Ethics and Modernity

Nothing like a good discussion of ethics on a winter's day, eh?
Today I am summarizing the 7th Chapter from Jarvis' book

Ethics and Modernity

This should shake a few cages!  *grin*

Jarvis' purpose in this chapter is to find the basis for a learning society "which embodies goodness" and to understand the society that we now live in which has been called a learning society.  To do so, he first reviews 6 schools of thought on ethical value.  

Surely, in a few pages, Jarvis can't do justice to 6 schools of thought.  I certainly can't even do justice to Jarvis' arguments in a few paragraphs.  So, understand that what comes below necessarily leaves a great deal out.  These are just the barest bones. 

1. Deontology

• related to Kant and the idea that what is good is what a rational person would will to be universal law
• goodness relies in adherence to rules (universal ones, of course). 
• Has its critics: 
• (e.g.) when seated in a motive of obedience it's a cultural or legal value, not a moral one
• Rawls is more contemporary (1971) positioning justice as fairness
• also a legal and political concept more than a moral one
• Arendt (1958) relates ethics to forgiveness
• Jarvis argues that the principles of fairness and forgiveness are not aligned with the fundamental aims of capitalism.  In fact, when profit is gained at the expense of others, fairness is an obstacle.  
• Deontology does not, in Jarvis' view, provide a satisfactory ethical basis on which to construct a learning society.   
• I am not a student of philosophy, so I accept that I may be missing something important when I pose this question:  Does a system of rules and benefit ascribed based on adherance to those rules not sound in line with the workings of Global Capitalist Economics?  The rules may or may not be explicit, but it strikes me that when workers engage in lifelong learning in order to maintain their employability, they are then "playing by the rules of the game" are they not?  

2. Teleology

• With reference to Bentham (1978) Jarvis explains that this school of thought judges the moral good of an act based on the consequences of the act. 
• something is good if it leads to the most happiness for the most people. 
• There are criticisms:
• Does the ends always justify the means?  Was it "good" for Bonhoeffer to try to assascinate Hilter?  Would it have been good for someone to kill George W?
• Are motives not important in the ascription of moral good? 
• Are unintended "collateral casualities" (negative consequences) relevant to the valuation of good?
• Jarvis refers to the "underclass" as collateral caualities of consumer society. 
• How can we evaluate goodness when long- and short-term consequences are at odds? 
• Jarvis suggests that teleology is also an inadequate basis on which to establish goodness in a learning society. 

3. Intuitionism

• This represents the idea that "good" is not definable.  We just know it when we encounter it.  
• Has its critics: 
• even if one knows good, what compels one to do good?
• our interpretation of "good" changes with education and experience, so how can there be "a" good.? 
• One more school bites the dust. 

 4. Emotivism

• the idea here is that there is no such thing as good.  When we express that something IS good what we really mean is that we approve of it.   It's an expression of an emotion. 
• Critics:
• emotive may be stronger than reason:  and that just won't stand in modernity!
• emotions are confused with attitudes

5. Discourse Ethics

• Habermas (1990) developed this idea out of his theory of communicative action and ideal speech acts. (I won't review here but if you are unfamiliar and interested, the book is Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, and Wikipedia doesn't give a bad summary to start you off)
• It relates to the validation of truth claims in discourse by looking at the presuppositions in it. It attempts to rationally reconstruct moral insights and is based in a moral obligation of commuinctive rationality.  Validity of an ethical norm can only be established through dialectic argument. 
• requires ideal speech conditions (again, refer to theory of communicative action)
• Implies that we learn our ethics through communication with others. 
• Jarvis is attracted to this school because it positions discourse as learning.  We learn through communicative action (as opposed to strategic communication -- which we might label advertising). 
• Jarvis did not say this here, but I wonder if he is going to begin to develop an idea of a learning society in which learning is the continued interogation of morality through communicative discourse ethics. 
• One criticism is that not everyone is developed enough to engage in fruitful moral discourse. 

After reviewing these 5 schools of though, Jarvis quotes Bauman (1993, p. 247) and concludes that

Morality is not safe in the hands of reason (p. 132)

and that modernity is a condition of confused values where schools of thought on morality are inadequate to establish the concept of goodness in a lifelong learning society.   He does accept that political rules should be based on reason and judged by an ethic. And he proposes that the schools of thought reviewed here regarding "the good" are evidence that we are going to have to keep in mind the complexity of the meaning of ethical value in modernity where there is a complex relationship between the individual and the group.  

6. Agapism (situation ethics)

• Jarvis positions Agapism separate from the other schools.  
•  from a Greek word for love it positions that the only universal moral good 
• concern for the Other, without a concern for self-interests, is always good
• (this is the antithesis of modernity)
• other versions of "good" either overly emphasise the individual or the group
• emphasizing the individual threatens to have us lose sight of our responsibility to each other. 
• We always exist in relationships.  Relationships come first. 
• emphasizing the group threatens to have us lose sight of our individual humanity
• "...one's humanity is simultaneously shared and singular." (Jackson, 2005, p. 43). 
• Agapism focuses on the relationship, and therefore negotiates between the individual and the whole.
• Jarvis claims that his arguments suggest that it is impossible to locate moral good in behaviour or reason because they cannot both protect the individual and the whole.
•  He refers to the "Delors Report" (1996) in which UNESCO positions 4 "pillars" of learning, one of which is "learning to live together."  Jarvis suggests that only an agapist ethic can fulfill that pillar.
•  He admits to a utopican vision where everyone exercises
  

 both concern and freedom in a resonsible manner for the good of the whole and, as a result, all individuals grow, develop and fulfil their own human potential in relationship--what Levinas refers to as Infinity.(p 137)

•  The purpose of a utopian vision such as this is to remind us that we've not achieved perfection 

The City of Man, or the New Jerusalem...cannot be achieved through the ideas of modernity which endeavoured to construct it through individual effort and knowledge (p. 137). 

