Introduction
1. Niklas Luhmann has posed this very question both implicitly and explicitly in his many criticisms of morality. See, for instance, “The Sociology of the Moral and Ethics,” International Sociology 11.1 (March 1996): 27–36.
2. First published as “Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3–12. The lecture was probably delivered at Cambridge University in 1929 or 1930.
3. Wittgenstein discusses the moral distinction of good/evil in connection with the epistemological (or even ontological) distinction right/wrong (or true/false). I agree with Wittgenstein’s view that absolute judgments are impossible with respect to any of these distinctions, but my argumentation in this book is largely confined to moral issues.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:464.
5. See my discussion in chapter 2 of the distinction between ethics and morality.
6. Walter Kaufmann, “Hegel’s Ideas about Tragedy,” in New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. W. E. Steinkraus (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 202.
7. I thoroughly disagree with Hegel’s quite sexist analysis of Sittlichkeit and Moral in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he states: “Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 280).
8. Analects 13.18. Quoted in Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine, 1998), 167.
9. This is a somewhat provocative proposition since the Confucians are normally understood as moralist philosophers, particularly by their amoral Daoist critics. My understanding of Confucius, however, is a little more complex. I believe that Confucian morality is based on nonmoral, emotional cultivation. The Confucians are moralists, but their morality is based on amoral and natural feelings.
10. Analects 1.2. In Ames and Rosemont, Analects of Confucius, 71.
11. “Latimer Should Be Granted Clemency,” Globe and Mail, Saturday, 8 December 2007, A28.
12. See Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System, trans. Klaus A. Ziegert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
13. This expression alludes to the language used in advertising, such as, Miller Lite and Bud Light.
14. Richard Rorty, “Solidarity and Objectivity,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3–19.
1. The Moral Fool
1. For an English translation see Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding (Translations from the Chinese) (Cleveland: Forum Books, World Publishing, 1963), 385. I comment on this allegory in detail in The Philosophy of the Daodejing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 99 ff.
2. Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 534–35; emphasis in the original.
3. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 376.
4. Niklas Luhmann, Paradigm Lost: Über die ethische Reflexion der Moral: Rede anläßlich der Verleihung des Hegel-Preises, 1989 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 19.
5. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13. For a discussion of this quote, see William Rasch, “Immanent Systems, Transcendental Temptations, and the Limits of Ethics,” in Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity, ed. William Rasch and Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 73–98.
6. Nietzsche introduces the term “extra-moral” in his early treatise Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne (On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense). I prefer to use the more common English term “amoral.” Nevertheless, this book is highly influenced by the criticisms of morality found throughout Nietzsche’s whole oeuvre. I appreciate Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the pathology of morality, but sometimes this very diagnosis seems to be quite pathological as well, particularly when he explicitly defends an immoral position, that is to say, a merely inverted morality, as was true in “Morality as the Enemy of Nature,” in Twilight of the Idols. However, as was so often the case, Nietzsche was ahead of his time in pointing out the semiotic character of morality, that is to say, its communicative aspects. My own analysis of morality in this book fully concurs with the following observations found in “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind,” in Twilight of the Idols, namely, “there are no such things as moral facts” and “morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena: or, more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of them. . . . Morality is merely a sign language” (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, with the Antichrist and Ecce Homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici [Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2007], 37).
2. Negative Ethics
1. Hans Saner, “Formen der negativen Ethik: Eine Replik,” in Negative Ethik, ed. Henning Ottmann (Berlin: Parerga, 2005), 27–30.
2. Angus C. Graham, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 147. See Zhuangzi jijie, in Zhuzi jicheng (Peking: Zhonghua, 1954), 3:255, for the original. Transliteration altered.
3. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 201–2. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:55, for the original.
4. Nietzsche lists this confusion as the first of the “four great errors” in the so-called section.
5. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 211. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:165–66, for the original.
6. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 211.See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:166, for the original.
7. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 213. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:171, for the original.
8. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 90. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:109, for the original.
9. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 129. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:229, for the original.
10. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 207–8. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:156–57, for the original.
11. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 208. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:157–58, for the original.
12. Graham, Chuang-Tzu, 174. See Zhuangzi jijie, 3:199, for the original.
13. For an antihumanist reading of the Lao zi, see Hans-Georg Moeller, The Philosophy of the Daodejing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
14. I have in mind authors such as N. Katherine Hayles and Donna J. Haraway.
15. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002), xiii.
