Introduction: Moralities or Ethics
How can good people do evil and how can wicked people do good? How
do victims simultaneously victimize others with such equanimity? Those
of us working in the field of ethics recognize that morality, in the context
of ethics, is often deeply paradoxical. Ethical systems tend toward reason
and coherence, yet human moral behavior continually deviates from the logical
serenity of metaethical principles. Though paradox is likely one of the essential
aspects of moral life, ethico-moral paradoxes are nevertheless understandable
if not entirely resolvable. Arithmetic, or logic, is capable of perfect
accuracy; yet if the numbers or premises are false the conclusions are patently
unreliable. So too with ethics; one can determine with reasonable certainty
what is the right interpretation of virtually any case study using one set
of metaethical principles or another. The problem is that our moral
behavior rarely fits neatly into teleological, deontological, utilitarian
or any other metaethical system. Descriptively speaking, we are moral creatures
not ethical creatures. Of course we use metaethical principles like we use
algebraic equations, but neither algebra nor metaethics can resolve problems
outside their crystalline domains. So once the moral analysis departs from
a neat metaethical algorithm, lived morality typically allows for moral paradoxes.
What follows here are three moral paradoxes that originate from a somewhat
Kantian influenced postmodern acceptance that morality occurs in language
systems and not in an extra-human noumenal realm. Moral systems are
here approached as dynamic semiotic wholes, what will be described as a variety
of language game or moral semiotic gestalts.i
Paradox One: On Being Good and Evil
A morality, largely in agreement with Kurt Baierii and Lawrence Kohlberg,iii
is a de facto agreed-upon system of mutual respect and loyalty shared by
a group of people who rely on this system of thought, will and behavior to
live as a community. By and large moralities are expedient, helpful and for
the most part benign requirements for social cohesion. Within the context
of a morality we make determinations of right and wrong behavior, and certainly
some moralities are more ethically coherent than others. Some moralities
are more logically consistent than others, and some may well be fraught with
internal ethical contradictions.iv
But neither ethical coherency nor logical consistency is required for a morality
to work as a viable set of dynamic conditions that allow dependable social
cohesion amongst those who live within that particular morality. To embrace
any morality requires openness to others within one’s moral community as
well as some degree of identification with those within one’s moral community.
But many moralities, from varieties of extremist feminism to varieties of
religious extremism, are exclusionary to the point of being systematically
evil. Though those in the morality are open to one another the evil
morality defines itself in opposition to any dialectic intrusion from beyond
its fundamentally rigid boundaries.
As a consequence, though all moralities determine right and wrong behavior,
moralities are certainly not all equal. Some can justify extraordinary cruelty
to its non-members while others cannot. And no morality is either absolute
or sacrosanct outside of its own internally produced convictions, which is
where I part company with Kohlberg and Baier, who argue that rationality
is an extra-moral criterion for distinguishing between good and bad moralities.
However, it is not merely Kantian logical coherence that distinguishes a
good morality from a bad morality. Rather, there is also an aesthetic that
comes into play. Hume’s insights are closer to the mark when comparing metaethical
principles to living moralities, for good moralities allow us to develop
a greater taste and sensitivity for moral beauty than do bad moralities.
Humans do create moralities, and we use them to fulfill very human needs,
but those needs are certainly not all related to a truth or to truths consistent
with some particular set of absolute metaethical principles. Unlike Baier
or Kohlberg, I do not believe that there is a moral “soundness” criterion
by which individual moralities can be tested. “All normative moral judgments,”
argues Baier, “imply that the directives embedded in them meet a criterion
-- and would pass a test -- of soundness, and that in different moralities,
the accepted criterion and test may be different.”v
All these tests, however, ultimately depend for Baier on an extra-moral logical
“rational order.” Kohlberg, more nostalgically, appeals to “culturally
universal stages of moral development”vi
culminating in an extra-moral, somewhat fantastic, Platonic form of justice
as self-sacrifice that is the highest stage of moral development and is shared
universally by all highly developed moralities and not shared by less well
developed moralities. He points to Martin Luther King and Gandhi as two examples
of people at the highest level of moral development. This, however,
seems to me stunningly arbitrary.
