In a class concerned with identifying the significance and utility of sophistic and pragmatic philosophical traditions, ideology tends to become a four-letter word, but I’d like to take a moment to caution us against dismissing wholesale the validity of ideology, if only as a kind of sophistic koan.
I got to thinking about this after reading Richard’s call for discussion around the relationship between “Truth” (notice the capital T) and violence in terms of means and ends, in which he identifies “Truth” with ends justifying means and “truth” as means justifying ends.
This calculation becomes problematic when we reframe it in terms of consequentialism and deontology. A consequentialist assigns ethical value to the end result of an action, whereas a deontologist assigns value to the action itself, or the means. Utilitarians, in believing that the ethical action is the one that produces the greatest good and the least amount of evil, are consequentalists, and pragmatists tend to be utilitarians. Why? Certainly not because they hold to any “Truth” but because they can’t possibly claim, as the Kantian deontologist does when stating a categorical imperative, that a particular act should be made universal law. The universe is too messy to permit that kind of certainty. Here, then, the foundationalist deontologist claims “Truth” but assigns ethical value to means over ends, whereas the consequentialist-utilitarian-pragmatist who only holds claims to “truth” assigns greater value to ends.
But then again, the old “ends justifying means” and “means justifying ends” distinction doesn’t quite work for either of these ethical systems. As a deontologist, one has a duty to act in a particular way and is acting ethically if and only if one is acting out of a sense of that ethical duty. For instance, if I save my kid sister from drowning because she’s my kid sister and I love her, then I am not acting ethically. I’m not acting unethically, either. It’s just that the action doesn’t possess ethical value, because I don’t have to fulfill any ethical duty to execute it. But let’s say my kid sister is s spiteful little demon whom I have no affection for, but because I recognize that I must treat every individual as an end in and of his or herself, I must do my duty by honoring that life as an end and saving it from drowning. So the trick to deontological ethics is that we assign ethical value to means only because the ends, i.e. every human life, have intrinsic value. One does not justify the other so much as we each have to take both into account when determining our duty, that in every case another individual could act in the same manner without violating another person’s right to be an end in and of themselves without the need for any further valuation or justification, ethical or otherwise.
Unlike the deontologist, the consequentialist-utilitarian-pragmatist hesitates before assigning any intrinsic value to any one individual, action or outcome. She wants to draw inferences about what should be valued from past experience and the interplay of various present forces and factors, then from a kind of probability theory assign through deduction the best possible provisional value, then act from there in the hopes that it will produce the most good and the least harm. But from an understanding of history she recognizes how complicated this matter really is, and that an action that takes for granted the life value of, say, 300 people in order to save 3 million might set a precedent for others to act accordingly, until those initial 300 expendable people have exponentially grown beyond the original 3 million benefiting from the initial act. In fact, many of those 3 million might later by sacrificed in a later value-assignment trade off based on the same logic. Our consequentialist-utilitarian-pragmatist, then, might find it provisionally expedient to assign value to every human life as the most likely way to act in such a way as to produce the greatest good for the most people and the least bad for the least people. In doing so, she actually values a particular means as a way to a particular end, valuing each individual as an end as a means to executing that means.
Both traditions would find problematic any sort of “truth = x justifies why” equation. And although both appear perfectly capable of arriving at nonviolence as the only justifiable ends or means, we know both consequentialism and deontology as ethical systems have yet to prevent violence in the world. As Cody mentioned, maybe humans are just hardwired for violence in a way that even the most elaborate ethical rewiring, as in the case of the Tibetan monks, isn’t enough to keep us from acting out of a deeper sense of value assignment.
But I don’t think it’s hopeless. I think we need to keep trying on ideologies until one fits. After all, an ideology is merely a system of thought and belief, and I dare anyone to refrain from systematizing their thoughts. But thought patterns are like stereotypes; we need them to function in the world, but we also need to know when they no longer apply in particular situations. The pragmatist is equally skeptical of categorical imperatives and any claims to “the greatest good for the most people,” just as she, like Holmes and Dewey, is skeptical of accepting the value of the individual as intrinsic. The pragmatist knows no ideology will ever fit in all cases, or in any one case forever. The universe is just too messy.
We need walk-in closets of ideologies. We need ideologies for prayer, and ideologies for war. The ideology, then, becomes a site of interrogation and not a final assignment of value or a justification. Therefore, we need safe (nonviolent) spaces into which we can enter to have our various ensembles interrogated. That in order to achieve a safe space like this we already have to value safeness, nonviolence, and know how to achieve it, is a problem with the ideology to which I’m holding in the hopes that it will prove itself out as assigning justifiable value in the future. For now. Until someone proves me wrong.
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