(paper for ph.d. seminar)
Content
I. Ethics - excluding knowledge of morality
III. Presenting Zygmunt Bauman
V. Ethics seen in an sociologcally perspective
A. The situation of the moral self
B. Reconstructing the history of ethics
C. Deconstructing modern ethics
VI. Ethics as the substitution of autonomy with heteronomy
A. Universality and the communitarians
VII. The impossiblity of founding Ethics ontologically
I. Ethics - excluding knowledge of morality
Whereas political philosophy, loyal to its classification as pratical philosophy, has maintained its traditional links to the kind of knowledge today offered by the social and political sciences, ethics has made itself more and more independent and hence ignorant of the increasing amount of knowledge about those social interactions, which contains moral behavior. What ethics felt it necessary to know about moral behavior was given by common-sense in the form of those moral intutions, we allegedly all have.
Looking back on this development, what seems strange is that when it comes to theoretical matters, philosophers has been deeply suspicious about the reliablity of common-sense, whereas in practical matters precisely the same common-sense has been the basis on which they have buildt sometimes very impressing teoretical structures.
A decesive step for the course of ethics in this century was no doubt taken by G.E. Moore in his Principia Ethica. By insisting that one could not - should not - draw conclussion about what to do from statement about how the world is he contributed to the arrogance with which ethics since then has treated whoever had something to say about how people behave here and now, how they behave in other places and cultures and how they have behaved up through history. What mattered in ethics was intuitions about right and wrong and the meaning of the words used about moral matters; nothing else.
This is not because philosophy has been generally anti-scientific, quite the contrary. In theoretical philosophy the development of natural science has been integrated to a very large extent in epistemology. Scientist has been allowed to cross the boundary and become philosophers, accepted as valid interlocuters within the established institutions, taken seriously at conferences and being invited to write in philosophical journals. Not all scientist however. The same process that made it legitimate to let in the natural sciences meant leaving out human sciences as unrelyable in matters of truth.
The proces has been most clearly visible within analytical philosophy in the English-speaking world. It has so-to-say been most close the the ideal-type development described above. But because ethics was neglected by the trendsetting continental traditions for most of this century, the institutions of analytical philosophy (departments, associations, journals, acknowledged authorities etc.) are today dominating within ethics, just as analytical philosophy has the advantage having discussed many crusial questions in detail for years, and in a language which today is the international language within the philosophical community.
This means that analytical ethics more or less has earned the right of, if not setting the standards of ethics, then at least being heard in matters of ethics; ignoring it demands a very good reason. And this means, to put it bluntly, that it is perfectly acceptable for a philosopher to be ignorant about morals when working within ethics. You can even be ignorant of ethics within the philosophic tradition, and still participate with equal weight if having an interresting argument to put forth. Nobody today would dream of suggesting, like Aristotle, that dicussing these matters requires a certain knowledge about human beings, a certain life-experience or maturity. (1) And certainly nobody would dare requiring systematic knowledge from sources of knowledge outside philosophy itself. (2)
Whatever the logic behind the proces was, the result is that ethics today to a very large extent is, not just as the sociologist Salvador Giner rightly says, "sociologically illiterate" (3); it is also ignorant about the development of other human sciences such as psychology and antropology. And if some philosophers have been aware of the development, it has only been integrated as common-sense knowledge, not as a contribution of science. (4) Using concepts like for instance 'sub-consciousness' or 'structure' does not mean an integration of Freud or Levi-Strauss as scientist; these concept just happen to have been integrated in our, more or less common, common-sense knowledge.
And those few who has directly used results from human sciences have done it peace-meal, picking up a few usefull hints they happend to stumble over, not caring whether the science in question as a whole recognized the results as an important contribution to the body of knowledge or just as curious marginal findings. Whereas it is acknowledged that to participate in theoretical philosophy, one have to know something about natural sciences, in ethics one does not have to know anything about human beings and the behavior when living together and confronted with one another.
As moral philosophers turning to the human and social sciences for substantial knowledge about morality we have to take care not simply taking the first theory we happen to run into, as it often happens when non-philosophers turns to philosophy for the first time!! The first choice to be made is to which science one should turn. Acknowledging that morality for sure is a social fact, and knowing that precisely this has not played a very important part in ethics, (5) sociology seems a fair start.
Several things can be done to avoid too blind-folded an amateurism: Taking courses, listening to conferences, reading introductions and textbooks, chatting with sociologists etc. (6) Having got a general idea of what matters within sociology and who among the theoreticans are generally recognized as more important than others, two strategies seem reasonable: Starting with the classics or starting with the contemporaries.
Both strategies shows to be rewarding. If one turns to the founding fathers and for instance takes Emile Durkheim's doctoral thesis from 1893, The Social Division of Labour, then at the first page he announces that "This book is above all an effort to treat the facts of moral life after the method of the positive sciences." (7) continuing in the rest of the Preface and the Introcuction to argue against moral philosophy as practiced by his contemporaries. What is striking in his survey trough the moral philosophy of his time is that moral philosophy does not seem to have developed much since then. Hence Durkheim argues against utilitarians, Kantians and ethics with Aristotelic roots, and with arguments still prevalent in the current debates. Durkheim himself considered his sociology as way of improving moral philosophy, having the, from my point of view very understandable, impression that it was running around in circles, unable to progress following its traditional strategies. (8)
Turning to our contemporaries, the Polish-English sociologist Zygmunt Bauman seems to be a good bet. Winner of The European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Theory in 1990 with the book Modernity and the Holocaust, that is, widely recognized by his colleges, Bauman not only questions the relationship between sociology as a discipline and morality; he also traces the logics of morality within modernity as such, and finally, in his Postmodern Ethics from 1993, steps over the line and makes normative claims as to what moral is and should be. That is, doing exactly what Durkheim wanted to do, but never succeeded in doing, (9) investigating systematically into morality and making it relevant for moral philosophy, for ethics.
