Sometimes it seems that those who uphold moral rules as absolutes are making the fulfillment of the rules a kind of bedrock on their own. "It is good because it's important to be a moral person and a moral person is one who follows the rules." I'm on the radio discussing what's right and wrong, and my caller is talking about the rule "Thou shalt not commit adultery" as one to which there can be no exceptions. I inquire, "What if, God forbid, your husband has Alzheimer's disease. He's no longer aware of you as a wife, has no concept of your being faithful or unfaithful, is no longer really a husband to you. But by the nature of this terrible disease, he may yet live for a long time, and you are still a young woman with a woman's needs. Would you still feel bound by that rule?" Yes, she would. It would be a terrible situation, but it's still wrong. "But what good is served by the rule?", I wonder. That is not the way she is thinking: the rule has become its own bedrock. The fact is that, given her belief, she probably would suffer from such bad conscience if she did otherwise than follow the rule that it would not be worth it to act more freely. But that does not validate the moral wisdom of taking that rule as an invariant guide. A person crippled by inappropriate moral inhibitions might well be wise to obey them, in order to avoid the pain of real (albeit uncalled-for guilt), but would be wiser still to work to become free of them.
In the case of the faithful wife, to follow blindly the invariant rule imposes costs on her --costs that are not offset by any benefits to anyone else-- which I would regard as a kind of personal tragedy. For that woman, I only hope that life never deals her that particular card that her morality gives her no way of discarding. But, as one would expect with the workings of probability, such cards do get dealt, and one hears of such personal tragedies, when someone's rigid attachment to a structural way of thinking about morality condemns a person to a life of suffering unnecessarily.
But there are also situations where it is other people who suffer the consequences of a person's making a moral fetish of observing a rule. What if I said to the Nazi, "I cannot tell a lie --it would be morally wrong for me to do so-- yes I do know where they are hiding," would I then be a "good" person? To me that course of action would appear, rather, as a monstrous form of self-indulgence. Morality, I suggested earlier, is supposed to act as a counterforce to what we may surmise is a tendency to give excessive weight to our own selfish concerns. But a morality that bids us to observe certain rules whatever their cost, or that directs us to cultivate some image of "good character" without regard to consequences, is in danger of being not a morality but a dressed-up form of selfishness.
I find very appealing the image of the hero as the man-of-good-character, the one who stands on principle. But not all of that appeal is to the part of me that is really devoted to goodness. That part of myself that is self-centered is also involved in that attachment I have to the ideal of "character." And I think that kind of ambiguity is not peculiar to me. While the "I can do no other" kind of guy is admirable, he is also vulnerable to a kind of moral recklessness. Thomas More could not in conscience sign that document that King Henry VIII insisted he sign, and in the end he was decapitated for his integrity. I don't know how that very famous struggle ramified through the England of his time, but I hope that More was at least concerned with what the effects would be. If it were the case that he would be willing to withhold his signature even if that meant that all England would burn, I would find something morally terrible about such a man. "What is so all-fire precious about your honor that a whole people should suffer so that your sense of honor remain unsullied?" My own integrity has kept me from doing a lot of things, mostly to my credit in my own eyes. But I can see in myself a capacity to refrain from getting my own hands dirty because of some inflated sense that I should be above such dealings, where a more truly moral person might make himself more truly the servant of goodness.
When structural elements are treated as bedrock --when fixed rules or principles or virtues are regarded as being good in themselves-- what results is a morality floating on a void. What's so good about it? What is it that's being treated as a good in itself? Promise-keeping, truth-telling, fidelity-to-spouse, law-obeying--- all of these contribute to the good-feeling of human beings in the great majority of circumstances. But what about those instances where the fixed guides of structural morality diverge from the course that leads to the best outcome in terms of the overall quality of experience? It is here that we come to grips with what seem to me the inescapable limitations of all structural morality.
Imagine that one rejects a morality of consequences. Such a rejection means that one will knowingly, and in the name of morality, choose a course whose consequences are worse than what one was in a position to achieve. To justify this, one must have an answer to the question: what is the good that can justify the net sacrifice of human (and other sentient) well-being? I cannot envision a satisfactory answer. If following some fixed rules of morality would, in a particular instance, inflict avoidable injury on creatures that experience suffering and joy, with no countervailing benefit that's also in the experiential realm, how can one have done right? (Is that person moral who would allow "Thou shalt not steal" to prevent her rescuing a starving person from death?) If obedience to any authority --however often otherwise it is a wise and benign authority-- would have the net result of worsening the experiential realm of the sentient community, can there be any sound justification? (Does this "nation of laws" not celebrate the vandalism of the Boston Tea Party?) Where the unwavering practice of specific virtues does not yield any improvements in the realm of felt-experience, how can such conduct be virtuous? (To cite a previous example, if we knew that Thomas More would protect his "integrity" no matter how bitter the consequences for his countrymen, should we think him a hero?) I see no way.
