The Moral Origins of Wicked Institutions

Ted Everett

Philosophy Club talk, 10/28/03

I want to tell you about a moral insight that has come upon me recently with great force. I do not know if what I have to say will strike anybody else as new – for all I know, I’m only recapitulating one of the many well-known views that I have always missed because I watch so much TV instead of reading boring philosophy books. In any case, I think that it will at least seem familiar to you once I’ve said it, because that’s the way it seems to me now, although I know I’ve never looked at things in quite this way before. This is what happens in philosophy sometimes. We state the obvious, what everyone already knows, but with some little trick of emphasis that stands it out against the vague background of common sense. And then we have a theory.

[That was the prologue. Here’s the paper.]

Why is there so much systematic wickedness in the world? Why is there war and civil war, slavery, economic class oppression, religious caste systems, racial and ethnic discrimination, corruption in governments, businesses, unions, charities, churches, even universities? Why do civilized people slaughter other civilized people in wars? Why do ordinary, friendly people slaughter their neighbors in civil wars? Why do religious people try to wipe out people of other, sometimes highly similar, religions? Why have most people in the history of the world lived under tyrannies or cruel oligarchies? How could the institution of slavery have seemed morally acceptable to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews? How could it have persisted for so long, so recently, in an enlightened, liberal society like the United States? Why does it persist to this day in some parts of the world?

Why do revolutionary governments seem to collapse so quickly into despotism? Why do idealistic movements tend to turn into rackets once they have achieved their main goals? Why has our own superbly constituted political system descended into such vicious partisanship that it is becoming harder and harder to perform the ordinary business of government – holding elections, appointing judges, proposing and passing legislation – without war-like campaigns of dirty tricks, lawsuits, and lies?

When corrupt or unfair institutions have been plainly identified, why is it so hard to fix or destroy them? Why is it so hard to wipe out the Mafia in American cities? Why is it so hard to eliminate corruption in big city police departments? Why is it so hard to reform agencies of government, including public schools, that have been visibly defaulting on their duties? Why did the Archdiocese of Boston continue for so many years to reassign known child molesters in its priesthood to positions of authority over other children, in plain violation of the law and of its own clear principles? How could anything like that have happened? And why are ordinary, decent people so little surprised at the emergence of such wickedness in their essential institutions? What is wrong with everybody?

How is it that those engaged in wicked institutions are so often people who profess sweeping, egalitarian moral principles, with great seeming sincerity? How do they fail to perceive the gaps between what they say themselves and what they do, when they are more than competent at pointing out such faults in others? How have conservative Christians, who profess to believe in absolute equality before God, the blessedness of poverty, and so on, still managed to segregate their brethren of lower social class or other races into separate churches of the same denomination? How can anybody claim to be a follower of Jesus of the Gospels, and still pursue a life of wealth and luxury? It’s not just about religion – even the secular, libertarian Republicans who oppose programs like affirmative action on the grounds of their belief in pure equality of opportunity, nevertheless do everything they can to create advantages for their own children, including leaving them a lot of money when they die. Such people even want to wipe out the existing taxes on inherited (i.e. completely unearned) income. How can they fail to notice that this is the exact opposite of equal opportunity?

Things are certainly no better on the left, with so many progressives, socialists, and even communists among the senior faculty at our poshest and most prosperous universities. How can you believe in total, worldwide economic equality, even claim that this ideal is worth the loss of tens of millions of lives in far-off places, and still possess two Volvos, a nice sailboat, and a place on Martha's Vinyard for yourself and your own family? How can you claim to believe in equal, public education for everyone, but send your own children to the best prep schools and private colleges that you can get them into? How can you claim to despise all forms of social inequality, but still compete as fiercely as anybody else for jobs and raises and promotions from the most prestigious possible employers? People on the right perceive this moral hypocrisy among leftists very clearly, but it seems to be just as invisible to the leftists themselves as the rightists’ own hypocrisy is to them. And most of these people, on both sides, are very far from stupid. So why is everyone so blind?

