Of Ethical Theory

       
       [I am presenting my contributions to theory, philosophical or otherwise, under 

        the  label ‘my contributions’. I would like to get these articles appreciated as 

        well as  critically reviewed by lay-persons & experts too. If convinced I am 

        ready to modify my positions acknowledging the critics.]

Morality can be simply a commitment to conventional dictums or norms into which you happen to be ‘socialized’ in your childhood. Morality is simply telling you as to what you ought to do, what you may do and what you ought not to do. These are enjoining norms, permissible norms and prohibitive norms. Ethics proper equip us with the methods by which we are in a position to evaluate the norms themselves. It is critical and universal while morality may be specific to culture in which we happen to be ‘thrown’ in, at particular era, society, family or peer-group.

My ethic is modernist i.e. neither pre-modernist nor post-modernist. Ethic cannot either be based on science or spirituality, let alone the idea of reducing it to either of these.

Science per se is a-moral and morality per se is non-scientific. When I talk about spirituality I refrain from any super-natural entity-speculations. I will also go on to prove that positing such entities is not a pre-requisite for spirituality. For those others who can not refrain, I see the ethical implications of such speculations rather than ontological status of such entities. Ethic can (at the best) answer ‘what is right’ but that knowledge can not automatically supply the psychic energy required for volition demanded by the  right action. Ethic can not teach you the art of saving energy from wasteful and harmful blame-games. This requires forgiving one-self or others in case of failure (without falling prey to escapism). 

To be good is one thing and maximizing the spontaneity in your goodness is quite another. Spirituality is aimed at the later. However smuggling the ideas required in spirituality into ethics proper is grand highway for escapism. Personal ethic is mainly concerned with voluntary possibilities for an individual. Protecting and enhancing these possibilities however goes in the arena of political ethic.

Project of philosophy is not one of speculatively completing the incomplete causal-knowledge available at given level of progress in science. Deliberations regarding propriety of purpose (telos) is the task of philosophy and not the causal explanations regarding why you happen to be ‘in the situation and of the inclination’ from the point of view of an external observer.  Freedom and Causality are compatible. The subjective experience of  exercising freedom or choosing is immediately given and all have to go through it (rather have grand opportunity of going through it), no matter how far they understand or are informed about causal explanations for ‘what is happening in and around them’ which is not immanent to them. Humans have always been classifying some of their yearnings as ‘temptations’ and some others as ‘duties’ as they saw the urges in immanent form irrespective of what sort of ‘objectivist psychology’ they supposed. (say, ghosts, deities and other incumbents of the pan-animism they believed in.)

Even today the experience of choice does not appear as mechanical or chemical events in genes, neurons or whatever. Dilemmas, anguishes, indulgences, attractions, aversions are belonging to the ethical-dimension, and quite apart from the physical descriptions proposed to causally explaining them.

Philosophical Reductionisms are always dangerous. Pragmatic role of science is marvelous as it is. Philosophical use is dangerous. Danger is very simple. You end up in eliminating the very problem that you originally wanted to solve.   

Prudence: necessary but not sufficient

It is true that in many cases moral conduct does involve, forgoing gains and accepting losses, bearing stress and giving preference to the good of the ‘others’. This self sacrifice however is not the essence of moral conduct but rather a side-product of moral conduct voluntarily borne by ‘Self’ for the sake of moral conduct. As we shall see later, the ethics behind moral conduct is not essentially altruistic, but is rather egoistic at a different level. I must say ‘at a different level’ for, some thinkers try to reduce moral conduct as simply a more intelligent pursuit of self-interest.

While taking this care, I do not intend to denigrate ‘more intelligent pursuit of self-interest’, namely, Prudence. To the contrary I do hold prudence as a virtue. Moral conduct does transcend prudence but in no way condemns it. Rationality in its most primary form lies in choosing most efficient ways of fulfilling a goal, which precisely amounts to prudence. Stopping at this (prudential) level of rationality however is immoral. Of course taking a goal as goal itself is questionable and moral conduct precisely requires, sometimes, refraining from taking a wrong goal as goal. Although prudence is not sufficient for morality, one should never deem imprudence as a virtue. Wickedness is more of a vice than stupidity but that does not make stupidity a virtue! As we shall see later self-harming vices are as deplorable as other-harming vices.

