here’s my cent:
The question of morality or ethics is the question of
HOW TO BE A GOOD PERSON.
Since personhood is irreducibly a SOCIAL phenomenon, the question of morality or ethics is a social issue — how to act in public, how to be a good citizen, how to be a decent human. (Notably, with regard to ethics or morality, how a person THINKS is irrelevant except to the extent it affects action.)
That being said (and as a person who went to Sunday school or church almost every Sunday until I was 18), I feel compelled to proclaim my belief that
THE 10 COMMANDMENTS IS MORALITY FOR DIMWITS.
Which is not to say that some of the principles expressed in them should not be incorporated into a decent moral system, but that the style, the approach, the implicit theory underlying the idea of putting morality into “ten commandments” is stupid and authoritarian and facilitative of a dim, consumerish outlook and attitude easily used by authoritarians to manage and control the stupid.
Isn’t this undeniable?:
People who do not believe in God, whether agnostic (like me) or atheist, and are good people anyway, are better people than those for whom being a good person somehow involves or is tied to the existence of God. (This is not an attack on people who believe in God, many of whom would be good citizens even if they knew there was no god, but could be rightly construed as an attack on people who think that people who don’t believe on God are somehow inferior/bad citizens of the universe.)
The point is we good citizens who are agnostic or atheist are not good people based on some fear of hell or shame, or a desire to emulate or please some God; we’re good because it’s the right thing to do and we want other people to be good and we wouldn’t expect them to be good if we weren’t being good. (And many of us believe that people can and generally will be good if they are not subjected to authoritarianism.)
Dimwits deride the concept of “situational ethics.” But that’s life – situations, and determining how to act in them.
Ideally, one would work up an analytical calculus of whether and how one’s proposed actions affect other people negatively, and then make a reasonable determination – the same determination most other people trying to be good citizens would make – about whether to proceed even in the face of the negative consequences to others.
If people were honest and thoughtful and reasonable, that is if we were all good citizens, and strove to follow this method, that is all the morality we would need — no supreme being required. (Although it would inevitably need to be supplemented by a little bit of law, specifically some kind of punishment/education/rehabilitation of people who repeatedly make moral choices that reasonable people would not make.)
Personally, I find the good-versus-evil axis one of the least useful for developing a philosophy and ethics around. In Oriental thought, the axis used is much more wise-versus-foolish, and in modern thought (especially for those of a scientific, medical, or ecological bent) one axis would be healthy-versus-unhealthy.
Now I find these latter two to be more useful axes for approaching how to evaluate a situation because they “frame” the situation and one’s response differently. If one is “evil” they need to be banished or punished. If they are “foolish” they need to be educated. If they are “unhealthy” they need to be cured. Educating and curing people are actions much more in keeping with progressive values than punishing, destroying, and banishing, to me at least.
Once one decides on a fundamental value or principle that is going to underly one’s moral construct – such as “cherish life and help bring it to its greatest fruition” or “Love God with your whole heart and soul and mind” (which some qwould say amount to the same thing) – one then can choose any of these axes as the starting point for developing yardsticks for deciding what to do in everyday life.
The 10 commandments, based on the good-versus-evil axis, are a relatively crude early effort, as you point out. Not that they’re necessary worthless, just that hopefully we’ve developed better constructs along the way in the subsequent several thousand years of “civilization.”
Of course, there are those that would say no subsequent revision is needed and no improvement is possible because those pearls fell from the lips of god, but personally I believe our role or calling is to be more co-creative, loving, and involved in the process than such a perspective would entail.
I might be wrong, but I’ve bet my life (and afterlife, whatever that might entail, if anything) that I’m not. Maybe that’s faith, maybe that’s hubris, maybe I don’t know – but if you believe in something enough to make it the core principle around which your ethics is built, you don’t have a lot of choice if you’re going to be honest with yourself.
I think what you’ve said here KP is extremely important. I’ve been thinking lately about how destructive this concept of “evil” has been for us.
