Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → how I came to have my ethical beliefs

There’s a kind of amusing story about how I came to take this plunge I’ve taken.

An old friend of mine, one I’d met through a writers’ email group about ten years ago and who got me into train hopping for a spell, sent me an email out-of-the-blue asking me to help him on a project of his.

We hadn’t been in contact for a few years, so this was kind of a surprise. It turned out that he thought I was still living in San Luis Obispo and he wanted me to masquerade for the news media as a SLO representative of a group he’d formed — Progressive Junta.

I told him I didn’t live in SLO anymore, but he didn’t think that’d be much of a problem. He knows that I’ve got a penchant for trolling reporters and don’t mind using the news media as a canvas for performance art.

So I said “sure” and asked what he was after. He wanted me to talk about how Progressive Junta was planning actions in the SLO area and then just ad-lib from there. I guess the papers down there were willing to run with his idea but just needed some sort of local angle.

So I did. I called up the reporter and talked about how Progressive Junta were printing up five thousand cards modeled after the ones that coalition forces were dropping over Iraq — only our cards were going to urge the folks at Vandenberg Air Force Base to disobey any orders to use weapons of mass destruction or commit other war crimes. We planned to go on a nighttime raid of neighborhoods around Vandenberg, leaving these cards on windshields and in mailboxes and so forth. I thought that was sufficiently dramatic and controversial that it’d give the reporter something to work with.

But then I started to ad-lib and went off on this whole spiel about how it really all boils down to personal responsibility and how we’re going to try to do outreach to people who feel like they’re opposed to the war but whose actions support it, and to analyze our own actions to see how we might be contributing to the very wrongs we’re fighting against.

And when I hung up the phone I realized that I’d been plagiarizing my rant from a little voice inside my head that had been trying for weeks or months to interrupt me with an urgent message from my conscience.

When I said it out loud, and then hung up the phone, I thought to myself: “Wait a minute, I actually believe that!” And that’s when I realized that it was time to start this experiment.

A friend writes…

Heh heh. Sounds like you’ve called my self-righteousness and raised me. The money bit is pretty obvious and up-front. It is positive, direct, measurable support. But that does beg the question: to overuse an overworked political metaphor, could I congratulate a German who lived through the Reich managing to avoid taxes the whole while but not in any more active way interfering with its activities?

I’ve stopped my active support of the government, but I could certainly be doing more to actively oppose it. As for education and propaganda, these Picket Line pages have a pathetically small readership given the amount of energy I put into them, but what I hope to accomplish is to leave a trail that folks can follow should they so choose.

I think I can see where you’re going with your line of argument, but you’re just sort of hinting at it. It sounds like what you’re saying is something like this: “If you’re going to live your live according to some sort of altruistic-like ethics, how can you go half-way? How is any inefficiency or luxury justifiable when the alternative would be to help to further your cause? And if your answer is that you’ve got your priorities and sometimes your personal luxuries take precedence, then would you please shut your pie hole and stop with your sermons about responsibility and ethics, because the rest of us have got our priorities too and we’re doing the best we can?”

I’d like to see you wrap your criticism up a little tighter and throw it at me again, ’cuz this sounds like an interesting nut to crack.

I think that I’m hoping to appeal less to a desire for moral purity, and more to just a reexamination of how you (or anyone else) is actually living in relation to the more nuanced and smudgy principles you (or anyone else) already operate under.

I’m not going for purity, myself. At least not in this project.

What I did instead was just to bring my life into sharper focus and realize that I wasn’t living it the way I wanted to. Specifically, I was giving a great deal of actual material support to an organization whose actions were abhorrent to me. , I gave a few hundred dollars to Amnesty International, a few to the EFF, a few to the Drug Policy Foundation. And I felt pretty happy about that. But it took me a long time to even acknowledge that I gave fifteen thousand dollars to the IRS .

I didn’t have to take a vow or pursue sainthood or anything like that, I just had to honestly come to grips about what I was doing with my life. Then I saw that it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with it, and I started doing something else.

Taxes are so cleverly hidden away — swiped from your paycheck before you even have time to miss ’em — so gradual and so ubiquitous, that it’s easy to pretend they’re not really aspects of your life so much as they are natural phenomena or something. But there’s a weird double-consciousness about them. Ask someone what their salary is, what they “make,” etc. They’ll almost always tell you their before-taxes salary.

They’re able to believe almost simultaneously that it’s their money, they can take credit for earning it, it belongs to them and it was never their money in the first place, they have no blame for where it goes or how its spent, and they don’t miss it.

I hope to help provoke people to reintegrate this double-consciousness, to feel wholly the actual facts of their situation. Then I hope to fight the temptation to hide from this by making explicit the various justifications people use to pretend the truth away. Then I hope to demonstrate

  1. that to the extent that you are paying taxes you are actively and positively and willfully supporting the government,
  2. that if you feel that the government is doing rotten you should consider withdrawing that support, and
  3. it’s not all that hard, see?

Here’s what I try to tell myself: “When you’re making a decision about something (say, whether to get a pitcher of beer down at Zeitgeist) — try to estimate the actual effects of your decision, as well as you are able, and without trying to sweep under the rug any of the facts about it. Then decide whether given the totality of that, what you actually want to do, and do it. Then, in your spare time, work on reducing as much as possible the convenient justifications and fact-hiding methods you use, educate yourself more about the way the world works, and become more honest with yourself about your actual ethical beliefs as opposed to the ideal ones you like to think you have but don’t actually practice with consistency because they don’t in fact match your desires.”

Usually these fact-hiding things come in two flavors:

One: A flaw in your reasoning or perceptual skills — there are a gazillion of these (optical illusions are a category). Marketers exploit ’em by the handful. Humans are full of cobbled-together reasoning methods and sensory kludges that are easy to exploit. You just gotta keep your skepticism up and keep testing out and examining your ideas. (The book Inevitable Illusions is a fun catalog of some of these flaws.)

Two: Self-dishonesty about motives and ethics and such. You believe that you’re motivated by X, yet you do an action Y that seems to contradict that motivation. Rather than honestly integrating the two, you lie to yourself about the nature of action Y to make it fit. The best cure for this is relentless self-criticism, which can be done painfully and involuntarily through a bad trip or some sort of life crisis, expensively and painstakingly slowly with psychotherapy, or steadily with practice and enough self-esteem to put up with how goddamned humbling it is.

