Fatherhood and Ethics in a Post-Post-Modern World: Confessions of a Mostly Reformed Ne'er-Do-Well
Lately I’ve found myself reflecting on the kind of moral example I hope to be able to set for my one-and-a-half year old son, Ander. It’s no mere cliché that as a new father you find yourself tending to reexamine aspects of yourself you might have taken for granted in the past. For me, nagging questions about ethics and morality have been a recurring, lifelong preoccupation anyway, only now I find myself reexamining all the usual questions from a new angle.
I should confess at the start that, from early adolescence on, I’ve sometimes been less than what can be characterized as saintly in my personal conduct, although I’ve always tried at a minimum to adhere to a sort of layman’s Hippocratic oath (“at least to do no harm…”). But even that hasn’t always worked out quite the way I’d hoped (who knew there were so many devilishly subtle ways to do harm?)
At various times since I first shed the devout religious faith I held throughout my early childhood, I’ve been a liar, a truant, a juvenile delinquent, a sexual libertine, a substance abuser, a wannabe rock star, a political conservative, and perhaps most egregious of all, a telemarketer (though for what it’s worth, even in the absolute depths of my moral debasement, I couldn’t stomach this last role for more than a couple of months).
When temporary lapses in ethical judgment happen, we’re lucky if the damages are minor and easily containable. But my experiences suggest that such lapses are inevitable, even for the best of us: Sometimes we just glance up a moment too late, just in time to see that pint-sized demon that squats on our left shoulder cough up a little puff of white feathers while the angel that normally sits on our right is suddenly AWOL.
In my case, I could easily lay the blame for my personal failings on my early upbringing and my parents’ bad example.
After all, I could point out, my mother was a heroin addict who met my father while trolling for American soldiers in the pool-halls of Frankfurt, Germany—and she not only shot up in front of me, left me to care for myself while she was high, but even sometimes let me take hits of pot smoke from her homemade coffee can bubbler-bong when I wasn’t yet even five years old. (Incidentally, the lullaby she most often sang to me as a child was “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which to this day brings tears to my eyes, on account of how sweetly and honestly she sang it.)
My father, meanwhile, was a borderline sociopath who shortly after meeting my mother got himself ejected from the US military by calmly walking into his commanding officer’s office one day and shooting up heroin in front of him.
To some, such a troubled personal history might seem like a sort of moral “get out of jail free” card. But not to me. I decided long ago that I’m solely responsibility for my intentional actions, both the morally laudable and the morally reprehensible ones. And I stand by that principle, even though I’ll admit I can’t necessarily construct a persuasive argument for it. Given what we know now about the elaborate interplay of environmental factors and genetic propensities in shaping our potential intellectual and moral capacities, the idea of absolute personal responsibility almost seems quaint and old-fashioned. And yet, the principle of personal responsibility nevertheless seems axiomatic to me: Like a necessary assumption we make before we can even begin to have a discussion of ethics, not a point to be debated along the way.
Anyway, it’s an often touted but nevertheless accurate claim that we live in morally-challenged times. The very best among our moral, religious and political leaders are ultimately nothing more than ordinary, decent men and women, and the worst among them are penny-ante charlatans and outright criminals, so it can be hard to know where to begin looking for sound moral guidance. And we often put on such peculiarly creative cultural blinders when it comes to the absurd ethical contradictions common in contemporary American life.
Here’s an example of 21st Century American ethics in action:
Every year to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday our self-professed freedom- and peace-loving nation slaughters, braises, bakes and carves millions of hormonally-fattened, cage-farmed Turkeys (and the turkey, if you recall, in a twist of historical irony, was once a leading contender for the title of national bird, although we eventually ended up with the fittingly ill-tempered bald eagle, a near cousin of the vulture, instead).
At the same time, to assuage our peculiarly dissociated collective guilt over the ugly reality of our carnivorous holiday habits, every year like clockwork, our President takes time out from his busy schedule of marketing the Global War on Terror™, demoralizing civil rights activists, and systematically dismantling the constitution, and with a flick of his imperial pen, he publicly issues a pardon for a single, free-range farmed turkey.
