Moral Philosophy and the Modern World

Verene

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898559
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This work raises for the contemporary reader the ancient and abiding question of the nature and meaning of human virtue. In Part 1, it draws upon Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero and the works of Renaissance Christian humanists who were influenced by them, such as Pico, Vives, and Erasmus. The moral act guided by the cardinal virtues and the good is seen as the key to human happiness and the formation of character. Character is the basis for the pursuit of self-knowledge, decorum, and dignity, which properly guide human affairs.Part 2 takes up Hegel's principle of the labor of the negative as applied to three phenomena of modern life: the presence of terrorism, the personality of the psycho-sociopath, and the problems of the technologically dominated life of the modern person. These are the most powerful impediments to the good life in the modern world and pose problems to which the ethical doctrines of utilitarianism and the categorical imperative provide an insufficient response. To confront these phenomena, we are led back to the classical conception of the role of prudence or practical wisdom as the foundation of ethical life.

1

The Moral in the Theater of the World

The Moral Act and Its Narration

At first, morality is habit. Children delight in imitation. They form their actions on the basis of what is present to them in others. Their actions are disciplined by parents, relatives, and friends, that is, if they are fortunate to have those who themselves are guided by virtue and decorum. Habits, when they come together in the individual as a coherent whole, form character. Thus character arises naturally from the self’s relation to itself and as the basis for the relation of the self to others. The habits of the individual confront social habits or customs, and the child finds itself in a world of manners and moral order.

If the world of family and friends is not present for the child as a world of civilized life and moral expectation, the child has no or little basis for shaping natural desires and appetites or developing judgment and willpower to direct actions. That child experiences no sense of excellence and is potentially an unfortunate or dangerous human being. But the lack of proper conditions to develop as a human being of character does not mean the child has no chance to acquire character and thus is excused from moral or legal restraint. Experience shows that many who are deprived of a proper childhood find a way to rectify this early deprivation and arrive in adulthood as individuals of good character. Others do not and are lost to their own potential humanity. Why one individual surmounts difficult conditions of origin and another does not but is submerged in them is a question that remains without a clear answer. This view of childhood is not intended as a social-scientific account of child development but only as a general picture of the human.

When a child reaches the age of reason morality transcends habit and reflective morality begins to take shape. By this time conscience also becomes active, the child having been repeatedly exhorted to exercise empathy in relation to others by the question, How would you feel if someone acted in such and such a manner to you as you are acting toward them?

When habits and customs conflict within themselves, offering the individual no clear course of action in a given situation, reflection enters as a means to establish choice. Reflection is the method of the understanding. The understanding approaches the world by means of classifying its contents and formulating critical judgments concerning truth and error in regard to what is held about these contents. Reflective morality is tied to the phenomenon of arguments pro and con in relation to a given issue or problematic situation, in an effort to direct choice. But within this approach to the moral, duplicity reigns. The self, now capable of constructing arguments and placing them over habits and customs, holds fast to the claim that such arguments can in principle and thus in fact direct choice, when actually moral choice is generated through the force of character and a specific moral argument is endorsed on the basis of what the individual will do because of who the individual in fact is.

To overcome the inherent self-duplicity of reflective morality, what I will call speculative morality is required. Speculative morality does not rely on the antimony of argument and counterargument, nor is it a reversion to habit and custom. Speculative morality rests on the acknowledgment that character and choice are dialectically related. The moral agent must see with the mind’s eye the connection between character and choice in any moral action. What is required is not the critical and analytic powers of the understanding but the synthetic power of reason, the power to perceive the connection between character and choice in a given instance as reasonable. Morality, then, is what we tell ourselves after we have acted. Faced with a moral situation that requires us to act, we act from the basis of our character. We must choose, knowingly choose, and choose from the consistency of our character. Choice requires that we not act under such extreme duress that only one course of action is truly open to us. The key to our choice is narration.