III. Presenting Zygmunt Bauman
Bauman was born in a jewish family in Poland in 1925. He spend the time during the Second World War in the Sovjet Union, and returned afterwards to become a part of communist Poland. He got his education as a sociologer in Eastern Europe, made a brilliant career as an intellectual, writing a considerable amount of articles and books. Some of his articles from the mid-sixties were quite controversial when judged from the orthodox ideology - he for instance wrote about alienation in postwar Poland, officially impossible in a communist socity - and during the anti-semitic campaign in Poland in the late sixties, which deprived many jews their occupational posibilities, he left the country and now lives in England, retired after being a professor in sociology at the university of Leeds.
So like many post-modernist Bauman is also a post-marxist. Curiously enough this is not something which he mentions in his recent books (I only know about it from having talked to people who knows him better), even though he emphazises very strongly the close link between totalitarianism and the modern projekt of making the world more reasonable. He does mention that he is of jewish origen, and that he did not experience Holocaust first-hand; (10) but that is all. No mentions of his carrer as a communist intelletual. Not mentioning these experiences makes his universal claims, or better, his general analisyses of how it is to live under modern and post-modern conditions subject to the suspicion that his special experiences with the Stalinist version of Modernity actually does play a very significant role in the way he is thinking about Modernity in general, and - to me, at least - it explains some of his focuses and emphasies.
In his anlysises of Modernity and rationality, for instance, the state and the bureacrazy plays the major roles as opposed to the individual; but there is no real distinction between variuos types of states or bureacrazy, i.e. democratic and totalitarian. Freedom of expression is seen to be an efficient means against the institutionalized production of evil; but a democratic culture as a gaurantee for that is not mentioned.
This in it self, of course, does not undermine the validity of his claims, but it points to possible limitations in the interpretation of modernity and post-modernity, because Baumans experience is formed mainly on the eastern side of the Iron-carpet. It seems like his experiences of Modernity from Eastern Europe makes him accept Webers analysis in such a degree that he does not even question or mention it as the main sources of his developmental scheme.
From my reading of Bauman - and from listening to him at a seminar i Aalborg, Denmark from the 15th to the 18th of April 1996 - I would place him in the hermeutical-phenomenological tradition within sociology, being very highly influenced by Max Weber. This blends with his marxist background to form a position very much like the early Critical Theory by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who precisely was influenced by thsese two traditions. I was told that Bauman only after having written Modernity and the Holocaust discovered that the problem, which he tried to solve in this book, was very much the same which Horkheimer and Adorno tried to solve in the The Dialectics of the Enlightment, namely why mankind in stead of developing a human society had sunken into barbary. And in Modernity and Ambivalence from 1991 he explicitly says that what he is trying in that book is wrapping "some historical and sociological flesh around the 'dialectics of Enlightment' skeleton." (11)
But his rejection of the Marxist-Hegelian developmental scheme, his radical critique of rationality, and a more heavy leaning towards hermeneutics, makes him, in stead of ending up in the aporias of Critical Theory, put all the blame on the rationality of modern society. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer Bauman does not recognized reason as the normative ideal, and therefore he has no problems dismissing modern rationality all together. To Bauman modernity is the beyond any doubt the less human stage in history, a real dark-age of alienation and repression, from which post-modernity is seen as a real Enlightment, the begining of a "modernity without illusions" (12). This interpretation however means that he keeps the modern developmental scheme, but in Webers pessimistic version, just supplemented with a posible positive overcoming of the Weberian final duality.
This means, firstly, liberating the individual of the rational responsibility for the outcome of rational decisionmaking, because it is very hard to escape the rationality imposed on every human being by all modern authorities and institutions. This picture is very much the same as the one painted by western Weberian Marxist like the above mentioned, i.e. the total and inescaple alienation in modern socialization. But Bauman then tries to escape the despair by, secondly, reintroducing an even more unconditional moral responsibility that was there "'from the start', somehow rooted in the very way we humans are" (PE, 34). Unlike Critical Theory he is not constrained by a Freudian antropology; but can recognize morality within human nature.
Still, this only remains a postulate. Bauman sticks to his phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, without analyzing what kind of a conception of human nature which could support his claims about human morality. Like Emmanuel Levinas whom he relies very much on in his exposition of human morality he only gives an interpretation of the meaning of human ethics (13); he leaves human morality as a mystery and does not venture into speculation about it's ontological foundation; by his strange, restricted way of using 'ontology' he actually denies the possibility that morality can any ontological grounds. But his metaphysical claims remain only hints, they never become systematic and elaborate claims about human nature.
Nevertheless the turning to sociology becomes philosophic after all. First of all my reading will naturally be philosophical, but Bauman himself leaves the sociological assumption that morality is best approached as a social fact, and turn to a moral individual conception of morality, relying very much on philosophers from the phenomenological tradition such as Emanuel Levinas and Knud Løgstrup.
