Towards a democratic liberatory ethics
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TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
Abstract:
The
object of this article is threefold. First, to critically assess the
approaches to liberatory ethics particularly those developed in early
modernity which aimed at deriving an ‘objectively’ grounded liberatory
ethics. Second, to explore the reasons why today’s liberatory ethics should
avoid both the Scylla of ‘objective’ ethics as well as the Charybdis of
irrationalist ethics or unbounded moral relativism. Third, to show that a
democratic liberatory ethics, which could only be derived through a process of
democratic rationalism, should necessarily express those moral values which are
intrinsically compatible to the democratic institutions themselves.
1. Introduction: What is liberatory ethics?
A good
starting point in discussing liberatory ethics is to attempt to define it. We
may define liberatory ethics as those approaches to ethics
proposed by radical theorists of the ‘antisystemic’ Left,
which aim to assess, from a radical viewpoint explicitly challenging
the present form of socio-economic organisation based on the market
economy and representative ‘democracy’, the ethics of various societies in
the present/past and suggest the normative ethics
of a future liberatory society, As such, liberatory ethics is a branch of
moral philosophy, an alternative ethics to ‘orthodox’ moral philosophy, i.e.
those approaches to ethics proposed by theorists who, explicitly or implicitly,
take for granted the socio-economic
system and the set of values justifying it.
But, before
we begin our investigation on the various approaches to liberatory ethics it may
be useful to see the main divisions within this field. As it is well known,
the central issue around which all of Western ethics has revolved since
classical Greek times is the one arising out of the debate between ethical
relativism and ethical objectivism. The former was adopted by the Sophists, who
based their philosophy on the principle that goodness and justice are relative to the customs of each
society, if not merely a disguise for the interests of the stronger. On the
other hand, the main proponent of the latter was, Plato, who adopted a stand,
according to which it was possible to know an objective form or idea of
goodness.
A
similar division exists today, not just among ‘orthodox’ moral philosophers,
but also among supporters of liberatory ethics. Thus, the main division in
liberatory ethics is the one between what we may call ‘objective liberatory
ethics’ and the various forms of liberatory ethical relativism. The former is
that type of ‘objectively’ grounded liberatory ethics, which proposes a set
of ethical values on the basis of an assumed social evolution that is supposedly
the outcome of a historical process (Marxist ethics) or, alternatively, of a
process of natural evolution (Kropotkin, Bookchin et al). The latter is the type
of liberatory ethics that has been developed in the aftermath of the serious
crisis of ‘objective’ ethics that was marked by the rise of postmodernism.
It should be
made clear however that I do not
classify under liberatory ethics the ethics proposed by communitarians like
Etzioni,
as well as postmodern ethics, Habermas’ ‘communicative ethics’, Rawls’
theory of justice, and environmental ethics. The reason for this exclusion
is that none of these
approaches
might be characterised, on the basis of the definition given above, as
liberatory ethics, since all of them take for granted the present socio-economic
system. On the other hand, the approach to ethics that is implied by
Castoriadis’s work, as well as the approach developed here, do meet the
criteria set by the above definition of liberatory ethics, as they explicitly
challenge the present socio-economic framework. Furthermore, both these
approaches may be seen as an alternative to the ‘objective’ type of
liberatory ethics that was developed in the past, whilst at the same time they
do not fall to the usual traps of the present era: the unbounded moral
relativism of postmodern ethics and the various forms of irrationalist ethics
—either the latter is based on traditional religions or on the various forms of
rampant spiritualism.
In the next
section of this paper, I will assess the ‘objective’ approaches to
liberatory ethics, with particular reference to the Marxist and the libertarian
approaches. Then, I will examine the present crisis of ‘objective’ ethics
with particular reference to the criticisms raised against it by postmodernists
and Castoriadis. Finally, in the last part, I will attempt to outline a
democratic ethics based on the Inclusive Democracy project (ID).
2. ‘Objective’ approaches to liberatory ethics
‘Objective’ liberatory ethics
emerged in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the orthodox
Enlightenment ethics, which had become the dominant ethics in the West after the
decline of the religion-based ethics of the precapitalist era. The common
characteristic of the approaches that we may classify under this heading is that
they are all based on the hypothesis of some kind of social evolution that is
either determined
by the historical process (Marxists) or the process of natural evolution
(Kropotkin, Bookchin et al). Although they all agree that the content of ethics,
i.e. ethical judgments, change through definite causes in historical
development, they also insist that the only sound basis for analysing the
evolution of ethics can be found in scientific analyses of nature, man, and his
social relations. As both Marxists and anarchists maintain, it is only in the
historical or natural process respectively, that the unity of ethical judgments
and ‘objective/scientific’ analyses can be found.
The Marxist
approach to liberatory ethics:
one-dimensional
ethical relativism
Marx, Engels, and Lenin wrote little that could constitute a
theory
of liberatory ethics, particularly as regards its normative aspects, i.e. the
ethics of a future society. Marxists in general concentrated on what we may call
‘positive ethics’, i.e. the ethics of present/past societies and its
evolution, rather than on the ethics of a future society. It was this fact that
created the impression that Marxism has no ethics
―an impression that was
reinforced by some of Lenin’s statements. Thus, just a few years after the
1917 revolution, Lenin stressed that:
We
repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts… We say
that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class
struggle of the proletariat… We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old
exploiting society and to unite all labouring people around the proletariat,
which is creating a new, communist society. Communist morality is the morality
which serves this struggle, which unites the toilers against all exploitation,
against all small property.
As is clear from the above
statement, Lenin was in fact adopting what some describe as ‘pragmatic
expediency’, i.e. a cynical view of
morality according to which the end justifies the means, at least as far as the
period before the establishment of a communist society is concerned. With
regards to the ethics of the
communist society, the Marxist hints about the form that a future liberatory
society will take (after the transitional stage of a socialist society), pointed
towards a society which differed little, as regards its main elements, from the
kind of society described by utopian socialists, anarcho-communists and others.
In a nutshell, the communist society was described by the motto “From each
according to his/her capacity, to each according to his/her need.” This
implied a post-scarcity society of abundance in which all goods would be
distributed on the basis of need rather than of endeavour.
The ethics of such a society were indirectly described by the
concept of “communist man”, which was shared by all these visions.
This concept embraces qualities like willingness to work without economic
compulsion, ability to place the public welfare ahead of limited individual
interests, respect for the producers and the products of labour, solidarity, the
endeavour to develop one’s talents and capacities to their fullest not for
personal satisfaction or prestige but as a means of advancing the material and
cultural well-being of society as a whole etc.
It
is therefore important to consider the Marxist contribution
to positive ethics since this could provide, even
indirectly, useful clues about their views on liberatory
ethics in general. Particularly so when one takes into
account that the Marxist attempt to convert the liberatory
project into a ‘scientific’ one, i.e. to move from utopian
socialism to ‘scientific’ socialism, was in fact a (false)
attempt to hide their moral choices about future society
under a respectable ‘scientific’ cover
—particularly needed
in the first phase of modernity (nineteenth century) when scientism was
dominant.
