David Cowles
Jul 15, 2024
“The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality…every event is its own end!”
Whether it’s a copy of the 10 Commandments posted on your classroom wall or a list of ‘Daddy’s House Rules’ stuck on your refrigerator door, when you’re a kid you learn ‘morality’ as a set of rules. In fact, the foundation of Western ethics, the Torah, looks like one giant rules-based moral code – all 4 books and all 613 mitzvahs.
While Judeo-Christian ethics proceeded along several different tracks, a serious challenge to rules-based morality was not mounted until c.1500 CE when Nicollo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) proposed an alternative better suited to emerging ‘modern’ attitudes. In lieu of a system based on rules he proposed a system based on results: “The end justifies the means”.
Note the sea-change: our focus has shifted from the past (experience, memory, custom, legislation, and revelation) to the future (technology, efficiency, productivity and profit). There’s at least one problem with this: the real future is nothing like the real past!
We know what we know about the past in the ways that we know it. What we know about the future is different both in substance (content) and in form. And we know it in very different ways. We research the past; we predict the future.
In ways I’m sure he didn’t imagine, Machiavelli played Chanticleer; but instead of summoning the dawn, he summoned ‘the great darkness’ known as the Enlightenment. No wonder we were able to sell so many tickets to Game #8 of the 1956 World Series!
By taking the ethical focus off the concrete event, the means, and shifting it to its ephemeral consequence, the end, Machiavelli provided a readymade, universal justification for every human engineered horror imaginable.
Compare this to Moses: “Thou shalt not kill.” Ok, we can still fudge that with our convoluted doctrines of just war, death with dignity, reproductive freedom, self-defense, and retributive justice; but we can’t make it go away entirely.
For that we needed Machiavelli: now the act of killing, like all acts, is itself morally neutral. Moral value comes from the results, the consequences of an act, not from any aspect of the act itself. That’s saying a lot! We’re not only throwing out the action per se but also its motive, its intent, and the method of its execution.
So, we justify genocide, nuclear war, et al., based on imagined, long term, positive consequences. A bit hard to swallow but not to worry: 300 years later, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill would give Machiavelli a much-needed make-over.
In the ‘spirit of the spin’, they reframed ‘the end justifies the means’ as ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. Clever, but note that the focus remains on consequences rather than on acts themselves.
Sidebar: Intellectual History is full of similar progressions. For example, Matthew and Luke ‘cleaned-up’ Mark to get the Gospel message ready for prime time.
First year philosophy students don’t necessarily warm to Machiavelli’s rather dry presentation of his ethic. But when they hear the same message softened by Bentham and Mill and presented under its new name, Utilitarianism, they jump on board.
In fact, when college students are first exposed to idea of Utilitarianism, their usual reaction is, “Of course!” This by itself should raise an eyebrow. Whenever an idea goes from inconceivable to irrefutable in a relatively short period of time, we should be en garde. We may be looking at a shift in the cultural paradigm rather than true intellectual progress.
After the Bentham-Mill reformulation of Machiavelli’s ideas, acceptance spread quickly. Now Dostoevsky could say, “Now, everything is permitted,” as could Malcom X, “By any means necessary!” How did it happen that an ethic ‘unimaginable’ before 1500 became ‘obvious’ by 1800?
The cultural phenomenon known as Renaissance, the ideological phenomenon known as Reformation, and the intellectual phenomenon known as Enlightenment, combined with the sociological phenomenon of Industrialization, to drag the Western world into its only true Dark Age (1700 – 1900)…the so-called Age of Reason. Hmm…
Sidebar: Let me digress for just a minute to consider the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel. Babel refers generally to the phenomena of urbanization (Cain) and industrialization, and it spotlights the adverse impact of these activities on language.
Our language evolved organically out of the infamous ‘human condition’. It had to serve many functions simultaneously. Initially at least, Homo Sapiens did not have the luxury of specialized languages for different functions. The earliest languages had to be suited to interpersonal communication, philosophical reflection, and artistic expression, as well as industry and commerce.
For example, many languages contain a syntactic variable we call Voice. OG Indo-European languages typically had 3 robust voices:
An Active Voice well suited to the communication of information.
A Passive Voice ideal for the expression of emotion.
A Middle Voice suited to model the interpersonal aspects of life.
Unfortunately, the Middle Voice has largely disappeared, and the Passive Voice has atrophied into a degenerative form of the Active Voice; et voila, humanity today! We’re very good at making things, period. To misquote George W. Bush, “We’re all ends, no means.”
To oversimplify just a bit, Babel made the world safe for Machiavelli but Bentham made it safe for Bolshevism. How ever did we go so wrong? Turns out, the problem is not primarily an ethical issue at all; it’s an ontological one. It comes back to what we mean when we talk about an entity or an event.
