In addition to the general human proclivity for weakness of will (akrasia), for states of denial, self-deception, and wishful thinking, for occasionally succumbing to illusions, or even imbibing the occasional delusional thought, we are constitutionally or dispositionally prone to any number of cognitive and social biases. This should enter into any account, in moral psychological terms, of why even ostensibly “good” people tend to arbitrarily and thus irrationally circumscribe their sphere of moral considerations and conduct. Thus, even the Golden Rule, which “does not ask for heroic self-sacrifice or saintly forbearance” (or supererogatory moral behavior), is often limited to the private or intimate realm, as it were (in contrast to the parable of the Good Samaritan), thereby excluding its logical extension into public or political morality. Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, it was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who invoked the golden rule as axiomatic for prescriptive social morality.* I was provoked into thinking about such matters after reading the following paragraph from George Kateb’s important book, Human Dignity (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011):
“The vexatious problem is that people who practice the golden rule in everyday life are sometimes willing to give their support to political policies that do not rise to the best political morality [this is a distinct but not unrelated problem from what occurs with moral and political rationalizations for ‘dirty hands’]. They are uncommonly good persons who go out of their way to help others, but who think that they are good citizens when they allow or endorse state activities that regularly invade the rights of people abroad or at home [i.e., in their own country]. They implicitly accept the division between personal and public spheres of action, but in such a way as to confine morality to personal life and exclude it from public life. It is as if the only goodness that can be shown is to people to whom one can do it in one’s own person [Perhaps this is why La Rochefoucauld wrote that ‘Virtue would not go so far without vanity to bear it company’ and ‘We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives’] The irony is that those who try to follow the golden rule show imagination in dealing with the suffering of a few, but lose all imagination of suffering when events are distant or on a large scale. [There may be something at work here that is other or more than a ‘failure of imagination.’ According to William Ian Miller, we are liable to be afflicted with ‘two desperate and inescapable desires: to be thought well by others and to think well of ourselves. The second desire depends on the first more than the first on the second; in any event, they are complexly intertwined. Nor is either of these desires mere vanity: they are much of what makes us socializable; nor is it entirely distinct from what we, flatteringly, call conscience.’ The desire for esteem and a desire for self-esteem are more easily satisfied in an interpersonal world or communal context in which we directly interact with others, although La Rochefoucauld and the moralists writes Jon Elster, believed ‘civilized life is held together by the desire for esteem or vanity, which has the miraculous capacity to mimic virtue.’] They have the imagination to see what is before them but not to see what isn’t. Patriotism [which, in this case, is indistinguishable from nationalism] is one of the passions that help to bring about the public blindness of private goodness.”
There is a book that provides the requisite philosophically sound moral argument for extension of morality beyond not only the private sphere or intimate realm (or the slightly larger interpersonal space of daily life), but also beyond that crooked circle bounded by one’s fellow citizens as members of a nation-state: please see Robert E. Goodin’s Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (University of Chicago Press, 1985).
* For a brief account, see the relevant sections from my introductory essay on the Golden Rule.
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