Category: moral philosophy

Evil: Remorse and Moral Understanding (Gaita 2)

I am envisioning four or five posts on Raimond Gaita’s book, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2^nd 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.

Evil

I have finally (after more than three months) finished reading Raimond Gaita’s Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2^nd. Edition 2004). It is a dense, brilliant, and in many ways, wise book. It was very much worth reading it slowly—not just because of the intricacy of many of its arguments, but also to give myself time to ponder their implications before hurrying on. The book is, in many ways, a mess; Gaita chases any number of hares and their relevance to his central concerns are often tenuous at best. Plus he is full of prejudices—some of which lead him into taking positions that are egregiously wrong and are simply asserted, not argued for. In addition, he likes to argue against positions others are claimed to have taken without even naming who these mistaken souls are, and having his representation of their views stand as accurate since they don’t get to speak for themselves.

All these flaws are readily forgiven because there is something to stir reflection on just about every page. And now that evil (after the Hamas assault and Israel’s response) is being pondered as it was in the aftermath of 9/11, a book offering its “absolute conception” of that term should be welcome.

On one reading, Gaita’s absolute conception is awfully thin. His starting point (at least as I see it) is to accept the Kantian prescription that there is a non-negotiable obligation to respect the other; that human beings are only to be treated as ends in themselves, never as means to some other end. What Gaita adds is that this obligation is “absolute”—and that philosophers are badly mistaken when they think they can argue their way to making that obligation rational, or binding, or some such substitute for its simply being obligatory.

He presents this first assertion by way of an argument against Kant. Basically, he says it is a travesty of the sort to which only a philosopher could subscribe to think our obligation to help a suffering human being is based on a rationally arrived at conclusion that I could not will that everyone neglect that suffering person (i.e. Kant’s categorical imperative). The direction of obligation runs in exactly the opposite direction. The appeal to me to help that person is direct; it does not go through the detour of a rational calculation (of either a Kantian or a utilitarian—or even a virtue ethics—kind.) I don’t think of what the consequences of my helping will be, or what I owe myself as a rational being, or what action would reinforce my virtuous character. I am called to simply respond to the need of another. That call is absolute. Nothing more to be said.

Except of course there are 300 plus pages of more to be said. But let me first offer some of the ways Gaita strives to express this “absolute” notion of good and evil. This vision of “goodness” is grounded on “the inalienable preciousness or the infinite preciousness of every human being” (xv). “Sometimes I speak of seeing the full humanity of someone” (xv). Moral probity entails “an understanding of the distinctive kind of limit another human being should be to our will” (xix). “When we say that we are treating someone as a means to our ends, we mean that his reality as a human being does not limit our will as it should. Or, to put it more accurately,: it is part of our sense of the reality of another human being, that he be the kind of limit to our will that we express when we say that he must never be treated merely as a means to an end but as an end in himself. We express this more simply when we say we must treat him as a human being. To acknowledge the reality of another human being is to have our will engaged and limited” (278). Gaita is fond of recalling Iris Murdoch’s understanding of the “ethical task” as “seeing the world as it is,” with the primary requirement of “coming to see the reality of another person” (211), which means seeing that person as a “human being” with claims upon us. But an adequate undertaking of that task is not a matter of correct knowledge or correct principles or of following a rational procedure of either observation or decision-making. Rather, it “depends on what we attend to and on the quality of our attention” (269); such qualitative attention is best characterized as “love,” and best understood as “not prompted by love as an investigation might be prompted by curiosity, but . . . [as] itself an expression of love” (211). Goodness is a way of being in the world, a stance of careful (in every sense of the word) attention to all that occupies the world apart from one’s own self, especially attentive care of other humans.

Evil, then, is the failure to acknowledge, and actions that follow upon that failure, the preciousness of the other. A failure to attend to and to care for the other. “Because evil, as I understand it, requires a conception of preciousness violated, and because people can do evil for banal reasons, the concept of evil (that I develop) has little or no place in the characterization of people or their motives. For that reason, people who say that the concept of evil does not help explain the actions of evildoers are right. Sometime, however, appeal to the concept is necessary to characterize adequately people’s responses—the person whose remorse is informed by a sense of his victim was infinitely precious, or a spectator who responds to wrongdoing in a way informed by that same sense” (xxvi).

We might conclude from this statement that Gaita’s whole project is hopelessly abstract since it will not offer any help in solving the “mystery” of evil (i.e. how it is that people can do evil things). But what Gaita does think long and hard about is how people might be brought to “an understanding” of how others are precious or should be a limit on their own will. He calls that realization “moral understanding” and is especially good on how such understanding does not coincide with what most philosophers would understand as “knowledge” or as “justified belief.”

