Redeeming Value

The elections in the States are mostly decided, now, with Patty Murray having locked up Washington and clearing up some of that unsettling picture: we have, as a nation, shifted the balance of (especially financial) power in government to a party which seems to have no platform. I do know what their platform isn't, but a lot of stuff isn't. Like Louis C.K. would advise, "Some things are, and some things are not. Because you can't have 'everything is'--then, nothing wouldn't be. You'd have giant ants in top hats, tap dancing, all sort of crazy shit." And as a result of what we now don't know anything about, I have discovered something.

First, what we do know. Most clearly, we do know that we have elected three new congressmen who are categorically opposed to abortion, and one in particular from Kentucky, who is against it even in the case of the mother's life being compromised. I don't agree with it, not least of all because it's logically inconsistent--if you're for small government and for government charge over women's right to choose, your brain is either non-functioning, or you just don't like women very much, or you're religious, which fervently compels you to both. And speaking of inconsistency--and incompleteness, while we're at it--we know that there is a huge groundswell--a thing whose type I quite like--which has an aim that I very much do not, to the point of being scared of it. This is one of the principle points I am planning to come to in a later post, concerning the Contract from America. One pervasive theme that seems to exist in a lot of the rhetoric I read or see indicates that we, as a nation, are falling away from both deontological ethics and empirically-based utilitarian ethics, and we are starting to embrace a virtue-based system of ethics. By no means is this switch embodied by one part and not by another; nearly everyone with a microphone or under a spotlight seems to be guilty of this, and the only variance is the degree to which those ethics are supportable a priori or, which is more convincing in government, by way of precious evidence. This is deeply concerning to me; virtue ethics are a turret whose gunman does not require training to operate it.

When you embrace the fundamental truth of virtue ethics, that intrinsic and instrumental value are relative and individually determined, you necessarily trust everyone to make his or her own judgements about the common good and about the production of happiness against a rubric that you admit does not exist. In other words, you could equally defend selfishness and charity, and you can do either one as often and as vibrantly as you feel is appropriate. The kickback, and really the only check against being inconsistent or heinous, is that people eventually just stop hanging out with you, if you are horrible. But what if everyone behaves this way? Where is the check? And how can you tell who is more horrible, if that is all you are used to; or you are given a choice between equally vapid, detrimental options; or you are too ignorant to know the difference between horrible and nourishing? If you refuse to outline a cogent and consistent moral outline, as with deontology, then you lose even an attempt at rigidity or predictability. If you refuse utilitarianism, you admit that past evidence is not sufficient to persuade you that some action or attitude or stance is, or can be, more likely to cause happiness in people than another. And, having shrugged off those two structures, you embrace the whirlwind of relativism which has snapped up virtue ethics, and which can drop that system on its head, in a field a thousand miles away from where it was standing seconds earlier. All the systems have their flaws, and I have written a handful of papers on these; but I don't understand why, when the consequences of the decisions made by our politicians routinely govern our air, our bodies, our privacy, and our futures, we would so quickly abandon the idea that predictability is precious. It seems that we would rather vote for who we think a person is, and we want to leave behind what a person does and why a person chooses what he does.

I am confused by almost every politician who exists, because it seems as though they are either bad at thinking, bad at empathizing, or bad at feeling shame. To be worse is to be all three, and therefore to be the vast majority of suited grinners who we would see in newspapers, if we read them enough to know that you are doing us a disservice even by shaking our hands. I am confused by the people who are allowed to vote in our country, because of exit poll data and because of quotes in media. I am confused by priorities inculcated by most adults, in most states of the union, most of the time. I feel as if my future, or at least my satisfaction with it--my sense of confidence--is standing in front of a pillbox, and I am already looking down at my chest, touching the tear in my scorching jacket, knees weak and teetering, breathing smoke.