. However dignity feels a little like a rhetorical plug here, as if we are giving it a physicality it doesn’t really have to keep our logic afloat. Meanwhile conflicts over euthanasia are often bound up in competing “self-evident” ideals.

My own view at first seems to complicate matters further. I don’t believe there is a set of narrow constant ideals. Jim Henson seems to me to have attained something ideal with his storytelling however that doesn’t mean that Quentin Tarantino has fallen short of that by being less optimistic. I applaud sword swallowing trapeze artists but don’t think the rest of us are bad people for playing it safe. I admire great teachers for wading knee deep in their communities but I don’t begrudge an ancient Icelandic historian their research hours. Going on I don’t think certain expressions of sexuality are a universal ideal, or that everyone should have a house and car to go with the two and half kids.

This lack of a narrow ideal is actually useful however. It is the means by which we can largely define legitimate morality – following the premises that no meaningful harms or benefits means no moral issue and only where there is an ideal can we have meaningful harms or benefits. If we recognise something ideal in Jim Henson’s work and something ideal in Quentin Tarantino’s work then we know that the ideal is not to be found in qualities unique to one or the other (puppets or gore). As more and more exclusive qualities are pared away and as we recognize the ideal in other art I propose we draw closer to triangulating the ideal, in this case for storytelling. We can do something similar with a life well lived, with relationship structures, with our relationship with animals and so on. Recognising various forms of the ideal allow us to recognise what is truly ideal and what is merely form.

This still leaves the greatest question of all which is how do we recognise the ideal. To do this I believe relies on a set of skills that are both fragile and instinctual. They are fragile because the conditions of their development are unknown – there may be more biology than we understand, maybe certain types of play are crucial – but when they are developed they seem surprisingly robust without a need to manufacture them repeatedly. What I’m talking about is empathy – the capacity to connect with and recognise very subtle deprivations or the flourishing of another human or even an animal’s spirit. Through empathy with the people impacted we recognise forms of the ideal and through different forms we can triangulate the actual ideal. From there we have harms and from there we have morality.

We are not done yet however because we can also question a morality based on its conclusions. Here I agree with the proposition that involuntary actions are amoral. It may be incorrect to blink when a ball comes at you or it may be best to blink and protect your eyes but it is not a moral matter at least not until your ninja training gives you control over that reflex. In a very subtle stretch of our point we can say that if I am falling into the sun this may be a sad thing but it’s not a morally bad thing. The moral conclusion that I should punch the sun out of the way shows we’re talking nonsense. This provides a fairly solid basis for a sensible moral conclusion– that it makes a contribution to our decisions about our actions -but the implications of this statement are significant.

 If the only legitimate moral conclusions are ones which contribute to our decisions then it becomes worthwhile to rewrite moral questions in terms of the choices for action open to us. To do that we need to have context, we need to take into account our actual power and the broader consequences of using it and we need to quite frankly be a little more real than most moral discussions are. We are going to end up either promising action or confessing immorality. For example if I am asking whether the indefinite detention of refugees in Australia is wrong I either mean nothing sensible or I mean should I vote for a party that supports indefinite detention, should I ever take a job at a detention centre, should I attempt to free people there, should I write letters to my M.P.? Broadly speaking should I take an opportunity to support indefinite detention or oppose it? What should I do?

I could say that my question is meant to be hypothetically meaningful; that I’m really asking if I was solely in charge of Australia’s immigration policy then what should I implement. However is this really sensible? It is like asking “If I was as strong as ten supermen should I even punch the sun out of the way?” A fascinating thought exercise perhaps but revealing of the sort of nonsense a statement that something is wrong in isolation can be.

To return to the question of moral topics then, a legitimate moral topic is one which informs our choices about actions which benefit or harm as measured against what is actually ideal (not merely one form in which the ideal is found). That’s a hell of a sentence there which will be aided by an example;

Because empathy allows me to recognize ideal relationships in married and unmarried couples or same-sex and opposite sex couples or for that matter friends, teachers and students and work colleagues but not in relationships of any form which thrive on belittlement or deceit I can identify a true ideal as being honest and mutually encouraging relationships. The core of a morality regarding relationships would be about promoting actions which build mutual encouragement and honesty between people (including myself and others). If something like marriage can be shown to serve that ideal then it becomes a secondary good thing to do. That would also be a case by case matter and of course marriage would only ever be good if it was possible and in light of its full context for the people involved.