The lucky bird is then, in a public ceremony with much media fanfare, spared the axe and retired to a petting zoo, his head still securely attached to his shoulders.
Never mind that the entire spectacle is essentially meant to signal the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday, an occasion for which millions of other birds with no less legitimate claims for clemency are hastened en masse into the ovens.
Never mind that, with yet another flick of that same imperial pen, the President just expanded the Iraq War budget by another 700 billion or so.
Never mind that some of this money will no doubt be used to replace the American bullets that killed a pregnant Iraqi women and her cousin as they sped without stopping through a military checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad, the woman being in heavy labor and her cousin in a state of complete panic at the time.
But I recently promised myself to stop talking politics, so let’s just leave those points where they stand for now.
Suffice it to say, the modern world is full of difficult moral problems. Which is why it seems just that much more important to me to think long and hard about what values I’d most like to pass along to my son. My own religious beliefs are an idiosyncratic co-mingling of Christian and Buddhist teachings, and I’m deeply mistrustful of organized religion, which I was raised to regard cautiously, as a fertile soil for hypocrites and opportunistic con-men, of which recent decades have produced bumper crops.
I remember a conversation I once had with a devout Christian woman I met through my work. She was telling me about her recent decision to pull her children—good, faithful Christian children whom she feared would be corrupted by secular influences—out of public schools and start them on home schooling. I should probably have minded my own business, but instead, I poked my nose in and tried to reason with her from a Christian perspective: What happened, I pressed her, to the time-honored notion that Christians ought to aspire to be like lights of truth to the world, helping to lead sinners to righteousness by their shining moral leadership? What happens when all the lights go out in the public schools? What happens to all the kids trapped in the dark?
The woman acknowledged the validity of my point, but replied that it wouldn’t be right to knowingly expose her children to the wickedness and perversity rampant in the public school system. What’s more, she wanted to keep her children from being indoctrinated with secular propaganda such as the Theory of Evolution.
I told her I understood even if I didn’t agree, wished her well, and left. There’s no use in trying to reason someone out of an unreasonable position. So I politely dropped the subject and vamoosed.
Looking back, I’m not sure if I should have done more to make my point or not. But then, what more could I have done? I could have shouted political slogans in her face; I could have whacked her over the head with a copy of “Origin of Species.” But none of that would have changed anything one iota, except perhaps to further open the divide between our points of view. And she was, after all, only a decent and well-meaning, if slightly confused, human being, just like me. Besides, a mother probably should have the right to take her children out of public school if she wants to, whether for good reasons or bad, and regardless of whether that choice ultimately serves the best interests of the rest of the world or not.
In an ethics course I took in college, I was introduced to an idea dubbed, as I recall, the “Good Samaritan” principle: The gist of it was that while certain choices might not necessarily be moral imperatives, they might however be requirements of basic human decency. If you found a small child lying unconscious and bleeding in a street gutter, for example, you might not be morally obligated to look after the child, but your humanity might suffer grievous harm if you didn’t.
Personally, I think that the kinds of moral distinctions the “Good Samaritan” principle tries to draw might be useful to a point, but they also threaten to go too far, potentially opening up that nasty can of worms we call “moral relativism.” It seems to me that, as a matter of fact, there is a fundamental moral obligation to help our fellow human beings when we find them in immediate danger: Not throwing a life preserver out to that poor fellow out in the middle of the lake who is “not waving but drowning,” as the poet wrote, constitutes a crime of omission, doesn’t it? That is, if we know he’s drowning and happen to have a life preserver handy?
At the same time, it’s surely not a moral requirement that we all spend every day of our lives scanning the water for potential drowning victims in need of rescue.
But let’s talk a little bit more about that nasty bugaboo called “moral relativism” whose specter I raised earlier.
The basic idea behind moral relativism is generally understood to be something like “in reality, there are no moral absolutes, no simple, right or wrong ethical choices.” To the extent that this abstruse system of ethical hocus pocus is not exclusively a straw man invention of fear-mongering political opportunists (passing themselves off as high-minded moral zealots, of course), moral relativism leads to some pretty odd ethical judgments: An armed robber from a working-class neighborhood devastated by economic collapse might even be held largely blameless for robbing an interloper from a wealthier neighborhood—especially if the hypothetical robber is a family man with children who might otherwise go hungry while the robbery victim is a man with more than enough wealth to spare.