Thus, he wants to reject both sides of the cognitivist/non-cognitivist argument in meta-ethics. To understand the preciousness of other human beings is not like knowing that water is H2O because moral understanding is not definitive or conclusive; it doesn’t end an inquiry but in fact opens one up. How am I to act on that understanding in the almost infinite varieties of my encounters with other people? And the way I do act on that understanding is constitutive of my own character, my own way of living a life. The understanding, and how I act on it, is therefore individuating. I have not gained some general truth in reaching that understanding; I have instead been given the puzzle of how to instantiate the understanding. The ethical “task is one that cannot be completed in the sense of issuing in results that could count of the realisation if its end(s) (291). There is no recipe or formula that answers the relevant questions and gives me a blueprint for how to proceed. I can’t ever “know” all there is to know about how to act ethically. How to live a good life, one that eschews evil, means taking into account at every turn the obligation I have toward treating others as precious. What that means in different circumstances is something I need to discover in the specific instance. And there are other considerations besides avoiding evil that influence my choices about how to live—just as there are different circumstances that offer widely various options for actions that are “good.”

In short, Gaita is arguing that “true” means different things within different discourses or different “conceptual spaces” (a term he likes). His point is derived from Wittgenstein. The cognitive/noncognitive choice is forced upon us by a too rigid positivism; that false choice derives from an overly constrictive account of what counts as “true” or “real.” Either we must join the cognitivist and say that the statement “murder is bad” is “true” exactly in the same was that 2 +2 = 4 is true—or we are trapped into saying that “murder is bad” is not cognitive because it cannot meet that positivist standard of “true.” Appeals to “ordinary language” do no good here; either they are used to say moral assertions come with a claim to truth and thus underwrite “moral realism,”, or to say that people making moral assertions are just in “error” and need philosophers to show them that their truth claims are unjustified. Gaita is surely right (in my humble opinion) to say we should avoid this whole unproductive and wrongly framed debate. The whole empirical tradition from Hume through to Dewey that aspired to articulate moral truths that would be as non-contestable as mathematical ones simply failed to see that the standards of truth internal to the edifice of mathematics could not be transferred wholesale over to the standards of truth for moral statements. The canons of persuasiveness, evidence, argumentation etc. are very different in the two discursive domains.

Of course, Gaita’s “absolute” conception of good and evil means he can look very much like a non-rationalist. That is, he does seem at time to be saying that the preciousness of each human being is not something open to argumentation, to refutation by way of rational or philosophical argument. His final chapter offers a very unconvincing (to me) claim that the moral skeptic cannot be “serious”–and therefore should not be argued with. To argue with the skeptic is to already cede the terms of debate to him. Instead, the “absolute” position of an a-rational or pre-rational preciousness of every human being must hold the floor since no one (Gaita implausibly states) really denies that position. (I will have more to say about this stance in subsequent posts, partly because it returns us, I think, to the “mystery” of evil.)

Oddly in light of this grounding claim about the preciousness of the human being, Gaita insists that his argument is non-foundational. “[My] book is marked, on the one hand, by its strong opposition of fondationalism and, on the other, by its equally strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to the requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human being”(xxii). What he means is that “my affirmation [of preciousness] is as firm and unreserved as it is metaphysically groundless” (xxvii). There is no philosophical demonstration available to prove that each of us is precious—just as there are no conclusive arguments to show that one fails to live a “worthy” human life is one is not “lucid” (a favorite Gaita word) about what one is doing with that life. And there is no ontological claim about the status of human beings apart from how human beings regard (and attend to ) one another. Gaita calls his position “non-reductive humanism” (xxiv); that is, the assertion of human preciousness does not “reduce” to something else. It is absolute in and of itself; self-standing, not resting upon something underneath or more fundamental than itself. Morality, he is claiming, can only rest on this absolute; attempts to ground morality on other bases—reason, consequences, notions of virtue or of flourishing, or some metaphysical reality—obscure what is actually (and awfully, in the fullest sense of that word) at stake: our treating others and ourselves in a way that attends (in the deepest and fullest possible way) to our humanness, which is given to us absolutely (no rationale for why one exists instead of not existing, and no rationale for what humans are capable to doing with that existence they have been given.)