Marxists correctly stressed the historical
nature of ethics and rejected any idea of eternal ethics, or immutable
moral laws, emphasising instead that the content of ethics crucially depends on
time, i.e. on the concrete form of society at a particular moment in history
which, in turn, is determined by the prevalent mode of production. Hence, a
feudal ethics, corresponding to the feudal mode of production, preceded the
bourgeois ethics of capitalism, which however gave rise to
proletarian ethics, vividly described by Engels.
As the same author points out, capitalist ethics, like that of all other ruling
classes, necessarily identifies its class interest with universal good whereas,
in fact, all ethical notions and systems have a specific historical origin and
are relative to particular forms of society.
However, the ethical
relativism adopted by Marxists extended only to the time dimension and always in
relation to the economic concept of the mode of production, so that they could
accommodate their ‘scientific’ view of History with their analysis of ethics
and its evolution. Communist ethics, for Marxists, is the highest possible
ethics at the present period of historical development because it represents the
needs and interests of that particular class, which in a capitalist society
—as
Historical Materialism maintains— can alone raise society to a higher level,
through the elimination of capitalist exploitation and the release of the forces
of production from the fetters capitalist relations impose upon them.
The inevitable result
of the one-dimensional ethical relativism adopted by Marxists was a
one-dimensional analysis of ethics, which did not take into account the crucial
significance of non-economic factors in the determination of culture and
—indirectly— of ethics. This was particularly significant with respect to
historical analyses of pre-capitalist societies in which the economic element
was not the dominant element in their organisation and therefore political, or
even pure ideological factors like religion
played a much more important role than economic factors in conditioning social
organisation, culture and ethics. The limited nature of Marxist ethical relativism becomes evident, for instance, when one attempts a
comparison of cultural differences in today’s societies. Thus, Engels’s
stand that ‘in similar or approximately similar stages of economic development
moral theories must of necessity be more or less in agreement’
could hardly explain for example the tremendous variations in ethical rules
concerning e.g. the relations between sexes in countries at similar economic
development but with very different cultures and ethical structures (for
example, Saudi Arabia and Brazil).
One
important element of Marxist ethics, which is common in all types of
‘objective’ ethics, including the anarchist ethics of Kropotkin and
Bookchin, is the idea of ethical Progress i.e. of an evolution towards moral
‘improvement’ (in terms of mutuality, solidarity and self-government ) that
supposedly corresponds to some kind of social or natural evolution. Thus, Engels
refers to the evolution of the idea of equality over time and mentions the
recognition of equal rights to all citizens in ancient Greece (excluding
foreigners, women and slaves), which led to the present formal equality of
political rights for all in bourgeois society and, at the same time,
to the proletarian demand for an inclusive equality that would extend to
the social and economic sphere, i.e. to equality that would imply the very
abolition of classes.
For Marxists, therefore, as Engels put it clearly, ‘the idea of
equality, both in its bourgeois and in its proletarian form, is itself a
historical product, the creation of which required definite historical
conditions which in turn themselves presuppose a long historical development. It
is therefore anything but an eternal truth’.
Similarly, as regards the
future liberatory society, Marxists have no doubt about the role of historical
evolution. Thus, Engels writes that ‘only conscious organisation of social
production …can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the
social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men
in their aspect as species. Historical evolution makes such an organisation
daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will
date a new epoch of history’.
Freedom is
‘necessarily a
product of historical development’ and ‘each step forward in civilization
was a step towards freedom’,
(for which Marxists, like socialists and most anarchists, and unlike
liberals and individualistic libertarians, adopted a positive conception).
However, for Marxists, freedom is crucially constrained by some
material preconditions—a hypothesis which, as I have tried to show elsewhere, practically negates the
realm of freedom. Thus, as Marx stressed referring to the mythical communist
stage:
In
fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined
by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus, in the very nature of
things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production …(until then)
freedom can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally
regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common
control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.
Still, as we shall see next, it is
not only Marxists who see freedom constrained by material preconditions.
Libertarians, although adopting a conception of
equality which is different from the conceptions adopted by liberals and
Marxists, end up with the same
material preconditions for freedom as Marxists do. Not surprisingly, they end up
with a similar approach as regards the grounding of liberatory ethics.
The libertarian approach to
liberatory ethics
When we compare the libertarian notion of equality with respect to the
liberal and the Marxist notions, we notice first that although some libertarians
like Berkman,
not unlike liberals, talk about ‘true equality’ in terms of equal
opportunity, still, their world
view is very different from that of liberals as they do not
ignore the
institutional constraints which make such equality formal and particularly the
market system and private ownership and control of economic resources.
This has important implications with respect to the notions of
‘justice’ and ‘rights’ used by anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin,
which had little to do with the
corresponding liberal notions.
Thus, for anarchists, ‘justice’ meant perfect equality and absence of any
domination, while ‘rights’ meant equal rights, in the sense of perfect
equality, which included not just liberal equality before the law (Bakunin was
particularly clear in distinguishing between justice and legal justice) but also
economic equality, as well as the lack of hierarchical structures.
For modern anarchists like Karl Hess “rights are power, the power of someone
or some group over someone else ... rights are derived from institutions of
power.”
This concurs with the view adopted by the ID project that I developed elsewhere
according to which human rights are mostly rights against the state in the sense
that it is only in forms of social organisation where political and economic
power is concentrated in the hands of elites that many ‘rights’ are invested
with any meaning, whereas in a non-statist type of democracy, which by
definition involves the equal sharing of power, these rights become meaningless.
This implies in turn that, in principle, the issue of human rights should not arise at all in the case
of a non-statist democracy like that of ID, although there still remains the
problem of how certain fundamental individual freedoms are safeguarded against
majority decisions.
Furthermore,
the libertarian vision of equality significantly differed from the Marxist
notion of economic equality. As Bookchin pointed out, libertarians have always
stressed the element of choice (i.e. individual freedom) in their definitions of
equality, something that ‘was to create a radically new point of departure
from the increasingly teleological visions of religious and later
‘scientific’ socialisms’.
For the same author, ‘the anarchist and libertarian utopist emphasis on
individual freedom meant the emancipation of history itself from an ahistorical
preordination and stressed the importance of ethics in influencing choice’.
Likewise, the ID project defines freedom in terms of individual and social
autonomy, something that not only
makes the element of choice an
integral part of the conception of freedom but, even more crucially, does not
make the realm of freedom dependent on some material preconditions which put it
off till the mythical stage of post-scarcity!
