Ethics, honour and the dangers of over-ritualization, part 1
Posted By Marc on July 10, 2010
This set of posts is a first cut at integrating some ideas I have been working on in one form or another for several years now. While I am really interested in the general case of the evolution of moral and ethical systems within groups, for this specific set of posts, I will only be considering one system: Anthropological ethics regarding operations in war and near-war (i.e. COIN) conditions. My hope is to produce a rough model of a highly complex situation that, with more work, will be increasingly generalizable.
Some initial notes
Let me start by saying that the process I am using to build this model is based on the “operational notion of truth” (i.e. the postulate that a theory (or model) is nearer to the “truth” than its rival explanations if it better predicts events; NB: it does not claim to be the “truth”).
It would be nice if I could deal with the evolution of moral and ethical systems within groups in isolation from other factors. That, however, is impossible since professional groups do not act in a social, moral or ethical vacuum. professional groups also do not stand outside of time, and all ethical and moral systems evolve over time.
It would also be easier if I could adopt the assumption that “ethics” is a unique, crisp set of considerations for individuals. Unfortunately, it isn’t and, as I hope to show, any “certainty” displayed in ethical systems merely highlights localalized boundaries of those systems; the metaphysical equivalent of “Here be dragons”.
I think that it is also important for me to state, up front, the distinction between “morals” and “ethics” that I am using here (and in other material I have written on the topic). I hold that “morals” and “moral systems” refers to systems of behaviour/perception within and between groups that evolve over time in order to meet the operational environment. “Morality”, using this definition, is inherently group based. I contrast this with “ethics” or “ethical systems” which I take to refer to systems of behaviour/perception that are located within an individual, and which are frequently the result of attempts to resolve the claims of overlapping and competing moral systems. “Ethics”, using this definition, is inherently individually based.
I think it is also important to note that other people writing in the area use an inversion of this – “ethics” for group based behaviour/perception and “morality” for individual based behaviour/perception. Etymologically, it could go either way; I just happen to prefer the one I am using despite the fact that many moral systems are termed “codes of ethics”.
One final note: this is the first of several posts laying out the overall model as it stands now. This post is mainly concerned with establishing a general framework for examining the question and outlining the terminology I use.
The environment of moral systems
All moral systems operate in a complex and competitive environment with both other moral systems and with lived reality. Indeed, I have found it very useful to consider this competition as if it were a Darwinian selection-space.
In his article The Six Essentials?, Wm. Calvin notes that there are six essential characteristics in order for a full fledged, Darwinian process to operate:
1. There must be a pattern involved.
2. The pattern must be copied somehow
3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance
4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space.
5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment [Natural Selection]
6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns [Theory of Inheritance]
(NB: edited for brevity to prime points only)
That multiple moral systems exist in social reality should not be in doubt and is easily verifiable empirically (try googling “code of ethics” and see how many entries turn up; I got ~10.6 million results). That these systems are in competition with each other, at least some of the time and in some areas, is also easily verifiable empirically through an examination of any two (or more) such codes that claim to deal with roughly similar areas of operations (consider, by way of example, the difference between the American Anthropology Association and the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association on the use of deception in research).
The same verification for the existence of competition also illustrates several other points. First, it is rare for code of ethics to completely disagree with each other. Indeed, there are many points of similarity and, in a number of cases, (almost) exact agreement between them on certain issues. Consider, by way of example, the universal injunction against murder in religious systems. The competition in this example appears in the distinction between when a killing is “murder” and when it is not or, to put it another way, when killing is a morally “good” or “neutral” event.
The second point that becomes clear is that moral codes are collections of patterns that are coupled together and that, as a result of this, we can actually examine the couplings that hold these collections together as patterns in and of themselves. For example, within Christian theology, there are competing patterns of connection regarding the “literalness” of scripture. One pattern holds that all interpretation must be literal (there are also disagreements on how literal and whether or not that applies only to the Hebrew and Greek “originals”), another holds that only specific injunctions must be taken literally, while a third holds that scripture must be taken literally if that matches continuing revelation and/or church tradition.
So, we have competition between variant patterns at both the level of application (or content; “do” or “do not”), interpretation (“apply the do or do not when…”), and coupling (structural and interpretive “do” or “do not”). Furthermore, the competition does not take place in some isolated social space.
