Why Your Moral Outrage Reveals What You Really Believe About Human Nature
Examining Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: Identity and the Good Part 1
This essay continues our exploration of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. In examining his notion of moral reactions and what they entail, it covers most of Chapter One (Quotes from Sources are marked "SS" with page numbers).
Philosophy has a reputation for convoluted explanations, tortuous reasoning, and unnecessarily complex sentences—what some of my family members would call highfalutin writing. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read some ridiculous passage for the umpteenth time and thought, “My god, could you have made this any more difficult for your readers? Did you really have to write it like that?” Take this passage from Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death:
“The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself…In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation of the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.”
I know. It’s ridiculous. What he’s saying here is basically this: if we think of ourselves as split between the physical and mental, the mind and the body, then what we call a person is the relation between the two. For we are not simply one or the other but a combination of them, and they have to relate in some way. But it is only when you begin to self-reflect and self-interpret, when you can see yourself through this relationship, that selfhood arises.
It seems obvious that he could have explained his idea much differently. Why this wordy, borderline nonsense, instead of a straightforward explanation? I have no idea—but in some cases it’s justified, if only in a more limited sense. What I’m referring to here is the use of jargon. To streamline discussion, the medical field has terms like endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, which is a procedure that uses a small camera to examine the upper small intestine, bile ducts, and pancreatic ducts, with contrast dye injected backward into these ducts for imaging. Of course, doctors have to explain this every time they use the phrase with a patient, but imagine if they also had to explain it in every conversation with a fellow doctor. Those conversations among experts, in this case doctors, would go nowhere; they would devolve into constant explanation, and this is why we have jargon.
Let’s take an example of Charles Taylor’s use of jargon in Sources of the Self.
“A moral reaction is an assent to, an affirmation of, a given ontology of the human.” (SS 5)
This sentence isn’t too bad. Yes, it’s a bit wordy but not unnecessarily so, and other than the use of ‘ontology’, it’s quite readable—a far cry from Kierkegaard. I want to draw our attention to this sentence because it’s the key to understanding the rest of the chapter, but to get us in a position to know what ‘ontology’ means, we have to do some groundwork. Lucky for you, I’m here to guide you along the way, and of course, I’m going to get there in a roundabout way, because, well, I fancy myself a philosopher.
So we’ll start with the first part of the sentence. What does Taylor mean by ‘moral reaction’? They concern “...the respect for life, integrity, and well-being, even flourishing, of others. These are the ones we infringe when we kill or maim others, steal their property, strike fear into them and rob them of their peace, or even refrain from helping them when they are in distress.” (SS 4). When we react to injustice, we’re revolted by the wicked treatment of the powerless or feel compassion toward the starving. There seems to be a natural, almost universal drive toward or away from certain behaviors and actions, and these are “so deep that we are tempted to think of them as rooted in instinct.” (SS 4).
People tend to think of moral reactions as gut instincts, visceral reactions like recoiling from loud, sudden noises, or our tendency to yawn when others yawn, or the nauseating effects of alcohol. The connection between these experiences and our reactions is a brute fact. We experience and react—there’s nothing here to argue about whether we should recoil or be nauseated. We do, however, argue about our moral reactions. We argue over who deserves respect and why, and we argue about the obligations we owe others when we attempt to justify our moral reactions. When arguing about why a person deserves to be treated with respect, we might say they’re “...creatures of God and made in his image, or that they are immortal souls, or that they are all imminations of divine fire, or that they are all rational agents and thus have dignity which transcends any other being, or some other such characterization; and that therefore we owe them respect.” (SS 5). We can’t argue about what truly does or doesn’t deserve a nauseous reaction—but we can argue about who does or doesn’t deserve respect, and we do so by making a claim about what kind of beings they are.
We can perhaps see this better by examining the difference between anger and indignation. Anger only rises to indignation when we perceive a grave injustice, when some standard of treatment is not met. When, for instance, a holy man is denied the Eucharist, or an autonomous agent is denied liberty, or when an artist is denied self-expression. Indignation goes beyond anger because it carries with it a sense of righteous outrage, and this outrage is a product of how we understand the human condition. It is only through the claim about what a person is that we can understand why the act denied is so outrageous, why it incites indignation; an autonomous agent ought to be able to choose.
This can be seen again in the special weight we give to protecting children, the care we exhibit in our interactions with them, and the disgust we feel at their being exposed to what they ought not to be. Children are an unrealized potential that deserves protection not just because of what they are now, but because of what they can become, and we have a responsibility to protect them from knowledge, experiences, or choices that would corrupt them or force premature moral complexity on them. Our moral reactions to harms against children involve implicit claims about a child’s innocence, vulnerability, and lack of moral maturity.
