Making sense of moral conflict – Lukes
- What is moral conflict? How does it make sense, and how we should treat it when it emerges? We should eliminate it, deal with it, it is real.
- For Aristotle, “conflicting moral beliefs as a mark of ignorance, never as a recognition of conflicting moral requirements, while Aquinas further thought that the moral virtues formed a harmonious unity and could not exclude one another”.
- For Kantians, “”when moral theories of this monistic sort have run up against recalcitrant moral intuitions that conflict with their favored higher order principle, they have too often resorted to the tactic of denying those intuitions their very status as ‘moral’ ones”.
- Relativism tries to solve the problem of moral conflict, by stating that any value has legitimacy, and it is acceptable in its own place. (The problem is that it doesn’t get the scale: it depends at what level the conflict is established, and to enforce relativism you have to give up to his first principle: each value is legitimate in its own place, except the one I establish in this sentence, which is universal. This Is a version that could apply to a liberalism enforced to a higher scale, but at least doesn’t pretend to be otherwise NdM).
- What are the possible forms of moral conflict?
- “Conflicting moral claims or requirements that face agents, individual or collective, not with how to reconcile or regulate interpersonal or social conflicts between individuals, between individuals and groups and communities, or between groups and communities. Moral conflicts are conflicts between moral claims that may face persons or groups or communities or governments representing them, when individually or collectively they deliberate about what to do”.
- What are the sources of conflict? Conflict may arise from moral obligations; between the actions they require within a certain situation.
- Secondly, we can find conflict coming from different purposes, ends, or (vague) “values”. For example, should we promote democracy in any case, even at the cost of individual freedom?
- “Technical progress cannot co-exist with absolute security of living conditions for everyone. Conflicts inevitably arise between freedom and equality, planning and the autonomy of small groups, economic democracy and efficient management, and these conflicts can always be mitigated by compromise and partial solutions”.
- How can we reduce conflict that comes from technological advancement? What scale should we use to solve it? The underlying value is always that advancement are good for the society as a whole, and there’s no way to stop it on a smaller level ndM.
- “Thirdly, there are even more holistic and less well-defined entities between which moral conflicts may be thought to hold: moral codes or systems or world views or, in Rawls’s phrase, “conceptions of the good.”
- “Conflicts of this sort are marked by incompatibilities of perception and belief, over “how good and evil are to be recognized and distinguished from each other. ” Such cultural differences of moral perception can certainly seem real enough. As Kolakowski remarks, they cannot be removed by retreating to some common ground which the adversaries share or by appealing, as in science, to some “higher tribunal” capable of an intersubjective adjudication of controversies.
- Conflicts between different kinds of moral claims.
- Several writers have pointed to the irreconcilability of the conflict between consequentialism and deontology, and I have already referred to the way in which utilitarians (who embody the dominant form of consequentialism in Anglo Saxon cultures) and Kantians seek to deny its very existence. Consequentialism requires that the agent maximize the overall good (on some interpretation of that good) , by so acting as to produce the best outcome, all things considered, for all those affected by this action.
- We can add another one, conflict between different scales of groups, where each one of them will claim their autonomy to rule under a certain group. The higher the scale, the more liberal the value of the group should be in order to justify its existence, and that’s a point that needs to be stressed out ndM.
- The view of Machiavelli: while the act accuses, the result excuses”. Can the resolution of conflict be justified by the results?
- “For utilitarians and some other consequentialists (among whom I include Marxists, for reasons mentioned later) such dilemmas cannot exist, if the appropriate calculations for measuring the best overall outcome, all things considered, have been correctly made.”
- “Conflict may signify diversity, incompatibility, or incommensurability”.
- Diversity could be diversity of morals: in such cases-as opposed, say, to our contemplation of Athenian democracy or life among the Incas-conflict involves a more or less deep but relevant difference of lifeworld and lifestyle, that may be responded to in various ways. Among these ways are rejection, conversion, and various kinds of syncretistic adaptation. Not all moral diversity, in short, is conflictual. Nor does all conflictual diversity issue in incompatible ways of living.
