Virtue as Identity: Emotions and the Moral Personality
304
Virtue as Identity: Emotions and the Moral Personality
304eBook
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Overview
The book re-affirms traditional morality as the foundation of our individual and collective identities. The author argues that emotions as well as rational decisions guide the value choices we make and the ideals of character that we presuppose on a political level as much as they do in our private lives. Thus the societies we live in are a reflection of our identities, or the identities of the majority. This opens up radical questions about the identities of the dissenting minorities, the proper concept of a moral or value-community, and the real reach and value of tolerance in modern democracy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783483051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/11/2016 |
| Series: | Values and Identities: Crossing Philosophical Borders |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Virtue as Identity
Emotions and the Moral Personality
By Aleksandar Fatic
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Aleksandar FaticAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-305-1
CHAPTER 1
Value, Virtue, and Character-Formation
CROCODILE VALUES VERSUS VALUES OF VIRTUE
Early in 2015, while editing articles for a book, I read striking lines written by a Japanese philosopher about the role of philosophy in Japan. In the article, Tetsuya Kono writes that Japanese children need help to establish emotional connections with others, to assert themselves, and develop a self-confidence to speak their own mind within what is generally a very authoritative (perhaps even authoritarian) system of education, which teaches young people social roles and models of behaviour founded on the value of obedience and 'fitting in' (Kono, 2015: 186). This reminded me of a conversation I had had just days beforehand, with a young Japanese philosopher from Tokyo, about the Japanese mentality. She said that she believed the main feature of Japanese mentality was to try to 'read the atmosphere' in order to fit in seamlessly and avoid sticking out at any cost. She added that it was socially unacceptable to question authority or create any kind of 'disturbance'.
This book is, of course, not about Japan, but Japan is often taken as an example of social discipline and striking practices of socialization, and the latter is one of the focal themes of the book. The desire to control people by social etiquette, as is the case in Japan, is in principle not different from the general policy of control which is based on the assumption that, if set free, the human being would automatically be prone to 'creating disturbance' or acting destructively. Such control policy is prevalent in most democratic societies and is particularly well exhibited in the liberal and neoliberal ideologies. Unless checked, people will become corrupt. Unless effectively policed, people will cheat, steal, and engage in violence. Unless aggressively surveyed, they will tend to ally themselves with problematic social causes which, ultimately, might threaten 'national security'. At least this is what the pessimistic ideology of human nature which is inherent in the liberal ideology suggests. What my friends from Japan reported — a sense of authoritarian socializing pressure within the Japanese society — was in no way unique: such pressure is generally encouraged, and in fact omnipresent, throughout the Western democratic world. The control policy in the West is perhaps less focused on socialization (although this is changing with the increasing surveillance of children at schools for any 'problematic attitudes'), and more on repressive controls threatening or actually leading to criminal or administrative sanctions. Such policy is invariably predicated upon the negative premise that people are prone to being corrupt, and institutions are there to stop them from actually engaging in corruption or deviance. The premise is rarely discussed, and, like most negative or pessimistic premises in social theory, it tends to become commonplace and 'accepted knowledge' without being adequately argued or examined. Just as the 'realist' theory for the international behaviour of states assumes a basic state of anarchy, where states tend to jockey for positions and use their resources to establish antagonistic domination over others, the prevalent understanding of the human nature which is reflected in socialization and social control practices assumes that, given the opportunity, people will act selfishly and immorally. In other words, in the absence of external imposition of values, their core values which guide them in the making of choices will tend to be those which selfishly promote one's relative position vis-à-vis the others. This view portrays man as a fundamentally competitive being, almost insatiably hungry for recognition and confirmation against and over everybody else.
One wonders where this prevalent view really comes from. In a clinical setting, when someone comes with deeply troubling and pessimistic assumptions about people in general, this typically leads to a questioning of one's self-perceptions. If one assumes that 'people are evil', the next question is usually about what one thinks of oneself: whether one is also evil, or one stands apart from everybody else as a beacon of the good against the sea of evil. In the former case, the issue often turns out to be one of lack of self-love, which is generalized to a lack of appreciation of people in general. In the latter one, a plethora of disorders might be at stake, usually involving obsessive or unrealistic self-perception, various psychological complexes of superiority, and the like (Hassim and Wagner, 2013). In a social and political setting, however, nobody asks this type of questions about the prevalent assumptions, which sometimes, in their content, closely mirror individual beliefs which would qualify any individual for serious counselling and careful observation. If an individual view of the human race as fundamentally predisposed to immoral predatory behaviour is a sign of mental disorder, or at least a cause for serious moral questioning, could it then be that the general assumption in political theory and social practice that, barred the state's capacity to inflict punishments and impose a certain order, people would use every opportunity to act in predatory and immoral ways, is also psychologically and morally problematic? Might we argue that a political system which is predicated upon the assumption that everybody will act in selfish and evil ways unless effectively discouraged from doing so by social sanctions is the result of a depressed, gloomy, pathological worldview? By extension, would this mean that the controlling practices so prevalent in modern democratic states are psychotic or at least borderline psychotic? My answer to all three questions in this book is 'yes'.