Chances are you’re right now living roughly the life you want to be living. In the areas you perceive it to be in conflict with your ideals, you probably just plain don’t have those ideals, or you do have them but they’re superseded by other ones you don’t want to acknowledge as such. In some other areas, you’re probably hiding from facts you’re afraid are there because they either do conflict with your ideals in frightening ways, or they don’t conflict with your actual ideals but do conflict with the ideals you’d like to think you have and you’d rather not notice the contrast. Or not. But that’s one way I fool myself, anyway.

Hmmm… what would make me go back to being a government supporter? I don’t know. I think I’d know it if I saw it. I don’t much support government at all in the abstract, so it would come down to a cost/benefit sort of thing. If the government was harmless enough, even though it was stealing money from me and my friends, I might still throw taxes at it if that’s what it took to make enough money to do something cool enough to offset the uncool things the tax money was doing.

On the other hand, the government could force me to support it, either by literally putting me in irons with a whip at my back or by forcing me to pay taxes even on the first dollar I earn. I guess in the second case, there’d still be the option of trying to evade the gov’t in the underground economy or some such. But you see what I mean — at some point the gov’t can make not supporting it sufficiently painful that supporting it would become the better option.

So I could be brought back into the system either way, I suppose. Claire Wolfe said something like “we’re at an awkward point where it’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” But we’re also at a point where the state is too evil to actively support, but not so evil that support cannot be withheld.

Here’s another excerpt from Juanita Nelson’s account of her arrest that I found , too late, alas, to include it in ’s Picket Line:

Juanita Nelson’s account can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

It is, as far as I can see, an unpleasant fact that we cannot avoid decision-making. We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority. For we then have made the decision to do that — have concluded because of belief or of fear or of apathy that this is the thing which we should do or cannot avoid doing. And then we share in the consequences of any such action. Are we doing more than trying to hide our nakedness with a fig leaf when we take the view expressed by a friend who belonged to a fundamental religious sect? At the time he wore the uniform of the United States Marines. “I’m not helping to murder,” he said. “I’m carrying out the orders of my government, and the sin is not mine.” I could never tell whether there was a bitter smile playing around his lips or if he was quite earnest. It is a rationalization commonly held and defended. It is a comforting presumption, but it still appears to me that, while the seat of government is in Washington, the seat of conscience is in me. It cannot be voted out of office by one or a million others.

This harmonizes well with what I wrote back in when I started this experiment:

I’m responsible for the actions I choose — I cannot rent out my conscience to another person, army, government, corporation, majority or law-book. It’s not just unwise, given the history of the last century, but it is literally impossible. Each of my decisions is a decision I choose based on what I anticipate the consequences will be. I may take into account what the law says, or what the Bible says, or what the movie critic for the Chronicle says, but ultimately I’m the one making the choice. If I ignore my conscience, I’m committing a particularly dangerous form of suicide — choking off the guardian of my free will and leaving behind the sort of dangerous robot who’s spent the last hundred years swerving from cradle to grave building gulags and genetically engineering more evil forms of smallpox. Not for me.

It feels good to find a kindred spirit who has walked the road I’m on ahead of me.

A devil’s advocate psychoanalyzed me while I was away in Guatemala :

A few months back he found God, or his atheist non-existent equivalent. His emails to me began to change — at first I noticed the enthusiasm and purposefulness and figured he was just remembering how fun life can be if you’re not dragging a heavy desk job around on your back (he quit his job during his miracle conversion). But I also noticed a change of tone that seemed familiar but that I couldn’t quite place.

Then I realized… that he was acting born-again. It was not at all what I would have expected from the old cynic…

The obsession with questions of ethics (which he’d always seemed to dismiss as a dead-end street before); the cosmic portent he attributed to mundane choices in his wee, mortal, primate life; the way his words seemed to survey the field from a high altitude… everything was there except the wrathful thunder-voice from the clouds telling him what to do and the surrender to a mildewed literature of mythology and dogma.

Or so I hoped.… I’d tried to draw him out in email and get him to admit that he’d signed up for Landmark or gone in for that Buddhist stuff again or joined Narcotics Anonymous in the middle of a bad mushroom trip or found Jesus swimming in the bongwater. Nothing doing… he seemed to have been not on the 5-lane superhighway to Damascus when lightning struck, but going on his own uphill machete-chop through the jungle.

I think there’s a species of considered reflection and sober decision-making that has probably been respectfully suffixed with “complex” or “syndrome” in the hallowed journals of psychology. Fellows about his age suddenly become aware of themselves in a new way, discard their sophomoric philosophical dodges and amateur hedonisms, and then quickly hide under the big rock of some preformed dogmatic nonsense before things begin to get too scary.

It remains to be seen, I suppose, whether or not he will avoid that fate. But he seems pretty well-immunized. I guess this born-again mental process is independent after all from the dogma-vultures who feed on its victims.…

He’s kinda high on righteousness and rhetoric right now. He’s been reading Sartre on the French Resistance and you can tell he’s drawing parallels. He thinks he’s living in a country under occupation by vile aristocrats and their frightened toadies and, well, there’s not much to argue with in that interpretation except that it lends itself to extremes of melodrama and a certain urgency, if, that is, you’ve got a newfound concern for ethics or somesuch.

Well, it’s interesting to be put under the magnifying glass in this way. To the extent that open-ended observations like these need a response, the response should probably be centered on three questions that are raised: 1) Is my newfound interest in washing my hands of financial support of the government a symptom of a more general personal renaissance in the area of ethics? 2) Is this a stereotypical Seasons of a Man’s Life-style thing that I’m just embroidering with my own eccentricities (and therefore this blog is potentially as banal as the love poetry of the pubescent)? 3) Is it akin to a “born-again” religious conversion?

I’m tempted to start by making observations of my own, starting with the fact that all of this interesting examination might just be a fancy way of trying to evade question #4: But is he right? Amateur psychoanalysis can be a nice ad hominem way of trying to make an uncomfortable argument go away. (It can also be a way of getting further mileage out of the freak-show-like interest one can take in a kook with his bizarre manifestos and such — and if this is your motivation, I can sympathize with you, but forgive me if I don’t feel like indulging you.)

To questions #1–3 I may have to plead a reluctant “no contest.” I do feel like I have been taking questions of ethics a lot more seriously lately, and my decision to start this experiment is a symptom of that. Whether this is something that can be dismissed as a “syndrome,” as question #2 suggests, or if instead it is just an overdue maturing of my outlook is something you can decide for yourself.

As for the religious speculation, well, I guess in part it depends on your answer to #2. Religious answers to big questions aren’t really my style, I’ll tell you that much. I tend to see religious answers as ways of avoiding questions or wishing them away. That said, I’ll admit there’s more about this universe of ours that remains mysterious to me than there is that I’m pretty clear about, and there’s a lot of room in that mystery for stuff I’d be willing to adopt a worshipful attitude toward if any such thing shows its face to me, so I’m not going to write off the religious thing entirely.

