The Borders of Things

Rocks in Hard Places

For the context of this post, go here, then here, and then here.

I have no intention to start throwing things at Mesh's argument. In fact, I've been thinking through a similar thing for a while now. What really sparked it was, actually, the Terry Schiavo legal battle. I realized that if I believed that someone I loved was in extreme pain, unable to communicate or improve, I would pull the plug, regardless of the state regulations or any moral law that may tell me to do otherwise.

Would I call this a higher moral act, beyond good and evil? Or would I try to legitimize it by some ethical framework? I hope I would do neither, and say that I murdered my wife, but that I would do it again because I love her.

Then I realized, as I performed this thought experiment, that I ended up on very dangerous ground.

Why? Because I was recognizing a situation where I would act totally individually and particularly against an ethical framework. I would, essentially, submit myself to being immoral because being moral, quite frankly, wouldn't be good enough.

But what happens when you open that door? What terrors are unleashed into our ethical reasoning, our ability to act as well as to think? What happens when we go to war, for instance, and say "This is unjust, and innocent people are going to die, but, dammit, we're doing it anyway because of the people we love"? Sure, at least we aren't adopting a moral highground ("but this war is just!") or some sort of pervers epistemology ("Don't worry, little permanently-handicapped-by-a-bomb Iraqi girl, you're actually being liberated!"). But are we, as Josiah worries, resigning ourselves to "moral futility"?

I fear that we can be. And it is precisely because in a foxhole no one is an ethicist that we need to work through these arguments as rigorously as we can outside of the foxhole, which doesn't always mean sending some one else there to protect us and our abstractions.

At the same time, I am equally fearful of a "moral calculator." We see this in the later Derrida's distinction between law and justice: justice cannot be reduced to law because the latter is a "definitive judgment," in other words, it is mechanical, like an algorithm. If we stick with a model based on law, we eliminate the particularity of each situation, the dynamism which life in this world calls for, the very dynamism, I think, that Mesh sees as necessary and inevitable, and consequently, not easily fit within "moral laws."

So I fall somewhere between Josiah and Mesh. I am fully sympathetic of Mesh's point that we deny the fact that we are murderers, condemned to always be in bad faith--the door, in other words, is already wide open and we can't deny it. Yet I also think that we CAN reason ethically in the world as human beings, that we MUST, and that we need to do it in full response to the dynamism of reality, the particularity of the situation. The reason I brought up the just war tradition is not because I wanted a moral calculator to allow me to wash my hands (although I may have given that impression), but to throw in another tool for practicing that reasoning today in a more complex way.

Maybe it doesn't do that. If not, I'd abandon it. But lets not also abandon the inability to say "this is unjust and it should not be done." If we do that, we are taking the freedom to which we are condemned and tearing it from responsibility. And that can be as equally monstrous as the violence which is explained away.

Posted by pjaussen at April 19, 2006 06:01 PM | TrackBack