Double-edged Sword

Two items appeared in my local newspaper the other day that illustrate some of the drawbacks of morality. The first is international news from Associated Press (September 6, 2020): 

     Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday warned Greece to enter talks over disputed eastern Mediterranean territorial claims or face the consequences. “They’re either going to understand the language of politics and diplomacy, or in the field with painful experiences,” he said. “They are going to understand that Turkey has the political, economic and military power to tear up the immoral maps and documents imposed,” Erdogan added, referring to areas marked by Greece and Cyprus as their economic maritime zones. 

            So, according to Erdogan, Greece’s “map” is not just incorrect but immoral. And because of that, it is a matter not just for negotiation or judicial ruling but, if necessary, military action. “This means war!” as Groucho Marx would say … and countless actual political leaders have said through the blood-drenched centuries. 

The second item is a letter to the editor:

     Reading the Aug. 18 story, “Charges against man in killing of dog upgraded,” it sickened me to know someone could do this to a dog or any pet of [sic] that matter. But it was done and that’s why I am writing this article. … I along with my wife would have been out there in front of Superior Court joining the protesters in their protests for this cause. … I would like to commend the judge who upgraded these charges of a misdemeanor to a felony …  regarding the perpetrator. I am going to say very little as I feel you do not deserve to take up any space in my article, except to say you as a person are a disgrace to human society, you should be dealt with as if you murdered a person and be given life in prison without parole but I know that’s not going to happen. And yes, I own a dog. 

            Now this is a cause I am certainly sympathetic to, but the over-the-top condemnation of the presumed perpetrator goes beyond what I could support. As with Erdogan, the writer of this letter has clearly upgraded his strong dislike of something – in this case, cruelty to “any pet” -- into a moral judgment. But an additional feature of the moralism in evidence, I surmise from the phrase “or any pet” and otherwise speculate on statistical grounds and not this particular case, about which I don’t know the actual details, is that the letter writer has a double standard. 

Thus, I can readily imagine (extrapolating from experiences I have had) that if someone were to ask the letter writer if he was a vegetarian, he would erupt in anger. “What does that have to do with anything?!” 

 “Well, you seem to be outraged by cruelty to animals, and there is no worse cruelty to animals than what happens in animal agriculture, and we have no need to eat other animals, or even animal products, in order to have a tasty and healthy diet. So I was just wondering if, given your extreme animus toward one kind of animal cruelty, you have the same toward other kinds as well.” 

At which point I would expect to hear a torrent of absurd arguments. “Of course I eat animals! There’s nothing wrong with that! Everybody does it. We need to to live, and to stay healthy and strong. Humans have always eaten animals. Other animals do it. We are at the top of the food chain. It says right in the Bible that God condones it. The animals we eat wouldn’t even be alive if we didn’t eat them.” Et cetera et cetera et cetera. 

But in fact what is going on here, I submit, is that because the person is a moralist, he will spare no invective to condemn things he doesn’t like, but when the moral spotlight is turned on him, spare no fallacy of reasoning to exonerate himself, precisely because moral condemnation is the most stinging form of rebuke there is. The double-edged sword of morality is painful to others and painful to oneself, and so it makes us attack others but defend ourselves with equal vehemence.

It’s all very silly, really … but highly baneful. If instead we conceptualized our differences as having to do simply with opposed desires, our conflicts would be less intense and more amenable to benign resolution … not to mention, more in line with reality … or so it seems to me.

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