Still,
Bookchin, following the anarchist tradition, linked his conception of freedom to
the same material preconditions mentioned by Marxists: the post-scarcity
society. The inevitable outcome is that the difference between the Marxist and
the libertarian approaches is reduced to the issue whether post-scarcity freedom
is the inevitable outcome of social evolution and the historical process
(Marxists) or, instead, of a process of natural evolution. Thus,
Kropotkin, who like Marx was a strong believer in science and progress,
attempted to base his liberatory ethics
not
on the study of the historical process and the ‘laws’ of motion of society
and economy like Marx but on the
study of nature. His strong belief in scientific and moral progress and on a
naturalistic ethics is evident in
extracts like the following ones:
a new,
realistic moral science is the need of the day…that such a science is possible
lies beyond any reasonable doubt. If the study of Nature has yielded the
elements of philosophy which embraces the life of Cosmos, the evolution of human
beings, the laws of physical activity, and the development of society, it must
also be able to give us the rational origin and the sources of the moral
feelings. And it must be able to show us where lie the forces that are able to
elevate the moral feelings to an
always greater height and purity.
Kropotkin
was of course right to contrast science as ‘the source of all true
knowledge’
(although one should better replace ‘science’ with knowledge based on reason
in this quote) as against ‘intuition’, ‘spiritualism’ and the other
forms of irrationalism that are rampant among today’s self-declared
anarchists
—many of whom, embracing Zen, Taoism and other varieties of Eastern
spiritualism, attempt to base liberatory ethics on ‘some mysterious moral
intuition inherent in the human psyche’.
He was wrong however when he tried to
deduce a ‘progressive evolution’ based on what he considered as an
indisputable ‘fact’ ―that mutual aid is the predominant fact of nature―
and then, on the basis of this ‘fact’, to conclude that:
it is already possible to conceive the history of
mankind as the evolution of the ethical factor, as the evolution of an inherent
tendency of man to organise his life on the basis of mutual aid, first within
the tribe, then in the village community and in the republics of the free
cities —these forms of social organisation becoming in turn the bases of
further progress, periods of regression notwithstanding… we certainly find in
the development of Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire, a continual
widening of the conception of mutual support and mutual protection, from the
clan to the tribe, the nation, and finally the international union of nations.
It is
therefore clear that for libertarians like Kropotkin mutual aid is so generally
inherent in social animals that it constitutes “a law of Nature"
and that consequently there is a ‘universal law of organic evolution’
involving the consecutive steps of an ascending series (mutual
aid-justice-morality) that leads men to a continual ethical progress.
Such an evolutionary ethical progress was seen by Kropotkin as
a pre-requisite to the development of an anarcho-communist society, in
place of the dominant capitalist
ethics that was grounded on individualism, self-interest and profit. In this
problematique, the reason why the tendency for justice (i.e. equality)
has not prevailed so far is that the progress towards equality is retarded
(or at times even regressed) by the opposing tendency for domination, for power
over others, which has led to the creation of hierarchical societies that
reinforce this tendency. Whether, therefore,
Kropotkin’s ‘objectively’ grounded ethics was based on positivism, or, as
Brian Morris argues, on an ‘evolutionary holism’,
there is no doubt that Kropotkin did try to create an ‘objective’
liberatory ethics based on Progress and natural evolution—an attempt that was
developed to its logical conclusion, almost a century later, by Murray Bookchin.
Bookchin
(who is undoubtedly the most significant anarchist writer of the second half of
the twentieth century) writing at a time when the ecological crisis created by
the dynamics of the market/growth economy was at full blast, not only developed
a full ecological ethics but also provided a more sophisticated version of an
‘objectively’ grounded ethics, founded on what he called ‘dialectical
naturalism’. Unlike some deep ecologists,
Bookchin does not adopt a teleological view of natural evolution; instead his
approach is explicitly non-teleological. As he has repeatedly stressed:
Let me
emphasize that social ecology, while viewing nature as a ground for an ethics of
freedom and individuation, does not see an inexorable “lawfulness” at work
that derives the human from the nonhuman or society from nature, Social ecology
is not only a philosophy of process, it is also a philosophy of potentiality…
This notion, in any case, is a message of freedom, not of necessity; it speaks
to an immanent striving for realization, not to a predetermined certainty of
completion.
However,
his dialectical naturalism explicitly assumes that the actualisation of
unfolding potentialities for freedom
―within the process of
natural
evolution―
involves a
‘directionality’ towards a democratic ecological society and a moral
economy:
minimally we must assume that there is some kind
of directionality towards ever-greater differentiation or wholeness insofar as
potentiality is realised in its full actuality
Still,
as I attempted to show elsewhere,
the attempt to establish a directionality toward an ecological society depends
on two crucial hypotheses. First,
that there is a directionality in natural change, which yields a clearly
discernible evolutionary
development toward more complex forms of life, greater subjectivity and
self-awareness, growing mutuality –a hypothesis that is supported by
modern developments in biophysics, in terms of the self-organisation theory,
which introduce into biology a type
of 'law of increasing complexity' that is consistent
with dialectical naturalism.
Second, that there is a graded evolutionary continuum between our first nature
and our second (social and cultural) nature, so that 'every social evolution is
virtually an extension of natural evolution into a distinctly
human realm'.
Although, Bookchin stresses that social evolution is profoundly different
from organic evolution, still, social change in his scheme is characterised by
a process of Progress, defined as 'the self-directive activity of History
and Civilisation towards increasing rationality, freedom'.
Thus, 'second nature' , namely, the evolution of society, 'develops both
in continuity with first nature and as its antithesis, until the two are
sublated into 'free nature', or 'Nature' rendered self-conscious, in a rational
and ecological society'.
However, the hypothesis about a rational process of social evolution is not only
undesirable, since it creates unintentional links with heteronomy and it may
easily lead to inadvertent affinities with intrinsically anti-democratic
eco-philosophies, but untenable as well.
To my
mind, the dialectical idea of unfolding objective potentialities, i.e., of real
latent possibilities which may (or may not) be actualised, is not applicable at
all in the case of social change. To talk about any particular being that, in
developing itself, actualises what
at first was only a latent possibility and that this way attains its own truth,
we have to assume that there is a specific possibility in the first place and
not a choice of different possibilities.
Therefore, whereas it is true that an acorn has the potentiality to become an
oak tree and a human embryo to become a fully mature and creative adult, we
cannot extend the analogy to human society and assume that the potentiality of
society to become free 'is equivalent'
to these natural potentialities. The obvious difference between the
potentialities of acorns and human embryos to become oak trees and adults
respectively, and those of society to become free, is that the former represent
single possibilities whereas the latter is just one possibility out of two broad
possibilities: for autonomy or heteronomy.
Therefore, if we take into account that 'the very history of the
Greco-Western world can be viewed as the history of the struggle between
autonomy and heteronomy',
it is obvious that the heteronomous forms of society which have dominated
History cannot just be considered as 'fortuitous events', similar to those that
may not allow an acorn to become an oak tree. So, to assume that the possibility
for autonomy (i.e. a liberatory society) is an
unfolding and therefore rational
potentiality
(in the dialectical sense of the word) and
conversely to assume away the possibility for heteronomy as just a
capacity for irrationality,
may easily be seen as a deliberate objectivization of one possibility at the
expense of the other, in order to conceal our choice for the autonomy tradition
under the cover of dialectical 'objectivity'.
