The Snake in the Garden – the two contradictions at the heart of morality

Moral principles are culturally variable. In one culture it is bad to eat a pig, in another to eat a cow, in another a woman must cover her hair and in yet another a woman must shave her head, and so on. Yet these variable principles tend to be the least important, the least central of these moral systems. The hearts of all moral systems seem to be remarkably similar which is why it is possible for culturally diverse societies to live together.

Let us take the Golden Rule, for example: “do as you would be done by”. It lies at the heart of all the great moral systems of the world including its religions. The root of the success of all the main world religions has been their ability to extend the principle from being only applicable between people within a small group who share a genetic pool – tribal or national, for example – to those people who share our opinions, and onwards to humanity as a whole.

This rule is deducible a priori from the condition of being a social animal whereas the other principles mentioned may be characterised as culturally specific. On the other hand, the biosphere is by its nature cannibalistic: living things must live at the expense of other living things, even plants compete for space, light and air. In the natural world there may be respect between the hunter and the prey but there cannot be reciprocity. “The cut worm forgives the plough”, as William Blake formulates it. Within humanity too conflicts inevitably arise especially where groups compete for scarce resources.

Human existence is not solitary but social so humans need to have moral systems. But, another consequence of the social nature of human existence is that everyone depends on other people and therefore needs things from other people which they do not necessarily want to give. Ideally the survival of the individual depends on reciprocity and free giving but it doesn’t always work like that, and sometimes people are forced to be manipulative or coercive.

It is because of this fact that moral conundrums are most often not black and white. The real moral dilemma is the one where we have to weigh more than one bad option against another to work out which will have the least worst outcome. Parents tell children that they must not lie yet most adults find that they often have to lie to avoid situations where offence may be caused or more serious damage may be done.

A moral principle may be an a priori truth or it may be a cultural norm or custom. But even when it is an a priori truth the way in which it is applied is culturally determined and historically variable. Only a short while ago devout Christians in Europe thought that trial by ordeal and public executions were perfectly acceptable but would be likely to call them “un-Christian” in the twenty-first century. In other words, moral standards are a matter of what society decides they are at the time, and in other words again, they are a matter of point-of-view.

The other paradox that lies at the heart of morality is the illusion that all human individuals are uniquely valuable. From the point of view of the parent each of his or her children is uniquely valuable, other relatives and friends only slightly less so, but the effect tends to wear off with distance. It would be disingenuous of me to say that I care about the man on the other side of the world who assemble my bicycle as I do about a close relative though there may be reasons why I would not wish him any harm. For me, in truth, he is a means to an end.

Proximity in this analogy may be equated with love. On the subject of love Derrida says:

The difference between the who and the what is at the heart of love, separates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity, or because I love the way that someone is? …

That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. The question of Being, to return to philosophy – because the first question of philosophy is: What is it “to Be?” What is Being? The question of Being is itself always already divided between who and what. Is ‘Being’ someone or some thing? I speak of abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. One wants to be true to someone – singularly, irreplaceably – and one perceives that this someone isn’t x or y. They didn’t have the qualities, properties, the images, that I thought I’d loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.

Here Derrida identifies love as being an aspect of what it is to be conscious and human – part of being – and the paradox of valuing people for the value they have for others – trust, beauty, intellect etc. – or valuing them for themselves as fundamental to being human. It is so fundamental that if a person is not valued for themselves alone in the early years of their lives, psychologists tell us, the individual will grow up damaged and unable to take a full part in society.

This ability to love is uniquely human but it is part of the delusional picture we have of ourselves. Love does not exist yet we have to believe in it to make things work. It fulfils a function rather like i, the imaginary square root of minus one, does in mathematics. At an individual level we need love for society to function. Yet at a social or at an historical level individuals are not important. We all embody strands of our culture, experiences, thoughts and feelings that are also available to others. A loss of ten per cent of an army does not destroy the army and does not even alter its character appreciably.

