Personal Virtue and Social Conditions

The blog assignment for this week asks us to think of a morally admirable person and describe the ways his or her virtues are connected to the society in which s/he lives or lived.  The second half of this assignment is especially important, since there is sometimes a tendency to think that virtuous people exist in a sort of cultural and historical vacuum.  In fact, every virtuous person is virtuous because of and in the context of his or her particular experiences -- personal as well as social.

Some people overcome great personal and social obstacles to practice virtue and to help make their society better.  Good examples of such people are members of minority groups, women, and others who suffer social exclusion and/or repression.  Despite lacking access to the same resources as more powerful members of society and experience injustice and often physical and emotional abuse, they do not take the path of anger, bitterness, or virtue but rather astound both their enemies and their allies with their example of virtues such as patience, forgiveness, and generosity.  Martin Luther King Jr. is an outstanding example of this kind of virtue.

Other virtuous people seem to become good not in spite of but because of their social conditions.  Their personal histories, families, economic advantages, and cultural training all equip them to embody certain virtues.  Not everyone succeeds, of course, but some do.  One notable example is England's Queen Elizabeth II, who has served as an example of culturally valued virtues such as courage, patience, and courtesy, particularly during World War II and other crises.

Obviously, neither Martin Luther King nor Queen Elizabeth embody virtues that everyone values, and even those who value those virtues may not agree that these individuals embody them fully.  However, these two examples help us think about a couple of the different ways that social conditions and histories enter into the construction and practice of personal virtues.

Bob's Bugatti and Singer's Ethics

Singer’s argument is simple but challenging:  we are like Bob, the fictional rich guy who values his fancy car over the life of a child.  We'd rather let innocent children die than give up our completely trivial luxuries. 

How can Singer make this argument?  His logic is that we spend money on non-necessary items instead of directing our resources ("throwing the switch") to ways to make life better -- even to make life possible -- for poor people, especially in developing countries.  Singer believes that both individuals and governments should send aid to people in poor areas for famine relief and other urgent problems.

The most common to this argument might be that the little bit that one person can donate won't make much of a difference.  This is not compelling to Singer, since he believes both that every individual has a moral obligation to donate whatever we can and also that the sum total of many small individual donations will add up to significant amounts.  Further, he thinks we should pressure our government to devote more funds to foreign aid, especially for direct relief for victims of famine and other crises.



I think Singer's argument has a lot in its favor, especially because it pushes us to take responsibility for our inaction as well as our action.  Most of the time we don't think we are choosing to let children die, but Singer challenges this assumption and pushes us to make our choices explicit.  Passively standing by while people die (or other bad things happen) is as much a choice as more obvious actions are, according to Singer.  We are not off the hook morally just because we caused a death through our inaction rather than our action.  This is a lesson that can be applied in many areas, not just the problem of hunger in poor nations. 

Singer's argument makes me think of a quote attributed to Dante Alighieri (but probably not really by him).  It suggests that remaining "neutral" is in fact a moral choice, and one that deserves judgment just as more explicit choices do. 

Rules and ethics

The role of rules in ethics is a longstanding debate among philosophers.  It’s often framed in relation to the differences between deontological (Kantian) and consequentialist (Utilitarian) thinkers.  The first group believes that ethics does indeed require rules or general principles, primarily because rules are seen as objective.  They are outside ourselves and our self-interest, at least if they apply equally to all people, the way Kant’s categorical imperative must do.  The categorical imperative says that an action is moral only if it is universalizable: we must be able to want everyone to act in this way.  If that is not true, then the actual or potential action is not ethically good.

(Immanuel Kant)

From the perspective of deontological ethics, rules are indeed necessary because without rules, our moral ideas and behavior might be guided by subjective factors like self-interest, prejudice, loyalty, and the like.  We would not be held to the same standard as others and would try to justify our actions with appeals to principles or foundations that are not really moral.  Rights are a common kind of rule-based ethics. Rights are supposed to be possessed equally by all people in the relevant category (all citizens, all humans, all children, etc.) and cannot be violated. 