16. Ibid., 32.
17. Ibid., 88.
18. Ibid., 96.
19. Ibid., 116
20. Ibid., 112.
3. The Redundancy of Ethics
1. Angus C. Graham, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 81. See Zhuangzi jijie, in Zhuzi jicheng (Peking: Zhonghua, 1954), 3:351, for the original.
2. Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 79.
3. See the introduction for a more detailed discussion of how I use the terms “love” and “law” in this book.
4. See section V.B.b. in G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
5. On the issue of legal coherence, see Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
6. Niklas Luhmann, Gibt es in unserer Gesellschaft noch unverzichtbare Normen? (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1993), 19; my translation.
4. The “Morality of Anger”
1. Walter Berns, For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty (New York: Basic Books, 1979). See in particular chapter 5, “The Morality of Capital Punishment.” The excerpt from this book included in Philosophy of Punishment, ed. Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988) 85–93, is titled “The Morality of Anger.”
2. Berns, For Capital Punishment, 154–56.
3. Ibid., 8.
4. From “The Morality of Anger,” in Philosophy of Punishment, 86. This reference to Aristotle is not included in the original book.
5. Rhetorica, 1378a, quoted in Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York Oxford University Press, 1991), 124.
6. Ibid., 1378b, in Kennedy’s translation of On Rhetoric, 125.
7. Ibid., 1380a, in Kennedy’s translation of On Rhetoric, 130–31.
8. Ibid., in Kennedy’s translation of On Rhetoric, 130.
9. For contemporary Zen Buddhist philosophy and its negative ethics see the works of Masao Abe, particularly Zen and Western Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), as well as Abe’s contributions in The Emptying God:. A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1990).
10. Quite prominently, for instance, in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. See The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, trans. Norman Wadell and Masao Abe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 3. William F. Powell lists a number of occurrences of the same phrase in his translation of The Record of Tung-shan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 78–79n. 89 and 41.
11. John Blofeld, The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination (London: Rider, 1962), 50. The English word “love” in this translation is somewhat problematic. It does not really mean passionate, romantic, or unconditional love, nor does it mean love in the sense of affection—as I use it in this book. Love here means the opposite of aversion, and thus something akin to liking or attraction.
12. Ibid., 54, 60.
13. Ibid., 74, 137.
14. The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi, trans. Burton Watson (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 61.
15. Ibid., 53.
5. Ethics and Aesthetics
1. Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 89. See Zhuangzi yinde (Peking 1947), 18/6/82–19/6/86.
2. Richard Rorty, “Analytic Philosophy and Conversational Philosophy,” typescript, 6.
3. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 145.
4. Ibid., 141.
5. I discuss the issue of “good baddies” and explain the term “carnivalistic” in chapter 12.
6. The Presumptions of Philosophical Ethics
1. Niklas Luhmann, Paradigm Lost: Über die ethische Reflexion der Moral: Rede anläßlich der Verleihung des Hegel-Preises, 1989 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 21.
2. Niklas Luhmann, “Politik, Demokratie, Moral” in Normen, Ethik und Gesellschaft, Konferenz der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften, (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern. 1977), 17.
3. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 1.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Ibid., 3.
6. Ibid.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 262.
8. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 96; emphasis in the original.
9. Ibid., 101; emphasis in the original.
10. “We punish criminals principally in order to pay them back, and we execute the worst of them out of moral necessity,” says Walter Berns, in a very Kantian fashion, in Berns, For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 8.
11. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 142–43.
12. Ibid., 144–45.
13. The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi, trans. Burton Watson (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 61.
14. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 11; emphasis in the original.
15. Ibid., 54.
16. Ibid., 64.
17. F. Rosen, introduction in Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, xli.
18. “Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics” Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3–12.
7. The Myth of Moral Progress
1. A much more elaborate—but similar in content—deconstruction of this aspect of the myth of moral progress is the chapter “Non-Progress” in John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002), 153–89.
2. Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, vol. 1, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).
3. Throughout this paragraph I quote from the appendix in Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development, 409–12.
4. Lawrence Kohlberg and Mordecai Nisan, “Cultural Universality of Moral Judgment Stages: A Longitudinal Study in Turkey” in Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, vol. 2, The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 582.