A Marxist, on the other hand, could call moralities “superstructures,” and
certainly they seem to be. For clearly every morality is a system that resonates
with the material and economic conditions of the community within which they
operate. Contemporary American moralities for example are not generally antagonistic
to consumerism and as a consequence we genuinely presume that spending money
lavishly is both a moral good and a patriotic social duty, odd though that
notion may be from the perspective of other moralities. Nevertheless, the
Marxist notion of culturally based moral evolution that churns out ever better
historically determined moralities is as ungrounded as the universal morality
of any other fundamentalist, religious or otherwise.vii
In a word, the Marxist is opposed to the capitalist in principal, whereas
capitalism, as a consequence to its openness to extra-boundary challenges,
has changed in dialectic with the Marxists and others. The government
controlled capitalism of 2005 would be generally unrecognizable to the capitalists
of 1905. Not so for exclusionary Marxism.
In summary, the only moral absolute possible is that all cohesive groups
of people do indeed share their own moralities. And some of these moralities
are evil in that they are exclusionary and some of these moralities are benign
in that they are open. In other words, as a consequence of this link
to serving specific social functions, some moralities are not merely contradictory
or incoherent, some coherent moralities are functionally evil and some incoherent
moralities are functionally benign. Thus feminist moralities that exclude
or disregard men, or extremist religious moralities that can justify killing
nonmembers are quite simply evil regardless of whether they are sound or
unsound, internally coherent or internally incoherent. All moralities,
evil or benign, certainly entail a mutual respect for and loyalty to those
within that moral group. Unlike benign moralities, however, evil moralities radically exclude all but those who are members of their particular moral group.
Evil moralities are thus defined by their absolute and systematic exclusion
of some person, some group of people or some groups of people to such a degree
that the exploitation, destruction, suffering or death of those excluded
is utterly irrelevant to the members of the community that embraces that
particular evil morality.
On the other hand a benign morality remains open, even vulnerable, to internal
transformations through dialectic exchange with other moralities. Benign
moralities neither identify themselves as exclusionary nor operate according
to fundamentally exclusionary principles. As a consequence, benign
moralities do change as dialectic interaction with new ideas causes them
to change. The American legal system is generally an example of a coherent
benign morality in that each precedent setting case changes our interpretation
of the law. The American legal system is also, by its very design,
non exclusionary. Not so with radical feminism or other exclusionary
extremist or quasi-religious cults, that can justify disregard for nonmembers
with virtually no limit.
In further terms consistent with Hume, an evil morality would utterly obliterate the possibility any sentiment of sympathyviii
or compassion for those people outside the parameters of that particular
evil cohesion. Since moral approbation and disapprobation only apply to those
who are members of the moral community within which these determinations
occur, they do not apply to the outsiders. For all intents, those excluded
from an evil morality become inanimate automata around the periphery of the
moral community. The excluded people are then defined as the moral outlaws,
and accordingly are perceived as uncivilized, irreligious, outlanders, aliens,
hooligans, sub-humans, animals or merely just vermin. As such, the outlanders
are beyond considerations of moral sentiment. Their utility is tied solely
to their exclusion; they are worthy neither of praise nor blame. Their pain
or joys are irrelevant; from the perspective of this morality they become
merely useful, useless or dangerous.
In essence then, evil is adherence to a discourse that excludes, and its
evil is only evil with regard to those excluded or with regard to those whose
own benign moral discourse can recognize the radical exclusivity of an evil
morality. In their own minds therefore, those who are truly evil genuinely
conceive of themselves as compassionate realists and generally nice, kind
and even courageous people. Their morality assures them this is so. The German
Nazi SS, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the Roman Catholic Inquisitors, the American
Jacksonian Indian Removal soldiers or any of history’s notorious and various
killing squads are all evidence of cohesive moral groups with a proud honor
amongst themselves who must, by dint of their rigid moral duty, massacre
the infidels however so defined.ix
This also implies that there is a categorical difference between the wicked
person who is a disobedient member of his moral community, whose behavior
circumvents the very morality that protects him, and the evil person who
is a good and upstanding member of his radically exclusionary moral community.
To behave wickedly is to choose to breach the mutual respect and loyalty
of one’s moral community. To behave evilly is to choose to adhere to the
mutual respect and loyalty of one’s radically exclusionary community. And
herein lays our first paradox: one can be both good and evil simultaneously.
This paradox arises only when evil is conceived of as a communal system rather
than as an individual action evaluated by trans-moral metaethical principles.
