A New Pragamatism-Locating the Personal in the Moral

This first major post should give you some background about me, my reasoning process, and my moral reasoning. NOTE: I have not EDITED yet

What is Morality?

An ethnographer--a scholar who writes "thick description" accounts of different cultures-- entering a new field site will soon learn that his informants--those who provide an ethnographer with information through conversation, by being observed, or through written correspondence--express their ideas of appropriate and inappropriate behavior with a variety of judgments and justifications. Sometimes these judgments will be of the ethnographer himself, as when I was told in no uncertain terms to "get it right" by a friendly but cautious, even suspicious, elder. At other times, the informant will be evaluating the behavior of someone who shares his cultural background--as when a middle aged man I was talking to complained about a growing generation gap.

What were the signs of this gap? 1) His teenage son wouldn't mow the lawn when asked, 2) kids and teenagers were text-messaging instead of sitting quietly and listening to the conversations of their elders, 3) young people were expressing growing doubts about the leadership of their community and about the effectiveness of community values in allowing them to lead good lives. 1, 2, and 3 were all situations used to evaluate "the generation gap" but each was situated in very different contexts. Generally, 1 was personal, tied, among other things, to the son's resentment as his father's divorce. 2 was social. 3 was philosophical/political.

Each of my informant's judgments, however, could fall under the rubric of "morality." Indeed, my informants used a term very similar to our term 'morality.' This term referred to behaviors that were in accordance with the will of the ancestors, in balance with the natural environment (which included "spiritual" aspects of that environment), and in balance with the human world of society, genealogy, and family.

What then, is the nature of "morality?" What distinguishes "morality" from "law" or "custom"? In many European cultures, morality has spiritual sanction. Breaking a moral rule is believed to cause massive disruption at a cosmological/social/and perhaps personal level. We avoid breaking the law simply because we fear certain, specific punishments. We avoid breaking moral rules because we fear more general, and more fundamental (whatever that means), consequences. As children, for example, moral rules may involve fighting, lying, stealing, being disobedient. Who can't remember with fresh guilt some deed of little consequence committed when one was a child? As adults we may believe in new rules and actively violate ones that shamed us when we were children, realizing that our childish impressions of the consequences of violating these rules were exaggerated.

If our perception of the morality of certain behaviors is subject to reevaluation, and if we judge a behavior to be moral because it of great consequence, then what leads us to consider a behavior to be of great consequence? Further, because our use of the term 'moral' does not indicate whether an actions is "good" or "evil," how does a person distinguish between the two?

The next section argues that this process is always personal, no matter whether the person believes in an omnibenevolent (benevolent in all ways) deity, a harmonious universe, or just that person's self.


Evaluating Consequence: Shifting Desires and Data Processing

Some have argued that forces which are named "good" and "evil" are natural to the universe, objective properties of behaviors that are perceived by persons to a greater or less degree. Persons, and even deities, then act either to encourage good, to encourage evil, or to maintain a somehow necessary balance between the two. This perspective sometimes includes a natural balance between good and evil maintained by impersonal forces (such as karma).

Considering this perspective, I ask two questions: 1) How would one prove the existence of objective moral categories and 2) even if their existence could be proved, why would one choose to lead others to do good or evil?

I have no good answer to the first question. However, I do believe that the question matters. If we can determine that there are natural properties--like cool colors and warm colors, for example--that we may label "good" and "evil," then the promulgation of our knowledge of these categories will influence future decision making. At this point, however, I do not believe that such categories will be "discovered." While cool colors and warm colors, arguably, would exist as wavelengths whether they were observed/measured or not, I do not see any evidence that good and evil are such properties. Instead--with some consistency across cultures but also great variation--good and evil, right and wrong, seem to be qualities assigned by the human observer and not natural properties at all.

How do humans come to assign these properties to behaviors?

Let us consider a situation where I am uncertain of the morality--the consequence, good and/or bad--of a behavior. I am currently looking for work and have considered seeking a job where I help a business by analyzing, for example its organizational culture and am hired to help make certain changes to that structure. This fairly common situation is, for me, a moral dilemma, one that pales in comparison to deciding whether to join a Human Terrain Team, but I’ll address that dilemma in my next post.

So how do I decide? Some of the decision process is invisible to me. Some, perhaps the majority, of the process takes place at a subconscious (although I prefer the term “unconscious”) level about which I can only speculate. However, from what I gather, the decision process goes something like this.

