The Depth of Moral Meaning - Reflection on a Childhood Experience

 

Last entry I wrote about grief as revealing the preciousness of the beloved person, just as much a part of the universe as atoms or molecules. I want to further explore about how some emotion-thought-experiences reveal aspects of reality. As a guide I want to use the introductory chapter of Christopher Cordner’s Ethical Encounters: The Depth of Moral Meaning (2002), a wonderful book, right up there with the best of Gaita’s and a key book for my thinking.

. . .

 

    I recall an incident from my childhood that I have never spoken about to anyone since it happened. I assume it was the summer vacation between the 3^rd and 4^th grade. Out of economic necessity (my father has lost his job in Owensboro and gotten a job for an Owensboro company that required him to relocate to the Bowling Green area), my family moved away from my hometown. My parents bought a house far out in the country, one house among a row of about ten new houses built along a country road (some farmer rightly concluding he would make more money building houses than planting corn and tobacco). Behind these houses was a very large open space, badly eroded land that had once been used for grazing, though there were no fences. About 75 yards or meters behind our house was a pond. At this pond lived many creatures interesting to a boy of my age: frogs, toads, lizards, turtles, snakes, mostly. I had once gathered a few frogs and made a home for them on our carport in a little plastic pool – I got rocks and grass, and such so they would feel at home. I hope I intended to release them back into the pond, though I cannot remember exactly what my intentions were. Three houses down there lived a Methodist minister. He had a son. I am vague on how I came into contact with him, but I know he visited me and took interest in the frogs. I have no idea of the context, but he had a syringe with him. He filled the syringe with water, picked up a small frog, and injected the frog with the entire contents of the syringe, bloated it horribly. I experienced what he did as awful in a way I cannot really put into the words. The coldness of the act, the medical tool involved. Now I would say it was awful, callous, and even a desecration of life, though I couldn’t put it into words then. That is all I remember.

     In what did the awfulness consist? The awfulness did not consist primarily in the frog's pain. Had that been all, I might have just written that he made the frog suffer unnecessarily and that was wrong. My memory was of the coldness of the act, the medical tool involved. Neither did the awfulness consist merely in a violation of a rule. I  do not remember thinking, "One ought not do that, that is against the law or God’s law." It felt horribly wrong before I had words for it.

    Now I want to say that it was the meaning of the act that was so awful. Reflecting back, trying to put it into words now almost 60 years later, I might want to say that for him the frog became "nothing but a thing" whereas it was a creature of wonder to me (city boy that I was). Perhaps what struck me as awful was that the frog ceased to appear as a living creature and became merely material to manipulate. The syringe perhaps had an aura of technical control and clinical detachment. The frog's own life, its own way of being in the world, counted for nothing. It became an object upon which a procedure was performed. The frog's own life, however small, seemed not to matter at all. It became merely material for an experiment, a thing upon which one could exercise some sick sadistic power.

     Reflecting on how I remember the pool I made for the frogs, there is an aspect of care that was violated. I had gathered rocks and grass so the frogs would "feel at home." Whether or not that was wise – it wasn’t – it expressed a child's impulse toward care. The minister's son responded in the opposite spirit. (I wonder if this poisoned my understanding of religion at this time? At least complicated it.)  Now I am inclined to say that the wanton cruelty appeared as a violation of care itself. My concern had been to make a place for the frogs. His interest was not in their life but in what could be done to them. The contrast between those attitudes may have been part of what made the incident unforgettable.

     And I feel now, looking back, the need to describe the incident as a desecration, i.e., not merely damage. One can damage a rock. One desecrates something that calls for respect. The act seemed a desecration because it treated something living, something I wondered over, as though there were nothing there to respect. The frog was not merely harmed. Something about its life was mocked or denied.

    Another aspect, which would explain why my memory remained vivid for decades, is that the incident revealed something horrifying to me about the boy. I suddenly saw a human possibility, a kind of cold, sadistic cruelty, a kind of emotional distance from the creature's reality. I learned of the possibility of treating a living creature with complete emotional detachment, as though its existence made no claim upon one's imagination, sympathy, or respect.   All these aspects involve the meaning of what was done to the frog.