All these moral structures deserve to be honored. But their true merit, I would suggest, must lie in their general tendency to lead to beneficial consequences. We are therefore compelled to choose between two main moral alternatives: that which treats moral structures as good in themselves, though they are not, and though at times they are opposed to the service of goodness; and that which seeks to find in each instance the best way to serve goodness itself, where goodness is understood as necessarily residing in the realm of experience, which requires us to see morality as necessarily aimed toward consequences. The absence of any fixed guide to achieving the best consequences means that a morality of consequences demands of us the exercise of an autonomous and inevitably improvisational moral judgment. One who chooses to obey structural morality only most of the time, must therefore choose when not to obey it, and is therefore on my side of the dividing line. It is the tension around this dividing line that will be at the core of our exploration throughout this work.
<em>Absolutely not.</em>
From the standpoint of the morality of consequences that I am proposing, to treat the elements of any structural morality as "good in themselves" is a kind of moral fetishism. By fetishism I mean treating the instrument as the purpose. A lie may hurt someone, and for that reason be bad. It may corrode the bonds of human trust that our security and fulfillment may depend upon, and be regrettable for that. But a to call a lie bad-in-itself is to give a value to something that is, separate from its impact on feeling creatures, morally like an asteroid striking a lifeless planet in a lifeless universe.
Many moralists have complained about the idea that desirable ends might justify the use of questionable means. But I think it still more difficult to explain how the employment of desirable means can justify the achievement of questionable ends.
Any declaration of a moral "absolute" strikes me as moral fetishism. When the Pope declares something --abortion, for example-- to be an "absolute evil," what does he mean? By absolute, I imagine that he means that no amount of countervailing moral considerations can ever outweigh it. Even if the whole world were to be saved by performing an abortion, it would still not be justified. To admit that it would be justified, would be to make the evil of the abortion less than absolute. If abortion is an absolute evil, we are compelled to let the rest of the world go to hell rather than perform a single one. But what can justify treating a finite thing as infinite, one moral component of a larger picture as so limitless that nothing can outweigh it? I can't see the logic of it.
It's time for me to give some hypothetical ground. I promised that my notion f "consequences" would include all the ramifications of what we do. Now if one posits an afterlife in which adherence to certain rules is rewarded for eternity, and violation of those rules is punished by equally eternal torment in hell, then the whole calculus of consequences to our actions is tilted practically toward the vertical, so that a great many decisions might well slide down into the grooves carved out by a structural morality. Eternal damnation for a single soul will weigh heavily against such finite matters as a hundred people being burned in a barn or shipped off to Auschwitz. That is not my own assessment of how in fact the consequences of our actions ramify, but I recognize that I could be wrong, and that someone who calculates on that basis will come to very different moral decisions than I.
But about that, I will make two points. First, that this is still consistent with my overall point in this chapter about the necessity of our orienting our morality in terms of the consequences of our action. And it is still a matter of understanding good consequences in terms of the felt-experience of sentient creatures. And second, that if the universe is ruled by a Being that rewards and punishes for an eternity according to our observance of such structural rules, that doesn't prove that those rules are good. Accommodating to rules, I would suggest, that might damn us for, say, lying to or killing a Nazi SS man to defend the innocent, I would place under the heading of "What's the best way of conducting ourselves in a universe ruled not by an all-good God, but rather someone more like Saddam Hussein?"
But if we suppose, as I indeed do, that our concern should be with the goodness that is visible to us in this world, and that a good God would want the quality of his creatures' experience to be good, then the structural elements of a morality cannot reasonably be treated as absolutes. Even the best of rules can only serve as general guides that are less than adequate simplifications of a profoundly complex human reality.