We must act, and in acting we must be able to relate to ourselves why we have so acted. We must rely on reason to keep us from simply providing ourselves with a rationalization. Rationalization is subjective reasoning that appears objective. But reason aims at objectivity. To be objective is to attempt to ground the elements of our decision, choice, or action in the whole of things. This narration guided by reason that is formed to justify our action presupposes a narration of the problematic situation itself. To act when confronted by a problematic situation we must first assess what will be the natural course of the events involved: what is its origin, its present state, and its future end, to the extent these can be grasped. The situation must be apprehended as a whole. Only then can we act, and once we have acted we must be able to place our action within a new relation of the whole. In this way, by rational narration, we build up a moral self, for all situations have been before in some form, are now, and will be again.

Reason and narration are counterparts because both are ways of giving form to the whole. The understanding functions as a means to dissect, classify, and connect what is partial in experience. The counterpart to the understanding is the proposition. Propositions connect this to that. Thus reflective morality is always seeking a decision procedure in order to determine what should be done, what should be connected to what to make the right choice. But the key to narration is the story. All stories, if they are fully told, produce a whole before our imagination. Stories, like songs, are wholes that hold all their elements in proportion to each other. A rational narration is not simply a history; it holds all of its elements together as an order per causas. In this manner what is related is comprehended as having a total order in which all elements are dialectically interrelated. A rational narration informs us not only of what has occurred but also why it has occurred.

Reflection and speculation are two ways of seeing. Reflection separates the mind’s eye from its object and determines its form as separate from its act of knowing. Reflection, as its Latin root, reflectere, tells us, is to turn our gaze back from the object, to apprehend it by retreating from it to a position outside its reality. Speculation, as its Latin root specere suggests, is to see into or spy out the inner form of its object. We apprehend the object by entering into its inner reality. We apprehend it by attempting to become it. Our penetration of its inner form is a kind of imitation of it as opposed to a reflective pointing out of it. Our moral act is predicated on our form of knowing. Once we know rightly, we can choose rightly. This sense of choice requires that we pass through reflective morality to speculative morality, and speculative morality requires that we join our powers of imagination with those of reason.

The motivation to engage in the moral narration of our acts after we have acted is rooted in the phenomenon of conscience. Conscience is considered in chapter 3, but its role is also of importance here. What conscience is, is lost in the depths of the human psyche, but that conscience exists in those individuals who have acquired a moral sense in their development as human selves is beyond dispute. Conscience is often associated with guilt. One may have a guilty conscience concerning a past action and be moved to relieve this burden of guilt from one’s life by some manner of restitution or atonement. Conscience, however, is a wider agency than the feeling of personal guilt. Conscience is based in empathy. Empathy is the distinctively human capacity for participating in another’s feelings, volitions, or life situation. It depends upon the ability imaginatively to project a subjective state onto another and to respond to it. It is the key to speculative morality because to exercise empathy one must see into the inner state of another and be affected by this vision.

This insight into the other is based on the self-insight that is at the base of conscience. This self-insight is a sense of right or wrong within the individual. Conscience is an inner power that guides the individual’s action toward goodness and toward justice, both in relation to the other and for the other, within the other’s situation. Conscience is tied to consciousness; these two terms in English share the common Latin root of conscientia. Our consciousness of our selves is connected to our consciousness of others and our necessary involvement with them as not only knowing animals but also as social animals. Conscience originates from consciousness when consciousness becomes a witness to the other. When this witnessing consciousness proceeds from observing the other to engaging in its capacity for empathy for the other, the result is conscience as an active force within the self.

In the Second Discourse, Rousseau writes, “It is very certain, therefore, that pity is a natural sentiment which, moderating in each individual the activity of love of oneself, contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species.”1 La pitié is pity, in the sense of compassion. Com...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction: Moral Memory
• Chapter 1: The Moral in the Theater of the World
• Chapter 2: Terrorism: The Ideology of Identity
• Chapter 3: Psycho-Sociopathy: The Counterfeit of Conscience
• Chapter 4: The Technological Person: The Dominance of Desire
• Bibliography