Let me state now for the record that I am not a moral relativist. I am, however, also not a simpleton, so I can’t deny that many situations and choices do elude simple analysis in terms of moral absolutes. Not every moral question can be answered in simple terms of right or wrong.
Many choices, for example, are morally neutral.
Turning left or right at a fork in a road when there’s no compelling reason to prefer one choice over the other is not a choice with any obvious ethical consequences. It’s a morally neutral choice, as many routine choices are.
Other choices may have obvious moral dimensions, but upon further analysis, turn out to be intractably subtle. It may be difficult or even impossible to determine which out of a given range of options is more ethical in some cases.
For example, consider the matter of the environmental impact of disposable vs. cloth diapers. At first glance, to someone concerned about the environment, cloth diapers might seem an ethical choice because they generate less landfill waste. But as it turns out, the reality is not quite so simple: As you’d expect, cloth diapers need to be washed frequently, using significant amounts of potable water and energy generated by fossil fuels. In addition, the chemicals most frequently used to treat and wash cloth diapers are among the worst offenders in terms of their environmental impact. The question of whether cloth or disposable diapers are better for the environment is a highly controversial topic, as it turns out. Google “Cloth vs. Disposal Diapers” for yourself to get a flavor for just how controversial.
To the committed moral relativist (if such a pitiful, self-hating creature actually exists), the fact that even a single scenario can give rise to an intractable or hopelessly ambiguous ethical dilemma invalidates the very concept of ethical absolutes. Our choices simply can’t ever be sorted into tidy moral categories of right and wrong, so the argument goes. Devoid of black and white ethical categories, the world offers nothing but endless shades of gray.
I’ve had many friends over the years who attached considerable significance to the notion that “There are no moral absolutes.” Well, I suppose I strongly agree with that statement, yet at the same time, I completely disagree.
Confused as I am yet? Well, let me explain.
It seems to me that absolutely denying the possibility of moral absolutes, perversely, entails making an absolute moral claim. The claim “there are no moral absolutes,” is essentially self-refuting, like the claim “this sentence is false”: If it’s true, it must not be true, because it amounts to an absolute moral claim of exactly the kind it asserts can’t be made.
So much for strong moral relativism, then. So what does that leave?
John Stuart Mills proposed a system of ethics called Utilitarianism, which, to put it crudely, holds that the guiding ethical principle behind all our choices should be to create by our actions the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. So if for some peculiar reason it makes everyone really, really happy to kill a random stranger every so often as part of a ritualistic bloodletting, I don’t suppose Mills would object, although I don’t think that was his point. Still, if it’s that easy for me to misread Mills’ to reach such a specious conclusion, I’m sure there are plenty of others who can do a lot worse.
Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, came up with a nifty little ethical rule of thumb called the “Categorical Imperative,” which in likewise grossly simplified terms works something like this: If you’re not sure whether or not a particular choice is ethical or not, imagine what would happen if everyone else behaved in exactly the same way. If all hell would break loose, raining negative repercussions down on you and everyone else’s heads, then the choice is unethical. In other words, if it might cause harm to you personally if everyone did it, then you shouldn’t be doing it yourself.
Another simpler way of putting Kant’s Categorical Imperative, of course, might just be to say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the infamous Golden Rule, one well-known formulation of which is found in the Christian bible, but its origins can be traced back even further to Chinese philosopher and all around wise guy, Confucius.
When I was a child, I thought I had accidentally discovered a logical flaw in the Golden Rule, a sort of loophole that could all too easily be exploited. What if some of the individuals reckoning their ethics according to the Golden Rule were sadomasochists, I conjectured? Or suicidal depressives, looking for a release from their suffering and presuming that others felt exactly as they did? If such individuals were to take the rule too literally and actually do to others what they would like to have done to themselves—well, you probably get the picture.
This little piece of Sunday-school sophistry points to an interesting problem, though: While morality, in general, may not be entirely relative, people’s individual values systems plainly are.
