Читать книгу The Protector Ethic - James V. Morganelli - Страница 12

Ethics is as complicated as martial arts, which is to say, as complex as we wish to make it. There are plenty of rabbit holes down which practitioners can fall, but at its most basic, ethics deals with primarily three sets of issues:

 Good and bad, which concerns the values we value

 Right and wrong, which involves how we reason and judge to uphold our values

 Decisions and actions we take to protect and preserve those aspects

Martial ethics deals with how we answer threats and violence when values contradict. Understanding how and why values come into opposition is central to defusing that conflict. Human values are only ever objective—shared by everyone, such as necessities for sustenance—or subjective—relative, shared only by some, such as those dictated by culture or creed. Nutrition is an objective value because if we don’t get it, we die. But your favorite football team is your subjective, arbitrary choice. Objectivity trumps subjectivity, always and every time. If it’s up to us to arbitrate between them, not only must we know good from bad, right from wrong, and how to act on these concerns, we have to first identify the subjectivity causing trouble and activate objectivity to alleviate it.

Applying an objective ethic means seeking the universal because it is just as it sounds: good for all involved. If protectors don’t deal in universals, then their thoughts, words, and deeds remain untrustworthy to those who are forced to live by their decisions and actions.

The ethical measure of decisions often comes down to how well they apply to everyone equally. Equality begins with trying to protect everyone in conflict—victims and perpetrators—basing decisions and actions on changing circumstances or context. If protectors do not treat everyone equally, decisions will become suspect, as will the protectors themselves, and it will foment more conflict.

Perhaps more important, without universals, protectors risk having their own thoughts, words, and deeds mutate and work against them. Doing the right thing means knowing how to discover what that right thing is. But if that’s done through disrespect, then protecting actually becomes bullying. This can cause confusion, frustration, and even physical sickness to those involved. Protectors need clarity to trust their decision making, since they’re the ones who must ultimately live with the decisions they may be forced to make.

In seeking the universal, we have to ask questions like, What is good? and, before this, What is valuable? And we must clarify what it means to value at all. These are the starter questions of ethics, and it’s good training to provide answers here, even if they’re difficult or confusing at first.

Can we know if any of our answers will approach truth? Moral truth? Unfortunately, much of the world will inform us this is irrelevant. It will say humans operate by “moral relativism,” meaning we cannot know with certainty the actuality of rightness, goodness, or moral values, as these are mere projections of culture and experiences distinct to us. As such, they are mere opinions, as particular as any partisan’s. Perhaps you stand with those folks and think that terms like objective, universal, and absolute cannot possibly pertain to moral thinking, and even less attain truth, in a world with infinite shades of gray.

Let’s sidestep the fact that condemning the possibility of objective, absolute statements of moral truth is in itself an objective, absolute statement of moral truth. Moral relativism is a colloquialism of a popular theory, as we’ll learn later, that people pick up and swing around as easily as a child’s plastic bat. When conceived as an “ethical” method, it provides tacit cover to legitimize not doing the right thing when the right thing needs to be done. Worse, it insists there can be no knowing the right thing.

Wrong.

At one of the many speeches G. K. Chesterton, the English writer and Catholic apologist, gave during his time, a reporter asked which book, if he could have any single book, he would want if stranded on a desert island. Such a learned and literary fellow must have some deep insight. Would he choose the King James Bible or a volume of Shakespeare? Nope. Thomas’ Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.

There’s a standard in his answer, one that cannot be unseated even by academics who make careers, some very successful, out of studying precisely which book is the best book to be stranded on a desert island with. These folks are outsmarting themselves—any other book is simply a matter of taste. Only Chesterton’s answer reminds us there is a whole world to see, one wholly worth seeing if only we could get the hell off that sandbar.

This is the essential difference between the relative and the universal, the subjective and the objective, the arbitrary and the absolute. And it outlines the real challenge in the study of ethics, especially in the study of martial ethics: to discern the truth of the good and then protect and defend it. If we’re willing to fight, or protect others from harm, or hurt, maim, or kill those who might do the harming, we had better be able to explain not only the good reasons, but the just reasons we fought for and defended others. We had better be able to clarify why.

In seeking the universal, what is good for everyone, we first need some context for what it is we’re searching for, thus the question, what is the nature of human nature? Is it a book to be read or a book to be written? Is it revealed to us, something we discover and recognize as an answer to what it means to be human? Or is our human nature whatever we conclude is worthwhile through reason and experience?

If our nature is due to reasoned knowledge, acquired through experience, then human nature is a book to be written and ought to be organized as good experiences deemed worthy enough for habituating. Much of Greek philosophy centered on the concept of defining this “good life,” eudaimonia. Greek thought is really, really old, so this is by no means new.

But here’s an older idea.

What is it that deems worthy any collection of experiences, habits, or traits concerning the good in the first place? What is it that provides the justification for their inclusion? Is it simply the fact that we think they are worthy? We all take a vote and agree they are? Remember, this book is not about what we agree on. We’re looking instead for what is undeniable.

Could there be an ardent standard by which our “good” ideas could be judged? Perhaps one that is more important and of greater value than fickle human opinion? Could there be a concept that is so cherished that even the good itself could be appraised against it to determine if it is in fact “good”?

There is.