I assume we are still waiting for the technical glitches to go their
gremlin ways and more friends to join the party. Meanwhile, some notes less
directly related to Hicks' article, but on the themes of concern to us ...
excuse the odd formatting here and there, this is a rare case where I
composed off-line and pasted text .....
What defines the moral dimension of discourse or other forms of action and
activity?
Minimally we can define the moral dimension by what is immoral: doing
needless harm to another primarily for the sake of one's own interest. 'To
do no harm' is the first principle of moral conscience, provided we
recognize the two additional conditions. 'Needless harm' reminds us that
sometimes harm must be done to avoid greater harm, or at least that we are
fallible and often unable to find a harmless resolution to the threat of
harm. The reference to 'our own interest' reminds us that immoral acts are
selfish; we also do harm from unselfish motives, and often inadvertently.
Avoiding inadvertent harm imposes a moral imperative to diligently inspect
our planned speech and actions to minimize any needless harm they might do.
Some individuals seem to be morally reckless, and others are 'tone-deaf' to
the moral tenor of their discourse or actions.
Harm done unselfishly may fall in the category of preventing greater harm,
but it is also the source of the greatest harms in human history. There is
nothing like the excuse of great purposes to unleash unbridled cruelty and
evil in the human character. The moral imperative in this case is to be
duly diligent in minimizing harm to others, and even to accept some harm to
oneself in order to lessen the harm that needs to be done to avert a
greater evil.
The 'others' to which we may do harm are not only other persons, but also
our human relationships as such, and our communities, small and large.
The kinds of harm we may do to persons begins with unnecessary unkindness,
proceeds to injury to reputation, to emotional pain, to physical pain, to
deprivation of what is necessary to life and to humanity, and to serious
injury and death. The kinds of harm we may do to human relationships may be
represented, for example, by betrayal of trust. The harm we do to
communities includes 'poisoning the atmosphere' of public discourse.
Individuals have the most power to do harm on our own scale: to other
persons. Fortunately, this power diminishes as we are encompassed in
relationships and communities,.
The networks in which we are embedded as agents also include nonhuman forms
of life, inanimate nature, human tools and artifacts, natural and built
environments on every scale. We can do needless, selfish harm to all these
as well, and in my view such actions are also immoral, and the same moral
imperatives apply.
But just as individuals are not the only victims of immoral speech and
action, so they are not, at the level of activity, the only originators of
evil. A relationship may do harm to one or more of the participants without
either doing any needless, selfish harm to the other, or within the terms
of a relationship each person may be led to act harmfully toward the other.
A social institution may be so structured historically that it harms all
those, or many of those, who participate in it, without there being any
identifiably immoral personal agent. More often, social institutions abet,
encourage, or coerce people to do harm to others as a condition of
institutioal sustainability or as a side-effect of such conditions. (The
notion of social institution here include the nonhuman participants in the
eco-social networks of interaction and dynamic process that sustain the
institution.)
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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