I think about a situation. Certain facts come into my mind, triggered by their relationship with other facts or by a mental model of what I need to consider. I'm not sure what these relationships or this model look like exactly, or if its even possible to put them into natural language. I don't even know quite where they comes from, although I can assume its a combination of experience and personal ways of doing things. Further, I gather a variety of other details, sometimes perceived as relevant sometimes not, in order to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious. Then I use these facts to make a decision. In this example, what are the facts?

As far as I can tell the facts are these--businesses want money. In today's hypercompetitive (to borrow a term from Robert Reich) economy, driven by investors and consumers, money is one of the main "products" of a business. Investors and consumers often drive corporations to make decisions which have consequentially harmful environmental, political, or social impacts. A corporation needs to exist in order to act responsibly, and it often cannot exist unless it makes decisions with these negative impacts.

Those anthropologists out there might think of another set of facts--in pursuit of money, businesses will go so far as to "deskill" anthropology, hiring agencies to seek informants, reducing ethnographic field data to a set of short forms, etc. Efforts to resist this trend will be partially successful, but only if they can demonstrate that these "deskilling" methods lead to obvious, demonstrable failures. Further, because of NDAs, anthropologists may sometimes find that information that would be valuable to future academic work is the property of their client or corporation and not to be published, although one hears amusing stories of corporations who want an NDA on the theories of Van Geneep and Victor Turner. However, in my mind, the only consequential harm that would result would be the "obvious, demonstrable failures" themselves.

So, now that I have some of the facts (and look how much explanation goes into trying to understand a twenty minute or less thought process), I've processed the information as well as I am able and now need to reach a moral conclusion. Moral arguments involve a) more formal reasoning, b) emotional awareness, c) an awareness of who I want to be--mentally, emotionally, socially, etc--after the decision is made and action taken.

My moral reasoning is often more formal. I do not assume that I have the "right answer" intuitively so I express the dilemma in different terms. Let's consider a few of my arguments. One is"if I gather the information, I'm not responsible for its use." There is an immediate objection--in the causal sense, I am partially responsible. However, I may not have great power to change the causal chain (or web of indeterministic and deterministic forces if you prefer) extending from information sharing to the business's decisions. Should the lack of power absolve me? I can't think of any arguments why it should. I chose to enter a situation where I lacked power to make sure others followed my moral code. However, maybe I'm not powerless, maybe I can present the information in such a way that I can make positive change. Would my actions be good enough to be justified, despite their being bad also?

This last argument raises a major moral question, the question of balance. Balance is one of the most difficult questions in anyone's moral philosophy. Lets take a few examples. In one situation, I harm someone but later make up for harming them by helping them in a way that erases or makes very small the effects of the initial harm. Does this mean that I can harm someone whenever I want, as long as I do the work to "make up for it." Well, asides from the risky assumption that I can "make up for it," I am tempted to say "no!" But why? Because a) I don't want others doing the same thing to me and b) because I exercise empathy. I don't like observing people in pain, so I go out of my way to avoid causing pain.

However, lets consider a situation where I need to do bad in order to do good, i.e. our original example. Here, it depends on how fundamentally consequential my actions are. If the harm I do is of little consequence, but the good I do is of great consequence. I'll commit to the good and acknowledge, but tolerate, the harm. In the organizational anthropologist working for a business example, having money and earning experience is important to me; it is of consequence. The harm that might result is of consequence also, but because I am, to a degree, an expendable actor in a harm-producing hyper-competitive system, why not work to do some good as part of that system? However, in order to truly say that my actions are good, those actions must go beyond mitigating harm and be of "good" consequence themselves.

But how do I come to perceive things to be of consequence, good or bad? At this point in the discussion, I'll use a very different, but common example. Imagine an omnibenevolent, omniscience, omnipotent deity. If good and bad are ascribed, not inherent, qualities, how does the deity decide what is good and what is bad?

I would suggest that even if this deity's ways are "mysterious"--as some would have us believe about their deity--the deity still makes personal moral decisions. I don't know what the "personality" of a deity looks like, but I do know that a conscious decision maker, if it can be said to have agency, must have a personality--some bases for its decisions. And, if the God is to be an proper object of worship (to use Bernard Gert's phrase), the bases for that decision has to be at least somehow accessible to us. We must have a reason to trust that God's good is something that we should seek, and God's bad something that we should avoid. In order to trust God, we must, to an extent, understand.