There are a number of available answers to all these questions, all of which have something going for them, but none of which succeeds if taken as a comprehensive theory of the origins of social evil. Christians and other religious people sometimes say that human beings are just naturally wicked or sinful. But what does this mean? It cannot be that we are all, say, psychopaths. For there are real, diagnosable psychopaths out there, and their actions are clearly distinguishable from those of ordinary people. It could still be said that we are all infected with some vague, lesser sort of wickedness, what has been called “man’s sinful nature”. But why does this bad chunk of nature tend to express itself in certain ways and not in many others that are just as bad, or even worse? The bad things that most people do are very far from random acts of violence or immorality, but rather fall into regular patterns that could never be predicted or accounted for on the basis of generic moral weakness. Our wicked institutions always seem to distinguish people into groups of some kind, and the people in one group harm the people in the other group not randomly, but systematically – and in ways that individuals rarely harm each other one at a time. For example, Palestinian terrorists and their many supporters target Israelis, not (for the most part) other Palestinians or people from Indonesia. Shall we really say that these are all naturally vicious people, who just happen onto one target rather than another? No, we can’t: we know that these are generally fairly ordinary people, without psychiatric histories or criminal records of the usual sort, who desire passionately only to kill Israelis, and for what they clearly take to be good reasons. Why is it that these otherwise ordinary, seemingly decent people do such things? Why, in general, do people tend to behave more wickedly when acting in groups than they do acting as individuals? This cannot be answered just in terms of basic human moral frailty.

Marxists and feminists and assorted other post-sixties progressives tend to say that groupwise wickedness results from people being poisoned with class or ethnic hatred, racism, sexism, and the like. Such hatred is irrational, they say, but sometimes understandable for economic, historical or sociological reasons. Although we all morally and rationally ought to transcend such environmental hatred, the fact is that most people just don’t have the strength of mind to do this. People raised by parents who hate, who go to schools with classmates who hate, and are taught by teachers who hate, absorb this hatred by a kind of psychological osmosis. So, according to this social-psychological type of analysis, groups of people turn wicked because the rational and moral forces within them have been overwhelmed by such irrational, emotional ones.

But there are many kinds of wicked institutions that seem not to be based on any kind of hatred at all. Corrupt bureaucrats and businessmen, as well as outright gangsters, tend to exploit such other people as can be exploited, without any stronger feelings towards them than, perhaps, a mild sort of contempt. There are even cases of such systematic exploitation or oppression where there seems to be a positive, mutual affection between the predators and victims, including urban political machines under crooked bosses like Richard Daley and Marion Barry, dirty unions like the Teamsters under Jimmy Hoffa, the Mafia under popular dons like Al Capone and John Gotti, even the murderous regimes of tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, who are revered by many of the people they oppress, if not the majority, right up to the day that they find themselves shipped off to camps or shot. In none of these cases is the usual social-psychological account of institutional wickedness in terms of class or ethnic hatred even remotely applicable.

Another paradigm that has been used in attempts to explain institutional wickedness is analytical psychology. Freud himself argues in Civilization and its Discontents that there is something like a principle of conservation of aggression at work in social oppression. In order to be emotionally healthy locally, say within our families or towns, we must experience what he calls aim-inhibited love (friendship or fellow-feeling) for those that we have to deal with regularly. But this leaves us with the problem of how to release all of our inner aggression, that store of unformed hatred that we all have built up in our ids. The best thing locally, although perhaps the worst thing globally, is for us to aim this hatred away from friends and family and towards outsiders. So, the crooked businessman oppresses his employees so that he can feel love for his wife and children, and the Germans hate the Jews so that they can feel a patriotic solidarity among themselves. This type of theory can allow for many cases of institutional wickedness within as well as between ethnic or other social groups. Everybody has to be mean to somebody.

The problem with this view is that some people just don’t seem to be mean or angry enough – not really hostile to anybody else or to themselves. Cheerful and phlegmatic people that we all know, some self-contained loners, stoners, grandmothers, pioneer families out by themselves on the prairie, scads of Buddhist and Christian monks, all seem to get by pretty well without ever wanting to hurt anyone. If such people do any harm at all, it’s through omission, not aggression. I suppose a Freudian can say that people like this all have the same “death instinct” as the rest of us, but it’s repressed, unconscious, unavailable for any but the most expert inspection. I don’t want to complain about unfalsifiability in principle, but we really should have a better reason to believe such things of all the seemingly harmonious and gentle people in the world, than just to save this theory.