Against this position, there are other philosophers who think that ethics does not require rules – and some who criticize rule-based ethics as a false or counter-productive approach to morality.  Some of these point out that rules are always made by a particular person or group of people, and no person can escape his or her subjective perspectives, values, and interests.  To imagine that we can come up with “objective” rules, in this view, is to kid ourselves.  Sometimes, the rules just justify what we think is in our own best interest, or they try to give a “transcendent” and absolute quality to our subjective preferences or even just to something we hope is true but isn’t really.

Some people think that ethics can be a mixture of different kinds of approaches and values – maybe sometimes rules are necessary but they are not all that ethics requires, nor are they the only kind of ethic that matters.  A good example of a mixed ethical model is just war theory, which includes some absolute rules (civilians can never be directly targeted) along with some conseequentialist calculations (you should not go to war unless you have a good chance of winning).  I think that such mixing may be inevitable, or at least helpful, when we try to apply ethics to concrete situations.

The Great American Desert

At first glance, this doesn’t look like an ethics article,  And no matter how many times you glance, or even look carefully, you won’t make a traditional ethical analysis out of Edward Abbey’s love letter to the desert.  However, there’s a reason that Weston included this excerpt here – it makes us think about some of the different ways that values are developed, justified, felt, and expressed, as well as about the different objects or subjects that have value.  Is the desert an object or a subject here?  That is an interesting question – but here I will focus on the questions that Weston poses.

What values does Abbey describe here?  Abbey describes both his own values and the values he thinks that the desert possesses.  Both of these help explain why he loves and appreciates the desert and why he wants to protect it.  At first he describes what is least lovable about the desert – the dangers and inconveniences, discomfort and emptiness.  It turns out that this is also what he finds most lovable about the desert: its radical difference from most of what we value.  It is unfamiliar, strange, not oriented or arranged for human comfort or even human survival.  It is independent and above all wild.

Are these moral values? We could also ask if these are social ethics values – in other words, are they related to human society and collective life?  Is ther emoral value in independent wild nature, including the parts of nature that do not really support human habitation?  Abbey would say yes, I think.  There is something profoundly moral – and not just emotional or aesthetic – in his love for the desert.  By “moral” here I mean values that take us out of ourselves, that can guide us in a way that is not self-interested but rather oriented toward a more general interest.

Can love for nonhuman nature be moral?  Why or why not?  This is the question of whether nature can be a general value – and Abbey certainly thinks it can.  For him, in fact, love of nature might be the most general value of all.  The “silent world” of the desert, with its noxious bugs and extreme temperatures and toxic plants, shows us a world that does not exist for us and that takes us outside our personal and even human self-interest.  As Abbey would say, “That’s why.”

Living through institutions and individual action

Bellah’s chapter on the important role of institutions in our lives reminded me of a recent episode of the radio show This American Life.  The episode “Hot in my Backyard” discusses the increasingly urgent problem of environmental destruction and what we can do to address this issue.  In part 3 of this episode, writer Bill McKibben argues, like Bellah, that individual efforts will not suffice to make real changes in the way we relate towards the environment.  Instead, according to McKibben, the way to go about addressing climate change is to work through political institutions. 

This episode follows the efforts of a college student as she attempts, following McKibben’s suggestions, to disentangle money from oil companies from the rest of her school’s finances.  Although the student is only somewhat successful (she meets a dead end when she confronts the oil companies), making efforts like this known is important, at least if we agree with Bellah’s thesis.  The successes this student and her peers make reveal the possibility for change if we work through institutions.  As Bellah states, “large-scale institutions can and indeed must be better understood, and they are amenable to citizen action and the influence of global public opinion.”  I am still left wondering about the question posed by Dr. Peterson, however.  Are individual actions ever worthwhile?  What does this mean, for example, about individuals’ choices to abstain from eating animal products?  Further, how can we overcome our societal tendency towards individualism in order to take political action (assuming, that is, that political action is most effective when taken by more than one person)?  How can we begin to reorient our perspective so that we live through institutions?

 -- Mary Puckett

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/495/hot-in-my-backyard