Our best structural moral principles are wonderful achievements. I will concede that they are usually good to follow. My only point is that they are not always good to follow. Thus they are not moral absolutes. My quarrel is with those who claim that they are, who equate them with goodness itself. I would not quarrel with a person who, conceding the occasional divergence between structural morality and the most moral course of action, takes the position: "Since I can't tell which are the exceptions, I'll follow the rules, acting 'as if' they're moral absolutes, but knowing that sometimes I'll do the wrong thing."
My Kantian friend quotes to me Kant's famous Categorical Imperative. "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." But why such a maxim should command great respect among moral philosophers escapes me. It seems to reduce human complexities to useless oversimplifications. My interlocutor is employing this Categorical Imperative in support of the idea that it is always morally wrong to lie. What kind of world would it be if everyone always followed the maxim I would be following in telling the Nazi the falsehood that I have claimed I would tell with a perfectly clear conscience? I agree with him that I would not want to legislate lying as a universal law. But I deny that I am acting according to any such maxim. To suggest that I am, I argue, is a terrible oversimplification.
In the case of the faithful wife, to follow blindly the invariant rule imposes costs on her --costs that are not offset by any benefits to anyone else-- which I would regard as a kind of personal tragedy. For that woman, I only hope that life never deals her that particular card that her morality gives her no way of discarding. But, as one would expect with the workings of probability, such cards do get dealt, and one hears of such personal tragedies, when someone's rigid attachment to a structural way of thinking about morality condemns a person to a life of suffering unnecessarily.
But there are also situations where it is other people who suffer the consequences of a person's making a moral fetish of observing a rule. What if I said to the Nazi, "I cannot tell a lie --it would be morally wrong for me to do so-- yes I do know where they are hiding," would I then be a "good" person? To me that course of action would appear, rather, as a monstrous form of self-indulgence. Morality, I suggested earlier, is supposed to act as a counterforce to what we may surmise is a tendency to give excessive weight to our own selfish concerns. But a morality that bids us to observe certain rules whatever their cost, or that directs us to cultivate some image of "good character" without regard to consequences, is in danger of being not a morality but a dressed-up form of selfishness.
I find very appealing the image of the hero as the man-of-good-character, the one who stands on principle. But not all of that appeal is to the part of me that is really devoted to goodness. That part of myself that is self-centered is also involved in that attachment I have to the ideal of "character." And I think that kind of ambiguity is not peculiar to me. While the "I can do no other" kind of guy is admirable, he is also vulnerable to a kind of moral recklessness. Thomas More could not in conscience sign that document that King Henry VIII insisted he sign, and in the end he was decapitated for his integrity. I don't know how that very famous struggle ramified through the England of his time, but I hope that More was at least concerned with what the effects would be. If it were the case that he would be willing to withhold his signature even if that meant that all England would burn, I would find something morally terrible about such a man. "What is so all-fire precious about your honor that a whole people should suffer so that your sense of honor remain unsullied?" My own integrity has kept me from doing a lot of things, mostly to my credit in my own eyes. But I can see in myself a capacity to refrain from getting my own hands dirty because of some inflated sense that I should be above such dealings, where a more truly moral person might make himself more truly the servant of goodness.
Imagine that one rejects a morality of consequences. Such a rejection means that one will knowingly, and in the name of morality, choose a course whose consequences are worse than what one was in a position to achieve. To justify this, one must have an answer to the question: what is the good that can justify the net sacrifice of human (and other sentient) well-being? I cannot envision a satisfactory answer. If following some fixed rules of morality would, in a particular instance, inflict avoidable injury on creatures that experience suffering and joy, with no countervailing benefit that's also in the experiential realm, how can one have done right? (Is that person moral who would allow "Thou shalt not steal" to prevent her rescuing a starving person from death?) If obedience to any authority --however often otherwise it is a wise and benign authority-- would have the net result of worsening the experiential realm of the sentient community, can there be any sound justification? (Does this "nation of laws" not celebrate the vandalism of the Boston Tea Party?) Where the unwavering practice of specific virtues does not yield any improvements in the realm of felt-experience, how can such conduct be virtuous? (To cite a previous example, if we knew that Thomas More would protect his "integrity" no matter how bitter the consequences for his countrymen, should we think him a hero?) I see no way.