Let’s now turn to Taylor’s quote above: “A moral reaction is an assent to, an affirmation of, a given ontology of the human.” Our moral reactions are the emotions we feel in situations that concern the life, liberty, and flourishing of others, and we feel the corresponding emotion because they incorporate an idea of what a human being is, an ontology. Feeling an emotion like indignation is to assent or affirm the underlying ontology that justifies the standard being transgressed, and an ontology is the background idea about what a person is that makes our moral reactions make sense. We feel indignant toward the denial of liberty because we are autonomous beings whose point and purpose in life is to exercise our autonomy, or outraged about the denial of last rites to a faithful woman in our congregation, or revolted at the violation of a child’s innocence.
Ontological accounts justify standards of treatment. We can understand the kind of respect owed, the obligations laid upon us, when we come to see each other as persons of a certain kind—rational agents, or self-defining creatures with a unique view on things, or as children of God. What we are defines how we and others should be treated, and this cuts both ways.
Just as ontologies justify why we ought to respect people, they can also give us reason to disrespect people. One only has to claim that others are spawns of satan, incapable of rational thought, or complete idiots without the powers of expression, and therefore they don’t deserve respect. Indeed, the claim would be that they deserve worse treatment, even death.
This is the process of dehumanization. The dehumanizer has to push a person or persons outside the ontology that justifies respect; have to claim they’re outside the bounds of what a real human, with all our faculties, is. The boundary is pushed through a host of terms: barbarian, savage, vermin, parasite, subhuman, terrorist. Words like these give license for inferior treatment, and they often do so implicitly, which is why those who wish to shrink our ontological boundaries should be forced to explain, explicitly, why it is these particular people deserve to be left on the outside. Or why there should be an outside at all.
If these ontological accounts can justify inhumane treatment, then perhaps we should do without them completely. Perhaps we could prescind from our moral reactions altogether. The argument might go something like this: We should neutralize our moral reactions so we can come to a better, more objective view about our moral obligations and who truly deserves respect. In coming to see what we really are, without emotions which cloud our judgement, we can see more clearly just what is owed to ourselves and others. Besides, all this talk of ontological accounts seems analogous to theories in the natural sciences, “In that they (a) are rather remote from our everyday descriptions by which we deal with people around us and ourselves, and (b) make reference to our conception of the universe and the place we occupy in it.” (SS 7).
It seems obvious, then, that we should argue about our moral obligations like we would argue about a scientific theory. We should start by identifying facts independent of our emotions and reactions, and then try to show that one theory was better than another. “But once we do this, we have lost from view what we’re arguing about.” For ontological accounts justify our moral reactions. “They articulate the claims implicit in our reactions. We can no longer argue about [morality] once we have assumed a neutral stance and try to describe the facts as they are independent of these reactions, as we have done in natural science since the seventeenth century.” (SS 8). Neutralizing our moral reactions requires stepping outside moral deliberation completely, for moral deliberation can only occur within the context of our emotions. Solely through feeling the weight of obligation can we begin to decide if the burden is worth bearing; only by feeling our blood boil with indignation can we begin to see why it is that people deserve respect and dignity. To detach from these emotions is to recede from the moral arena within which these claims are argued about. “No argument can take someone from a neutral stance towards the world, either adopted from the demands of science or fallen into as a consequence of pathology, to insight into moral ontology.” (SS 8).
This brings us back to a point made previously: emotions carry with them judgments about what is significant for us. They point us toward what matters in our lives, meaning our moral reactions are not limited to the respect and obligation we feel owed to others, but also include what makes our own lives meaningful and the dignity we command. Another reason why the neutral stance of avoiding our moral reactions can’t be carried through is that they help form frameworks for making sense of our lives. Frameworks are constituted by fundamental evaluations about what’s worth doing, what would bring us fulfillment. They help us orient ourselves to what matters, to what a meaningful life consists of, to what the good life really is, and our emotions are the windows through which we can access them. Frameworks constitute our identity—to be without a framework would mean “the world loses altogether its spiritual contour, nothing is worth doing, the fear is of a terrifying emptiness, a kind of vertigo, or even a fracturing of our world and body-space.” (SS 18).
A fuller explanation of the nature of frameworks and their relation to identity and selfhood is the subject of our next essay. I only bring this connection up to entice you to begin examining your emotions and what they may say about you. What brings you guilt or shame? Awe or disgust? What standards are being violated when you feel indignation?