Radical Ethics: An Introduction

THE PROBLEM

The old narratives, within which all of our ethical models have been couched, can no longer be appealed to for a global ethics because they are socially constructed. In more plain language, your religious faith, scientific worldview, or governmental model (all narratives, all requiring faith) work great so long as you’re interacting with other adherents of your faith. It’s good to have faith—it’s part of what makes us human. But each of these faiths has a geneology, a history which can be traced to someone somewhere, which has been sculpted and shaped by the passage of time and interaction with cultures. For example, what it meant to be a Christian looked vastly different in the first century than it does in ours.

Again, nothing can ever preclude you from having faith. I have a faith—a faith I’m willing to die for. But accepting the consequences for your faith is entirely different than imposing consequences on others who do not share your faith. You can, like Ghandi, suffer violence for your faith. You cannot, like Hitler, commit violence on its behalf. Why? Because each human on the planet was raised under different circumstances, told different stories, inheriting different behaviors along the way. No one on earth can arbitrate between them. Not the priests, not the scientists, not the philosophers—precisely because they are human beings.

So the problem is: How do we determine right action when interacting with those outside our faith? It would be great if we could answer Rodney King when he asks “Can we all get along?” with a resounding YES! Unfortunately, we live under limited circumstances, among scarce resources, with conflicting agendas. So the problem stands, and I think it’s the most important problem in the world.

THE STANDING “SOLUTION”

Thus far, the “solution” has been to wait. To let the truth (or lack of truth) seep in and become internalized, hopefully manifesting itself as a form of humility. We’ve hoped that in light of a lack of absolute certainty, we'll become more careful with our faith-become-opinions, more reluctant to commit violence at all. Some of us have elevated this humility to a new religion, believing in its power, over time, to save us all. Others have simply embraced the violence, seeing it much like the way many economists see foreclosures in the free market as the tool of a self-correcting system. This latter stance is hypocrisy, because in order for its adherents to presume to rise above the turmoil and watch it from their indifferent heights, they must be privileged—and once this privilege is threatened, they’re the first to become indignant and step into the fray.

But while the “humble” (who manage to be arrogant about their humility) sequester themselves away in their ivory towers, the rest of the world has crept out into the twilight and seized upon a new and hideous opportunity: Without the underpinnings of absolute truth (which we never really had), who’s to keep us from constructing our own realities? Who’s to keep the yarn spinners, the puppet masters, the cult leaders, the manipulators and exploiters from making up the rules as they go along? These rules have an uncanny tendency to benefit the rule-makers. They manifest themselves as tax codes, voter districting, morality legislation, and discrimination policies that are ever vigilant over the rights of the disabled, the minority, or the sexually harassed, only to be completely blind to the plight of lower socio-economic classes.

Don’t get me wrong—we never had absolute truth, and manipulation is as old as the world. But without that nagging feeling in the back of their minds that they’re violating unassailable truths, the exploiters have become emboldened. They feel safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing on the planet that can challenge their rhetoric. Or if they do find themselves under mounting social pressure, they can always shrug their shoulders and claim to be victims of their environment. “I,” they say, “am the monster you created.”

THE PROPOSED SOLUTION

Radical Ethics. The etymology of the word radical is “to the root.” Radical Ethics insists there are a handful of things we can all agree on, and that from this mustard seed of common ground, we can take mountains and toss them into the sea. I will use the rest of this already bloated post to enumerate a set of assumptions I believe every human on the planet can share, each assumption elaborating on the previous.

1. We exist. We weren’t privy to the deliberations leading up to our existence, nor can we agree there even were deliberations. We can’t answer why there’s something rather than nothing, but by virtue of reading this sentence, we can attest to the fact there is something.
2. Objects are real. An object is anything that has causal power—anything that can affect other objects. According to this definition, a rock is an object, and so is a mortgage. A zygote is an object, and so is an ideology. We are objects.
3. Objects are stratified (sub-points a and b explain each other).
   1. The categories of concrete and abstract don’t make sense anymore when referring to objects, by virtue of the fact that our only access to the world is via the abstraction of language. Let’s toss them out. In their place we can speak of stratified layers. What I mean by this is that on one layer of stratification we have a cell. At a higher layer we have an organ. At a higher layer we have a human being. At a higher layer we have a community. At a higher level we have a culture, etc.
   2. Processes are objects. A process is when objects interact with other objects in rhythmic patterns over time. This process, once sustainable, becomes an object. The human being is a process that has become an object. In the same way, a government is an object, and so is a computer.
4. Objects, by default, have a right to exist. This is simply an issue of integrity. If you agree that you have a right to exist, then you must concede the same mechanism which brought you into existence (whether it be the Big Bang or the Words of God) also brought everything else into existence, and to deny their right to exist is to deny your own.
5. Existence cannot be separated from flourishing. Flourishing is defined as the ability for an object (or a group of objects) to coalesce into a higher stratification of its own volition. Caging a wild animal and oppressing the poor are examples of the denial of flourishing, which is no different than denying them the right to exist.
6. Some objects become unsustainable, thus foregoing their right to exist. Sustainability is defined as the ability for an object to flourish over an indefinite period of time in such a way that does not threaten the flourishing of other objects. War is an object. We can consider it in terms of stratification like this: Citizens->Nations->War. Since nations now have nuclear weapons they are willing to deploy, war is unsustainable. Cancer is unsustainable. The meat industry, in its current form, is unsustainable. A natural ecology can be sustainable because, even though animals higher up in the food chain threaten individual creatures, those individual creatures could not exist in a healthy, balanced environment without their predators.
7. Agents have the responsibility to actively seek sustainability. Agents are sentient objects that have the ability to mourn the loss of other objects, to contemplate non-existence and choose not to exist (suicide), and to understand sustainability. Again, as an issue of integrity, if an agent comes to the understanding that they exist by virtue of stratified layers of sustainable objects, and if an agent chooses to exist, they must seek sustainability. This seeking out of sustainability becomes right action.

I'd be remiss not to give credit to Roy Bhaskar for strongly influencing my thinking. Some, if not most of these ideas come straight out of his Critical Realism. Unfortunately, the language used to convey critical realist theory is jargon laden to the point of being undecipherable by anyone without a specialialization in philosophy. Any idea is only as good as the language with which it's expressed, making Critical Realism a philosopher's philosophy.