One last point and I am going to leave it for today. The result of all this can seem like Gaita spends much of his book hectoring us (in the fashion of his hero Socrates) for not living up to the full possibilities our humanity affords us. It is true that it would hard to read this book without feeling that one has failed to live up to snuff. The other side of that coin, however, is that Gaita has an inspiring view of what a life worthy of being human could (should) look like. Much of the book plays out this vision of what can seem like super-human virtue. Far better, it seems to me, to take it as inspiring than to respond defensively to its portrait of one’s shortcomings. I will try to take that approach in future posts on the book—even as I am afraid that I will also be arguing at points that he asks more of humans than they are capable of delivering. And following that second line will bring Hamas and Israel back into focus.

Justice and American Politics

I want to open by saying (which will prove ironic in light of what I want to say) that I am currently reading Dante’s Divine Comedy for my sins.

I have elsewhere said that I think the fundamental dividing line between right and left in US politics can be quickly characterized by their different understandings of what justice means. To be blunt: I think this is one of the two or three most cogent and valuable insights I have had in my life. So I violate my usual rule of not repeating myself to express the basic idea again in this post.

It’s not like anything I have ever proposed in print has been taken up by others. But this one insight I do think could be of use, so it disturbs my sangfroid in ways the general disregard for my writings does not.

Here’s the basic idea—and how it relates to Dante. In the Paradiso, Canto 7, Dante is at pains to explain the logic of the Crucifixion. Basically, he says that forgiveness of an offense is not enough. Justice is not served unless there is also “atonement.” Some price must be exacted in order to cancel the debt the offense has created. (These economic metaphors are completely and utterly inescapable once some “payment” is required for having done wrong. Similarly, one cannot avoid talking about “reward” for good deeds when operating within the same paradigm.)

Of course, Dante’s Inferno is the place for individualized atonement—and Dante can barely conceal his glee that the big reprobates have to pay the price forever. No atonement can suffice in their case. The Crucifixion is about atonement for original sin, for the whole mass of human sins. Canto 7 explains why only the suffering of Christ could erase that stain. God can’t just forgive mankind its misdeeds. (Of course, it’s easy to ask “why not?” And it won’t surprise you that Dante’s answer to that question is tortured and not very convincing. His answer: humans, via Adam’s sin, had fallen from the perfection with which they were created. Being imperfect, humans could not themselves restore their perfection. Only God could do that–and he could only do it be becoming human himself and “atoning” for Adam’s sin by suffering death by Crucifixion. And answer that raises more questions than it answers–in my humble opinion.)

When it comes to individualized punishment in hell, Dante is usually a bit too human to rejoice in the sufferings endured by those he encounters, but he has no doubt of the justice of their being there, as stated (among other instances) in lines 10-12 of Canto 15 of the Paradiso. “It is well the he grieve without end who, for love of a thing that does not last eternally, divests himself of that other love” (where the “other love” is the love for and of God, a love that does last eternally.) There is just no atonement at all available for some people.

In short, there is always a soupcon of sadism and of self-satisfaction in the justice that motivates the right: people should get what they deserve. So the bad guys should be punished, and the good guys (me!) deserve all the rewards you can pile up. Meritocracy with a vengeance (quite literally).

The harshness is the point; it cannot be siphoned out to create some sort of “compassionate conservatism.” Even if the paternalism imagined in compassionate conservatism were to be enacted, it would be within the strict limits of the family (i.e. citizenry). Dubya may actually have been a sincerely compassionate guy, a true believer in No Child Left Behind (a noble slogan after all). But the compassion was certainly not going to extend to Afghans or Iraqis. The right is fueled by righteous indignation—and the desire to meet out punishment to those who “deserve” it, while augmenting the spoils divided up among the blessed.

That’s why American conservatism is shot through and through with a certain version of Christianity. Meritocracy—and the outraged sense that taxes take my hard-earned and well-deserved wealth and give it to the unworthy—is just another version of a religion built upon dividing sinners from non-sinners, and equating justice with the sinners getting hell and the non-sinners getting heaven.

Leftists are talking of something altogether different when they talk of justice. Maybe you could torture the left wing notion of justice into the language of “desert.” But the idea centers on what people deserve by the basic fact of being human. What we owe to one another as humans. Some basic set of ways to satisfy fundamental material and psychological/social needs. The things required to render a life worth living. The means to forging a flourishing life. Shame unto the society that begrudges those things to any in its midst. Such a society is unjust.

The left’s idea of justice has some Biblical sources as well (of course). But as Dante’s poem reminds us: ministers of vengeance and cupidity seem to usually have the upper hand in the Christian churches. There are always heathens and heretics at the door—and surely god does not want you to extend a helping hand to them. All that love your enemies stuff is overwritten by the doctrine of god’s eventual justice, of the fact of hell. If even God can’t love wicked humans, but sends them to hell, then there is a definite limit to what enemies you are enjoined to love.