Logical conclusion is that, we should follow prudence within the limits of morality. It is immoral to cross the limits, imprudent to unnecessarily narrow down the limits and disastrous to fail on both axes.

State of mind or degree of consequences or intent of the actor?

What makes an action a ‘right’ action? Those who tend to substitute ethics by spirituality focus upon ‘blissful state of mind’. One simple objection is that if actor is ignorant about means and connections, can be misled into wrong action without any trace of bad intent. But even keeping this aside, blissful state of mind is extremely rare in terms of occasions and personalities. Blissful state of mind will make life of a moral actor easier but will not make him a moral actor in the first place. Moral actor overcomes temptations and applies his volition for the right action and he cannot decide about rightness of ‘action as such’ simply by observing his personal state of mind. This is where Indian tradition has remained weak in developing ethical theory and has assumed that duties given by social structure are ‘duties’ in an ‘ethical’ sense.  ‘Performing given duties without any expectation for fruit’, is supposedly one of the paths to permanently achieve blissful state. Thus this ‘state of mind’ theory no way helps us in developing critical and universal ethic. As we will find soon, ‘duty’ is the central notion of ethic that I agree with. This duty however is not given to us but we have to decide upon and give it to ourselves.

Degree of consequences of any action is highly dependant on fortuitous variations in circumstances. We can not say that earnings of a gambler on his lucky day constitute a ‘well-deserved reward’. If an engineer callously commits mistakes in his calculation but there happen to be no casualties in the resulting accident, does that make that engineer less blame-worthy? Ethic that we are trying to formulate is individual agent-based. Political management of macro-results is a different thing. It is indeed possible to arrange immoral agents in such a way that social outcome is positive. This can be a good prudence at macro-level but not morality at micro-level.

Therefore ‘intent of the actor’ is the proper variable for deciding about morality of the actor. Type of action in terms of intent itself has to be deemed as moral or immoral. This position is called ‘deontological ethic’ to which I subscribe to. You simply can not skip over Kant’s teachings as he is the founder of (modern) deontological ethic. For Kant, if actor is acting out of pure sense of duty without putting any conditions of his ‘interest’, he is counted as ‘moral’ actor. Second teaching is that the principle implicit in the action has to be universalizable. This means that the actor must think as if, he is legislating a law, applicable to all and think of what sort of world will be created if all act in the same way.

If the actor finds that he would not be ready to live in such world, he is making an exception for himself from the rule he endorses and this is precisely immoral.

While regarding this teaching as very valuable, one problem immediately arises. Absolute barbarianism is also universalizable if I am ready to die at the hands for the victor who kills me! Of course Kant does not endorse this as he is committed to principle of non-violence. This becomes amply clear when we see his third teaching. “Never treat humanity in other or yourself as ‘means’ alone but always also as an ‘end in itself’.” [I would replace ‘end in itself’ by ‘end-generator for and by himself/herself’ but that is a finer difference dealt elsewhere]. Principle of universalization along with humanism of the third teaching eliminates the barbarian possibility.

The third teaching however clashes with the first teaching namely pure sense of duty regardless of any other interest. Form of right action may be pure sense of duty but how do we say anything at all about the ‘content of duty’ without referring to human interests? Furthermore, if I act out of pure sense of duty without any regard to my or other peoples interests, am I not using myself and others as ‘means alone’? Thus Kant’s third teaching flows in the face of his first!

Apprehension to consider human pleasures and sufferings as ethically relevant variables has arisen out of blunders made by ‘Utilitarianism’. Pleasure maximization calculus, apart from its operational difficulties,  takes aggregates of pleasure or suffering without considering as to who has contributed in generating pleasures or suffering, completely fails to ground any principle of Justice. Secondly if we consider pleasure and suffering on the receiving end, receiver will naturally try to avoid suffering and get pleasure by sheer prudence. Then what remains ‘moral’ about it? Utilitarianism is also consequentialist and hence obscures the aspect of fortuity. So we have very good reasons to guard ourselves from falling in the Utilitarian trap. At the same time we must come out of the impasse of form-only type of deonticism wherein sense of duty is cherished but one is left with no guidance regarding the content of duty. 

