Howard Richards

October 15, 2004 

 

In 1795 Immanuel Kant predicted that the day would come when the ever-increasing horrors of war would demonstrate the necessity to establish peace. 

Surely the day Kant predicted has now arrived. 

Kant asserted that the necessity to establish peace would be driven home by horror,

The possibility of establishing peace was guaranteed by ethics. 

Peace could be established by a series of collective decisions to follow the moral law 
-- moral law which Kant believed was written into the essence of all rational beings 
and also written into the legal principles governing a market economy The principles of property rights, contract rights, and freedom,  (which are the only principles he cites in his Foundations of Metaphysics of Morals as examples of strict categorical imperatives)  

Kant is a major progenitor of today’s liberal-institutional school of thought in international relations and his thought is a direct ancestor of the democratic peace theories which have influenced the Clinton and both Bush administrations 

Echoes of 18th century ideals like his are also heard in today’s public statements of the World Trade Organization, the WTO, which describes its trade liberalization agenda as an engine of peace which promotes respect for all persons 

Unfortunately, in the part of his philosophy that specified which normative principles would establish peace, Kant was mistaken. 

Global peace cannot be built with a philosophy that regards strict respect for property rights as a categorical imperative. 

Such a philosophy cements into place the division of the world into two worlds, the world of the haves and the world of the have-nots 

But the standard reasons for which Kantian and all liberal approaches to peacebuilding have been criticized by people who call themselves political realists, for example by Hans Morgenthau, do not assert that Kant specified inadequate normative principles. 

Instead they deny the causal efficacy of ethics in general, any ethics, and assert the causal efficacy of something they say is not ethics, but rather something else, often called "power." 

The theory of ethical construction offers a more believable account of how peace, which all agree is necessary, can become possible 

It is more believable than Kant because it is more firmly grounded in the ways ethics actually functions in human life 

It is more believable than so-called political realism because it is more firmly grounded in the causal powers social scientists and psychologists actually find to be operative in society  

And it offers a theory-based methodology for building sustainable peace and justice  

The practices of ethical construction are guided by the premise that ethics, or norms, are what society is made of. 

Consequently improving society is improving norms. Or, equivalently, if one prefers an idiom that sounds more like social science one can express the same thought by saying,  "Social structures are cultural structures, and cultural structures are normative." 

Once established this premise ethical construction is by definition the way to peace  

Because improving ethics and improving society, are construed to be the same. 

Or, equivalently, if one prefers an idiom that sounds more like social science, the conclusion that peace building is cultural action in the sense Paulo Freire gave the term. 

Or moral and intellectual reform in the sense Antonio Gramsci gave the term, or social reconstruction in the sense John Dewey gave the term is a conclusion that follows naturally from a critical realist ontology and epistemology:  

Let me now put on a postmodern hat, and take several imaginary steps backward the better to survey my position from outside myself and the better to deconstruct my own discourse. 

Let us put in quotation marks some key terms: 

"premises" 

"ethics" and 

"society." 

The "premise" that ethics is society is not a premise like Euclid’s postulate that all right angles are equal to one another, that is to say, it does not state an abstract fact supposed to be always necessarily true.  

It is not a premise that starts a chain of reasoning with a principle for constructing further links of the chain, as Peano premised that for every natural number n there was a successor number n + 1. 

It is not a premise in the sense that it states a fact from which a conclusion follows, as for example from the premise that in Australia there are black swans it follows that the statement "All swans are white" is false, 

It is not a premise derived from the common meanings of words, as one might say the common meanings of words are premises of Bertrand Russell’s assertion that it is necessarily true that that a bachelor is an unmarried male, 

"Ethics is society" is a premise in the sense that I begin my theory by saying something first; I begin by saying, that "ethics, or norms, are what society is made of"  

I claim that this speech act, uttering this phrase, will contribute to building a world of sustainable peace and justice. I choose to talk this way, and I recommend that you talk this way as well. 

The idea of "speech act" was developed by John Searle from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s similar notion of "language game." 

Speech acts and the playing of language games can be regarded, as Wittgenstein said, as events in the natural history of the human species.  

My claim is that when people choose to talk of social and economic issues as issues about how best to promote and improve ethical norms, those sorts of conversations are on the whole desirable events in the natural history of the species. 

This premise claims to have helpful consequences; it does not claim to be true.  

However one reason it is helpful is that it brings into focus a great number of facts which are true. 

Having discussed the key word "premise," I now turn to the key words "ethics," and "society,"  

"Ethics" and "society" are words with complex histories and many synonyms. 

Among the synonyms I include quasi-synonyms that do not exactly match. They overlap. They do much of the same work 

Of the two words "ethics" is by far the oldest.. 

Aristotle treated as subdivisions of ethics both politics and education. Economics was a footnote to politics, a subdivision of a subdivision of ethics. 

Aristotle was not unusual among western thinkers, and western thinkers were not in this respect different from Confucius or many other eastern thinkers, for whom the key question was over and over again , "What is the right thing to do?" 