The lived reality of competitive moral systems
One of the most important points that we need to consider is that moral systems do not operate in a social vacuum; they operate in our day to day lives – our “lived reality”. This means that component parts of the multiple moral systems existing in our individual heads are constantly being tested against empirical, lived reality.
Now, in a nice, clean (and probably boring) universe, one would think that this constant empirical testing would lead towards a situation where all moral systems would converge towards a singular understand; an “inevitable” convergence or unification point. This, to my mind fallacious, assumption lies behind a number of teleological theories such as Marxism (the inevitable “second coming” of Communism), Spencerian “evolution” (aka “survival of the fittest” and unilinear evolution) and Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point.
But empirical lived reality does not operate this way for one simple reason: human minds do not operate this way. Humans, annoying species that we are, have the (possibly) unique ability to believe two or more contradicting things at the same time and selecting, at the sub-conscious level, which belief will be held in the conscious mind based on the immediate situation. Sociologists and social psychologist refer to this behaviour as “role appropriate behaviour”, and what it really means is that we “bring to consciousness” (“entrain” to use Charlie Laughlin’s terminology) moral codes [behaviours & perceptions] that are appropriate to the immediate event and situation.
At the same time (remember that we are an annoying species), humans are capable of remembering what we have done and, sometimes, trying to “integrate” our often conflicting behaviours/perceptions that allows us to say “this is who I am”. Social theorists refer to this concept as “reflexivity“, but other terms work just as well – “soul searching”, “self reflection” and (my favorite) “turn around and look at yourself”. All of these concepts share a similarity, which is that they are ways of reducing conflicts between components of symbol systems whether those be scientific theories or moral codes.
“But”, I hear the ghost of Marx cry, “this process of reflexivity will inevitably lead to a full integration: thesis, antithesis leading to synthesis!” Wrong (again) Karl, it doesn’t; at least in immediately perceivable and testable social reality (the question is still open if we were to take a Buddhist time line on the issue, but that is beyond the current limits of testability). Outside of the possible cases of Saints and Bodhisattvas, this can be empirically verified by a simple experiment: go out and talk with your friends and acquaintances and find out how many of them are fully self-reflexive and self-integrated. What I suspect you will find is that most people are self-reflexive and self-integrated in some areas and non-reflexive and unintegrated in others.
Ethics and the individual soul
“Soul, what does soul have to do with this?”. More years ago than I care to state in a public forum, I became intrigued by the many and varied ways in which the term “soul” was used. This probably came from an early childhood fascination with ancient Egyptian religion and how that compared with Christianity, especially in regards to the concept of the soul (here is a quick overview of the Egyptian version). But what does this have to with a discussion of ethics?
Let me return, for a moment, to the concepts of self-reflexivity and self-integration discussed above. Where do these take place, and where can they be perceived (if they can)? If we provisionally accept that their site of operations is in the complex electro-neuro-chemical interactions of the human body, and most plausibly concentrated in the brain (because of neural density), then we can start to refine how they can be perceived or, to be more accurate, the conditions that will bound our potential for perception.
The first of these boundaries is temporal: our physical system is in constant flux – homeostatic rather than static and, barring radical new medical technologies, will inevitably disintegrate (hey, some teleological assumptions can be backed up empirically). The second boundary condition is somewhat trickier to communicate but deals with another empirically verifiable fact: when we “turn around and look at ourselves” we can “see” something, even if it is only a memory of our past actions.
So, if we take these two boundary conditions together, we have a “location” for our processes of self-reflexivity and self-integration and the ability to perceive at least facets of those ongoing processes; we are capable of seeing “our selves”, at least somewhat. But what term do we use for what we are perceiving? I use the term “soul”, even though what we perceive is much closer to what the ancient Egyptians called the Ba, for the simple reason that I just don’t want to hear all the sheep jokes that would be inevitable if I asked people what a particular action would “do to their Ba”.
The soul (Ba as long as I don’t hear any sheep jokes!), is the manifestation that we can perceive (“darkly” to steal [and invert] from St. Paul) of our current ethics and “self”; that which makes us us, at least at the point in time at which we perceive it.
This has some important implications for moral codes. The components and linkages of moral codes are subject to interpretation and rejection by individuals. These individual acts of interpretation, acceptance and/or rejection are the mechanisms for both the production of variant patterns (Calvin’s points 3 and part of 6) and one facet of the multi-faceted environment (Calvin’s point 5).
End of part 1.