All these moral structures deserve to be honored. But their true merit, I would suggest, must lie in their general tendency to lead to beneficial consequences. We are therefore compelled to choose between two main moral alternatives: that which treats moral structures as good in themselves, though they are not, and though at times they are opposed to the service of goodness; and that which seeks to find in each instance the best way to serve goodness itself, where goodness is understood as necessarily residing in the realm of experience, which requires us to see morality as necessarily aimed toward consequences. The absence of any fixed guide to achieving the best consequences means that a morality of consequences demands of us the exercise of an autonomous and inevitably improvisational moral judgment. One who chooses to obey structural morality only most of the time, must therefore choose when not to obey it, and is therefore on my side of the dividing line. It is the tension around this dividing line that will be at the core of our exploration throughout this work.
<em>Absolutely not.</em>
From the standpoint of the morality of consequences that I am proposing, to treat the elements of any structural morality as "good in themselves" is a kind of moral fetishism. By fetishism I mean treating the instrument as the purpose. A lie may hurt someone, and for that reason be bad. It may corrode the bonds of human trust that our security and fulfillment may depend upon, and be regrettable for that. But a to call a lie bad-in-itself is to give a value to something that is, separate from its impact on feeling creatures, morally like an asteroid striking a lifeless planet in a lifeless universe.
Many moralists have complained about the idea that desirable ends might justify the use of questionable means. But I think it still more difficult to explain how the employment of desirable means can justify the achievement of questionable ends.
Any declaration of a moral "absolute" strikes me as moral fetishism. When the Pope declares something --abortion, for example-- to be an "absolute evil," what does he mean? By absolute, I imagine that he means that no amount of countervailing moral considerations can ever outweigh it. Even if the whole world were to be saved by performing an abortion, it would still not be justified. To admit that it would be justified, would be to make the evil of the abortion less than absolute. If abortion is an absolute evil, we are compelled to let the rest of the world go to hell rather than perform a single one. But what can justify treating a finite thing as infinite, one moral component of a larger picture as so limitless that nothing can outweigh it? I can't see the logic of it.
It's time for me to give some hypothetical ground. I promised that my notion f "consequences" would include all the ramifications of what we do. Now if one posits an afterlife in which adherence to certain rules is rewarded for eternity, and violation of those rules is punished by equally eternal torment in hell, then the whole calculus of consequences to our actions is tilted practically toward the vertical, so that a great many decisions might well slide down into the grooves carved out by a structural morality. Eternal damnation for a single soul will weigh heavily against such finite matters as a hundred people being burned in a barn or shipped off to Auschwitz. That is not my own assessment of how in fact the consequences of our actions ramify, but I recognize that I could be wrong, and that someone who calculates on that basis will come to very different moral decisions than I.
But about that, I will make two points. First, that this is still consistent with my overall point in this chapter about the necessity of our orienting our morality in terms of the consequences of our action. And it is still a matter of understanding good consequences in terms of the felt-experience of sentient creatures. And second, that if the universe is ruled by a Being that rewards and punishes for an eternity according to our observance of such structural rules, that doesn't prove that those rules are good. Accommodating to rules, I would suggest, that might damn us for, say, lying to or killing a Nazi SS man to defend the innocent, I would place under the heading of "What's the best way of conducting ourselves in a universe ruled not by an all-good God, but rather someone more like Saddam Hussein?"
But if we suppose, as I indeed do, that our concern should be with the goodness that is visible to us in this world, and that a good God would want the quality of his creatures' experience to be good, then the structural elements of a morality cannot reasonably be treated as absolutes. Even the best of rules can only serve as general guides that are less than adequate simplifications of a profoundly complex human reality.
Our best structural moral principles are wonderful achievements. I will concede that they are usually good to follow. My only point is that they are not always good to follow. Thus they are not moral absolutes. My quarrel is with those who claim that they are, who equate them with goodness itself. I would not quarrel with a person who, conceding the occasional divergence between structural morality and the most moral course of action, takes the position: "Since I can't tell which are the exceptions, I'll follow the rules, acting 'as if' they're moral absolutes, but knowing that sometimes I'll do the wrong thing."
My Kantian friend quotes to me Kant's famous Categorical Imperative. "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." But why such a maxim should command great respect among moral philosophers escapes me. It seems to reduce human complexities to useless oversimplifications. My interlocutor is employing this Categorical Imperative in support of the idea that it is always morally wrong to lie. What kind of world would it be if everyone always followed the maxim I would be following in telling the Nazi the falsehood that I have claimed I would tell with a perfectly clear conscience? I agree with him that I would not want to legislate lying as a universal law. But I deny that I am acting according to any such maxim. To suggest that I am, I argue, is a terrible oversimplification.
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