Bookchin
is, of course,
right
in insisting that in developing a democratic ethics we should adopt a
non-hierarchical interpretation of nature.
However, it should not be forgotten that
this
is just one possible form of interpretation of Nature that we consciously
have
chosen because it is compatible with our choice for autonomy in the first
place. This is obviously very different from assuming that a non-hierarchical
interpretation of Nature is an 'objective' one and that, as a consequence, a
democratic society will be the product of a cumulative development, a
rational process of realisation of the potentiality for freedom.
To
my mind, social ecology’s attempt to develop an ‘objective’ ethics not
only undermines its democratic credentials but it also gives an easy target to
statists and irrationalists of various sorts, as it is indicated by the fact
that most attacks against social ecology focus on its philosophy —apart
of course from the case of some ex-Bookchinites who, revealing the undemocratic
nature of their views, also attack its political basis!
Still,
given the crucial role that the ideology of Progress in general and ethical
progress in particular plays in both the Marxist and the libertarian approaches,
it would be worthwhile to assess it in more detail.
The myth of Progress
History
does not justify the idea of Progress towards a free society, in the sense of a
form of social organisation which secures the highest degree of individual and
social autonomy at the political, the economic and the social levels
―what we
call an Inclusive Democracy. Even more so, as we shall see below, History does
not justify the hypothesis of an ethical progress. Therefore, unless we
underplay the significance of the imaginary element in human History and we deny
the fact that History is a creation,
(as Marxists do), we have to conclude that it is impossible to establish any
sort of social evolution towards a particular form of society. In other words,
even if one accepts the hypothesis that self-consciousness and self-reflection,
in very broad terms, are part of
a dialectical unfolding in
Nature and do not just represent a rupture with the past, this does not imply
that there is a similar dialectical unfolding toward a free society, i.e., an
Inclusive Democracy. Such a view is incompatible with historical evidence, which
clearly shows that the historical attempts for a free society have always been
the result of a rupture with the instituted heteronomy (which has been dominant
in the past) rather than a sort of processual 'product'.
Thus, the fact that societies, almost
always and everywhere, have lived in a state of
instituted
heteronomy (namely a state of non-questioning of existing laws,
traditions and beliefs that guarantee the concentration of political and
economic power in the hands of elites), with no trace of an 'evolution' towards
democratic forms of organisation securing individual and social autonomy,
clearly vitiates any hypothesis of a progress towards a free society. In fact,
if there is any continuity in history, it is a continuity in heteronomy
interrupted by usually sudden and temporary leaps into
'autonomous' forms of organisation.
Thus, an autonomous form of
political organisation (direct
democracy) has always been the rare exception
and even rarer have been the cases of
autonomous
forms of economic and social organisation (economic democracy and ‘democracy
in the social realm’). It is only therefore with respect to social change in a
broad sense, which includes the accumulation of scientific and technological
knowledge, as well as improvements with respect to gender relations, human
rights, etc., that we may perhaps speak of some sort of
progress. But, these changes in no way justify the hypothesis of a
directionality towards a free society.
As far as scientific and technological change is concerned, few would
argue today, particularly after the experience of the last century, that there
is some sort of correlation between progress in these fields and the degree of
autonomy achieved in society at the political and economic levels. Furthermore,
several writers have noted the increasing vulnerability of the human species
because of the world-wide reliance on the same technology and the fact that
increasing technological complexity is accompanied by an increasing lack of
flexibility and adaptive capacity. Also, as regards the
alleged improvements in gender, race, ethnic relations, human rights in general,
they hardly justify the hypothesis of progress towards a free society, in the
sense of an autonomous society. The improvements in social relations and
structures have not been matched by a corresponding progress in political and
economic relations and structures towards political and economic democracy.
Although the widening and deepening of women's rights, minorities' rights, etc.,
may have improved the social position of the members of the respective
communities, from the democratic viewpoint, this process has simply led to the
expansion of the ruling political and economic elites to include representatives
of these communities. Furthermore, these improvements do not imply any
significant changes with respect to democracy in the workplace, the education
place etc. Even as regards the human rights record, one may raise serious doubts
about the progress achieved. Torture, for instance, after tapering off
with the Enlightenment in Europe in the seventeenth century to the extent that
it had almost disappeared, came back with a vengeance in the last century, to
the extent that the twentieth century has been called by some ‘the
torturer’s century’.
At the cultural level, as Polanyi
has persuasively shown, the establishment of the market economy implied sweeping
aside traditional cultures and values. This process was accelerated in the
twentieth century with the spreading of the market economy and its offspring the
growth economy all over the world and the inevitable elimination of all
cultures not based on the system of the market economy. Furthermore, economic
globalisation has led to a parallel cultural globalisation,
which not only rules out any progress towards more complexity, but, in
effect, is making culture simpler, with cities becoming more and more alike,
people all over the world listening to the same music, watching the same soap
operas on TV, buying (or aspiring to buy) the same brands of consumer goods,
etc.
Similarly, as regards ethical Progress, i.e., the evolution towards moral
'improvement' (in terms of mutuality, solidarity, etc.), it is indicative that
even social democrats like Habermas and Bobio, who have an obvious
vested political interest in the idea of Progress and social evolution,
also admit that it is not possible to assert the existence of ethical Progress,
despite the acknowledged rapid technological progress of the last hundred years
or so. Thus, Habermas, countering the pessimism of the Frankfurt School about
Progress, argues that the error in the Marxist and other optimistic theories of
social evolution lies in the presumption
that
Progress on the system's level
(which attends to the material reproduction of society) would automatically
entail an improvement on the level of moral-practical conscience.
So, one may argue that the
unmistakable trend, at least in the past two to three centuries, has been
for growing selfishness and growing competition, rather than for enhanced
mutuality and solidarity. Likewise, it is at least doubtful whether there
has been an ethical progress in terms of environmental values.
Furthermore, one may argue that the fact that some enlightened parts of
the world population have moved from religious ethics and the premodern myths
about God to the ‘objective’ ethics of early modernity, and that
today there is a similar movement away from ‘objective’ ethics to various
forms of ethical relativism, does not imply some kind of ethical progress . In
fact, even today, at the threshold of a new millennium, the vast majority of the
world population (including the clear majority in many Western countries—and
predominantly in the USA where most of the population still believes in God,
miracles etc!) have not even made the first step in this supposedly ascending
path, i.e. the move from religious morality to some form of morality based on
‘objective’ ethics. Far from it, in the past quarter of a century,
for reasons that I examined elsewhere
a rapid rise in every form of irrationalism (which includes not simply the move
back to religion but also towards other forms of irrationalism, spiritualism
etc.) became obvious.
