ethics

An ethical digression

~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

[letting the middle P of PPE have an airing]

When I was a newly-arrived undergrad, exposed for the first time to the idea of philosophy and the terms and characters of ethics, ‘consequentialism’, ‘deontology’, JS Mill and Immanuel Kant, I leapt to the glib conclusion that the utilitarians were obviously right and Kant (as I dimly understood him) wrong. How could duty matter more than happiness? How could doing something out of respect for the moral law matter more than the actual effects of your actions? Of course you’d lie to the axe murderer at your door!

But now, decades later, I find the calculations of utility less appealing, and the idea of acting out of a good will seems a stronger, firmer pole for a moral compass. If only consequences matter, not principles, there are so many excuses, so many get-out clauses available to weasel out of responsibility or honour: It doesn’t matter – no one will even know, everyone else does it, or: just one more plastic bottle in the sea causes less harm than the convenience to me… etc. etc.

But duty doesn’t let us off. It is, as Kant has it, categorical, absolute. And, like virtue (the third leg of the ethicist’s stool), it is a matter of who we are, not just what we do and the effects of our actions on the world.

You may say there’s no point in fighting a losing battle against climate change or tyranny. You can’t make any difference as an individual caught in the machine. Take the easy road, make the best of it, make hay while the sun shines. But duty (or virtue) says, ‘not in my name’. My small choices cannot stop the sixth extinction, but if the human species is to leave a world impoverished, I don’t want to be a thoughtless contributor to that end. Just so, citizens protest against the warmongering of their governments, in hope of effecting change of course, but beside hope, in acknowledgement of a moral imperative: this is wrong and I would not be part of it. ‘Duty’ is an old-fashioned word, but I have heard it lately, from the mouths of Earth Protectors, doing their best to preserve and restore ecosystems.

The other word that goes with ‘duty’ is ‘respect’, respect for the moral law, respect for moral agents as ends not means, respect for our own ability to choose, respect which applies absolutely, not just if it makes us (or the sum of us) happier. But when it comes to living together on this finite world, perhaps we need some virtues too – to counter the hubris of ‘treating humanity always as ends not just means’, of being ‘legislators in the kingdom of ends’ (Kant again) – primarily humility, and recognition that we are in not on the world.

We need the habit of respect for the ecosystem; we need not to have to deliberate about whether to buy that, throw that away, eat that, abstain from that. We need a way of living that makes the right things not necessarily easy to do, but easy to choose, because they come naturally. Individually, we need to hone the right instincts and habits; socially and politically, we need to build the right institutions, so that those institutions support and enable, rather than undermining and frustrating, our best intentions.

Some words and pictures

~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

Ethics under neoliberalism:

Moral principles, ethical evaluation, are cast as a luxury we can’t afford, or the province of cranks and loony utopian thinking.

Why do I feel the need to apologise for imagining a better way of being? Why does systemic change feel impossible? The power of markets (i.e. the power of money) has become so naturalised that it’s barely possible to imagine overcoming it. Even the natural catastrophes predicted by climate science are somehow felt as less potent than the political and economic structures that have been built in my lifetime. ‘Individual freedom’, that cloaking device of neoliberalism, becomes a prison, whose bars are constructed by mega-corporations and increasing inequality. Freedom to put your money wherever you like, including in the hands of tame politicians, is no freedom for the unmoneyed majority, whose democratic voices are suppressed and whose social and natural environments are plundered, converted into additional income streams for the already rich.

Individualism is taken to imply that morality is a matter of personal choice, so there’s no space or need for ethical debate. Questions of what value is or what principles we as a society should live by are dismissed or swept under a rug of ‘cost-benefit analysis’. Only financial value is countable – what is unmonetised is invisible.

But counter-voices are being raised, arguing for different metrics of social value – replacing GDP with well-being and sustainability, infinite growth with circular economies (doughnut economics), challenging the assumption that self-interest and competition are the basic human condition, recognising the existence of altruism and community.

Faced with the present planetary emergencies, maybe those voices will come to prevail. Isolated individuals pursuing money in ‘free’, i.e. unregulated, competitive markets have not so far proved to be the best way to protect our ecosystem. And when catastrophes happen, it is mutuality and the gift economies of charity, sharing and collaboration, that leap to the fore.

Identifying value with monetary cost and letting economics do our moral thinking for us – these are the luxuries we can no longer afford.

Watercolour experiments:

Two self-portraits using different paper and brushes – very different results: first image = large round sable brush on cartridge paper, second image = mainly fine brush on heavy watercolour paper

‘there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’

~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

Some thoughts about consciousness, imagination and ethical value – a brief philosophical excursus (with apologies for pontificating and a vaguely relevant picture to dilute the verbiage)

 

Our ethical universe is defined by the scope of our imagination. That is, the moral significance of another being for me corresponds to my ability to imagine the world they experience. In a world of so many people, we are inclined and encouraged to focus our concern on those nearest to us, whose lives resemble ours. One death near at hand counts for hundreds on the far side of the world. And people nearer to home may be excluded from our attention by the differences between us and them, differences which we perceive as barriers, the walls of a black box we need not look into.

Consider a person whose physical or cognitive faculties are very constrained, whose life one would think from the outside is terribly limited. Such a person might well be neglected by society and by individuals in society, as living a life of little value to themselves or anyone else. How many ‘utils’ can such a life hold, even in the best of all possible worlds? What is the point, says the devil’s advocate, of wasting resources on such as them? (Think of the people not so long ago, put away in institutions, left there to endure miserable lives, out of sight, out of mind.)

But as soon as one seriously considers what it would be like to be that person, to be in that box, such dismissive neglect is hard* to maintain. Because for them, their life, their world, is (as for all of us) a universe. So if that life is deprived, miserable, painful, a universe is those things.

From the inside, we all live in/constitute an entirety – the world as experienced by us. While, from an objective point of view, we are each only insignificant fragments of a vast physical manifold, from a subjective point of view, our (my) consciousness contains everything. And before/after this life, nothing exists.

 

Sculpture_Watts
Sculpture: Personal Space (with visitors) – plaster, bronze, wood

 

Is this a solipsistic image? Perhaps – except that we are capable of a less egoistic stance, which asks us to exercise our (moral) imagination; we can attempt to empathise, at least to think about the content of those other black boxes. That is to recognise that every conscious being contains/constitutes a personal universe. This recognition is what calls up the claims of respect, à la Kant. As soon as I consider the life-world of the other in imaginative empathy, the weight of their needs for whatever would make their universe tolerable is felt. This acts as a counterweight to the caricatured utilitarian idea that individual values/utils can be added and subtracted, balanced against each other, and perhaps that some lives might not be worth living.

This may be an impractical thought. It does not much help us make policy decisions, which must somehow deal with costs and benefits and the distribution of scarce resources. How can choices between equally and absolutely valued lives be made? But perhaps it does just act as a reminder that no life, no person, ought to be seen as ultimately negligible. General policies tend to treat people as statistical abstractions, as beans to be counted. This makes the decisions easier. Such decisions should not be easy, though; they should not be taken lightly. They need to be anchored by an acknowledgement of the weight of particular lives.** Again we look to Kant: every conscious self deserves, demands, respect, as an end and not simply as a means.

 

*I had written ‘impossible’ but that would perhaps underestimate our capacity for hard-heartedness.

**It often seems that the people with power are, perhaps because of that fact, less likely or able to engage in imaginative empathy with respect to those they have power over, because their lives are so different or because it would make hard decisions even harder. Hence the recurring suggestions that members of government should experience the effects of their policies themselves by, for example, attempting to live on benefits.

 

Copyright © 2014 Fliss Watts