1 | THE MORAL FOOL

ONE OF MY FAVORITE Daoist stories is about the “old man at the fort.” At first glance, it does not seem to have anything to do with ethical questions. Still, I believe that it is to be read, in the final analysis, as an allegory about what may be called the moralist mindset, and, if my reading is correct, that it presents a thoroughgoing as well as ironical and satirical criticism of such a mindset.¹ The story is quickly told. It is about an old “fool” who lives at a frontier fort and who cannot distinguish between good and bad. He loses his horse, and the other people call this bad, then the horse returns with a whole herd of horses, and the others call this good. His son then breaks a leg when riding one of the horses, and the others call this bad, but then the son is exempted from military service and thus survives a war, and the people call this good. One could, obviously, endlessly continue the story. On the surface, it is about good and bad luck. The old fool is too stupid to share his neighbor’s conceptions of good and bad luck—but, of course, his foolishness turns out to be wiser than the common sense of the average people. Good and bad prove to be extremely shaky categories. One changes into the other, and the real fools are those who believe that they can judge the goodness and badness of things which, in fact, are subject to continuous change and reversal.

In my view, the story is not so much about the tricky nature of fate that so often makes events turn out different from what is expected. This is, for sure, an issue that the story plays with, but I don’t think that it is at its philosophical core—if it were, the story would lack depth and merely express a rather commonplace truth. The story has, I think, a subtler message and this is primarily about the old man and his seemingly foolish inability to distinguish between good and bad. In other words, it’s not so much about the shifting winds of change as it is about the human tendency to look at the world in terms of good and bad. When it comes to luck, we apply these labels quite naturally. Luck is always either good or bad. Only a fool can’t see this. It can thus be said that the story addresses one of the most obvious cases of looking at the world in terms of good and bad—and it illustrates a stunning case of not thinking in these terms. How strange it is that the old man cannot even call luck good or bad!

Read in this way, the main point of the story is the foolishness of not deeming things good or bad—a foolishness that, paradoxically, emerges as wisdom. While luck is among the most obvious cases in which we apply the terms good and bad, morality is probably among the most severe and critical. With respect to luck, there is something playful in judgments about good and bad. If it’s just bad luck, we may be able to laugh about it—at least later on. Moral judgments are not funny. To deem somebody morally bad is hardly a laughing matter. If we really feel that someone is morally bad, this is usually both a very strong and a very serious feeling. There is even a special term for this kind of badness: it is called “evil.” Evil is the severest kind of badness and does not leave much room for humor or ambiguity.

I think that the foolishness of the old man at the fort is a very radical one. The case of good and bad luck is only meant to demonstrate his general mistrust of such a perspective. The old man simply lacks these categories. Ultimately, and in the most serious dimension, this implies that the old man is also, and most importantly, a moral fool. If he does not understand the difference between good and bad luck, he will not understand why or how people can make ethical distinctions. He will be blind with respect to moral judgments. It is this position that I defend in this book. I share the old fool’s mistrust in the goodness of distinguishing between good and bad—particularly when it comes to morality and ethics. And I suggest that perhaps such moral foolishness may turn out, just as with the old man at the fort, as wiser than apparent moral cleverness and the beliefs and assurances that result from it.

So what do I have in mind when I talk about ethics and morality—and advocate being suspicious of them? Very much in line with my reading of the story of the old man at the fort, I conceive of them as ways of distinguishing between good and bad, and, more precisely, as probably the most serious or extreme form of this distinction. Ethically, the distinction between good and bad becomes the distinction between good and evil. In other words, the most uncompromising application of the terms “good” and “bad” is their ethical application. In its moral guise, this distinction applies to people and what they do and are, and to mark the degree of disdain that usually goes along with the negative side of this distinction.

When we say that an object is good or bad, it does not make sense to use the word “evil.” We rarely accuse our car of being evil when it won’t start on a cold day—and if we do, we do so jokingly or metaphorically. A judgment that concerns a car cannot really be a moral judgment since it lacks the capacity to be viewed ethically. The same is true for animals. We do not hold the skunk morally responsible for the bad odor it leaves behind, and normally we do not even pass moral judgment on a bear that kills someone, even though we may agree it has to be shot to prevent it from inflicting further harm. We do not kill the bear because it is evil, but because it is dangerous. There are also some human beings whom we do not think about in moral terms. A crying baby may well cause frustration and anger—even if it’s one’s own child—but what normal person would say that the child is evil? We also do not accuse people who lie in a coma and cost the taxpayer (at least in Canada) possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars of being immoral parasites. In all these cases we do not apply our moral mindset—and I think that this is, quite obviously, a practical thing. Who would want to live in a world where skunks that smell, children who cry, and costly patients are deemed evil? The moral use of the distinction good/bad seems to be an extreme form of this distinction that is not used in many—perhaps not even in most—cases. The question is, Is this extreme form of distinguishing between good and bad really desirable?

