The Ambiguities of Moral Action

Let me, for starters, delimit the scope of the moral, thus to separate genuinely moral from what might be called spontaneous useful action. All action is aimed at achieving something good, and we can define good simply enough by saying that it’s something pleasing to us. The issue of moral choice never really arises unless there is a conflict between goods—thus until a situation arises in which we must deny ourselves something for a so-called “higher” good or undergo a pain or deprivation in order to benefit either a future instance of ourselves or to help other people. If there is no conflict, there is no morality involved. Morality always involves the willing acceptance of some kind of deprivation. To eat the French fries may not be a moral act, but to eat the spinach, if I don’t like it, may be—because it is good for me. Similarly, doing services for others in exchange for something else is just exchange. I’m merely pleasing myself by means of other people. When I spend a day helping the old lady next door move her furniture to a small apartment half-way across the city—and I rent the truck and do all the labor—then I’m doing something just because, under the circumstances, I find it appropriate.

Moral action thus seems to require the development within us of a kind of sympathy—both for an enlarged sense of our selves and for other people. In the first case, I enlarge my sense of self from this immediate moment to the larger sense of myself over a long period of time. In relation to others, I include the community as part of my narrow being, hence I give of myself to the collective. In both cases a sense of sympathy and unity must be present as a motive. The sensory pay-offs of abstemious behavior or good deeds are quite minimal.

Now the ambiguities of moral action arise precisely because such action demands this inner state, this intuition, this something that I call a sympathy. And we are not the sole agency that participates in the formation of this feeling. Nurture plays a very big role. Our sense of sympathy is an inner presence formed reciprocally with the community. Suppose a child grows up in a harsh and violent environment where an abusive figure dominates and sets the tone of most hours of the day—whether he or she is present or not. Here I am reminded of Saddam Hussein; he grew up in the shadow of a violent stepfather with criminal tendencies. If our earliest experience is of a certain kind, just how free, later, is our will to ascribe to the “world out there” a benevolent aspect? Why should it—when its own experience has been of a world of irrational and arbitrary threats against which only deception, dissimulation, and countering violence are really effective foils?

Ambiguity further plagues this subject because even people who grow up in the worst of circumstances still retain a sense of moral rights and wrongs. This sense may be deformed, but it won’t be absent. The person will know what hurts him or her, and he or she ought to know to avoid doing to others what he or she does not wish to experience. The good deeds of people scarred like this may be more difficult to discern, but may be present. The Biblical admonition, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” [Matthew 7:1] is based on the perception of this ambiguous character of moral action, the roots of which are so clouded and difficult to see. To shake our organic rootings in actual experience so that everything appears clearly, sharply, and in the right focus, requires a long journey sometimes—and sometimes is present early thanks to the grace of fortunate birth, parents, and optimal circumstances. And even then, the drag of the sensory, the personal, and of the here and now are great enough to lead us into error.