And as I read about the history of tax resistance, civil disobedience, and such, and about people who stood up to governments bravely in ways I hope I’d be capable of — I’m finding that a lot of my role models and heroes have taken motivation and inspiration from religion. So I’m becoming a lot less hostile and dismissive of the religious outlook than I used to be. Religion for many people seems to be a way of avoiding questions of truth and responsibility, but for some people it’s a method for relentlessly confronting these same questions.

I’ve got a case of post-traumatic stress that dates back to the Holocaust, which is an odd thing to say considering that I’m a gentile who has lived in California since I was born, in . It has nothing to do with an accident in past life regression therapy (yes, there is such a thing here in California) or some sort of time-machine story. It happened this way:

I was a precocious reader — I was reading before kindergarten, and pretty well, too. Words I didn’t understand I approximated phonetically and tried to ask about or figure out from context. And I absorbed books by the bagful. I remember going door to door for the “MS Read-a-thon” asking people to pledge a certain number of cents for every book I read. Boy were they surprised. I feel kind of embarrassed in retrospect at extorting this money out of my neighbors with my child’s charm and their low expectations.

I made the local paper for that trick — there’s a picture of me lying on my belly on the carpet in front of the bookcase in our family room with my ankles dangling in the air over my butt, a big smile on my face (if memory serves, with two missing front teeth), and a copy of Charlotte’s Web in my hands.

Of course I wasn’t always able to understand or put into context what I was reading. I could read the newspaper, but the newspapers were full of Viet Nam and assassinations and Watergate, and grown-ups weren’t about to try to explain those things to a kid my age.

I read a book called Alan and Naomi — I was probably in kindergarten or first grade and I haven’t read it since, so forgive me if I mangle it a bit in summary. It takes place in New York around and the protagonist is Alan, a kid who is struggling to get the respect of his peers (among the universal struggles of human childhood and a good way for an author to make a protagonist sympathetic).

This crucial project is sidetracked when Alan’s mother introduces him to Naomi, the new kid on the block. Naomi is a refugee recently arrived from Europe, and she’s got genuine Holocaust post-trauma issues, not my second-hand metaphoric variety. She’s uncommunicative, withdrawn, prone to repetitive and senseless-seeming actions, and easily provoked into fits of terror without much warning.

Mom would like Alan to try to play with Naomi, to help her come out of her shell. Of course this is not on Alan’s agenda, but he agrees to help, first because Mom asks him to, then because he comes to see it as something worthwhile, and finally because he comes to know and care about Naomi herself.

There are crises of conscience when Alan’s relationship with the weird girl gets in the way of his hopes for peer acceptance, but he resolves these and muddles through. Slowly and steadily Naomi begins to come back from her nightmares to her refuge in New York.

But then something frightens her (I don’t remember what) and at the end of the book Naomi is back close to where she began.

I’m sure my memory has warped the plot a bit, and I’m sure I’m leaving important things out that at the time I didn’t understand or think relevant. This may be the first story I read that didn’t have a happy ending, which alone might explain why it made me uneasy. But it also made no bones about the Holocaust being a real historical event, and provided enough details that I knew there were monsters in the world that my teachers, my parents, and the muppets weren’t telling me about.

And for much of my life since then, I’ve felt like the Holocaust and the many other examples of institutionalized vast human cruelty have been the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room nobody wants to talk about. Not that it doesn’t get talked about at all — Hitler’s a big star on the History Channel and such — but that it doesn’t get talked about seriously and in the present tense, as an ongoing problem in crucial need for a solution. How do we, the human race, get ourselves so wound up and fucked up that we do these things to each other, and how do we keep ourselves from doing it again?

After my first young suspicions about the evil of psychotic human hives were awakened by the book Alan and Naomi, as I related in ’s entry, my initial reaction was not surprisingly unsophisticated.

I remember as a young child having trouble sleeping for weeks after reading in the newspaper about local squirrels that had been found to be infected with the plague or rabies or something. I’d seen squirrels, even fed them, patiently waiting for them to come take nuts out of my hands, and it terrified me that their seeming harmlessness had hidden a potentially fatal danger (that my parents had failed to protect me from and that I had only learned about in the paper). Being wee, I became frightened of malicious squirrels hiding under the bed or coming through the windows at night to attack me.

My fear of the Nazis was at first of a similar irrational bent — but more easily countered. The Nazis were on a scale between squirrels (which certainly existed, but which I was assured weren’t generally menacing) and wicked witches (which were undeniably malevolent, particularly toward children, but which didn’t actually exist) — the Nazis were real and evil, but no longer existed, and so I didn’t have to fear them.

And so I came to see the problem at first as something that was confined to the (to me) distant past, and that was essentially a battle between a group of evil people and a group of good people, and the good ones won, end of story.

One of my earliest attempts at creative writing was called “The Japs! They’ve Found Us!” and is part love-story, part action-adventure and centers around a tunnel escape from a Japanese P.O.W. camp. It was based almost entirely on the understanding of World War Two I had gleaned from my collection of Sgt. Rock comic books (which, comics though they were, did occasionally confront some ambiguities, ironies and tragedies of war that helped to break down my early naïveté, that is when they weren’t occasionally introducing super-robots or caped heroes in tights onto the battlefields of World War Two).

As I grew older, I came to understand that the evil I feared wasn’t an aggressive race of inhuman slant-eyes (nice to get our crudest bigotries out of the way early), or a strangely-mustached set of men in funny pants and jackboots from a country that existed in black-and-white. It started to dawn on me that the evil was still around, and that if it came to where I lived, there’s a good chance it would come speaking my language, handing out gold stars to good boys, and looking far more respectable and civilized than its victims. And I came to understand that I needed to learn how not to be one of the victimizers as much as I needed to learn how to keep from being one of the victims.

And literature helped nudge me along there, too, with books like The Chocolate War and Lord of the Flies feeding my thought experiments on human nature.

Recent history had given liberal adults a wariness and a respect for civil disobedience as well, and this had trickled down to me. The civil rights movement was largely responsible for this, although Deep Throat’s Watergate leaks and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers were also examples of individuals defying authority for (what my parents and many teachers certainly believed to be) good reasons.

When I was born, a delusional and aggressive lunatic was in the White House, the country was at war, and the state security apparatus was out-of-control and was being used to silence and intimidate critics of the country’s war policy. An unconventionally conservative adventure movie actor was California’s governor. People wrote op-ed pieces about America’s imperial ambitions — although in those days they usually meant this rhetorically, and they considered it a bad thing.