It is necessary to get a better understanding of exactly where the extreme of moral judgments lies. Moral judgments—moral applications of the good/bad distinction—normally have to do with social agency. Outside of a social context, morality does not have a place. But even within society there are morality-free zones, so to speak. Infants and unconscious people, for instance, do not fully qualify as moral agents. One of the most famous and influential positions in modern Western moral philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, points out with utmost clarity that an action as such does not have a moral quality, but only the will behind it. It is the intention and the motivation that can be called ethically good or bad. Infants and unconscious people may do things that are bad, but they cannot be evil because they do not have what we normally call free will. A moral judgment thus seems to presuppose not only social agency but also, and more specifically, human will and reason. If one has neither will nor reason then she cannot be judged in moral terms.

If, on the other hand, one has will or reason, one becomes morally responsible. This puts a heavy moral burden on humans, particularly in the Christian tradition. God has supplied us with free will—but this gives us the capacity not only to do wrong but also, in moral terms, to do evil, and, in religious terms, to “sin.” In fact, if one believes in Christian doctrine, one faces the problematic inheritance of original sin. God created us as moral beings and we cannot escape our moral frailty and weakness. From a Christian perspective it is very difficult not to conceive of humans in moral categories. In a certain sense, Kant merely secularized the Christian ethical tradition. Being equipped with free will and reason, we cannot avoid our moral responsibility. We are inherently and inescapably moral. Neither Christianity nor Kantian philosophy allows for a nonethical understanding of human beings. Or, put positively: From both a Christian and a Kantian perspective, morality can be defined as the specific and exclusive capacity of humans (who have free will and reason) to be good or bad.

Morality or ethics is, accordingly, a very peculiar human trait. Its extremism lies in its being restricted to humans, and, more precisely, to a specific range of human beings. Nonhuman beings cannot be moral. But there are also human beings who cannot be moral, for instance, the previously mentioned infants and unconscious patients. These are, according to a moralist kind of logic, at the fringes of humanity. We may well love our little children or our demented grandparents, but since we do not look at them as moral agents, they are either not yet or no longer fully responsible members of society. Moral capacity and a concept of mature humanity seem to be closely connected. Morality seems to have something to do with a conception of human life that focuses on free will and reason and a certain view of what it means to be an adult. It is a concept of good and bad that is reserved for those who fulfill the criteria of rational human individuals. As such, it reveals itself as an extreme form of humanism, since it applies only to humans, and, furthermore, only to those humans who are deemed fully human.

Another aspect of what it means to be morally good or bad—as opposed to being good or bad in a nonmoral sense—is that such a judgment has far-ranging consequences; it is, again, an extreme type of judgment. We reserve it for rational humans, but, of course, not all good/bad evaluations of responsible adults are ethical. If someone is, for instance, good at sports or at driving, this does not count as a moral quality. Moral judgments normally do not apply to specific abilities or achievements. As Kant noted, they do not apply to acts or performances at all. According to him, they only apply to the will behind an action, but perhaps even this definition is not sufficiently exact. When we call someone morally good or evil, I would argue, we normally do not refer to the person’s specific intentions but to their character. If we say that a person is good, and we mean it in a moral sense, then we believe that he or she is essentially nice. We like or dislike not their will but them as an entire person. Moral judgments are in this sense unlimited; they do not refer to this or that quality. Instead, they refer to the general character of a person. Moral judgments tend to be fundamental. If we say that a woman is a bad runner, we do not say much about her. If, however, we say that she is evil, then it will not matter how good a sprinter she is. Saying “she is a good teacher, but a lousy cook” is very different from saying “she is a good teacher, but she is morally reprehensible.”

By saying that morality is an extreme and perhaps the most serious form of the distinction good/bad, I also mean that it is reserved for those whom we consider to be fully human, and that it applies to them in a very essential way. Moral judgments only apply to those whom we take seriously (not to things and animals, not to infants or the senile), and it applies to them sweepingly.

