Hello again dear
reader.
Today's conversation
stems from noticing the fact that (at least to me). It seems that society has
forgotten how to have a "civilized" debate concerning politics,
morality, ethics or any other hot button issue. More often than not something
that starts out as a conversation or debate will rapidly devolved into an
emotionally charged contest as to who can swing the best insult. And this is
not what a civilized debate is supposed to be, it is supposed to be a
conversation and/or discussion in which all sides of an argument or heard
discussed and debated on their merits and then a conclusion and compromise of
mutual respect is reached between all parties concerned. So hopefully dear
reader, by the end of today's conversation, you will have a new appreciation
for what it means to conduct a "civilized" debate both online and
off...
It’s hard not to notice
that in interactions both online and off, people seem increasingly polarized
when it comes to political, social justice, and moral and ethical issues of all
kinds. Rather than engaging in a civil discussion, debates turn into
emotionally-charged flame wars, marked by blame, shame, and the exchange of
insults. Such interactions are acrimonious, seemingly interminable, and markedly
shrill.
What accounts for the
tenor of these melees on morality?
Some astute observers
have posited that our political and social positions have become more fervent
as society has become more secular. People seem to have an ingrained penchant
for the “religious” — a proclivity to draw lines between us and them, the pure
and the polluted, doctrine and heresy, the unconverted and the woke — and in
the absence of traditional faith-based outlets for these energies, have
channeled these “religious” impulses towards partisan politics.
There’s surely
something to this theory. But the shrillness of our modern debates on morality
has an even deeper underlying cause.
The 3 Elements of a
Rational, Functional Moral Culture
In After Virtue,
philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that Aristotelian virtue ethics offers
the best model of a healthy and well-functioning moral system; its strength, he
asserts, is the presence of three elements — all of which must be in place for any
moral system to thrive:
1. Man-as-he-happens-to-be.
This is a human being
in his raw, morally untutored state. This is man left to his own devices and
allowed to follow his default impulses. Man on the path of least resistance.
2. A view of
man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos.
Telos is the Greek word for man’s
ultimate aim. It represents his ultimate purpose and function — an essential
nature that can only be realized by throwing off the inertia of default desires
and actively striving after it.
For the ancient Greeks,
a man’s telos was reaching a state of eudaimonia; a word that is hard
to translate but means something akin to happiness, excellence — full human flourishing.
For Aristotle specifically, eudaimonia meant not only possessing good
character, but achieving excellence in action. Virtue was both the goal and the
practice — the end man should strive for, and the active means of attaining
that end.
For Aristotle, a “good
man” was as functional and objective a concept as a “good watch” or a “good
musician.” A good watch accurately tells time; a good musician plays his
instrument well; and a good man fulfills his purpose as a man. Each statement,
the philosopher would say, is equally objective and factual.
3. An ethical code
that allows a man to move from state #1 to state #2.
Man-as-he-happens-to-be
and man-if-he-realized-his-telos are antagonistic states — one slides into the
lowest and easiest, while the other aims for the noblest and highest.
To transition from the
former to the latter — to access one’s full potential — you need to adopt
certain behaviors and habits of action. What behaviors and actions to take are
prescribed by a set of ethics that are specifically designed to move you from
state #1 to state #2. The code lays out which virtues will take you towards
your telos, and conversely, which vices will stymie your progress in reaching
it. As MacIntyre explains:
“The precepts which
enjoin the various virtues and prohibit the vices which are their counterparts
instruct us how to move from potentiality to act, how to realize our true
nature and to reach our true end. To defy them will be to be frustrated and
incomplete, to fail to achieve that good of rational happiness which it is
peculiarly ours as a species to pursue.”
Although we can
describe this set of moral precepts as an ethical code, it should not
be thought of, at least in the context of Aristotelianism, as primarily a set
of rules. As MacIntyre observes, “the most obvious and astonishing absence from
Aristotle’s thought for any modern reader” is that “there is relatively little
mention of rules anywhere in the Ethics.” In the absence of strict,
rote, universal rules, Aristotle instead argued for the cultivation of a kind
of master virtue which would aid a man in acquiring all the rest: phronesis,
or practical wisdom. As a virtue in one context can be a vice in another (e.g.,
being frugal vs. being cheap), a man needed phronesis to guide him in doing the
right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.
Each of the three
elements above “requires reference to the other two if its status and function
are to be intelligible.” The combination of the three produces a moral culture
that is not only functional, but rational.