Today, some things have changed, but I’m still wrestling with Nazis and still using books to help me along — this week with Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Eichmann, as I discussed , went on trial in Jerusalem for Nazi crimes against humanity in after having been apprehended from his refuge in South America. Eichmann was one of the Reich’s experts on the “Jewish problem” and on the practicalities of implementing its solution. If you needed to get a bunch of Jews concentrated into a ghetto, Eichmann could help. If you then needed to get those Jews into freight cars and transported to Auschwitz and sorted out properly, he’d make sure you got the right number of cars and the tracks were clear.

He’s a monster of history, and after his capture and during his testimony he’s all the more infuriating because he’s so relentlessly oblivious. He doesn’t seem to have any grasp, except when he occasionally resorts to cliché, of the scale, or even of the sort of activity he was engaged in. He uses the “I was only following orders” excuse, but not in the form in which it might have made sense (if I didn’t follow orders, I’d be shot) but in a shameless exhibition of moral surrender (I followed orders because I felt that completely replacing my conscience with the Führer’s will was the best and safest thing I could do under the circumstances).

Arendt’s subtitle is “a report on the banality of evil” (by which she means this grotesque obliviousness — Eichmann didn’t seem to even care about the evil he was doing; if Hitler’s Final Solution had been to cover Poland with racquetball courts, he would have just as cheerfully taken part) — but it reads more like “Hannah Arendt, concurring in part and dissenting in part in The People of Israel v. Eichmann.” Not that the language is formal and tedious legalese — far from it — but that the tone resembles a legal opinion. She’s reporting on the trial, she insists, and so she’s interested in judging the case (and the judgment) against Eichmann, which she finds legally and logically flawed (the prosecutor comes off as a grandiose buffoon, the defense lawyer inept, the applied standards of justice incoherent, the judges honorable but prevented by pressure from outside the courtroom from making a clean and worthy decision).

But although in the epilogue she retreats from some criticism (before her book was published, it had appeared in The New Yorker, and even before that people were criticizing what she was rumored to have written) by saying that she meant only to comment on the trial itself and the evidence raised in the trial without addressing larger issues the trial might have suggested, this is disingenuous. Some of her conclusions are controversial and challenging and more far-reaching.

In the course of reviewing the evidence and the greater historical record it corresponds to, she explains the bureaucratic apparatus that accompanied the Final Solution — the overlapping and competing bureaucracies as it turns out — and how they accomplished their duties in different parts of Nazi-occupied and -allied Europe as the war ran its course and as Nazi policy about the “Jewish problem” changed.

One of the things she finds is that by and large, the Nazis expected more opposition to their plans than they encountered in the countries they occupied. They instead often found a country eager or at least willing to turn over its Jews and a Jewish leadership eager to accept ultimately empty promises and flimsy concessions in return for their cooperation.

Furthermore, where popular resistance was encountered it often was at least somewhat successful in discouraging the Nazis from carrying out mass exterminations. A case in point was Denmark, of which Arendt says:

One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.

It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do) — but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative areas had.

(“Students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action” can indeed learn from the story of occupied Denmark, as told in Gene Sharp’s books on nonviolent action and elsewhere.)

Arendt quotes a German Army physician who had witnessed some atrocities and who, after the war, tried to explain why it had been so difficult for him to oppose what he saw:

“Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.” Needless to add [Arendt adds], the writer remains unaware of the emptiness of his much emphasized “decency” in the absence of what he calls a “higher moral meaning.”

As Arendt points out, such protests were not necessarily “practically useless” at all:

[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Some time back I realized that I’d left the marked trail and was heading off the map. Some of the thoughts that most engaged me were ones I was only just learning how to articulate, and ones I was having a hard time finding precedents for.

When the thing that engages you has a name, a school, a history — you can call on that tradition to help you describe yourself and what you’re thinking about, and you have a ready-made shortcut for telling people what you’re up to. “I collect early 20th Century tobacco cards.” “I’m a zionist.” “I’m a fiscal conservative.” “I’m challenging traditional gender roles in television.” Whatever.

I’m having a hard time defining or even describing This Thing that’s engaging me these days. So I’ve been working overtime trying to find somebody who’s beat me to it so I can say, “I’m a So-and-soian” or “I believe in Such-and-suchism.” So far, no such luck. So today I’m going to ramble on for a bit about what sorts of thoughts are churning in my brain these days. Maybe you can come up with a name that encapsulates them — email me with your ideas!

It’s not that I’m a marvelously original thinker — there’s precedent for most of the elements of This Thing, just not the combination of them (or if there is, I haven’t found it yet). Some of the themes of my thinking lately:

  • The importance of getting your personal ethical ducks in a row, in order to strengthen your foundation, to test your principles against reality, to testify wholeheartedly for those principles, and to cast a vote with your whole conscience for the kind of world you want to live in.

In this I find some harmony with the existentialists, or with any number of philosophers who explained that to find out what you believe, how you act is a better demonstration than what you say. I also see parallels to Thoreau, when he said hopefully: “It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.”

And I’m encouraged by stories like the one told in Against All Odds from ’s Mother Jones magazine, which shows that appeals to conscience from dedicated individuals can occasionally be strong enough to conquer gargantuan institutionalized evil:

[P]icture the world as it existed in . Well over three-quarters of the people on earth are in bondage of one kind or another. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumber free people. African slaves are also scattered widely through much of the Islamic world. Slavery is routine in most of Africa itself. In India and other parts of Asia, some people are outright slaves, others in debt bondage that ties them to a particular landlord as harshly as any slave to a Southern plantation owner. In Russia the majority of the population are serfs. Nowhere is slavery more firmly rooted than in Britain’s overseas empire, where some half-million slaves are being systematically worked to an early death growing West Indian sugar. Caribbean slave-plantation fortunes underlie many a powerful dynasty.… One of the most prosperous sugar plantations on Barbados is owned by the Church of England. Furthermore, Britain’s ships dominate the slave trade, delivering tens of thousands of chained captives each year to French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies as well as to its own.

