ENSAIO MODELO - Nº10
“Polus: So you’d rather want to suffer what’s unjust than do it?
Socrates: For my part, I wouldn’t want either, but if it had to be one or the other, I would choose suffering over doing what’s unjust.”
- INTRODUCTION
In the previous excerpt, Socrates defends that it is better to suffer an injustice than to do it by yourself, challenging the general consensus. The great majority of people have been, at least once, subjected to be afflicted by injustices, whether because they are part of a minority, or because they were in a particular situation in which they were disadvantaged; however, if they could do anything to avoid the suffering succeeded thereof, they would do so, even though that action could be considered unjust. The whole discussion emerges from the fact that there are injustices that are previous to one’s action; therefore, they have not been caused by him, so why should he suffer because of them? On the other hand, if we just accept those previous injustices and use them to justify unjust acts, wouldn’t we be, deliberately, enduring injustice?
Throughout this paper, I intend to defend the Kantian thesis that just acts must be done independently of our inclinations or affections, namely, we have to do the right thing even that it eventually causes us suffering. Nonetheless, insofar as I am concerned to study a practical series of rules, I do not think that this maxim ought to be followed inexorably; to demonstrate it, I will consider the opposition egoist-altruist — both meaning their full-restrictive formulas — to find up to what point they are universalizable. Finally, to conclude my analysis, I will announce my reasons to believe why we should be ethical and just instead of trying to take advantage of one another.
- MORAL KNOWLEDGE IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY
First of all, I think we should consider the very basis of our moral thoughts and the way people vulgarly recognize concepts such as “justice”, or “ethics”, or even “morals”. The most propitious and productive way to do so is analyzing the work of Plato, using as reference mainly Republic — in which we can see a very similar discussion upon justice in the character of Socrates —, and Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics will especially be used as an object for our analysis. In effect, a great part of their moral views comes down to an improvement in the Greek traditional views on morals.
In Republic, Glaucon asks Socrates to defend justice over injustice and show, clearly as possible, why a just person would be happier than an unjust person, opposing, thereby, the common opinion. To properly establish this challenge, Glaucon resorts to an earlier defense made by Trasimidias, which goes somewhat like this: to be a happy person, one doesn’t have to be just; it only has to apparently be so. That is if you could be a bad person doing everything you please, receiving undeserved honors, cheating your opponents, taking advantage of other people and so on… and yet no one could possibly figure it out your wickedness; if even with all of your bad actions, people still believe you are a good person, you would be much happier than a just unknown person. To make that even clearer, we can consider the life of that other person, the just one. Initially, as a good person, it would be easily deceived by bad people, for he would never expect in others what he doesn’t found in himself, namely, wickedness. He would endure his good actions no matter how much harm they would cause to him. He would die poor, miserable and deceived. Follows from this explanation that virtue ought to be a winding road and that no one would reasonably choose it.
Socrates’ response is, in spite of long, quite simple, we cannot directly study justice in one individual; it would be like studying the ocean with a small cup. Therefore, we need to use a projection of humanity to study justice in its magnitude, society. Socrates starts to pursue what would be the ideal form of government and which would be its relations to justice. Nevertheless, he achieves an important conclusion: a person cannot be adequate for plenty of things, he must focus their efforts on only one thing; one cannot be good both as a cobbler and as a statesman, or as a blacksmith and as a joiner. Justice would be, thus, making people be what they should be and giving them what they deserve. In the ideal form of government, the republic, the state would be controlled by philosopher kings, which were, since their birth, designed and tested to be there. The whole point of designing a utopia is a strategy to understand justice and to apply it to our lives. Socrates does not intend to actually create this republic, but it is only a measure for our thoughts, to compare it to our personal actions. It is a primitive form of reflective equilibrium since any deviation in relation to reality would be regulated. Follows from his analysis, that a just person would be happier than an unjust person to the same extent a just society is happier than an unjust society. That’s a curious conclusion and there are a lot of points in which we could attack it, but let’s get back to it later on this essay.