V. Ethics seen in an sociologcally perspective
In his ethics Bauman see himself facing the same problem that has triggered of the ethics of, among others, Karl-Otto Apel (14) and Hans Jonas, whom he quotes: "newer was so much power coupled with so little guidance" (PE, 17). Like the two mentioned Bauman sees this as the proper point of departure to understand what has been called the ethical crisis of our times.
A. The situation of the moral self
The problem is more precisely that what we do now, because of our advanced technology have farreaching effects, some of which we do not even know about, some of them unthinkable and therefore uncalculable. Because of the global division of labour and the integrated economy everyone of us - at least in the western world - participates more or less in processes which, when they sum up, have appalling consequences, like the exploitation of the third world and the destruction of the ecological balance of the earth.
Furthermore in our daily affairs in the western world we are split up into many roles each of which demands different actions, some of which apears incompatible, both with each other and with what could be called our moral selves. As moral selves, as individual human beings we are irreplaceble; but as roleperformers we are indeed replacable by persons with similar skills.
Both these aspects of Modernity points for Bauman in the same direction, namely to a responsibility that is "floating" (PE, 18). This can very well be seen as a reason not to engage one self in any moral questioning about whether or not one is doing the right thing, since it is very dificult to blame somebody in paricular for the outcome of what is going on. Still, some feel this unsatisfying, and take it upon themselves to be responsible.
But this only adds to the feeling of uncomfort, because, says Bauman, "the lack of habit" (PE, 20) of being responsible: "We miss responsibility badly when it is denied to us, but once we get it back it feels like a burden too heavy to carry alone." So we try to escape, says Bauman (quoting the analysis of Erich Froom: The Fear of Freedom), through submitting ourselves under an authority, which knows more than us and which we can trust, some rules to follow which will tell us right from vrong. The problem now is that there are too many rules to chose from. There is no authority strong enough to dimiss the others, and the result is that moral choices appears to us as "intrinsically and irreparably ambivalent. (...) These times, says Bauman, offer us freedom of choice never before enjoyed, but also cast us into a state of uncertainty never before so agonizing." (PE, 21)
B.Reconstructing the history of ethics
This ambiguity of moral practice is reflected in moral theory, that is, ethics. Ethics is, says Bauman, "a moral code wishing to be the moral code" (PE, 21). Modern ethics is charaterized by its attempt to reduce the plurality of morality and hence the ambiguity of moral choices, a plurality which itself is the outcome of the original modern break with the premodern unifying tradtion.
The initial break with the medieval tradition came with the Renaissance. For the renaissance thinkers the break meant freedom from tyranny and dogmatism, freedom to build up one self in the image of one-self as civilized being, at the same time different from the uncivilized mass. The "humanist emancipation at the top" resulted in "a more or less permanent break between two sections of society, guided by two totally opposed principles: (...) self-assertive Übermenchheit against slave-like submisiveness to passions." (PE, 24)
The freedom of self-constitution was seen as intrinsically human, allthough as a "universal human capacity", a potential not yet realized by the masses. That situation called for political leadership by the allready emancipated few. What all philosophers agreed about was "the need and the possibility of laying firm and und unshakeable foundations of morality binding all human beings" (PE, 25), substituting the Revalation of the Church with a universally valid human-made ethics, grounded in the nature of man.
The Enlightment shares this premise, that mans potential should be - and could only be - made real guided by "reason-beares", that the reason of the people had to be revealed to the same people by someone more reasonable than them-selves, and that they had to be helped by arranging the environment so as to reward the right conduct. The people, in short, needed "teachers" and "legislators" (PE, 27).
The idea was that uncultivated man would allways seek pleasure and avoid pain. So doing good had to be justified in terms of this basic condition so as man, by doing good morally speaking, also would be convinced that this would at the same time mean a better life for himself. We are all motivated by selflove and interest, but only as enlighted self-love and true interest will they eventually reach the goal they seek. (15)
People must be told what their true interest are; if they do not listen or appear to be ahrd of hearing, they must be forced to behave as their real interest demands - if necessary, against their will. (PE, 27)
The overall asumption is that there is a gap between interests and true interests, needs and true needs, and overcoming this gap, you need guidance. This assumption is, allthough Bauman does not say that, by the premodern, so-called traditional society, where the mases was considered in need of the guidance of the Church; in Modernity this guidance was overtaken by philosophers and politicians.
This assumption could also be expressed so as the morality of the people is best secured by imposing heteronome rules to the people in stead of giving them authonomy right away.
All social institutions backed by coercive sanctions have been and are founded on the assumption that the individual cannot be trusted to make good choices (whether 'good' is interpreted as 'good for the individual', or 'good for community', or as both at the same time). (PE, 28f)
The only way human freedom is seen as morally productive is if practiced acording to "heteronomously set standards", which means to form ethics after the pattern of the Law, substituting morality with rules to be obeyed by man giverned by reason. "Individual respeonsibility is then translated (...) as the responsibility for following or breaching the socially endorsed, ethical-legal rules." (PE, 29)
C. Deconstructing modern ethics
This philosophical scheme is result of trying to cope with, on the one hand the idea of universal human freedom, based on reason as inherent in every man, and on the other hand, the reality of the modern - and I would add, every known - society, where individual autonomy and heteronomy are "unevenly distributed", where the degree of autonomy and heteronomy, freedom and dependence are among "the principal factors of social stratification." (PE, 29) In short, that "some individuals are freer than others".
What is at stake is legitimizing once more that society is in need of rules and, even more important, rulers.