If you had proposed, in the London of , to change all of this, nine out of ten people would have laughed you off as a crackpot.… Looking back, however, what is even more surprising than slavery’s scope is how swiftly it died. By , slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere. Every American schoolchild learns about the Underground Railroad and the Emancipation Proclamation. But our self-centered textbooks often skip over the fact that in the superpower of the time slavery ended a full quarter-century earlier.…

[T]he British anti-slavery movement leaves us an extraordinary legacy. Every day activists use the tools it helped pioneer: consumer boycotts, newsletters, petitions, political posters and buttons, national campaigns with local committees, and much more. But far more important is the boldness of its vision. Look at the problems that confront the world today: global warming; the vast gap between rich and poor nations; the relentless spread of nuclear weapons; the poisoning of the earth’s soil, air, and water; the habit of war. To solve almost any one of these, a realist might say, is surely the work of centuries; to think otherwise is naive. But many a hardheaded realist could — and did — say exactly the same thing to those who first proposed to end slavery. After all, was it not in one form or another woven into the economy of most of the world? Had it not existed for millennia? Was it not older, even, than money and the written word? Surely anyone expecting to change all of that was a dreamer. But the realists turned out to be wrong. “Never doubt,” said Margaret Mead, “that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Another theme:

  • A skepticism of large-scale abstract ethical algorithms (utilitarian or Kantian for instance)

I’m not much up on ethical philosophy, but apparently there’s a new up-and-comer that’s trying to defend some territory of its own on the field where the Kantians and utilitarians have been battling it out. This newer ethics (it’s not really new — it actually predates both utilitarianism and Kantiansm but is now having a revival) goes by the name of “virtue ethics.”

In Kantian or utilitarian ethics, you are supposed to be a precise and astute person, who sizes up the situations you are confronted with and either a) puts them in categories that you can match with preselected, universal, rational principles so you can choose your best response accordingly, or b) calculates the results of different possible responses so as to pick the best one based on these predicted results.

In virtue ethics, the goal is not to be precise and astute and then to apply a guiding framework based on the data you retrieve. The goal instead is to be virtuous, to be a good person. You are encouraged to practice being virtuous, since it is a skill learned through practice and not simply the result of applied theory. When you are confronted with a situation where you need to make a choice, ask “what choice would a virtuous person make?” (For instance, “What Would Jesus Do?” if you’re a Christian).

I’ve taken some inspiration from the mythical Disumbrationist League:

If the theory of the Disumbrationists differs from other well-known forms of anarchism substantially it is in their advocacy of “nobility.” The knights-of-the-round-table language sometimes used in Disumbrationist propaganda has led some to smell therein a suspicious odor of monarchism. But this is not the nobility of the European courts, but more the nobility of Lord Buckley, who appropriated his title on the basis of being noble rather than inheriting it on the basis of his ancestry or acquiring it as a reward from political elites. Perhaps “honor” is a more appropriate word to describe what the Disumbrationists are getting at, but there is some deliberate effort on their part to play off of the ideas of romantic Arthurian knights, so “nobility” it is. The noble order here resembles less the royal court and more Jack Black’s “Johnson Family” — nobody joins the Johnson Family, and there’s no set of commandments to follow, but if you aim to do right by people, you’ll come to be known as “a Johnson.”

I’m a little discouraged at how fuzzy this sort of ethical guidance is, but I’m also pretty much convinced that fuzzy ethical guidance is about the best we can hope for. There’s no God to hand down commandments, and the best human attempts to make up for this absence have all been disappointing.

But more to the point, I think that a horror like the holocaust wasn’t caused because not enough people knew “Thou Shalt Not Kill” or because Kant wasn’t taught at the university (hell, even Eichmann called himself a Kantian). Which brings me to the next point:

  • I’m concerned about the willingness of people to pretend to abdicate their responsibility for their chosen actions for the most threadbare of reasons.

This has been what has had me digging through Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Glover, and Stanley Milgram’s experiment. It also brings me back around to existentialist philosophy, where these excuses for denying choice and agency are exposed as “bad faith.”

Here I found a kindred spirit in tax resister Juanita Nelson:

It is, as far as I can see, an unpleasant fact that we cannot avoid decision-making. We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority. For we then have made the decision to do that — have concluded because of belief or of fear or of apathy that this is the thing which we should do or cannot avoid doing. And then we share in the consequences of any such action.… [I]t still appears to me that, while the seat of government is in Washington, the seat of conscience is in me. It cannot be voted out of office by one or a million others.

Which leads me to reevaluate the nature of this “government.”

  • “The government” is a kind of a mythical creature, like “Zeus” or “Fate” or “the wheels of history.” It’s a piece of shorthand, a literary device, but not an actual agent in the world we live in. It’s also the “bad faith” excuse behind much of the worst parts of .

I’ve done a casual read-through of the literature about the theory of government, and about anarchism, and I’ve had a hard time finding anything that seems to look at it from this point of view. Closest thing I got, sad to say, was from the mouth of the character Bernardo de la Paz in Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He called himself a “rational anarchist:”

A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.

I hesitate to claim to be in a philosophical lineage founded by a character in a utopian science fiction novel, so I looked into a libertarian by the name of Robert LeFevre who was the real-life character Heinlein based his de la Paz on. Alas, I think I’m closer to the Moon’s crazy libertarian than the one that actually lived on Earth.

  • Because this “government” is really only the sum of the actions of the people who use it as an excuse, solving the problems of “government” means not to tilt at a windmill and call it “government” but to address people directly, as people.

This is humbling in its scope (there are a lot more people in the world than there are governments). It is also democratic in its spirit — not in the voting/elections sense of democratic, but in the sense of the power really residing in the people, not in some empowered minority or institution.

And maybe it’s just as quixotic as the alternative of setting your lance against the spinning arms of “government.” But the tale of the abolitionists I mentioned earlier gives me hope that through appeals to conscience and individual assertions of conscience people can change the world.

Dear Salmos—

That’s not a dumb question. That’s one of those advanced, extra credit, smart questions.

My ethical philosophy started where most people start: absorbing the ethical guidance from the people around me when I was a child, trying to systematize that advice into principles I could apply in a more general way, and looking to law, philosophy, or the God hypothesis to try to find some sort of concrete grounding behind these principles.

Most of these principles, and certainly most of the hypothetical foundations behind them, disintegrated from their own contradictions, absurdities, and unlikelihoods as I got older, and so eventually I became an ethical skeptic.

I didn’t think there was any way to objectively ground ethics, and I figured it was probably effectively a subset of aesthetics. And so I started to live a life freed from concern about transgressing phantom ethical boundaries — not even as an egoist, but something more haphazard and arbitrary.

Had I been of the mettle of a Nietzchean übermensch, I might have become a Nietzchean übermensch, or maybe a Randoid demi-hero, or quite possibly just a dick. As it was, I mostly became sophomoric and inconsiderate.

Somewhere along the line, I discovered that I’d misevaluated ethics as being something that must either be given a rigorous foundation in reason or must be discarded as a superstitious façade covering up or justifying social manipulation, personal prejudices, and cultural convention.