At this point it is probably appropriate to further clarify the meaning of “morality” in relation to “ethics.” Here I use both terms, as is common in contemporary English, more or less interchangeably. This makes sense since the two terms used to have the same meaning, one derived from ancient Greek (ethics) and the other from Latin (morality). Both the Greek and the Latin term designated behavior that was in line with what was socially accepted as “good.” To be ethical or moral meant to act in a way that was considered proper, customary, and right. Accordingly, ethics and moral philosophy were similar disciplines that tried to define what constituted proper and right behavior, to identify the underlying principles of what was right and proper, and to establish norms that would provide guidance for acting in a righteous and appropriate manner. These disciplines also investigated what made someone virtuous and what virtues were, that is, what constituted the personal ground for being ethical or moral.

In modern Western philosophy several attempts have been made to distinguish terminologically between ethics and morality and thus to go beyond the traditional synonymy of the two terms. I briefly discuss three representative attempts. In the early nineteenth century Hegel—in the context of criticizing Kant’s moral philosophy—introduced a peculiar distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics in Hegel’s German is Sittlichkeit—which corresponds to the Greek and Latin meaning of ethics and morality explained above. Literally, Sitten are the customs and manners of behavior considered proper in a society. Sittlichkeit, or ethics, therefore means for Hegel “established custom, not a set of principles. Sittlichkeit is shared activity, shared interests, shared pleasures; it is not first of all, and perhaps not at all, rational reflection on the rules.” This means: “The key to understanding Sittlichkeit is the notion ofa practice. A practice or set of practices might have a set of explicit rules (as in chess or music composition) but it need not have any such rules.”² Ethics, for Hegel, then means what is actually considered good behavior in a community. It is what, in the double meaning of this term, is realized as the good life in a community. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, ethics refers to the standards of good behavior and obligations that are “already there in existence,” and thus with respect to ethics “there is no gap between what ought to be and what is.” In Hegel’s understanding, the opposite is the case with morality. Morality refers to the norms that we can intellectually define. If ethics refers to the “established custom,” then morality means the “set of principles” that we may be taught, but that are not necessarily practiced in the community. It is what we can rationally accept and understand as being good, but what we do not normally experience in the community on a day-to-day basis. Taylor explains this meaning of morality: “Here we have an obligation to realize something which does not exist. What ought to be contrasts with what is. And connected with this, the obligation holds of me not in virtue of being part of a larger community life, but as an individual rational will.”³ Ethics is thus contrasted with morality. The former is the practice of customary goodness in society whereas the latter means a set of normative rules that one can arrive at through rational deliberation but that is not necessarily actualized.

The German social theorist Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) worked with a distinction between ethics and morality that is remarkably different from Hegel’s use of the two terms. Luhmann defines “morality” as a type of communication by which the esteem or disesteem of others is distributed. Like his one-time teacher Talcott Parsons, he distinguishes between esteem and approval. Similar to my understanding of the moralist mindset as an extreme form of labeling people good or bad, Luhmann argues that moral judgments always concern the person as a whole. Approval is limited to certain acts or performances of a person and is therefore not a moral evaluation. We may approve or disapprove of one’s decision or one’s dress, but this is not yet a moral judgment. If, however, we esteem or disesteem people, then we either morally accept or disdain them. Moral distinctions distinguish between those whom we accept and those whom we don’t. Accordingly, moral values are the criteria by which we either esteem or disesteem others. For Luhmann, morality is the condition of the market of social esteem.⁴ Morality is neither customary behavior nor a set of principles, but the actual social differentiation between those who are deemed good and those who are deemed bad or evil. Whenever we qualify someone as “evil” we engage in moral communication. Morality is thus a social technique for introducing distinctions. It is a way of dividing our world into goodies and baddies. “Ethics,” on the other hand, has a very specific meaning. Luhmann conceives of ethics as the theoretical reflection on morality. Ethics is therefore not moral, but, so to speak, metamoral. It is the nonmoral analysis of how morality works. Ethics is thus not concerned with actually determining who or what is either morally good or bad, but with explaining how morality works in society. Ethics is the science of morality that observes morality. It does not distribute esteem or disesteem but reflects on the fact that such distribution takes place and plays a major role in social life. Ethics is the sociological discipline that investigates moral communication.

A third attempt to distinguish between ethics and morality is that of the contemporary postmodernist thinker Drucilla Cornell. In her book The Philosophy of the Limit she writes:

For my purposes, “morality” designates any attempt to spell out how one determines a “right way to behave,” behavioral norms which, once determined, can be translated into a system of rules. The ethical relation, a term which I contrast with morality, focuses instead on the kind of person one must become in order to develop a nonviolative relationship to the Other. The concern of the ethical relation, in other words, is a way of being in the world that spans divergent value systems and allows us to criticize the repressive aspects of competing moral systems.⁵

In her understanding, “morality” is some sort of strict and relatively coherent normative system. It is like a definitive guidebook on how to act. To be “ethical” has a much more personal meaning for Cornell. It is a project of personal cultivation that enables one to engage in nonaggressive and tolerant relationships with others. Whereas morality results in a specific set of beliefs and rules, to be ethical is something entirely different. It is not used to judge others and oneself according to a rigid catalog of values, but works to live and coexist with others regardless of their specific identities.