Such a moral code is
rational in the sense that there is a logical relationship between is and
ought. That is, if your telos is X, we can objectively say
that you ought to do Y, and you ought not to do Z, in order
to reach it. To achieve this end, you must adopt these means.
While this threefold
scheme can form the basis of a personal moral code, Aristotle specifically
imagined his system of virtue ethics in the context of community (in
his case, the Greek city-state). Individuals aim to fulfill their telos as men,
while pointing that effort towards what MacIntyre calls a “shared project of
achieving a common good” (for Aristotle, for example, reaching one’s telos was
closely tied to being a good citizen and contributing to Athenian democracy).
Within a community with a common telos, rules are erected that prohibit
negative behaviors that would be destructive to the efforts and relationships
necessary to achieving its shared project, while virtues — positive traits of
character that move the community closer to that common good — are celebrated
and encouraged. The rules cannot be understood apart from the virtues at
which they aim; the former are not arbitrary, but designed to facilitate
the greater flourishing of the latter.
The same 3-part moral
framework also exists within the Abrahamic religions, only, as MacIntyre
explains, shaded a bit differently:
“The precepts of ethics
now have to be understood not only as teleological injunctions, but also as
expressions of a divinely ordained law. The table of virtues and vices has to
be amended and added to and a concept of sin is added to the Aristotelian concept
of error. The law of God requires a new kind of respect and awe. The true end
of man can no longer be completely achieved in this world, but only in another.
Yet the threefold structure of untutored human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be,
human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos and the precepts of
rational ethics as the means for the transition from one to the other remains
central.”
For the religious
adherent, one’s telos wasn’t eudaimonia (at least as Aristotle understood it),
but salvation — being transformed into a creature divinely made perfect.
The Fate of a Moral
Culture Without a Shared Telos
Over several centuries,
and for complex reasons, a teleologically-based moral system eroded in the
West.
As MacIntyre succinctly
summarizes, “the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and
Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of
Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of
man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos.”
The idea of having an
ultimate aim survives on a personal level (though scarcely few people seem to
think of themselves as having a telos, or know what theirs is). But on a broad,
cultural level, Western societies no longer share a telos in common. The kind
of moral system outlined above can really only function in a fairly homogeneous
community of limited size; as a society grows increasingly large and diverse,
people no longer share the same telos (or have a concept of telos at all), nor
a project of common good that the telos supports. Thus in our own culture, many
competing teloi exist, or are absent altogether.
Yet, we still retain
the other two pieces of classical morality: man-as-he-happens-to-be and a set
of ethics. Witness the effect this creates:
The moral code which
was specifically created to move man-as-he-happens-to-be towards his telos, now
hangs in space, detached from a larger purpose.
There is only man in
his raw state, and a code of behavior he is to follow. But, in the absence of a
telos, this code consists not in virtues, alongside attendant rules that help a
man achieve them, but in the rules alone. As McIntyre observes, when a
moral culture lacks a teleological element, “Rules become the primary concept
of the moral life.”
In a moral system which
lacks a telos, there exist only negative proscriptions for appropriate behavior
— rules which are not designed to move man to fulfill his essential purpose,
but simply to allow the basic functions of society to continue.
No. No. No. Don’t.
Don’t. Don’t.
And so today we have an
abundance of voices pointing out what a good man isn’t, but very few
describing what a good man is. We lack a positive ideal. In this we’ve
become a nation of something worse than school marms — for at least the
disciplinarian teacher reprimanded her students with some end in mind.
At the same time that
rules become more central to such a moral culture, they become less motivating.
Still today we know that man in his untutored state is prone to bad behavior,
and so establish rules in an attempt to educate that behavior. But in the
absence of an accompanying telos, such rules lack a compelling why — a
rationale for why a man should choose to undergo this education, and offer his
compliance, rather than following the less challenging path of least
resistance.
This is quite
problematic, for as pointed out above, man-as-he-happens-to-be and
man-if-he-realized-his-telos are antagonistic states. The latter is not how we
act if left to our druthers. Achieving one’s telos involves mastering lower
impulses to reach for the higher variety. It requires self-mastery,
self-control, delayed gratification. It’s not a “natural” state, and as such,
its pursuit requires strong motivation — motivation that can only be furnished
by pointing to an overarching aim.
Given the lack of motivation
inherent to a telos-free moral code, vice inevitably waxes and virtue wanes.