If one chooses to break the rules of one’s own evil system to recognize an
outsider, one thereby behaves wickedly. Rule-breakers are always wicked
from the perspective of the moral communities of which they are de facto members and whose rules they break. For from the perspective of a communal moral system, adherence to one’s de facto
moral community is the source of one’s exclusionary moral discourse. But
this paradox of the good and wicked member of an evil morality disappears
once we realize it is merely a consequence of a category mistake akin to
confusing minds with brains. Good is only evil when evaluated from the perspective
of a benign morality, and from the perspective of an evil morality precisely
the opposite is true, evil is good. If good behavior is defined as
adherence to any morality we lose the ability to determine any absolute cross-morality
coherence. Of course, pristine ethical evaluations can easily be applied
to all moralities just like arithmetic can add all things real and imagined,
but lived good and evil are rooted in one’s moral community and not at all
rooted in some transcendent absolutistic ethical coherence. This distinction
between ethics and morality then allows for the paradox that to be truly
evil one must also be truly good. One must be a good member of an evil
group to be evil, for evil entails moral obedience to an exclusionary morality;
evil is not an abstract metaethical determination.
For example, the good Nazi would be the most evil Nazi -- the good terrorist
the most brutal terrorist -- the good extremist the obedient extremist most
willing to kill himself for his exclusionary moral community. If Anita Hill
lied for political expedience, which may well be the case, Anita Hill too,
would be utterly good and evil. So, to be truly evil, one must always be
good and evil. Whereas the merely bad Stalinist would, oddly, be wickedly
good.
Paradox Two: On Being Wickedly Good, Wickedly Evil and Wickedly Bad
As is apparent I am reserving the term “wicked” for disobedience to one’s
home morality. Those Nazis who helped Jewish families escape death behaved
wickedly via their de facto Nazi morality, yet their behavior was
good if judged in the context of a benign moral system. By the same logic,
Catholics who handed Jewish families over to the Nazis were both wicked and
evil. For their behavior was consistent with the radically exclusionary morality
of Nazism and simultaneously circumvented of the benign, by and large ecumenical,
Catholic morality, of which they were de facto members. Therefore, relative to the Catholic benign morality, the compassionate Nazi would be wickedly good,
and the Catholic who served Nazism would be wickedly bad. On the other hand,
relative to the Nazi exclusionary morality, the compassionate Nazi would
be wickedly bad and the Catholic who served Nazism wickedly good. This implies
that we cannot conceive one’s own actions as evil from the perspective of
our own de facto morality. One is generally blind to the
log in one’s own eye despite the ease with which we see the splinter in our
opponent’s.
Determinations of evil are now always extra-systemic determinations made
from the context of a benign moral system. Exclusionary extremist organizations
never conceive of themselves as evil, only benign moralities evaluate exclusionary
moralities as evil. So, all who are truly evil must be blind to their evil;
to know yourself as evil entails evaluating your de facto moral system
from a perspective outside of your radically exclusionary moral system, which
entails at least momentarily stepping outside of your morality. If,
therefore, I can grasp my evil, I am only wickedly evil and not truly evil
at all, for even to conceive of myself as evil I must, at least momentarily,
have grasped my actions from the perspective of a morality that is not my
own. I must at least momentarily have deviated from my de facto evil morality.
Again, the compassionate Nazi would be wicked insofar as he had deviated from his de facto
membership in an evil morality. But he would be good in the context of a
benign morality. Even more peculiar, the genuine member of the evil morality
who deviates from that morality in order to bring about greater inner coherence
or in order to make it more perfectly evil would also be wickedly evil. He
would be wicked insofar as he deviated from his morality, evil insofar as
his identity is genuinely tied to this exclusionary morality. The overly
strident SS officer would be perhaps the finest example, insofar as his disobedience
was solely in order to make even more severe the morality he identified with.
“Despite our orders, we shall kill their pets and children as well.”
The even more paradoxical situation revolves around those members of any
morality who deviate from their morality in order to transform the morality
to become more coherent, more effective, or even simply more ethically sound.
These are the people who identify with a benign morality and work through
disobedience -- wickedness -- to improve their morality for the sake of all
its members. These people from the Humean perspective would indeed be worthy
of moral approbation as a consequence of the increased social utility their
wicked behavior might achieve. These are the admirably wickedly good members
of a benign morality, and the wickedly bad members of an evil morality. These
are those members of a morality courageous enough to recognize that the rules
of their morality are in place to serve the moral community and the moral
community is not in place merely to obey the rules. Thus the wickedly good
members of a benign moral group will work to transform their moral community
even if this entails breaking the rules of that moral community. The wickedly
evil members of an exclusionary moral community will break the rules of their
exclusionary moral community in order to make it even more exclusionary.
