AFFILIATION AND MORALITY
by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Global Politician, NY
Feb 23 2007
The Anglo-Saxon members of the motley "Coalition of the Willing" were
proud of their aircraft’s and missiles’ "surgical" precision. The legal
(and moral) imperative to spare the lives of innocent civilians was
well observed, they bragged. "Collateral damage" was minimized.
They were lucky to have confronted a dilapidated enemy. Precision
bombing is expensive, in terms of lives – of fighter pilots. Military
planners are well aware that there is a hushed trade-off between
civilian and combatant casualties.
This dilemma is both ethical and practical. It is often "resolved"
by applying – explicitly or implicitly – the principle of "over-riding
affiliation". As usual, Judaism was there first, agonizing over similar
moral conflicts. Two Jewish sayings amount to a reluctant admission
of the relativity of moral calculus: "One is close to oneself" and
"Your city’s poor denizens come first (with regards to charity)".
One’s proper conduct, in other words, is decided by one’s self-interest
and by one’s affiliations. Affiliation (to a community, or a
fraternity), in turn, is determined by one’s positions and, more so,
perhaps, by one’s oppositions.
What are these "positions" and "oppositions"?
The most fundamental position – from which all others are derived –
is the positive statement "I am a human being". Belonging to the
human race is an immutable and inalienable position. Denying this
leads to horrors such as the Holocaust. The Nazis did not regard
as humans the Jews, the Slavs, homosexuals, and other minorities –
so they sought to exterminate them.
All other, synthetic, positions are made of couples of positive and
negative statements with the structure "I am and I am not".
But there is an important asymmetry at the heart of this neat
arrangement.
The negative statements in each couple are fully derived from –
and thus are entirely dependent on and implied by – the positive
statements. Not so the positive statements. They cannot be derived
from, or be implied by, the negative one.
Lest we get distractingly abstract, let us consider an example.
Study the couple "I am an Israeli" and "I am not a Syrian".
Assuming that there are 220 countries and territories, the positive
statement "I am an Israeli" implies about 220 certain (true) negative
statements. You can derive each and every one of these negative
statements from the positive statement. You can thus create 220
perfectly valid couples.
"I am an Israeli …"
Therefore:
"I am not … (a citizen of country X, which is not Israel)".
You can safely derive the true statement "I am not a Syrian" from
the statement "I am an Israeli".
Can I derive the statement "I am an Israeli" from the statement
"I am not a Syrian"?
Not with any certainty.
The negative statement "I am not a Syrian" implies 220 possible
positive statements of the type "I am … (a citizen of country X,
which is not India)", including the statement "I am an Israeli". "I
am not a Syrian and I am a citizen of … (220 possibilities)"
Negative statements can be derived with certainty from any positive
statement.
Negative statements as well as positive statements cannot be derived
with certainty from any negative statement.
This formal-logical trait reflects a deep psychological reality with
unsettling consequences.
A positive statement about one’s affiliation ("I am an Israeli")
immediately generates 220 certain negative statements (such as "I am
not a Syrian").
One’s positive self-definition automatically excludes all others by
assigning to them negative values. "I am" always goes with "I am not".
The positive self-definitions of others, in turn, negate one’s
self-definition.
Statements about one’s affiliation are inevitably exclusionary.
It is possible for many people to share the same positive
self-definition. About 6 million people can truly say "I am an
Israeli".
Affiliation – to a community, fraternity, nation, state, religion,
or team – is really a positive statement of self-definition ("I
am an Israeli", for instance) shared by all the affiliated members
(the affiliates).
One’s moral obligations towards one’s affiliates override and supersede
one’s moral obligations towards non-affiliated humans.
Thus, an American’s moral obligation to safeguard the lives of
American fighter pilots overrides and supersedes (subordinates) his
moral obligation to save the lives of innocent civilians, however
numerous, if they are not Americans.
The larger the number of positive self-definitions I share with someone
(i.e., the more affiliations we have in common) , the larger and more
overriding is my moral obligation to him or her.