Therefore, the issue that arises is whether changes in the historical
forms of social organisation reveal some kind of progress towards a free
society, which would represent the graded actualisation of unfolding human
potentialities for freedom (as Dialectical Naturalism maintains), or whether,
instead, they do not reveal any form of ‘directionality’ or progress, since
the form society takes each time merely represents social creations, which are
conditioned (but not fully determined)
by
time and space constraints, as well as by institutional and cultural factors.
The former view sees History as a
process of Progress, the unfolding
of reason, and assumes that there
is an evolution going on towards
autonomous, or democratic, forms of political, economic and
social organisation
—a view which, to my mind, is not supported by History. The latter
view sees the autonomous society as a
rupture, a break in the historical
continuity that the heteronomous
society has historically established.
Of course, 'autonomy/heteronomy'
is
not an ironclad distinction. Autonomous and heteronomous forms of social
organisation historically interact
with each other, and elements of both may
coexist
within the boundaries of the same society. Still, despite the development
within each tradition and the possible interaction, no
development
between them may be established. For instance, one may support the case that although
constitutional monarchy did express a more sophisticated form of heteronomy than
absolute monarchy and, by the same token, parliamentary ‘democracy’ does
represent the most sophisticated form of oligarchy in History, still, the
differences between the political regimes involved refer to the size and the
composition of the ruling elites, not to the fundamental distinction itself
between ruling elites and the rest of the population —a distinction that
excludes the vast majority of the population from any effective political
decision taking. Similarly, within the alternative autonomy-democratic
tradition, the Parisian Sections of the early 1790s,
where women had an equal share in the distribution of political power, did
express a more complete form of democracy compared to the Athenian assemblies.
Also, the Spanish collectives in
the civil war, which contained a
significant element of economic democracy, did express a more complete form of
autonomy than both the Athenian and the Parisian assemblies.
Thus, although it is true that the break with the heteronomy tradition
takes place in a specific time and place and that therefore History, tradition,
and culture certainly condition the form that
society takes, still,
institutional
and historical factors never
determine when and where this break will take place, or even the specific form
the autonomous organisation of society will take. An autonomous form of social
organisation has always been a creation
expressing
a break with past development. The rare historical cases of relatively free
forms of social organisation came about as a result of the fact that at certain
historical moments, for reasons that only partly refer to the concrete
historical circumstances, social imaginary significations expressing the autonomy project had become hegemonic
and led to a rupture of the dominant social paradigm of heteronomy. That such
ruptures do not fit in any
unfolding dialectical pattern of History, and cannot even be considered
as 'reactions' to heteronomous forms of organisation, becomes obvious by
the fact that repeatedly in History similar, if not identical, institutional and
historical circumstances led to very different forms of social organisation. As
a rule, they led to heteronomous forms of social organisation and only very
exceptionally to attempts for autonomy.
The classical Athenian democracy is a characteristic example. There is no
doubt that the movement from tribal blood ties to civic ties represents a form
of development. The question is whether this development is a development within
the heteronomous tradition or, alternatively,
one between the two traditions. I would argue that although elements of autonomous organisation may be found in tribal societies
(e.g., tribal assemblies), still,
the movement from tribes to cities
represents a development predominantly
within the heteronomous
form of social
organisation and only in one exceptional
case (Athenian democracy) towards a
new form of autonomous
organisation. This fact, in turn,
illustrates the significance of the imaginary or creative element in History,
rather than of any kind of an evolutionary pattern in political organisation.
As Castoriadisputs it:
Democracy and philosophy are not the outcome of natural
or spontaneous tendencies of society and history. They are themselves creations
and they entail a radical break with the previously instituted state of affairs.
Both are aspects of the project of autonomy ... the Greeks (discovered) in the
sixth and fifth centuries that institutions and representations belong to
nomos
and not to physis, that they are human
creations and not “God-given” or “nature-given.”
A view of History based on an evolutionary pattern could not explain why
a similar movement from tribes to cities in many parts of the world,
even in classical Greece itself, has
led, on the one hand, to the
classical Athenian democracy and, on the other, to a
variety of oligarchic, if not despotic, forms of political organisation.
Of course, few would deny that specific ‘objective’ factors (geography,
climate etc) may have played a significant, but never a deterministic, role on
each historical occasion. What is disputable is whether there has been a
long-term pattern of social evolution that
led to classical Athenian democracy, an experiment that was not repeated
elsewhere at the time and which re-emerged
hundreds of years later.
Parliamentary 'democracy' is another example. As I have tried to show
elsewhere,
representative democracy is not a
form of political democracy; as it has developed in the West, it may better be
described as a form of liberal oligarchy. Furthermore, parliamentary democracy
can in no way be seen as a stage in the development of democracy. This is
obvious not only from the fact that direct democracy historically preceded
parliamentary 'democracy' but also because, as the experience of the past two
centuries or so has shown, parliamentary democracy, if it evolves into
something, it evolves into a further
concentration of political power in the hands of
professional politicians' elites, at national or supranational levels.
Social development, in terms of political organisation, is not 'cumulative',
i.e. one leading from various forms of 'democracy' (constitutional
monarchy, parliamentary democracy,
etc.)—which reflect quantitative differences—towards direct democracy that
is clearly a qualitative change.
By the same token, the market economy is neither a relative (even a poor
one) to economic democracy, nor does it
constitute
a kind of stage in the development of economic democracy. Instead, as I tried to
show elsewhere,
today's market economy represents a definite step backwards in comparison to
the socially controlled economies of the medieval free cities.
Furthermore, if the market economy evolves into something it evolves towards
further concentration of economic power and there is no prospect whatsoever
that a market economy will ever lead, through cumulative quantitative
changes, to the qualitative change of economic democracy.
Finally, the various attempts for ‘democracy in the social realm’,
particularly workplace democracy (workers' councils, Soviets), and for democracy
in educational institutions have always been associated with historical
'moments' of insurrection and as
soon as 'order' has been restored, either by the institutionalisation of a
'revolutionary' new regime of heteronomy (e.g., Soviet Union) or the
continuation of the old one, the democratic forms have been replaced by forms of
pseudo-democracy at the workplace, the University, etc.
So, it is not possible to derive any sort of evolutionary process towards
a free society, what we call an Inclusive Democracy. The historical attempts to
establish autonomous forms of political, social and economic democracy,
although, of course, did not appear ab novo,
still, they cannot be fitted in any
grand evolutionary process. This is clearly indicated by the fact that such
attempts took place in specific times and places and as a break with past
development, rather than in several societies at the same stage of development
and as a continuation of it. Therefore,
although the ideals of freedom may have expanded over time, the last 25 years or
so notwithstanding, this expansion has not been matched by a corresponding
evolution towards an autonomous society, in the sense of greater
participation of citizens in decision taking. In fact, the undermining of
communities, which was intensified
by the emergence of the market economy 200 years ago and has been accelerated by
the development of the present internationalised market economy, as well as the growing privacy and self-interest of individuals encouraged by
the consumer society, are clear indications of a trend towards more heteronomous
forms of society rather than the
other way round. Likewise, if we accept the view that I tried to develop on
globalisation,
i.e. that the present internationalised market economy marks
the latest phase of modernity, as well as a new, higher, stage in the
marketisation process, then all the signs are that we have entered a
new period where the ‘two-thirds’ (if not the '40 percent')
societies of the North will be based on sophisticated forms of heteronomy,
whereas the miserable societies of the
South will rely on various forms of brutal authoritarianism, disguised under the
formal parliamentary democracy format. The permanent ‘war’ of the
transnational elite against terrorism,
aims exactly at suppressing any anti-systemic movement towards a liberatory
society and few doubt that the elites will be effective in achieving this aim,
with the decisive help of a mainly reformist Left.
