Moral Boundaries

Mary Ann O’Donnell is the most knowledgeable person about Shenzhen, Chinese or other, I’ve read. Her blog, Shenzhen Noted, deals with the sorts of issues on a level I aspire to. She recently wrote about different moral boundaries for America and Chinese students. For Chinese families academic cheating was “unwise” but understandable because scores were important. Smoking marijuana, however, was among the worst things an adolescent could do because it “showed a student’s selfishness and lack of concern for family and friends.” Mary Ann, like many Americans, thought the opposite: cheating is horrible and while you wouldn’t recommend smoking pot to teenager, it’s hardly the worst thing they could do.

our common point was that ethics is about responsibilities toward others in our lives. we differed in the groups we chose as our ethical point of reference. more interestingly still was my friends’ idea that care of the self (by not smoking pot) was in fact an ethical question because one’s body belongs to family and friends and not primarily to some self.

I don’t so much disagree as think there’s a different level of analysis that explains things easier. Mary Ann is absolutely right that ethics towards others explains the difference, but I don’t think we need to go so far as to say that in modern urban Chinese society there is a limited idea of “self” and that your family owns your body.

What I’ve been saying about the “Confucian Blind Spot” seems to apply here perfectly well. The issue at play is that in Chinese society the rest of society, both individuals and any idea of a “Greater Good”, are ignored at the expense of help those in your own “circle”. Confucian, and post-Confucian, society is modeled in a way that someones relationship to you defines your responsibilities to them. Others are necessarily people you know, there is no other “Other”. That cheating on a test hurts somebody else who you don’t know, but deserves it more, means less than getting into a good college and later supporting your family at a higher level. It’s a collective, rather than individual, selfishness.

The Problem With Principles

Modern ethical philosophy fits pretty neatly into two camps, the world of Bentham and the world of Kant – the consequentialists and the deontologicalists. Bentham was concerned with the outcomes of actions – how much good or bad came out of whatever you were doing. Killing people produces lots of pain and misery, so it’s bad unless it’s for a greater good. Kant was more principled. His equation for living in the world was essentially “do unto others…” but more thought-through. Everything you do, run it through your head as if that’s the way it should always be done by everyone. If you think helping the poor is important, you need to give a few cents every time you see a real beggar.

Jane Jacobs made a compelling argument in Systems of Survival that we need different value systems (“ethical syndromes”) in different jobs – even in different parts of the day as we change roles going home from work. I’d like to take that idea and go a different direct. We should be principled in our personal lives, but consequences are about the only thing worth considering in the world of politics and policy.

An Anti-Torture Defense of Yoo

My position against torture is a little more nuanced than what you’d see over at the Daily Dish. I agree with Sullivan that the war on terror isn’t so fundamentally different that we have to break with the tradition of respecting human rights while fighting that crushed the Nazis in the Second World War. I think it’s immoral and abhorrent in all it’s forms – from the stress positions, waterboarding, to sleep and sensory deprivation. I think the Geneva Conventions should and does apply to this war like every other

Even with that, I offer a limited support to John Yoo and Bush’s Office of Legal Council’s (OLC) infamous “torture memos.” This is because almost every rule has to be broken or stretched at some point or another. I think this is the heart of what I hoe those memos are is that there might be a time when the Geneva Conventions would cause more harm than good.