Fear of Ethics

I must confess up front that I’ve avoided a real engagement with all that ethics brings with it during my training in the academy thus far. I’m incredibly uncomfortable with it (this is a blog so I can talk about my feelings, right?) for reasons I’m equally uncomfortable considering. My response to this set of texts, then, is in the first instance incessant shifting in my chair, wondering when it’ll all stop, and in the second instance reversion to a more comfortable consideration of what’s at stake in these arguments when they’re abstracted out into manageable concepts with familiar contours. Which isn’t to suggest that there isn’t an ethics of abstraction (though I’m uncomfortable thinking seriously about this). It is to say, however, that what I’m more drawn towards the larger political stakes (at least on the face of things) put forth in Jameson’s response to MacIntyre, which I’ll come back to at the end.

But first, one of the reasons I’ve perhaps lazily but nonetheless consciously avoided ethics like the plague, articulated by New York Times columnist and Keynesian economist Paul Krugman (only yesterday):

“Now, inequality of opportunity is only one reason for the inequality in outcomes we actually see. But of what remains, how much reflects individual effort, how much reflects talent, and how much sheer luck? No reasonable person would deny that there’s a lot of luck involved. Wall Street titans are, no doubt, smart guys (although talking to some of them, you have to wonder …), but there are surely equally smart guys who for whatever reason never got a chance to grab the 9-figure brass ring.”

So far so good. The conservatives Krugman rebuts in this entry of “The Conscience of a Liberal” have no solid ground (at least in terms of the flawed infrastructure of American legal, economic, racial, and spatial determinations) upon which to convince anyone of a direct and unbreakable correlation between morality and economic affluence (or even adequacy). The playing field isn’t, and never was, conducive to this fantasy of “equal opportunity.”

Or, as Krugman agrees, “economics is not a morality play; the social and economic order we have doesn’t represent the playing out of some kind of deep moral principles.”

But then the liberal twist, the return of a political and ethical horizon, the point at which I once again go to my room and slam the door because auntie ethics came to visit bearing a big basket of “if only everyone abided by this set of regulatory ideals” (my aunt has never said any such thing, but I bet she thinks it all the time):

“That doesn’t mean the order we have should be overthrown: the pursuit of Utopia, of perfect economic justice, has proved to be the road to hell, while welfare-state capitalism — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed by a strong safety net — has produced the most decent societies ever known. The point, though, is that anyone who claims that transferring some income from the most fortunate members of society to the least is a vile injustice is closing his eyes to the obvious reality of how the world works.”

While one could perhaps make the argument that the use of the word “Utopia,” here, is simply a shorthand for something more akin to that which seems absurd, irrational, a commitment to something ruined long ago, I think there’s far more at stake, at least when we consider Jameson’s critique of MacIntyre’s disavowal of Marxism for what MacIntyre repeats as a realistic engagement with practices determined by historical sequence, as opposed to practices that seek to break from them. To be clear, I’m not working towards an argument about MacIntyre’s liberal tendencies, here; rather, I’m resorting to the abstraction (or perhaps the right word is distillation) of an argument in order to avoid the more stomach turning task of thinking seriously about ethics, and I’m doing so by way of the structural limits and imperatives of what Jameson here (indeed, through his whole career) endorses as Utopic thinking. Which is to say that we can see Jameson’s critique (though he then let’s MacIntyre off the hook for what seems like a “he doesn’t even know how Utopic he really is!” kind of conclusion) about the self-fulfilling prophecy of anti-Utopic thinking (the kind of thinking that constantly limits itself to the imaginable, to historical practices in and of themselves) articulated at a different register in Krugman’s caveat to an otherwise sound dagger through the ethical heart of American neo-conservativism: “the pursuit of Utopia, of perfect economic justice, has proved to be the road to hell.” Krugman is quite clearly gesturing to historic failures of a “road” we abandoned long ago (he would probably name 1989 as this final abandonment). Of course the two operative terms in what Krugman hopes is a self-evident shorthand are “Utopia” and “perfect economic justice.” The road was an attempt, but the hell (so the claim goes) comes from the first two (not the road itself).

And this is where we can see, if not in content then certainly in form, the force of Jameson’s critique of MacIntyre’s anti-Utopianism: what makes Utopia utopic is not that it takes contradictions of extant conditions (economic justice understood as identical logics across conservative, liberal and communist policies and morality) and points to some easy resolution within the same system that produced the contradictions in the first place (i.e. communism with capitalist economics) but rather that the formalization of the unimaginable in utopic form (radical politics, cultural fictions, etc.) make explicitly clear the structural and imaginative limits to the actualization of radical alternatives. Utopic thinking isn’t an end in of itself, but rather a means for recognizing the conditions of such means in the first place. And so if ethics (or liberal morality for Krugman) resides immanent to historical practice but also limits itself to reproducing those historical practices, then it, like Krugman’s so-called trump card (communism failed, long live capitalism), makes me want to take anti-depressants.

Maybe I’ll face my fears another day.