5. Lawrence Kohlberg and Anne Colby, The Measurement of Moral Judgment, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
6. Kohlberg admits that there are cultural factors that influence the results of his surveys, but he still maintains that the model is universally valid. See the two cross-cultural studies in Kohlberg, The Psychology of Moral Development: Kohlberg and Nisan, “Cultural Universality of Moral Judgment Stages: A Longitudinal Study in Turkey,” 582–593, and Lawrence Kohlberg, John Snarey, and Joseph Reimer, “Cultural Universality of Moral Judgment Stages: A Longitudinal Study in Israel.” 594–620.
7. Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development, 412.
8. Such attempts have been made. See Heiner Roetz, Die chinesische Ethik der Achsenzeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). Roetz’s attempt to discover Kohlberg’s sixth stage and his rational moral universals in Confucianism is in my view perfectly analogous to and equally as absurd as earlier attempts by Christian missionaries to discover Christian universal values and beliefs. I do not think that Confucianism is in need of Christian or Kohlbergian missionaries.
9. Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development, 142. See also, Kohlberg, Snarey, and Reimer, “Cultural Universality of Moral Judgment Stages: A Longitudinal Study in Israel,” in Kohlberg, The Psychology of Moral Development, 594–620.
10. A. S. Neill, Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 44.
11. See, for example, chapters 10 and 55 in the Daodejing.
12. For more information on the image of the infant, see “The Body (of Infants and Corpses)” in my Daoism Explained: From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory (Ideas Explained) (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 74–81.
8. For the Separation of Morality and Law
1. Rasch, Nobles, and Schiff work with Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. Rasch argues against the subjection of the legal system to moral oversight saying that the “‘ethical moment’ threatens to become, then, the moment that jeopardizes the autonomous self-reproduction of the system by dissolving the clear distinction between system and environment. The law ceases to be the law when the ethically occupied other lays it down. It becomes a commandment” (William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity. The Paradoxes of Differentiation [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 143). Nobles and Schiff describe in detail the history of the separation of law and morality and trace it back to the seventeenth century. Referring to Hobbes they write: “To an external observer, the legal system’s claim to be applying moral principles could appear quite bogus” (Richard Nobles and David Schiff, A Sociology of Jurisprudence [Oxford: Hart, 2006]), 63.
2. This is how I read section C.C.c (“Reason as Testing Laws”) in the Phenomenology of Spirit. See G.. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 256–62.
3. Niklas Luhmann, “Politicians, Honesty, and the Higher Amorality of Politics,” Theory, Culture, and Society 11 (1994): 25–36.
4. Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System, trans. Klaus A. Ziegert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 445, 214–15.
5. Ibid., 460.
6. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87.
7. Ibid.
8. Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 1022.
9. Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Emotions” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1993, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
9. Morality and Civil Rights
1. Quoted in Nelson Manfred Blake, A History of American Life and Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 124; emphasis in original.
10. How to Get a Death Verdict
1. There was some sort of makeshift tribunal but it did not meet contemporary legal standards.
2. I am not singling out the United States as the worst country that still practices the death penalty. I am simply not as familiar with the practice in other countries and thus do not know if or to what extent my analysis of the situation in the United States also applies to them.
3. See “Appendix B: Reported Frequencies of National Death Penalty Policy, 1980 to 2001,” in Franklin E. Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
4. As with virtually all fundamental human rights, there is no consensus, neither diachronically nor synchronically, about the right to life. The European Convention on Human Rights as adopted in 1950 explicitly declares the death penalty to be in line with this supposed right, whereas an amendment to it commissioned in 1982 requires the abolition of the death penalty (Zimring, Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, 28–29). The abolition of the death penalty in Europe is certainly often seen as a result of the acceptance of human rights, but it can hardly be called an effect of (often ineffective and legally ambiguous) human rights declarations. I would argue that the relatively recent European development of declaring the death penalty a violation of human rights is not so much a reason for the actual abolishment of the death penalty as it is that the increasing contradiction between death penalty practice and functionally differentiated law resulted either in practical or explicit abolition in many European countries. This historical trend is, in my view, the reason for the recent European construction of the death penalty as a human rights violation. There is no objective human right that would make the death penalty inherently illegal. The popularity of human rights semantics made it convenient to justify the abolition of the death penalty on its basis. It was a semantics that came in handy when the death penalty became socially obsolete. The idea that human rights are at odds with the death penalty is not a cause but an important side effect of the global trend toward abolition.