The wickedly bad members of an exclusionary moral community will break the
rules of their de facto evil moral community to attempt to transform
their exclusionary moral community into a benign moral community. And these
wickedly bad agents of an evil morality are perhaps the most courageous people
of all.
Paradox Three: The Moral Narcissist as Wicked Victim
The American scramble to achieve victim status is typically an example of
wickedness born of narcissism. The moral narcissist creates an entirely
new set of problems for a morality. The moral narcissist is capable of extraordinary
cruelty and exclusion yet he is neither evil nor benign, for he lives outside
of any morality. The moral narcissist has no authentic concern for obedience
or disobedience, good behavior or bad behavior, wickedness or evil. The only
actions worthy of moral approbation or blame are his own actions, and the
only sentiment for the moral narcissist is self sentiment. The moral narcissist
does not see himself through the lens of social prestige, acceptance or love.
He provides himself with these. For the moral narcissist there is no system
other than self. So, all behavior is socially meaningless. Since others are
fundamentally nugatory for the moral narcissist, murder, charity and cannibalism
are all morally equivalent. At root, the moral narcissist is a member of
no moral community whatsoever despite what pretenses he makes or dues he
pays or rules he follows or orders he gives. All that is done is done entirely
out of radical self absorption. These are people who are generally considered
morally blind, for they are indeed entirely without sentiment for others.
They lack, as a consequence of their narcissism, all fellow feeling.
The moral narcissist is therefore patently amoral. For narcissism is the
diametric opposite of any morality either evil or benign: the narcissist
has structured the world so as to exclude all others from his personal world.
Others are much like standing reserve or geological barriers: aids or impediments
to the accomplishment of the narcissist’s personal goals.
The moral narcissist is a unitary creature whereas the evil person is communal.
The moral narcissist thus lives in a world utterly devoid of any felt morality,
for it is a world utterly devoid of any genuine community. For the moral
narcissist the categorical imperative functions superbly because he has indeed
universalized his maxims for behavior, after all only he truly exists as
an autonomous moral agent. Others are morally excluded from his private morality,
which is then no morality at all.
This creates the third paradox: The moral narcissist may be a registered
member of a moral community, benign or evil, to which he is utterly indifferent.
And herein lays the methodology of the narcissistic victim. If the
moral narcissist is a de facto member of a benign moral community,
there accrues a wicked benefit for the narcissist if he can demonstrate to
that community that he has been excluded, or that he is a member of a sub-group
that has been excluded. The benefit accrues because a benign moral community
must always to some degree define itself as non-exclusionary, and those excluded
can therefore, legitimately make a moral claim against this benign moral
community using the very coherencies of that benign moral community to justify
their claim. If this claim is made disingenuously, by a narcissist who cares
not a jot for the moral system against which the claim is made, this is wicked
behavior. And herein lays our third paradox. The excluded moral narcissist,
whose exclusion is a consequence of his intentional rejection of the morality
of which he is a de facto member, is self excluded and is thus not
excluded at all. His intentionally false claim of being excluded is repaid
with unearned benefits. Like cow birds or cuckoos who trick other birds
to tend their eggs and young, the moral narcissist uses the required compassion
of the members of a benign morality to exact greater advantage for himself.
The narcissist who so behaves is thereby behaving wickedly, despite the fact
that his de facto benign moral community defines him as a victim of their exclusion. So, moral narcissists who are de facto
members of benign moral communities are indeed blameworthy victims, whose
claim of victimization is actually intentionally exclusionary of the very
moral communities upon which they prey. Exaggerated claims of
victimization such as those made by so many of America’s perennial victims
are thus antagonistic to the community that deems these self manufactured
narcissistic victims deserving of compensation and compassion.x
Another aspect of the moral narcissist is also a consequence of his radically
selfish goals; a moral narcissist makes an ideal leader of an evil moral
community. Certainly we have seen evidence of this in extremist religious
and para-religious organizations of all varieties. Klan leaders, Islamist
totalitarian autocrats and various Christian televangelists all come to mind.