Now, let’s give a look at Aristotle’s philosophy. Aristotle also takes the sociability of man as granted; all of his analysis is made in order to organize man in a complex political community. The foundation of his ethics is the differentiation between virtues and vices; According to him, all the extremes are vices and virtues would remain between two of these extremes. Therefore, vices would be flaws whether for lack or for excess and virtues would be the perfect expression of moderation. For example, we have that both cowardice and temerity are vices, cowardice for lack and temerity for excess; the virtue associated with these vices would be courage, but to whom this virtue is dedicated? Aristotle affirmed that every category has its own virtues and some of them can transcend to be human virtues. Courage is an important virtue for a soldier, but we cannot say precisely whether it is important for a blacksmith, insofar he is a blacksmith. Along with that, Aristotle says that virtues and vices are correlated with pain and pleasure. When we do good things, not because it is our natural disposition to do so, but because we are expecting the pleasure that comes from that action or because we are avoiding the pain that comes from the correspondent inaction, our action is not entirely good. Finally, Aristotle defends that the only way to achieve happiness or Eudaimonia, is through virtue, for happiness would be the activity of living in accordance with virtue.
The analysis made by Aristotle and Plato is very significant for our analysis, but I do not think it is enough to prove that it is better to suffer an injustice than to do it. First of all, because both of them ground their studies in ideal types of governments — I am here using a Weberian term from modern sociology, which is a whole field of studies that they had none contact —, the welfare of a society does not mean the welfare of its individuals. Society is much more complex than just an association of people; the whole is more than just the composition of its parts. The basic structures of society must be critically considered to decide a form of association in which a person could be just and still be actually happy. Unfortunately, the actual configuration of society works in a way that justice is not entirely profitable, so it will naturally occur suffering to people who dedicate their lives to justice. However, should we stop being just for the physical and emotional consequences of it in our persons?
- DEONTOLOGISM OR WHY SHOULD WE STILL FOLLOW JUSTICE
I wish to start this chapter with a question: if a person is deadly thirsty — to such extent that they cannot even fantasy with anything rather than water — and they run desperately to satisfy himself with water, is this a free action? Obviously, there was nothing precluding them to get water or not, but that is not the real point of this very question. To make this clear I will appeal to some Aristotle’s announcements on liberty: free actions have to be deliberated and it has to possibly could have been different from what it has actually been. So the question is, now, another: could this situation have gone somehow different? One could say that our poor little character could have died and, indeed, it could. But let’s consider, firstly, that he wanted to keep living — let’s take that for granted —, hence, that was the only thing he could have done, so he was not actually free. Either way, we have to admit that, for this case, the dimension of human liberty is the choosing of his goals (whether to live or not). However, this conclusion is yet very subject to criticisms, for some of these goals we do not actually choose; for example, people naturally pursue happiness and life, so these goals are not entirely the fruit of our will or deliberation. In effect, there are some “goals” that we can call of a more precise term: “inclinations”.
After this initial explanation, I have another question: Can moral actions arise from inclinations? I do not think so. The own idea of moral seems to us as something to be related as a matter of liberty. When we say that a person did the right thing, it is presupposed that they could have done another thing instead — mostly of time what we would have called the wrong thing. But when we dealing with “determined” things, we cannot say they are right or wrong. When a rock falls in someone’s toe, we do not say the rock should be arrested, for it would be abnormal to blame an object disproved of the power of choice. Follows from this reasoning that a moral act does not need any inclination, it has to be autonomous.
Kant defines autonomy in opposition to heteronomy. Heteronomy exists when the will behind one’s action is not its own, but it is a fruit of an inclination or expectation. When someone helps a person expecting to receive any kind of payment from that, it is not a real moral action, for the motivation of such action does not come from its author, the agent, but from its expectation of something. If the possibility of the payment does not endure anymore, neither does the action. Our will would be then divided into three imperatives: hypothetical ones, a practical one and, finally, the categorical one.
A hypothetical imperative is a formula that guides one’s action in order to achieve something, that is why its name alludes to the word hypothesis because the action is grounded in the hypothesis of receiving what it initially expected. A practical imperative is almost the same thing, but its goal is happiness and that is quite different from other inclinations because happiness is an ending in itself. Ultimately, we have the categorical imperative, which is an a priori rule that guides one’s action entirely because of the own action, it does not care with contingent factors, such as inclinations, expectations or any sort of goals. Between those three, the only imperative that can fundament a moral action is the categorical one, because it is the only that entirely express human autonomy, which, by its turn, is a manifestation of our rationality.