So the two sides talk past one another. The right sees threats, enemies, and (simply in some cases) the undeserving. The reprobate not only bring suffering upon themselves, but it also outrageous if society does not act to punish them, to make them pay for their waywardness. Why leave punishment to the next world when you can get the jump of divine vengeance in this one?

The left (bleeding heart liberals) saves its indignation for the cruelty of a society that treats those it deems unworthy so harshly. Its cries for justice are for society to do right by these neglected souls, not to heap more suffering upon them.

Morality—and the State

In The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), Thomas Nagel writes: “moral requirements have their source in the claims of other persons” (197) and that “the basic moral insight is that objectively no one matters more than anyone else, and that this acknowledgment should be of fundamental importance to each of us” (205).

This seems to me both pretty accurate—and utterly wrong—about what morality is and what it does. Morality, I want to say, is a two-edged sword. And that makes it very hard to decide whether, in the final analysis, morality is a good thing or a bad one. Does it do more harm than good in the world? I don’t think that is an easy question to answer.

Why? Because morality attempts to order the relationships among people—and between people and other inhabitants of the globe. What is the right way to interact with others? What attention, consideration, and resources do I owe to others—and they owe to me? What actions and attitudes do I find admirable, even worthy of imitation as well as esteem? What actions and attitudes, all things considered, make things go better in this sublunary world—reduce suffering, promote happiness and flourishing? It is unthinkable that humans would not ponder such questions—and attempt to provide answers. Nagel seems to think that if we ponder these questions—taking into consideration the claims of others and our own claims on others—that we will, in Kant-like fashion, reach a radical version of egalitarianism. No human matters any more than any other. I cannot make an exception of myself (or of my family, or of my compatriots); I am to be treated the same as everyone else. What I feel due to myself is due to them.

Now Nagel does take seriously Bernard Williams’ objection that Kantian universalism asks something that is not only impossible to achieve, but in actual practice would be fairly objectionable, perhaps even monstrous. Any morality that asks us to treat our mother or our spouse exactly as we would treat everyone else in the world flies in the face of human psychology—and of human flourishing (since rich particularized relationships with a small set of others are essential to flourishing). Nagel’s response is that the “gap” between universalist (“objective” in his terms) morality and personal partiality cannot be closed. It is a tension we must needs live with—and negotiate on a case by case basis.

My concern is rather different. I do think a moral politics looks something like Nagel says it does. “An important task of politics,” he writes, “is to arrange the world so everyone can live a good life, without doing wrong, injuring others, benefiting unfairly from their misfortunes, and so forth. . . [The best would be a world in which] “the great bulk of impersonal claims were met by institutions that left individuals . . . free to devote considerable attention and energy to their own lives and to values that could not be impersonally acknowledged” (206-207). In other words, a social democracy that served the resource needs of all while regulating against exploitation and other forms of special privileges as the public business of politics, while leaving individuals both free and resource-enabled to pursue their individualized, private visions of the good life. Again: a vision premised on the notion that all are equally entitled to the means for flourishing, and that many different versions of how to flourish are to be tolerated.

The problem is that there is a very different view of what morality entails. This other morality is more prescriptive (more restrictive) in its vision of the ways one might choose to flourish—and still be found morally acceptable. Even more crucially, this second “other” morality is not based on a vision of the equality of all. Just the opposite. This morality divides between the worthy and the reprobate—and feels fully justified (in fact finds the grounds for that justification in morality itself) to deny to some what is granted to others. Sinners are not entitled to anything; they deserve nothing, except to be punished. Far from being an equalizer, morality is deployed to be a great divider. It gives us the means to identify those who are not equal, who are not worthy of consideration and respect and a sufficient share of the world’s goods.

In other words, it seems like the height of wishful thinking for Nagel to say that the (objective, impersonal”) view of morality leads to the conclusion that all are equal. It is pretty implausible, it seems to me, that even 25% of humanity holds to that conclusion as a moral demand upon themselves—and, as Williams points out, even that 25% makes exceptions to equal treatment all the time. More obvious is that the vast majority of humans distinguish between worthy and less worthy people—and use morality to both make that distinction and to justify treating the unworthy in various differential ways, ranging from indifference to and lack of sympathy with their troubles to active deprivation and punishment as what they deserve.

This divisive use of morality—accompanied as it often is with a distasteful, sanctimonious self-righteousness—is more than enough to give morality a bad name. Many have argued that morality is the source of more harm to humans than any absence of morality. In morality’s name, we meet out punishment, deprivation, contempt, and hate-filled condemnations.