So, what other possibilities are left? I have already developed one kind of alternative theory of my own, based on the idea that it might be rational for different people to have radically different beliefs, even when faced with the same pool of public evidence, provided they have different pools of what I like to call private evidence. I mean primarily different sources of information that people have found reliable in the past – typically one’s own parents, teachers, and other local authorities. What we think of as universal or objective rationality, for example in science or philosophy, is sometimes undermined by, and is persistently at odds with, this sort of local or subjective rationality. It is not, then, because people are irrational that we end up with different, mutually hostile religious and other traditional beliefs. It is because we are rational. The fundamental difference between us is just that we happen to know and rationally trust different other people, which is hardly avoidable given that there are billions of us, each one in at least a somewhat different local epistemic situation.

I have been treating this as a potentially comprehensive explanation of human nuttiness for a long time, and tried to understand traditional, oppressive institutions like slavery as resulting fundamentally from false beliefs that get passed on from one otherwise reliable person to another, based on these rationally justified relationships of trust. But I have come to see recently that this epistemic sort of analysis is still not enough to cover many wicked institutions. For there are cases where there is no important difference in what people believe, but still a great difference in what they do. For example, when one sect of Christians, or one cell of Socialists, goes violently after another whose beliefs are virtually indistinguishable from its own. Or when one set of criminals gets into a gang war against another, as happens all the time with Mafia families, motorcycle gangs, the Crips against the Bloods, and so on. Or consider family feuds like those between the Montagues and Capulets, or Hatfields and McCoys. These cases cannot be explained on the basis of differences of general belief, because there aren’t any – so why do they happen? I suppose that we could still try to explain them epistemically, in terms of the people involved having different beliefs about each other, each believing that the other is wicked while itself is good. But at least some of the time, conflicting groups don’t even pretend to disapprove of their enemies, any more than one baseball or football team really pretends to disapprove of the competing teams (although there is sometimes a bit of this, as with the Red Sox and the Yankees). Hector and Achilles may have hated each other, but not by way of moral disapproval. They each acknowledged that the other was a great warrior of high virtue, as worthy as himself morally to have the favor of the gods. And it is a commonplace of old British war movies that the equally cultured English and German officers should have and would have been friends, were it not for the brute fact that they were already enemies. So, I have come to doubt that war and class antagonism, even ethnic and racial oppression, is fundamentally a matter of beliefs or basic attitudes at all. But in that case, where does it all come from? What is the origin of wicked institutions? Is there any general sort of explanation?

I think I have the essence of an answer, and I don’t know why it took me so long to think of this analysis in general terms, because most of the interesting cases of the sort I’ve been talking about are entirely familiar to us, and I suspect that we already understand them, at least implicitly, in just the way that I want to suggest. In fact, something like this theory has to be true for the majority of war and gangster movies even to make sense. But let me say it anyway, to get it off my chest, and satisfy at least myself with an articulation of this inchoate, commonsense analysis of wickedness. In place of the theological, psychological, socioeconomic, and epistemic accounts that I’ve mentioned, none of which works in a sufficiently general way, I want to suggest an account that is directly moral. I say that people are not wicked in the ways that I am talking about primarily because they are imbued with sin by God, or nature, or the devil. People are not wicked primarily because they are psychotic, or neurotic, or under the power a “death instinct”. People are not wicked primarily because the means of production are controlled by the wrong social class, race, or gender. People are not wicked primarily because they are foolish or misinformed. People are wicked, for the most part, because they are good.