One well-meaning guy thinks monogamy is the only way to go; another equally well-meaning guy thinks anything less than radical polyamory is a barbaric form of human bondage. Who has the right to settle that argument? Ideally, both guys would just agree to live and let live, staying out of each other’s way and otherwise enjoying a kind of separate peace.
But get this: Over a couple of beers, the second guy convinces the first guy’s wife that his radical pro-polyamory views are correct. She drops the first guy like a sack of potatoes for a roll in the hay with the second guy. Then a third guy, a fourth guy, a fifth guy, etc. The first guy confronts the second guy, and with the Golden Rule in mind demands “How could you sleep with her? I would never in a million years do the same to you. What about the Golden Rule?” The second guy just flashes a quick Cheshire-cat grin and replies “Maybe so, but of course, I wouldn’t mind in the least if you’d done the same to me.”
But then, maybe in this hypothetical example of one way the golden rule might be subverted, an even more fundamental offense has been committed. Surely one thing both guys have in common is that neither of them would relish the idea of someone else forcing him to live according to a values system other than his own. And yet, isn’t that more or less what the second guy did, in violation of the Golden Rule?
Either way, it seems that even the most elegant, time-honored ethical principles aren’t without their potential complications. In fact, I suspect there are rarely occasions when questions of morality generate easy answers (except, of course, when they do, as I suspect those occasions do exist as well).
More importantly, just asking serious questions about ethics at all seems vitally important to me. In fact, after giving it all this thought, I suppose that what I really hope most for Ander’s moral development is that he, too, learns to ask ethical questions and try to work through the answers for himself.
Sure, you can crib all the answers from someone else’s paper for the math exam, but if you don’t learn to work through the problems for yourself, your brain never forms the connections needed to solve them, and you deprive yourself of a certain degree of autonomy and self-integrity that should rightfully be yours.
Weighing the ethical dimensions of one’s actions and grappling with the complex moral challenges that come with being both human and alive are just fundamental aspects of what it means to be a healthy human being. And without earnest, ethical self-examination and probing, no matter how aimless these activities may seem at times, what possibility of meaningful personal growth is there? And what is anything that doesn’t grow but dead?
I should confess at the start that, from early adolescence on, I’ve sometimes been less than what can be characterized as saintly in my personal conduct, although I’ve always tried at a minimum to adhere to a sort of layman’s Hippocratic oath (“at least to do no harm…”). But even that hasn’t always worked out quite the way I’d hoped (who knew there were so many devilishly subtle ways to do harm?)
At various times since I first shed the devout religious faith I held throughout my early childhood, I’ve been a liar, a truant, a juvenile delinquent, a sexual libertine, a substance abuser, a wannabe rock star, a political conservative, and perhaps most egregious of all, a telemarketer (though for what it’s worth, even in the absolute depths of my moral debasement, I couldn’t stomach this last role for more than a couple of months).
When temporary lapses in ethical judgment happen, we’re lucky if the damages are minor and easily containable. But my experiences suggest that such lapses are inevitable, even for the best of us: Sometimes we just glance up a moment too late, just in time to see that pint-sized demon that squats on our left shoulder cough up a little puff of white feathers while the angel that normally sits on our right is suddenly AWOL.
In my case, I could easily lay the blame for my personal failings on my early upbringing and my parents’ bad example.
After all, I could point out, my mother was a heroin addict who met my father while trolling for American soldiers in the pool-halls of Frankfurt, Germany—and she not only shot up in front of me, left me to care for myself while she was high, but even sometimes let me take hits of pot smoke from her homemade coffee can bubbler-bong when I wasn’t yet even five years old. (Incidentally, the lullaby she most often sang to me as a child was “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which to this day brings tears to my eyes, on account of how sweetly and honestly she sang it.)
My father, meanwhile, was a borderline sociopath who shortly after meeting my mother got himself ejected from the US military by calmly walking into his commanding officer’s office one day and shooting up heroin in front of him.