JWC on 
Daniel Gallant on 
MM on 
Mr. Xyz on 
Marc on
How about “morality” as a conceptual system defining good and evil while “ethics” are a system of morality applied to a specific situational context?
For example “professional ethics” for lawyers may differ significantly from societal morality but are still socially approved for utilitarian reasons ( and violations of said ethics are punished, even if the reason for breaking them are inarguably morally good)
I love this preliminary elucidation of the metaphysical and am interested in what is coming next.
In my reading of world literature and in my encounters with people who try to do things with ethics, I find that people–especially those who work in bureaucratic organizations,whether military or academic–try to impose a fixed, determinant order on something that is really situational and may clash with the title metaphor of Hermann Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game. The title of Hesse’s final masterpiece signifies the fragility of the empty that rituals we humans play in the pursuit of the sacred organizational ideal, which is dependent on a profane motherworld outside the story’s main setting, Castalia. Castalia represents the organizational equivalent of the narcissistic ego ideal in individual psychology.
Perhaps people who conduct military anthropology or any kind of anthropology or other field of study could become more ethical if they would stand down their COIN manuals, memo writing, and their lessons learned slide-shows that some find so over-ritualized they refer to it as “Death by Power-Point.”
They should turn instead to Hesse and also Fydor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka on the perils of empty rituals. Dostoyevsky’s characters of the Underground Man and Kafka’s Joseph K are fine examples of how institutions and organizations quite harrowingly crush the individual’s freedom of choice in the pursuit of Dostoyevsky’s metaphor of the Crystal Palace or Kafka’s incomplete novel the metaphor of the Prison.
Archetypal psychologists are also important to note in this respect. They claim that there is no unified soul. Just as there is no unified set of morals or ethical system that each one of us can adopt and practice to total perfection. Anyone who has studied research ethics deeply enough also knows that there are no easy answers to ethics. We have ideals, to be sure, but every research project has its own inner logic that it follows. At best, you can establish guidelines but not a fixed beat that everyone marches to in perfect formation.
An organization or institution that tries to establish such tight control will be met with resistance. That’s because organizations are full of people with disunified souls that are operating on metaphysical plane of existences that are bigger than the organization and everyone it it. Administrators who don’t understand that can expect a mighty scapegoating if they fail to grasp that.
Good administrators have a knack for listening closely to the pantheon of voices in their office spaces. Bad ones do not. They punish.
Universities and militaries who have no respect for the ground truth of the people they employ become so decadent that they find themselves in a double-bind of attrition and failure to attract quality future recruits. No one wants to work in a gulag atmosphere.
Archetypal psychologists depart from their Jungian counterparts. For them, soul is an entire pantheon of archetypes that ebb and flow in a person’s consciousness. You can’t control these things. You just have to go with it and let what’s inside oneself resonate. That’s how you find the more nuanced answers, which is the hallmark of great research. And we all know that research is not great research unless it alters one’s consciousness in the conduct of it. And the really great research is the kind that alters the consciousness of one’s colleagues and ultimately an entire field of study. Few of us are ever fortunate enough to achieve that, but we can strive and learn from those who have.
Military Anthropology or Military Social Science will never achieve such a state unless it learns to listen better to the disunity of souls of its own people. COIN environments are terribly messy places, too, rife with disunity. You just can’t impose a fixed system of ethics on people or on COIN.
So you are right, Marc, at best perfection is rather boring but at worst it is soul-crushing.
Or perhaps I could sum up a different way by quoting from the band, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club: “What good is it if you can move a mountain but don’t have the love of the people?”
Fantastic article! I am definitely looking forward to seeing more articles!
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Great stuff! Looking forward to following it.
Part of it may be drawing the line between “Belief” and “Truth” Two very different things.
Another bit leads to Game Theory and the Nash Equilibrium:
“The strategy choice point where all players are making the best reply to strategy/choices made by everyone else in the game.”
In this case morals or moral choices are not a consideration at all. Players make choices of the best strategy for themselves and the equilibrium point is when all the choices have the highest utility for all the players.
Nash got his trip to Sweden proving that all games have this point. Morals and belief are not a factor.
Interesting stuff it is.
Hi MM,
Funny you should mention the “belief” and “truth” line. I was just writing up the section dealing with that when your comment came in .
Hi Zen,
I played with that for a while, but ended up rejecting it in favour of my current model simply because that particular system couldn’t account for as much as the current one can.