      Now I wasn’t an angel, and I am sure the boy was generally no devil. (His family moved away soon thereafter, and I never got to know him better.) But still, I think my response of a kind of shock and awe to the cold callousness of the deed was true – I almost want to say innocent – in the sense that it disclosed something important about the world / reality. I have never doubted it despite decades of studying moral philosophy. Philosophy either makes sense of that disclosure or not – that is how I look at philosophy. I want to deepen my understanding of the world by reflecting on such authoritative experiences philosophically. And I have found that much of what I learned in philosophy implied either that my response was “merely subjective” i.e. ‘in me’ and not part of the world; or that it is ‘objectively’ a part of the world, in the same sense that sound waves and molecules are. Here philosophy just confused me. If the awfulness were an objective property of the event in the same sense that physical properties are objective, then disagreement about it would have to be understood either as ignorance or irrationality. The boy who laughed would simply have failed to perceive a fact that was plainly there. If it was an objective property of the deed in the manner of a physical property, then I cannot understand why it was disclosed only through a response of pity, awe, and moral attention. Yet that cannot be right. What is lacking is not information, not even reasoning, but a certain responsiveness to the meaning of what was done. If the awfulness were merely in me, then my shock disclosed nothing about the deed at all, only about myself.  It would only appear that the deed was awful whereas in reality it would not be.  As Cordner put it: 

Such feeling gets projected onto the situation by us confronting it, and the projected feeling gets, so to speak, built into the very language we use to describe the situation. The basic model here continues to be the ‘deliciousness’ of the ice cream, which is to be understood as a linguistic projection of a subjective sensation of taste. 

    The meaning and so the reality of what was done was disclosed in and through my response to it. Meaning, not purely subjective tastes or feeling; not objective properties (objective in the sense that any rational person would see them regardless of who they happen to be – the saint and the sadist would see the same facts). Philosophy had become blind to the significance of meaning, leaving us with various either-or choices: subjective or objective, appearance or reality, fact or value, etc. (all understood in a univocally narrow sense).

      Our Enlightenment inheritance, so Cordner, predisposes us to mistrust our experience, to mistrust meaning. Our experience tells us that the sun rises; science tells us the truth that the earth rotates. Fear and superstition told medieval Europeans during times of plague that witches were practicing black magic or Jews were poisoning the wells or even God was punishing all those poor peasants (including children) for their sins; science tells us the truth about contagions. Well, that God for the Enlightenment. This model of reasoning is still – I want to say unfortunately – very needed. But to make this model of reasoning the only legitimate one makes us blind to much of reality, like the awfulness of what I witnessed. As Cordner put it: “There is just too much about ourselves and our experience that we cannot make sense of, or can make only seriously distorted sense of, through such enlightenment dispositions.”

       Short elaboration. The Enlightenment picture not only claims that objective knowledge is scientific knowledge; it also wants to reshape the self into the kind of thing that can know scientific facts, not be fooled by appearances, i.e., experience. On that picture, reason is the faculty that discovers objective reality. Emotion belongs to the subjective side of the divide. The more reason frees itself from emotion, attachment, personal involvement, and particularity, the closer it comes to objective truth. Just like Mr. Spock Star Trek fame. The ideal knower is therefore something like a detached observer. Thus our deepest moral concepts – cruelty, love, dignity, contempt, innocence, betrayal, reverence, etc. – are relegated to the realm of appearance, of the subjective (in us, not reality)  because they involve emotional, personal response.

    Enlightenment-style ethical thought assumes on this picture of reason. Take classical Utilitarianism, which would make essential the consequences produced by the act in terms of pleasure and pain. Thus the wrongness could only lie in the suffering of the frog, or perhaps the cultivation of dispositions that may lead to future suffering, perhaps even the distress caused to observers like myself. Therefore, to the thought, the act was wrong because it produced more suffering than happiness. Note this is a quasi-objective calculation, factual in a sense, impersonal in a sense. Anyone, whatever their character, state of soul, belief system, whatever their emotional response, can see that, (Or? Well what about the pleasure of the sadist? That aside for now.) This is part of the story but it is too thin. My shock was over the deed itself and the spirit in which it was done. Even if the frog felt no pain (imagine a perfect anesthetic), the act would still be callous, awful. Something is missing. (Spock was a utilitarian of sorts.)

