by Todd May
Before going any further, let me be clear about one thing. I’m not claiming that the only thing our stories about ourselves do is express values. And I’m not claiming that all our stories about ourselves express values. Rather, I’m pointing to the idea that many of our stories express values, and that we can learn a lot about our values by investigating those stories.
Let’s return for a moment to our victim. Although for all the world this victim may be expressing their identification with his victimhood through their stories, they may well refuse to acknowledge that as one of their values. “No,” they tell us, “it’s not me. The problem is the world. I really wish life were otherwise, that things worked out better. But the world is just badly arrayed, and so I find myself always on the short end.” Such talk can be frustrating, since one wants to point out the disconnection between the stories this person tells and the refusal to acknowledge the value that is constantly expressed. However, it is precisely this disconnection I want now to focus on. One of the aspects of the stories we tell about ourselves—illustrated in the extreme by the victim in my example—is that they can reveal values that we would prefer not to acknowledge, even to ourselves. Otherwise put, our stories can express our self-deceptions.
I want to tread this territory of self-deception carefully, since it is easy to go wrong when discussing it. I believe that the approach to self-deception through this account of the stories one tells about oneself can loosen the grip of other, less satisfactory approaches. I’m thinking here especially of a psychoanalytic approach, one for whom stories are often traceable back to a particular trauma, that of the Oedipal stage. For the classic psychoanalyst at least, the self-deception revealed in our stories about ourselves is symptomatic of—or at least associated with—an early conflict that analysis can trace back to its origins. On the account I am defending here, there need be no deep reason, one situated in the dark recesses of childhood, for a particular self-deception. To see this, let me offer a quick, embarrassing story, one that I told my wife right after it happened.
I was driving home one day after working out at my local gym when a car pulled out in front of me. It came close to cutting me off as it turned onto the road and then proceeded to go ten miles an hour under the speed limit. So I laid on my horn for a good quarter of a mile while I followed him. (Notice the “so.” “So I laid on my horn.” That’s a New York “so.” For New Yorkers it just follows that if someone makes a move like that you lay on your horn.)
In any event, if I reflect honestly on this story it reveals a value that I would be loath to claim publicly, which is why it is embarrassing. It is a lapse into a certain aggressiveness of the kind that I mentioned above. However, I think a lot of males, particularly in the US, share this aggressiveness as a value, even if it is one they would not want to acknowledge. If my wife had pointed out at the time that I seemed to value my aggressiveness toward this person—which, mercifully, she did not—I would have certainly denied it. I might have said something about what a jerk the driver was, or what we New Yorkers are like, but would not have admitted that I sometimes express a value that I find repulsive in much of our culture. But the fact is, I do express that value sometimes. It is part of who I am, even though I would rather it not be and would probably continue to deny it in many of its other expressions.
The philosopher Richard Moran tells us, “The truth of someone’s story will typically display forms of significance that could not be available to the character, but without for all that being either a falsification or the representation of something that applies only to the story and not to the reality the story is recounting.”3 However, there is no need to find the seeds of this unavailability in childhood conflicts. It need not be, for instance, that my father was some sort of castrating type that I find myself expressing this value that I cannot acknowledge, even to myself. Rather than looking inward at deeply buried conflicts in my childhood to see the source of this self-deception, we should instead look outward at our cultural norms.
In his book Freudian Repression,4 Michael Billig, for all his praise of Freud, finds the seeds of repression to lie not in the individual’s unconscious but, rightly in my view, in those social and cultural norms that dictate what one can say and what one cannot. Although a full treatment of this point and its implications for thinking about self-deception is beyond what I can discuss here, let me just call attention to the idea that in any culture there are things that are allowed to be admitted to others and things that are not. And because of this, there will be things that can be admitted to oneself and things that cannot. Otherwise put, the roots of repression, and with it self-deception, are social rather than individual.
This can be seen clearly in the story I have just told you. In much of US culture at large, such aggressiveness is often welcomed. If I were immersed in that culture I would have been able not only to admit to myself that I laid on the horn for so long; I might have been able to boast of it. But that isn’t the culture in which I find myself, for which by the way I am eternally grateful. Rather, my culture, or perhaps subculture, is one in which such aggressiveness—indeed rudeness—is frowned upon. It is not okay among the people I prefer to spend time with to act in this way. And so it is difficult to admit, even to myself, that I can hold acting this way as a value. However, my telling the story I told shows that while I reject that value consciously, there is part of me that still holds it as a value. And, in a wider culture that encourages men to be macho and aggressive, this should not be entirely surprising. After all, my subculture may reject the values of the larger culture, but we who inhabit my subculture are not immune to the influence of larger cultural norms.