To some, such a troubled personal history might seem like a sort of moral “get out of jail free” card. But not to me. I decided long ago that I’m solely responsibility for my intentional actions, both the morally laudable and the morally reprehensible ones. And I stand by that principle, even though I’ll admit I can’t necessarily construct a persuasive argument for it. Given what we know now about the elaborate interplay of environmental factors and genetic propensities in shaping our potential intellectual and moral capacities, the idea of absolute personal responsibility almost seems quaint and old-fashioned. And yet, the principle of personal responsibility nevertheless seems axiomatic to me: Like a necessary assumption we make before we can even begin to have a discussion of ethics, not a point to be debated along the way.
Anyway, it’s an often touted but nevertheless accurate claim that we live in morally-challenged times. The very best among our moral, religious and political leaders are ultimately nothing more than ordinary, decent men and women, and the worst among them are penny-ante charlatans and outright criminals, so it can be hard to know where to begin looking for sound moral guidance. And we often put on such peculiarly creative cultural blinders when it comes to the absurd ethical contradictions common in contemporary American life.
Here’s an example of 21st Century American ethics in action:
Every year to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday our self-professed freedom- and peace-loving nation slaughters, braises, bakes and carves millions of hormonally-fattened, cage-farmed Turkeys (and the turkey, if you recall, in a twist of historical irony, was once a leading contender for the title of national bird, although we eventually ended up with the fittingly ill-tempered bald eagle, a near cousin of the vulture, instead).
At the same time, to assuage our peculiarly dissociated collective guilt over the ugly reality of our carnivorous holiday habits, every year like clockwork, our President takes time out from his busy schedule of marketing the Global War on Terror™, demoralizing civil rights activists, and systematically dismantling the constitution, and with a flick of his imperial pen, he publicly issues a pardon for a single, free-range farmed turkey.
The lucky bird is then, in a public ceremony with much media fanfare, spared the axe and retired to a petting zoo, his head still securely attached to his shoulders.
Never mind that the entire spectacle is essentially meant to signal the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday, an occasion for which millions of other birds with no less legitimate claims for clemency are hastened en masse into the ovens.
Never mind that, with yet another flick of that same imperial pen, the President just expanded the Iraq War budget by another 700 billion or so.
Never mind that some of this money will no doubt be used to replace the American bullets that killed a pregnant Iraqi women and her cousin as they sped without stopping through a military checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad, the woman being in heavy labor and her cousin in a state of complete panic at the time.
But I recently promised myself to stop talking politics, so let’s just leave those points where they stand for now.
Suffice it to say, the modern world is full of difficult moral problems. Which is why it seems just that much more important to me to think long and hard about what values I’d most like to pass along to my son. My own religious beliefs are an idiosyncratic co-mingling of Christian and Buddhist teachings, and I’m deeply mistrustful of organized religion, which I was raised to regard cautiously, as a fertile soil for hypocrites and opportunistic con-men, of which recent decades have produced bumper crops.
I remember a conversation I once had with a devout Christian woman I met through my work. She was telling me about her recent decision to pull her children—good, faithful Christian children whom she feared would be corrupted by secular influences—out of public schools and start them on home schooling. I should probably have minded my own business, but instead, I poked my nose in and tried to reason with her from a Christian perspective: What happened, I pressed her, to the time-honored notion that Christians ought to aspire to be like lights of truth to the world, helping to lead sinners to righteousness by their shining moral leadership? What happens when all the lights go out in the public schools? What happens to all the kids trapped in the dark?
The woman acknowledged the validity of my point, but replied that it wouldn’t be right to knowingly expose her children to the wickedness and perversity rampant in the public school system. What’s more, she wanted to keep her children from being indoctrinated with secular propaganda such as the Theory of Evolution.
I told her I understood even if I didn’t agree, wished her well, and left. There’s no use in trying to reason someone out of an unreasonable position. So I politely dropped the subject and vamoosed.
Looking back, I’m not sure if I should have done more to make my point or not. But then, what more could I have done? I could have shouted political slogans in her face; I could have whacked her over the head with a copy of “Origin of Species.” But none of that would have changed anything one iota, except perhaps to further open the divide between our points of view. And she was, after all, only a decent and well-meaning, if slightly confused, human being, just like me. Besides, a mother probably should have the right to take her children out of public school if she wants to, whether for good reasons or bad, and regardless of whether that choice ultimately serves the best interests of the rest of the world or not.
