THE MORALITY DILEMMA
Beware those who presume they have all the answers
If our response to any moral issue is consistently strident or out of proportion, UBC’s Paul Russell says it trivializes every moral issue. We don’t learn to distinguish which problems are significant. Douglas Todd There is no general right to never be offended … Being made to feel uncomfortable is an essential part of being part of a serious and open ethical community.
PAUL RUSSELL, U BC philosophy professor
“Hello, Mr. Ethics.” I cringe whenever I’m greeted this way, even though I’ve learned such quasi-humorous remarks come with the territory when you make ethics part of your beat.
I suspect similar teasing is aimed at clergy, professors of moral philosophy, high school principals, ombudsmen and even university officials responsible for diversity and inclusion.
My first reaction when someone introduces me as Mr. Ethics is to make fun of myself. Half-jokingly, I might blurt out something like: “I don’t really have ethics. I just write about them.”
I’m sure Aristotle, Jesus or Buddha would have come up with a smarter retort, but it’s my feeble attempt to lower expectations — because there are few things worse than being stereotyped as a person who thinks they’re morally pure.
In freedom-loving North America, most people are wary of those who presume to have all the moral answers.
But that doesn’t mean such people have become extinct, even if Joseph McCarthy, Jerry Falwell or Mao Zedong are long gone. The morally vain are always appearing in new forms.
How many times a week do we experience a media commentator, environmentalist, anti-racist, religious leader, community activist or self-declaredly patriotic politician raging with moral righteousness?
Whether the subject is abortion, sexual orientation, assisted suicide, gender, taxes, climate change or racism, a lot of us can still become, as they say, preachy.
UBC philosophy professor Paul Russell generally welcomes it when his students and the public take ethics seriously.
It’s better than being oblivious to right and wrong and adopting a “flimsy relativism, with no secure standards,” he says.
But Russell is also acutely aware of the downsides when people become obsessed with being ethically rigorous.
Russell grew up in Scotland in a strict Plymouth Brethren church where, he says, it seemed everyone was trying to appear “more pure and pious than the next person.”
As a result, he has no time for religious leaders who act as if God is firmly on their side — whether they’re a Sunday morning televangelist or a fanatical follower of Islamic State.
But Russell, who recently received a $12-million grant from the Swedish Research Council to lead a global study into ethical responsibility, is also aware secular people are just as prone as the religious to moral zealousness.
MORALITY AS A COVER FOR SELF-INTEREST
How can a sense of morality be abused?
The worst way is when moral rigorousness becomes a pretence for self-interest.
It’s happened through history: Kings, queens, popes, mullahs and demagogues are among those who have consolidated power by acting as if they are more virtuous than supposedly evil opponents.
Morality is corrupted when it “masks cruel and vain motivations,” Russell says, “when it’s used as a weapon to beat others down, or to secure a position of power and influence to control others or acquire social and material benefits.” In these cases, morality becomes hypocritical and fraudulent.
Abusing morality for personal gain often occurs in authoritarian institutions, says Russell, a specialist on the 18th-century Edinburgh philosopher David Hume. Ambitious officials, for instance, have climbed up the Soviet or Chinese communist systems by acting as if they were the most ideologically pure in regard to the class struggle.
Different forms of moral one-upmanship occur in democratic capitalist societies.
Politicians, academics, business people and civil servants can advance their careers by claiming, sometimes inaccurately, that the system morally discriminates against them, perhaps because they are women, men or members of a certain religious or ethnic group.
U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump has found his own way to take advantage of such identity politics. Wrapping himself in the flag, he’s won support from Americans who feel marginalized by what they consider preferential treatment for minorities, including Muslims and undocumented Hispanic migrants.
When moral posturing isn’t being misused for personal advancement, Russell says it can also take the form of oldfashioned dogmatism.
Liberals and conservatives can act morally virtuous to give themselves the “unearned confidence” that they know better, he says. Regardless of whether they’re Conservatives or Greens, Presbyterians or Sikhs, antiabortion or women’s activists, people can gain a sense of belonging and identity from believing they are part of a superior group.
Credit goes to the new Pope, Francis, for maintaining this is no way to prove you’re a good Christian or a good person.
In 2014, Francis urged Roman Catholics to get over their “obsession” with homosexuality, divorce and abortion. He called on them to bring a “new balance” to the moral issues of the day, which he said should include not only sexual topics, but economic justice.
WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO NEVER BE OFFENDED
In a relatively democratic and diverse society like Canada, we always need to temper a belief in absolute morality so we can tolerate people who have different values.
That doesn’t mean anything goes. We can still have provisional opinions, for instance, about where right and wrong reside in the high-profile sexual assault case against former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi, in which he was found not guilty.
But tolerance does require that, regardless of beliefs we may hold about sexuality, aggression, God or racial identity, we don’t have a right to silence other people because they dare disagree with us.
“There is no general right to never be offended, or never be challenged or questioned by opposing views and values,” Russell says. “Being made to feel uncomfortable is an essential part of being part of a serious and open ethical community.”
With Christianity weakening in the West, public intellectuals such as psychologist Jonathan Haidt have become increasingly concerned about how oppressive holier-thanthou attitudes have transferred to secular campuses.
Even Barack Obama agreed last year with an article Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote for The Atlantic titled The Coddling of the American Mind. The authors argued that over-protected, mostly liberal students were acting as if they were “too sensitive” to be exposed to alternative views on gender, sexual behaviour or race.
It’s dangerous, Russell says, to revert to quick moral outrage over every minor infraction or supposed ethical failing. If our response to any moral issue is consistently strident or out of proportion, Russell says it trivializes every moral issue. We don’t learn to distinguish which problems are significant.
Russell is not the only one who would like to see students, the public and scholars become a bit more like Europeans — more critical and less timid about publicly raising questions over hot-button issues such as immigration, refugees, gender or radical Islam.
Respectful and balanced debate is supposed to be the basis of an open society. To that end, Russell reminds people like me to not get too upset even about the state of free expression and debate in North America. Maybe it’s not as dismal as some of us think.
After all, even though conservative doctrine or political correctness can be stifling on this continent, it’s easier to live with than the crackdowns that occur in oppressive regions of the Middle East, Africa or East Asia. In some countries, if you dare speak out, Russell says “you can’t go to sleep at night without worrying about your family’s safety.”
Compared to the savage ways that the Islamic State or North Korea’s leaders impose their supposed superiority on others, we can remind ourselves most North Americans are still moral pussycats.