There is, I believe, a lesson to be drawn from this consideration of how our stories can reveal aspects of ourselves that we would prefer not to acknowledge even to ourselves. It is the first of two lessons I want to consider, and the one that flows most obviously from what has just been said. We are more complicated, often in ways we would prefer not to acknowledge, than we would often like to believe. Investigating the stories we tell about ourselves is one way to reveal this to us. In fact, it is a privileged way of revealing this, since it is we who tell the stories. These are not stories that are told to us by others, but rather our own stories out of our own mouths. I need to be clear here, since putting things this way may invite a misunderstanding. As Adriana Cavarero has shown, many of our stories don’t originate with us. They are told to us by others. In her book Relating Narratives, where she also introduces the idea of narratability, she argues convincingly for this. In her view, we seek to have meaningful stories of our lives told to us by others and can feel a sense of completion or wholeness when they do. Moreover, many of the stories we tell about ourselves are rooted in stories about us that others have told us.
I believe Cavarero is right about this. The social character of our existence makes it inevitable. I am not the origin of all my stories. Rather, they are a product of the relationships I share with others. Nevertheless, I do tell stories about myself, and those stories reveal values that I endorse, or identify with, or seek to embody. And, regardless of what I may wish, some of those stories reveal values that I would prefer not to acknowledge. That they come out of my mouth, however, gives them a particular privilege in revealing who I am that being told stories about myself by others does not possess. This does not mean that the stories others tell me about myself are necessarily less true than my own. Self-deceptive stories can reveal values that I hold while nevertheless being false or misleading. But, we might say, I reveal my values through my stories about myself whereas others infer my values through their stories about me.
The second lesson to be drawn from these reflections is complementary to the first, and important for an entirely different set of reasons. It is the lesson that will bring us back to moral decency and a recognition of others as having their own, more intricate, lives. If I am more complicated than I would like to believe, then others are also more complicated than they would lik
e to believe. But, and this is the point, they are likely also more complicated than I would like to believe. The significance of this point should not be lost in a Europe and a United States that have become more polarized politically in ways we saw in the previous chapter.
We have a tendency to live in echo chambers that reflect our own righteousness back to us. Consider how embedded each of us is in our niche markets, our favorite internet sites and television channels, our isolated and sometimes gated communities, our social groups comprised of like-minded friends and colleagues. If the recent profusion of technological media has brought us all closer together in some ways, it has made it easier for us to distance ourselves from one another in others. We inhabit communities that reinforce our beliefs about ourselves and about those outside those communities, often with a sense of our own probity that we do not confer on the unfortunates who are not among us. If we take seriously the realization that we and others are more complicated than many of us think, a realization that reflecting on our stories about ourselves might lead us to, then we can counter this reductive thinking about others as well as about ourselves.
Once again, I need to be clear here. I am not endorsing any form of moral relativism that would see all forms of living or all types of belief as equally worthy. The previous chapters should suffice to quell any fear of that. And in fact, the phenomenon we are looking at here points in precisely the opposite direction. On the one hand, if we are more complicated than we might like to think, it is precisely because we may value things that we know we should reject and that reflectively we do reject. On the other hand, the complications of others may reveal to us aspects of them that we, by our own normative lights, would endorse. If others are more complicated than the echo chambers we live in would lead us to believe, this may well be because they endorse, identify with, or seek to embody at least some values that we ourselves also endorse, identify with, or seek to embody. And perhaps, by interacting with these others, we might find common ground that, if we listen only to ourselves, will remain unavailable to us. That is the point of civility we discussed in the previous chapter, and we arrive back at it through a reflection on ourselves, or more precisely on the stories we tell about ourselves.
We are all complicated creatures, living more than we know and at times more than we would like—or would like to know. We are, and so are others. None of us are seamless. None of us are without aspects of ourselves that we would often prefer to not to acknowledge, even to ourselves. If it is difficult for us to live up to the kinds of moral demands placed upon us by the extreme altruists of practice or moral theory, it is even difficult—perhaps impossible—for us to live up entirely to the sense we have of who we are. This need not be a deep source of worry to us. If we are willing to admit this to ourselves, then we do the best we can to figure out who we are and go on from there.
When we recognize this in others, however, we might become attuned to more than their fallibility. That itself would be something, if we see it not as a fault but as something that makes them more like us. Beyond their fallibility, though, we might recognize their complexity, a complexity that may make them more like us than we often imagine. It is one thing to tell oneself in the abstract that another person is, as a human being, like us in important ways. It is another and deeper thing to feel it in others the way we can feel it in ourselves. Using the stories we tell ourselves as the beginning of a reflection on our complexity as well as our self-deceptions can bring us to a point where the feel of that recognition becomes salient for us, a point insisted on by the ethicists of care we saw in the second chapter.
