Is morality a barrier to understanding?
Friday 5 September 2008 at 00:22 UTC
Despite his tendency to ultra-leftism, rabid anti-Americanism and incandescent anti-Zionism, I have some residual respect for the art critic and marxist-humanist polymath John Berger. His 1972 television series “Ways of seeing” and later book of the same name had a profound effect on me during the early 1980s when I first began delving into philosophy and aesthetics as an intellectually-starved, post-school youth.
Berger was recently interviewed for the Sunday Times by Brian Appleyard, and interesting reading it is too.
Norman Geras quotes approvingly from Berger’s utterances on Marxism, ethics and matters transcendental:
“He remains a Marxist, but with a crucial note of dissent. ‘The problem with Marxism is there is no real space for ethics. Okay, there is plenty of space in it for the struggle of justice against injustice, but the notion that an act is good or bad in itself – there is no space for that. There is no space for that which is outside time or, if you wish, for the eternal… There is the possibility of it being combined with another philosophical view which is not simply materialist.’”
The economist Chris Dillow, on the other hand, is dismissive of morality and ethics in social analysis. Dillow raises a number of pertinent points, but I think he doth go a little too far in his strictly materialist Weltanschauung.
Morality in public discourse is, as Dillow says, often no more than a projection of ego (and, I would add, herd mentality). While I agree that a fixation on such poorly-defined notions as goodness and badness can be a barrier to understanding, the following is, I feel, a little too strong:
“Morality is like woolly underwear. It might keep you warm, but it’s not interesting. It contributes little of substance to social or economic questions.”
Sociality arises from the many complex interactions between the individual elements of society, and I don’t think one can brush aside the individual’s willingness or unwillingness to be a social, considerate and empathic human being. (That, by the way, is just a long-winded way of referring to “goodness or badness” without recourse to the emotional ickiness of everyday human language.) The causes of crime and anti-social behaviour in general are many and various, and you cannot reduce these to material social and economic questions in the abstract.
As Norm says, Marxism was never an all-encompassing system, despite the naïve and sometimes malicious efforts of some to use it as such. That said, it does have a limited predictive potential, and therefore provides a useful theoretical framework for social analysis. But like any “science”, hard or soft, Marxism is incomplete. It is in particular deficient in the ethics department, but there is to me no conceivable reason why this cannot be remedied.
Friday 5 September 2008 at 09:58 UTC
You say: “I don’t think one can brush aside the individual’s willingness or unwillingness to be a social, considerate and empathic human being.”
But what influences this willingness? Is it an innate sense of morality, or is it social conditions? “Bourgeois” social science has today converged upon Marxism in stressing the latter, by saying that people respond to incentives or peer pressure; we see the excrescence of this in Cameron’s “nudge” agenda.
It would be sad if Marxists abandon this view just when it’s becoming mainstream.
Friday 5 September 2008 at 10:22 UTC
The first person to answer this question will be hailed as the greatest scientist who ever lived. :-) My hypothesis is that the influences are various, and include social conditions. But part of it will be innate, and I challenge anyone to show convincingly that it is all derived from social conditions.
Marxism is a soft science as it provides a theoretical framework that provides borderline testable predictions. But it does so only to a limited degree, and as a model of reality it is weak as it relies on circular assumptions and normative statements that make the system highly under-determined. It would take the most sophisticated Bayesian analysis imaginable to untangle all this.
It’s not enough to state that behaviour X arises from social condition Y; you have to demonstrate the link. Otherwise, it is reasonable to continue talking of social values as being at least partly based on something innate.
I come at this as a natural scientist, and I admit that my knowledge of trends in social science – bourgeois or otherwise – is limited. The trend in the natural sciences is towards a systems thinking that recognises the limits of reductionism. If Marxism (or marxism) can do likewise, then it might just progress.
Friday 5 September 2008 at 13:20 UTC
I wasn’t being reductionist here - I deliberately used the word “influences” rather than “determines.”
I fear this is a half-full/half empty debate.
Tkae the claim “crime arises from inequality”. We can demonstrate this link with empirical evidence - showing that unequal countries have more crime, and that the poor are more likely to commit crime than the rich. We can also point to reasonable mechanisms - the poor have fewer options to make money legitimately and face smaller losses from being imprisoned.
So we can show that conditions influence behaviour.
However, there are some people who commit crime even when they have advantaged backgrounds, and others who don’t commit crime even when faced with the same conditions as those who do.
So crime arises both from social conditions and something innate. My complaint against moralists is that they miss the former point. Of course, the crudest economic determinists miss the latter. But I like to think I’m not among these.
Friday 5 September 2008 at 13:39 UTC
“I wasn’t being reductionist here - I deliberately used the word “influences” rather than “determines.”"
OK, that’s selective reading on my part, for which I apologise.
“I fear this is a half-full/half empty debate.”
Possibly, but it is also one constricted by a poverty of language when it comes to discussing ethics. My impression is that many (I’m not accusing you of this!) fall back on a naïvely reductionist analysis for this reason.
No-one bar the most ideologically-blinkered would deny the correlation between crime and poverty. So yes, social conditions undoubtedly influence moral behaviour.
But there is also experimental evidence (I’ll try and find some references) that there exists a moral sense which transcends cultures and socio-economic conditions. You are right to attack “moralism”, but my impression is that very few people days take take strict moralism seriously. From what I can see it is an argument trotted out by right-wing politicians on the stump, not serious thinkers of whatever political hue.
But coming back to the point of the post, I do think that Berger and Norm are right to call marxism on its lack of consideration for ethics. This is a challenge for intellectuals working in this field, and I hope they take it up.