One may therefore raise serious objections with respect to both the
Marxist and libertarian approaches for their adoption
of the idea of dialectical Progress in History, and, implicitly or
explicitly, in ethics . Thus, it should not be forgotten that the adoption of
the idea of Progress implies also
the endorsement of such conclusions as the
Marxist one about the 'progressive' role of colonialism,
or the corresponding anarchist one that the state is a 'socially necessary evil'.
However, if we adopt the view that there is no
unilinear or dialectical process of Progress and a corresponding
evolutionary process towards forms of social organisation grounded on autonomy
and we assume, instead, that the historical attempts for freedom and democracy
represent a break with the past, then, forms of social organisation like
colonialism and the state can be seen as just 'social evils', with nothing
'necessary' about them, either as regards
their
emergence in the past, or the form
that social change has taken since, or will take in the future.
However, if the hypothesis of progress in social change and
of a rational historical process is untenable, then the question arises
whether it is still possible to develop an
'objective' ethics which assesses forms of social organisation as 'good'
or 'bad' on the basis of the degree according to which they represent the
actualisation of the latent potentialities for freedom. The obvious answer,
which is implied by the above analysis, is that any attempt to develop an
‘objective’ ethics on the
assumption of a process of social evolution (based on an ‘objective; reading
of History or natural evolution) is little
more than an effort to mask a conscious choice
among the autonomy and the heteronomy tradition, the democratic and the
non-democratic society.
Still, the fact that a democratic society represents a conscious choice
does not mean that this is
just
an arbitrary choice. This is
clearly implied by the very fact that the autonomy project turns up in history
again and again, particularly in periods of crisis of the heteronomous society.
Furthermore, the fact that heteronomous society has been the dominant form of
social organisation in the past is not indicative of its intrinsic superiority
over an autonomous society. Heteronomous societies have always been created and
maintained through violence (military, economic) and/or indirect forms of
control (religion, ideology, mass media) by privileged elites, which aimed at
the institutionalisation of inequality in the distribution of power..
Finally,
the grounding of a free society on
a conscious choice rather than on some ‘objective’ social or natural
‘laws’ does not deprive us of an ethical criterion to assess the various
forms of social organisation and generally of social behaviour. In fact, the
degree to which a form of social organisation secures an equal distribution of
political, economic and social power is a powerful criterion to assess it. But
this is a criterion chosen by us and not implied by some sort of evolutionary
process. In other words, it is a criterion which is consistent with the view
that I will develop in the last section,
that
the project for a democratic society and its ethics can neither be grounded on
scientism and objectivism nor on Utopianism and irrationalism.
3.
The crisis of ‘objective’ ethics
As I attempted to show elsewhere,
scientism and objectivism in general entered a serious crisis in the
present phase of neoliberal modernity (or as
postmodernists call it the era of postmodernity). This had inevitable
consequences on ethics since the ethics of the early phases of modernity, both
the orthodox and the liberatory ones, was based on objectivism in general and
scientism in particular. Postmodernists were
among the first
who
attempted to theorise the crisis of ‘objective’ ethics, both orthodox and
liberatory. At the same time, Marxist and libertarian writers, under the
influence of the postmodern critique, began developing various hybrids of
‘poststructural Marxism’ and ‘post structural anarchism’ respectively,
which not only adopted the postmodern critique of scientism and objectivism but
also embraced the postmodern rejection of ‘universalism’, consequently
abandoning any idea of a liberatory project aiming to replace the market economy
and representative ‘democracy’ with a
new liberatory society. Similarly, the ecological movement, under the same
postmodernist influences and also some irrational spiritual ones, developed a
kind of ‘environmental ethics’ that was deeply influenced by irrational
spiritualistic tendencies. Thus, most of environmental ethics has been
characterised by irrational pantheistic,
or similar spiritual, approaches to Nature.
However, as I hinted above, postmodernists were not the only ones to
criticise ‘objective’ (orthodox and liberatory) ethics. The other major
source of criticism comes from within the autonomous-democratic tradition. I
will examine next these major critiques.
The postmodern critique of
‘objective’ ethics
Although there are various currents within the postmodernist camp, (which
I have considered in detail elsewhere),
I will attempt here to summarise the main elements of what has come to be
associated with the notion of the postmodern approach to morality —a morality
that has often been celebrated as
the ‘demise of the ethical’, the substitution of aesthetics for ethics and
the consequent ‘ultimate emancipation’.
The main
contradiction of modern society is seen by many postmodernists to be the one
between individual autonomy, (which they see as the free will, that was
recognised by the Enlightenment to rational individuals, and had been denied by religious morality)
and social heteronomy, i.e. the heteronomy of what they call ‘rational
management’,
by which
they mean the ‘injection’ into human conduct, through legislation etc, of a
set of rules so conceived that the individuals, while exercising their free will
and making their choices, would be likely to choose what is right and proper
over what is wrong and evil.
However, as Zygmunt Bauman stresses,
the
defining feature of modernity, as seen by postmodernists, was not the
contradiction itself but the fact
that this aporia (i.e. a contradiction
that cannot be overcome , one that results in a conflict that cannot be
resolved) was played down by modernists as
‘a conflict not-yet-resolved-but-in-principle-resolvable; as a temporary
nuisance, a residual imperfection on the road to perfection, a relic of unreason
on the way to the rule of reason’.
Thus, to resolve this contradiction, both orthodox and antisystemic moral
philosophers of the early phases of modernity searched for absolutes, universals
and foundations in theory. However, whereas orthodox ethics found their way into
legislation, with Western legislators attempting to impose universal moral
codes, liberatory ethics suggested alternative forms of social organisation
within which the conflict was supposed to be overcome. It is therefore clear
that the modern solution was based on the assumption that it is possible to
create a non-ambivalent,
non-contradictory ethical code, so that universal reason could replace
universal religious belief in guiding individual and collective morality. On the
other hand, postmodernists are not interested at all in eliminating the
contradiction between individual autonomy and social heteronomy. For them, every
kind of liberatory project is rejectable because it is by necessity
universalist.Instead, postmodernists
focus their attention in criticising the modernist project, casting doubt on its
main premises.