All three terminological distinctions—Hegel’s, Luhmann’s, and Cornell’s—make sense. The problem is that none of them correspond to the actual usage of the terms “ethics” and “morality” in contemporary English. The introduction of such a distinction therefore is, in each case, slightly artificial and forced. The authors give very good reasons for their respective understanding of the terms, but none of them have succeeded in making their definitions commonly accepted. In order to avoid adding another technical distinction between the words “ethics” and “morality,” I have decided to simply follow their traditional synonymy. For me, ethics and morality are basically identical, and, accordingly, ethics and moral philosophy are the same discipline.

It has to be acknowledged, however, that while ethics and morality are more or less interchangeable terms in contemporary English—just as they once were in the Western philosophical tradition—their meaning has shifted since the time of ancient Greece and Rome. Very much in line with Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit, the terms originally referred to what was considered good behavior in the sense of being in line with social customs and manners. Given the increase in the complexity of social life, the entirely new dimensions of multiculturalism and globalization, the new lifestyles brought about by the industrial and technological revolutions, the role of manners and customs has greatly changed since the time of Aristotle or Cicero. It is therefore no longer the case that ethics and morality primarily refer to what is generally regarded as socially proper, simply because it would be very difficult to actually identify what this is in today’s world. In the ancient world it was, for instance, believed that a certain way of life was proper for all women—and that this way of life differed significantly from that of all men. Hardly anyone in the modern West would agree with such an understanding of morality and ethics. In correspondence with the drastic social changes that have occurred since the classical age, ethics and morality have taken on a different meaning. They are conceived not so much in terms of customs or manners but with personal integrity and individual character traits, on the one hand, and supposedly universal values such as justice, freedom, and equality, on the other.

Since it is not my intention to come up with a new ethics, I am not at all concerned here with defining the moral virtues or ethical norms of our society. I leave this to the moralists and professional ethicists. My intention is to bring forth a criticism of morality, not as a criticism of specific values or forms of behavior, but as a criticism of the moralist mindset. I question whether the moralist perspective is appropriate. Is it really necessary and good to look at the world in ethical terms? Is it advisable to make ethical judgments? Is it fruitful to think and talk in ethical terms? And, most of all: Is it helpful to deem others good or evil?

I am concerned here with the function of ethical distinctions in our society. In what follows, I analyze what happens when we heavily engage in ethical communication, with a special concern with the law and mass media. I understand ethical thought and communication as an extreme and highly serious form of distinguishing between good and bad that normally applies to persons and their acts. Of course, ethical reasoning can also be extended to groups of persons and collective acts. A war, for instance, can be deemed just or unjust and thus conceived of in ethical terms. But even in such a case it is usually assumed that some people are responsible for the war and that the morality or immorality of that war is ultimately the morality or immorality of those people. The same is true for politics. When it is said that certain policies are immoral it normally means that the regime that is responsible for these policies is in violation of ethical norms.

Being interested in the functioning of moral communication in our society and being a critic of morality, I mainly focus on the pathology of ethics. My attitude is thus somewhat similar to Nietzsche’s.⁶ I try to point out the disadvantages of moral distinctions and the specific pains and troubles that they create. This should not be confused, however, with advocating immorality. If a doctor advises her patient to stop smoking this does not mean the she advises him to do the exact opposite. There is, in fact, no positive opposite to smoking. The alternative to smoking is to stop smoking, and not to “do” its opposite. Similarly, the advice to be cautious with morality only advises one to be cautious. The moral fool is precisely not a moralist, but he is neither an immoralist nor a reversed moralist. To say that it is not necessarily good to be moral is not itself a moral judgment—as I point out in the introduction. The moral fool does not even claim that it is, in a strong sense, good to be amoral. A doctor would not say that it is, in a strict sense, healthy not to smoke. Refraining from smoking does not make you healthy; it simply eliminates a certain risk. In the same way, the moral fool refrains from taking the risk of making judgments about what is good or bad. But this does not imply that avoiding this risk makes you automatically good. Therefore, the moral fool does not say that it is morally good not to be ethical. He only says: I do not understand why some people seem so determined to look at the world in moral terms.