We have it on the authority of Raymond Williams that the word "society"was not invented until the 18th century. We have it on the authority of Michel Foucault that this 18th century discourse created the entity that it was talking about, namely society. 

That recently invented entity, society, is the object of study of social science. 

Once invented, and once made an object of study by professional explainers, society had to be explained.  

If we read classic and contemporary texts in social science, we will find that society is explained by such terms as "norms," "relations of production," relations" generally, "customs," "habitus," "rules," "positions," "functional and dysfunctional," "conventions," "stories," "institutions," "social structures," "rituals," "roles," and "practices."  

In other words, social science explains society with by and as ethics.  

What the items in the list of synonyms I have just read have in common is that they all draw on notions used to guide behavior. One good ancient name for such notions is "ethics."  

I am not saying that all of the synonymous terms, such as "norms" and "institutions" should go out of circulation, and that henceforth social scientists should only use the term "ethics," 

Nonetheless, whatever reasons others may have for talking the ways they do, I am encouraged to talk as I do by the near-equivalence of my terminology to the standard vocabularies of social science.  

 I am saying that making up norms and rules to guide social life is a natural activity of humans. Complaining when somebody done somebody wrong; and ranting and criticizing; and praising and blaming; and participating in endless conversations about rights and wrongs; are also natural activities of the human species as building nests is a natural activity of many bird species 

Social life organized by cultural norms began at the same time humanity began. It began hundreds of thousands of years ago in that dark backward abysm of time when non-human primates first crossed the imaginary line that marked the boundary between non-human and human, as Nancy Tanner has shown in her book On Becoming Human, 

As Tanner points out, the human body, its larynx, its cerebral cortex, its hormones, its tongue, has evolved as the body of a cultural animal.  

 I am agreeing with Clifford Geertz that culture is the ecological niche of the human species, and adding that culture is centrally about norms. 

But let us not forget that other kind of social scientist, the so-called political realist, who explains social phenomena by means of something which is explicitly not ethics, not a set of norms, something often called "power." 

Leo Tolstoy in some ways was one of them. Tolstoy wrote that the upper classes only imagine that their privileges derive from the science of jurisprudence and the laws of economics. In fact, as Paulo Freire, Betty Reardon, and others besides Tolstoy have also noted, our privileges rest on violence, on the war system and on its domestic equivalents. 

Half true. The other half of the truth is that the science of jurisprudence and the laws of economics are themselves at least as dysfunctional as war, if we define a functional system as Buckminster Fuller did, as one that works for one hundred percent of humanity without ecological damage.  

Ethical construction is concerned with both halves of the problem Tolstoy described: both with replacing violence with nonviolence, and with transforming law and economics so that they follow every day more and more the principle of agape, that is to say, translating the Greek, the principle of welcome, the principle of inclusion, the principle of sisterhood and brotherhood of all. 

Ethical construction is a critical realism. Realist because it grounds social science firmly in the natural sciences. Critical because it does not accept social reality as it is, but instead deconstructs it and reconstructs it. 

A helpful consequence is that it does not reject the many constructed social realities that history and anthropology describe. Ethical construction values and needs the positive aspects of the many religions, myths, rituals, musical cultures, ethnic traditions, psychologies, and pedagogies that the human species has invented 

Given the historical record, we have no reason to be optimistic about human nature. We need all the cultural resources we can get in order to transform an animal with strong anti-social tendencies into a pro-social animal 

Rene Descartes was wrong to say that the endless debates of ancient philosophers about virtue, debates which never came to any generally agreed conclusion, should be terminated, and replaced by sciences built on foundations of clear and distinct ideas 

On the contrary, those endless dialogues about rights and wrongs that Descartes disparaged are inseparable from the ecological niche of the species. 

The preservation and further construction of spiritual communities constantly renegotiating ethical conventions are natural human activities. 

Natural like nest-building.

In saying that we cannot afford to lose any cultural resources from any tradition, I am not saying different traditions mean the same things. I am saying they often do the same things.  

When a Christian says agape, and a Comtean positivist says Humanity, and a Marxist says society producing for itself, and an economist says revealed preference, and a Muslim says that God is sovereign on the Day of Judgment, and a Gandhian says ahimsa we do not all mean the same thing.  

Nevertheless, diverse speech acts performed in diverse cultures may have the same desirable consequences. Players of different language games may do the same thing,, even though they do not mean the same thing.  

They may feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, provide housing for the homeless, free the prisoners, cheer up people who are depressed, resolve conflicts, sacralize cooperative relationships, welcome the newborn into the world, and honor the dead with a decent burial. 

Another helpful consequence--perhaps the most helpful consequence--of talking in terms of ethical construction is that it is an umbrella vocabulary applying equally to modern and non-modern culture. It denies Max Weber’s distinction which defined modern Westerners as rational, and everyone else as customary. 

Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the postmodern tribe generally have arrived for their own reasons and in their own ways at a similar result. They have deconstructed the Enlightenment. 

Thanks to the postmodernists it is no longer intellectually respectable to say that whereas earlier people and non-Western people were and are superstitious, embracing belief-systems with no rational grounds, modern Western liberals are different.  