5. See the section on Kant in this chapter.
6. Phoebe C. Ellsworth and Samuel Gross, “Hardening of the Attitudes: Americans’ Views on the Death Penalty, “in The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90–115; William C. Bailey and Ruth D. Peterson, “Murder, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence: A Review of the Literature,” in The Death Penalty in America,, 138; Ernest van den Haag, “The Death Penalty Once More,” in The Death Penalty in America, 449–50; Richard C. Dieter, “Millions Misspent: What Politicians Don’t Say about the High Costs of the Death Penalty,” in The Death Penalty in America, 402.
7. Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 311.
8. This is obviously closely related to the American morality of anger discussed in chapter 4.
9. See, for instance, van den Haag, “The Death Penalty Once More,” in The Death Penalty in America,445–56; Tom Sorell, Moral Theory and Capital Punishment (Oxford: Basil Blackway, Open University, 1987).
10. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 143.
11. See, in particular, Sorell, Moral Theory and Capital Punishment, 30–32, 162.
12. For Kant’s discussion of these issues see Mary Gregor’s translation of The Metaphysics of Morals, 140–45.
13. Günter Wohlfart made me aware of the surprising parallels between Kant’s and Robespierre’s moral philosophies. See his book Die Kunst des Lebens und andere Künste: Skurille Skizzen zu einem euro-daoistischen Ethos ohne Moral (Berlin: Parerga, 2005), 75–76.
14. Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, ed. Slavoj Žižek, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2007), 126, 137.
15. Ibid., 132–33.
16. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice,’” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1970), 81, 63. Ironically, in the speech in which Robespierre vehemently demands the execution of the king, he also presents himself as a death penalty abolitionist who “abhor[s] the death penalty generously prescribed by your laws” (ibid., 64). It seems that soon after he rectified his moral principles.
17. See van den Haag and Bern quotations in this chapter.
18. “Every murderer—anyone who commits murder, orders it, or is an accomplice in it—must suffer death” (Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 143).
19. Sorell, Moral Theory and Capital Punishment, 4.
20. Walter Berns, “The Morality of Anger,” in Philosophy of Punishment, ed. Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), 89; van den Haag, “The Death Penalty Once More,” in The Death Penalty in America, 451–52; Banner, The Death Penalty, 282.
21. Herbert Morris, “Person and Punishment,” in Philosophy of Punishment, 78; van den Haag, “The Death Penalty Once More, “in The Death Penalty in America, 454.
22. Hugo Adam Bedau, “Innocence and the Death Penalty: Assessing the Danger of Mistaken Executions,” in The Death Penalty in America, 344–60.
23. Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen, The Exonerated (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2004), 5. The death penalty was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 ; it was reinstated in 1976.
24. Zimring, Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, 42–64.
25. Ibid., 51–52.
26. Ibid., 55.
27. Ibid., 57.
28. The need for this term is closely related to the morality of anger discussed in chapter 4.
29. Zimring, Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, 58, 61.
30. Ibid., 59
31. Ibid., 62.
32. Berns, “The Morality of Anger,” in Philosophy of Punishment, 89.
33. Joseph L. Hoffman, “How American Juries Decide Death Penalty Cases: The Capital Jury Project,” in The Death Penalty in America,335.
34. Ibid.
35. Quoted in Zimring, Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, 54; bracketed material in the original.
36. Ibid., 55; emphasis in the original.
37. Hoffman, “How American Juries Decide Death Penalty Cases,” in The Death Penalty in America, 338; emphasis in the original.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 333.
40. Blank and Jensen, The Exonerated, 5.
41. Ibid., 34.
42. Bedau, “Background and Developments,” in The Death Penalty in America, 19. Detailed statistics are found on p. 20.
43. Banner, The Death Penalty, 276.
44. Quoted in Zimring, Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, 61.
45. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 2003), 53.
46. Larry Myers, “An Appeal for Clemency: The Case of Harold Lamont Otey,” in The Death Penalty in America, 361–83; quotes are on 381 and 383.
47. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 146.
11. Masters of War
1. I particularly recommend Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare, trans. Roger T. Ames (New York: Ballantine, 1993).
2. Moral reflections on warfare that discuss the conditions for legitimate wars exist in other schools of ancient Chinese philosophy, particularly in Confucianism (Mencius) and Mohism.
3. For other significant differences see the chapter on war in my Philosophy of the Daodejing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 75–86. Daoist war philosophy is not only amoral but also nonheroic and unconcerned with ethnic or national issues.