So where, finally, does this leave us? If the reflections of these pages have resonance for us, we find ourselves in a space that is one neither of moral purity nor moral depravity. Rare among us is the creature who scales the moral heights. Such exemplars exist, but most of us are not among them. I know that I am not, and those few I know who think they are strike me as quite mistaken. But neither are most of us pure egoists, seeking to benefit ourselves, others be damned. We don’t think of ourselves that way and we are right not to think of ourselves that way. Our moral lives lie somewhere in between these two extremes. Moreover, although we are not likely or even able to craft ourselves to be our morally best, most of us are open to become morally better.
What this book has sought to do is to occupy that space between moral purity and moral depravity and to ask how we ourselves might occupy that space, the space of moral decency. In doing so it has aimed both to describe our moral lives in ways that are consonant with how we think of them and at the same time to suggest routes that, without abandoning what is dear to us, would open us to possibilities of moral growth.
This is not, as we saw in the first chapter, a task that has been taken up by much of traditional moral philosophy. This does not mean that such philosophy is on the wrong track. It is important to ask questions not only about the better and the worse but also about the best. But for those of us who pursue something less than the best, because we cannot or will not or perhaps think we ought not to do otherwise, what we have described here offers one way to think about our moral lives. Decency, if nothing more, is also nothing less than a way to conduct our lives that, if not optimal, might at least offer us a sense that perhaps we will leave this polarized, conflicted, and often fraught world a little better off for having passed through it.
Nine Rules for Moral Decency That Should Be Followed Strictly and without Exception
1. Look people in the face more often, particularly when you’re angry with them.
2. If your colleague leaves the room, cover their cup of coffee with a napkin.
3. Enjoy your moral behavior as best you can.
4. If you’re not going to give money to that homeless person, send it to an organization for the homeless.
5. Try not to contribute to the dying of the environment.
6. Say hello to the cat. Avoid eating it if possible.
7. Continue on your path of being a recovering racist, misogynist, homophobe, and so on.
8. Create some politics. After all, it created you.
9. Enjoy reading philosophy, even when it advises you to be better than you can reasonably be.
Acknowledgments
This book arose out of a suggestion from my editor at the University of Chicago Press, Elizabeth Branch Dyson. Her faith in my ability to write it, her guidance throughout, and her suggestions on the initial manuscript were all more generous than I deserve. My wife, Kathleen, read each chapter and made suggestions that far improved what I had handed her. My colleague Chris Grau offered a close read of the first chapter that significantly improved its presentation. Jenni Fry’s copyediting significantly improved the readability of the text. And two readers for the Press made close and sensitive readings from which I took a number of suggestions.
The book is dedicated to Kathleen, David, Rachel, and Joel, each of whom has taught me far more about moral decency than I should have needed to learn.
Notes
Preface
1 These examples come from Peter Singer’s The Most Good We Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). We will meet Singer again periodically throughout this book.
Chapter One
1 In case this might seem like a cultural quirk rather than an acknowledgment of others, it should be borne in mind that it is an example of the Scandinavian view that one is obliged to the community, in contrast to a US view that is typically more concerned with the rights one can claim upon the community.
2 Recently there have arisen a number of ethical approaches that resist the overall theorization that follows here. Among these is ethical particularism, especially as it appears in Jonathan Dancy’s fascinating Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Although my approach here shares with Dancy’s a resistance to overarching principles, it treads on different ground. Dancy is interested in articulating a proper
approach to ethics in general; this book is focused on living a morally decent life.
3 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 88.
4 In Groundwork, Kant’s specific example concerns not dishonesty generally but lying specifically. However, it would seem that willing dishonesty can no more be universalized than willing lying. There might be cases in which someone might not tell the entire truth without violating the categorical imperative, say when you are asked by a friend whether he looks good in his wedding pictures and you respond, “Your suit is really nice.” But even here you can’t will dishonesty but rather must will a certain limited type of honesty.
5 What we have seen here falls under Kant’s category of “perfect duties.” There are also “imperfect duties,” those we need to perform but not all the time.
6 Perhaps the most influential recent text in virtue ethics is Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
7 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), 1098a15.
8 Bernard Williams emphasizes this point in his contribution to Utilitarianism: For and Against (J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
9 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (Spring 1972), 231. Singer’s argument has been developed at greater length by Peter Unger in Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Shelly Kagan’s The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) comes to similar conclusions but uses different argumentative approaches.