I am envisioning four or five posts on Raimond Gaita’s book, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2004). This is the second of those posts.
The topic today (and in at least one subsequent post) is how Gaita thinks one might achieve moral understanding, where that understanding is 1) a realization of the other’s preciousness (with the corollary of understanding evil as treating a person in a way that violates his/her preciousness) and 2) not a kind of knowledge, i.e. not a fact owned as an intellectual possession (the way I know that Paris is the largest city in France), but instead is experienced as an orientation, a fundamental disposition, that infuses everything I think and do and feel. It is primary and absolute, the most important determinant of how I am in the world, of how I treat others, and of how I understand myself.
Since it is obvious that many people lack that understanding, that they treat others as mere things, there must be some way to think about how one might be moved from dispositional states that enable evil deeds (where evil is defined as mistreating others either physically or psychologically.) James Baldwin speaks in his essay “Equal in Paris” of those for whom “the pain of the living is not real.” Gaita associates evil with exactly the sort of imaginative lack that Baldwin notes. We might, following Wittgenstein, call this failure “aspect blindness.” Evil is done by those who blind themselves, either willfully or involuntarily, to the reality of the other person as fully human, fully capable of the kinds of pain, aspirations, goodness, and worth as myself. One way that Gaita expresses this idea is to say moral understanding recognizes the other “as an intelligible object of someone’s love” (146). {I will, inspired in part by Baldwin, want to talk about “hate” presently.}
Gaita offers three ways in which someone who lacks that imaginative grasp of the other as fully human might come to understand it. 1) Remorse; 2) example of goodness; 3) “conversation.” I will be examining each of these in turn. From the outset, let it be noted that stated baldly each of these looks remarkably feeble. How could they even remotely be up to the task? But think about the usual recourses in efforts to “convert” the perpetrator of evil. Here’s the four I can think of.
1)Moral injunctions, stated either as commandments or principles.
2) Legal constraints, i.e. sets of strictures that attempt to establish guardrails against various kinds of behavior deemed unacceptable/harmful, underwritten by sanctions against those who trespass against those strictures.
3) Persuasion via rational argumentation (i.e. moral philosophies that set out to “demonstrate” by one means or another) that evil is bad, so you shouldn’t do it.
4)Violent coercion, either through various forms of punishment (exile, confinement [prison], ostracism, or corporeal harm) or through extermination (execution, war).
The limits of #3, persuasion, are all too obvious. #4, Violence, doesn’t so much address the conversion issue as conclude, despairingly, that no conversion is possible, so evil doers must not be tolerated and should be punished—with the well known effect that violence becomes reciprocal and escalates. Violence does not solve anything; it just leads to more violence. #2, legal constraints, are an attempt to structure coercions in ways that stop short of violence in at least some cases (where voluntary compliance can be achieved for the vast majority) and to establish safeguards against arbitrary exercises of power. The “rule of law” is not to be sneezed at; in a highly imperfect world, the law is about the best expedient we have come up with to reign in some of human beings’ worst impulses/failings. The chaos endemic to “failed states” makes the achievements of legal realms precious. But the ability—and endless efforts—of people to twist the law to their own advantage means that it is very hard to credit the law with the kinds of “moral understanding” that Gaita aspires to. The law is always only a “second best,” a prudent response to the despairing conclusion that humans are everywhere prone to evil and that we need to safeguard against that proclivity. And it prove a tricky task, one that is very often not successfully achieved, to keep the law from being simply a disguised and apparently more “civil” version of violence. The link between the law and punishment is the bridge from the legal to the violent. Finessing that connection is difficult indeed–especially for someone, like me, who wants to believe that the law does not necessarily reduce to violence, that it can have a legitimacy and an efficacy separate from its deployment of violence in certain instances. Finally, #1, moral injunctions (whether arrived at through philosophical reasoning such as found in Kant or Bentham, or announced as commandments that come from on high) hardly seem very effective when weighed against the atrocities of human history. Ages of faith (such as the Middle Ages are sometimes claimed to be) hardly seem more free of abuses of fellow humans by the faithful than ages deemed decadent because obedience to divine commandments is lacking. No set of beliefs in either principles developed by moral philosophy or in commandments proffered by religion seems to insure virtue or to prevent doing grevious harm to others. As is often noted, such principles and commandments are all too often used to justify harming others–as heretics, reprobates, or not fully human.
In short, Gaita’s list of transformative possibilities only looks excessively feeble if we have some exalted (and, to my mind, unrealistic) idea of other possible means of moving the evil-doer to goodness. It is certainly worth noting that Gaita’s bias here is very individualistic. His antipathy to “principle” and to rationalist arguments means that he is uninterested in general remedies, eschewing (quite explicitly) what might be called “systematic” or “overarching” approaches.