Everyday technology develops and artificial intelligence becomes a more immediate reality. It is conceivable that within the next few decades artificial intelligence may replicate human intelligence and interface with it directly. Is it then conceivable that a machine might value another entity as a “who” rather than just as a “what”? It is not a mystery; it depends on how the programming code is written.

It is an important lesson from human history that a moral system that consists of a book of black and white rules to be rigidly applied is unlikely to be satisfactory and inevitably results in exacerbating the cruelty and injustice it was intended to avoid. Justice is a matter of balance and discretion and no one has the unlimited wisdom required to make it perfect.

In recent years the problem has become more difficult with the globalisation of trade and the accompanying mixing of groups with different cultural norms. It is a constant problem to reconcile conflicts between the moral principles of groups who live side-by-side? It is about to become even more difficult with an increasing impact of artificial intelligence and biological engineering, and the combination of the two, which will challenge all our customary points of moral reference.

Some Thoughts on the Problem of Time

Our lives are dominated by time. I was stuck in traffic this morning and was fearful that I would be late for my first appointment. When I was nineteen I was too young to be accepted for certain jobs and now I am too old to be accepted for certain other jobs. We all have our personal histories that we might put into our cvs or find in our photograph albums. There are many different kinds of example that could be given. Of course, this domination by time is a feature of the society in which we  live, an advanced industrial society with a high degree of complexity in its institutions and a high degree of specialisation in its workforce. We are, as the popular formulation goes, “cash rich and time poor”. In pre-industrial societies time is less pressing and in pre-agricultural societies it is something different altogether.

It is perhaps not obvious that our concept time is intimately connected with our consciousness – that time and consciousness are inseparable. Time is like the air we breathe: so ever-present, so much a part of us that we don’t question its nature in the ordinary course of things. Time is such a core concern that we see it as a dimension of the physical world that we inhabit and we speak of time as the ‘fourth dimension’. And yet our perception of time is bound up with the social construction of consciousness. People exist in time whereas things do not.

Take for example, my computer. Of course it exists in time, look there is the digital clock on the right hand side of the task bar. It is telling me that it is nearly lunchtime and that there is barely enough time left for my current task. However, if I go into my spreadsheet and enter the formula for current date and time so that it is displayed in the spreadsheet cell and then reformat it as a number, the shocking truth is revealed: the date is just a number of days since an arbitrary start date and the time is just a fraction of a day. The computer has no knowledge of time at all: time is just another number format.

You might object that things exist in time because they have a history. There was a time before my computer existed and there will be a time when it doesn’t exist anymore. This cycle is true of all things, including ourselves. Yet without consciousness this cycle has no meaning and no significance. My computer knows nothing of its creation, of its destruction or of its existence. It is only in time because it is in my consciousness.

Consciousness is created from our dialogue with ourselves which is shaped by our dialogue with others. It is the dialogues between people and within people that reflexively creates our language, our ideas, our preoccupations and the society in which we live. In another society, these things are structured differently so consciousness in a different society is different and its perception of time is different.

When we come to observe the physical world the matter is no easier. I am always troubled when I hear some populariser of science saying something to the effect that when an astronomer looks through a powerful telescope he sees stars that are so far away that he is seeing them as they were millions of years ago because that is how long it has taken the light from them to reach us. This kind of talk is fascinating, but it is nonsense. Our consciousness is a feature of the human organism and our conception of time along with it. It is perfectly fitted for dealing with situations where our dialogue is with someone a few yards away or, with the wonders of modern telecommunications, a few thousand miles away. It is meaningful in the situations we are familiar with to treat ‘now’ as though it were common property and the same for all of us. But, when we deal with a larger scale it becomes meaningless. How can we say that we are seeing an object as it was in the past just because it is a long distance away? Surely we are seeing it as it is now, in our present. There is no related consciousness perceiving the object where it is and there is no guarantee that the two nows have a simple relationship with each other. In other words ‘now’ is just a concept that people have created to help them get along with each other and time is not such a simple matter as it first appears.

Accountability and Intention