The same as the pessimistic view of human nature that stands at the core of liberal economic (and to a considerable extent political) theory is based on the idea that people are driven mainly by selfish interest and ambitions, and that institutions are there to ensure fair rules for the otherwise essentially egotistically driven competition for limited resources. Similarly, the view that people will be corrupt unless prevented to engage in corruption is commonplace in most discussions of institutional reforms and anticorruption policies today.
Despite their tacit acceptance as 'common sense', the pessimistic premises of social and political theory are far from persuasive, and some are couched in what could be considered sheer phantasm. Consider for example the theory of social contract — many would say the founding theory of modern political liberalism. The theory stipulates that society is justified on the basis of assumption that the initially totally sovereign individuals, equipped with full personal liberties, and mutually independent, have created a consensus to relinquish the necessary minimum of their sovereignty to common institutions that would rule them all, in exchange for the provision of basic needs such as security and some predictability in their mutual interactions. This presumption is used by liberal theory to justify the need for the state to remain at a necessary minimum of prerogatives so as not to encroach on more personal sovereignty of the individual than is required by the presumed consensus. Consequently, the liberal theory holds it that corrupt institutions that develop full-fledged corporate interests of their own and start to artificially reproduce their own prerogatives threaten the legitimacy of liberal society — but only because such transgressions violate the social contract. This contract makes it clear that liberty lies primarily with individuals. Individuals are supposedly more 'liberally free' outside the community, but they receive comparatively greater benefits from communal life than the price they pay by relinquishing some of their rights, allowing the institutions to regulate their transactions.
The problem here, of course, is not just that the presumption of social contract is difficult to prove, but that such an event would have been existentially impossible. First, the idea that the 'original' human condition is 'asocial' is a phantasm: since the most primitive forms of social organization 'human animals' have lived in some type of community. Aristotle's definition of man as 'political animal' is based exactly on the observation that man's primary condition is social, rather than solitary (Solomon, 1990: 130–43).
Secondly, even if 'human animals' had been solitary to start with, any 'consensus', 'congress', or similar event resulting in a social contract would not have been possible, especially in light of the idea that man is essentially selfish and interest-driven. Mutually hostile, antagonistic, and solitary individuals would have no common ground on which to build a consensus. Much less would they be able to muster sufficient mutual trust to embark upon a common project that, if it went astray, would have guaranteed the demise of them all. Empirically speaking, social contract theory is nonsense. Aesthetically, it is a nice and elegant hypothetical explanation of how liberal ideology could be generically justified. In this case, the aesthetics of the argument has clearly prevailed over its empirical and existential viability. Obviously, the social contract theory has not been proposed in order to generically explain the emergence of society, but rather as a rationalization of how society could be justified vis-à-vis the presumed original, unlimited liberties that people are supposed to have somehow legitimately relinquished in favour of obedience to the state. But what does this really mean in terms of the significance of the social contract theory? It is a phantasm that might illustrate how some aspects of society could be justified, while admitting that the actual events mentioned in the social contract theory could never have actually taken place. In other words, it is a hypothetical justification by means of what could never be but, if it was possible, might help justify what one finds difficult to justify in tenable terms. For this and other reasons it is not my intention to discuss social contract theory on its own, for I believe that it has no significant merits at all. Instead I merely acknowledge its significance in the history of ideas and its fundamental role within the liberal theory. I also point to the germane pessimism about human nature that has seeped from the social contract theory into the liberal political philosophy. I argue that, just as the social contract theory is useless as an explanation of how society might have come into existence, its view of human nature as essentially egotistic is detrimental for the development of constructive social ethics.
Just as in reality human beings have likely never been solitary, they are also not as selfish and interest-driven as the liberal paradigm would have us believe. True, the advocates of the market as the main (or only) regulating force for social interactions allow that altruism will sometimes occur, but they are quick to explain this as a method of preventing drastic social outcomes that would not be in the interest of systemic stability (McKean, 1975). Systemic stability is an instrumental value that corresponds to the interests associated with survival of the system. These interests are similar to the more traditional biological models of collective self-preservation that dampen the struggle between members of the same species in nature in the interest of preservation of the species itself. Similarly, the reductionist economic understanding of altruism is that it simply dampens the otherwise natural cut-throat behaviour of one human being towards another, all in the interest of preservation of the system or society (which the proverbial throat-cutters also need in order to thrive). Thus the liberal economic theory makes altruism seem entirely compatible with the gloomy view of the human nature associated with social contract and the origins of political liberalism (e.g., Berlin, 1969).