This individualistic bias is, in fact, central to his whole approach to morality. The preciousness of the other can only, for Gaita, be experienced meaningfully in the individual instance. We experience (understand) humanity’s preciousness only through the encounter with an individual we recognize as precious. He has no truck with generalized sentiments about universal brotherhood or loving all human kind. He deems those notions “sentimental” and is scathing throughout his book about the delusional, self-deceiving, and non-lucid fatuities of sentimentalism. (See pages 306-307).
Remorse is absolutely central to Gaita’s whole book because it focuses in on the individual—both the individual who does the harm and the individual who has been harmed. Remorse generates moral understanding through the lens of the individual experience of having done harm and now feeling remorseful about it. “Remorse teaches us what it is to wrong another. I would put the point more generally like this. . . . It [remorse] discloses the fundamental determinant of our understanding of what it is to be a human being. It is fundamental because it radically transforms what conditions it. What it is to be a friend, what it is to be a husband, what it is to be a lover, what it is to be a respondent to another’s call to seriousness—these are transformed under the shock of what a human being is disclosed to be in serious remorse” (151).
My first reaction to this passage is to summon up a word Gaita never uses: vulnerability. What makes a human precious, or at least what Gaita terms an “immediately intelligible object of remorse,” is the fact of how vulnerable that human is to being hurt (by what I or another might do). The “condition” that remorse causes to come dramatically into view is that susceptibility to being hurt. Humans are fragile creatures—and evil is taking advantage of that fragility, sometime for reasons of gaining certain advantages, and sometimes for the sheer pleasure of harming another. Remorse is being repulsed by the vision of the hurt one has caused. That vision brings home the fact of the other’s vulnerability—and, thus (in Gaita’s view), not only a reaction against my having exploited that vulnerability, but also a more general recognition of the “condition” of vulnerability I share with all other humans. Some essential element (“fundamental” Gaita says) has been “disclosed” through this individual experience of remorse.
“When we ask what makes . . . an obligation a moral obligation–then I think we should seek at least some part of the answer in the kind of elaboration we give when we express most seriously our sense of what it means to wrong someone. Nowhere is that sense more sober than in lucid remorse. ‘My God what have I done. How could I have done it?’ Those are the typical accents of remorse. They do not (I argue) express an emotional reaction to what one has done, but a pained, bewildered–or perhaps, better, incredulous–realisation of the full meaning of what one has done” (xxi). My italics–because I want to return to these issues of “meaning,” “lucidity,” and “seriousness” in subsequent posts. For now, I just need to highlight that remorse entails a “realisation” of 1) what doing wrong to another means and 2) a recognition that I am the one who did this wrong.
Gaita places a huge emphasis on the way that remorse is connected to “haunting.” “One way of characterising remorse in its difference from some other moral reactions is to say that it is possible only over what has the power to haunt us. That power is a certain kind of individuality . . . . [It would] be a form of her humanity becoming manifest to him, of his seeing her as ‘another perspective on the world’ (in the sense in which we use that expression to remind ourselves, and others, of the reality of another human being)”.(157). The concrete example (which explains the use of the pronoun “her”) is of a man who has raped a woman. Remorse would entail his being “haunted” by that rape—and would entail her now being “manifest to him” as another human being. Similarly, Gaita returns several times to the idea of a murderer being “haunted” by his victim. “A murderer’s remorse is as it is because he murdered a human being, but in order for him to understand that, his victim must remain with him in his distinctively human individuality, for that is what it is to be a human being in any sense that makes the murder of a human being an immediately intelligible object of remorse. . . . He is haunted by the particular being that he murdered” (149; 148).
What can we say about this “haunting”? It is all so Dickensian, conjuring up pictures of Jonas Chuzzlewit in the throes of the maddening aftermath of committing murder. Are murderers and rapists really haunted by their misdeeds—and, even more to the point, by their victims? I suspect, in the case of rape at least, that the victim is much more likely to be haunted by the crime than its perpetrator. Is PTSD triggered by having killed—or by having been wounded or by having been a witness to the killing of one’s comrades? I mean this as an open question. But it is one that has Socratic implications (to be explored in subsequent posts) because Gaita is deeply committed to–and tries to explain as best he can–the Soctratic claim that it is worse to do evil than to suffer evil. Some kind of “haunting” (the exact nature of which I will need to tease out) appears necessary to this notion that the consequences of doing evil are dire.
Maybe worrying about the absence of any haunting in so many case just points to the obvious fact that many fail to achieve moral understanding, they (I) never have the full reality of another human being come home to them. And, of course, being haunted by the harm one did to one’s spouse is quite different from being haunted by the harm one did to someone deemed (by whatever line of reasoning) an “enemy.” Remorse—and its concomitant haunting—is all too rare. To rely on it to combat evil seems a forlorn hope.
Yet. What can bring home to anyone the realization that doing harm to another is repugnant? Gaita will spend lots of time thinking about the harm one does to oneself when inflicting harm on others, the Socratic position. I will get to that. But for today I want to end with two final considerations.