A while ago, someone at dk wrote a diary about this. Sorry, I can’t remember the title or author, so I don’t think I can find it. But the jest of it was that defining “evil” becomes so caught up in your point of view – ala “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” That made a lot of sense to me.
I like your reframing of it as unhealthy or foolish. You can still take a stand against something, but there are remedies other that annihilation of the evil that become possible.
I also think the lessons we learned years ago from the likes of Erickson about moral development have been almost completely lost in our culture and our national dialogue. Giving all reason over to a higher authority (be it the pope, bible, constitution, ten commandments) as the be-all, end-all of truth is the earliest stage of moral development. That seems to me where our current dialogue in this country gets stuck.
To play devil’s advocate, what about people who knowingly and intentionally use or abuse others to advance their own selfish interests? Or people who know their actions result in very negative consequences for others, but choose to proceed anyway for selfish purposes? I guess one could characterize that as foolish, but it doesn;t seem to be the kind of foolishness that education is likely to overcome (unless maybe the education is incarceration or banishment) because it’s already knowing and intentional. One could describe it as unhealthy, but not really as hte kind of lack of that can be treated (unless, again, the treatment is incarcertaion or banishment). And although using the word evil to describe such anti-social types may not provide any solutions other than incarceration or banishment, but it does seem to be a just characterization in that is emphasizes the negative SOCIAL consequences of such people.
Thank you guys for yr thoughtful comments! A society full of people with the moral senses you express would be a great one!
I’m not sure if this will be a helpful response to your question – but I immediately thought of Sister Helen Prejean and her approach to those on death row. I suppose she would be best classified in KP’s two possibilities of seeing these people as “unhealthy.” And her approach is to condem the violence but to find and connect to the spark of humanity in every person – no matter their deeds. Of course, I imagine she would note that a person who has killed someone and is likely to do so again, should be incarcerated for the protection of society. But she has demonstrated that incarceration coupled with a “calling” out to someone’s humanity can be healing.
I appreciate yr point — for money I am what amounts to a public defender in the California Court of Appeal — every single one of my clients right now is in prison for between 17 years and life in prison. From what I know about these 10 people, there’s really none that I would consider “evil.” Most acted badly in situations they found themselves in and could not handle. On the other hand, when I think of the well-thought-out anti-social schemes of people like Karl Rove and Andrew Fastow the term evil seems appropriate — they know what they’re doing and do it anyway. That’s not to imply they are necessarily beyond redemption. Lee Atwater had his cancer-ridden death bed conversion. But again, maybe the benevolent idea that bad-intending people are foolish or unhealthy may not make the point strongly enough that they have a social, rather than individual problem. (I hope my reiteration of this point does not come across as the all-too-typical insistence on having the last word — that’s one flaw I pride myself as having mostly gotten rid of.)
You raise a different but very important point – the concept of societal collective responsibility. Dick Cheney – or Hitler for that matter – do / did monstrous things, but they didn’t arise in a vacuum. While they bear responsibility for their choices, the limits on those choices are set by their culture, and they were put into office and enabled along the way by their nations. Osama is as much the poisonous fruit of a half-century of certain American foreign policies and political choices as he is an individual responsible for his choices.
Just looking at my own life, at any number of key junctures the choices I made and the things I aspired to were limited by what I knew of the world. Only by questioning things was I able to transcend my working-class Catholic Philadelphia upbringing to find a wider world. But all along the way, fellow questioners of the system (this was our theme song) at some point grew weary and were sucked back into the system…
How many violent criminals were victims of abuse? On a less visible (but no less real) level, how many had their IQs stunted and their nervous systems damaged as children by lead and other pollutants they were exposed to – that thus channeled them towards a life of criminal activity? (off-topic, but check this out).
