On moral choice

A difficult moral lesson, which I struggle to teach Zenella, is the necessity of taking responsibility. It is the beginning of morality and having a personal ethics. One has to be able to say "I did wrong" to be able either to stop doing the wrong or to make reparation. It's tempting -- and it's a temptation that Zenella is all too willing to give into -- to shift the blame for any wrong you do. There are two main ways to do it that I can think of. The first is to claim that you did not have the ability to make a moral choice. You simply did what you had to do. Circumstances compelled you. Similarly, you might claim that your "principles" or your existing moral structure left you with no choice. Zenella is not prone to this, because it is a more sophisticated method of avoiding responsibility. What one does when doing this is ignore that the choice is simply abstracted one level. You chose your moral structure or "principles", after all. Because Zenella does not have "principles" (she has principles but that is not the same thing), she cannot use them to hide behind. She concentrates on the second method, which is to blame someone else. It comes in several forms, but it boils down to the same thing: someone else's wrong compelled me to do wrong.

She has a fine model for it, because Mrs Zen's moral calculus consists of blaming someone else -- generally me -- for any wrong she does. (Her self-image does not generally allow her to take responsibility for any wrong, which is frustrating because if you will not accept blame, you cannot stop a bad behaviour.) That's not to say she does not identify any wrongs connected with her. She does but she is not able to feel responsible for them. She thinks her parenting has harmed the children, for instance, but she cannot articulate that that is something wrong she has done. It makes for difficult, fractured conversations. I've fucked the kids up, she'll say. What do you mean? I'll say. What have you done? And she'll shrug. I shout at them, she'll say. This, I know, is a prelude to a claim that she shouts at them because I shout at them. All parents raise their voices at their kids from time to time, usually out of sheer frustration. If you do not, you are either heavily drugged or not all that concerned.

If I catch Zenella hitting one of her siblings, she'll say, they hit me first. Okay, I say, but that doesn't mean you should hit them. It's just as bad as their hitting you. She looks at me as though I'm insane. In her view, the second hit is justified by the first, but the first has no justification at all.

Lately, Zenella has broadened out into a subset of two wrongs make a right. She has begun to indulge in ex post facto exculpatory excuses. You know what I mean. You do a wrong to someone and are caught. You had no good reason for it but, as I noted, you don't want to take responsibility for the wrong. So you find a reason. So Zenella will do something and I'll say, you shouldn't do that. She'll say, last week Mummy said... and she is off the hook. The plausibility of the excuse is not important; all that matters is that there is one. It doesn't matter that I buy it because she is looking only to fulfil her own moral calculus, not answer to mine.

This sort of thinking provides an easy out morally, which is why I want to help Zenella stop doing it. It is facile to find something in another's behaviour to exculpate your own wrongs. But others are only rarely truly responsible for the wrongs you do. You nearly always have a choice. Recognising that and choosing right are what makes a person moral.

The question whether Zenella should necessarily aim for being moral is another story. Will it make her happy or improve her life? I tend to believe that because she is sensitive, she'll find herself easier to live with if she is morally upstanding, but who knows? Maybe she would be better served by being trained to be amoral. It's something I need to think about.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:59 am