In an ethics course I took in college, I was introduced to an idea dubbed, as I recall, the “Good Samaritan” principle: The gist of it was that while certain choices might not necessarily be moral imperatives, they might however be requirements of basic human decency. If you found a small child lying unconscious and bleeding in a street gutter, for example, you might not be morally obligated to look after the child, but your humanity might suffer grievous harm if you didn’t.
Personally, I think that the kinds of moral distinctions the “Good Samaritan” principle tries to draw might be useful to a point, but they also threaten to go too far, potentially opening up that nasty can of worms we call “moral relativism.” It seems to me that, as a matter of fact, there is a fundamental moral obligation to help our fellow human beings when we find them in immediate danger: Not throwing a life preserver out to that poor fellow out in the middle of the lake who is “not waving but drowning,” as the poet wrote, constitutes a crime of omission, doesn’t it? That is, if we know he’s drowning and happen to have a life preserver handy?
At the same time, it’s surely not a moral requirement that we all spend every day of our lives scanning the water for potential drowning victims in need of rescue.
But let’s talk a little bit more about that nasty bugaboo called “moral relativism” whose specter I raised earlier.
The basic idea behind moral relativism is generally understood to be something like “in reality, there are no moral absolutes, no simple, right or wrong ethical choices.” To the extent that this abstruse system of ethical hocus pocus is not exclusively a straw man invention of fear-mongering political opportunists (passing themselves off as high-minded moral zealots, of course), moral relativism leads to some pretty odd ethical judgments: An armed robber from a working-class neighborhood devastated by economic collapse might even be held largely blameless for robbing an interloper from a wealthier neighborhood—especially if the hypothetical robber is a family man with children who might otherwise go hungry while the robbery victim is a man with more than enough wealth to spare.
Let me state now for the record that I am not a moral relativist. I am, however, also not a simpleton, so I can’t deny that many situations and choices do elude simple analysis in terms of moral absolutes. Not every moral question can be answered in simple terms of right or wrong.
Many choices, for example, are morally neutral.
Turning left or right at a fork in a road when there’s no compelling reason to prefer one choice over the other is not a choice with any obvious ethical consequences. It’s a morally neutral choice, as many routine choices are.
Other choices may have obvious moral dimensions, but upon further analysis, turn out to be intractably subtle. It may be difficult or even impossible to determine which out of a given range of options is more ethical in some cases.
For example, consider the matter of the environmental impact of disposable vs. cloth diapers. At first glance, to someone concerned about the environment, cloth diapers might seem an ethical choice because they generate less landfill waste. But as it turns out, the reality is not quite so simple: As you’d expect, cloth diapers need to be washed frequently, using significant amounts of potable water and energy generated by fossil fuels. In addition, the chemicals most frequently used to treat and wash cloth diapers are among the worst offenders in terms of their environmental impact. The question of whether cloth or disposable diapers are better for the environment is a highly controversial topic, as it turns out. Google “Cloth vs. Disposal Diapers” for yourself to get a flavor for just how controversial.
To the committed moral relativist (if such a pitiful, self-hating creature actually exists), the fact that even a single scenario can give rise to an intractable or hopelessly ambiguous ethical dilemma invalidates the very concept of ethical absolutes. Our choices simply can’t ever be sorted into tidy moral categories of right and wrong, so the argument goes. Devoid of black and white ethical categories, the world offers nothing but endless shades of gray.
I’ve had many friends over the years who attached considerable significance to the notion that “There are no moral absolutes.” Well, I suppose I strongly agree with that statement, yet at the same time, I completely disagree.
Confused as I am yet? Well, let me explain.
It seems to me that absolutely denying the possibility of moral absolutes, perversely, entails making an absolute moral claim. The claim “there are no moral absolutes,” is essentially self-refuting, like the claim “this sentence is false”: If it’s true, it must not be true, because it amounts to an absolute moral claim of exactly the kind it asserts can’t be made.
So much for strong moral relativism, then. So what does that leave?