Maybe I’m not seeing something, but when I try to analyze things in terms of evil they keep coming back around to some kind of circular argument that involved what I postulated as the initial core value – evil is that which offends my god, (or how I interpret the will of my god). If you say something is foolish or unhealthy, presumably you can show, based on observable facts, that the action will result in physical harm to someone or something. If you say something is evil, I don’t see how you avoid the argument eventually resolving down to, at a fundamental level, “I don’t like it.” And ultimately you can’t base a free society (one that also ensures the rights of minority opinions) on that foundation. The founding fathers knew this, as did the Taoists, and the pagans (“As ye harm none, do what thou will.”) Those that want to base everything in society on the religions of the Book, not so much.
Since I don’t think we really disagree, it makes me think it is a definitional matter, and since you and Nancy make good points for not using the term ‘evil,’ I accept them.
Thanks again KP.
The real challenge for us, of course, is in trying to understand folks like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush in terms of “unhealthy” or “foolish.” While it does pain me to say this, I think that’s just because we prefer not to. I know that I want to see them pay for their actions, and anything that attempts to understand and provide for rehabilitation just doesn’t strike my fancy.
But I think the case still holds. These men are “sick” as is the culture that has allowed them such power. I think in a time where our understanding about this and how to heal these kinds of sicknesses is more advanced, it will seem obvious. But unfortunately, I think we’re still in the dark ages on this one.
The real challenge for us, of course, is in trying to understand folks like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush in terms of “unhealthy” or “foolish.” While it does pain me to say this, I think that’s just because we prefer not to.
Very, very true. Especially when history shows repeatedly the rewards for such behavior (Jesus, Ghandi, M.L.King). First we kill them, then we canonize them. Maybe there’s a slight cause for hope in that Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela have avoided that fate…
It’s been my general observation that most people do not see themselves as doing something “immoral” — even when others around them would disagree. The human mind has a lot of tricks wherein it can interpret or selectively edit perceptions, and thus justify almost any kind of behavior towards others rather than face the unthinkable — that one is doing a wrong or immoral thing.
Hence, the plant executive doesn’t really look or absorb the information that discharges from his profitable business (which, after all, is providing jobs in an economically depressed part of the state) is poisoning the groundwater or that one of his products is killing a certain percentage of people who use it. The man accused of rape claims the girl was “asking for it” because she was in the bar alone that night. The abuser almost always blames the victim for “provoking” him. (The Bush Administration is full of people who can always justify their actions, whether on grounds it’s really “good for the economy” or necessary for “fighting terrorism”…). And those are justifications that people make — corporations (who are made up of people who often seem to believe that by forming a corporation, they have absolved themselves of any moral responsibility for the results of the corporation’s actions, as it is a legal entity in its own right)have NO moral center whatsover.
That is why we need LAWS, that are clear, specific and deal with measurable cause and effect, with specific events, situations, and results. Because a very specific law will deter most people from taking the action that is proscribed… where relying on someone’s “morality” is just going to lead to trouble sooner or later.
The real strength of one’s moral center isn’t about faith, it’s being willing and able to constantly evaluate and examine one’s own motivations and actions, the results on other people, and accept that sometimes we are going to be wrong, and need to make adjustments in our actions or beliefs to account for that.
The people who worry me the most are the ones who can never admit when they’re wrong, who can always justify anything they do… who believe that as long as they are RIGHT, any harm that comes to others as a result does not matter, or isn’t their responsibility. And of course, they’re always RIGHT, and they have the justifications to prove it, no matter what the circumstances. That kind of thinking leads to truly evil acts… because the person doing them does not beleive what he she is doing is evil at all, but morally right, therefore they are incapable of seeing the harm to others in the results.
Thank you Janet for restating more clearly the point I was trying to make:
“The real strength of one’s moral center isn’t about faith, it’s being willing and able to constantly evaluate and examine one’s own motivations and actions, the results on other people, and accept that sometimes we are going to be wrong, and need to make adjustments in our actions or beliefs to account for that.”