Shower Thoughts #1
I want to elaborate here some ideas — which, I hope, can form a more or less coherent and systematic way of thinking— about Ethics, human nature and practical reasoning… maybe even God. Most of what I argue here will lack proper justification from a tecnical/philosophical point of view, but I figure that is the price to pay for having thoughts about these matters made intelligible in a somewhat concise fashion.
The question I want to explore, more generally, is “How ought one to conduct one’s life?” (assuming, obviously, that it is us who are actually in control — that is, assuming free will — and that some ways of conducting our lives are better than others).
There are a few things I will take as a starting point. First, that everyone pleads allegiance to something. What I mean by this is simply that every time any of us makes a choice, we do it for a reason, and that reason stems from some fundamental value or other. These fundamental values are the things we have plead allegiance to. It is by our allegiances that we differentiate what is important to us from what is not, what is good from what is bad, what we should do from what we should not. I think this is close to what Bauman meant when he said that humans are, by nature, ethical beings. I will stick to my terminology, as any self respecting wannabe philosopher should, and say that human beings are, by nature, allegiance pleading animals.
To be clear, though, what I mean by “pleading allegiance” is not to value something in some vague way. If I say I’ve plead allegiance to the flag of some country or some king or whatever, I certainly don’t mean that I simply “like” the king or the country. I mean that this king or country is one of my fundamental values in life. I mean that the well being of that king/country is by and for itself important to me, and I’ll stick with it through thick and thin. Most people nowadays plead allegiance to their own individual interests, I guess. Sometimes to their family, their profession, some cause or another. To plead allegiance to something is to let oneself be defined by it. The commitments I make are an integral part of what it means to be me.
The second starting point is much more contentious and controversial. I want to hold that no universal moral principle is true. “Killing is wrong” will only be true under certein circumstances. There may be enabling conditions which will make it the right thing to do — imagine, for instance, that there is a serial child killer on the run and you catch him with a knife in hand about to kill another one, and by the way you’re a cop who has been chasing this guy for so long… you’ve seen first hand the damage he has done to the families of those children etc.
There is a powerful argument to be made here against this point: certainly the principle “doing good things is good” is always right, or even “doing generous acts is always right”, or “being kind is always better than being cruel”. I won’t get too much into this kind of stuff, so let’s just say the following, to adjust to this kind of counter: no moral principle (that doesn’t pressupose moral concepts) is universally true. The truth of principles always depends on the context: some properties, if added to a situation, may alter completely the moral relevance of the other properties, so as to make killing right or pleasure bad (imagine feeling pleasure from crushing someone’s skull or something outrageous like that).
The third starting point follows from the first two. We cannot help pleading allegiances, and to a large degree that informs our conception of what is right or wrong, good or bad. Not only that, but the allegiances we make can lead us to do very bad things. If no universal moral principle is true, then nothing is universally valuable (that is, valuable in all cases). Regardless of how beautiful an ideology communism may be, for example, it is undeniable that it has lead people allied to it to some very reprehensible actions. But how can what defines our conception of good lead us to something bad?
If Good and Evil are defined not only by our rationality but also by our choices and place in the world, by our allegiances, then it is possible, in principle, that different goods may conflict. (of course, kantians won’t have this problem: morality and the Good is purely rational, so no contradiction or conflict is possible — it seems to me that consequentialism can easily be made to assume a similar position here).
When those conflicts happen, we face situations in which we have no good alternative: we are faced by a choice, a crossroads, but no matter what road we take, we will be taking the wrong one. This is what is called a tragic dillema. Sartre gave a very nice example of a young man who is conflicted between going to war to serve his country and staying at home to take care of his ailing mother. To say that we are in a tragic dillema is to say that whatever choice we make, we will have reason to regret it: there is no “rationalizing” guilt away from the fact that it was the best alternative or something of the sort. So tragic dillemas happen. In fact, they happen all the time. And they’re especially prone to happen if we don’t analyse the type of allegiances we plead.
Recap: to live we have to commit ourselves to things, but none of those things is always good (because “good” is something bigger then them — we define good by our allegiances, but not exclusively… if we do, we’ll have a very narrow vision of the good, and this lack of perspective will lead us in error, as it did with so many communists in the twentieth century), and they often conflict with each other.
Coming back to the central question now: “How should one conduct one’s life?” Well, it seems clear that we have to be careful about the allegiances we plead, so as to avoid tragic dillemas as much as possible. If one thing is certain (universally so, even?), it is that tragic dillemas are to be avoided. But how can we do that if nothing is universally valuable? 1) Won’t we sometimes have to act against our allegiances to be good? 2) Isn’t it innevitable that our allegiances may conflict in such a way that no good alternative is available?
I will answear the first question first. Suppose I plead allegiance to the interests of my brother, Arthur. Suppose also that I’ve plead allegiance to the interests of my sister, Katharina. They are both very important to me, their well being matters to me as an end in itself. If the situation arises in which they are pitted one against another, say, over some chocolate bar, how am I to act? If I favour Arthur I will be betraying Katharina, and vice versa. The solution here, I think, is pretty simple: with some reflection, I realize both my brother and my sister are part of a bigger whole, something they have plead allegiance to themselves, a family — our family. So in moments of conflict like this, the right thing to do is to suspend allegiances to each of them individually, and call to action my allegiance to the family, resolving the conflict this way.
Applying the same reasoning more generally, we see that the only allegiance we can never suspend is the allegiance to the most universal thing, the only thing that will always be good: the Good. Now we return to that objection I mentioned: it really is true that good things are always good, so that is fundamentally what we should plead allegiance to. Of course the Good is one thing, but it is one very abstract thing: there are many ways to it. This is the role our principles (our allegiances) take in our life: they help structure our decision making and guide us (roughly) towards the Good, but we have to remain alert and ready to suspend our allegiances anytime we feel some principle is steering us away from the Good.
Being a good person is the best thing a person can be, so one should conduct one’s life trying to be just that. Anytime good comes in conflict with communism, family or some king, flag, country or whatever, it’s time to let go. But what about when we have no good option? This certainly happens as well, and it’s much, much harder to make sense of.
I guess all we can do is reflect as best we can on our values so as to undermine the chances of this happening. Certainly it would happen less if we thought a little more about our allegiances, if we actually considered wheter they are leading us towards the Good or not. In some way that is what the church was for… every sunday you get a chance to think about your sins and wrongdoings, you confess and repent. Maybe you try to do better, maybe you don’t. Either way, you’re thinking about it in some way or another. People don’t do that anymore, then they suddenly realize they’ve been commited to shit things they’re whole life, and a mid life crisis ensues.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying the freedom from the fatherly guidance of the church is bad. I think it’s great, to a certain extent. Obviously all that guidance can be opressive and limit your ability (or even your need) to think about morality for yourself: just do as the preacher says and whatever. The more freedom we have, the more it is called upon us to have the maturity to make good decisions on our own. But that also works the other way: give a man too much freedom (that is, no guidance whatsoever) and he’ll do whatever he pleases, he’ll lose completely the sense of whats good or not (and probably end up throwing live animals into some guy’s bathtub). This is why we need alleagiances, I guess. They give us some guidance.
Make allegiances blindly and you’re a sheep, make no allegiances and your lost. The unexamined life is not worth living, I guess. But the examined one is no bargain.
I just realized I didn’t need to talk about tragic dillemas here to make my point and that it was a huge digression. Nevermind.
More on pretty much all these things here soon.