Thus, first, they reject any idea of moral certainty based on some sort
of ‘objective’ ethics. In their view, humans are morally ambivalent, as
there is neither a good human nature nor a bad one. Therefore, no logically
coherent ethical code can ‘fit’ the essentially ambivalent condition of
morality:
we
know now what we did not know then, when we embarked on this journey of
exploration: that a non-aporetic, non-ambivalent morality, an ethics that is
universal and objectively founded, is a practical impossibility; perhaps also an
oxymoron, a contradiction in terms
(…)
What follows is that moral conduct cannot be guaranteed; not by better designed contexts for human action, nor by
better formed motives of human action. We need to learn how to live without such
guarantees and with the awareness that guarantees will never be offered
—that a
perfect society, as
well as a perfect
human being, is not a viable
prospect, while attempts
to
prove
the contrary result in
more
cruelty than humanity, and certainly less morality.
Next, postmodernists assume that morality is much more autonomous from
society than modernists would concede. Bauman, for instance, asserts that
‘before society, its law-makers and its philosophers come down to spelling out
its ethical principles, there are beings who have been moral without the
constraint (or is it
luxury?) of codified goodness’.
However, even if one assumes a relative autonomy of morality (and culture
in general) with respect to the form of social organisation, the question still
remains whether the morality of socialized human beings (I do not mean the
morality which is based exclusively on kinship and reciprocity that has also
been observed in the animal world) can be reasonably assumed as not being
heavily conditioned by society, its values, culture and dominant social
paradigm. If therefore we assume a strong association between individual
morality and social morality, given that most people are socialised individuals,
the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ type of argument adopted by postmodernists is invalid.
This does not mean of course that all members of society adapt their
moral behaviour to society’s moral codes but it certainly means that most
of its members do conform to such codes
—unless of course a serious social
crisis, which also involves a morality crisis, is in progress.
Postmodernists
then proceed to criticise even the very foundation of the modernist project:
rationalism itself. Bauman
for instance celebrates the fact that
the
mistrust of human spontaneity, of drives, impulses and inclinations resistant to
prediction and rational justification, has been all but replaced by the mistrust
of unemotional, calculating reason. Dignity has been returned to emotions;
legitimacy to the ‘inexplicable’, nay irrational, sympathies and loyalties which cannot ‘explain
themselves’ in terms of their usefulness and purpose…We learn again to
respect ambiguity, to feel regard for human emotions, to appreciate actions
without purpose and calculable rewards. We accept that not all actions, and
particularly not all among the most important of actions, need to justify and
explain themselves to be worthy of our esteem…what we are learning, and
learning the hard way, is that it is
the personal morality that makes ethical negotiation and consensus possible, not
the other way round
It seems therefore clear that postmodernists, by not making a clear
distinction between the private and the public realms on the matter, not only
contradict the autonomous nature of the pluralism they preach, but
also confuse
rationality in
the private realm with rationality in the public realm.
Thus, if society legitimises the ‘inexplicable nay
irrational’ and at the same time does not rule out any collective
decision-taking based on such premises, it is in fact legitimising heteronomy,
given that the irrational ‘explanations’ of the inexplicable have always
been based on some form of externally given ‘truth’. In other words, a
society in which collective decision-taking and consensus is based on personal
morality, which, in turn, may well be founded on irrational premises (i.e. the
premises that are usually prescribed by religious or spiritualist ‘truths’
and moral codes), may well be an heteronomous society and therefore the
pluralism characterising such a society is also of a heteronomous nature. No
wonder that the first sperms of democratic societies, like the Athenian
democracy, were clearly distinguishing between the public and the private realms
and while they ostracised irrationalism from the public realm, where all
deliberations had to be carried out in terms of rational argument, they even
celebrated acts that had only
‘passions’ and spontaneous inclinations for their cause in the private
realm.
Thus, although one may agree that non-rational, or even irrational,
behaviour could not (and, in a sense, perhaps should not) be ostracised from the
private realm, It is clear that in an autonomous democratic society democratic
rationalism is the only way to derive the moral code that should guide
social morality. But, it is obvious that this is not the stance adopted by those
postmodernists who declare that:
reason
cannot help the moral self without depriving the self of what makes the self
moral: that unfounded, non-rational, un-arguable, no-excuses-given and
non-calculable urge to stretch towards the other, to caress, to be for, to live
for, happen what may. Reason is about making correct decisions, while moral
responsibility precedes all thinking about decisions as it does not, and cannot
care about any logic which would allow the approval of an action as correct.
Yet, as I mentioned above, it is the postmodernist rejection of
universalism in general and moral universalism in particular, which
characterises their problematique and makes it particularly objectionable from a
liberatory viewpoint. For them, morality is
not
universalisable . Still, this
does not imply some sort of simplistic moral relativism, in the sense that
morality is merely relative to time and place. In fact, what is rejected is the
substitution of heteronomous, enforced-from-outside, ethical rules for the
autonomous responsibility of the moral self, i.e. the replacement of local
distortions
in the name of one all-human ethics.
Postmodernists, not only see modern societies as making the false
assumption that they can be the ultimate authors and the sole trustworthy
guardians of morality, but also accuse them for practising ‘moral
parochialism’ under the mask of promoting universal ethics, which is nothing
else than a power-assisted ethical code. In fact, for postmodernists, it is the
supposedly universal moral codes that are plagued with a parochial
relativism—something that could lead to the overcoming of variety through the
extension of the scope and the reach of a given institutional power, political
or cultural, i.e. to a yet more thorough substitution of ethics for morality,
heteronomy for autonomy.
The ideology of Progress, as postmodernists rightly point out, was the
ideology that modern states used in order to justify this ‘moral
parochialism’, or some would call cultural imperialism.
Thus, any significant variations of the moral codes in the rest of the
world versus the ‘advanced’ countries were attributed to backwardness and it
was thought that it was simply a matter of time before the moral values of the
latter (who also happened to be the victors that have always been writing
History) were universalised. Otherness (all man—made otherness, including the
ethical one) was temporalized in a way
characteristic of the idea of progress.
In fact, the postmodernist rejection of the modernist ideology of progress in
general and moral progress in particular is one of the salient features of
postmodern analysis with which few would disagree today. Bauman, for instance,
refers to two devastating examples from recent History to dismiss the myth of
progress. In America, he observes, the shame of Vietnam boosted high-tech
warfare, much more than it did moral self-scrutiny, so that with electronic
surveillance and smart missiles, people can now be killed before they have a
chance to respond. Similarly, in Palestine, ‘the memories of the Holocaust
firm the hand of the Israeli occupiers of the Arab lands: mass deportations,
roundings-up, hostage-taking and concentration camps are well-remembered as
cost-effective’. The inescapable
conclusion he derives is that:
No
victory over inhumanity seems to have made the world safer for humanity. Moral
triumphs, apparently, do not accumulate; in spite of the narratives of progress,
movement is not linear
—yesterday’s
gains are not reinvested, nor are the bonuses once awarded irreversible. Ever
anew, with each shift in the balance of power, the spectre of inhumanity returns
from its exile. Moral shocks,
however devastating they might have seemed at the time, gradually lose their
grip until they are forgotten. All their long history notwithstanding, moral
choices seem always to start from square one. No wonder there are powerful
reasons to doubt the reality of moral progress, and in particular the moral
progress of the kind which modernity claims to promote.