Example:
I have moral obligations towards all other humans because I share
with them my affiliation to the human species.
But my moral obligations towards my countrymen supersede these
obligation. I share with my compatriots two affiliations rather than
one. We are all members of the human race – but we are also citizens
of the same state.
This patriotism, in turn, is superseded by my moral obligation towards
the members of my family. With them I share a third affiliation –
we are all members of the same clan.
I owe the utmost to myself. With myself I share all the aforementioned
affiliations plus one: the affiliation to the one member club that
is me.
But this scheme raises some difficulties.
We postulated that the strength of one’s moral obligations towards
other people is determined by the number of positive self-definitions
("affiliations") he shares with them.
Moral obligations are, therefore, contingent. They are, indeed, the
outcomes of interactions with others – but not in the immediate sense,
as the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggested.
Rather, ethical principles, rights, and obligations are merely the
solutions yielded by a moral calculus of shared affiliations. Think
about them as matrices with specific moral values and obligations
attached to the numerical strengths of one’s affiliations.
Some moral obligations are universal and are the outcomes of one’s
organic position as a human being (the "basic affiliation"). These
are the "transcendent moral values".
Other moral values and obligations arise only as the number of shared
affiliations increases. These are the "derivative moral values".
Moreover, it would wrong to say that moral values and obligations
"accumulate", or that the more fundamental ones are the strongest.
On the very contrary. The universal ethical principles – the ones
related to one’s position as a human being – are the weakest. They
are subordinate to derivative moral values and obligations yielded
by one’s affiliations.
The universal imperative "thou shall not kill (another human being)"
is easily over-ruled by the moral obligation to kill for one’s
country. The imperative "though shall not steal" is superseded by
one’s moral obligation to spy for one’s nation. Treason is when we
prefer universal ethical principles to derivatives ones, dictated by
our affiliation (citizenship).
This leads to another startling conclusion:
There is no such thing as a self-consistent moral system. Moral values
and obligations often contradict and conflict with each other.
In the examples above, killing (for one’s country) and stealing (for
one’s nation) are moral obligations, the outcomes of the application
of derivative moral values. Yet, they contradict the universal moral
value of the sanctity of life and property and the universal moral
obligation not to kill.
Hence, killing the non-affiliated (civilians of another country) to
defend one’s own (fighter pilots) is morally justified. It violates
some fundamental principles – but upholds higher moral obligations,
to one’s kin and kith.
Note – The Exclusionary Conscience
The self-identity of most nation-states is exclusionary and
oppositional: to generate solidarity, a sense of shared community,
and consensus, an ill-defined "we" is unfavorably contrasted with a
fuzzy "they". While hate speech has been largely outlawed the world
over, these often counterfactual dichotomies between "us" and "them"
still reign supreme.
In extreme – though surprisingly frequent – cases, whole groups
(typically minorities) are excluded from the nation’s moral universe
and from the ambit of civil society. Thus, they are rendered
"invisible", "subhuman", and unprotected by laws, institutions,
and ethics. This process of distancing and dehumanization I call
"exclusionary conscience".
The most recent examples are the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda,
the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, and the
Armenian Genocide in Turkey. Radical Islamists are now advocating the
mass slaughter of Westerners, particularly of Americans and Israelis,
regardless of age, gender, and alleged culpability. But the phenomenon
of exclusionary conscience far predates these horrendous events. In
the Bible, the ancient Hebrews are instructed to exterminate all
Amalekites, men, women, and children.
In her book, "The Nazi Conscience", Claudia Koontz quotes from Freud’s
"Civilization and its Discontents":
"If (the Golden Rule of morality) commanded ‘Love thy neighbor as
thy neighbor loves thee’, I should not take exception to it. If he
is a stranger to me … it will be hard for me to love him." (p. 5)
Sam Vaknin ( ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central
Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press
International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of
mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory
and Suite101.