This ethical lassitude is still a cause of consternation to a culture, that,
even if it’s lost hope in producing citizens of sterling character, still needs
them to act with a minimum of propriety and trust in interpersonal
relationships in order to keep day-to-day life safe and copacetic. It is
rightly felt that people can no longer be left to rely on their phronesis to
make moral judgements (for without a telos, what would this judgement be based
on?), and so more and more granular and restrictive rules are created as to
what constitutes appropriate behavior — external, universal, one-size-fits-all
guidelines that of course work much less well in some circumstances than others.
Naturally, there is
much disagreement on just how far all these rules should extend beyond the
enforcement of the bare minimum of propriety. Just how granular the rules
should get is a matter of one’s perspective of what is “just” and “right” and
these positions are based on conflicting telos, or on no defined telos at all.
Indeed, the
disappearance of a shared telos from a culture’s moral code ultimately has a
deteriorating effect on that culture’s moral discourse. When a culture loses
its shared telos, is and ought are divorced. Without this
connection, moral precepts lose any objectivity — a rational basis for why we
should choose one position over another. Though we still voice our positions as
if they had this kind of rational authority, our moral arguments in fact become
“mere instrument of individual desire and will.” We assert our opinions as if
they are objectively true, when they are in fact the arbitrary product of
emotion and personal preference. One notices that there is very little philosophical
discussion surrounding our moral debates at all; very little appeal to reason
is issued beyond “This is the way it should be! . . . Because!” Moral
debate becomes a series of reciprocal shouts. Flaming, blaming, shaming.
Or as MacIntyre puts
it, “without a teleological framework the whole project of morality becomes
unintelligible.”
As he observes, each
person has become an autonomous moral agent, who “now [speaks] unconstrained by
the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority;
but why should anyone else now listen to him?”
Living a Eudaimonic
Life In an Irrational, Dysfunctional Moral Culture
MacIntyre truly offers
an incisive explanation for why our moral debates are so shrill. Moral precepts
— encouragements of virtue and prohibitions of vice — are rationally based when
they lead to a clear telos. If your telos is this, you ought to do that.
When a culture lacks a shared telos, and everyone is following their own
ultimate aim (or lack such an aim at all), people with competing teloi simply
talk past each other, while those without any teloi make moral arguments that
sound objective but are really the irrational products of personal preference
and emotion.
While MacIntyre’s
insights are descriptive, and it’s enormously helpful to understand why things
are the way they are, they’re less prescriptive; what should we do with this
information? Three takeaways suggest themselves:
The importance
of having a personal telos. Even though modern society no longer shares a common telos, you
still should be clear on your own. What’s your ultimate aim? What’s your
essential purpose and function? Throwing off your default desires is never
easy. Knowing the end you’re aiming for will make you far more motivated in
embracing the means — the habits of action attendant to living a strenuous life
of virtue and excellence — that are necessary to get there.
The
pointlessness of debate (with those who don’t share your telos). The West still celebrates the
debate of political, social, and moral issues, and we do so because of the
tradition we inherited from the ancient Greeks. But the framework that allowed
their rigorous exchanges to function — the context of a defined city-state with
a shared telos — no longer exists in our large, heterogeneous modern countries.
We’re still trying to engage in an old model of rhetoric, despite inhabiting a
very different cultural landscape. The result is our empty, interminable,
emotion-driven shouting matches.
Now I’m not saying we
should never debate important ideas. Such debates can be healthy and robust
when in engaged in between people who share the same telos. And those
who do not share the same telos can debate issues in a strictly pragmatic way —
arguing for which solutions will be most effective or expedient. But when
debates concern issues of “right” and “wrong,” if the parties do not share a
common telos, the result will only be pointless, irrational pontificating.
The importance
of belonging to a community. While it is impossible to share a telos with millions
of other people, it is still quite possible, and desirable, to do so with a
smaller community of like-minded folks. For Aristotle, achieving a life of
eudaimonia could never be a solo affair; it required working on a shared
project of common good with others. Comrades in a common purpose sharpen each
other, and can create and achieve things they couldn’t by themselves.
Just as importantly,
communities of virtue act as repositories of moral excellence, emitting an
influence and fragrance that strengthen and leaven the larger culture, and
preserving virtues that might otherwise disappear. As MacIntyre ended After
Virtue over three decades ago:
“It is always dangerous
to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and
among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn
between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the
Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there
are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and
women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium
and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with
the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve
instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction
of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so
that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and
darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to
conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What
matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within
which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the
new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues
was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely
without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting
beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”