A crocodile may be biologically programmed to stop short of killing another crocodile, expelling it instead from the preferred hunting grounds. In much the same way, a liberal, market society will stop short of letting its poor starve to death and may provide them with soup kitchens, shelters, and even some free emergency health care. Liberal societies differ from one another in ways not dissimilar to the way crocodiles differ from one another: some will be more and some less violent in getting their way over those seen as challenging their interests. The fact that most liberal societies stop short of allowing their weakest members to simply die does not give them much moral credit if their reasons for doing so are strictly instrumental, pragmatic, and fundamentally selfish, and not altruistic. This insincere 'benevolence' in no way makes liberal states morally superior to illiberal societies. The latter might guarantee fewer liberties in the areas of privacy and rights to noninterference to their citizens than do liberal states, but many take affirmative steps to prevent falling through the social net that are not predicated only on the interests of systemic stability of the state and society.
The 2010 introduction of 'ObamaCare' in the United States, which subsidizes the purchase of private health insurance and requires everybody to have some type of health insurance, was a step forward compared to the previous situation where many people had had no health insurance whatsoever. Even more people had been unable to buy sufficient coverage to meet even the most common health problems, especially as they aged. However, this type of more benevolent style still fails to oblige the state to provide reasonably comprehensive health coverage for everyone, and thus falls short of changing the general predatory philosophy that firmly depicts health as a commodity to be purchased on the liberal market. The liberal crocodile of ObamaCare is less predatory than the liberal crocodile of no health care for many Americans that preceded it; however, it remains very far from the entirely different political and ideological animals that provide universal health insurance to all citizens free of charge, such as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Germany, Cuba, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Spain, Russia, Portugal, and many other European countries. In practice, the difference might come down to a degree of health care provided: even in countries with free universal health insurance, many people use private doctors and private hospitals, which — to various extents — they pay for from their own pockets, because private doctors provide a better service. The difference is philosophically significant, however. The way the state relates to its citizens, and the value that it places on the citizens' lives and health, are reflected in the way it conceptualizes healthcare policy. While a state that sees it as its duty to cater to the health of all citizens may not in reality have sufficient resources to provide high quality health care for everyone, its attempt and desire reflect its values. In other words, even when the state does not have the means to help everyone, it shows that it cares by doing what it can without discrimination. That is already a lot, and perhaps the most important thing that people need from the authorities and institutions in order to feel socially empowered and politically fully enfranchised.
The logic of the market is fundamentally compatible with the behaviour of predatory animals. Every crocodile will generally act within the logic of the market, within the limits of individual physical strength and the challenges it faces. Similarly, most crocodiles will stop short of killing another crocodile unless forced to do so. However, no crocodile will go out of its way to actively help another crocodile. Some (and not so few) people, and some states, will and do go out of their way to help their week peers or citizens. Thus it seems as though the liberal economic, in fact nihilistic, reductionist explanation of altruism is more suited to crocodiles than to the men and women most of us aspire to become.
The liberal assumption that people are 'naturally' selfish and that their interactions in society are most properly analysed in terms of interest appears to militate at least superficially against the conceptualizations of virtue as selflessness, which dominate the moral discourse in most liberal democracies. There is a deeper consistency behind this apparent contradiction, however. The consistency is in the idea that selflessness arises from efforts to fight the natural selfishness. Thus a person characterized as virtuous is considered to excel in developing an ability to act contrary to one's natural impulses. In this context, moral improvement is seen as a struggle, just as any achievement is seen by liberal ideology as the result of a fight. This ideology takes it as an 'obvious' fact that human nature is selfish and institutions are there to dampen what would otherwise become cutthroat social dynamics, resulting in an ultimate destruction of society, either through its physical destruction or through a degradation of the quality of life to the extent where it is no longer worth living. In this context morality and virtuous values are seen as opposed to what is essentially the human condition. The idea essentially implies that building a moral character means renouncing, rather than developing and refining our natural human qualities. Human nature is thus perceived as fundamentally antisocial; it is seen as the dark reality against which society rises to open new horizons of hope which the human beings desire, yet which are fundamentally in opposition to their own partial and egotistic drives. This is why ethics in the liberal ideology is overwhelmingly repressive and limiting: it is all about the things we desire, but can't do or have, for various moral reasons. Alternatively, it is about 'duties': things we would rather not do, but must do in order to act morally. The obvious consequence of this type of moral reasoning is that a perfectly moral life is consistent with an utterly unhappy or deprived one. It is possible to be moral and at the same time deeply unhappy on account of the frustration of one's 'natural' desires and impulses. Furthermore, if the human being is a rational predator by nature, and moral action is fundamentally antipredatory, then human happiness and fulfilment are inconsistent with human morality. This is a very blunt and simple way of putting the problem, which is usually much more nuanced in everyday reality. The blunt formulation, however, serves to lay the core problem bare so that I can address it directly in the course of this book.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Virtue as Identity by Aleksandar Fatic. Copyright © 2016 Aleksandar Fatic. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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