Moral philosophy (MP)is always the one that scares people. For years, philosophy was spilt into two parts: Logic & Metaphysics (L&M); Moral Philosophy. I was advised to keep well away from MP. For that reason, in my first year, I went with L&M. Rather tedious to say the least. Logic was boring – let’s put stuff into pseudo-mathematical formula so we don’t have to deal with the emotional implications…and Metaphysics: Descartes, vaguely interesting because of the Cogito, but tedious because it stands or falls on the belief in a benevolent God. Hume was quite good – no God for him. Kant and his desperate attempts to create a world run by reason, but which also relied on a God (could there be anything more unreasonable). There must have been others, but I can’t remember. I do remember epistemology. That was fascinating.
In second year, we hit the moral philosophers. Aristotle, plus some others I’ve forgotten. Aristotle stuck with me, and I stuck with him. No mythology of the origins of morality, no “natural law” or morality being handed down by God.
With Aristotle, it’s straightforward. Person X is pointed out to you as being ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’…and you imitate them. Once your imitation becomes habit, that means you’re good too. What’s good? Whatever your group, tribe, society thinks it is. However, unlike the absolutists, this concept of ‘good’ can change; there’s room for manoeuvre. His concept has always seemed more human to me.
Oh, before I go on. I studied the Analytic school of philosophy. Apart from a couple of option courses in third and fourth year (Existentialism and The Continentals as far as I recall), those from abroad – Derrida, Marx, Sartre, Foucault, Adorno, Nietzsche – were confined to Literary Theory. Odd, but there you are.
From Aristotle, we went to Kant (the categorical imperative is useful, but too much like the Bible). Some attention was paid to Aquinas (who simply sanitises Aristotle for the Catholic Church) and to Hume (who has the bizarre idea that unless a work is morally good, it can’t be aesthetically good). The there was Rawls – take what exists and justify it. By this point I was reading, amongst others, Wittgenstein, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and it seemed to me that the distinctions found in UK universities, between sociology, psychology, literature, politics etc., were entirely fabricated, in that separating these subjects disarmed them. Separating them rendered them meaningless, and trapped them. They simply became academic topics. Naive as it sounds, I wanted (and want) a philosophy that will change the world. This is what continental philosophy (even calling it that is redolent of the old “fog in channel, continent cut off” joke) was trying to do, by refusing to accept false distinctions.
Right, back to the topic. Aristotle, it seems to me, gives us a fairly accurate picture of how we ‘learn’ morality: initially, we imitate the “good person” which, when that imitation becomes habit, makes us good too. However…this only works if we exclude the human capacity for independent thought. The capacity to compare and contrast, and to draw conclusions for ourselves.While the imitation game might works when we’re young, as we get older, become teenagers, doing X because Y number of people think X is good begins to lose its shine. We question, we interrogate; we ask how X became a good, we ask how X can remain a good if it disadvantages a particular group or class of other people. We struggle with the rationality of how X can be a good if it rests on injustice. This is where the phrases “It’s just the way things are” and “It’s always been this way” surface, as apparent justifications of irrationality and injustice. For many, they accept this and “move on”…but now the central question becomes “Why do they move on? When the injustice is so glaring, how do they justify this to themselves?”. Is it the case that only I can see this injustice? No. It’s a case of apathy (learnt from parents and peer groups), plus the ideological construction of “the individual” which, in turn, reconstructs the concept of ‘injustice’ as one of ‘laziness’ and “lack of ambition”. This ideological reconstruction is far reaching: competition becomes an integral part of “the human condition”, therefore, failure to be competitive becomes an individual failing. At the same time, the placing of the individual as the foundation of society displaces the community, makes ‘community’ a category error; instead of ‘communities’ we now have “collection of individuals”, with the idea holding these together being that of the contract and “benefit to the individual”. This becomes the basic unit of this ‘society’: “Does X benefit me as an individual, or should I walk away and find greater benefits elsewhere?”. In short, the aim is to sever ties between people. The idea that I have duties, responsibilities and obligations to others in virtue of their being human is disparaged, made an indication of weakness.
So what we have is, returning to the Aristotelian formulation of “the good” is an entirely self-centred concept, that represents care for others as a weakness. The Kantian formulation has the potential to alter this, but doesn’t; as Kant relies on the existence of God, then the ultimate notion is that the ‘reward’ for living a good life (whatever this means) is received in Heaven. In fact, it becomes quite obvious that Christianity (religions in general) is an ideological construct, designed to bolster capitalist ideology per se, the suggestion being that the more miserable your situation on earth is, the greater your reward in heaven will be.
But…what of the concept of rationality in all this? Well, for a start, the Age of Enlightenment is undercut by its exponents relying on an idea – religion – that is supremely irrational. The other idea, that the human person and human society is ‘perfectable’ through rationality and science begs one particular question: does we conceptualise rationality as progressive, something that develops and expands over time? Add to this the idea that, if we take ‘happiness’ for human persons as a rational ‘end’, attempting to pass off competition as natural is irrational – in that it causes misery and contributes to the sum of injustice.
If happiness of human persons is rational, then competition and selfishness are irrational, which suggests that those who base their actions on the latter are, in moral terminology, ‘bad’. If we formulate rationality as a striving towards “the good”, and see rational thought as progressing towards this end, then it makes those who stress competition/the individual irrational or bad (even ‘evil’: if you know that X is the good/proper action in this situation but you choose Y, the bad/improper action then, in your choice of the latter, you are choosing evil which it can be argued makes you evil).
If we acknowledge that there are competing rationalities, then how do we establish a metric between these to decide which should hold sway – even which rationality is more rational?If we hold that the more rational rationality is the one that results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people (utilitarianism), then those who act against this must be held to account. We can also say that capitalism, which sacrifices the community to the individual is, irrational. However, fro this ‘formula’ it becomes apparent that rationality does not triumph merely in being rational, otherwise capitalism and its ‘ideas’ would be null and void. Therefore, there must be some other factor here, one that counts for more that simply being the most rational: power.
Murmurs from the Forest 