Ethics Behind the News
It is almost as awkward to introduce yourself on the Internet as it is idealistic and naive to hope that in such a forum a moral community might be established.
It is especially awkward to try to introduce our whole group at The Center for Ethics, Capital Markets, and Political Economy. A few of us are long time friends, having met at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville years ago. Most have us have met each other around this effort. Even those with Virginia ties have gone on to other places, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, Detroit. But they have made a point of returning, and they do so now on the official business of this Center, which is off and running and is here for the duration. There is nothing particularly Virginia about the Center, though thinking about how Thomas Jefferson would view the state of the nation gives a certain perspective.
Though we were never very self-conscious about this (except in philosophy or theology, or in reading Dante), the idea that it is only through the local that we may know the universal is one we all believe. Local doesn't mean provincial view. You have to get to know and care about the people near you to know and care about the people far away. "Think local. Act Global" might be our slogan.
To lead into my take on what the Center is about, I would ask all of you reading this to recall the great scene in King Lear when Lear is holding court in a barn on a heath in a storm after having been outcast from his palace, betrayed by his own family. Just before he calls court to order he falls to his knees and prays for the poor ("naked wretches wheresoere you are") whom he had neglected in his days of "superflux."
Shakespeare lets it be known here that Lear, crazy man that he is, is slowly regaining true royalty and that the restoration of justice we see at the end of the play is now having its seeds planted. Well, we don't pretend in any way to have the courage of such high drama, but as an ordinary bunch of professors, lawyers, doctors, economists and investment, we feel the pinch of the irony; and, so think about us in cyber space the way you think of mad Lear on the heath.
The hardest thing to live down in what we are trying to do comes in our decision to use the word "ethics" in our title. The word is on the tip of everybody's tongue these days: there are numerous think tanks working on ethics, courses being taught about ethics, Ph.D.'s being taken in ethics, government committees on ethics, and so forth. All of this ethics activity takes place in an age when many people know television characters, e-mail friends, business colleagues on the web, and radio "hosts" far better than they know their own neighbor, leave aside the poor naked wretches on the next block. Perhaps a good case could be made that the general decline in morality we see around us every day is a result of this type of thinking alone. It would make sense of this odd fact that nearly everybody is "ethically aware" but, from all accounts, lacking the feel and the taste for the basic ingredients of civilization. Our senior scholar put this to us in just this way sometime back. We live in an age of the "rise of ethics and the decline of moral civilization," he said.
I wondered at the time how such a thing could be and it was while making final preparations to launch the Center page that the answer came. In setting out some ideas early last November for this weekly column to be called "Ethics Behind the News" some graceful bit of irony came our way. When we began looking around for some news with ethics behind it all we could find at the time was a lot of news behind ethics, most of it political news.
We are not political innocents. Among us are political advisers, stumpers, and all of us have worked at the grass roots. We know first hand the rough and tumble of politics, and, in case you are interested, as a group we vote across the spectrum. Ethics is more than a convenient baseball bat for the two political parties to bash each other with. The restoration of this powerful word is our business. We didn't like what we saw, and so we confess we are a company concerned with ethics and proud of it.
No one of us is a philologist but from what we are able to make out "ethics" is not something awaiting definition by a committee of which there could be liberal or conservative versions. Rather, ethics is like pregnancy--you either are or you are not ethical; and if you are not ethical it follows that there is no ethical imagination to know how, leave aside want, to become ethical. If you don't believe this then try to explain to somebody who doesn't even have the table manners to wait until all are seated and served before eating why he should be ethical. He will not be able to fathom any conceivable reason for delaying gratification.
"Ethics" and "etiquette" in fact share the same linguistic roots. Ethics is also kin to "ethos," the spirit or character of a community. In both cases the "ethic" is the bond without which there would be no community at all. Nor as an intellectual study is ethics prior to community. As Michael Oakeshott said, a good cook isn't somebody who dreams up a pie and then tries to make one. A good cook makes a good pie by knowing all about the ways and withers of flour, sugar, eggs, heat, and so forth. An ethicist is like a cook. He or she can help show what is good for communities through a systematic, critical, and analytical study of norms, institutions, virtues, and all of their various combinations that prove to be good for communities. This Aristotle does in his Nichomachian Ethics and in his Politics. These treatises that are meant to be, and still are, universally applied, are based entirely on the culture this father of exact philosophy knew and loved, fourth century Athens.
Thus, to incite people into an ethical state, as our politicians, among others, try to do, one does not plead and peddle ethics. One pleads and peddles civilization. For it should be clear from the above that an ethic evolves over time from a people that has determined to practice the basics of civilized order, such as careful listening to others, speaking the truth plainly, helping the helpless, refraining from terrorizing the timid, showing through art and craft that our deepest sentiments are shared by all, and things even more grandiose than these. A bent towards basic civilization maintains and improves, often time changing, ethical practices, which otherwise would become a routine of meaningless forms.
This means that a culture needs those trained in divining, defending, and enhancing "oughtness," the prudential discovery that there are duties towards others we must carry out though they are commanded by neither force nor nature. These people are the moral philosophers of the culture. As charged with keeping ethical forms alive they advise us on what to do in new, living, situations, such as when medical technology changes, or when an enemy threatens war, or when there is not enough food to go around. But none of this is a cry for more ethics. If civilization is to be maintained or enhanced in the policies of the moral philosophers and the statesmen there will need to be ethics already in place. No caviling of a moralist can get anybody to give up food if he or she has not already learned at least to wait until everybody else, in normal situations, has been served.
Shakespeare, the saintly bard, knew this. Before Lear drops to his knees and prays for the poor in powerful confession, he commands Mad Tom, a "poor naked wretch", to enter the hovel on the heath before he does. He practices good manners and proper etiquette, a paltry acknowledgement of human dignity, but a good first step for somebody who had just a few scenes ago staked his commonwealth on flattery, and on flattery's policy of easy command and power unsoftened by responsibility.
In the act a revelation occurs that readies Lear for the prayer, for in these gestures the self-distancing of morality is contemplated and exercised. There is, as Flannery O'Connor reminds us moderns, a mystery in manners, in etiquette, in ethics: order and hierarchy are hollow forms and their deadly power is dying, without the acknowledgement that whatever the distinctions among the people, all people are equal and that prerogative and privilege thus spell sacrifice.
In the simplest act of coming to the aid of another, even if this is the merest gesture of respect, true dignity and power begin to move and are visible, should they wear the rags of the peasant or the useless ornaments of royalty in a tempest. The knowledge of this occurs in the moral act and nowhere else. That is the mystery. The vision of equality amidst real distinction is the vision, and what the vision sees is "ethics," a moving bond on all people, different as they are.
Abstracted from the moral act of sacrifice, "ethics" joins the ranks of other dead words, words that would be entirely without meaning like "progressive," or "humanistic," or "values," were it not for the vague and ever-changing and super-charged innuendo given them by those who find this a convenient way to make us servile and to make us blind to the suffering of others as we move cheerily on.
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