First, Gaita usefully distinguishes between regret and remorse. In my own case, I can illustrate this by saying I have no regrets about the end of my first marriage. In every imaginable way, I think that my not remaining married to my first wife was a good thing for both of us. I have no regrets at all that we ended up divorced. But I am full of remorse for the pain I caused her as we made our way toward that divorce. I don’t know how I could have avoided causing her that pain, but I hate the fact that I did cause it. Am I haunted by the image of the “me” who inflicted that pain and by the image of the “she” who was its victim? That seems a fair characterization of the way those memories inhabit me. Am I more haunted by the harm I did than she is by the memory of the harm done to her? I sure hope so (but have no way of knowing since I have had no contact with my ex-wife since our divorce.) Has my remorse increased my “moral understanding” or made me a better person? I would say that it is hardly in my hands to answer that question. I certainly would like to think it has influenced how I have behaved in my second marriage. But I would hardly claim that it transformed me wholesale. I still have fallen into habitual patterns of relating to my partner that are harmful—and not radically different from ways I interacted with my first wife. All of which might only be a way of saying that transformation is hard, is rarely (ever?) very radical, and that our tendency toward evil (toward a failure to imagine the other as a full-bore human being) is always there and always very difficult to overcome. Transformation, especially imagined as located in one epiphanic moment, an eclat, seems to me more the stuff of theater (with those Aristotelian moments of recognition and/or reversal) than of how most lives unfold. Remorse is more endemic (at least in my experience) than marking some clear boundary before and after its arrival.
Second, I want to think briefly about hatred. Gaita (inspired particularly by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, both of whom he invokes many times) wants to activate what he calls “the language of love” (119) as a much more adequate way to think about a “moral understanding” of our desirable relationship to others than the vocabularies offered by the various extant moral philosophies (Kant, Bentham, and Aristotle for short). That’s why Gaita gravitates toward Socrates (along with Weil and Murdoch), because Plato places such a strong emphasis on love (in the Symposium obviously, but in other places as well).
What to say then about hatred? Gaita basically doesn’t mention it. Evil for him is blindness to the other’s humanity. But what about an active, hate-generated, desire to harm the other? A desire that might, in fact, revel in the fact of the other’s humanity, since it is precisely the fact of that humanity that makes one’s intended victim so susceptible to harm. I am thinking of torture here in all its possible manifestations. It makes little sense to torture an animal because we don’t have as extensive a sense of the kinds of suffering an animal can experience. (This might very well be a mistaken understanding of the range of animal sensations, but it remains the case—I would argue—that you cannot torture an animal by describing in full detail ahead of time what physical suffering you intend to inflict on him.)
Hatred would seem to rule out remorse, not because you deny to the one you hate full humanity, but because you believe him to be a depraved example of humanity. I have been led to think about hatred because I have been reading James Baldwin, specifically his earliest collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son.” In that collection (all essays written between the ages of 24 and 31), Baldwin openly states that he hates white people and that he hates his stepfather. In fact, Baldwin says, having been turned by racism into a hater is one of the worst things racism did to him. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law” (Notes of a Native Son, 84, Library of America edition of Baldwin’s essays). Baldwin desires to purge himself of hatred (and in later writings after this volume will move to talking a lot about love), but not because of any concern for those he hates—only because of what hatred does to him.
It seems to me, however, that hatred is much easier to explain than evil; hatred is not “mysterious” the way evil can seem to be. Hatred, I would suggest, has three prerequisites: 1) an ongoing injury or harm, 2) lacking the power to either end or otherwise escape that harm being done to one, and, finally, 3) an ability to identify a specific person or persons who is inflicting the harm. (Yes, you can hate someone who has harmed you in the past but no longer has the ability to harm you. But it seems to me that hatred in such a case is unlikely to lead to action. The harmed one has managed to escape the infliction of harm and, thus, can let it go. But I am perhaps very much underestimating the strength of the desire for–and the pleasures of–enacting revenge.)
Despair rather than hatred might best describe the case where the first two requirements are met—i.e. a continuing harm one is powerless to alleviate—but where identifying the perpetrator seems impossible. (I take it this is the case for many of the economically exploited. Who concretely and specifically to blame for having a dead end job that doesn’t pay enough to afford the rent? Who to focus one’s hatred on?)
When there is a focus for the hatred, then inflicting harm can be a pleasure positively to be desired—even if the infliction of harm has little to no chance of alleviating the conditions that generated the hatred. Hence the actions of the suicide bomber or the sadism of ethno-nationalism. The desire to lash out is strong—and can prove to dominate over other desires.
I do think Gaita’s book suffers from neglecting this “positive” incentive (or driver) toward inflicting harm on others. His thinking is dominated by the “negative” driver, by the lack of an imagination capacious enough to recognize the full humanity of the other. But that lack is often willful—or, even more disturbing, not lacking at all. Instead there is a hatred of that other and a fully deliberate decision to take advantage of the other’s sharing the human condition of vulnerability.
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