Do you recognise anything to be morally necessary? I can easily imagine that many of you don’t. Scepticism is easy, and in any case easier than holding yourself to account.
It’s easy to overlook or dismiss the morally necessary because most of the time we live in a murky world of moral contingency and epistemic uncertainty. But every now and then we hit upon a clear moral limit. I have sometimes found these limits in my own life: life has shown me what I believe. I imagine some of you have experienced the same.
It’s difficult to think what would show the same to someone who has never found these limits in their own moral experience. Classically, we appeal to stories and literature. We look to cautionary tales. We turn to Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov, Shakespeare and Macbeth, Dickens and Scrooge.
Or we look to examples from real life, like Jimmy Savile or Hiroshima. War is as good a source of examples here as any because it shows people mostly at their very worst, but the extremity of the situation occasionally shows them at their truest. (I won’t say best.) I have in mind here a well-known example of George Orwell finding himself unwilling to shoot a man who is holding up his trousers:
I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.
George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War‘
Orwell says – in what seems to me to be an exercise in English understatement – that this doesn’t reveal anything particularly morally relevant. I’m inclined to disagree. He recognised a difference, and recognising a difference requires that you have a capacity to recognise that difference. Perhaps he thinks that goes without saying.
But I don’t think we should gloss over the power that the capacity to recognise someone as a ‘fellow-creature’, and not only a ‘thing’ like a ‘Fascist’ or an ‘enemy’, has over us. I’m not sure we can make sense of that power without acknowledging a categorical moral limit of some kind, even if we might disagree about where and when and how that limit will be hit. We shoot at ‘things’ without a second thought, but we do not shoot at ‘fellow-creatures’ without hesitation.
Modern military training often seems to be a matter of training soldiers to forget this distinction in order to eliminate the hesitation. I have no near experience of this reality, so I will outsource to Major Dr Peter Kilner, Instructor at the US Military Academy, who reports:
Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli – such as fire commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a ‘target’ – and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so.
Major Dr Peter Kilner, ‘Military Leaders’ Obligation to Justify Killing in War‘
Perhaps we might all agree that this isn’t a good thing, but we might disagree about why. He continues:
In and of itself, such training is appropriate and morally permissible. [sic] Battles are won by killing the enemy, so military leaders should strive to produce the most efficient killers. The problem, however, is that soldiers who kill reflexively in combat will likely one day reconsider their actions reflectively. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely – and understandably – suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.
Major Dr Peter Kilner, ‘Military Leaders’ Obligation to Justify Killing in War‘
He cites some examples of modern soldiers who later struggled to come to terms with what they’d done in combat. Of course these soldiers had all the justifications or excuses or ‘morally-sufficient reasons’ necessary to exonerate them from any real wrongdoing. They did what they had to do; they are blameless. But that’s not really the point, is it?
Here is only one representative example:
‘[I just] reali[zed] that he was another human being, just like I am. And so that’s hard to deal with, but that day it was too easy. That upsets me more than anything else, how easy it was to pull the trigger over and over again…’
I’m reminded of a sequence in the documentary film Restrepo (2010), where young American soldiers are shown engaged in a heated firefight. They are seen a’whoopin and a’hollerin and celebrating at the destruction of the enemy at their hands, as if they were playing a computer game or scoring touchdowns. Of course it’s meant to be shocking, even if no judgement is offered for or against the morality of their action.
We can sit back and wring our hands and clutch our pearls at the sad reality of young people going to war and what necessarily comes with that. There is moral tragedy in what they do, and perhaps more tragedy in becoming (in needing to become) the kind of people that do what they do: it is better to suffer evil than do it, after all.
But I would ask what we could expect when we send young people out to fight. Having been put in a situation where they have to do what they know ought not be done, do we expect them to do it with moral sensitivity? And as they are shooting and blowing people up they shout: ‘Sorry! I hope that didn’t hurt too much! I really find this all terribly difficult!’ Such inconsistency is not sustainable and must be resolved one way or another.
Orwell follows his well-known example with what seems to me a lesser-known example which he takes to be more morally revealing. He tells a story of a recruit who was an ethnic minority from a poor background. This recruit is unfairly suspected of a theft and is summarily accused and humiliatingly strip searched. He is not guilty, of course, but Orwell says:
What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.
George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War‘
Is this not a sober recognition of a violation of moral necessity, a failure to see and respect this recruit in their full humanity, because he was poor and dark skinned, and that this wrong cannot be made right by compensation? It can’t be bought off, paid off, or ‘made good’ with petty things.
The same recruit later defends Orwell. This is what strikes Orwell as most revealing of the characteristic ‘moral atmosphere’ of that time and place:
Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening experience.
George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War‘
War is a time when the morally impossible becomes possible. Most of the time this is a terrible thing. Very occasionally it goes in the opposite direction, such as when one man is naturally forgiven by another, even though he might not deserve it, for the simple reason that they have fought alongside one another.
I can keep citing example after example, battering you over the head with examples of moral necessity in an attempt to get you to see what I am talking about. But these examples will only work as examples of moral necessity if you are receptive to their recognition. If you stubbornly refuse to accept the concept then you will be eager to keep coming back with justificatory responses that entirely miss the point: ‘So Orwell felt guilty about falsely accusing the recruit; it’s natural, but he did what he could to make amends: he gave him brandy and chocolate.’
But could he dismiss his own moral response so easily, and retain his understanding of the ‘moral atmosphere’ of that time and place? Could he come to understand that he did make good with brandy and chocolate? And if he could, then what would be remarkable about the recruit coming to his defence? And in turn, what would this incident say (of any ‘morally revealing’ interest) about war? That sometimes mistakes are made but you can make people feel better with brandy and chocolate? What a lesson!
Wouldn’t dismissing a response so revealing of the moral character of that time, for him, force him to reassess his moral understanding of that time? And if he throws out his moral understanding of that time, would he lose a vital part, a corner or an edge, of the shape of his moral world?
It seems to me that those moral responses, captured as important in his recollections, are definitively expressive of his moral understanding as such. That is why he recollects those incidents, in their way, and not others. He comes to understand that the wrong he has done to the recruit cannot be made good with brandy and chocolate, and that tells him something important about ethics. These are paradigmatic cases, the cornerstones and hinges of his moral understanding. They are a realisation of moral limits. How else could they have the meaning that they do?
What are these stories without their recognition of the morally impossible? Is the lesson of Raskolnikov that we should be wary of our natural human psychological tendency to beat ourselves up? Is the lesson of Macbeth that we should be careful not to murder one-too-many on our way to the top? Is the lesson of Scrooge that children and family are bad for business? These are not conclusions that you can seriously conclude.
I say that you do recognise the morally necessary – of which the morally impossible is an instance – in your quotidian moral reasoning. I say this because you are not stupid and when you are not being deliberately obtuse you do recognise the meaning in these stories. What you are, if you are sceptical, is hesitant to endorse that recognition. You are hesitant to rationally commit to that recognition because you think it has insufficient rational foundation, and you think having insufficient rational foundation is a sufficient reason to doubt, or even throw the judgement out entirely. We do recognise moral necessity, you might agree, but there is nothing that conclusively establishes that we are right to recognise it.
To that I say this: Whilst there might not be any evidence or argument that conclusively establishes that we are right in our recognition of moral necessity, still we have every right to recognise it. But that is an argument for another day.
I recognise moral necessity; I suspect you do too. There is no reason to reject that recognition, and there is reason not to reject it, because a recognition of moral limits is a condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement. But if I recognise moral limits, then I recognise that there are certain things I cannot do, things like dismissing my moral limits when they are not convenient. That is the nature of moral necessity.
Read more: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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