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Morality often consists of telling other people not to do something you don’t like. Don’t approve of what a person is wearing? Ban it. Offended by nekkid people? Make clothes mandatory…but only the clothes you approve of. Someone not having sex in the missionary position? Call them pervy and shame them. Wait…someone’s having sex? By George (yes, that one), it’s time to call on the government to intervene.
In practice, of course, moral reasoning does tend to be more complicated. The “I Don’t Like So You Don’t Do It” approach works fine for cultural tyranny, but when it comes to real actions with tangible consequences, methods of moral reasoning tend to differ. One kind of moral reasoning is consequentialism, the perspective that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by the nature of its consequences. Consequentialist ethics can be tricky, because it involves sorting cause and effect, action and consequence; it’s often a case-by-case thing even though there are certain general principles to impose order on the mess.
Another kind of moral reasoning is virtue ethics, which isn’t so much concerned with consequences (or rules), but with the quality of character. Where consequentialists will see characters in terms of actions, morality in virtue ethics stems from having a virtuous character. The trick, of course, is to define what a virtuous character is. (Or, you could just say that you’ll know a virtuous character when you see it. I guess that makes virtuous character like pornography.)
Although not a dominant theory in contemporary moral philosophy, we see a lot of virtue ethics in play in the day-to-day, especially in the political arena. I have the sneaking suspicion that political dialogue embodies a conflict between these two different, even incompatible, kinds of moral reasoning.
I hate to offer yet another dichotomy, because as with anything else it’s not an either/or proposition. People aren’t necessarily consistent in which kind of moral reasoning they’ll employ, if they employ any formal kind of reasoning at all — most people haven’t taken classes in moral philosophy. But as general trends, the opposing influences of consequentialism and virtue ethics on our collective thinking would go a long way toward explaining what we see out there – the difference between how we talk about McCain and Obama.
The Allure of Simple Answers
Consider the consequentialist’s problem. Ask him if X is wrong, and you’re likely to get a big answer starting with, “Well, it depends on whether or not A and B, although everything can change if C is a factor. And then there’s E…” It’s like the reason why no one talks to scientists; people want the English, not the Scientish, and if don’t they get the English, then they cozy up with global warming deniers and creationists. In the case of ethics, they cozy up with Republicans. (Sorry. Cheap shot.)
The simplicity of focusing on this elusive thing called “character” underlies a variety of political attacks. In a rabid piece of character assassination published recently within these very pages (http://www.thefrontpageonline.com/new/), Ted Hayes argues that Obama isn’t an American black man, but the descendant of a father firmly implanted in “an Islamic tradition hailing out of Saudi Arabia that enslaved and continues to enslave Black Africans to this day.” The conclusion: he “ain’t one of us.”
To some extent, this is laughable. If Obama, a man who worked his way up – in Chicago – from humble roots, isn’t “one of us,” who is? President Bush, with his old money family, membership in the most elite of elite secret societies (Skull & Bones), and privileged life? How about McCain, who left his disabled wife and married into his millions and multiple mansions? Frankly, the notion of any of the politicians being “one of us” is rather extraordinary, but the point is how the focus on “character” inevitably forms part of a game of identity politics. Obama critics like Mr. Hayes seem quite ready to attack (dishonestly) Obama’s character instead of his policies, but when it comes to their own Republican ponies, like McCain, they are silent on deficiencies obvious to everyone else. (Side note: This is related to the phenomenon of so-called “right-wing” punditry where the likes of O’Reilly, Coulter, Malkin, Goldberg, Prager and so on rail against “liberals.” Good identities are pitted against bad identities, good characters against bad. The conservative/liberal divide is just another skirmish in the identity wars.
The mixture of character ethics and identity politics explains why Al Gore, among others, gets such a bum rap. With his character established, in certain quarters, as suspect, anything he says is viewed with suspicion if not hostility. It’s a handy way of negating any unpleasant or inconvenient message: kill the messenger, kill the message.
This also explains why “liberals” are often charged with hating America whenever they dissent from the government’s policies. The focus on character creates this kind of reasoning:
(1)The U.S. is good, therefore whatever the U.S. does is good by definition. (2)If the U.S. does something bad, see (1).
Patriotic exploitation, reductive simplicity, gut appeal; just what the Powers That Be love to keep their grip on power and money.
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