The "neo" in "neo-Manichaean" reflects my idea that sometimes good and evil embrace so tightly in real-life situations as to be hard to distinguish. Order and chaos are quite literally joined in battle so as to create a zone of fecund evolutionary change, the "edge of chaos." As a result, not only is chaos sometimes benign — the weather over the long term is a chaotic system, after all — but there is such a thing as too much order.
Those are my metaphysics. My stance on good and evil is more or less one of moral relativism.
Moral relativism stands in contradistinction to moral absolutism. I'll contrast the two with reference to a book I'm reading, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart.
Beinart writes (p. 121ff.) of how today's political conservatives don't want to fight terrorism by using foreign aid to attack economic root causes such as too little funding for public schools in many Arab and Muslim countries. Too many young people in the Muslim world are educated in religious madrasas, where some are taught jihadism. Yet American conservatives object to funneling U.S. tax dollars into aid to institutions abroad that would undercut totalitarianism.
Why the objection? One big reason, says Beinart (p. 121), is that such a policy
... shifts blame from the terrorists themselves, and thus threatens the quality conservatives cherish most: moral clarity. As conservative commentator William Bennett has written, the question "shouldn't we work on getting rid of the poverty and oppression that are the root causes of terrorism" bespeaks a "want of clarity about the difference between good and evil."
After 9/11, writes Beinart (p. 133):
Bernard Lewis, the eminent Arabist who became the Bush administration's leading guide to the Muslim world, explained that in the jihadists' view, "the United States had become morally corrupt, socially degenerate, and in consequence, politically and militarily enfeebled." And conservatives found that argument compelling because it matched their own deep fears about American society. They too saw the Clinton administration's foreign policy weakness as the product, ultimately, of its moral weakness — a weakness they feared had seeped into the marrow of American life. Beneath the superficial novelty of America's terror war lurked the same old conservative fears. Could America match the absolute confidence of its fanatical foes? Had liberalism produced a nation of relativists, unable to distinguish good from evil? The religion of non-judgementalism ... has permeated our culture, encouraging a paralysis of the moral faculty," wrote William Bennett, in a book titled Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. "We have been caught with our defenses down — our intellectual and moral defenses as much as our physical ones."
Hence, Bennett is a moral absolutist. As a relativist, I don't agree that we're in a moral morass if we don't see the world purely in black and white. That is the basis of my moral relativism.
Beinart speaks of the moral absolutism of conservatives as making the achieving of "moral clarity" or "moral purity" job number one our fight against terrorism. Accordingly, don't attack anything but terrorism itself, say the moral purists. Home in on that which is purely and unremittingly evil, and fight that.
Moral relativists such as I say that's too simplistic. The real world is ineluctably complex. Sometimes you have to fight evil using subtle, nuanced strategies that lack ideal moral clarity.
I'll come back to the topic of moral relativism later on in this post, when I will investigate it more thoroughly as a philosophical position.
Meanwhile, some words on the basic ideas of "good" and "evil." I am also reading the new book by Francis Collins, the scientist who headed the Human Genome Project. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is Collins' testimony that his love for science and his faith in God are not irreconcilable.
Collins began life indifferent to religion, moved into agnosticism and outright atheism in his college years, then in his mid-twenties started to take the "God hypothesis" seriously. He began to be convinced by the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis that humans are universally guided by a Moral Law or "law of right behavior" (p. 22ff.). We have trouble sticking by it or discerning how it applies to particular situations, but we all have an inner sense of right and wrong that is common to all members of our species in all cultures, places, and times.
Collins says that our innate, shared human moral sense could only derive from inside us and thus bespeaks a God. Collins argues that no strictly scientific explanation, based on Darwinian evolutionary pressures or anything else, suffices to explain what Lewis called our uniquely human love for agape (ah-GAH-pay) or selfless altruism. Collins identifies our notion of true selflessness as the basic kernel of the whole concept of goodness.