You can trust the wise (the code name of the mighty) to do good autonomously; but you cannot trust all people to be wise. So, in order to enable the resourcefull to do more good, one needs to give them yet more resources (they will, one hopes, put them in good use); but in order the prevent the resourceless from doing evil, one needs to further restrict the resources at their disposal (one needs, for instance, to give more money to the rich, but less money to the poor, to make sure that good work will be done in both cases). (PE, 30)
Freedom is more than an inherrent quality of man a privilege in society. It is bound to be contested, and therefore has to be formulated by the holders of that priviledge so as not be something within reach of everyone. But also the definition of what is the proper understanding and use of freedom is bound to be contested, because it stands for a real conflict, and the intents of modern ethics to overcome this conflict by formulating universally valid principles have failed, ending
up with either a list of trival recipies for universally experienced, but abdominably insignificant or imaginary dilemma, or with abstract models pleasing the philosopher with their logical elegance, yet largely irrelevant to the practical morality and daily deceision-making in society as it is. (PE, 30f)
Therefore we at so to say back at square one, left on our own, without trust in Reason to guide us. We know now, says Bauman, that we will forver face moral dilemmas without unambigously good solutions, and that we will never be sure, neither if solutions can be found at all, nor whether it would be good to find them after all.
What the analysis of Bauman amounts to is showing how modern ethics has legitimized the conservation of the traditional normative powerstructure within society, by turning the initial idea of universal human freedom into a tool for the emergence of the new so-called enlightened rulers, who after all were not able to live up to their task, and whose failure has left us without trust in guidance at all. This is for Bauman the significance of postmodernity, which is, "one may say, modernity without illusions" (PE, 32).
Post-modernity means recognizing that "Human reality is messy and ambigous - and so moral decisions, unlike abstract ethical principles, are ambivalent." (PE, 32) And that for all likelyhood this is a condition which is a permanent condition, not only a temporaray nuissance, that will stay like that whatever we do or know. Postmodernity can be seen as a "re-enchantment of the world", as "the resistance to [the] dis-enchanment" (PE, 33) which was pursued by Modernity. A large part of events and acts in our world is not only not-yet-explained, but in all likelyhood inexplicable. Starting the analysis from this point will, according to Bauman, "even make the hope of a more humane world more realistic" (PE, 34), because of its very modesty.
This is beacuse post-modernity gives us the chance of rediscovering the "human moral capacity [...] as it truely is" (PE, 34), as the fundament on which societies are build and by which they survive, as that which "makes ethical negotioations and consensus possible", allthough without guaranteeing any happy ending. Post-modernity means for Bauman the 're-personalization' of ethics and morality, showing that in human beings "moral responsibility was 'from the start', somehow rooted in the very way we humans are" (PE, 34); it is not the outcome of a ethical process.
It is the primal and primary 'brute fact' of moral impulse, moral responsibility, moral intimacy that supplies the stuff from which the morality of human cohabitation is made. After centuries [...] the ' mystery of morality inside me' (Kant) once more appears to us impossible to expalin away. (PE, 35)
One of these are the moral acts which Bauman - as we shal se below - leaves unexplained, offering only a phemenological analysis of how morality shows itself to us.
VI. Ethics as the substitution of autonomy with heteronomy
This rather elaborate summery of the basic approach of Zygmunt Bauman to ethcis allows us to state his more basic arguments against modern ethics without so much explanation. What is improtant to remember is Baumans radical anti-authoritarian stand: Heteronomy is an evil in itself, autonomy conversely something to cherish. And there is no middleway, no idea of a civil society, an equal participation in a solidaric collectivity. Not giving any credibility to the idea of a non-totalitarian collectivity, not discuusing it at all, but simply dismmising it; this is what I mean, when I say that Baumans thinking may if not determined then highly influenced by his own experience of the hollow ideology of solidarity in the postwar communist world. Because: Without the basic individualitic assumption, there is not much of an argument in his discriptions of the two central themes of ethics, the demand for universality (A.) and the search for foundation (B.).
A. Universality and the communitarians
The idea of universality - that the test of the validity of ethics rules is whether or not they can be said to hold for every human being - Bauman attributes to the philosophers, whose "professional mark" (PE, 38) exactly is being much more preoccupied by coherence than ordinary people. Add to this the assumption that truth, by definition, is one whereas the errors can be countless, and you have a central feature of modern ethics: That when formulated consistently the system of rules in question shows all other rules to be "mistaken or evil", accepted out of ignorance and immaturity, if not of ill will" (PE, 38). It is either them or us! The stage is set for the moral crusade against underdeveloped, backward and evil people and cultures, the western mission of civilizing the rest of the world.
Any norm however arises within a community, and seen from a sociological point of view tends to be part of statepolicies directed against other states, no matter how universal they present themselves. Universal norms is presented as a we against them, with the assumption that this distinction in the end will be eliminated. Confronted with the persistant diversity of human lifeforms the idea of universality has tried to get rid of more and more substantial content to end up with a "processual concept of universalization." (PE, 42) The persistant hope has been that history, or more generally, time would heal the differences. But with the comming of post-modernity, this hope has lost its credibility.
