Every Space is a Moral Space

The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.

It is never desirable to be accused of moralism. We don’t want to be beholden to the stuffy demands of a grandparent who embraces the last vestiges of a Puritan heritage. Even if the word “morality” is generally understood, the concept today no longer has the currency to be efficacious or persuasive. Whether or not we ought to blame the death of God or some other event, the force that once made moral statements meaningful is gone. But this state of affairs has not stopped us. Sexual misconduct, the honor code, and the incarceration box remain prevalent campus prerogatives. Each of these debates requires the ability to articulate obligations to certain norms of conduct, norms whose violation is cause for reprobation and censorship. But they, too, often seem to fall prey to the overwrought rhetoric of unfounded dogmatism. Yet we ought not to despair that morality still lingers even while its grounding is gone. In fact, the very sterility and oppressiveness which seem to characterize the moralism of contemporary political advocacy can only be eliminated by giving a substantive basis for morality.

Once-Marxist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre begins his 1981 book After Virtue with a rather bleak image of contemporary discourse on moral philosophy. He allegorizes a story in which the world has gone through so disastrous a catastrophe that the common narrative of the scientific revolution and its ensuing successes do not survive: instead, we have only the tattered remains of a handful of textbooks, the broken parts of shattered instruments, and a limited scientific vocabulary vaguely inherited from the previous generation. In this new world, we might have some idea of the meaning of “proton” and “Hadron Collider,” but it is inexact and approximate; precise atomic models and experimental records are consigned to the dustbin of history.

MacIntyre contends that moral discourse in our own day is exactly equivalent. That is, we have inherited a rather nebulous conglomeration of words—“morality,” “virtue,” “justice”—whose exact signification we fail to grasp. Because gaining access to the context in which the original meaning of these words arose is temporally impossible, he suggests that we are stuck using them in wrongheaded ways. For example, “reproductive justice” has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of justice being the virtue that governs the relationships between people. The consequence is that morality has been taken from the environment in which it was once intelligible and the discourse of moral philosophy has broken down.

If he is right about where we are, then the situation is dire. We lack the ability to communicate about issues which demand the individual or collective responsibility of people to accomplish. We likewise cannot go back in time to regain an appreciation for the colors and contours that once contextualized such language, endowing it with intelligibility. Since we cannot fashion a solution for the latter problem, I dedicate the remainder of my words here towards the former.

British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, a contemporary of MacIntyre, argues that, “the concepts of obligation and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible. These concepts are survivals from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer survives, and are only harmful without it.

Her solution is to simply rule out the use of duty-driven words which are now outmoded and no longer useful. After all, morality really was just the veneer of good manners promulgated by Puritan New England, or perhaps Victorian Britain, for the smooth running of society, and nothing else. If so, we ought not to lament its passing, but along with Nietzsche, we ought to finally rejoice that we have given up our ungrounded faith in the values of true and false, of right and wrong. Since the imago Dei is a forgotten myth, we might as well make ourselves in the image of man.

The downside of this resolution is that it undermines any good, such as maintaining a peaceful society, that is attained by using the word “moral.” In other words, jettisoning moral language does nothing to fill the gap that an absence of morality creates.

One contemporary manifestation of the vapid state of moral language is the wayward conversation about human rights. I was recently at an undergraduate conference in which the Yale Political Union and the visiting Ivy League schools debated the resolution “Human Rights are Human Fiction.” After a series of floor speeches had been delivered at this strange convention, the resolution passed by a generous margin. The most compelling and repeated argument for this conclusion based itself on the fact that older notions of human anthropology, God, and the common good no longer ground claims of rights. Instead, since the UN adopted the 1048 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, rights have been the ungrounded invention of government leaders. For roughly the last seventy-five years, linguistic use of “human rights” has simply been the accepted way to give panache and credibility to a law that needs (and lacks) some substantive foundation.

But there is another response to the decay of a moral vocabulary. One can insist that the very reason that moral semantics lost their significance stems from the abandonment of deeper metaphysical commitments. In reality, if language has become bereft of significance, then substantive understandings behind mere semantics that once gave them life have also been stripped away. The despoilment of language is a secondary consequence or a superficial symptom of a deeper shift in ontology. If moral discourse is an example of this kind of change, then the solution is not simply to jettison terms of moral duty (though that may be part of it), but to recover the understanding that once animated them to a status of communicability and importance.

I believe that we should prefer this second response. Without morality, individual lives, campuses, and societies lack shape, genesis, and direction.

The University is well aware, for example, of the dire import of the issues of sexual assault and harassment. It recently passed a new resolution that no “romantic” or “sexual” relationships of any kind can exist between faculty and students, even between faculty and graduate students. Regardless of what one thinks about the exact merits of this resolution, it points to the reality that sexual misconduct is a serious enough problem that the University wants to take a substantive initiative to mitigate it. This effort, even if it’s not expressed in the same way by its advocates, is the enactment of a moral prerogative. Of course the motivations aren’t necessarily couched in language of moral imperatives, but the resolution demonstrates that rules are seen as a necessary aspect of a well-functioning campus community. Not only do its proponents accept a normative claim (“sexual misconduct is evil and ought to be eliminated”) but they take a measure to realize this end. The (fortunate) widespread consensus on sexual misconduct is simply one contemporary example of absolutist claims operating amidst a general distrust for moral language.

At the University, we are walking a strange line right now. On the one hand, moral language is outdated and when revived, often perceived as an instance of power play by a dominant group. But simultaneously, “bystander intervention” and “sexual misconduct training” urge us, in certain ways, to be moral citizens of the campus community. The authorities of the non-academic parts of academia must find themselves in an odd place. For it is as if we are unaware that through the destruction of a morality – however imperfect – we would be left with cultural chaos unless something else filled the gap. Right now, the gap is filled by empty lists of rights, rules, and responsibilities. Orientation leaders are provided sensitivity training ad nauseum, and a non-satirical “hook-up bill of rights” exists. Such pandering responses to the real problems on campus aren’t full-fledged degradations of the dignity of humans, but at the very least they leave something to be desired. We depend upon moral rules even while expressing our distaste for them.

Perhaps the shallowness of contemporary advocacy is not the only kind of morality open to us. The fear of a stuffy legalism of today is as valid as our condemnation of ungrounded puritanism. However, if we really want to move beyond the problems latent in a truly outmoded morality, we need to reframe our current account as well. Simply scrapping one list of arbitrary rules in lieu of another will not change anything.

I believe that a university cannot flourish without normative directives of behavior. We must acknowledge, whether it is fashionable or not, that every space is a moral space. Lacking further substantiation, collective detestation or praise of an action—such as sexual misconduct—is shallow and superficial. Instead, the persistent presence of such social condemnation or approval speaks to the need for uncovering a deeper basis for moral claims. To raise a true edifice of morality that is not baselessly asserted, we must be able distinguish between the good and the bad in contemporary advocacy. The edifice of morality lacks a foundation, and we need to build one.

Will Nolan

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