Non-violence, Prosperity and Justice

In my opinion the way out of the impasse is to consider pleasures and sufferings, not at receiver’s end but at generator’s end. To avoid suffering at receiving end is prudent but to refrain from generating suffering can be a maxim which is universalizable. Nobody wants suffering and everybody will agree that nobody should generate suffering, as far as possible. This is the non-violence principle. Generating suffering for one-self is also violence unto oneself. Here we come to one axis of what should be content of duty. It must be borne in mind that any principle that we derive is not to be taken in any perfectionist sense. We may fail, as we more often than not, do. But we know the axis on which improvement is to be made. Non-violence is one duty along with other duty-principles that we will shortly derive.

Here a possible confusion must be cleared right away. Moral actor, in course of his commitment and efforts for right-action, may suffer as a receiver. This is not suffering generated by moral actor. It is already generated by some immoral actor or ones own immoral conduct in past. In case of overcoming some addiction one has to tolerate the withdrawal symptoms and this is suffering at receiving end. Generation of this suffering was done by the addict while he was indulging in the pleasure of addiction qua an immoral actor.

Pleasure principle has been made notorious because it was regarding maximizing pleasure at receiving end. The ‘content enriched’ deonticism that I am proposing, guides us to focus upon the generation-point of pleasure. Everybody wants pleasure so everybody ought to contribute in generation of pleasure. This commitment to productive labor and enterprise as well as cordial communication, is a commitment to what we are going to call as Prosperity-principle. Here, medical or similar efforts for alleviating already existing suffering are also counted as equivalent to generation of additional pleasure. We must recognize the operational difficulties in determining as to ‘who contributed how much?’ This difficulty is present in non-violence as well. Still we get a qualitative criterion that, whether the act was of constructive nature or destructive nature. We also have to account for human costs incurred while producing prosperity.

Justice is very difficult and controversial principle. Once we have decided that non-violence and prosperity are the duties in which everybody must contribute, we can turn to the question as to who contributes in which direction as per these two principles, vis-à-vis what fruit one gets in the course. It is clear to our ‘axiomatic-intuitive’ sense of justice that positive contributors should get positive fruits and negative contributors should get negative fruits. As far as crime and aggression is concerned, we can not endorse retributive justice. One, retributive justice directly violates non-violence principle. Two, no retribution leaves behind satisfaction of justice done but rather taken as an additional injustice and vicious circle of retribution ensues. Especially targeting perpetrator’s family or group members is not correct even as retribution. Therefore for violent and aggressive acts, deterrent and restitution are the principles acceptable to modern civilization. In case of constructive acts, meritocratic values are necessary but not sufficient. This is on account of operational difficulties in determining merits and also considering disabilities of actors which may not be due to their own fault. Therefore a generous-meritocratic principle has to be accepted.

There is a philosophical basis for this. In order to make the philosophical principle of justice more clear, we can formulate it as below.

“Give priority in your duticiousness to the dutiful and then you may bestow your primary duties (non-violence and prosperity) towards others who are not so dutiful” 

I ought to give prosperity first to those who highly contribute in prosperity. If my capacity of creating prosperity remains to be exercised, there is no bar against giving prosperity to those whose contribution is low.  Similarly I ought to be strictly non-violent to those who are non-violent. However this does not permit me to be violent unto the violent except in case of utter self-defense or lawfully permitted deterrence. In short ‘duticious to the dutiful’ does not mean ruthlessly duty-denier to the duty-failed.

Non-violence, Prosperity and Justice is the trinity of ethical principles. What if they clash? This is a very pertinent question. At this juncture it must be noted that

1)    The three axes tend to form a vicious circle as well as virtuous circle. Every opportunity to break vicious circle and connect virtuous one must be grabbed.

