Moral struggle
December 14th 2011 19:23
What sort of examples comes to mind if you hear the phrase "moral struggle"?
Here's three that come to mine.
-- 1. Every lunchtime, I have to make a choice between greasy food and salad, and usually I go the grease. You know it's bad for you, you know it's the wrong choice, but you rationalize it and do it anyway.
-- 2. An officer, in wartime, is told to lie to his men and send them to certain doom. This will cause a distraction that will save more lives in the long term. He ponders. He weighs up what he thinks is right, he weighs up his own ability to lie, he makes a decision.
-- 3. Jewish mother hiding beneath floorboards with other families, while the house is being searched. The mother has a young baby, who is about to cry. The mother must cover the baby's mouth, and make a choice as to how much to stifle and how long to keep her hand there.
Of these three, I think there's a sense in which only the third example deserves the name "moral struggle", if it's considered a moral situation at all.
The first example, apart from being trivial, and apart from not involving a moral question on many people's conception of the word (rather, it is a "prudential" issue) -- apart from these things, it's a situation where the subject knows what's right and wrong. There is a struggle of willpower, but no struggle of belief or commitment.
The second example involves a genuine struggle between belief. You could frame this struggle in different ways: for instance, obligation not to lie and duty towards comrades on the one hand vs obligation to obey and utilitarian calculus on the other.
But one thing that I've tried to communicate is that the officer is approaching the question with his brain. It's like a maths problem. Certainly there must be emotions involved, but the officer masters them -- he ponders, he reflects, he thinks rationally about what to do.
What I want to emphasise about the third case is that the mother doesn't know what to do, emotions are very much involved, and it's a struggle that's embodied -- you can imagine her sweating, the thoughts flying around her head, the fear, etc. What it's not is a case of rational calculation and problem-solving pure and simple. The mother is not sitting there saying to herself, "What outcome will lead to the greatest happiness?" nor "I have these beliefs. I must make a decision as to which is the most important."
If she did stay cool and calm, how would we feel about that? Would we call the struggle moral?
Well, I think we might. But we might also feel that moral commitments should be written into your responses, and not simply carried about in your head. We might feel that "moral struggle" should involve genuine conflict of principles, and not simple calculation. We might feel that there has to be that period of aporia and mental churning -- what do I do, what do I do -- that constitutes the "struggle". And we might feel that paradigmatic cases of moral struggle should involve huge struggle, ripping you in two, going to the core of your being.
So, if it's purely intellectual, then it's not moral. And if it's easy, then it's no struggle.
Here's three that come to mine.
-- 1. Every lunchtime, I have to make a choice between greasy food and salad, and usually I go the grease. You know it's bad for you, you know it's the wrong choice, but you rationalize it and do it anyway.
-- 2. An officer, in wartime, is told to lie to his men and send them to certain doom. This will cause a distraction that will save more lives in the long term. He ponders. He weighs up what he thinks is right, he weighs up his own ability to lie, he makes a decision.
-- 3. Jewish mother hiding beneath floorboards with other families, while the house is being searched. The mother has a young baby, who is about to cry. The mother must cover the baby's mouth, and make a choice as to how much to stifle and how long to keep her hand there.
Of these three, I think there's a sense in which only the third example deserves the name "moral struggle", if it's considered a moral situation at all.
The first example, apart from being trivial, and apart from not involving a moral question on many people's conception of the word (rather, it is a "prudential" issue) -- apart from these things, it's a situation where the subject knows what's right and wrong. There is a struggle of willpower, but no struggle of belief or commitment.
The second example involves a genuine struggle between belief. You could frame this struggle in different ways: for instance, obligation not to lie and duty towards comrades on the one hand vs obligation to obey and utilitarian calculus on the other.
But one thing that I've tried to communicate is that the officer is approaching the question with his brain. It's like a maths problem. Certainly there must be emotions involved, but the officer masters them -- he ponders, he reflects, he thinks rationally about what to do.
What I want to emphasise about the third case is that the mother doesn't know what to do, emotions are very much involved, and it's a struggle that's embodied -- you can imagine her sweating, the thoughts flying around her head, the fear, etc. What it's not is a case of rational calculation and problem-solving pure and simple. The mother is not sitting there saying to herself, "What outcome will lead to the greatest happiness?" nor "I have these beliefs. I must make a decision as to which is the most important."
If she did stay cool and calm, how would we feel about that? Would we call the struggle moral?
Well, I think we might. But we might also feel that moral commitments should be written into your responses, and not simply carried about in your head. We might feel that "moral struggle" should involve genuine conflict of principles, and not simple calculation. We might feel that there has to be that period of aporia and mental churning -- what do I do, what do I do -- that constitutes the "struggle". And we might feel that paradigmatic cases of moral struggle should involve huge struggle, ripping you in two, going to the core of your being.
So, if it's purely intellectual, then it's not moral. And if it's easy, then it's no struggle.
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Comment by Journeywoman
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When I think of moral struggles, I always think of Captain Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager. On a few occasions in that series Janeway discovers a way to get her crew home (they're stranded in the Delta Quadrant, many thousands of light years away from Earth), but it's at the cost of violating Starfleet's Prime Directive (which boils down to not contaminating alien cultures in any way). She always chooses to uphold the Prime Directive, which is what makes her character so impressive..... in so many of those situations, I'm sure a lot of people watching would have chosen to get their people home, if it were up to them (myself included).
As far as I can see, moral struggles are often a struggle between the easy thing to do, and the right thing to do.... (edited to add) - but it's not always clear which is which.