Responsibility; Or Nothing At All

So I said I was going to address the phenomenological aspects of the current vaccine/mask crisis ("threatened" is probably the more apt verb in that sentence).  And I dug into my archives looking for where I'd mentioned Sarte's "Existentialism is a Humanism," the essay where he laid out his idea of ethics without a metaphysical source (i.e., God) to ground them in (which strikes me as funny now, since Aristotle kicked that ball into play in the first place without any reference to the gods at all).  What I found starts (if I can keep this in order and make new sense of it) with Wittgenstein:

And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it.

I can't drop a long quote like that into the discussion and expect it to be self-explanatory; so I'll quote my own explication of it from 16 years ago, when it seems my head was clearer.  But it's going to involve more Wittgenstien, so we're in danger of running in circles here:

The distinction here is a simple one: the distinction between words as used in a scientific discussion, and words as used in ordinary conversation. In this essay Wittgenstein distinguishes between "relative" and "absolute" usage. He gives the example of someone behaving badly and, when this is brought to their attention, the person says, "Yes, I know, but I won't change." Our response, he says, is not to say "Oh, that's all right, then." That's language used ethically, and in an absolute sense. But if you say I play piano badly, and I say yes, but I don't really want to play any better," you'd say "Oh, well, as you wish." The word "badly" is being used in a relative sense. But can language be used absolutely, across disciplines? And the clear meaning of the metaphors, is that an absolute in the presence of reality, would destroy all relatives. Which is, frankly, almost a Biblical view of the presence of God.

For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.' The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. For we see now that we have been using the word 'miracle' in a relative and an absolute sense. And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: lt is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt as to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don’t mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

I would draw ethics back from that brink, the one that wants to "say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable."  I would leave that, first, to morality; because I draw a distinction between ethics and morality.  Wittgenstein isn't doing that, here; but the distinction in my discussion is important.  I'm not incorporating Wittgenstein so he can do the heavy lifting for me.  I'm using him for context.  I'm using him to place this conversation in a context where we are discsussing, or at least touching on, the ineffable; but we are always talking about two different subjects, and only really talking about one of them.  Morality won't concern us here; only ethics will.  And the distinction is that morality may well have a foundation in what Sartre would consider "God," but there is no necessary connection between morality and ethics.  Morality may have a foundation in the transcendent; but ethics springs from Aristotle's basis:  the community.  I'm not quite as limited as Aristotle; I don't think ethics is the behavior of the happiest man in the community.  I think ethics is the assurance that everyone is treated well, and fairly.  Which is hardly enough of a definition to suit any purpose (and probably the reason Wittgenstein makes it so mystical it can have no definition; that's another discussion); but it's a starting point.

Don't worry; I'm not going to start there and then stop the discussion.  We're just getting started.  But before we start fully, let me drop this in:

For instance, I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop. Has this lessened my commitment to ending it? I do not find that to be the case at all. Does this lessen my ability to bring others around to sharing my desires, and hence diminish the prospects of ending animal agriculture? On the contrary, I find myself in a far better position than before to change minds – and, what is more important, hearts. For to argue that people who use animals for food and other purposes are doing something terribly wrong is hardly the way to win them over. That is more likely to elicit their defensive resistance. 

Instead I now focus on conveying information: about the state of affairs on factory farms and elsewhere, the environmental devastation that results and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered. It is also important to spread knowledge of alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet. If such efforts will not cause people to alter their eating and buying habits, support the passage of various laws and so forth, I don’t know what will. 

So nothing has changed, and everything has changed. For while my desires are the same, my manner of trying to implement them has altered radically. I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly. 

My outlook has therefore become more practical: I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized. This implies being an active citizen. But there is still plenty of room for the sorts of activities and engagements that characterize the life of a philosophical ethicist. For one thing, I retain my strong preference for honest dialectical dealings in a context of mutual respect. It’s just that I am no longer giving premises in moral arguments; rather, I am offering considerations to help us figure out what to do. I am not attempting to justify anything; I am trying to motivate informed and reflective choices.

Now, this muddies my premise, because with this we've substituted "morality" for "ethics."  Or it seems we have; actually, I'm trying to clarify the distinction, and this seems a good way to do it. What you have here, of course, is morality as a set of rules everyone must follow, else there is no morality. Joel Marks has gone from the error that morality can only come from a god (or "God," as he puts it, by which he seems to mean the God of Abraham; but he's so indiscriminate in his use of the term, and apparently so unlettered in philosophy of religion or theology, I will not presume for him what he doesn't seem to understand) to the error that morality is all about imposing your will on others. A universal standard is, for him, not a universal standard unless everyone actually follows it. Unless everyone, in other words, does as Joel Mark does, there is no common morality and no single source for it. But the moral imperative (or perhaps the categorical one, since he doesn't seem to have abandoned his deontological ethics*), is still the same: everyone must act as I do, or must be persuaded to act as I would.   This is what remains unchanging in his analysis:  "I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized."  And there his problems begin.

