Dear Theo,
Here I go again. I'll try to keep this one short. I just get carried away !
Whenever morality is discussed in its widest context it is always referenced to society or, more specifically, human society. One need only refer to Michael Nisbet’s ' coherent society ... unified human community’ or Ricky Streets’ social construct to see the prevalence of this view. They are, indeed, substantially correct; evaluations of right and wrong are determined by culture, which thereby maintains the order and structure of the society. I would deny, however, that these evaluations comprise some kind of consensus opinion of the members of society; for this to be so there would have to be some mythical afternoon where everyone downed tools to discuss ethics. This is clearly nonsense. The vast majority of people are led by the nose, never even thinking about their moral beliefs, or thinking about it on only the most superficial of levels, like building a weathercock on a house made of assumptions.
Those of a more philosophical bent will delve a bit deeper, but few challenge the most basic premises of the above view, i.e. that society, and indeed humanity itself, are good things to begin with. People continually (and narcisistically) assure me that they are, but I am a rational person and, like all rational people, draw conclusions from what I observe, and I have observed little in either my personal life or in human history to support such an optimistic appraisal. The evidence, in fact, is a catalogue of stupidity and atrocity, yet everyone is so unaccountably pleased with themselves as if they want applause for being human, and when something bad happens, something that shows humanity in a less than flattering light they have the nerve to act like its all a big surprise and proceed to congratulate themselves on how civilised they are. To summarise, the notion that humanity is good or important is a superstition not borne out by the facts.
My opinions are not too dissimilar from Rousseau's, that, to put it kindly, society causes more problems than it solves, and therefore to subordinate morality to it is mistaken. In fact I think that subordinating the concept of good to any kind of final cause is wrong, since one can always question the goodness of the final cause. Morality in principle (rather than practice) has no purpose at all, but is rather a by-product of free will, of autonomy (i.e. a choice rather than a simple reflex. Bacteria do not have autonomy).
To conclude (at last!) I will return to Michael Nisbet’s remarks, particularly ‘all men are akin '. All men are not akin, or should not be, and that is a good thing since if they were they would be so easy to replace; to put it bluntly, there are plenty more where they came from. As for broadening the definition of 'human', it was in fact Peter Singer's definition of human (which I went on to modify somewhat) that formed the starting point of the entire controversy. My point there was that self-consciousness, in all but the most trivial senses of the word, and what Ricky Street calls ‘social participation’, are in fact inimical to each other, since the latter is always accompanied by a procrusteanism which is effectuated by the very unity that wannabe peacemakers espouse. Ascend into anarchy !
Dave Botting
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