Furthermore, in itself, the logic of universality does not confine itself to questioning just other cultures; in fact, taken to "its logical limits" it questions "the practice of any selfconfined political community", being in "opposition against all moral dictate", and thereby spawning "a radically individualistic stance." (PE, 40f). To Bauman this means that for a "consistent liberal [...] morality may only be rooted in qualities and capacities possessed by individuals qua human persons." (PE, 41)
[T]he idea of universal morality, if it is to survive at all, may only fall back on the innate, pre-social impulses common to humankind (as opposed to those resulting fro social processing; the end-products and sediments of the legislating/ordering/educating action), or on equally common elementary structures of human-being-in-the-world, similarly antedating all societal interference [...]. The alternative would be to concede the battlefield to the perpetual adversaries of universalism's preachers, the communitarians. (PE, 43)
The communitarians put their emphasis precise at the fact that norms are born within societies, that people grow up within societies with which they identify and becommes 'situated' as persons. Being confronted with the post-modern conditions however they have the problem that moral communities has to be created anew, to be "postulated" following a "programme" (PE, 44). The self is allready uprooted, and the situatedness had to be produced socially, and this production does not come by itself, but as a result of a struggle between various communities gain superiority so as to be able to define how to be situated, and in the end as a choice of the self.
What the two types of ethics have in common is the wish to "substitute heteronomous ethical duty for autonomous moral responsibility." (PE, 46) When seen from a sociological perspective, when seen not merely as philosophical systems of ideas, but a social forces in the world as it is, they both seem to support a hierachical structure, where something else than the human being in it self sets the rules of the game. "Neither of the two is immune to misuse; neither is properly protected against being harnessed to the promotion of moral heteronomy and the expropiation of the individual's right to moral judgement." (PE, 47)
As options for morally acceptable formulas for how to do the right things, none of them serves the purpose; the only way is to look more closely at human relations in themselves.
The moral self has the moral impulse "as the ground on which it stand" (PE, 62) but this has always, by philosophers, been considered too "subjective, elusive, erratic" to serve as foundation for morality. When people continues behaving morally the reason must be found in "something that is allways and everywhere the same for all human beings [...], or something that changes from time to time and place to place having been first collectively created", that is, "nature or history" (PE, 62). In both cases the individual is confronted with "species-wide or community-wide 'ought'", and, as above in the case of the quest for universality, morality is only recognized as "heteronomous" (PE, 62).
In general philosophers have distrusted the moral self and its moral impulses. This distrust itself has not been put openly as an empirical proposistion to confirmed or rejected. For philosophers and other orderbuilders it was left outside "the realm of the thinkable [...] by ordering it out of the order." (PE, 63) This human order was supposed to be responsible of the civilized behavior of man, and was the construction of human reason. Outside the human order was only the law of the jungle, danger and demons; if moral impulses, unreliable like all other emotional impulses were to become "genuinely moral" they had to be "operated 'under a new mangement'" (PE, 64), that is, by reason.
Classic utilitarianism which to a great degree is responsible for the way modern ethical philosophy has developed, did not recognize at all moral impulses as such. The basic motives in human actions were the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain; "moral intentions and acts could be only the fruit of social enginering" (PE, 64), of teachers and interpreters, rulers and moral thinkers. The task of the latter was convincing "the coerced" that their happiness-seeking was most likely to obtain the desired results if they followed moral rules. The moral thinkers tried to give reasons "which a sane [i.e. rational] person cannot not accept" (PE, 65). This is what philosophers mean when they talk about the foundation of moral rules: To give reason as to why one should accept following a given moral code.
And this code was seen as modelled by the Law, expressed in principles, given by reason, a faculty allegedly common to all human beings, although as we have allready seen, for Bauman this means developing a screwd scheme for maintaining social stratification. The distrust was directed towards "a moral subject whose autonomy is grounded in something other than the internalization of principles allready endorsed by an authority which claims to be speaking for 'everybody'." (PE, 66) Reason give the reasons for following the rules, thus morality finds its foundation in "reason-dictated rules and rule-guided reason" (PE, 67). That meant following Kant in his distrust in inclinations and emotions, "axiomatically" assuming "that feelings, much as acting out of affections, have no moral significance [,that r]eason had to be un-emotional, as emotions were un-reasonable" (PE, 67).
The process shows a "desire to tame and domesticate the otherwise obstreperous moral sentiments through lodging them safely in a straitjacket of formal (or formalizable) rules" (PE, 68). The deontological concept of ethics means that "it is enough to know whether the acting was in agreement with the rules prescribed for that sort of action" to know whether it good or not. This clears the road for a criterium of right and wrong based "procedure rather than effects and motives" substituting "the question of 'doing good'" with "the question of discipline." (PE, 68) To Bauman this de-substatiation of ethcis leads directly to Holocaust, leaving no moral posibilities for a moral self, who wish to resist immoral rules on moral grounds.
The search that starts from the disbelief in the self's moral capacity ends up in the denial of the self's right to moral judgement. (PE, 69)
VII. The impossiblity of founding Ethics ontologically
The impossiblity of modern ethics lies in the fact that
morality is given, though it is given precariously, in a posture that resists synthesis, that does not survive synthesis, that melts and fades at the point at which the synthesis takes over. (PE, 71)
Morality shows itself to us in meeting another face, in our relation to the Other. Morality shows itself to ME in the meeting of the Other, not as a person, but as a face. The Other has no power over me, it is not a question of resistance, but of opposing without any resistance, being opposite to me: "The Other has no power over me" (PE, 73). My moral being surfaces "as I command her to command me". By herself the Other is weak, completely at my disposal, and nevertheless I position her as an authority, being willing to let her command me, even before having heard her command. This is the meaning of being-for-the-Other.