Because, frankly, what's moral about that? It's the cartoon morality of Puritanism; it's Pecksniffian in the extreme. Even Sartre understood that if there is no common source for what is right and wrong, then the choice made by the individual is a terrible burden which is the price we pay for being Godless. Marks thinks we pay no price and have only the burden of persuading others to think as we do so they won't, ultimately, be immoral. He tries to hide the ball on that, but clearly his morality impels him to persuade you to believe as he does and if you won't, well, you can't say he didn't try to make you see the light. Oh, you aren't condemned; but you aren't right, either. He is; even if he can't convince you that he is. 

What morality is this? It asks nothing of me except I do what I like, and demands nothing of me except I persuade you to do as I like, too. And if that fails, well, I'm alright with that, too. No, we can't go down that road; but we can see the problem of establishing a morality for others.  We'll touch on that again, with Niebuhr's analysis of moral man [sic] and immoral society.  But for now, the problems of morality are not the problems of ethics. 

You can follow the link to finish my musings on this particular take from back in the day.  I use this much of what I wrote then to clarify the distinction between ethics and morality, and to point out that what I consider moral, is not something I can impose on you.  The distinction is over the state power to regulate, or even outlaw, abortion, v. the state power to mandate you wear a mask or allow the injection of a vaccine.  As I've noted repeatedly, we demand that of children, for whom we allow little or not agency.  We consider it protecting minors from mistakes they can't possible imagine the consequences of.  We no more let a minor be a party to a contract than we allow them to make their own health decisions.  Adults, we conclude, are different; but the difference runs into the needs of society, which is where we get to public health issues,  And the issue then is one of ethics, not necessarily one of morality.

Is it ethical, for example, to smoke in public places?  We decided it wasn't because of public health issues.  We could have said it was a simple matter of aesthetics:  rooms not filled with smoke are much more pleasant to be in, it turns out.  I speak as one who grew up with a father who smoked like a chimney.  I remember the haze of his smoke (pipe, cigarette) hovering almost at my nose level when I was growing up, especially in the den where he'd sit and smoke and watch TV.  I remember the smell of burning tobacco permeating everything. I only really noticed it years after, by its absence. I thought nothing of it as a child, though I grew up with respiratory problems that have only abated in late adulthood.  For most of my life I literally couldn't smell anything.  I wonder now how much of that was just reactive to the ubiqitous smoke.  

Don't misunderstand me.  My father was a dear and compassionate man.  Had he thought for one minue the smoke was endangering my health, he'd have avoided it around me.  But it was a public health issue all the same, and we finally banned smoking from public places altogether, because we finally understood that.  The problem now is:  covid is killing us much faster and more directly than lung cancer and heart disease, especially for second-hand smokers or just your humble host (whose lungs are fine, thanks for asking).  But we treat it like we used to treat smoking:  it's entirely the choice of the smoker, when it isn't, at all.

Alcoholism doesn't affect just the alcoholic.  Drug addicts have families, too.  Even violent criminals have people who care about them.  No man, as Donne pointed out, is an island.  What makes us think we are all islands, now?

I think the fundamental issue is responsibility.  "Religion is responsibility," Jacques Derrida wrote, "or it is nothing at all."  It's one reason religion is in decline in America, and isn't even being replaced by hucksters and "gospel of wealth" peddlers.  It's not because Christianity was making everybody feel miserably responsible for their sins and the sins of their friends and family and children and the world; it's because religion demands a response, and that response makes you:  responsible.  And that seems to be something we cannot bear; well, that some of us cannot bear.  The other issue, also limned by Derrida, is death.  It comes in his question:  "My death; is it possible?"  It's a profound question, but most people can't get past the issue of their own death to consider it.  And the issue of their own death is:  there is no issue.  They won't contemplate their own death, won't consider it for a moment. If they die, they say, this is how they want their funeral conducted.  Which, of course, they won't be around for, but that's because:  "My death, is it possible?"  And usually the true answer is: "No."  So they reject concerns about infectious disease, insist even that death is preferable to....well, injection.  Injection is imaginable; death is just a word, especially when preceded by "my".

On MSNBC the other day the reporter was at a hospital full of covid patients, none of them vaccinated.  Many wished they had been, or could be now, but one woman told the reporters she'd rather die than be vaccinated.  That is a woman who cannot imagine her own death as a possibility.  Her statement is that of an irresponsible child, refusing responsibility even for her own life.  She cannot consider that she might well die, and that death will be permanent, will be an end, will mean the living going on without her; it will mean her personal end.  Only a petulant child would say, in face of death, "I'd rather die than be safe!"

And what of all the people who waited too long, and now regret their prevarication?  One way or another, they disavowed responsiblity for their lives.  They have excuses, reasons, explanations:  but it all comes down to a failure of responsibility, for themselves and others.  It's clear now that if more people had bothered to get vaccinated, out of a sense of responsibility to themselves if not to others, the delta variant would not be ravaging our country.