I realized that I was making ethical evaluations all the time, as much as I might pretend to believe that no such things were possible, and that these ethical evaluations were as real parts of my experience as, say, color. I couldn’t run away from them without going through grotesque internal distortions of reality (like trying to pretend that I didn’t see “blue” because I couldn’t find a rational foundation for color).

So I decided to bite the bullet and try to accept ethics rather than try to rationalize it away. So my “center” is an ethical “sixth sense” where I look at some situation and intuitively know “that’d be wrong” and steer away from it. Perhaps that means that ethics reduces to aesthetics after all.

Reason is a participant in my ethical evaluations, and in my evaluation of my ethics, but I don’t expect it to take the lead, and I don’t expect ethics to be derived from reason. There may be no reason to serve God and not the Devil at any particular moment. A lot of religion seems to be an attempt to invent reasons — God’s commandments, or divine judgment with punishment in the afterlife, for instance. But I’m kind of fond of imagining the existentialist atheist saying — ha! there’s no God, and no reason to serve God and not the Devil, but I’m going to serve God anyway! Wheeee!

It’s a performance I’m putting on for myself. Or a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book writ large.

Nothing matters, ultimately, except to the extent that we decide that it matters. No God will fill out a performance evaluation for me. I won’t be reincarnated as a prince or a lamprey. Our suffering and triumph means nothing in the greater scheme of things. Cruel and evil people prosper and then die old and satisfied in their sleep while innocent children have their arms ripped off by bombs and die of dysentery. Neither get redemptions from a heavenly accountant — from the perspective of eternity, their books are already balanced and their accounts are of no account. My bones will crumble to dust in no time at all, and my name will be forgotten as quickly. And I am going to try to be a good person anyway because that’s what I want to do with my life.

I tried to summarize Karl Jaspers’ The Question of German Guilt. One of his arguments was that, when it comes to questions of politics the choice of being aloof is not available to us. We are unable to look at the political mess around us and just say “I’m not going to participate and I take no responsibility for what happens in the name of my community or nation.”

As Jaspers put it:

Every human being is fated to be enmeshed in the power relations he lives by. This is the inevitable guilt of all, the guilt of human existence. It is counteracted by supporting the power that achieves what is right, the rights of man. Failure to collaborate in organizing power relations, in the struggle for power for the sake of serving the right, creates basic political guilt and moral guilt at the same time.*

In other words, we’re all doomed to have to take a stand of one sort or another. Attempts to stand aloof are really just evasions of this responsibility, and amount to acquiescence and acceptance of the current regime.

When I started my experiment in tax resistance, my goal was “to stop supporting the government personally — to wash my hands of it. I had a selfish desire to live my life according to my principles, and not a more overarching agenda of regime change or reform.” I felt that “a compelling case for the need to resist the government can be made. Now, finally, I have earned the right to weigh that case. Once I stop supporting the government, I can make the decision of whether to wash my hands of it or whether to actively oppose it.”

I was following Thoreau’s lead, here. He argued in Resistance to Civil Government that while a person might decide to take on the task of reforming society as a hobby or a calling, a person is not obligated to try to make the world a more just place, but is only obligated to make sure that he or she is not acting as an agent of injustice. For him, voluntarily paying taxes to the government stepped over this line, but his goal was not to overthrow the government, but “to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.”

Later on I came to have doubts about whether standing aloof and reclaiming one’s innocence is an option. I was debating someone who felt that as long as you take no fully voluntary steps to commit injustice, you are in the clear. Since paying taxes is not voluntary, you cannot be held responsible for what the government does with your taxes, and so you shouldn’t feel like you are obligated to inconvenience yourself in any way in order to avoid paying taxes.

I had a hard time answering this objection, though I gave it a good go. It just seems to me that the horror of a state like ours is too gargantuan to be just the work of those people with actual evil intentions and shameless direct culpability. It requires a nation of people working together. The American government rules because of the consent of the American people (not because it is a democracy, but because it like all governments ultimately relies on consent). The many ways, large and small, in which we manifest this consent serve to weave together the leviathan that enables murder and suffering on vast scales.

I incline toward the viewpoint that the libertarian ethical ideal of “initiate no aggressive act” is damn near impossible due to this complex web of complicity, and that people who believe that they can escape this by merely “intending” to initiate no aggressive acts are missing something important about intentions and actions. How does one cope with this fog of culpability and diffuse aggression, especially if it is impossible to actually stand aloof from it? Ball-and-stick models like “if you commit an aggressive act, you owe the victim appropriate restitution” fail under the load of this complexity.

There’s a utopian folklore in the libertarian tradition — sometimes called “Libertarian Zionism” — that envisions some promised land (or promised “gulch”) where the libertarian non-aggression principle is the only law. Some people hope to reach this place through magic, others through imagination, others by building an island in international waters, or even moving to New Hampshire.

William Williams just wanted a place to call his own, that’s all. He didn’t want anything from the government, and he didn’t care to give anything to it either. He bought himself some land and has steadfastly refused to hook up to any public utilities. He collects rainwater, uses a septic tank, has solar panels for electricity and uses propane, kerosene and wood for heating and cooking. He has no telephone.

He’s roughly the sort of person I imagine when I think of someone doing things Thoreau-style — deciding to cut off corrupt civil society and just go it alone. And in my daydreams of Thoreauvian aloofness, William Williams is visited by songbirds not bureaucrats, and it all ends happily ever after.

“I don’t bother anyone. Why should they bother me?” he said. He’s about as apart from the state as you can get… except that he’s been hauled into court again and again — for refusing to hook up to the local sewer system, for refusing to let Allegheny Power run a line through his property, for refusing to respond to court orders.

We seem to be stuck — the more energetically you try to get out of the government’s clutches, the more tightly it squeezes. If you decide to cooperate, even only to the extent that it demands at gunpoint, you become part of the web of complicity that makes the leviathan stronger. All the libertarian utopias and strategies of aloofness are chimerical. The only choice seems to be to plod ahead in the mud of this real world, choosing to side with the angels or the devils and making your decisions accordingly.

* I found a similar argument in Hannah Arendt’s essay on Civil Disobedience. It seems to me to suffer from the same problems found in the long line of myths inventing the consent of the governed from the Hobbes/Locke tradition of Western philosophy. These amount to hand-waving and just-so-story-telling, and to the extent that they are taken literally were well-refuted by, for instance, Lysander Spooner’s No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.

Still, there does seem to be something important in the ideas that, first, we are born into civilization and there is never any question of entering it or leaving it and so we must decide how we are going to coexist with it, and, second, that to the extent that we know we can dissent if we do not do so we are in some manner consenting.

