Friday, Jan 16, 2009

NPR, Pendulums, Moral Complexity

Lara and I are still without a car (ever since the deer incident), and I was reminded this week why I've been so slow in looking for a new one.

I meet with a pathologist in Baltimore twice a month as part of my branch's ovarian cancer study, and I rented a zip car to get there. There are many reasons for not owning a car, including the freedom from liability, the extra money saved from insurance and fuel expenses, and the daily pleasure reading while riding the train or bus. This week, however, it was the horrendous DC traffic that really made me grateful for public transit.

But I digress. What I do miss about owning a car is NPR.

At some point between Baltimore and DC on I-95 there was a spirited and interesting discussion on the Diane Rehm Show entitled "Bush Legacy on Presidential Powers" (you can listen to here). The guests were Bruce Fein, Stuart Taylor, and Joseph diGenova.

I don't know much about Fein, an expert in constitutional law, but I was duly impressed with his remarks. (And he's not an ideologue; in his career, he has called for the impeachment of both Bill Clinton and Bush/Cheney.) I won't go into detail about what he said in the program, as I'm not meaning for this post to be of a political nature; I recommend listening to the discussion on your own. (You can also read his take on the departing administration's "executive despotism" in his book Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy.)

I would like to comment on one thing that Joe diGenova, who played Fein's foil, said:

"I must say though, this is something that I find rich. There is in the world, particularly in academia, and on the left sometimes, the view of 'moral relativism,' meaning that 'There are no absolutes. There never is. There's never a right, theres never a wrong. Its all situational.'"

He later attacked "moral relativism" again during the program, and in both cases, the inclusion of the term seemed like a pretty random thing to make as a main point (and suspiciously like the kind of political rhetoric that people identify with even though it is contextually meaningless). Diane Rehm, however, didn't indulge him by letting the conversation go off track.

But I'll take your bait, Joe! So, I'm wanting to throw this question out there, and I'm asking this from a philosophical angle, not a political one: Isn't the debate between moral absolutism and moral relativism largely irrelevant, regardless of which is true (forgive the pun)?

It strikes me that talking about moral absolutism in a practical sense is like a lab scientist who claims that the reactions in the controlled conditions of a petri dish will be replicated in a complex system such as human tissue.

A classic example in chaos theory is the pendulum, a simple harmonic motion that is well covered in entry-level physics courses. But attach that swinging pendulum to another swinging pendulum, and you have what appears to be a totally chaotic, random motion that no entry-level physics student could predict. Despite their name, "chaotic" systems are actually deterministic and non-random; it is merely the small, incremental changes amplified over time that make the system appear to behave randomly.

In the same vein, even if there is an universal moral framework--a "right" and "wrong" that corresponds to the "up" and "down" of a pendulum--when one attaches all the situations and people together, the combined system is an incredibly complex picture, containing varying degrees of "rightness" and "wrongness" [1]. It is not that the rules are relative, or change from scenario to scenario, its just that each scenario has so many component parts that, for all practical purposes, absolute guidelines can't be applied (which is why I believe we need inspiration from God to help guide us through a non-absolute world).

After all, even the first example of human moral agency in scripture wasn't clear cut. The easiest case for a moral absolute--a direct decree from God--was challenged right there in the first book of Moses, when Eve essentially has to directly disobey God's command so that mankind can experience sorrow and ultimately understand joy [2]. Clearly, God wants our obedience, but His tests are not made up of dichotomous true/false questions. Obedience is hard because it is almost never straightforward [3].

Whether you believe in God or not, adhere to the idea of a moral absolute or not, this is an incredibly complex world which we need to navigate. To believe that any problem, situation, or solution--even involving something as horrendous as the 9/11 attacks--can be seen as black and white seems to me an incredibly naive.

While it certainly is an important philosophical concept, I hope people will stop throwing around the accusatory term "moral relativism" in political discussions like it's some sort of zinger (especially against Bruce Fein, a libertarian constitutional scholar for crying out loud).

So, in closing, I'm really going to do badly at this blogging bit if I can't master brevity. The problem is, the loose, anything-goes-format of a blog only tends to encourage the ramblingness of my writing style.


Notes (because I'm getting paid by the word)

[1] Physicists and philosophers, of which I am neither, please humble me with your wisdom.

[2] I realize in some Christian theologies Eve is seen as the one who blew it for all of us. In LDS theology, however, there is a critical difference. Realizing that there could be no progression without challenges, Eve did an important act in turning down the sin-free safety of the garden, and she is considered a great hero in the story. Yay Eve!

[3] Those darned sins of omission.