This does not mean that we discover morality being together; for Bauman "being with means being apart." (PE, 70). We live together, but with a "distance beteen us" which "will never vanish" (PE, 70). From this perspective, which Bauman calls ontologically, we can never end up with anything but Law and ethics in the shape of Law, "with its heteronomy and coercive power" (PE, 70). In the ontological perspective it seems that Bauman accepts the idea of human beings as brutes, only being ruled by the Law of the Jungle: "Ontology is the territory without morality." (PE, 71)
But still morality is given. This means that morality must be found somewhere else, be seen from another perspective: "Morality is, says Bauman, before ontology; [being] for is before [being] with" (PE, 71). The 'before' is not to be understood as a relation in time, because "the 'before' of moral condition is a non-othological before". The 'before' means 'better', because morality not only not is found in ontology; it precedes and dethrones ontology.
Morality is a trancendence of being; morality is, more precisely, the chance of such a transcendence. The moral self comes into its own through its ability to rise above being, through its defiance of being; through the choice of 'face to face' over 'with' (PE, 72).
Morality being in opposition to ontology means that
Morality has no 'ground', no 'foundation' [...]. It is born and dies in the act of trancendence, in the self-elevation over 'realities of being' and 'facts of the case', in its not-being-bound by either. (PE, 73).
Bauman himself admits the strangeness of his explanation, but says that "there is no other place for morality but before being". (PE, 75) The idea is that the moral self only comes into being when it becomes moral; without morality there is no self at all, no real human beings. Taking responsibility is an act of self-creation. But only in an ethical sense; "ontologically there is nothing before being, [...] being is before morality; the moral self can be no other than a moral self." (PE, 75) Ontologically the moral selves are inseperable from human being of flesh and blood, the latter actually being before the former.
The awesome truth about morality is that it is not inevitable, not determined in any sense which would be considered valid from the ontological perspective; it does not have 'foundations' in the sense that perspective would recognize. (PE, 75)
Meeting the Other is a "pre-ethical event" which makes morality possible, an "awakening" in the words of Levinas. Bauman employs the metaphor and concludes that if one can awake then one can also fall asleep:
There is nothing necessary in being moral. Being moral is a chance which may be taken up; yet it may be also, and as easily, forfeited. ((PE, 76f)
But the awakening to being for the Other is the
birth of the self [...] as the unique I, the one and only I, the I differnt from all others, the irreplacable I (PE, 77)
I become irreplacable in my responsibility towards the Other; it is my responsibility, and nobody elses: "My responsibility is untransferable, no one could replace me." (Levinas in PE, 77)
So to Bauman it seems that there is nothing necessary for a human being in becoming a self, and given the ordinary sense of the words the seems very strange. At most it seems that for Bauman human beings only have the possibility of becoming selves, a possiblity which may not come into reality, and even if having become real, may be lost again. Only in the moral act, the act of not doing what one could do, does one become a self. To this I will return below.
To Bauman this responsibility does not derive from anything else. It does not procede from a contractual relation, and does not arise because of what I know of the Other, of her virtue, or what she has done, or can do, for me. The responsibility is not a matter of reciprocity; the moral relation is one of "in-equality, non-equity, [...] not-asking-for-reciprocation, [...] disinterest in mutality, [...] indifference to the 'balancing up' of gains or rewards" (PE, 48)
In a moral relationship the relation is asymmetrical. I and the other are not exchangeable, and cannot be thought of as a 'we'. All the duties are mine, and I cannot blame the Other for not being as I am:
The moral person and the object of that moral person's concern cannot be measured by the same yardstick - and this realization is precisely what makes the moral person moral. (PE, 51)
I cannot command the Other to die for me or any other cause; but I can command myself to die for the Other. This moral command is not universalizable. "It is this uniqueness [...], and non-reversability of my responsibility, which puts me in the moral relationship. [...] My responsibility is always greater than that of the Other." (PE, 51f) This is what makes a moral relationship difernt from a contratual relationship.
Morality has to be understood using the idea of "saintliness", "a standard over and above the shared, universal, conventional or statistically avarage measure of moral decency." (PE, 52) if to be understood at all. Morality has to have a Utopian content. Moral responsibility does not have 'purpose' or 'reason', not an effect of 'will' or 'decision'; "it is rather the impossibility of not being responsible for this Other here and now that constitutes my moral capcity."
So on the one hand there is nothing necessary in being moral, as quoted above, or becoming a moral self; on the other hand morality is to be found in the very way we are and it is impossible not being responsible for the Other, which to Bauman exactly being moral. This seems very much to be a contradiction, and as far as I can judge, it is.
My guess is that Bauman is being misled by Levinas' use of 'ontology'. Levinas opposes very strongly the ontology of Heidegger and the phenomenology of Husserl, which he also considers to be "too ontological". What they have in common is a the scientific conception of being deprived of any moral content, a conception which - so it seems - Levinas accepts. This is the only reason I can se for his strange account of morality as 'otherwise than being', 'before being', 'trancending being', and all the other expressions which places morality somewhere besides being, even though everyone - including Bauman - can se that morality is.
But this concept of being as morally neutral differs very much from the ontology of the ancient Greeks, for whom being included morality, simply because morality is. So Bauman faithfully refers Levinas' way of dealing with ontology, while at the same time drawing the only possible conclusions of the his own analysis, i.e., recognizing morality in the very way we are, in human beings as beings, that is, as an ontological necessity, a moral impulse, strong in some cases, for some beings, weak in other case, for others. But there is no need to accept that morality "has ambivalence as its sole foundation" just because it is "neither orderly nor logical" (PE, 78).
