On Morality

This one's for you Ben - thanks for constantly reading these polemics of mine and responding.

Okay so when I was an undergraduate I began by being a Music Major, but after a year and a half I got burned out. And I wasn't willing to give up the guitar or my love of music. So what I gave up was being a music major. Up to that point the only philosopher I had read, at least in any serious way, was Nietzsche, and upon reflection I didn't really understand what they hell I was reading.

So there I was, looking through the catalog of classes and I nothing looked remotely interesting until I got to the Philosophy and Religion major. At this time Appalachian had combined two rather different disciplines into one - which could have worked except that the programs didn't connect. The sense I had - which is just a sense - is that the philosophy professors secretly thought they were smarter and the religious professors secretly thought they were doing real scholarship.

Anyhow, so during my tenure in this department I got to meet Orus Barker - who was so influential on the way I think that if I'm honest I don't know where his voice stops and mine starts. In his Social Issues and Ethics class one day he made a distinction between Ethical and Moral - two words we tend to use interchangeably.

However, the point he was showing was that they aren't the same word and the difference is actually monumental, if taken seriously. "Ethic" comes from the Greek "ethos." "Moral" comes from the word "mores." Now the latter means "social norm," something that is acceptable in a particular society. These tend to take the forms of rules - or what is called in philosophy deontology. So moral means a rule-based system that governs all places within the social world in a similar fashion. Morals do not deal with difference. In fact what they do is try to eliminate the idea of difference - the particular.

Ethics, however, if thought about as a derivative of "ethos," do almost the opposite. "Ethos" means "to dwell." Dwelling is ambiguous. It basically means to stay with something for a while. This means both a persons dwelling and the way a person dwells, ruminates, thinks.

In one of my religious studies class we read The Poisonwood Bible and what happened in the book - to drastically reduce plot - is that a preacher from Georgia (I think) went to Africa to preach and convert. He believed he could take his values and apply them anywhere. He was moral. Well this turned out badly. My essay on the book was that while he was Moral he wasn't Ethical - he couldn't dwell. He couldn't understand the particular. And because of this he brought about lots of death.

The Greeks have this beautiful term: kairos. Kairos means "at the appropriate time." We don't have a word like this and we should. (We should also have a second-person familiar like they have in Spanish. The south does - we have Y'all.") This word is all about "ethos." It's not rule-based; it's particular.

If one dwells poetically one learns to think. Morality does not think. It formulates. This is why Bentham's utilitarianism is referred to as a "moral calculus."

Okay so what does this have to do with the last post on homosexuality? Well here's what I think. Only a person who lives with a rule-based, non-exceptional set of morals can ever hold positions like "It's wrong for this person I don't know to engage in behaviors I don't which cause harm to nobody." If a person dwells poetically, which means embracing multiplicities, the idea that everyone should be one way just doesn't arise - at least I can't see how it would.

So do we need morality? Well, I guess. I mean The Law is based off of morality (a non-situated set of rules) and most of the problems with the law arise because of this. But I'm actually okay with it just being universally illegal to murder or to rape or to copy and resell the films of Michael Bay. But I'm not sure this is a victory for "morality." I mean what space can a person dwell poetically in where it would be acceptable to commit any of the crimes previously mentioned? And if we really examine The Law, if it was purely about morality there wouldn't even be lawyers. Lawyers exist in part because actions are situational with particular circumstances. For example, we allow for murder if it's in self-defense. So, it's actually incorrect of me to suggest that I'm okay with murder being universally wrong.

What we need is to learn to dwell. We need to have a sensitive mindfulness towards the world and the beings that dwell with us. We need to understand that a heterogeneity is better than a replication of self.

More than that though here's what is so wonderful about Kairos and Ethos: they contain within them the possibility of surprise, invention, the new. Morality can only repeat - it cannot create. It is about limits, not about possibilities.

So yes, I am saying stop being moral. Dwell in the muck. It's dirty, but it's exciting.