- Incompatibility: Antigone cannot both obey the dictates of family loyalty by burying Polynices and those of the law decreed by Creon. Agamemnon at Aulis cannot save both his fleet and his daughter. Sartre’s pupil cannot both join the Free French and console his mother.
- Buried very deep in our philosophical consciousness and implicit in our social scientific practice is the nearly universal presumption that consistency of preference and of ethical beliefs is a mark of our rationality. But is it?
- Incommensurability: Incompatible moral claims become incommensurable when the trade-offs become unavailable because there is no “comon currency
- If the claims of two (or more than two) types of liberty prove incompatible in a particular case, and if this is an instance of the clash of values at once absolute and incommensurable, it is better to face this intellectually uncomfortable fact than to ignore it, or automatically attribute it to some deficiency on our part which could be eliminated by an increase in skill or knowledge; or, what is worse still, suppress one of the competing values altogether by pretending that it is identical with its rival-and so end by distorting both.
- Lukes tried to discredit various attempts to make nonsense of such conflicts, and by suggesting our moral experience bears witness to their presence and to their importance.
- There are two ways of taking the sting out of incompatibility: One is to deny its reality via theodicy: by believing, as Bishop Butler did, that God has so arranged the world and our natures that, though in acting morally we may appear to follow divergent moral principles that exclude general benevolence, nevertheless, sub specie aeternitatis, the general happiness is secured.
- The other is to deny its necessity via the secular inheritance of theodicy: moral utopianism. A moral utopian believes that there is in prospect a perfect world in which all actual moral incompatibilities will be overcome because the subjective and objective conditions of life will render them impossible, even inconceivable (Marxist are in this category ndM).
- As Weber, “speaking directly,” memorably put it “the ultimately possible attitudes towards life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion. Thus, it is necessary to make a decisive choice. ” What man, he asks, “will take upon himself the attempt to ‘refute scientifically’ the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount? For instance, the sentence ‘resist no evil, ‘ or the image of turning the other cheek?
- Values are not discovered by reason, and it is fruitless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life, ” that “producing values and believing in them are acts of the will.
- Many of the commitments, loyalties, and obligations that we have to relationships and activities that matter to us consist in part in a refusal to engage in the very kind of tradeoff that full commensurability would require.
- If all this is right, then we can only conclude that modernity-in which the separation between the partial and the universal, like that between fact and value, has become a prevalent cultural fact-renders incommensurability inescapable.
- What about liberalism? The case for religious toleration was central to its development; and out of that there developed the crucial but complex thought that civil society is an arena of conflicts, which should be coordinated and regulated by the constitutional state.
- This has led critics of liberalism to condemn it for being anemic, pale, morally half-hearted, skeptical, even indifferent (it’s a mater of scale! We care less about the abstract, but in the abstract we can’t avoid discussing the themes liberalism brings to the table).
- Rawls too distinguishes between “those that allow for a plurality of opposing and even incommensurable conceptions of the good and those that hold that there is but one conception of the good and which is to be recognized by all persons, so far as they are fully rational.
- Allan Bloom, by contrast, while defending “liberal education,” is plainly a monist and a full subscriber to the “dominant tradition.” I doubt that there could be a more devout form of adherence to that tradition than the Straussianism he has so successfully popularized.
- For him, the Rawlsian defense of liberalism is nothing short of a plea for moral indifference and skepticism, even “value-relativism. “
- Diversity naturally arises from our limited powers and distinct perspectives; it is unrealistic to suppose that all our differences are rooted solely in ignorance and perversity, or else in the rivalries that result from scarcity.
- This raises the deep and difficult issue of specifying just what sense liberalism is to make of moral, and more generally value, conflicts.
- Some, most obviously some religious conflicts, cannot be resolved, because their justification seems to be internal all the way down: what is to count as good or overriding reasons remains to the end internal to the opposed parties and not susceptible to common or public argument.