There is likely no community better for the moral narcissist to maximize
his self absorption than an evil, exclusionary, moral community. The most
recent example of such a moral narcissist is Saddam Hussein, a bona fide
and brutal narcissist. The reason for the success of narcissistic leaders
like Hussein is that an evil moral community is unable to comprehend itself
except insofar as it retains its rigid boundaries, which may include a narcissistic
leader, who thereby, is shielded from outside criticisms by the exclusionary
morality that surrounds him. In Hussein’s situation the evil morality that
shielded him was the Baathist party; for Hitler it was the Nazi party, for
Tomas de Torquemada it was a branch Catholicism. An evil morality,
like a benign morality, is good by definition, and thus all who are members
are good insofar as they follow the rules of that morality.
Due to their permeable boundaries, benign moral communities, on the other
hand, are prone to restructure themselves as a consequence of outside influences.
Within a benign morality, a narcissistic leader will not have the luxury
of using an exclusionary morality to shield him from disrupting outside influences
antagonistic to his unassailable position. As an aside, this illustrates
why those who deem themselves victims are extraordinarily prone to embracing
evil moralities, and why leaders of evil moralities typically define themselves
as victims of benign moral communities. In conclusion I am not all
reluctant to suggest that some of our own more radical American victim cults
-- religious, political gender and race based -- are indeed evil moralities
led by obviously morally blind narcissists.
Endnotes
i. See A Metaphor of Shame and the Myth of The Primal Scene,
James D. Carmine, Ph.D. Dissertation Directed by Professor Don Ihde, SUNY
Stony Brook, 1988 . In this work I discuss the odd development of Freud’s
Primal Scene to illustrate how pseudo-religious thought systems and other
varieties semiotic gestalts are vulnerable to invasive transformational metaphors.
Freud’s Primal Scene is a metaphorical inheritance from Hesiod.
ii. See The Moral Point of View: A Rational Basis of Ethics New York Random House, 1965; The Rational and the Moral Order,
Chicago, Open Court Publishing Company 1995, and “The Point of View of Morality”
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol 32 no. 2 (1954), pp 104-135 (reprinted
in Ethics, History, Theory and Contemporary Issues, by Steven M. Cahn and
Peter Markie, New York, Oxford Press (2002), pp 514-528.)
iii. See Essays on Moral Development. Volume I: The Philosophy of Moral Development,
New York Random House, 1981. Kohlberg’s debt to Kurt Baier is significant.
On page 159 he quotes Baier (1965) in the context of multiple moralities:
“There is no a priori reason to assume that there is only one true morality.
There are many moralities, and of these a large number may happen to pass
the test which moralities must pass in order to be called true. For there
will be many different moralities all of which are true, although each may
contain moral convictions which would be out of place in one of the others.”
I do not however agree with Baier or Kohlberg in their presumption of some
nebulous underlying Kantian principle that transcends all moralities other
than mere internal coherence. From my perspective there is no extra moral
position of goodness from which to evaluate moralities. Moral conviction
is always felt within a particular morality, a particular social system semiotically
structured.
iv. See Kurt Baer, 1954
v. Baer, 1995 p. 225.
vi. Kohlberg, 1981, p 1.
vii. I include here those like Adorno, who argue essentially that authoritarian
personalities akin to the fascists is a consequence of a psychological disorder
that arises out of capitalism, and as such is a phase to be superseded, perhaps
even cured, when a more Marxist world order comes to pass.
viii. “The rules of morality therefore are not conclusions
of our reason…. But a sympathy with public interest is the source of the
moral approbation, which attends that virtue.” Classics of Moral and Political Philosophy, ed Michael Morgan, 1992, David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature,
Bk III, pp. 821, 829. The point being, moral approbation is a felt conviction,
generally educated into the social agent, “As public praise and blame encrease
our esteem for justice, so private education and instruction contribute to
the same effect.” p. 844
ix. This essentially eliminates the need for the pseudo-diagnosis
of an authoritarian personality. Morality can now begin to be retrieved away
from the domain of the psychology of personality theory and returned to the
proper domain of philosophical choice. After all, in a world of mass communication
we do have the option to choose different moralities.
x. I recently heard a lecturer say women are incapable
of being abusive since all women are victims of abuse by definition. Anyone
who genuinely accepted that notion would be a blameworthy victim, for any
brutality such a person performed would be morally justified despite the
cruelty to others. Such a person would be either a good and evil person or
more likely she was intentionally circumventing her moral community solely
in order to demonstrate herself as excluded for the sake of personal gain.
That’s a victim who is both wicked with regard to her exclusionary morality
and evil as a member of such an evil morality.
James D. Carmine is chair of the Philosophy Department at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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