I'm not wholly convinced by Collins' argument alone, which I feel could be a bit more rigorous, but I note that it goes along with something I've just read in an old college textbook, an introduction to philosophy. In the section on moral judgments, one of the book's authors points out that "the most influential writer on ethics during the last fifty years," G.E. Moore — the book I have is now over thirty years old — found a way to prove that "good" cannot really be defined.
There are some words, Moore showed, that are not meaningless but can be explained only by pointing to instances of what they convey: words like "yellow" or "bitter" or "pleasure" ... or "good." These words are all incapable of being analyzed into simpler concepts. "Yellow" and "bitter" refer to natural phenomena that are of the senses. "Pleasure" and "anger" and "fear" are natural but introspective. "Good," however, is not strictly sensory or introspective, since it is not "natural" to begin with; it is instead a "non-natural" quality.
Our capacities for pleasure, anger, and fear, Collins would argue, are natural inasmuch as they derive from evolutionary processes. But our capacity for moral judgment is by this same reasoning non-natural, just as Moore said.
Now for the further discussion I promised on moral relativism. I have a second book, this one titled Ethics and Metaethics, from 1963. Ethics or morality asks questions about how specific human actions are to be evaluated, and metaethics or metamorality asks whether, and how, such ethical/moral issues can in fact be settled, once and for all.
The book has a section on "Right Action," whose introduction by the book's author, Raziel Abelson, suggests to me that what I above called my "moral relativism" may be a misnomer. My position may actually be one of "intuitionist absolutism."
Abelson presents five readings in this section of his book, whose subtitle is Readings in Ethical Philosophy. They alternate between absolutism and relativism. The religious absolutism of Anglican Bishop Robert C. Mortimer (1902 - ?) leads off the parade with an assertion that an act is right if and only if God commands it. Filtered through "natural law," à la Thomas Aquinas, God's commands are also for Mortimer mediated by personal conscience and church pronouncements.
Mortimer's religious absolutism is challenged by the secular "conventionalism" of Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), who based morality and ethics on something other than an appeal to higher authority. This was in an age when the prerogatives of kings were giving way to the rights of individuals and their voluntary mutual associations. Instead of divine or monarchical fiat, morals and ethics were grounded by Hobbes firmly in society's own laws, customs, traditions, and agreements: "an uncritical conformity to social authority and custom," Abelson says (p. 304). Hobbes' conventionalism was relativist in that moral laws did not derive from anything immutable or absolute; still, they could not be meaninigfully challenged or criticized.
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) sought to derive moral laws from critical appeals to absolute reason, not to absolute divine will. He "was a devout Pietist and regarded Christianity as the highest moral ideal, but he made ethics more fundamental than theology" (p. 306). For Kant, "logical consistency [is] the single standard of what is right." Thus, "the single condition that qualifies a rule of conduct as a moral law is that it be logically possible to want every rational being to want to follow it under any conditions" (pp. 306-7, my italics).
Kant's rational absolutism was challenged by the utilitarian relativism of John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), who says that which is morally right is such because it produces the most pleasure, or alleviates the most pain, for the most people. Ethics derive, that is, from worldly situations. But Mill's utilitarian relativism doesn't explain why (among other things) "we feel that actions such as breaking a promise are wrong, even when we are sure that they produce more pleasure than pain" (p. 308).
Thus we come to the intuitionist absolutism of W.D. Ross (1877 - ?). Why is is wrong to cause unnecessary pain, intuitionists (or "deontologists") ask of utilitarians? Why right to alleviate suffering? Ross and other intuitionists "maintain that the rightness or wrongness of an action cannot be inferred from any other facts, but must be recognized directly and immediately, as a self-evident feature of the action itself" (p. 309).
That seems to accord with my own ideas — which surprises me, since intuitionism is classified as an absolutist position. True, it doesn't appeal to divine commandment or to Kant's reasoned "respect for universal law" as the bedrock of moral judgment, but only to the highly abstract notion that whatever is right is right in itself. We must ultimately rely on our personal intuitive faculties to recognize what that right action is.