Here’s how it works. I want to say, with Thomas Nagel, that there are two realms of morality, an objective one and a subjective one. As with objective and subjective rationality, I want to say that objective and subjective morality are deeply at odds with one another. This distinction is not the same as the one between deontology and consequentialism, though Nagel sometimes seems to say that it is. For it is possible to have deontological rules that are effectively objective, like Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and consequentialist theories that are basically subjective, such as Hitler’s racist teleology. What really matters, in my view, is that some principles depend for their application on the agent’s specific moral situation with respect to particular other people, and some apply independently of such relationships between the agent and others. The first are principles of subjective or personal morality (which govern concepts like duty and honor), and the second are principles of objective or impersonal morality (which govern concepts like fairness and distributive justice). My thesis here is that it is because people are good in the subjective sense that they cannot reliably be good in the objective sense. In a nutshell, you can’t always do your duty, and be fair at the same time.

Here is a standard, if artificial, sort of example. Suppose that I am confronted with a “Sophie’s choice” of lives to save. A number of children are faced with certain death unless I act, and I can only save a certain number of them, but that number is unknown to me. This forces me to rank all of the children in the order in which I would choose to save their lives. Now, these children include my own daughter, my nephew, the child of a close friend, the child of a friendly neighbor, the child of another Geneseo resident not known to me, a child from Livonia, a child from Boise, Idaho, and a child from Sri Lanka. Here is what I would do, if forced to make this set of choices. I would rank these children in exactly the order I have just listed them in here, beginning with my own child, and ending with the child from Sri Lanka. Why would I do this? Do I think that American children are more valuable than Sri Lankan ones? The answer is, I don’t. I like Americans, but I’m inclined to like Sri Lankans just as much. There’s nothing especially valuable about Geneseo children, either. I don’t even think that my best friend’s kids are inherently more valuable than most other children who are being decently brought up. Even my own daughter, much as I love her and take pride in her many virtues, is nothing all that terribly special in objective terms. There are, I am quite certain, plenty of Sri Lankan, and Nigerian, and even French children just as worthy as my own of being kept alive. What accounts for my ranking of children is not in any case a set of judgments about the children’s’ differential value, but a differential set of obligations that I have to each one, which depend on their relationships to me. I have a duty to protect my daughter. I have a lesser, but still considerable duty to protect my brothers’ children, and a duty to the families of my friends and neighbors that is greater than the duty that I have to strangers. This is my moral situation – nothing at all special about it, except that it is mine, and I am the person who is supposedly being forced to make these choices. Imagine instead that I had ranked these children randomly, perhaps by making them draw straws. This random ranking would have been completely fair from an objective point of view; in fact, clearly more fair than my actual choices, since each, equally deserving child would stand an equal chance of being saved. But listen: I would be a moral monster if I chose which children would be saved in such a fair and equal way, especially in not recognizing that I have a special duty to save my own daughter first. I’m her father.

This is not just something that comes up when choices must be made about whose life to save. The same conflict between personal duties and objective moral principles shows up all the time, whenever we direct special attention to our own families, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and others with whom we have specific bonds of solidarity or obligation. I save money for my daughter’s college education, not somebody else’s. And I want her education to be better than average – much better than average, if I can arrange that. Nothing against any other kid her age – but I want mine to be prosperous and happy, and I have a moral duty to bring that about if I can. And I have similar, if usually lesser, duties to my other family members, friends, colleagues, and a whole slew of other individuals and groups. So, I try to be a good teacher. I try to help my students. But that’s just it – they’re my students. They’re not stone-age tribesmen from the jungles of Borneo. They’re not illegal Mexican immigrants. They’re not even American black kids, for the most part, even though there are a lot of black people in the nearby city of Rochester. I have nothing but good will for all those other people. I wish them all well. But my job is here. My teaching responsibilities are to the students here. And it’s the same way for everybody – we all have duties to take care of all the other people close to us, and in general, the closer they are to us, the more care we are morally required to take of them.

