Moral Sentiment and Moral Judgment after the Paris Attacks

Ever since the dust began to clear after what President Hollande rightfully called “the horror” of Friday night, my media consumption — yes, especially my Facebook feed (constantly refreshed with reflections from Public Seminar) — has mostly consisted of two things: (1) people, in various ways and with differing degrees of what could be called “reflective awareness,” offering expressions of solidarity with the victims of the terror attacks in Paris; and (2) people condemning the fact that this outpouring of sympathy (I emphasize this word for reasons disclosed below) is heinously selective. Specifically, the accusation is that while many “Westerners” have seemingly limitless reserves of concern for Europeans, they are not the least bit disturbed by the loss of life in Africa or the Middle East.

In stating this accusation, against which (to be clear) I hope to push back — and push back hard — in one important respect, let me expressly state that I don’t disagree with the basic judgment involved. I also abjure this phenomenon, which I do not deny is both real and painfully apparent in recent days. I merely think — and believe this is of no small importance — that the insistence of the rightness of this judgment is completely out place, even, to speak frankly, insane and inhumane at this particular moment. Why? Because moral judgment, in the Kantian mode I wholly endorse, is a conviction based on the application of pure reason to the empirical world of the morally relevant facts of the world as it is. The time for judgment of this sort is in your study (office?), your parlor (living room?), or your classroom (if you are privileged enough to sit in one most days), as you reflect quietly, perhaps with a friend or loved one, perhaps with students or colleagues, and try to determine the way in which the moral principles to which you hold fast (say: “All human beings are equal and of absolutely equal moral value”) hold in the instant case. But while I absolutely agree that the basic judgment is right — since this principle holds, we ought to hold each victim in absolutely equal regard — I insist that it is wrong to shout about it (and shouting is what I’ve been hearing) right now.

How can both be true? How can it be right to make this judgment and wrong to express it in this way at this time? I offer this answer: the judgment is right in terms of the application of “pure practical reason,” but we — on Facebook, in blogs, on the commentary circuit — are not in the “pure practical reason” business. We are involved in public discourse that we hope will influence our fellow citizens to help us make a better world, or at least make a world that is a bit less shitty (as my mother would say). As such, we would do well to recall that, as Robin Wagner-Pacifici has argued, moral sentiments, not rational judgments, form the basis of the kind of civic engagement that can actually bring about that better (or somewhat less-bad) world.

In short, my recommendation to my well-meaning and not incorrect friends and colleagues is that we join Wagner-Pacifici in returning to the Scots, but in this case that we listen again not to Smith on the “moral spectator” but to Hume’s famous dictum: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Treatise of Human Nature, Part II, Ch. 2, Sect. 3). This does not mean that our passions (as “good Westerners”) as they exist now are absolutely right and that if they tell us that Paris matters more than Beirut, or that French lives (or European lives or Western lives or white people’s lives) matter more than Lebanese lives (or African and Middle Eastern lives or brown people’s lives), then we should tell reason to shut up and get in line with them. Far from it. It means that reason can only ever help us — on the one hand — to understand why our moral sentiments are aroused by this or that “instant case” or — on the other hand — to persuade another as to why their moral sentiments ought to be so aroused. We might well regret what Hume calls “the present disposition of the human heart” (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3.7), and we might rush to remind to remind ourselves that Hume himself carried a lot of cultural assumptions, including a superiority of Europeans to Indians similar to the prejudice that those who lament Paris more are accused of holding (id. , 3.19). These are fair points. But why are we having this conversation at all, and especially this week? Because we want to bring about a world in which the human heart is enlarged to the greatest possible extent. And I just cannot see how castigating those whose heart is at least enlarged enough to identify with an Eiffel Tower blended with a peace sign is the way to help that heart get larger.

The first thing to note in this light about “our pattern of discourse” over the past four days is that, according to the most recent count I can find, the victims were of 19 nationalities and hailed from Mexico, Chile, Algeria, and Morocco, among other nations. That is to say, before we instantly judge ourselves or others for feeling more tied to the victims of the Paris attacks because they are Parisian, French, European, “white,” or whatever, we should at least pause to consider that, maybe, for some or many of us, we feel more tied to the victims of the Paris attacks because they represent something: they represent intuitively, sentimentally, our attachment to pluralist, multi-ethnic, and open societies. They are brown and black as well as white. They are, in a distinctive way, us. They are not merely human beings whose lives matter just as much as every other human being; they are human beings living in the condition of pluralist democracy, and in grieving their loss we are grieving something that does touch us in a special way. We should not be ashamed of this, nor should we be called racists for it. Quite the contrary: we should be grateful that in cities like Paris, London, and New York — cities that terrorists target for reasons — the great experiment of the modern, pluralist, multiethnic, and multicultural democracy is pursued with passion. And we should lament, even especially lament, when that kind of life is attacked, irrespective of how many people are killed or their race, religion, nationality, or ethnicity.

