Dear Unknown Friends:
Here is part 2 of the landmark lecture Where Ethics Is, which Eli Siegel gave in 1974. In it Mr. Siegel—with his scholarship, and down-to-earthness, and depth, and kindness, and humor—looks at important writings on the subject, and he explains what ethics truly is. We see: Aesthetic Realism shows ethics to be much bigger, more powerful, more everyday, more organic, more beautiful, more mandatory, more inescapable, than people have taken it to be.
In this section, Mr. Siegel gives three definitions of ethics, the first of which I’ll quote now: “Ethics is the study of what the outside world deserves from you.” And he explains something shown by Aesthetic Realism, that ethics is aesthetics, in keeping with this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Ethics, if it’s the real thing, is always a oneness of the opposites self and world. Unless we feel taking care of our own self and being just to the world-not-us are the same, we’re not fully ethical, nor can we be truly at ease.
On What Should Economics Be Based?
In Where Ethics Is Mr. Siegel refers to the Goodbye Profit System lectures he was also giving at the time. And in this talk he presents the way of seeing ethics that was at their basis. Those lectures, and this one, have in them the means of understanding what’s taking place in the world’s economy today. He showed that profit economics, because of its unethical basis, had gotten to the point at which it no longer worked and never could again. In 1974, one form this economic failure took was an unmanageable inflation, and Mr. Siegel speaks of that here.
In the Goodbye Profit System talks, with vast and diverse evidence, Mr. Siegel explained that the only way our economy could now succeed was by being based on ethics. And the profit motive, by its very definition, is unethical: it’s the seeing of people, not in terms of what they deserve, but in terms of how you can use them to aggrandize yourself financially.
As to that word deserve, so central to ethics: there is more feeling today than there ever was about what people deserve. Men, women, young persons are much more aware of, and outspoken about, things deserved by every human being—including enough food to eat, a good place to live, healthcare, a chance to be educated. To have children hungry in America; to have parents purposely miss meals so they can give some food to their children; to have people out of work who could be useful to their fellow citizens; to have people receive paltry, inadequate wages; to have people worried they will be thrown out of their homes—is a national shame, is cruel, and is completely avoidable.
There has been a big effort over the years to make the profit motive seem praiseworthy. For a while the effort was somewhat successful, because people would like to justify a certain purpose had by all of us—the purpose from which the profit motive arose. That purpose is contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Nevertheless, while contempt hurts those it’s used against, contempt is also the big weakener of whoever or whatever has it—whether person or economic system.
That is so because ethics, Mr. Siegel made clear, is not a set of precepts or something theoretical. It is a power, a force in reality itself, “like electricity,” like “the atom.”
They Want to Seem Ethical
Some of the evidence for the power of ethics is this fact: when a person does something unscrupulous, mean, shady, he or she usually tries to make that action seem to be ethical. It is very rare for a person to say, “I’m being vicious, I’m hurting people, I’m telling lies, because I want to have my way.” There is generally an effort—sometimes elaborate—to make the sleaziness and brutality look just, deserved, ethical. Here are some historical examples:
During the hard-fought campaigns to make child labor illegal, those who wanted to keep little children working in their mines and factories justified themselves on ethical grounds. They said (among other things) that it was good for poor children to work because working taught those little ones responsibility, built character, which would serve them well in later life.
Also, the existence of unemployment insurance was objected to, and in many ways still is. Persons who have wanted to keep government help from millions of jobless people have presented their reasons as ethical: for example, to give such persons money would make them lazy, stop them from looking for work, and thereby rob them of a proud sense of self.
Then there’s the effort, which has occurred in world history, by a person who lost an election to try to overturn it by spreading lies that the election was illegitimate and that he, the loser, was the real winner. The person and his cohorts of course don’t say, We’re unethical and are trying to get power by hook or by crook. Instead, they say, We are trying to save the nation from those other guys’ evil ways.
Even Hitler presented himself as ethical. He told the German people that great wrongs had been inflicted on them, and he would right those wrongs.
And, of course, slaveholders in the American South, if questioned, spoke of how well they treated their “darkies.” They explained that these folks were much better off on the plantation, where they were well taken care of, than if they’d been free—as those irresponsible and really cruel abolitionists desired.