 
Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century was a precursor of the postmodernists in that he too shattered the pretension of modernity to have found, at last, a rational basis for ethics. Nietzsche took great pleasure in driving home the point that God was dead, and as a consequence Man, and also Woman, were dead too.  

If nothing is sacred, then respect for the dignity of every person is not sacred.  

Many are appalled by Nietzsche and by the ethical relativism of the post-modernists. Many cling to Enlightenment humanism for the same reasons Richard Rorty clings to it, even though he himself has demonstrated logically that it has no rational basis. That is to say, they cling to it from fear that if humanity lost its faith in 18th century humanistic ideals, however groundless that faith might be, it could only revert to something worse.  

Ethical construction proposes an alternative that is not worse but better, and which does have rational grounds. 

Its conclusion is the opposite of postmodernism: Human dignity is sacred, and so are many other ideals. Plain scientific research being done every day, without any need for a special philosophical interpretation of science, shows that there are many religions with many conceptions and experiences of God and the sacred. Everything known about homo sapiens shows it to be an ethical species. Norms and belief-systems that embed norms in cosmologies are part and parcel of normal human life.  

The many volumes of published scientific research on human ethical development form a mountain of evidence for the proposition that humanity is an ethical species. Among the best-known studies are Jean Piaget’s research on children playing marbles, and on children forming clubs with rules. It appears from cross-cultural studies that all over the world, for reasons genetically hard-wired , normal children at a certain age begin to form social groups with formal rules.  

The majority of adults practice what Lawrence Kohlberg and others call a conventional morality. The conventions vary from place to place, and from age to age.  

Kohlberg described late 20th century psychology of moral development as a technology which made it possible to implement the early 20th century philosophy of John Dewey. According to Dewey, it is precisely the task of social reconstruction to improve the ethical conventions that govern social life.  

Another helpful consequence of ethical construction talk is that it offers an alternative to the rational social choice theories of neo-liberal ideology. Kenneth Arrow, Gary Becker, Robert Nozick and many others think that modernity, by means of free markets and democratic elections, has replaced the world’s ancient civilizations, based on custom and convention, with a new and better modern form of life, in which the ethical criterion justifying all legitimate value judgments is free choice.  

Ethical construction opens the way to a higher form of pragmatism in which there are more social choices than the rational choice theorists dream of. Namely there are social choices about the normative framework rational choice theory, and mainstream economics generally, presuppose. Namely, the normative framework of property rights, markets, and contracts. 

Pragmatism has a bad name because it is used as a euphemism for surrendering to economic power. Economic power is power because it decides whether economic activity stops or goes. No investment, no go. Persuading investors to say yes may require delivering to business a skilled and docile labor force that works for low pay. Attracting investment may also require relaxing environmental standards, tax holidays, and public subsidies to guarantee private profits, privatizing water supplies to make water a source of profit, and allowing DNA patterns to be patented. Downplaying social ideals while taking whatever measures are required to please investors has often been called pragmatism.  

A higher form of pragmatism does not surrender to economic power, nor to patriarchy nor to compulsory heterosexuality nor to any other form of socially constituted power. A higher form of pragmatism thinks outside the box.  

The justice that will make peace possible is not a rigid justice that makes the distinction between haves and have-nots universal and eternal,. It is a flexible justice that brings communities together to solve the problems of here and now. It is, as Leibniz said, the love of the wise. In Martin Luther King’s phrase, derived from his doctoral research on Paul Tillich, it is a justice that is love in action.  

It is a justice which seeks to include everybody in the benefits of property ownership and in the benefits of medical and other advanced technologies. It is, as St. Thomas Aquinas said a constant will. It is a constant will to continually improve institutions so that they function better and better to meet human needs and to preserve the biosphere 

A higher pragmatism is a more scientific pragmatism, because in its passion for doing whatever works to end poverty and oppression, it discards certain thoroughly unscientific myths of the Enlightenment . It discards, for example, the myth that there was an initial social contract which set in stone the rights of property owners. A higher pragmatism says yes, property can be redefined and redistributed; yes, debts can be cancelled; yes the performance of firms can be socially and not just financially audited; yes, everyone who is born on the planet can be included as a full participant in the ongoing process of renegotiating the rules people play the game of life by. 

Yes, everybody can be both a beneficiary and a trustee of the earth, of the capital assets accumulated in the course of history, and of humanity’s accumulated knowledge. 

The world of social democracy, the world that implements ancient ideals of cooperation and sharing under modern industrial conditions, is the world where peace is possible. 

It is not a world without conflict, but it is a world without desperation. Therefore it is a world where conflicts can be resolved nonviolently or with minimal violence.  

It is not a world where justice has been defined once and for all, but it is a world where everybody can participate in the never-ending renegotiation of the rules of justice.  

The moral law that makes peace possible is not located in pure reason where Kant thought it was located.  

It is located in a global mosaic of diverse cultures, each composed of many sets of more or less functional and more or less dysfunctional language games. Facilitating participatory processes that modify these many social realities to make them work better is the task of ethical construction.