So what’s the answer? Does morality do any good at all—or should we dispense with it altogether? (Note here that I have loaded the question to the liberal, social democrat side. The practitioner of divisive morality would say it does good; it is fit and proper that we identify sinners and deal with them as they deserve. After all, isn’t justice getting what you deserve, not this namby-pandy liberal idea that everyone is deserving just by the fact of showing up?) In any case, I can only say that the Kantian, equality affirming morality has done good in the world; there has been progress toward increasing equality inspired by that viewpoint. But there is no denying that divisive morality has justified great cruelty and massive exclusions. So we can’t say morality is to be endorsed tout court. It is an ambiguous—and very dangerous—tool that can be used in contradictory ways.

Would we be better off without morality at all, without these attempts to delineate worthy ways of living and of arranging our social relations? I am not prepared to go that far, but I do think we should be wary of any self-congratulation about our tendency to partake of such attempts to use morality to advance the egalitarian thesis. Those attempts (as Nietzsche among others alerts us) might very well be more despicable than otherwise.

Reflecting on these matters led me to realize that much the same can be said about the State. Let me explain. Despite the resistance to this idea in certain leftist circles, I think there is little doubt that States work against pan-violence. The historical record of pre-state societies is one unbroken litany of violence. Hobbes was mostly right: the war of all against all (or, at least, of tribe/clan against neighboring tribe/clan) was endemic. Men strove to grab what other men possessed. (That all this is a pathology of masculinity seems indubitable.) Plunder and rapine were hardly abhorred; they were the source of honor even in Homeric epics that could also register their horror and insist that an unattainable peace would be preferable.

What some deny is that states bring this omnipresence of violence to an end. “War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne proclaimed. And that statement is hardly nonsense. We can say of the Western states formed in the period from 1500 to 1900 that they 1) exported violence/war to the regions that became their “empires”; 2) that they exerted violence (in the form of various types of punishment) on their own domestic populations of criminals, religious and political dissidents, and those deemed mentally or morally deficient; and 3) that they fought one another with astonishing regularity. Periods of peace and security for people trying to live out a normal life-span untainted by violence against them were short and uncertain.

Furthermore, and this is usually the clincher in such arguments, is that (starting with the Napoleonic wars at the very least, but likely true of the earlier religious wars) the organizational powers of centralized states meant that violence was carried out at a scale impossible for the clashes between clans/tribes characteristic of pre-Columbian America, pre-monarchy in Scotland, or in various locales of the Middle East before the rise of the Ottoman Empire (to take just a few examples).

The State, in other words, is also double-faced: it suppresses one kind of anarchic and ever-present violence, the outright kleptocracy of pre-state conditions. But in its gathering the means of violence to itself (partly as a way to cow other actors into non-violence) it periodically (and with depressing regularity) deploys that violence with results (in terms of deaths, suffering, and destruction) that dwarfs pre-state violence. So the state, like morality, seems both a pathway to peace and forms of society that allow for peaceful co-existence—and the source of the most horrific violence.

Can you get one without the other? The anarchist dreams that getting rid of the state will eliminate violence altogether as we live in ways that realize our mutual dependence on one another. The Kantian dreams of a perpetual peace if only we can have one super state (thus eliminating in one fell stroke wars of one state against another and the violence of pre-state societies). Like morality, the state delivers something that is good (control over omnipresent violence) and something terrible: the infliction of violence on vast numbers.

And there is more than just an analogy between that state and morality on the level of their doubleness. There is also a clear connection in that both work to designate those who are legitimate targets of differential treatment—reaching all the way to killing them. The reprobate for morality are the non-citizens for the state (even as the state will also treat citizens deemed reprobate differentially).

I sometimes think it all comes down to punishment. Both morality and the state identify those who should be punished. These people deserve punishment, are worthy of being punished. When it comes to the state, the justification is even more arbitrary than it is for morality. The non-citizen can be legitimately deprived of various things simply on the basis of bad luck. The non-citizen was born elsewhere, so has no claim to the state’s protection or its largesse.

There are multiple ways to configure the assertion that some human being is not entitled to what I have. Morality and that state (through the law and through the category of citizenship) enact that sorting function all the time. It is to a certain extent their raison d’etre. That an alternative morality aims to establish the equal entitlement of all, just as an alternative politics looks to use state power to distribute to all the resources needed to flourish, stands as one justification for holding on to morality and the state as necessary contributors to what this alternative vision wants to accomplish. But it’s such a steep climb because morality and the state are tainted with the ways in which they actively thwart what the social democratic, Kantian vision aims for.