Morality is there, in our way of being; the question is why has such troubles becoming the decesive motivation when it has to compete with other motivating forces. Bauman refers the observation by Knud Løgstrup that "[t]he moral self is a self always haunted by the suspecion that it is not moral enough." (PE, 80) But this does not imply that "moral anxiety [...] provides the only substance the moral self could ever have." (PE, 80) The moral self can be self-confident and sure about its inherrent morality; that is precisely because the moral self is very well aware of this fact that it is so hard to bear when it does not live up to its own standards of moral responsibility. Admittedly, this foundation like the one offered by Bauman "leaves a lot to be desired" (PE, 80), not being very solid. But it avoids the most radical of the conclussion s drawn by Bauman.
The motor behind civilization is to Bauman as it was to Adorno the anxiety caused by uncertainty. (Cf. MA, 17) Uncertainty is the universal human condition living in a society, and the paradox Bauman is that orderbuilding itself adds to the chaos, that whenver we try to solve one problem by ordering our surroundings, this way of behaving immideately generates more chaos, because of the limited scope of the action conducted. (Cf. PE, zxz) At our stage of development our resources when it comes to targeting and solving specific problems is tremendously much grater than ever before in history, which at the same means that the sideeffects of our solutions are even more disatrous.
To Bauman it is clear that human rationality cannot be trusted when it comes to shaping society and the world in which society is formed. But one might ask: Then what? What is the outcome of this way of thinking? Ethics is supposed to be action-guiding, but Bauman does not seem to leave much ground for establishing a conduct benevolent to both nature and man. So what do we do when our foremost tool, rationality is so untrustworthy, and the ethics, Bauman proposes leaves morality where ethics started, that is as "the mystery inside me", telling me that I am unconditionally responsible for the Other and everybody else, no matter what and in spite of the silent face that only "commands me to command", without any guidelines as to how this should be done.
Trying to react like a sociologist I could say that the picture painted by Bauman simply not is true, that he misrepresent morality as experienced by people in general. Morality is not just this passive "waiting" (PE, 87f) silently; and Levinas himself underlines that saying goes with being a face, that saying - and not what is being said - shows the Other to me as a face (16) and not just a picture or a mask. And the orderbuilding of civilisation was seen, and is still seen, by many as a moral task. Whether or not this is so, then to be able to channel the moral energies into this project, then the two things, morality and civilization must have something in common; if not it would not have been possible to lure so many people into the civilisation-project.
Bauman might not accept this populistic prejudice which serves as assumption, i.e. that in the long run people are right. But if this is not so, why place so much trust on autonomy? The answar may be the some are right, others wrong. Bauman sees the modern project as one long selfdeception, but why has it been possible to decieve people to such a degree and for so long time? And why are we, that is, Bauman in a position to see whatfor centuries has been a carefully hidden truth?
Bauman seems to be caught in the same trap as Descartes was once, trying to radically distrust all of his knowledge about the world. Descartes ended up with a trust in God that He would not have made Descartes and the rest of the world in such a way that he would be mistaken all the time. In the same way my reply to Bauman could be that I simply do not think it possible that we could have survived so long and made such an impressing cange in the living conditions if we not as human being were more or less doing what we think we are doing. And if we are to take Bauman's diagnostics of Modernity, it is still possible, well, more correctly, NOW, for the first time in history, it is possible to get to know the hidden secrets of Modernity. But only if we seriously take it upon us to relect over Modernity from the post-modern perspective.
Baumans position seems to imply either cognitive progess in history (NOW we can see...) or an elitist conception of grasping the truth behind the illusions (Let ME tell you how things are ...). And what is more, the first conception is also elitist, because it implies the existence of prophets, telling us the truth which has not YET been universally accepted. Neither of these conceptions are very post-modern, if post-modernity should imply a more radical trust in human beings; because what is our unconditional responsibility worth if we, who are not part of the knowing elite cannot percieve the conditions on which we autonomously are to act more or less correctly NOW.
If we discard the possiblity that we when it comes to morals, as a whole have becomme wiser as a result of the historical development, that we are now more moral than before - which to Bauman and me is what postmodernity is all about - then Bauman is left with illusions to explain why so much moral energy has been wasted on the modern project of creating af more humane world. But that collides with Baumans trust in human morality. Because how can we know if we are not misled as the majority of us have been according to Bauman for centuries. Leaving it with saying that we just know is not enough we the matter at stake is the whole development of civilisation, which Bauman wants us to accept as just an illusion.
To me a trust in people as moral agents also must imply a trust in people as capable of judging a situation correctly in its cognitive aspects. That does not mean that they cannot be wrong; but not everybody can be wrong over a long time. They might be lured into false ways of percieving whats at stake, and this may go on for a long time given the possibilities of manipulating with information, and peoples uneasyness about thinking that their rulers are a bunch of crooks; but once they know what is at stake, then they also know how to act. But a selfdeception covering virtually all of mankind for centuries is not likely. When Modernity have had such a succes as a moral and political project, it is unlikely that it is a total lie, a totalselfdeception which have lasted hundreds of years just to be unmasked now!
One might also ask who Bauman is adressing, and why? Is this a radicalized Enlightment project directed towards the masses or is it only meant to the ruling elite? If we take Bauman reconstruction of Modernity for granted, then only the ruling elites - if any at all - can be real actors; the masses have been cheated for centuries, so whay should that stop now! Philosophers and legilators acts, so it seems, relatively consciously to lure the masses into the ideology of reason so as to be able continue holding leading positions with the priviledges this imply. The masses live blindfolded, doing what they are told, blinded by the fictions of the authorities, faithfully following the way leading to their own distruction, just like the jews on their way to the gaschambers, letting themselves be cheated into doing things, as far as they know, rationally, not realizing that it is a trap, from which they cannot escape because the irrationality of the whole game is beyond human comprehension.
