Moral Investigations - 3.0. Demarcating morality.

This is a lazy, playful post. It's way too early to be too precise, so we are going to play around and see what we come up with.

One important thing when you're dealing with morality, or anything, really, is to try and demarcate it so that you can easily define it from everything else. So what is a moral situation, or a potentially moral situation? Let's take a few examples:

1) A kid is drowning in a pool.
2) Your family asks you if you could babysit.
3) One nation is insulted by another and invades it.
4) In a demonstration you see a person picking up cobblestones to throw.
5) You get up in the morning and go downstairs to make a pot of coffee. No-one else is awake.

What are the differences in them? Let's assume that you are the main actor, or that you "see" all these things in one way or another. We're not now concerned with what the right thing is: but if there is a right or wrong thing in any of these examples. I sort of believe that there is.

The old Marxist philosopher George Lucasz talked a lot of the ethico-political. I am not sure if he would agree with the turn I am taking here, but I would like to say this: all our relations with other people and the institutions that affect them are moral, or more appropriately ethico-political. Why do I say that? Well, it's because we really can drag out disproportionate pairs arguments here. We can make value judgements, be they purely emotive (ie, you just express how you feel rather than how it is, or how you believe it is) or otherwise, and clearly see a difference between, say, getting up every day to work out petitions, go out to complain, organize people and do everything humanely possible to lessen the effects of war and completely blindly cheering on it because those bastards aren't people anyway.

Another argument that I have for the existance of the ethico-political realm that includes all humans is how we can transform people into non-humans. That is, how propaganda can tell us that some people aren't really people at all and thus allow us to do whatever we like to them. This is how torturers work, I understand. You might be able to chalk it up to the infinite human value so prevalent in the Western world, but it seems to be a relatively universal thing for every culture. There might also not be a clear-cut definition of what a human is. Thus the abortion and euthanasia debate. I mean, I am pro-abortion and pro-voluntary and non-voluntary (not in-voluntary, ie the difference between someone permanently vegetabilized and who can't ask for help to death and someone who doesn't want to) euthanasia. But that's another thing.

Now. Can we have moral connections to animals? I believe we can. Again, disproportionate pairs. None of us like the idea of people who can't take care of their pets: it does upset us and raise our moral indignation. Just come up with whatever two totally disproportionate pairs and you will see the intense similarities between that and our moral interaction with humans. Because that is what I think is important here: moral interaction. It doesn't matter if people can't be moral agents back to us (that totally violates our intuitions: it would mean that it has no moral value to help an incapacitated child who can't speak but can clearly feel and suffer) but it does matter that morality is a social connection and always wound up in our interaction, even if it is second hand, to others. Remember again: we are not saying anything about what right and wrong is, merely where it can be found.

So this brings us to the inanimate, the unseen and the unfeeling. Do we have moral obligations not to crush tiny, tiny beings? Should we do what some devout Eastern monks do and carefully, carefully brush aside the tiny creatures that they'd otherwise step on? (interesting sidenote: these people actually, if I understand it right, "upgrade" bugs and other beings to give them the moral status of a person).

I think what we must say is this: to some extent we really do. Morality is a continuum, though. There's not a sharp divide between "good" or "bad" people but "merely" degrees. Perhaps those Eastern monks really have a wider moral sphere than we do. (Or perhaps they don't considering that they might do it because they think that those bugs are actually people, thus not having a wider circle any more than a person who lives today in a larger community has a great one from someone who lived in a much smaller one).

So what about plants? Or rocks? What about Nature and Mother Earth? What about the Baltic?

I don't think we can have a direct moral obligation to these things. They can't feel in the sense that seem to be important to be included in the /direct/ moral sphere. Of course they are important in a moral sense considering all the creatures that need those. If there was a rainforest somewhere that had no animals, no bearing on the oxygen that has an effect on the world, etc, then it wouldn't matter if we chopped it all down. I mean, sure, it's a biological impossibility but this is just a possible world scenario.

What about time, then? People who aren't born, and people who are now dead. Are they included in our moral feeling at all? For reasons that I think have to do with our own fear of being forgotten (remember that we are relying on a third person subject as a "viewer" when we make moral value judgements) but that doesn't make it unreasonable, or any more so than other moral feelings. I think that in the end we have strong moral feelings to the people who have gone before us and that should be included in the indirect sphere, like the Baltic Sea, of our morality. They are dead, gone, finito. They won't come again. But to us, it feels right to cherish them and keep something of them alive. We could "will it to a universal law" because we want people to be good to us when we die. I don't know if this is cheating in any way, but it seems reasonable to me.

People who aren't born yet I think are easier to handle. Let's create a principle and then set out to prove our hypothesis: the principle of no distinguished place in time. That is: the ends cannot justify the means (alltogether: disproportionate pairs again) and we cannot justify destructive behaviour now, as many do, for some grand goal ahead. Though noble, history should teach us how well that usually works out. And also, when viewed realistically and weighed against the misery of the present the goal will shrink to more humble proportions. Of course, an idealist like me is not happy with just that: but I think it is an important lesson to avoid much misery. If then, there are no privilieged places we can consider our children, their children, etc, as somehow involved in our moral sense. Now, you might say that we need people to actually be there for us to be able to be able to make clear moral actions that have something to do with them.

But... do we? Sure, there are all the problems of induction, the problems of not knowing and so on. But we're not interested in that. We're interested in the fact that even though we might never see the people we affect, we would still say we can affect them with the morality of our actions. Compare the actions of a king who starts a war that ravages two people, or a man who organizes a rescue operation of slaves in North America before the Civil War that he never deals with directly for fear of being found out. Future generations, and the people we never meet even though our actions affect them also have emotions, and they can be hurt somehow like the dead cannot. It's just not now, but that doesn't matter.

But, you say, we cannot see what will come of our actions. We cannot know what will happen: the butterfly effect, etc. That's true: most of the time. So we have to opt for most likely scenarios when there seems to be a clear moral 'radius'. Ie, if we throw a banana peel on the street that might obviously affect someone. If we buy fair trade brands, that will affect someone. And we can be pretty sure of that. Not -certain-, but relatively sure.

So our moral sphere is quite wide. All our interaction seems to be filled with value if we look at it.

I am going to write some more about Kant and Sartre and how they come out of this when I have the time and feel like boring you guys more with this. Until then, taa!