The second thing I wish to call attention to is why exactly our sympathy is more profoundly engaged when an attack singles out the loss of this kind of life as well as the loss of biological life as such. Two remarks are pertinent here: one on sympathy and one the connection between Paris and this kind of life.

Sympathy. For students of the history of philosophy such as myself, this word will instantly trigger an association with the great 18th century Scottish Enlightenment and maybe most of all the moral philosophy of David Hume. These thinkers and actors, who were the great leaders of this philosophical movement, were all “men of action” who fought bravely for causes we can easily identify with “social justice,” even if when assessed from the political movements of the present they might be seen as conservatives (or at least center/center-right Liberals-with-a-capital-L). In their spirit, I want, with great humility and the greatest sympathy, to encourage us all to embrace one another and the ideals of sympathetic moral education, rather than to argue about whose principles are purer.

Paris. At the same time, I want to note that Paris is more than a place on the globe; more than the capital of France; more than a target for extremist hate. In those regards (and others like), it is “nothing special” and ought not to hold any special place in our heart. I agree. However, it is also a metonym for the old republican cry of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Let’s focus on the third of these. My sense is simply that leveling the charge of “selective sympathy” against those who have been so moved by the events in Paris but less so by those in Beirut and elsewhere has an especially bitter irony in that it accuses those moved by these distinctive French values that they fail to embrace these values. Specifically, the claim is made that we should all hold to the value of solidarity (to use the modern sense of fraternité) by not granting any more of our personal affection or the energy that makes up our sphere of moral concern to those to whom we feel indebted for even being able to articulate the norm in the first place. To say this does not mean to say that the French are, in fact, more deserving of this concern, but rather acknowledges that there are reasons for our sensibilities to be so motivated.

A closing note

I wrote the first third of these words while riding the U9 metro from my son’s school in the (upper middle class, very white) Wilmersdorf section of Berlin to (working class, ethnically diverse) Wedding, while on my way to teach in the former East. Along the way, I passed through the former main station of divided West Berlin (Zoologischer Garten) and then the “migrant neighborhood” of Moabit. Today, an extended family of about 20 Arabic speakers rode with me from Zoo to Turmstrasse (the heart of Moabit, and one center where the city of Berlin is trying desperately to get refugees officially registered as such and into temporary housing). I smiled at the children among them (three babies on their parents’ arms; a pair of girls, cousins likely, exactly my daughter’s age; a boy perhaps two years old; and an older boy, perhaps 8 or 9, sitting alone in the corner of the train), who alone made eye contact with me. As the girls smiled back, their parents (aunts, uncles, grandparents) had a heated conversation. I looked at the other commuters to gauge their attitudes. In their eyes and expressions, I read a variety of responses — a wide range of degrees of sympathy, from disinterest to care, from friendliness to disgust. The future of Europe and, in my estimation, the prospects of a less shitty world in general, hinge on all of us on that train feeling the solidarity that was so horrifically disrupted in so many ways these last days. And I wonder: does the outpouring of sympathy for the multi-ethnic, multi-racial victims of the Paris attacks help or hinder “the struggle for Europe’s soul”?

Why am I sharing this detail? To illustrate (and I use the verb advisedly) my conviction that Hume and Wagner-Pacifici (following Smith, Hume’s friend and fellow traveler) are right in insisting that an infinite extension of moral sentiments would actually deprive us of our capacity to act on our duty. This is what my friends who place their rhetorical and logical emphasis on the problem of “selective solidarity” are missing out on in their quest to bring moral sentiment into accord with pure impartial reason. Instead, we say, in using occasions like the horrors of the past week in Beirut, Iraq, Syria, Paris, and elsewhere as “teaching moments,” we need to use practical reason impurely, as “the slave of our passions” that it “is and ought to be,” in order to help us manifest our will to engage with the world in the partial way of which we are capable.