I hope this hasn’t been too painfully dry for readers. From my own perspective this has taken big risks. I’ve certainly expressed more optimism than I feel every day – some days the idea that morality is all nonsense feels more credible. I’ve put some opinions out here that I may return to one day with vehement disagreement. However I’m also aware that this has very much been located in the thin air of abstracted principles. I’m imagining that anyone who made it this far may be chuckling at the idea that this is a post of tumultuous controversy when it barely touches on the real world applications. Ultimately it’s when our morality is played out on the ground that it is really defined.

Moralising anyone?

 Several days work researching and writing recently vanished with the collapse of my laptop. I’ve had some data recovered but there’s still a big loss. As a consequence I’m going to pause before returning to the topic I had almost completed on Roman Catholic attitudes to sex and contraception.

Quite frankly I also need a break from it. Whilst the highest Catholic authorities use a fairly cool language to describe the issues there are a lot of hotter heads amongst academics at Catholic institutions and writing for Catholic journals. Some of their comments are basically cruel and manipulative rhetoric. I’m more than a little sick of digesting it.

On a positive note I am now typing on a brand new computer! Closer to the point of this blog my discussions with people about contraception and general sexual ethics have raised a fascinating question;

What is Moralising?

When I think of moralising I think of a negative term meaning to go on excessively or inappropriately about morality. I don’t so much mean a certain type of discussing morality that is negative however, as I mean morality itself as seen from an angle that reveals its insufficiency – it’s inherent tendency to excessiveness and inappropriateness.

Moralising is therefore a trigger word for me that recalls a range of alternative ammoral perspectives which are pragmatic, non-dualistic and sensualist. The Book of Chung Tzu is a stand out example.

The Standard English Desk Dictionary of 1975 (in two volumes of actual paper on my shelf) defines Moralise as to indulge in moral reflection or to interpret morally. There’s no clear negative quality given to it at all. This surprised me although its also reflected most other dictionaries I perused.

Those dictionaries that did include a negative weight to the word moralising seem to be aimed at  non-english speakers. It’s as if they are trying to bring people who may not be aware of a cultural phenomenon up to speed. That cultural phenomenon is a broad disdain for moralising which isn’t hard to discover.

Ask almost anyone who doesn’t have a dictionary in their hand and they’ll have a negative pejorative association with moralising. Just as I do. What’s really interesting however is how diverse those negatives are. Mine emphasises a lack of pragmatics – the unhelpfulness of morality. My partner’s idea of what moralising means emphasised the inflexibility, the black and white vision, the lack of context that morality can sometimes have. For others it has been the weight of imposition and imbalanced power behind it.

Yet another theme is that morality can have sinister motives, either to herd us in ways that serve powerful interests or for an individual moraliser to make their wrong actions seem right. Moralising is used to describe the conduct of these insincere endeavours. That’s quite similar to how the word rationalising (which merely means to find reason for) is often colloquially understood as to manufacture excuses for bad behaviour. "Rationalising" is done by companies that chop down rainforests and "moralising" is done by Preachers who want brow-beaten flocks.

Equally fascinating about all these concerns is they come from outside the game so to speak. Let me explain what I mean by that. 

Morality is about right and wrong, defining what should be done and what one should  avoid doing. If I propose that something like living with your partner without being married is some kind of bad then from according to the logical flow of our discussion (“inside the game”) you are obliged to either concede the point or argue how it is not so bad and possibly even good. There are several types of “evidence” we can point to – a sympathetic connection with “the victim” as we see them, how this arrangement meets or fails certain rights, a social effect beyond the parties involved. If we agree on a morally authoritative text or understanding of natural law then we can also skip to that reference as well.

To say that my criticism of unmarried cohabitation is merely trying to excuse other behaviour, that this kind of morality is part of an agenda to control us, that other people’s relationships are none of my business, that it’s all too abstract a way to look at the situation or that I should “lighten up” are all refusals to play along. They are comments made from outside the game.

These responses don’t make logical sense in the conversation. They don’t flow or reflect what precedes them in a logical way. It is as I have said one plus one equals seven and rather than correcting my addition you have said “Maths is dumb.” If logic is our master then we should dismiss these responses.

However there are many instances when logic clearly is not a good master and needs to be reminded of its servant’s role. Seven is more than two, and two point two, four eight is also more than two. There are no arguments against accuracy to be found inside mathematics. However if two children argue because one got point two, four eight of a minutes more time with the favourite doll than the other then the aggrieved party can expect to have their case dismissed for lack of importance. In fact as a parent I think its important at this point to stand outside the game and point out the fruitlessness of the argument. We call that “not buying into it”. Maths (and logic) is for getting things done and there’s nothing to do here. Maths in this instance really is dumb.

