What is Morality? What is Reason?

Since it's the year end round-up for so many things, of course as one of the final reads of 2024, I had to also read Nikhil Krishnan's 'Does Our Morality Do Us Any Good', published in The New Yorker on December 23, 2024. There's a lot to chew upon. 

This is pretty much a book review of Hanno Sauer's new book, 'The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality' (September 2024). It's written in German and translated to English by Jo Heinrich.

The author is a Fellow at Robinson College, with an interest and a doctorate in philosophy. As such, this book review became a thoughtful essay too. The essay/review opened with the author's personal opinion, 

Naturally, I hold slavery to be an abomination and liberal democracies to be better than totalitarian dictatorships. But why? I could draw on my years of education to tell you it has something to do with my belief in freedom, autonomy, the awfulness of treating a fellow human being as a mere instrument. But a skeptic can point out that I had these convictions before I was ever in a position to articulate a cogent argument for them. The arguments came afterward; they are rationalizations of things I already believed.

Philosophers through the ages have long been divided as to whether there's such a thing as 'moral progress'. We also can't avoid talking about Frederich Nietzsche and his 'On the Genealogy of Morality' (1887) — guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. Immanuel Kant believes that 'reason is the basis of morality', and in freedom, there is moral constraint. Well, then we have many unreasonable immoral people in this world, isn't it?

Elizabeth Anscombe famously opposed Oxford University's move in conferring an honorary doctorate on Harry Truman because she said that Truman was a murderer. She argued that killing innocent people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima seemed necessary only because the Allies stupidly insisted that Japan unconditionally surrender. The brilliant Elizabeth Anscombe's philosophical work always give me a migraine. She is also a staunch Catholic. In her essay 'Mr. Truman's Degree' (1958), She argued that, 

To kill someone deliberately, she notes, is to kill someone either for its own sake or as a means to some further end. Such killing is intentional. By contrast, Anscombe claims that the distinction between the intended and the merely foreseen is “absolutely essential” to Christian ethics. Some actions (e.g. murder) Christian ethics always prohibits or forbids, and intentional killing of the innocent is on this list.

We are all a culmination of our education, families and society, isn't it? Math and natural sciences, as well as our beliefs in moral beliefs, and the religion we subscribe to. We are a product of our environment, all factors included. 

How we think, how we live, is exactly how we think the world ought to be. What is self-entitlement? That itself is a privilege. How I write, how I think, how I problem-solve and approach people, are a sum total of my education and my life's experiences. How would that morally justify me in any means to an end unless it's acknowledged by society and whatever done is within the laws of my resident city. 

That brings us to the past fifty years, decades that inherited the familiar structures of modernity: capitalism, liberal democracy, and the critics of these institutions, who often fault them for failing to deliver on the ideal of human equality. The civil-rights struggles of these decades have had an urgency and an excitement that, Sauer writes, make their supporters think victory will be both quick and lasting. When it is neither, disappointment produces the “identity politics” that is supposed to be the essence of the present cultural moment. 

His final chapter, billed as an account of the past five years, connects disparate contemporary phenomena—vigilance about microaggressions and cultural appropriation, policies of no-platforming—as instances of the “punitive psychology” of our early hominin ancestors. Our new sensitivities, along with the twenty-first-century terms they’ve inspired (“mansplaining,” “gaslighting”), guide us as we begin to “scrutinize the symbolic markers of our group membership more and more closely and to penalize any non-compliance.” We may have new targets, Sauer says, but the psychology is an old one.

Look at the world this 2024. Natural disasters notwithstanding because of climate change, wars and more wars with the Middle East going up in flames, and a return of Trump to the US Presidency, as well as some weird tweaks to the American medical and justice systems, et cetera. It's pretty much doom and gloom every day. 

I'm not sure I can simply stick my head in the sand and not bother about all this. If I do so, it's because I live in a weird little construct called Singapore. I don't know how future generations will survive. My scenario planning skills don't stretch that far. 

Is this a more pessimistic world now? I suppose each generation's 40-50 somethings will feel the same? Like we're embracing mortality, and along with it, a shift of morals even? That's for the philosopher within  every one of us to mull over. Deep thoughts for the second last day of the year. 

Thinkers who see morality as having been constructed are often supposed to have trouble accounting for the possibility of moral progress. What is progress, after all, if not swapping error for a timeless truth? The anxiety induced in us by genealogical reflection comes, in large part, from having to accept that what we’d taken to be an eternal verity might be a fairly recent product of human history, biological and social. If our moral commitments don’t rest on deeper truths, how can we hope to resolve the conflicts that continue to divide us? Sauer’s perspective here is notably sunny. He sees a possible future in which our values do not so much converge as reveal themselves never to have really diverged in the first place.