All the “ethical” protestations I’ve described were lies. But they were put forth because the persons’ real motives, which were horrible contempt, would not look good to others— including to others who, themselves, had those very same ugly motives. The drive to make one’s injustice appear ethical, says something about the centrality of ethics in the human self—even as selves betray ethics, lie about it, brutalize it.
Ethics today wants to be honored truly, as itself. It wants to be America—her economics, the way people treat people, think about people. Aesthetic Realism is the greatest honorer of ethics, as the lecture we’re serializing shows.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education
What Is Owing from Me?
By Eli Siegel
The definition of ethics can be put this way: Ethics is the study of what the outside world deserves from you. Ethics can also be defined as the study of what is coming to anything from other things. That is more inclusive. But the idea of coming to, deserved, what is just is important. If we saw a person dirtying a painting, we’d think he was doing something ethically wrong. If we saw somebody throwing broken glass among grass, we’d think that person was unfair to the grass.
Justice has to do with everything. Deserving has to do with everything. Coming to does. And another definition of ethics is the study of what is coming to yourself and what is coming to all other things at the same time.
In the most famous ethical statement of ancient times, the Hippocratic Oath, what is chiefly insisted on is what the doctor owes his patient. There was no American Medical Association, or Peloponnesian Medical Association, though doctors were aware of each other.
Continuing with the book I’ve been reading from, Oliver A. Johnson’s Ethics: Selections from Classical and Contemporary Writers, we come to Plato’s Republic. And Plato, or Socrates, goes along with the definitions I’ve given.
The idea of owing came up early. It’s present in the way a pilot of an airplane can feel there is something owing to his passengers—which is a continuation of something Plato says is owed by a captain of a ship. Ethics is chiefly the meaning of the phrases owing to, coming to, deserved by. And the people of the world have not given what is coming to other people of the world these hundreds of years. A definition by some persons has been: Justice is what’s coming to the most powerful people in a nation.
But we’ll take a sentence of Plato. It’s in the midst of Socrates’ discussion with Thrasymachus, who has his definition of justice. Thrasymachus has come to mean the unhandsomely argumentative person in a philosophic discussion. Socrates says:
So the physician, as such, studies only the patient’s interest, not his own.
Aesthetic Realism goes farther. It says: if you leave out the interest of anything in this world, you’re hurting yourself. Of course, you have to miss some things, but if you decide to miss some things, that much you’re limiting yourself. “The physician, as such, studies only the patient’s interest, not his own.” This can be amended by saying that in studying the patient’s interest the physician is studying his own.
And the ship’s captain,… in command of the crew, will study and enjoin the interest of his subordinates, not his own.
And also the interest of the passengers.
This matter of one’s own interest and the interest of others is exemplified by a notable book of Martin Buber, I and Thou, a section of which is included in this collection. That book is very praiseworthy, but I don’t think it says everything. The reason it doesn’t say everything is that aesthetics is the answer to the questions of ethics. When a doctor is fair to himself and fair to his patients, aesthetics happens. If the captain of a ship is fair to his crew and passengers, and also to himself, aesthetics happens. Ethics is looking for aesthetics in order to be right.
The Proudest Question
The big thing, though, is that ethics is bound up with the idea of what is owing from me. If any person is not proud to think of What is owing from me? that person is a dope. It’s the proudest, most beautiful question in the world: What is owing from me? It’s only when it’s not understood that it becomes dreary. It very often takes a parochial, intense, melodramatic, turbid, murky form. But as such, if anyone says, Something is owing from me, at that moment that person’s usefulness is proclaimed. If you can’t be useful, or you’re useless, you don’t owe anybody anything. So to say, Something is owing from me is the highest compliment that one could give oneself. And I feel that right now: I feel that the people here represent the people of America, and I feel that this presentation of ethics, in a lively and careful fashion, is owed to the persons here and is owed to all persons.
We go to another passage. The acrimonious discussion between Thrasymachus and Socrates is classical. Here Socrates describes some of that discussion:
No, please, said I; don’t give your assent against your real opinion.
Anything to please you, he [Thrasymachus] rejoined, since you won’t let me have my say. What more do you want?
So Thrasymachus, in his acrimonious fashion, is asking what is coming to him. In various places he expresses to Socrates the feeling Will you please listen to me for a while—I’ve got something to say too! You know what you did with my words—you just changed everything I said! That has to do with a notion of ethics: You won’t listen to me!