Jarvis then discusses stages of moral development.  He positions moral development as learning, specifically, as a form of lifelong learning. But he argues that although conceptualizing moral values is a developmental process, learning them through experience is not. 

Jarvis then refects back on previous chapters reviewing the values of modernity so that he can analyze them from the theoretical and developmental perspectives in the present chapter.    He warns that this section would require another book to do it justice, but his (and my subsequuent) review are limited by space and time.  

Scientific Knowledge

The claim that scientific knowledge is value-free is overly simplistic.  Once meaning is introduced to a fact, values are involved.  

Capitalism

• Capitalism is telogical
• "..the pursuit of profit by rational and legal means and, as such, fucntions at a low level of moral development in Kohlberg's scheme [of moral development]" (p. 140)  
• See http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm 
• He posits some of the collateral causualities of capitalism including
• impoverishment of workers 
• I have to take some exception here.  "poverty" compared to what?  Compared to no work?  communism?  some other ideal agapist society?  Is poverty not being measured in the terms set by capitalism itself?  In other words, am I impoverished if I can't afford a new car, granite counter tops in my kitchen, vacations, jewellery, perfume etc?  I think it a little like speaking out of the other side of your mouth to suggest that a social ill is created when people don't have the products of the system you aim to condemn.  
• impoverishment of suppliers 
• I have similar concerns with this argument.  Are the suppliers not part of the capitalist network, and thus positioned to make profit as well? 
• addiction to consumerism
• My issue with this claim is only that we are conditioned into a state of perpetual want-overload and have-deficit.  "Addiction to conusmerism" and other such statements seems to position consumerism as a given evil "just because it sounds like it's evil"  I need a little more evidence than that. 
•  Profit is the single goal, but it is not the only outcome and it is not a moral good. 
• the profit of the few is often at the expense of the many. 
• The means by which profit is maximized are sometimes morally questionable.
• means that try to obtain raw materials as cheaply as possible without human or environmental considerations
• means of lowering production costs that impact the wages and working conditions of workers
• means of selling at high prices by driving up the perceived need or reducing supply
• means of selling more through mis-information and persuasive techniques. 

Freedom

• Freedom has to be limited and used responsibily in order for one person's freedom to not impinge upon another's. 
• in this way, the utilitarian position on morality is weak and the deontological position must be qualified. 
• From the communicative action perspective, freedom is something that is debateable in ethical discourse. 
• From the agapistic position, the existence of the Other impinges on my freedom, and that is where ethics and care for the other begins.
• modernity downplays the freedom of the Other. 

Individualism

•   Individualism itself isn't a problem.  We are individuals and it is as individuals that we can accept accept personal moral responsibility to have concern for others.   (This is a bit of an embellishment on what Jarvis is saying, but I don't think he'd disagree) 
• The problem with modernity is that it fails to adequately address the dual and complex nature of humans both as individuals and as a collective.  It needs to better integrate the concept of relationship, where the role of the individual is in relation, and where we all are born and live our lives. 
• Whereas Jarvis is clear that the focus in modernity is on individualism, and I can't deny that to a large degree, there is one other observation that I think is relevant and should be included.  In a great many supra-national and national policy documents on LLL, the individual is indeed "saddled" with the responsibility of continual up-skilling. But there is an undercurrent text that suggests that he or she must do so as a valuable citizen.  LLL is positioned as a moral responsibility to the group.  LLL is not so much an opportunity for the individual himself, but rather a responsibility to society and the economy.  I've called this a "responsitunity" because it has appeared to me as though the discourse is blending the two and where the individual ends and the society begins is not always clear. 

Rationality

•  Jarvis argues that although rat
• ionality is good, it is not sufficient to establish a morality. 
• We are not entirely rational 
• Concern for others, particularly when there are no self-interests involved, is not said to be rational. 

Pragmatism

•  Pragmatism is open to future learning, and therefore, can incorporate a LLL society. 

 Jarvis concludes by saying that "...global capitalism is not built on the value of moral goodness but on the otehr values of modernity..." as outlined above. 
He then goes on to pose questions about the morality of actions within a GC culture such as:

What of the advertising executive who produces advertisements that tare deliberately misleading? 

What of the employees of teh tocacco company who continue to work for hte company...?

What of the policy maker who deliberately prevents people from obtaining their traditinal rights by privatising community faciliteis such as water in parts of central Africa? 

He explains that although he cannot answer these questions, he suggests that theorists have wrestled with the responsibility of those who are just conforming to a system that is flawed.  (as all systems are) 

He concludes with   "If neo-liberalism is the logiacl outcome of modernity, then morally and politically it has failed."  (p. 148) 

The City of Man cannot be built on the values of neo-liberalism.  But this is where we find that LLL has become a dominant idea.   

In the next chapter, which I summarize tomorrow, Jarvis specifically looks at the ethics of LLL in a GC Society.  

He begins:

Our intention is to continue this critical analysis and place lifelong learning within its current social context, one that suggests that modernity has not succeeded, and then look beyond to what could be.  

 

•