In the third section of Groundworks on the metaphysics of morals, Kant proves the existence of the categorical imperatives. Before that, David Hume, in his An Inquiry on Human Understanding, defended the thesis of necessity, which claimed that every effect in the world would be the necessary effect of the existing causes — even the ones we could not recognize. In a conception like this, there would not be space for liberty, nor for autonomy and, thus, not for morals. Kant does not refute necessity thesis, he actually accepts it; however, he affirms that the dimension of human liberty is the will behind one’s action. For example, even that everything is predetermined and every one of our actions will be executed as they are supposed to be, we can still control our motivation, because we are rational beings. Morality rules are a priori formulas that can be achieved only by reason, that is why humans are the only capable to oppose their inclinations, differently from other animals.
Well, after all this discussion, we can return to our starting question: is it better to suffer an injustice or to execute one? It is better to suffer because that is the right thing to do and we do not have to do the right thing because it is good to do so, but because we ought to, not “we have to” as in an inclination, but “we ought to” as in a duty. If a person has natural altruism that makes them happy every time it helps someone, their actions are not moral actions, insofar they only make it because of happiness. If suddenly, this person does not feel this happiness anymore, their goodness and kindness are gone as well. But to what point shall we keep this?
- ATLAS SHRUGGED
Shall every person in this world be a martyr? I do not think so. The full-restrictive position on altruism seems very dangerous and it is also contradictory. Such as in utilitarianism, deontologism also has to measured and regulated for practical reasons; the inexorability of those theories is the worst part of them and exactly the one we want to correct. To show that, let’s try to universalize the maxim “if a person has to choose between suffer and commit an injustice, they shall choose to suffer”. What would we achieve with it? Let’s be very optimistic and say that this way all the injustice in the world would disappear — what does not seem very plausible —, but all the remaining people are destroyed, poor and disgraced, is that fair?. If each one of us tries to carry the world on our back, we all will be crushed. The conclusion I intend to achieve is quite simple, any moral theory has to consider, at least a little, its consequences. Happiness is also something to be considered and balanced in our endeavor.
Notwithstanding, we can easily see that full-restrictive egoism is also not a good answer. If everyone always chooses to commit an injustice rather than suffer it, we will still be drowned in suffering, pain, and disgrace. What appears to us is that the resolution we are looking for remains between these two extremes, so why don’t we take a look at some of the modern Aristotelian moralists?
- MORAL AS A FORM OF TRANSCENDENCE
In his book After Virtue, the Britannic author Alasdair Macintyre designed the narrative theory of the “I”. Every one of us is enrolled in different narratives, as “sons”, or as “daughters”, or as “parents” or even as “friends”. I think that interpretation is the real dimension of human liberty. The raining does not mean anything instead of a series of causalities; a person who born in a poor family or in a wealthy family, that is just randomness. They do not have any external meaning, except the one we give to it, through our power of interpretation.
We are beings and characters; as such we have to manifest ourselves in time and space. Our space is our planet, I think that is the primary fundament of eco-ethics; we need our place to keep existing. Secondly, we have our time. None of us can beat death, every one of us is eventually going to die; nonetheless, moral is the only way to overcome death, because “we”, such as our “I” are so involved in our narratives that they keep existing, even when we don’t. We have to handle with some sufferings in life, unfortunately, we have to follow some duties we have to ourselves as rational beings; we have to follow some rules as sentient beings and pursue the great amount of happiness; we also have some special duties to the person whose narratives we share, our parents, friends or colleagues. Sometimes we will naturally break them because we are humans, but we will always try to fix our errors. In the most of cases, it is better to suffer than commit an injustice, because it is through justice and moral that we will transcend our deaths and become part of the life of the people we helped.
SINTETIZANDO -
Autor da citação: Platão (428 a.C-348 a.C).
Posição em relação ao autor: Concordância
Tese do ensaio: Boas ações devem ser feitas independemente do prazer que elas causem no agente, salvo em situações especiais.
Autores usados em suporte: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Aristotle (384 a.C-322 a.C) and Alasdair Macityre (1929-).