"There is no simple or easy answer" to the question of how we are to decide which of our moral duties are "absolute" and which are merely prima facie, according to the intuitionist view (pp. 310-311). Though we have a prima facie duty to keep our promises, that duty can be overruled under special circumstances, such as if we have promised to meet a friend for some trivial reason and an opportunity arises to alleviate some great suffering, at the cost of breaking our promise.
"The relative weights of our various duties," Abelson writes (p. 311), "develop slowly through the accumulated experience and wisdom of mankind, and are matters of intuitive recognition." They can thus appear as self-evident to us; or, failing that, we can sharpen our moral intuition by "consult[ing] those of greater moral sensitivity and wisdom, to whom right and wrong are intuitively clear."
To me, when you start talking about the "relative weights" of various moral duties, you're very close to being a relativist. Indeed, per Abelson, "The intuitionist view as stated by Ross combines the merits of relativism with the merits of rational absolutism" (p. 311). Absolute duties are independent of circumstances, while prima facie duties are indeed situational.
Yet, whither objectivity? There's the rub, with intuitionism. How can our moral obligations be justified with reference to something other that the inner workings of our own minds?
W.R. Ross sidesteps this cavil by likening our prima facie duties to mathematical axioms such as 2 + 2 = 4, the truth of which become self-evident at some point in our intellectual development. Yet, crucially, our axiomatic prima facie obligations are unlike our mathematical axioms in that they fail to make the results they tend toward absolutely obligatory:
... no mathematical object (no figure, for instance, or angle) ever has two characteristics that tend to give it opposite resultant characteristics, while moral acts often (as everyone knows) and indeed always (as on reflection we must admit) have different characteristics that tend to make them at the same time prima facie right and prima facie wrong; there is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without doing harm to someone else, and vice versa. (W.D. Ross, "Right Action," p. 374)
According to Ross, what our actual or absolute duty is in any given situation is determined by weighing the prima facie rights and wrongs of all the moral elements which make up the situation, no one of which is by itself determinative. If our conscientious decision to act causes us to shortchange one of our prima facie obligations, we naturally feel a sense of compunction and do whatever is necessary to seek forgiveness or make amends afterwards. At the same time, however, we need feel no "shame or repentance" (p. 371).
For this reason, I would prefer to call intuitionist absolutism something else. Most absolutists are like Kant, as characterized by Ross: they say "that there are certain duties of perfect obligation, such as those of fulfilling promises, of paying debts, of telling the truth, which admit of no exception whatever in favour of duties of imperfect obligation, such as that of relieving distress" (p. 369). For the intuitionist, "duties of imperfect obligation" can outweigh "duties of perfect obligation." Sometimes, relieving distress takes primacy over moral punctilio. I'd call that relativistic. It's "situation ethics."
Abelson points out (p. 312) that religious absolutism, conventionalist relativism, rational absolutism, utilitarian relativism, and intuitional absolutism form a progression:
Religious absolutism generalizes from the rudimentary moral consciousness of the small child, who identifies right with whatever his parent [i.e., God as Father] commands. Conventionalism or cultural relativism expresses the next stage of development in the child, when he becomes aware of social authority outside his home. Kantian rational absolutism recognizes the authority of individual reason which the child, on reaching maturity, employs in criticizing both parental and social authority. But no matter how well developed his reason may be, a person cannot discover the best rules of life without enough experience to predict the consequences of his actions for himself and for others. Utilitarianism brings attention to the need for this practical wisdom in evaluating rules of conduct. Finally, intuitionism points out duties and obligations independent of one's own welfare and even of the common good, and expresses the moral consciousness of the cultivated and mature man, so deeply committed to his moral principles that he no longer needs a practical motive for following them. This unwavering committment to a moral code expresses a very high level of moral consciousness. But the actual code of conduct to which the moral individual is committed may vary from one social environment to another. Consequently, intuitionism does not provide a final answer to the question, "What is right action, and how can we prove it to be right?" ... .
At this stage of the evolution of my own moral consciousness, I'd say I'm an intuitionist who doubts that that question can ever be settled, once and for all, except by an appeal to prima facie axioms of right and wrong.
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