One of the best parts of this dialogue is where Socrates points out that your being unjust doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have things the way you want them. Then the part that I think foreshadows, in its Peloponnesian way, the economic failure of now, including inflation: Socrates asks,
But don’t you agree that, if injustice has this effect of implanting hatred wherever it exists, it must make any set of people…split into factions, at feud with one another and incapable of any joint action?
In a recent issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, I dealt with Leonard Silk’s article about trade wars. They have always been. In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations we have a good deal about mercantilism, which has with it the idea that you want to import as little as possible and export as much as possible. There are other things to it, but it could make for trade wars. It happens that the commerce of the world, whether local or international, has been conducted with ill feeling, with ill will. And everyone should ask, Was it necessary? What does it show? There’s a great deal of ill will in economics now. It’s bad ethics; it’s gone on a long time. It doesn’t work; it could not work indefinitely.
This is going on all over the world: They raised prices on me! So what do you think I’m gonna do? I’m gonna raise my own prices! It has happened millions of times. It has happened for centuries, but at one time it could be done gracefully: that is, you could raise prices and look like a gentleman. But now prices are raised because one is annoyed and angry and it’s the only thing left to do.
Injustice & Its Results
Injustice is a large subject and it begins with the depths of one’s own mind—not in what you do but what’s in your mind. One of the ideas in this part of Plato’s Republic is that injustice makes for bad results. Where is injustice, and what kind of bad results could it make for? The general statement of the Goodbye Profit System talks is that the economic injustice of three thousand years and more has made it so that in the 1970s we see definite signs that the profit system cannot be maintained. The present inflation is tangible evidence, and it has to do with this: 1) what is injustice?; 2) does it have any results? Also, does personal injustice have results?
A vivid instance right now of the effects of injustice is what’s happening in Northern Ireland. Ireland hasn’t given up its anger at what English kings did, beginning with Henry II in the 12th century, also what happened under Cromwell, and later continuations. And that’s why people can die at any moment near Belfast.
About the effect of injustice, Socrates says:
The effect being, apparently, wherever it occurs—in a state or a family or an army or anywhere else—to make united action impossible because of factions and quarrels, and moreover to set whatever it resides in at enmity with itself as well as with any opponent and with all who are just.
What economists have not been interested in so far—and for that matter historians, although there are many statements about injustice—is: What has injustice done in this world, and how much of it has there been? When people are as exact about that as about how many cars were sold, we might get somewhere. There has been a mighty lot of injustice. And a person may say about something, Well, that was unjust, but one of the things that happen in the world is: when anything takes place, the effects don’t stop immediately. How much they don’t stop should be looked at.
Socrates not only says that injustice will divide the community or nation or a number of people seen as together; he says that because of injustice a single mind is divided:
Then I suppose it [injustice] will produce the same natural results in an individual. He will have a divided mind and be incapable of action, for lack of singleness of purpose; and he will be at enmity with all who are just, as well as with himself.
That statement is important as to why people as individuals suffer—the saying that if a person is unjust he will be at enmity with both himself and some other people. That is still true. Anytime mind fares sadly, ethics is a cause.
In a further statement we get to some of the complexity of ethics, because everybody is both just and unjust. A person, for example, will try to do a little bribery, but at the same time will pay his bills. He tries to rook strangers, but he’s very good with his nephew. One of the reasons Plutarch has been so popular is that a person like Alcibiades is presented by him as heroic and also as unjust. Likewise Themistocles, and a person like Demosthenes, and Cicero. Socrates says that even unjust people who act together must have some notion of justice somewhere in them:
Had they been thoroughly unjust, they could not have kept their hands off one another; they must have had some justice in them, enough to keep them from injuring one another at the same time with their victims.
How Ethics Should Be Seen
People have seen justice in terms of lukewarm tea. That is, there’s a certain lukewarmness: All right, I may be unjust about this, but I may be just elsewhere. It happens that this won’t do any longer in terms of economics. There have been courteous letters from companies telling us how very sorry they are something happened, and they want to remedy it and all—and twenty years ago it was sometimes rather sincere. Right now, well, the brute and courtesy meet more often.
The way people have talked about ethics as if it were academic, something just consisting of campus discussions, has been sickening. Ethics is all the major leagues, all the minor leagues, all the amateur leagues and bush leagues playing on the same afternoon. What a tumult, what diversity, and also what continuity!