Evil and Failure to Reflect
Today I'd like to consider a view somewhat in tension with my series of posts on what I call the "problem of the ethics professors" -- the problem being that they don't seem to be any more virtuous than the rest of us. (Empirical data here and here.)
It's tempting, perhaps, to suppose in light of ethicists' remarkably ordinary blend of virtue and vice, that philosophical moral reflection is of no use to moral development. But that conclusion is troublingly cynical. If philosophical reflection about ethics -- which is, really, often nothing more than just thoughtful consideration of what's right and wrong -- yields no moral benefit, what's the point? Just to know better our wickedness? It's pretty darkly pessimistic to suppose that reflection, and consideration of the best historical and contemporary writing on virtue, duty, and justice, is powerless to produce moral improvement.
It's appealingly worldly, perhaps, to think poorly of the morality of ethicists; but then, I think, you owe yourself a story about how and why philosophical reflection fails. And I doubt the easiest stories here ("the problem with ethicists is that they ignore the Bible" or "philosophical ethics suppresses moral emotion") will work, at least not without considerable supplementation.
Here are two further thoughts that incline me not to dismiss the value of moral reflection so lightly.
First, there's the remarkable lack of moral reflection common among the perpetrators of great crimes. I'm struck by this, especially, in reading Holocaust literature. It's a famous theme, of course, in Hannah Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann, an expert in the logistics of shipping Jews to death. Albert Speer's well-known book Inside the Third Reich -- conceived while serving prison time for his role as an architect in Hitler's inner circle -- is to my mind amazingly unreflective about the moral dimensions of his activity, focusing instead on such issues as Hitler's movie-watching habits and how the Allies should have attacked ball-bearing factories. I can't help but wonder whether more morally reflective people would be less likely to be swept up in such evil. (Of course, there's the case of Heidegger....)
And second: In the famous Milgram experiment, subjects are persuaded to shock (they think) a screaming, protesting (and eventually eerily silent) man in an adjoining room for the sake of an experiment on learning. They begin by giving a mild shock as "punishment" for a wrong answer, with instructions to increase the level of shock with each wrong answer. Eventually, they believe they are delivering shocks of 300 and even 450 volts (marked "danger" and "xxx" on the instrumentation) to the victim. When subjects protest, they are placidly told, by a man in a lab coat, that they are to continue and that the shocks cause no permanent tissue damage. It's hard to know for sure, but I suspect that most subjects who paused for a while to genuinely reflect, in a philosophical way (why am I shocking this man? do we have any right to keep him here despite his protests? might there be some real risk to his life or health that his experiment doesn't justify?), would refuse to continue to shock the victim. No?
Philosophical moral reflection, powerless to improve behavior? We should not adopt that view lightly. But then we're left again with the problem of the ethics professors.