2)    Improvement on any axis is complementary to improvement on the others and so any improvement is welcome.

3)    The axis lagging behind too much deserves more attention.

Why people would tend to be moral actors?

1)    Will to deserve

2)    Will to Integrity

3)    Will to Peace

Human nature contains virtues as well as vices. In a sense, it is an empirically open question, as to which ones will prevail more. Politically managing to make people behave is necessary but that does not make them moral-actors. Ethics that we are discussing is voluntary and we must justify the optimism that (which has to be a faith, to some extent), if given a better chance people would prefer to be moral actor than an immoral one. It is said that trustworthiness required in teamwork and food-sharing for fully utilizing big-game, have gone into genetic makeup. Of course cultural inculcation and volition are too large factors than mere genetic evolution. Keeping aside the causal explanations we must identify the structure of moral-emotion as is presented to our consciousness. I think, ‘will to integrity’ and ‘will to deserve’ are important drives that tend to make us cherish morality and justice in particular. 

Why I am disturbed when I find my conduct contradictory, incoherent or arbitrary? Rationality hunger is definitely a core inclination in humans. It is true that man is not a readymade rational animal but certainly one who tries to be. Even ‘blatantly fallacious justifications’ are ‘justifications’ hence an evidence that one needs justification in the first place.  Even amongst criminals there is loyalty & resentment towards betrayal. This shows the existence of ‘will to deserve’ in rather unexpected quarters as well.

Any animal would go for fruits of its efforts, humans included. Humans however are not merely satisfied with positive fruits but also want to ‘deserve’ them. Without the verb ‘to deserve’ there can be no discussion about Justice. It is this ‘will to deserve’ that makes us maintain some sense of fair-play though not ‘equality’ of results! Some thinkers maintain that all this is nothing else but prudence in the long run or ‘enlightened self-interest’. I would not use the term enlightened in the sense ‘more intelligent’ alone. Enlightenment is also about positive and negative values. Mutuality in relations is not mere calculus of gains/losses. There is some intrinsic value of genuine togetherness. No doubt communication is partly manipulative. However at least partly it is for seeking communion.  

This is not to suggest at all that there is a necessary truth about unidirectional emergence of peaceful mankind. Kant whose teachings rested upon moral-volition of human individual, himself had to admit in essay on perpetual peace, “Man is made up of such a crooked timber that nothing straight can come out of him”!

Supererogatory Virtues

These are the virtues of which commission is praiseworthy but omission is not blameworthy. In other words these virtues can not be imposed or even self-imposed as duties. If generosity is made a duty it logically ceases to be generosity because by definition, generosity means giving more than what you dutifully ought to. Generosity, Compassion, Forgiveness and Mudita (joy induced due to joy of others) are typically classifiable in the category of Supererogatory Virtues. Mudita (which is polar opposite of envy) implies induced joy and multiplication of joy.

Karuna (compassion) is regarding suffering. However a word of caution and distinctness is needed in case of compassion. Compassion does not mean induced suffering due to suffering of others. That would multiply suffering unnecessarily. True compassion lies in urge to do something to alleviate the suffering of others and not expressing grief more loudly than the aggrieved.

Generosity is true one, if it is not coming out of showing off glory or craving of fame or an indirect ‘investment’ or ‘insurance’ (last two are clear cases of Prudence which are infra-moral and not supra-moral). True generosity comes out of need of sharing and co-enjoying.

Forgiveness appears altruistic but it benefits the ‘forgiver’ more than the ‘forgiven’. Holding in oneself a continuous fire of retribution is larger a suffering than the one inflicted upon the ‘enemy’. Here again a word of caution is needed. If you are trying to sublimate your weakness in defense or deterring retaliation in the name of forgiveness it is hypocrisy and is not a supererogatory virtue.

Supererogatory virtues do have beneficent consequences similar to the consequences of morality.  However one cannot justify one’s moral failure because he has displayed his supererogatory virtues in another situation or occasion. Going beyond duty does not justify evading duty. Prudence, Morality and Supererogatory virtues is a hierarchic sequence wherein later should come later without losing former.