The Limits of Moral Arguments

 

      Now in an imaginary philosophical discussion between the slave owner and a Socratic philosopher who was also a convinced abolitionist:  with good reason it might be considered morally wrong, rationally discussing whether a black African can be an individual in the same sense as a slave-owning white American of that time. What does this reveal? The presence of absolute value. A philosophical (Socratic) discussion presupposes the possibility of being wrong, of having the arguments and conceptual understandings that flow into one’s convictions refuted. In this case, that means being prepared to entertain the possibility that one’s convictions that slavery is a terrible evil, terrible really beyond words, is in whatever sense wrong. And that enslaving Africans with all that follows from that (from the lash to the separation of families, to above all the ways humanity is degraded) might be compatible with morality, or even as some argued a kind of duty for the white man. But to seriously entertain that possibility is itself evil. That implies the unshakable conviction that no fact, no possible evidence, and no change of conceptual understanding would matter. It implies that the subject is not appropriate for philosophical discussion; the slave owner is either blind or evil – if the former, he needs enlightenment, not argument; if the latter, he needs punishment.

         And even if there were some case for the abolitionist, despite the repugnance he felt, to engage in the discussion with something resembling the spirit of Socratic inquiry, what philosophic reasons could he offer for the slave owner to change the way he sees the world – based as that is on attitudes based on upbringing and form of life? It might, for example, be pointed out to the slave owner that the African has all the anatomical features of whites, but he knows this. It might be pointed out that they show grief behavior when someone dies, but he knows this. It might also be pointed out that they ‘have projects and categorical desires with which they are identified’ (B. Williams), but he knows this too.  It might be pointed out that the DNA is the same, but he could know this too. As Gaita writes, the slave owner believes slaves are like ‘them’ (whites) only in an attenuated sense, an attenuated sense of the individuality that in white folks conditions the slave owner’s sense that they are unique, irreplaceable in ways we experience in authentic grief. For the slave owner, Africans demonstrate grief behavior, but it is not real grief – it can’t go that deep ‘for them.’ He doesn’t understand their lives as fully meaningful; their names more resemble pet names; their faces lack the ability to express profound emotion (analogous to the caricatured faces of the Christy Minstrels); their sexual bodies are not objects of profound, tender love, and thus they cannot marry in the full meaning; it might not be a fine thing to do, but raping a black slave is no crime, given the construction of African bodies and sexuality. Their relation to their children might be emotional, but shallow – they’ll forget about them soon enough when they are sold away. And so on.

       Obviously, the argumentative – more missionary – purpose of the dialog would be to convert the slave owner, to get him to see the slaves more truly; to get him to overcome the meaning-blindness that his form of life and his internalization of that form of life have brought with it. It’s not that the abolitionist and the slave owner can step out of their forms of life, their attitudes, and convictions, look at the facts of the case, and then determine who is right. The ideology of slave society – for obvious reasons – was constructed to blind those people to the meaning other lives can have, and to reduce those victimized lives to their constructed picture of them, so that they could go on with their slave economy. The facts are the meanings; they are perceptible only from the outside of that way of seeing and within a form of life open to them. This is characteristic of absolute value.

       Only ad hominem or question-begging arguments are possible, seen logically, given that nothing could conceivably count as evidence against the absoluteness of the conviction or underlying attitude or no overriding concern could remove the duty to act. Others who do not see the world through the lens of the absolutely held attitudes or convictions are either meaning-blind (by fault or circumstances, or morally deficient). In any argumentative formulation, the first premise –that the outsider would doubt – would be self-evident to the person with the absolute conviction/attitude. But you might also reasonably think that the real leap of faith is involved here.