Arendt wrote:

Every man is born as a member of a particular community and can survive only if he is welcomed and made at home within it. Some kind of consent is implied in every newly born’s factual situation, namely, some kind of conformity to the rules under which the great game of the world is played in the particular group into which he belongs by birth. We all live and survive by a kind of tacit consent, which however it would be difficult to call voluntary. How can we will what is there anyhow? We might call it voluntary, though, when the child happens to be born into a community in which dissent is also a legal and de facto possibility once it has grown into a man. Dissent implies consent and is the hallmark of free government; who knows that he may dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent.…

…Seen in this perspective, tacit consent is not a fiction; it is inherent in the human condition. This consensus universalis, however, does not cover consent to specific laws or specific policies, even if they are the result of majority decisions. It is often argued that the consent to the Constitution, the consensus universalis, implies also consent to statutory laws because in representative government the people helped to make them. This consent, I think, is indeed entirely fictitious; under present circumstances, at any rate, it has lost all plausibility.…

The growing respectability of torture in the United States and its coming legalization, among other things, have sent me back to Hannah Arendt to look for some recommendations for how to proceed.

She was a refugee from, and a student of, a time and place in which

…the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were supposed to be self-evident to every sane person either as a part of divine or of natural law.… without much notice… collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.

And she put a lot of effort into trying to understand how this happened, and what, if anything, we can do to interrupt it. I’ve lately been reading a collection of her writings called Responsibility and Judgment in which much of the material directly attacks this problem, and most of the rest at least touches on it.

The most and greatest evil, Arendt believes, is not done by wicked or evil people, but “by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good” — “by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

Such people, in times when the conventional morality that serves societies reasonably well most of the time goes through a polar shift in which the “thou shalt not”s become “thou shalt”s, go along to get along — having no habit of using anything but conventional morality as a guide.

This evil — “banal” evil as she famously put it — is committed, according to her theory, by people who do not think. This isn’t to say that these people are not intelligent, or cultured,1 or knowledgeable. “Thinking” has a particular meaning in Arendt’s framework: it is a process of internal dialog, one that is necessarily done in withdrawal from society and real-world concerns (that is, you can’t think at the same time you are working or conversing). This withdrawal she calls “solitude” but it is a solitude that you share with yourself in a peculiar duality that enables the dialog to take place: you split in two and converse with yourself.

Thinking is not a method for determining hard-and-fast eternal truths about good & evil, but is a process of doubting and testing. It is related to remembering, in that if you think over what you have done and try to fit it into your life story, this is one way of remembering it. In contrast, if you do not think, and therefore forget your own actions, you are capable of doing anything “just as my courage would be absolutely reckless if pain, for instance, were an experience immediately forgotten.” … “The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back.”

If you do not think, you are “rootless” — at the mercy of the winds that might blow you into some new, pathological moral convention. It’s not necessarily the case that having roots means that you’re wisely-rooted, but it does mean that you have a stake in your own personality and self-imposed limits on what you are capable of doing. Without these roots, you have no limits, you are capable of anything, and your own character is a matter of indifference to you. In short: you are dangerous.

Thinking, which is to say being in dialog with yourself, is what gives you this stake in your own character — it “results in conscience as its by-product.” You don’t want to be spending your time in dialog with a monster: “If I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy.” This is of such importance that, as Socrates put it, it is better to be wronged than to do wrong.2

Arendt admits that while this may sound like a nice aphorism, its opposite seems more plausible. But “while many prefer to do wrong for their own benefit rather than suffer wrong, no one will prefer to live together with a thief or a murderer or a liar. This is what people forget who praise the tyrant who has come into power through murder and fraud.”

But here this “living together with” metaphor seems to be stretched too far.

If conscience is a by-product of thinking, because thinking includes this need to live in harmony with ourselves — that is if we are not expected to have some sort of pre-existing moral yardstick available through reason or divine revelation or what have you — then why do I not want to live in harmony with a self who is a murderer or a thief? The reason why I do not want to live with a murderer, assuming I do not have a pre-existing moral yardstick by which I judge murder to be wrong, is because I’m afraid of being murdered; I don’t want to live with a thief because I don’t want to be robbed; and I don’t want to live with a liar because I do not want to be deceived. But you’re not going to rob or murder yourself, and if you lie to yourself you may believe with some justification that you are doing this to your own advantage. Why would you not want to live with yourself as a liar, thief, or murderer unless you already held these things in contempt, in which case the whole exercise of trying to determine who you would be willing to live with as a way of bootstrapping your moral judgment seems beside-the-point.

The living-with-a-liar thing seems to be the crucial part: if you live with a liar, you cannot trust the inner dialog with which, by thinking, you pursue the truth you presumably love. Perhaps if you love truth, and therefore do not lie to yourself, an abhorrence for murder and theft will necessarily follow.

I see another problem: if this need to live in harmony with yourself is so vitally important that you would rather suffer wrong than commit it, rather be murdered than murder, rather drink hemlock than go into dishonorable exile, and so forth, then it seems likely that this will override any but the most extreme love of truth. If you and the self you are in dialog with can achieve this crucial harmony by agreeing to a comfortable lie, and the alternative is to be in disharmony over an uncomfortable truth, what’s holding you back from embracing the lie?

This love of truth and this need to live in harmony with yourself also seem so rare to me that the question of how to encourage them seems no easier than the question we started with — how to discourage people from participating in bureaucratic massacre and the like. How do you encourage people to love truth or to strive for integrity?

For that matter, where did I get the crazy idea that it is wrong to torture someone? Is such a notion even really part of my character, or is it some custom that I have rootlessly blown up against and that I am vulnerable to being swept away from in a change of wind?

In truth, I am most repulsed by torture in the abstract and the less I know of the victims and perpetrators and of the perpetrators’ motives. As things get more specific, I can get frightened (if I imagine myself or those I love being tortured) or I can even take some delight in the thought (if I imagine, say, Attorney General Gonzalez getting some first-hand experience of some of the techniques he’s helped to provide legal cover for).

Maybe my expressions of moral revulsion around torture are a sort of gambit — an attempt at prompting reciprocal altruism. I make an explicit promise to eschew torture even when I may be indifferent or hostile to its victims in the hopes that this will encourage other people to behave the same way to me and those I love.

Doesn’t seem like this would make much headway. Pious incantations of the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative are easily made — enforcing reciprocal altruism requires a lot more, including being able to verify and observe and monitor those you’re reciprocating with.

So I’d have to believe that these incantations have some powerful persuasive force all their own, without an effective mechanism of enforcement. Perhaps I can claim to have the force of Reason on my side (lord knows, many a philosopher has tried), or, even more persuasively, the Word of God. Socrates himself made a nod in this direction, suggesting that the mass of people who do not think, and therefore cannot self-generate moral behavior, must be held in line by a myth of a final judgment and threats of eternal punishment.