Which, of course, puts the onus back on us. I've argued that morality is not an inherent trait, but rather an ascribed one. Further, in asking whether we will ascribe moral labels to a behavior, our reasoning might clarify our thoughts, but it has to take into account our personality. A serial killer, for example, would not let empathy enter his moral reasoning. Indeed, the serial killer may find that the actions of greatest negative consequences are the ones that deprives him of victims. That is, of course, a simplification. A serial killer may have a socialized concept of morality that they enjoy flouting. But, remember, my definition of a moral action is not a "good" action, but rather one recognized to be of consequence.

In the next section, I explore how we influence one another's and our own personalities, data processing, and momentary desires in order to do "good."


Creating "Good" People: Personal Appeal and Power Politics

Although one basis of our moral decision making may be in biological response to stimuli, there are few parents who would argue that their children learned without guidance what appropriate and inappropriate behaviors were.

Instead, children require almost constant explanation and direction. The explanations are often fallacious or "dumbed-down," designed to modify behavior rather than to educate. The directions are often haphazard, intended to reduce disruptive and increase productive behaviors in the moment rather than to produce specific, complex behavioral responses. However, with a life time of this tutoring, combined with imitation, peer-correction, and personal reasoning, most children have a sense of the consequential and desires surrounding these consequences.

Sometimes, the child's sense of the consequential is challenged. Here a parent (or anyone else who desires to change the child's behavior) might use a normative argument, telling the child that "this is not the ways things are done." The normative response appeals to two impulses--the impulse to reason by imitation and the impulse not to offend those closest to you. Often, the appeal to the normative is enough to modify behavior. Sometimes, however, the urge to mimic may be undermined by an urge resist acculturation. At still other times their may be a conflict in expectations between the people closest to the child, and then a choice must be made.

If the normative arguments are insufficient, the person might try and influence the structure of a child's thought process, to teach the child the right way of looking at things. Here several types of cognitive-modification might be attempted. The child has refused to mimic the reasoning of their parent, so the parent might attempt to understand and to challenge the reasoning of the child.

It is probably impossible to understand another person's thought process in any specific detail. I have heard it argued that a computer scientist might be able to do it, and have read attempts, to take an example, by computer scientists to write the "program" by which a Kalahari San bushman applies linguistic terms. Even the computer scientists, however, would have trouble arguing that they are doing more than originating effective models for the thought process. Certainly, however, natural language might fail to do even that. Fortunately, however, humans do not rely purely on computer science and natural language to interpret information. Our brains are performing complex data processing that takes into accounts unconscious as well as conscious cues. These processes underly natural language, computer science, as well as visions from gods and ancestors. Attempting to map these process may be impossible, but we really don't have to understand them in such detail.

Instead, the parent tries, by whatever means available, to do several things to the child's brain. One of the most important of the parent's goals will be to focus the child's attention on several aspects of the situation and on how those aspects fit together. If the child ignores or does not give proper weight to certain facts, than the child will not realize their consequence. This process involves a presenting of facts, a presenting of potential relationships between facts as if they are facts, and emotional weighting.

The emotional weighting of certain facts and relationships between facts is a way of focusing or redirecting the child's attention. It can be accomplished by getting the child to mimic or react to the parent's emotions. It can by manipulating the child to try and feel something by making it unpleasant for them not to--perhaps by appealing to their pride, or to their guilt, or by indicating that you will no longer think well of them and withhold love or change your relationship with them in some other fundamental way. Whatever works--and is moral (?).

These two stages--reworking a person's attention to the world and manipulating their emotional response to that world are, I believe, the foundations of shared morality.

There is another foundation however--one in which we manipulate what data is present, both internally and externally, over the long term. If, for example, we realize that someone is developing a personality trait that we would like to see more of, we can encourage that by, say, putting them in situations that they desire for other reasons, but which bring will probably bring that personality trait to the fore. I wouldn't call this form of manipulation a foundation of shared morality. In the next section, I discuss it, however, as a form of moral behavior that underlies what I will discuss as a "New Pragmatism."


The "New" Pragmatism--Using the Personal to Establish Common Standards

My argument so far has been that the morality of a behavior is how consequential it is considered. Further, the evaluation that the consequence of a behavior is good or evil is inherently personal. If this evaluation is personal, than the only way to convince other people to do good is to manipulate them to see the world the way we see it and to feel about it the way we feel it. This manipulation may be subtle or not, and we may sometimes accept only token agreement as long as certain actions are accomplished.