The message conveyed seems to me to be: So lets be moral, in spite of all, just because ... In that social reality, against which Bauman judge the rest of ethics, disregarding their alleged intentions, this seems to imply: Lets just wait and se what happens, if we do whatever is morally good or not; let fate decide for us, very much like the traditional liberal trusted the invisible hand, a mystery in the hands of God, which human beings can not and shall not - ought not - try to understand. There is really nothing we can do, if we are not in authority. They decide for us, being themselves more or less part of the game. Whatever happens, we cannot use our rationality to calculate what will be beneficient or damageing to our fellow beings. Our idea of ourselves as being able to do what we think we do or what we intent to do is simply an illusion.
Still, in the end everything will be as it is supposed to. Being religious, this means trusting God; for the rest of us, this means simply giving up any hope of being able to counteract the inhuman tendencies in Modernity, which Bauman among so many others rightly have drawn our attention to. The hope needs nutrition if you have no faith in God, and to me, with my experience the hope is real in a small scale.
We act and we change things within our reach, in accordance with our intentions more times than not. We cannot be sure, but the probability is on our side, as long as we only do it in small scale. Larger scale projects include so many factors which can change, especially a mutitude of human agents which may or may not feel themselves part of the project. If we talk of shaping society, then we must of course include feed-back mechanisms, and that is precisely what democracy is about. Being able and having the right to intervine in the administration of your life, which in a modern society necessarily is divided between so many independently working hands that no one can get a total overview, not to speak of knowing it in detail.
Changing the conditions around you have effects, a lot of which will be unforeseen. But this does not imply a disaster. It can also be a surprise-party! Sometimes the results of our actions mingle in a way so as to produce side-effects which we all benefit from. Being without illusions, taking a "realist" position towards the world does not just mean painting everything in dark colors; it also means being without dispair, accepting that you have to die, sooner or later, but just for that being happy about living, entering the game to play your part the best you can, trying to do the best without disturbing the rest, with the knowledge that what I do now means something for you, whereever and whenever you are. And maybee the conjunction of all our actions without our knowledge changes the course of history, so that the world may survive for future generation. Maybee the world isn't is in such a bad shape as we fear. Who knows?!
1. Cf. Aristotle: Nikomachische Ethik, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1991 (1956), p. 7
2. The question of who has the right to intervene in the profession of ethics, if I for instance can demand being heard, I will leave aside for the moment. In the following I will simply asume that I will pas the test, matching whatever criterias I may end up proposing!!
3. Salvador Giner: "Sociología y filosofía moral" in Victoria Camps (ed.): Historia de la Ética, vol. 3, Barcelona: Critica, 1989, p. 121
4. Charles Taylor, for instance, is aware of many of the aspects brought forth by human and social sciences in thsi century, in fact he takes his departure in a common-sense understanding of morality highly refined; but he does not acknowledge it at a scientific contribution to be discussed, i.e. he does not quote anybody, but simply presents it as moral intuitions to be accepted as argued and described; having done this he re-enters into the game of philosophical reasoning. Cf. his Sources of the Self, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989
5. Even in the case of Jürgen Habermas, whose discourse ethics was developed after, or alongside, his reconstruction of the development of the social sciences and the construction of his own theory of social change, it does not seems to me that sociological knowledge about morality has played a very decive part. This also seems to be the opinion of Javier Muguerza, cf, his Desde la perplejidad, Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990, p. 638
6. I myself have benefitted from courses in sociological theory at the University of Valencia, lectures given at the University of Copenhagen, books such as George Ritzers Teoría Sociológica Clasica and Teoría Sociológica Contemporanea (1992), both Madrid: MaGraw-Hill, 1993 and Zygmunt Bauman's Thinking Sociologically, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990 and from personal relationsships over the years with sociologists.
7. Émile Durkheim: De la division du travail social, Paris: Felix Alcan, 1893, p. i. By the end of the Introduction Durkheim however says that what this theis offers is only a theoretical study, not an empirical sociological study.
8. This track, however, I will not follow here. Let me just recommend a small, but highly interesting book, Gérard Namer & Patrick Cingolani: Morale et société, Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1995, which tells the history of french sociology from the 1789-revolution up till the Second World War.
9. Cf. Steven Lukes: Émile Durkheim. Su vida y su obra (1973), Madrid: Centro de investigaciones sociologicas-Siglo XXI de España, 1984. At the time of his suicide he had just written the Introduction to a book about morality.
10. Cf. Bauman: Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. viii
11. Zygmunt Bauman: Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Cambridge: Polity Press,1993, p. 17. Hereafter refered to as MA, nn.
12. Zygmunt Bauman: Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 32. Herafter refered to as PE, nn.
13. Cf. Levinas: Etik og Uendelighed (1982), København: Hans Reitzel, 1995, p. 86
14. See for instance the first articles in Diskurs und Werantwortung, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990
15. The shared assumption of the moral philosophers, whom Bauman rightly portraits as the trendsetters, is thus anti-liberal; there is no invisible hand to guarantee the happy outcomme of all selfish enterprises.
16. Cf. Emmanuel Lévinas, op.cit., p. 83f
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