As our instruments have become more precise and our measurements more accurate, our notion of ‘an event’ is shrinking closer and closer to a singularity. We have stripped away motive, intention, tone, and even result from the event itself. We are left with a 4-dimensional canopy of point-like events, linked by ultra-thin filaments to form a causal web. That world exhibits a high degree of conformity, repetition and even redundancy. It is causal to the point of being deterministic.
But we have so pared down the power and scope of ‘events’ that they hardly seem to matter anymore. Our focus is ‘on the big picture’ now – ongoing trends, not grand finales. But fortunately, this is not how the world works! Events are the building blocks of reality. Not that everything is an event, but whatever is not an event is ‘real’ only as it participates in an event.
Events populate regions of spacetime (not necessarily contiguous) with internal structures and external relations, kind of like nation states. An even better analogy would be a human cell. Per se, it is an independent entity, but as such it supports a myriad of higher order (more general) entities like tissues, organelles, organs, the host organism itself, and who knows, the Genus Homo, Gaia or even Kosmos.
Where did the morality of Machiavelli and Mill go wrong? The problem lies in a faulty conception of a consequence. If I throw a rock at a garage window and the window breaks, it’s reasonable to regard the broken window as a ‘consequence’ of the thrown ball, though the event actually encompasses the throwing gesture, the trajectory of the rock, and the breaking of the glass.
We want the next moment to relate to the shattered glass in the same way the shattered glass relates to the thrown ball. But, again, that is not how the world works.
Perhaps a dog will run through the garage and cut its paw leading to a trip to the vet, interrupted by an auto accident along the way. Or perhaps the ricocheting ball also knocked over a space heater causing a fire that destroyed 3 city blocks. Or perhaps nothing special happened after the window broke; under the right circumstances, it might not be discovered for weeks.
We can reasonably say that the broken glass is an ‘effect’ (vary likely but not certain) of the thrown ball. We can also say that ‘accident’, ‘fire’, and ‘eh!’ are alternative, less likely effects of the broken glass. And because we got an ‘A’ in 3rd grade arithmetic, we want to be able to say that the thrown ball is the cause of the accident, fire, and eh scenarios…but we can’t.
The Transitive Property (If A = B and B = C then A = C) does not hold in the real world. Put another way, causality is part of the ‘internal structure’ of an event but plays no role in its ‘external relations’.
It’s impossible to know all the possible consequences, or even the one actual consequence, of any act. Every event is sui generis and causa sui.
It seems that the famous Law of Cause and Effect should have broader consequences – but it doesn’t. Causality exists. The problem is that we can never specify with certainty any or all effects, or any and all causes, for any given event. That means that nothing causes any thing but everything causes every thing…which I think you’ll agree compromises the value of the concept itself.
Furthermore, we would need to follow the chain of causes all the way back to the moment of Big Bang and extend the chain of effects all the way forward to Heat Death. Yet this is still not the real problem! Now we need to create an algebra that assigns a scalar ‘value’ and a vector ‘weight’ to every event in the chain (above) and an operation that allows us to calculate a single, unequivocal Value for the consequence in question. That evaluation, in turn, allows me to conclude that this aggregate end does, or does not, justify the means that led up to it. Impossible!
The notion of a specific, evaluable end is an illusion. Actions do have consequences, but we have no meaningful way to project those consequences or to evaluate their totality. Another way to look at this is as a ‘halting problem’: When is enough, enough? Can we ever say, “Ok, I’ve identified and evaluated all the significant consequences?” I don’t think so; and therefore, no act can ever be justified by its ‘ends’ because either (1) it has no end or (2) one and the same end is the omega point of every possible causal chain.
If we reject Legalism and Utilitarianism in ethics, what’s left? The act itself. Actions are moral or immoral based on the act alone. Actions derive their value, neither from their obedience to a list of rules nor from their so-called consequences. Acts are moral or immoral on their own. But how?
To grasp this core principle, we need to drill down our notion of what constitutes an event. The ever-contracting perspective of physical science is offset by the ever-expanding perspective of biological science.
An ‘event’ begins as a reaction to a particular state-of-affairs. This reaction is powered by the objective, universal values that inform one way or another every event. Events are sui generis, self-aware, and self-modifying. Each event has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That end is not a ‘consequence’; it is the event itself, projected into the actual world of every logically subsequent event.
The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality. But an act is not a gesture. It begins with the first stirring of appetition and it proceeds through various phases of intent. It embodies aspects of the world it inherits, colored by its own subjectivity. Ultimately, every event is its own end!
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.
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