John Stuart Mills proposed a system of ethics called Utilitarianism, which, to put it crudely, holds that the guiding ethical principle behind all our choices should be to create by our actions the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. So if for some peculiar reason it makes everyone really, really happy to kill a random stranger every so often as part of a ritualistic bloodletting, I don’t suppose Mills would object, although I don’t think that was his point. Still, if it’s that easy for me to misread Mills’ to reach such a specious conclusion, I’m sure there are plenty of others who can do a lot worse.
Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, came up with a nifty little ethical rule of thumb called the “Categorical Imperative,” which in likewise grossly simplified terms works something like this: If you’re not sure whether or not a particular choice is ethical or not, imagine what would happen if everyone else behaved in exactly the same way. If all hell would break loose, raining negative repercussions down on you and everyone else’s heads, then the choice is unethical. In other words, if it might cause harm to you personally if everyone did it, then you shouldn’t be doing it yourself.
Another simpler way of putting Kant’s Categorical Imperative, of course, might just be to say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the infamous Golden Rule, one well-known formulation of which is found in the Christian bible, but its origins can be traced back even further to Chinese philosopher and all around wise guy, Confucius.
When I was a child, I thought I had accidentally discovered a logical flaw in the Golden Rule, a sort of loophole that could all too easily be exploited. What if some of the individuals reckoning their ethics according to the Golden Rule were sadomasochists, I conjectured? Or suicidal depressives, looking for a release from their suffering and presuming that others felt exactly as they did? If such individuals were to take the rule too literally and actually do to others what they would like to have done to themselves—well, you probably get the picture.
This little piece of Sunday-school sophistry points to an interesting problem, though: While morality, in general, may not be entirely relative, people’s individual values systems plainly are.
One well-meaning guy thinks monogamy is the only way to go; another equally well-meaning guy thinks anything less than radical polyamory is a barbaric form of human bondage. Who has the right to settle that argument? Ideally, both guys would just agree to live and let live, staying out of each other’s way and otherwise enjoying a kind of separate peace.
But get this: Over a couple of beers, the second guy convinces the first guy’s wife that his radical pro-polyamory views are correct. She drops the first guy like a sack of potatoes for a roll in the hay with the second guy. Then a third guy, a fourth guy, a fifth guy, etc. The first guy confronts the second guy, and with the Golden Rule in mind demands “How could you sleep with her? I would never in a million years do the same to you. What about the Golden Rule?” The second guy just flashes a quick Cheshire-cat grin and replies “Maybe so, but of course, I wouldn’t mind in the least if you’d done the same to me.”
But then, maybe in this hypothetical example of one way the golden rule might be subverted, an even more fundamental offense has been committed. Surely one thing both guys have in common is that neither of them would relish the idea of someone else forcing him to live according to a values system other than his own. And yet, isn’t that more or less what the second guy did, in violation of the Golden Rule?
Either way, it seems that even the most elegant, time-honored ethical principles aren’t without their potential complications. In fact, I suspect there are rarely occasions when questions of morality generate easy answers (except, of course, when they do, as I suspect those occasions do exist as well).
More importantly, just asking serious questions about ethics at all seems vitally important to me. In fact, after giving it all this thought, I suppose that what I really hope most for Ander’s moral development is that he, too, learns to ask ethical questions and try to work through the answers for himself.
Sure, you can crib all the answers from someone else’s paper for the math exam, but if you don’t learn to work through the problems for yourself, your brain never forms the connections needed to solve them, and you deprive yourself of a certain degree of autonomy and self-integrity that should rightfully be yours.
Weighing the ethical dimensions of one’s actions and grappling with the complex moral challenges that come with being both human and alive are just fundamental aspects of what it means to be a healthy human being. And without earnest, ethical self-examination and probing, no matter how aimless these activities may seem at times, what possibility of meaningful personal growth is there? And what is anything that doesn’t grow but dead?
The Future of Music
Check out David Byrne's fascinating take on the future of the music business and advice for how independent artists can survive these changes here. A fascinating discussion of what's really happening in music from someone who should know. Thanks to Wired magazine for bringing this to us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