Until now, however, the assumption has been that we want people to become moral beings like ourselves. In those case where we accept token agreement, however, we are more concerned with the action than the person's motivation. We attempt to change their behavior because it is consequential, and we feel it must be changed. We don't necessarily even care if they become "like us" or not. It may be impossible to make them like us. It may even be, depending on the situation, inconsequential.

Personally, I find that the bulk of people in this world will never be "like me." Our dissimilarities of personality, personal experience, and current environment are sometimes consequential. Obvious examples of potentially consequential people are the ranks of islamo-fascists and christo-fascists around the world. Remember, I am an empathetic person, and I find even actions done to others to be consequential, so even if I am never personally the victim of the supporter of Islamic or Christian totalitarians, I do not simply shrug my shoulders and let them be.

However, because I recognize that all morality is personal morality, and that no personal morality can become universal unless all people become the same, I offer thoughts that may shape the paths of individual moralities without trying to specify the paths these moralities should take.

I argue that everyone should strive to bring out all of themselves in a way that they truly value. How many times have we seen people behaving completely irrationally because they chose emotion over reason or reason over emotion, rather than struggling to work with both the thinker and the feeler in themselves? Here, for example, someone who is personally very faithful to another human or a deity would have to seek a way to reconcile this faith with their rational capacity, even if the later is underdeveloped relative to the former. Make use, I suggest in religious terms, of all of the gifts god gives you.

Of course, some people might have a lot of trouble bringing out the underdeveloped parts of themselves--their capacity for empathy, for courage, for rationality, whatever. And some people might have trouble balancing the overdeveloped parts of themselves--the sadist, the hypercompetitive CEO, the hyper-anxious coward, whatever. But I feel that I can better cooperate with someone who is used to having to establish compromises between the various facets of their being than with someone who tends towards one extreme or another.

These compromises require struggle and even heroism. They also require acknowledging that the moral decisions that you make in the present may contradict ones that you will make in the future, because you are fundamentally still in development, and your personal development has become consequential.

Under this new system, the question of how will this action affect who I become is as important as the question of how this question will affect the universe. Who you are is consequential not only because valuing yourself fully makes some sense as a goal, but because who you become will influence what seems consequential to you, the future moral decision maker. If you're suddenly going to become more empathetic, the world can look very, very different.

The next section explores two markers of accomplishment in the "New Pragmatism"--purity and certainty.


Purity and Certainty--Managing Doubt

Believers in universal morality--rules that all people must follow or be killed/damned/personally tortured, etc--might object that they could never follow a philosophy where two desirable states, purity and certainty, were impossible. These states of "grace" after all, feel really good. They make sense within the context of a universal morality, where all you have to do is perceive yourself to be following all the rules, and deeply feel the satisfaction that this brings.

What would it take to feel personal purity in our system of personal morality? I think a person could come to consider themselves pure even though they acknowledge (following my ideas on balance) that even some of their consequential actions contributed to evil as well as good. They could not, however, feel pure, if they lived life in such a way that the evil was more consequential than the good. And, since different persons have a different sense of what is consequential, many could find themselves without the certainty necessary to make a judgment.

Holding off on our discussion of certainty for a minute, it should be mentioned that even if a judgment is reached that supports the perception of self-purity, this judgment may always be challenged. Also, as more of the self is brought-out, new emotions might redefine the consequential at such a rapid rate that nobody is stable in their judgments for a long enough period of time to feel pure. However, it seems to me that growth is usually slow and only in rare cases does the growth produce massive challenges to the old way of perceiving and judging behaviors.

Because of this self-questioning (as one actively pursues growth), however, certainty is always under threat. However, we can turn to other persons, engaging in similar struggles and even supporting us in our struggles (like parents, for example), and at least seek inter-subjective agreement. Looking towards others who are similar in certain ways to ourselves, we may receive the intellectual support for our own perspectives. From this inter-subjective agreement can come a personal certainty that is difficult to reach in intellectual isolation.

Of course, they may be wrong to, but that is why grace is fleeting.

Well, that's all for now, except for some minor edits. I know its rushed. I know sentences are a little overlong. I know that it may have massive gaps and confusions.

Leave comments and help me to have a little "certainty!"