In the same way labelling a discussion pejoratively as “Moralising” is an outside the game criticism of moral logic that can be purposeful and valid. Very few people would bother to defend writing with your left hand as morally sound even though it was once considered “sinister”.  A roll of the eyes is about all we’d give such a concern today and I consider that progress. However there are decent objections to the idea that the charge of Moralising (in its negative, pejorative meaning) really does come from outside the game. Criticising moralising is itself a statement of values; it is itself a moral statement. At a very fundamental level saying you shouldn’t tell people what to do is a contradiction. When I make this statement I am after all telling you what to do.

I am not the first person to make this argument. We live in a time when what was once intolerable is now increasingly a right, such as writing with your left hand but also the acceptance of the cohabitation of unmarried lovers and same sex relationships.  People who argue against these cultural changes run up against the growing belief that they moralise excessively, inappropriately, with the desire to control and impose behind their speech and a failure to consider nuance and context. In short they are accused of the pejorative form of “moralising”. They counter with the argument that anti-moralising is the aggressive new morality and that tolerance is now promoted with zealous intolerance.

As much as I eye-roll at those who preach intolerance of defacto or same sex relationships (or left handedness) I think they have a point that the criticisms they face are not truly outside the game. Or rather I don’t think there’s any clear inside or outside of the game of morality. There is a category of moral statements we consider legitimate moral discussion and another category of statements we consider “moralising” in a bad way. There is a struggle for our moral concerns to be included in the former category and for those concerns we don’t share to be in the latter. That struggle is no different to that of parent and child; where the child wants the parent to impose fairness over the fraction of a minute’s difference in time spent with the doll, and the parent wants the child to let it go. Just as eye-rolling doesn’t really cut it as an explanation to the child neither should it cut it for us.

As adults (pretend adults perhaps) this struggle is fought along the lines we define by our use of the term moralising. To give an example that puts me in the moralising corner you could consider the flippant use of gay to describe things as corny and trite. Leaving aside the fact that the fear of corny and trite inspires more shallowness than it avoids, I object to the use of gay in this way. I will ruin the party mood at times by pointing out how hurtful such speech could be to a gay person and how it is lazy and inaccurate. For this I get labelled as “moralising” which refuses to engage with any of my arguments but dismisses as stuffy the whole of discussing this topic as moral.

Looking specifically at my objection to morality as not pragmatic enough (that’s a blog post right there) you could consider my refusal to give much shrift to pragmatic concerns regarding the indefinite detention of refugees. Indefinite detention for child abusing priests is something I would not even agree with. They should at least know their sentence. Indefinite detention for people fleeing situations of torture and oppression because they might not be genuine but almost definitely aren’t is deeply immoral. Just think about what indefinite detention means for a second, apply it to your self and it should be obvious. However to some people I am moralising here in exactly the way I object to. I am drawing a line in the sand and refusing to even countenance any kind of cost-benefit analysis of the situation.

I feel that the people calling my attitude to gay jokes and refugee detention “moralising” in order to dismiss it, are actually proposing their own morality. It’s a morality that specifically excludes my concerns. I even think that, as much as any morality, it can be disingenuous, dichotomous, and inappropriate, with the desire to control and impose on behalf of power. In summary I think their use of  the criticism “moralising” is “moralising”!

I don’t really believe there’s a pax rationality that can solve these kinds of contradictions. I think language is supposed to be useful, and even normative, more than it is supposed to be consistent. And it’s massively worthwhile to limit morality to those matters which are of concern, as well as to point out when morality is being used to control us for hidden interests or when it reflects gross power imbalances. However we should be cautious using “moralising” in a pejorative fashion as our sole argument for anything. It’s worth recognising we aren’t really coming from an amoral and unassailable position. We are just trying to make ourselves unassailable. 

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Note: I was recently and deeply impressed by an article by Hugo Rifkind  which makes a similar point to this post. He writes about how sport claims to be above politics and how that is in itself a politic. It is a politic that allows dictatorships to use the neutrality of sport to soften their tyranny and murdering corporate sponsors to connect themselves with health and hard work;

“In theory it’s about putting sport first; rising above the petty wrangles of current affairs. But in reality, current affairs are the things that kick down your door and drag you off to a torture dungeon. Rising above them turns you into a whitewashing service for any global villain with a cheque.”;

Essentially no morality is a morality.