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Wednesday, November 10, 2004

What are Moral Issues?

In the wake of the election there has been a great deal of discussion about the fact that a plurality of voters sampled in exit polls chose moral values as the most important issue in their decision about voting. Many have gone rather further than the evidence warrants to claim that the election was mainly about values; others have reacted angrily to what they take as a misidentification of what values were at stake in the election. Among this latter group are many on the left (including the Catholic left--I'm thinking especially of E.J. Dionne) who ask why poverty and war are not moral or values issues? The media have concentrated on such issues as abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage as the preeminent moral issues and, indeed, the marriage question was on 11 state ballots, including Ohio. But why should these issues exhaust moral considerations about voting, many ask?

In fact, I think most people who took moral issues to be paramount in the campaign were thinking of abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage. Are they right not to have been thinking of poverty and war also? Aren't those, as many liberals claim, also moral issues? Well, yes, they are. Actually, from a certain perspective, any genuinely human action, that is, one freely chosen, has a moral dimension. However that moral dimension is not always brought sharply into relief. I don't think most voters would deny that poverty and war are closely related to moral considerations, but I think many would affirm these two qualifications: (a) that they agreed more with President Bush's moral choices with respect to war and poverty than they did with Senator Kerry's moral choices with respect to abortion, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage (although on this point Bush and Kerry are closer than on the others. Their main difference concerns the desirability of amending the Constitution to define marriage in the traditional way); and (b) this is partly because they think of those latter issues as morally more basic than the former. Moreover, I think there are plausible reasons for thinking this.

Kant famously distinguished between perfect and imperfect moral duties. Perfect duties tend to be negative and can be satisfied completely by discrete acts. The duty to respect the life of another can be perfectly fulfilled by not harming her. The duty to tell the truth can be perfectly satisfied by not lying. Imperfect duties cannot be completely satisfied by discrete actions and tend to be positive in nature. Kant, for example, thought that there was in imperfect duty of benevolence requiring us to help others. But just how that duty is satisfied cannot be fully explained in advance since much depends on circumstances. The perfect duties have a certain overlap with the Thomistic account of common precepts of the natural law. Such precepts are very basic and are expressed in the municipal law of most countries as well as in the revealed law of the Decalogue. I think it's these precepts or the perfect duties that most people explicitly identify with morality as an everyday matter. It isn't that most people would deny the imperfect duties as moral in nature, but they tend to concentrate on the more strict and determinate rules. This is understandable, I think, since such rules are clearer and they are very basic. A violation of one of them is easy to spot and particularly disruptive of the larger fabric of morality.

It is for this reason that people tend to think of abortion, stem cell research and same sex marriage as moral issues, but not so much poverty and war. The former issues seem more basic to the moral fabric of human society. The latter are more complex, allow for greater scope in prudential application and thus admit of less certainty and thus more potential reasonable disagreement. One could plausibly argue that alleviating poverty is best done by promoting economic growth as distinct from policies that emphasize redistribution. And one can argue about the justification of particular uses of military force. But many think of the more commonly discussed moral issues as entailing the violation of very basic moral norms, like that prohibiting the intentional killing of the innocent.

There is no reason to deny that poverty and war are also moral issues, but there does seem to me good reason to take note of the distinction between those sorts of moral issues and the more basic sort discussed by many election commentators.

# posted by Bradley Lewis at 5:10 PM

1 Comments:

John O'Callaghan, at 11:55 AM:

Thanks Brad for this thoughtful reflection upon the ways in which people think about "moral values," particularly in their political judgments. It provides a framework for denying that these "values" can simply be exchanged one for another by a calculus of value. I confess, however, that I'm uncomfortable with the Kantian language of perfect and imperfect duties. It strikes me that what Kant calls "perfect duties" are more first principles of common life. Though I don't think he quite meant this, calling them "perfect duties" and tying the sense of "perfection" to our "success" in fulfilling them can suggest to many that the moral life is primarily worked out in their fulfillment, while one ought not to hope for success or perfection in the realm of "imperfect duties." On the contrary, the dignity of human beings consists in being rational animals who freely pursue life in common as friends. So I would be inclined to call "perfect" goods those duties that Kant calls "imperfect," because it is in pursuing them in common that we achieve the perfection of our human dignity. The measure of our "perfection" in pursuing those goods in common should not be conceived of along the lines of success in following a universal rule, but in reasonably and creatively fashioning our common life as in a way artisans of human life. As Josef Pieper puts it, an act proceeding from the virtues, particularly as integrated in and by prudence, is good not because it exemplifies a rule of duty, perfect or imperfect, but because the virtuous man or woman makes it so. There are first principles of any art that must be observed, but fulfillment of such principles is not the perfection of the artisan's craft. Indeed fulfillment of such principles isn't really an expression of the virtues of that craft at all, but the condition for the development of the craft. Thus they are necessary conditions for the possibility of developing those virtues, and pursuing perfection in that craft. In human life there are certain goods that form the first principles of our common life; they must be protected not because they are the most perfect, but because without them there is no hope of perfection, living in common as friends in pursuit of the perfection of human dignity. Still our perfection consists in creatively making of our common life a kind of work of art. (Is blogging an imperfect duty, or a creative perfection of human life? Discuss.) If we lived in a just society we would not even think of the first principles because they would so ingrained in our craft of being human, just as good artists ask themselves what they want to create, not how to wield a brush or chisel. That many people think of these first principles of our common life as the realm of morality more than those goods of perfection we pursue in common, is a sign of our injustice as a community.

So I think you are right in focussing upon the different concerns of voters, those who are concerned not to tolerate attacks upon what I am calling the first principles of our common life as friends, and those who from a concern for the goods of human perfection are willing at least to tolerate such attacks if not to positively promote such attacks. I think the concern of the former is that without fundamental protection of those first principles, our common life is formed according to the whim of the will or advantabe of the stronger. Too often the weak hold the strong back in their pursuit of perfection, so they are destroyed. The concern of the latter is that too often while the weak may not be destroyed they are left out of the pursuit of perfection. Both laudible concerns. But, I think, one more fundmanental than the other. Those who are subject to destruction are without human hope. There is no human chance of our living in friendship with them.

War, it strikes me, is interestingly different. Prima facie it does not strike one as one of the goods of friendship that one pursues in human perfection. If anything, it can only be seen as consisting in actions designed to protect but not promote those goods. Then one has to ask to what extent it is morally justified by attacks upon the first principles of our common life versus attacks upon the ways in which we try to fashion the perfection of our common life. In the case of an attack upon these first principles, as a last resort one might think it a strict obligation of a society to protect itself. In the case of an attack upon the ways in which we pursue the goods of common life, it is more likely a question of prudence. I don't know quite how to think about it.

I don't know that there is a substantive disagreement between us here, but your post was a great opportunity for me to think through this.

John
ndethics@nd.edu

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