It is also reasonable to include duties to oneself, I think, as part of the same subjective morality. We often speak of owing things to ourselves, like a vacation or a nice meal out; more seriously, we tend to treat ourselves as morally connected beings over time. I have a duty to my future self not to go back to smoking or do other self-destructive sorts of things. When people do screw up their lives enough to end up on the dole, or in the gutter, or working for eight years as a security guard in Boston, they tend to feel a lot of shame, and suffer the contempt of other people. That we have such moral reactions to self-harm confirms that we have a genuinely moral obligation to take care of ourselves and to maintain our own dignity, which functions at least roughly like the duty that we have to take care of our children. I spend more on my kid’s clothes than I do on my own (that must be obvious), but I can’t let myself be too much of a slob. I owe it to myself not to become a laughing stock, if I can avoid it. In fact, I think I have a self-regarding obligation to make sure that I am seen as a good, useful person, even an excellent one if I can pull that off. I don’t seek to be an average teacher or philosopher, any more that I desire to be an average husband or parent. And this commits even more of my scarce resources to such local goals as fostering my own career, working as hard and conscientiously as I can, so that I’ll be thought as well of by my peers as possible.

It is our local duties, then, to ourselves, our families, our friends, our jobs, so on, that use up the great majority of our resources. Once I have done my local duties – paid my taxes, paid my bills, taken my family out to dinner once or twice, put a responsible amount away for the kid’s college tuition, and thrown another forty-eight hundred dollars into the Grand Canyon of my student loans, I don’t have very much left over at the end of the year. If I did, I might consider sending something to somebody in China. But even then, if I’m going to give money away, I’m much more likely give it to local charities like the Teresa House, which is just down the street from where I live. This is not because I’m a bad person, but because I’m a good one, or at least trying to be good – even though it’s unfair to the guy in China.

I am not saying that we owe nothing at all to strangers, or foreigners, or humanity in general. There are plenty of considerations that we really ought to extend to any human being, even any sentient being, insofar as it is in our power to do so. But our power is severely limited, even for the wealthiest and most capable among us, so we are forced to discriminate between the people to whom we owe special obligations and everybody else. This is the problem. Love, self-respect, friendship and comradeship, neighborliness, collegiality, and so on are all good things. But each of these good things imposes special duties, which entail some kind of willingness to help or other form of preferential treatment. And preferential treatment is the same thing as discrimination. If discrimination is objectively bad, then it turns out that love, friendship, and so on are good things that have objectively bad consequences. And I think that almost everybody ends up better off this way, connected to other good people with duties to him, than he would have been trying to survive in the jungle all by himself. But the global result of all of this subjectively good stuff is something very different from distributive equality, or even equal opportunity.

This is the real source of what some people call “institutional racism”. It is not the fault of individuals, and it is not a matter of some kind of mass psychological disease producing aggregate hostility in the minds of white people when they deal with blacks. But a lot of people treat it that way (especially people in charge of public schools) and argue that in order to eradicate this social disease as soon as possible, we need to hose white people down with guilt-provoking propaganda everywhere they go. But the basic source this “disease”, and its main means of transmission, is not hostility at all. It is friendship. We do favors for our friends, help them get jobs, and so on. And friendship is not randomly or evenly distributed. It grows organically, in families, villages, guilds, military units, philosophy departments, and innumerable other places. Now, it may well be that we should periodically, deliberately cut back on the growth of friendship, collegiality, and other relationships requiring reciprocity of favors, in order to make things globally, or interracially, or institutionally more fair, for example by “throwing the bums out” every couple of elections, or by imposing anti-nepotism rules, or term limits for powerful positions, or separate “internal affairs” divisions in police departments, or (who knows?) maybe even some kinds of affirmative action programs. But human friendship is not really a disease. It is a good thing in itself, and there is only so far that it can or should ever be cut back, even though this means accepting some unfairness caused by people doing favors for their friends. If we ever actually managed to eradicate such institutional unfairness completely, which seems be the primary goal for many people currently involved in politics, the means required to do so would turn our lives into an Orwellian nightmare.

So, this is my basic theory of injustice. I say that social and institutional inequality arise and persist mainly because of people doing their duty to themselves, their families, friends, neighbors, comrades, countrymen, and so on. These acts of local virtue are good in themselves, but given the globally uneven structure of our networks of dutiful relationships, they result in a vast, global system of entrenched and ramifying preferences, which are the fundamental source of social vice. If we didn’t do the sorts of things that produce these moral networks, we would not be proper parents, siblings, friends, and so on. We would not be what we all think of as good people. We ought to bear in mind that all these local acts of duty and cooperation produce untold amounts of good results for each of us, even in awful situations. The resulting social inequality is not at all, in the first place, an intended consequence of ordinary people doing their local duty. It is a statistical effect of the complexity of our cooperative interactions.

