{"id":6177,"date":"2021-07-24T14:16:38","date_gmt":"2021-07-24T19:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=6177"},"modified":"2021-07-24T14:16:38","modified_gmt":"2021-07-24T19:16:38","slug":"ethics-whimsy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2021\/07\/24\/morality\/ethics-whimsy\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethics Whimsy"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are many unflattering but appropriate adjectives that describe the current state of our culture. In perusing the pages of the latest issue of Ethics <\/em>journal,<\/a> it struck me that one of the better ones is \u201cabsurd.\u201d According to a page entitled, \u201cInformation for Contributors,\u201d<\/p>\n

Ethics publishes both theory and the application of theory to contemporary moral issues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, Darwin supplied us with what is by far the most significant and salient theory as far as moral issues are concerned. He pointed out that morality is a manifestation of the same evolutionary process that accounts for the rest of our mental and physical characteristics. In doing so, he reduced all the tomes of moral philosophy, whether written before or since, that don\u2019t take that fact into account, to intellectual curiosities. Most of the articles one finds in Ethics <\/em>refer to Darwin, if at all, as an afterthought. That is not the least of its absurdities. Indeed, assuming our species ever achieves what might be referred to as sanity without a smirk, future cultural anthropologists may find its content amusing, albeit somewhat pathetic.<\/p>\n

Consider, for example, the first article in the latest Ethics<\/em>, entitled Oppressive Double Binds, <\/em>by Sukaina Hirji. The article addresses the vicissitudes of those who deem themselves oppressed as they deal with \u201cdouble binds that exist in virtue of oppression.\u201d The author cites as a typical example,<\/p>\n

\u2026an untenured professor and the only woman and person of color among the faculty in a philosophy department.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We are informed that such oppressed individuals face inordinate demands on their time from similarly oppressed students who demand mentorship and emotional support. However, time devoted in this way is \u201cemotionally draining and takes significant time away from your own research. You feel trapped.\u201d The author comes up with several similar instances of the \u201coppressive double binds\u201d faced by such oppressed classes as \u201ctrans women and queer femmes.\u201d These, we are assured, \u201c\u2026are a powerful and pervasive mechanism of oppression,\u201d forcing these unfortunates to \u201cbecome a mechanism in their own oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the reader is no doubt aware, trans women are currently a particularly fashionable instance of an \u201coppressed\u201d group. The author singles them out for particular attention accordingly, noting for example,<\/p>\n

For a trans woman to be read as a woman at all in certain communities, she will need to present in an overtly feminine-coded way. However, given the stereotypes about trans women as artificial or constructed, an overtly femme presentation risks being dismissed as \u201ctrying too hard\u201d or as \u201cinauthentic.\u201d If a trans woman does not present in an overtly feminine-coded way, her presentation is explained by her not being a \u201creal\u201d woman. In this sort of case, part of what is going on is the intersection of an oppressive norm faced by women in general and an oppressive norm faced by trans women in particular.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given the many genuine instances of oppression that have occurred within living memory in this century and the last, involving the torture and death of millions, it strikes me personally as obscene to even refer to such trivial stuff as \u201coppression.\u201d That becomes doubly true in view of the fact that trans women and the other \u201coppressed classes\u201d referred to by the author have virtually absolute control over the cultural and political agenda in the U.S. and other modern \u201cliberal democracies.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to oppression, if the author cares to experience something closer to the real thing, I suggest she submit an article to Ethics<\/em> denouncing the unfairness to biological females of allowing trans women to participate in women\u2019s sports. She will quickly find that she is no longer on the tenure track, and her future chances of having articles published in Ethics<\/em> and similar academic journals have become vanishingly small. There will be some compensation, of course, in view of the fact that other \u201coppressed\u201d people will no longer rely on her for mentoring and emotional support. Should she care to enlighten herself about who are actually the oppressed and who the oppressors today when it comes to trans women, I suggest she read the accounts linked here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a> of people who have been fired, suspended, or cancelled for daring to question the prevailing orthodoxy. They are hardly the only examples.<\/p>\n

Anyone seeking even a hint of originality in the remainder of the journal about the nature of human morality, or the reasons for its existence, will do so in vain. According to the abstract of another article,<\/p>\n

Nietzsche famously discusses a psychological condition he calls resentiment<\/em>, a condition involving toxic, vengeful anger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As an instance of this resentiment<\/em>, he cites the CNN version of a recent historical event:<\/p>\n

\u2026self-styled \u201cwhite nationalists\u201d marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting variously \u201cyou will not replace us\u201d and \u201cJews will not replace us\u201d \u2013 the background perception being that other racial and ethnic groups were, through an alleged conspiracy, gaining power and status that the white supremacists thought was rightfully theirs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It never occurs to the author to even mention the fact that there are alternative versions of what went down at Charlottesville, or that the violence may not have been entirely provoked by \u201cwhite nationalists,\u201d or that any of the marchers were there for reasons other than promoting \u201cwhite supremacy.\u201d Of course, if he dared to deviate from the official narrative, he, too, might experience something closer to real oppression, and that with alacrity.<\/p>\n

One finds the same, dreary, slavish conformity to the currently fashionable version of \u201cobjective good\u201d in the remainder of the latest issue of Ethics.<\/em> For example, from an article entitled Impermissible yet Praiseworthy<\/em> we read,<\/p>\n

Suppose you are morally required to adopt a vegan diet, but you adopt a lacto-vegetarian diet instead. Although what you do is impermissible, blaming you for not going all the way to veganism could be counterproductive. Perhaps the effects of blaming you are even bad enough that we ought not to do so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t know whether the future anthropologists I referred to earlier will laugh or cry when they read such stuff. One must hope that they will be at least marginally more capable of intelligent and original thought than today\u2019s \u201cexperts on ethics.\u201d \u00a0As for you, dear reader, spare yourself the pain of seeking knowledge about human morality in modern academic journals. You\u2019ll find as much useful information about the subject in the first chapter of Edvard Westermarck\u2019s<\/a> The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas<\/em><\/a> published in 1906, as in anything that\u2019s been written since.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are many unflattering but appropriate adjectives that describe the current state of our culture. In perusing the pages of the latest issue of Ethics journal, it struck me that one of the better ones is \u201cabsurd.\u201d According to a page entitled, \u201cInformation for Contributors,\u201d Ethics publishes both theory and the application of theory to … Continue reading “Ethics Whimsy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[411,370,110,105,6,5,440,29,66,416],"tags":[128,162],"class_list":["post-6177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-darwin","category-edvard-westermarck","category-ethics","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-morality","category-objective-morality","category-philosophy","category-psychology","category-subjective-morality","tag-ethics-2","tag-objective-morality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1BD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6178,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6177\/revisions\/6178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}