However, postmodernists do not simply criticise the ideology of progress
but proceed to criticise the universalist projects of modernity and the very
idea of the citizen and the polis. Thus, modernity is accused for
attempting to ‘substitute the citizen (the
person with only such attributes as have been assigned by the laws of the single
and uncontested authority acting on behalf of the unified and sovereign state)
for the motley collection of parishioners, kinsmen and other locals’.
At the same time, it is argued that ‘the postulate of universality… opposes
the very Aristotelian principle of the polity as the ultimate fount and the
guardian of humanity’.
Still, what is not made clear is that it is only the statist form of
democracy, i.e. representative ‘democracy’ together with the system of the
market economy, which are indeed creating a clear divide between democracy and
society, economy and society, community and society, citizens and
individuals.Thus, a liberatory project like the ID project
―which is based on
the postulate that social autonomy is inseparable from individual autonomy―, is
nothing else than a demand for the reintegration of democracy and society, of
economy and society, of community and society, of citizens and individuals. But
such a reintegration is impossible outside a universalist liberatory project.
Particularly so if one takes into account the fact
that representative ‘democracy’ and the market economy represent the
materialisation of universalist projects, which today also have become
universalised. It is clear that it is only through an alternative universalist
project that the present
institutions, which generate the above divides, could be abolished rather than
through the particularised projects proposed by postmodernists. This is
because such an endeavour requires the development of a universalist
antisystemic consciousness, which could never be created by the political
alliances between the fractionalised social movements that postmodernists
support (feminists, Greens, identity movements etc). Needless to add that the
argument that ‘any polis separates,
sets apart, ‘particularizes’ its members from members of other communities,
as much as it unites them and makes alike inside its own boundaries’,
is obviously invalid within the problematic of a confederal ID.
Yet, the question remains: is there a universal morality? Or is it just
an illusion since there are several conceptions of universal morality and
therefore which one of them prevails at any moment of time is relative to
the strength of the powers that claim and hold the right to articulate it, as
postmodernists argue?
Few would doubt, of course, that there are more than one
moralities and surely the recognition of ethical relativism, as I
attempted to show above, is not a postmodernist invention. In other words, there is
little controversy nowadays on the fact that each society, defined in specific
time and place, has its own moral code, which is not simply determined by the
mode of production that is dominant in its social formation. The content of the
moral code is crucially conditioned by the interdependence between the
society’s socio-economic institutions in relation to its culture and the
dominant social paradigm. However, to the extent that a particular type of
society is universalised (for instance, feudal European Christian society, or
consumerist-individualistic USA) the dominant moral code of this type of society
is inevitably universalised as
well.
In this problematique,
the
postmodern claim that present society is not characterised by a universal
morality is false. This is because the universalisation of representative
‘democracy’ and the market economy has inevitably been followed by a
corresponding universalisation of the culture and the dominant social paradigm
which are compatible with these institutions. In fact, the
process of ‘globalisation’, which has characterised neoliberal
modernity, has been instrumental in this universalisation process. In this context,
the moral pluralism that postmodernists celebrate –taking for granted
the present socio-economic system
—is in fact a pseudo-pluralism, given that all
societies which have adopted a market economy and representative ‘democracy’
show fundamental similarities as regards their core values: individualism, consumer culture, heteronomous morality (either it is based on religion or
some other kind of spiritualism etc). In other words, cultural differences between
societies are much more influenced today by the differences in peripheral values
and mainly the differences in
heteronomous morality, i.e. the external moral codes imposed by religious and
irrational beliefs in general, which particularly flourish in the present neoliberal era of modernity.
Therefore, an autonomous liberatory society
should be expected to create its own moral
code, with hard core values which will inevitably be consistent with its
fundamental institutions (as I will try to show in the last section) and
peripheral values that may vary from society to society. In case such a society
is universalised then a new universal morality will be created, which will neither be
power-assisted nor
would involve an ‘imposed heteronomy by the power holders’, as it used to be
the case in all heteronomous societies in the past. To my mind, it is only a
world-wide genuinely democratic society, based on
universal
core values expressing the uncompromising demand for individual and
social autonomy and a variety of peripheral values celebrating difference, which
could promise peaceful and liberatory
coexistence.
Of course, neither reason nor any institutional framework could guarantee
individual and social autonomy and the morality which is compatible with it.
Nobody could doubt however that in such a society the postmodernist claim,
according to which in modern society ‘in order to act morally the person must
first be disowned of autonomy’, will be thrown to the
dustbin of History.
The Castoriadian critique of the
separation of ethics from politics
Castoriadis has been accused by, among others, Agnes Heller
as not interested in ethics. In fact, however, his critique of ‘objective’
ethics, both orthodox and liberatory, is much more fundamental than the
postmodernist critique, notwithstanding the fact that most of the postmodernist
criticisms I mentioned above (critique of the ideology of progress, critique of
objectivism and of certainties in the analysis of social phenomena or moral
behaviour etc) had been explored by Castoriadis before the rise of postmodernism
as a significant movement. For Castoriadis, the problem is not simply the rise
of ‘objective’ ethics which he considers as just an aspect of what he calls
the ‘unitary ontology’ that has always plagued political philosophy. For
him, the problem is heteronomy:
The
operative postulate that there is a total and “rational” (and therefore
“meaningful”) order in the world, along with the necessary implication that
there is an order of human affairs linked to the order of the world —what one
could call unitary ontology— has plagued political philosophy from Plato
through modern liberalism and Marxism. The postulate conceals the fundamental
fact that human history is creation —without which there would be no genuine
question of judging and choosing, either “objectively” or
“subjectively.” By the same token, it conceals or eliminates the question of responsibility. Unitary
ontology, in whatever disguise, is essentially linked to heteronomy.
The crucial
issuefor
Castoriadis is the separation between ethics and politics, between the inner man
and the public man, which lies at the basis of Western civilisation.
Of course, what he rejects is not
the separation between the private and the public spheres (in fact he proposes
the maximum degree of autonomy of the private from the public) but the
opposition between them that heteronomous societies create. As he rightly
stresses, ‘in
the “true” Greek world (i.e., until the end of the fifth century B.C.), no
opposition existed in principle between the “private” and “public”
spheres (though they were clearly distinguished), nor did any opposition exist
between ethics and politics’.
Thus, if we follow Castoriadis in distinguishing between the three main realms
as regards the relations of individuals among
themselves and their institutions
—i.e. the private sphere
(oikos),
the public