Now, how does this accidental, negative sort of inequality develop into positive antagonism? How do the really wicked institutions, things like war and slavery, arise out of subjective moral goodness? I think it comes from people caring for their friends and comrades, and upholding their own dignity. Consider Achilles and Hector again. They have each admitted that the other is a great warrior and noble soul and all that; why do they nevertheless decide to fight each other to the death? We need only ask. Achilles says, “this is the man who killed Patroclus”. And Hector answers,“ yes, of course I killed him – I’m a Trojan general, and Patroclus was wiping out a lot of our best guys. Besides, I thought he was you.” And Achilles says, “well, as long as it isn’t personal.” And Hector says, “that’s right. It isn’t personal. I’ve got responsibility for a whole city, here.” And Achilles says, “but it is personal, because the guy you killed is my friend. I have a duty to this one guy that I just don’t have to all those other corpses out there, or to you.” And so he kills Hector several times over, and all the other Greeks run up and stab him, too, and rip off his armor, and start talking about what a great looking warrior he was. Most examples of military violence are less dramatic, but I believe (as John Keegan has argued in The Face of Battle) that the ordinary soldier also fights mainly for the sake of his comrades, and only secondarily for king and country. Once war starts, though, for whatever reason, and soldiers start getting killed, a good man in uniform will do whatever’s necessary to protect his comrades and himself, and do his duty.

Slavery seems morally impossible to modern Western people, but we all know that it used to seem a morally acceptable, if sometimes rather awkward, institution. So, why is that? People have become slaves in large numbers through defeat in war (“it’s kinder that killing them all”, as the Athenians were wont to say), and in small numbers through default on local debts or desperate contracts, for example to avoid starvation, as we still see happening in Africa and Asia. But once people are consigned to slavery, their children must be slaves as well, if they are to have any chance of staying with their parents. And these children won’t have protective relationships with anybody besides their parents and a few other slaves, except to the extent that they form moral bonds with their masters and their masters’ families. So their only real hope for salvation is through other people’s principled, objective moral actions, and there is only so much of that to spread around. There aren’t that many objective moral fanatics out there like John Brown, for example, who are willing to throw their own families’ lives away for the sake of helping strangers of any sort. As for the masters of these slaves, they mostly try to be humane about it (as we try to be humane about the suffering of people in the Third World), but they have their own people to take care of, estates to maintain, and other perfectly genuine duties that require them to husband their resources. “I’m sorry you’re a slave, and I will try to be kind to you, but I am not willing to give up my farm and throw my family into massive debt just for the sake of your freedom.” This may sound cruel, but it’s the same thing we are all saying right now, in effect, to all the slaves in Mali and Sudan, and a billion others living oppressive circumstances overseas.

And what about corruption? Businesses, unions, government agencies, Christian churches, and communist revolutions become corrupt, I think, fundamentally because the people in these institutions make friends, which requires reciprocity, and develop other moral duties to each other, such as obedience and gratitude toward their sponsors, concern and protection toward their apprentices, and solidarity toward the whole. This happens absolutely anywhere that people get to know each other, and are in a position to do favors for each other. These subjective moral networks, what feminists call “old boy” networks, tend to get stronger over time, entrenching themselves through hiring and promotion practices, and the million little free decisions that we all make in our working lives, such which subordinates get extra training, which ones work on the most promising projects, and the like. We don’t usually see this sort of corruption as corruption when it involves us and our friends, because then we appreciate its basically moral nature. If one of our best friends gets a big promotion, for example, and he makes no effort “bring us along” with him, after all we’ve done for him, just because he thinks that someone else has got a slightly better resume – well, there’s a word for people like that: assholes.