Such things have been tried with at best limited success, but nobody with half a brain really believes them (though many profess them). We “are committed (it would seem) to think of conscience as an organ that will react without hope for rewards and without fear of punishment.”

Nietzsche would call this appeal to morality a gambit of the weak — if you think you can impose your preferences by force, you have no need to appeal to some universal standard of right and wrong, you just do your thing; on the other hand, if you are defenseless, big talk may be all you’ve got.

Moral behavior might, however, be a kind of demonstration of strength. In the same way that a bird with colorful feathers is advertising to potential mates that it has plenty of resources to waste on bright plumage (and so it must be one fit and clever bird) — a person who engages in moral living is announcing a cocky unconcern for the loss of whatever advantages come from being immoral or amoral. In contrast, for a person who really is in a position of weakness — someone whose children are starving, or someone addicted to drugs — morality is an expensive luxury.

Clarence Marsh Case, in The Social Psychology of Passive Resistance, points out that Franklin Henry Giddings had made this argument in his Democracy and Empire: “Not less are all the higher virtues — philanthropy, compassion, and forgiveness — manifestations of power… Moreover, it is only the men that have energy to spare who are normally altruistic. On the physiological side, altruism is a mode of expenditure of any surplus energy that has been left over from successful individual struggle. The meek shall inherit the earth, not because they are meek, but because, taking one generation with another, it is only the mighty that are or can be meek, and because the mighty — if normally evolved — are also by differentiation meek.” Giddings is here explicitly responding to Nietzsche.

―♇

But that’s all very speculative. Assuming morality and moral philosophy aren’t just some sort of fang-flashing, and if you aren’t buying the questionable moral foundations perennially discovered in Reason or God, what is there to keep you interested in ideas of right and wrong? What motive do you have to evaluate your own actions by this sort of standard?

I’ve toyed with the idea that in life we have one shot to be the sort of person we admire, and that this is motivation enough:

Nothing matters, ultimately, except to the extent that we decide that it matters. No God will fill out a performance evaluation for me. I won’t be reincarnated as a prince or a lamprey. Our suffering and triumph means nothing in the greater scheme of things. Cruel and evil people prosper and then die old and satisfied in their sleep while innocent children have their arms ripped off by bombs and die of dysentery. Neither get redemptions from a heavenly accountant — from the perspective of eternity, their books are already balanced and their accounts are of no account. My bones will crumble to dust in no time at all, and my name will be forgotten as quickly. And I am going to try to be a good person anyway because that’s what I want to do with my life.

But I still found myself relying on what I called “an ethical ‘sixth sense’ ” — this mysterious conscience. But of today’s villains, the torturers and terrorists and demagogues, who’s to say they don’t have their own sixth sense or that they aren’t enacting the character they admire? Arendt said that this “sixth sense” is misleading: “these feelings indicate conformity and nonconformity, they don’t indicate morality.”:

Conscience supposedly is a way of feeling beyond reason and argument and of knowing through sentiment what is right and wrong. What has been revealed beyond doubt, I think, is the fact that such feelings indeed exist, that people feel guilty or feel innocent, but that alas, these feelings are no reliable indications, are in fact no indications at all, of right and wrong.

But at some point I must feel that I wouldn’t want to live with myself if I were to do X, Y, or Z. Why wouldn’t I want to live with a torturer? Because I would feel guilty, I would be repulsed at myself, all of this because of this same unreliable ethical sixth sense. I also can’t help but feel that there are reasons why some things are right and others wrong that lie outside of me — it would be wrong for me to torture someone because of something to do with them, not just something to do with me. Could it really be that there is nothing more at stake in moral questions than my own opinion of myself?

  1. Though Arendt claims that among the Nazis, none of “these highly cultivated murderers… wrote a poem worth remembering or a piece of music worth listening to or painted a picture that anybody would care to hang on his walls… [because] no gifts will withstand the loss of integrity which you lose when you have lost this most common capacity for thought and remembrance.”
  2. Arendt believes this to be an entirely negative standard — that is it only tells you what you cannot do not what you should do. In other words, I cannot do X because I could not live with an X-doer. I don’t understand why you cannot just as easily think something like “I couldn’t live with someone who would neglect the opportunity to do Y or who would fail to do my Z obligation.”

A friend of mine shared a version of Bertrand Russell’s ten commandments on a social networking site. Inspired by that, and thinking that it could make for a useful exercise, I thought I’d try to come up with ten of my own. Instead, I came up with…

Ten things I think are probably true concerning ethics:

  1. Being good involves a number of interrelated skills (“virtues”) that are learnable and that most everyone can get better at with deliberate practice.
  2. Rules and maxims are poor substitutes for practice and habit when push comes to shove.
  3. Efforts to reduce ethics to one or a small handful of rules are perennially tempting and always wrong. Avoid the temptation to make ethics simple.
  4. That said, the intellectual exercise of elucidating the heuristics that roughly map to your ethical intuitions can be a helpful ethical yoga.
  5. Many people do not value their characters nearly enough. You’d be wise not to make that mistake. Aside from being a good idea in its own right, when you value your character you also find being virtuous inherently pleasant and attractive.
  6. You ought to beware when you step into a role (particularly a role in a hierarchy) that you believe permits or requires you to operate under a different ethical standard than normal or to suspend your judgment.
  7. It is okay to tell people when they do things that you think are dishonorable. It is okay to be intolerant of intolerable things. It is a good idea to be judgmental. It is also wise to be humbly aware of your fallibility.
  8. If you can learn to catch yourself lying to yourself you will have discovered a life-long and very rewarding hobby. Happy hunting!
  9. You are not a by-stander. You are involved. Doing nothing or sticking with the status quo is just as much of a moral choice as any other and you are just as responsible for having made it.
  10. You yourself have to be the one to care about it, value it, put it right, or make it matter — the universe isn’t going to do any of that for you and there never has been a God.

These are largely stolen from other people who said things that struck me as being true to my experience of the problem of figuring out how best to do this living thing. (For instance, Aristotle gets credit for #s 1, 2, and 5; Kwame Anthony Appiah, I think, convinced me of #3; Adam Smith and later experimental ethicists brought me around to #4; Hannah Arendt can have credit for #6, though she’s not alone, and some of #7 and #5 as well; the existentialists won me over to #s 9 & 10. I’ll claim #8 as my sole original contribution, though I’d be surprised if a bunch of people I haven’t come across yet didn’t really beat me to it.)