4. An interesting exception is Heraclitus. Often, the pre-Socratics, in particular Heraclitus, are surprisingly similar to Daoist positions. Günter Wohlfart has investigated this issue repeatedly. See, for instance, chapter 8, on Heraclitus and Laozi, in his book Der Philosophische Daoismus (Cologne: Chora, 2001).
5. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), xii–xv.
6. Ibid., 253, 259, 263.
7. Ibid., 101.
8. Ibid., 106.
9. Ibid., 85.
10. Ibid., 10.
11. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Epilogue: Continuing Implications of the Just War Tradition,” in Just War Theory, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 324.
12. Robert L. Holmes, “Can War Be Morally Justified? The Just War Theory,” in Just War Theory, 220; emphasis in the original.
13. Following a suggestion by John Maraldo, I note that I indeed do refer here generally to all academic so-called just war principles, including the principle of double effect, that is the idea that some bad things are ethically allowed (particularly in war) as long as they fulfil a number of good conditions. Walzer’s arguments referred to above are examples of how this principle can be applied.
14. Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
15. Ibid., 130–31.
16. Ibid., 85–98.
17. The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1998, 959. It is interesting to compare the relative death toll of Americans in the 1991 Iraq war with U.S. wars in the past century. The relative death toll in Vietnam and Korea was about ten times higher (0.66 percent and 0.64 percent, respectively) and the likelihood of dying in World War I and II was more than forty times higher (2.46 percent and 2.49 percent, respectively) (ibid., 161).
18. According to The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1998, there were over 85,000 Iraqi casualties (776). It is unclear how many of these were fatal. I do not think that a death toll of 30,000 Iraqis is an overestimate. Most terrorist acts (except such major ones as the 9/11 attack) have less effective ratios of loss.
19. Larry McMurtry, Crazy Horse (New York: Viking, 1999), 95.
20. The weaponry used in the world wars and in the Civil War was much more powerful than that used by Native Americans, which leads to a much higher casualty rate. Still, it seems obvious that the focus on killing the enemy was much more prevalent in these Western wars than it typically was in Indian warfare.
21. Walzer, Arguing about War, 11–12.
22. On the very day that I wrote this (28 October 2007) I watched a news program on CBS. A highly ranked military officer who fought during the second war against Iraq explained in an interview that the number of acceptable civilian deaths in attacking an important target (such as Saddam Hussein and other leaders) was twenty-nine. If thirty or more civilians were likely to die, the strike had to be authorized by the U.S. president or other eminent authorities. The officer stated that in such attacks probably more than two hundred civilians were killed during his time of service—but none of the actual targets. The same news program showed an interview with the Afghan president Hamid Karzai demanding that the U.S. army cease its practice of airstrikes against Afghan villages. So many civilians have been killed that, according to the news report, the U.S. army is even more resented by the population than the Soviet army was during its occupation.
23. Eyal Weizman, “Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Radical Philosophy 136 (March–April 2006): 16.
12. Ethics and the Mass Media
1. Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1.
2. Ibid., 20.
3. It should be stressed here that while I think it is very obvious that the mass media function in society, that is, sociologically, as the means of the proliferation of ethics, I still think that the aesthetic value of mass media art (such as films and books) has no specific relation to its moral content. Most movies shown on TV, in the theaters, or downloaded from the Internet contribute to the proliferation of morality in our society. But I think that what makes a good film an aesthetically good film (or a good novel an aesthetically good novel) can by no means be induced from its moral message (see chapter 5). Books and films have the sociological effect of proliferating morality, but their aesthetic value does not correlate with this effect. The aesthetic value of a mass media product should not be confused with its function in society.
4. See Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, 80, for a similar observation.
5. This quotation is taken from a text called “Some Questions of Leadership” (Guanyu lingdao fangfa de ruogan wenti). According to the official edition of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works, it was presented to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on 1 June 1943. The Chinese version is included in Mao Zedong xuan ji (Peking: Renmin, 1951–61), 3:854. The English translation here follows Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 316–17. An English translation of the whole text is included in Mao Zedong, Selected Works (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1964), 3:117–22.
6. See Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, 28–29.
7. See chapter 5 for a discussion of goodies and baddies.
Conclusion
1. See the introduction for more about Wittgenstein’s lecture.
2. Niklas Luhmann, “Ethik als Reflexionstheorie der Moral,” in Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Band 3 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 359.