I’m not saying that this kind of reciprocity can actually justify what Cardinal Law did in Boston to protect his dirty priests. There is such a thing as a felony, and good people should know enough not to cover such things up, however otherwise responsible they are for the well-being of the felon. But this is a matter not of absolute wickedness on the part of people like Law, just an imbalance between genuinely moral factors. I’m not going to defend rapists, but surely, friendship, solidarity, and pastoral care should count for something on the other side. Even a prig like me lets lots of nasty stuff go by without much interference, because I feel at least some loyalty and solidarity with the people that I know. I’m pretty sure that I would never cover up a forcible rape, but I certainly have put up with friends engaging in statutory rape sometimes, when I was in high school and college, and also many things like drug manufacturing and dealing, child endangerment with drugs, and all the other crimes that hippies used to feel entitled to commit. I certainly never ratted any of my hip professors out for giving drugs to students, sometimes implicitly exchanging them for sex, even though I really disapproved of that kind of thing and sometimes said so, and would not have done that stuff myself. Maybe there was cowardice in this – but honestly, it never even occurred to me to call the police, any more than it would occur to me now to turn a friend in to the cops for cheating on his taxes, or for driving home a little drunk.

My point is not that the results are always good when people do such favors for each other, but that these are the natural results whenever basically good people get to know each other. This fact makes moral mincemeat out of revolutionary governments like the ones in Russia, China, and certainly North Korea, that begin with smiling, shouting youth brigades, and end as paranoid, sometimes hereditary despotisms. Corruption through personal obligation is simply unavoidable in any human institution, and revolutionary governments are plainly no exception – in fact, their concentration of power in a few hands makes predictable corruption far more damaging than in societies where power is broadly dispersed. But even totally peaceful social movements tend to implode morally after a decade or so, through the natural development of subjective moral duties that tend to prevail over time against the movement’s objective goals. If a whole slew of recent critics like David Horowitz, John McWhorter and Christina Summers are to be believed, this is precisely what has happened to the big movements of the Sixties, Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH being a premier example of successful movement leaders turning into economic spigots for their families and friends. Christian movements and churches tend to collapse over time in just the same way, as seems to have been happening lately with parts of the Catholic Church – though they keep popping up again, as dissenters seize control, or start another sect. (If you are keeping score, it is morally worse to allow child rapists to be parish priests in Boston than to extort a couple of Budweiser distributorships for your kids in Chicago.)

What, then, accounts for all of the hypocrisy among idealists of the left and right? Is it just a way of covering up for their corruption? I don’t think so: the majority of blatantly hypocritical moral idealists aren’t personally corrupt in any serious way. But they are very puzzling. For example, how can the doctrinaire utilitarian Peter Singer sincerely claim that justice requires each of us to give away all of his income above some very modest, lower-middle class amount, while Singer himself holds onto something like 80% of a very substantial net income, and spends huge amounts on private nursing care for his own mother? (This is the central question raised by Peter Berkowitz, in a wonderful review of Singer’s work called “Other People’s Mothers”.) I am sure that it’s not because Singer is a corrupt sort of person. On the contrary, it is because he is basically a good guy, who takes care of the specific people he has obligations to. Given that he’s got that kind of money, he really ought to spend it on his sick mother, if there is anything that he can reasonably do to make her feel more comfortable. So, why can’t he just admit these facts, admit that he’s a normal person with responsibilities, and try to bring this factor into his philosophy? Why be a hypocrite about it? And why can’t social progressives all admit what is perfectly obvious, that they don’t really want everybody in the world to be equal – that in particular, they want to take extra-good care of their own families, and they want their own students to get into better grad schools than students from other places, and they want to get raises and promotions and other distinctions for themselves – just like everybody else? What is it that creates these glaring failures of intelligent people to match deeds to words, or words to deeds?

