Moral neutrality...a preface to talk of evil.

In previous posts I have used the language of "moral neutrality," and a comment here is necessary on what I mean by that term. It ties in so fluidly with the classical definition of good and evil, that I thought I should explain the notion before ruminating on evil and whether it exists. Post modern thought, in succumbing to moral relativism, has failed to recognize evil, but I think we should question the idea that there is no moral evil. Indeed, we all recognize that there are crimes against justice; there is moral and even natural evil, but our shepherds have told us to shy away from such strong language because of our cultural (read Christian) perspective.

So what is moral neutrality? One of the greatest expositions of it was put forth by Montaigne in his famous essay "Of Cannibals." In a nutshell, this essay makes the claim that we only call things barbarism that are not familiar to our own cultural standards. So, when we accuse those who practice cannibalism from distant cultures of immorality, we are simply imposing our own cultural standards on a people that do not share those standards.  We must, and this is how the lie goes, accept differing cultural standards, even if they are in our perspective evil, simply because we make that judgment based on unfamiliarity with distant cultures.  If we saw it through the cannibals eyes, we would think it strange to not eat the bodies of our slain enemies.  It would be immoral not to do so. If you notice, though, there is a moral imperative behind the seemingly innocuous claim that we ought not judge cultures differing from our own.  We must not critique different cultures for being wrong, they are simply different.  In this line of thinking, it didn't take long for the truth silencers to silence those who accept that there is moral truth, simply by telling those who can see there is moral truth that they are "closed minded" for questioning differing cultures.  A very cute trick, and a nice, noble lie.

The gist of moral neutrality, then, is that we cannot exercise judgment on moral action because we are completely engrained in a perspective that may be false.  We have to stay out of the arena of judging action, because our cultural standards are simply that, self-made cultural standards without any objective morality behind them. (I'm hesitant to use the terminology "objective" as it brings in notions of categorical commands and Kant, which I think have no place in truly philosophical ethics.)

We can also see this moral neutrality at work in how our president refuses to use the terminology "terrorist" for Islamic radicals who are bent on killing innocents based on their "infidelity" to Islam.  "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," as the saying goes.  Whether or not a "terrorist" is a "freedom fighter" we would have to examine his specific actions and what he is fighting for. In the West, we judge them terrorists, and rightly so, as they specificially target innocent people and murder them in cold blood.  This is not the action of just war, or virtuous military action.  Terrorism is the right term.  Similarly, America acted as a "terrorist" with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. It is immoral to target innocent people.

So moral neutrality is a false perspectivism, which on one hand claims there is no moral truth, but on the other, commands that we follow the morality that says there is no moral truth.

Of course, as my previous post attests, there is perspective in moral inquiry, and it does play a role in how we see moral truth (when we start discussing virtue theory, we'll expound upon how perspective plays a role in moral action). At the same time, there are the precepts of the natural law, which allow for cultural differentiation, but at the same time give us a means to critique actually immoral action.  In short, perpective plays a role in how we see the world, and there are legitimate cultural differences that should not be called immoral simply because they are different, but there is moral truth.  That is, there is perspective in moral inquiry, but there is also moral truth.  We live in a culture that goes to one of the two extremes, either there is no moral truth and only perspective, or there is no perspective and only moral truth. Both of these are false extremes.  (The former view is represented by our elites, and leftist politicians, the latter by misguided Kantian Christians and right-wing politicians.)

The greatest lies always start with a hint of the truth.  Moral neutrality is Enlightenment liberalisms greatest lie.  So what does all this have to do with evil?  In short, moral neutrality gives us no grounds for calling anything evil.  Yet, when a tragedy happens like the one that occured in Newtown, Connecticut, we all step back, as a world community, and say, "that is evil." We are such sick creatures that it takes the murder of innocent children for us to recognize there is moral truth.  I wonder what our shepherd relativists in academia, or our president, would say if we pushed them on whether this was evil?  I would guess they would probably admit it was, although their own philosophy disallows them to make that statement. After all, if there is no moral truth, this disturbed young man was simply acting on some perpectival good (on a side, this is precisely where classical philosophers would recognize there is evil, a perspectival good being realized, but a good that is not actually good. In other words, evil only exists in and of the good, so this murderer beheld an apparent good in his actions, but it was not a real good. This is the essence of moral evil. More on this later). "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," hard to imagine moral neutralists would hold to their morally neutral principles in the face of real evil.

This only serves to show that we are a Nietzchean culture. We have heard the term "cafeteria Catholic" in commenting on Catholics who pick and choose which principles of the Church they will follow based on their own wills. Well, the West is made up of "cafeteria moralists" with no principled approach to issues they take stands on, but only personal preference. Self-justification of my own will.  In a Nietzchean world where there is no truth, we, like Obama, can just pick and choose what we call moral or immoral based on situations and our personal preference. Although, the very principles of moral neutrality serve as a critique of simply choosing to say some individual action is evil, our non-contradiction deniers will tie themselves up in contradiction and continue to be impossible to argue with.  And they will get away with it because as a culture we have stopped philosophizing.

So, coming away from this post, I'm hoping my readers will have a better understanding of moral neutrality. It is the lie that we cannot make judgments about moral activity because the claim is there is no moral truth.  Our human nature, stamped into our very being, of course, detests this, and we can't help but call the murder of children evil.  That simple statement beckons to the idea that, even if we pretend there is no moral truth along with our academic shepherds, we inherently know that there is.  Discovering it becomes our biggest problem. Luckily, classical philosophy, namely Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, have given us a roadmap.  We'll follow that map in the coming posts.  Stay tuned for the inquiry into evil.