This notion doesn't need a god behind it, a superior power from which the rules flow.  (Again  I speak only of ethics, of behavior acceptable in a given society.) Indeed, the people refusing the vaccine or any measures to check the spread of the delta variant insist the god of freedom is on their side, and they are its devoted acolytes.  And freedom means the liberty to do as they please, without interference or orders to the contrary of their desires.  But even on that analysis, that they are free independent individuals, which in philsophical circles we call "existentialism," runs afoul of the fact there is still a "public" in "public health."  Their idea of freedom as irresponsibility runs up against Sartre's analysis, which while I don't adopt it as my own, is still a penetrating one.  

Sartre's ethic arising from the rejection of God is easily explained, as he did himself in a lecture. If there is no God, explained Sartre, no ethical system sustained by an outside authority to which humanity must conform, then it is indeed every individual for herself. But far from being liberating, that realization is even more burdensome: because now your choice, is the choice for all humankind. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a two-way street. By choosing for ourselves how we will treat others, we choose who those others are. We are responsible, in other words, for the entirety of humanity, because ethics is the concern of living a human life among other human beings. When we choose how that life is to be lived, we choose for all human beings what they are, who they are, and how they, too, should live. It is the very opposite of selfishness: it is responsibility, wholly and completely. When we choose, we choose for all humankind. We must choose very carefully, then; but we have no choice except to choose.

When mask protestors in Tennessee choose for their children, they choose for everyone else's children, too.  Which explains their anger:  they don't want to accept the responsibility, but how do they get away from that burden without blaming someone else?  And so some of the angriest leave the building telling doctors who testified for masks "We'll find you!" They don't want the burden of responsiblity for other people's children, but Sartre's analysis is inescapable:  when you choose for yourself, you choose for everyone else.  If everyone else is as selfish and self-centered as you, the only response is to be angry with them for their selfishness and lack of consideration.  But if people are fundamentally fair, compassionate, and considerate, then why would you be angry?

Wittgenstein is right: the very concept of ethics is explosive, burdensome, all encompassing.  It does not burden us with glorious purpose but with terrible responsibility.  Small wonder then that, as Americans resolutely hold to their adolescence, their insistence that "my freedom" is all that matters, and "my freedom" gives me absolute liberty to do what I want (or, in the case of Mike Lindell, to say what I want), and my "parental rights" trump your concern for your child (who was going to refuse the polio vaccine on such vacuous and selfish grounds?), that we find ourselves here.  But as Sartre's analysis points out (his ethics don't have to be ours to prove his analysis of the burden of being social creatures and individuals (thanks to Romanticism) to be a tension indeed), we can't escape the responsibility of how we define the other, even as we refuse to give the other any portion of the humanity we insist on for ourselves.  Niebuhr discussed this in terms of moral man and immoral society.  Society must look out for the interests of the whole, and so cannot be moral when morality requires sacrifice (as it always does, if only the sacrifice of my self-interest).  It's a simple equation:  I may think my children are poisoned by snake DNA, and that the moral thing to do is to kill them.  But I clearly don't get to impose my morality on my children (even if I can impose upon them my, say, ultra-orthodox Judaism, or a fanatically fundamentalist form of Christianity).  Still, my personal ethic does not allow me the freedom to expose you to contagion:  society must act to protect itself.  That's the basic concept of public health.  If you can't see it from Sartre's point of the responsibility of one for all (a great burden indeed), you should be able to see it from society's interest in protecting the members of that society.  That view, of course, impinges on "individual rights" or "liberty" or "freedom."

Which is where Wittgenstein's one true book on Ethics destroys all the knowledge in the world.  Or seems to, anyway.  Wittgenstein's ideas don't apply directly here, but more tangentially, maybe even referentially.  The emotions being stirred by this debate are fear; and that fear has two taproots, both of which Wittgenstein's insight exposes for us.  One is the fear of responsibility, the refusal to be responsible for everyone, or even for anyone (including ourselves. "I'd rather die than...." is the ultimate abdication of sense and responsibility.).  The second root is fear of the explosion of one's ethic of selfishness, the ethic of adolescence:  if that "true book" of Wittgenstein's can even be allowed to exist, then the adolescents' ideas explode because no true ethic can allow their ethic to stand; can even make their ethic possible.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't, they react the way children always do when they see no way out except the way of their parents:  they acquiesce, or they throw a tantrum.

The nation's problem now, the problem the people in the states have, is that some elected politicians are encouraging those tantrums.  And as we are still learning after four years of a toddler in the White House, elections do have consequences, and especially in the case of elected officials, what they decide is decided for us all: resolutely and concretely.  We have to reflect on our personal ethics, our own sense of morality (the two are not coterminous), and consider more carefully what is in the public interest.  Because relying on "enlightened self-interest" has led us into this blind alley, where the only way out is to turn around and go back to where we started down this path, and take a different one.  That different one will undoubtedly require a morality, a more encompassing understanding of the common good that isn't based on "enlightened self-interest" and "economic man [sic]" and the virtues of the "invisible hand."  Which is to say, philosophically, that utilitarianism as an ethical system (that's how it started, along with economics) is an oxymoron. 

Time we faced up to that, too.

*I would, had we world enough and time, argue that morality does come from God, but that doesn't mean it must be imposed upon the world in order to make us all line up and sit up straight at the table.  That gets us into the power of powerlessness, which is indeed another discussion altogether.