I’m not really sure about this, but here is an inkling: There is something about public discourse that requires us to explain things, whenever possible, in totally objective terms. This has not always and everywhere been the case. Traditional Judaism is chockablock with subjective principles on how to treat your family, servants, and so on. So, I gather, is Confucianism. But in the modern, scientific West, we have come to rely so much on theories that are simple, comprehensive, and impersonal, and these have so dominated intellectual discussion for the last few centuries (and even going back to Plato, and for that matter, Jesus), that we now find it very hard to take subjective principles seriously in theory, however much they continue to dominate our practical lives. This has brought about a silent kind of intellectual apartheid between our public and private, objective and subjective, moral lives. So, a proposition like “all children deserve an equal opportunity in education” counts among us as a proper theory, or at least, opinion – it’s the kind of thing that can be said at the top levels of public discourse. But a statement like “I really ought to get my kids their own computer,” does not count as a public theory. It’s just a personal remark, about you and your kids. And who’s going to argue with something like that, anyway? It’s just the sort of thing that, as we say, goes without saying. But it is precisely these subjective propositions, ordinarily confined to casual discussions on the way home from things like public lectures on utilitarianism, that refute utilitarianism, and radical egalitarianism, and Rawlsianism, and Christian Puritanism, and every other totally objective theory that purports to tell the whole truth about morality.

Hypocrisy among Christians, equal-opportunity conservatives, Marxists, utilitarians, and other idealistic moral thinkers is mainly the result, not of their personal vices, but of their personal virtues, interfering with their universalist commitments. We ought to be a lot more conscious of this fact, and less censorious about it. Peter Singer is a good son – and he’s not a bad philosopher, but he is missing something really important that gets screened off by his unquestioned commitment to objective reasoning. But subjective moral reasoning isn’t absolutely always screened off in this way. For one thing, there are some philosophers who take subjective morality very seriously: Aristotelians, W. D. Ross with his once-famous catalog of duties; Nagel, of course; some recent feminists who talk about the “ethics of care”, and plenty of others. These are a small minority, probably not ten percent of people writing in ethics these days, but it is not as though such views are utterly unknown. And let’s not forget that there are thousands and thousands of people deeply concerned about ethics, who could become professional philosophers but don’t, perhaps because they find the prevailing, exclusively objective type of moral theory totally unpersuasive. Some of these people become novelists; most just get on with their lives.

Here is a final question: to what extent, if any, can the subjective and objective realms of morality be reconciled? Are the conflicts I’ve been talking about resolvable in principle, or at least in practice, or are we stuck with wicked institutions as a permanent feature of our lives? And here is what I think. Yes, in a way, the two realms can be reconciled in principle. If we want to, we can subjectivize objective moral principles, and objectivize subjective ones. Objective principles can be expressed in terms of duties to all of humanity, or perhaps to God. And subjective principles can be absorbed by objective theories like utilitarianism in terms of all the long-run happiness that dutiful and honorable practices produce. But I’m not sure that this would do us any good. For we would still be faced with the fact that given all the limitations of our power, we cannot produce material equality, or even many less ambitious goals that are required by distributive justice, without defaulting on our local duties, or destroying the relationships that generate such duties – and make life worth living.

But perhaps there is a partial, practical solution, which is to increase our limited powers, build up our resources, so that we can make things more fair over time, without substantially interfering in the organic moral networks of civil society. Here is a quick, naive set of suggestions: (1) prune corruption conscientiously, but do not try to remove it altogether; (2) to minimize the damage done by unavoidable corruption, disperse economic and political power as widely as possible; (3) forget absolute economic equality and absolutely equal opportunity as social goals; but (4) continue to take taxes for the sake of redistribution – but not in ways or to such an extent that organic moral networks are suppressed; (5) use these taxes to create a floor of benefits, perhaps by way of a national or (potentially) worldwide minimum income; and (6) encourage economic growth, so that this floor can regularly rise. Good people, which is almost everybody, are generally happy to have surplus equitably taken for the sake of economic justice, and more so as they become more affluent – as long as they still allowed to look after themselves, their families, and their friends in a dutiful (hence, preferential) way. And this might just be good luck, but at the current state of our technology, there isn’t very much of value that is not available to people in the middle class of any economically developed country. So, let us bring it about that the whole world is at least as prosperous as most Western and some Asian countries are now. Then we can all compete for luxuries to hand out, as unfairly as our duty dictates, to our families and friends.