     Or a Kantian kind of picture, to which I was once drawn. Kant seeks a morality whose authority derives from reason alone. Not from emotion, tradition, custom, religion, personal attachments, upbringing, social practices, or the individual person. All of these vary from person to person and culture to culture. Morality had to be universal – and objective, rational, for the ideal moral knower. Can the maxim of my action be willed as a universal law? That takes the real-existing self out of it, as though it were a matter of a step in an equation conforming to the laws of math like the associative power of addition. The authority comes from the structure of rationality itself. In principle, any rational being anywhere in the universe should arrive at the same answer. The person disappears behind the rational procedure.

     Actually, a Kantian approach seems out of place here because frogs are not rational beings and only rational beings matter (i.e., have dignity) for Kant. He therefore tends to explain cruelty to animals indirectly: namely, the act is wrong because cruelty to animals cultivates habits that may later be directed toward persons, contrary to reason; or It reflects a failure of proper moral character. The frog matters because of what the act does to the human agent. Well, it does matter for that reason among others but that is not the heart of the matter. My horror was not merely concern for the boy's future character. It was directed toward what he did to the frog.

     Emotivism. An emotivist might say: "That is awful" means something like "Boo to that!" or "I strongly disapprove of that!" The judgment reports or expresses my subjective feelings and nothing more. The act itself contains no awfulness beyond natural facts. (cf. Wittgenstein’s ‘all propositions are indifferent’).  But this is unable to explain why your experience felt like a discovery rather than an expression. I felt as though you had encountered something about the deed, not just discover something about myself. Of course, as I said, the Enlightenment does not trust appearance, experience, emotions. So from its point of view, this is no argument against it. But in moral matters this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  (Emotivism is just as compatible with the Enlightenment picture as the other two. It agrees that genuine objectivity would have to resemble scientific knowledge. Then it rightly finds that moral judgements do not work that way. Therefore, so the theory, they must be subjective expressions of feeling. The Enlightenment conception of objectivity is not challenged. Rather, morality is expelled from the objective realm.

     Closely related to emotivism, one could then explain emotions away by appealing to various scientific theories (again, experience is appearance; science shows reality). A contemporary scientific naturalist might tell me that my reaction was the product of evolved empathy mechanisms. Human beings evolved dispositions against cruelty because such dispositions promote cooperation and group survival. Thus my horror is translated into biologically explicable, psychologically understandable, evolutionary advantage. Well, this may be true as far as the origin in prehistory of such responses go – though I don’t know how one would test that hypothesis. But it changes the subject. It does not explain whether the response disclosed anything about the act itself.     

      Our deepest moral concepts cannot be understood from the standpoint of a detached observer. They are not merely facts waiting to be registered by an impersonal intellect. Nor are they merely emotions. Rather, they are realities disclosed through forms of response that engage the whole person. As Cordner put is: "[Moral] Reality is not well thought of as hidden by and behind the appearances, but rather as disclosable only in a deeper sense of them." I want to try to understand this.

     Cordner often speaks of rising to the occasion, of a depth in oneself that enables one to grasp the depth of meaning in rape, murder, betrayal, and so on. My example is not quite like that as I was not displaying unusual moral heroism or wisdom. I was just a child. How did moral reality, as I am assuming it is, become visible to me as a child? I think the pond was the background against which the act occurred. I had spent time attending to frogs, turtles, snakes, and the life of the pond. Was fascinated by the life at the pond. I gathered rocks and grass. I wanted the frogs to "feel at home," however biologically foolish in fact. The important thing, I believe, is that I approached those creatures as living beings rather than as objects. I had, in a child's way, entered into a relationship of attention: that is, a relationship in which we look at something with patient, loving regard, allowing it to reveal itself rather than reducing it to our purposes. Then the injection occurred. What shocked me may have been not only the pointless suffering inflicted but the complete contradiction of the attitude – I think, at the risk of falling into sentimentality or romanticism, an attitude of innocence – through which the frogs had become meaningful to you.

      For the Enlightenment variation of ethical theory, emotion threatens objectivity. For Cordner (and Gaita, and Murdoch) certain emotions are conditions of objectivity. Not sentimentality or mere feeling, of course. Rather, love, pity, reverence, horror, gratitude, i.e., responses through which reality becomes visible. Suppose a positivist scientist described the event: 1) a frog of species X, 2) injected with Y milliliters of water, 3) resulting in tissue distension, 4) observed by two boys, 5) one displaying signs of distress. Everything in that description could be true. What horrified me is absent. The enlightened scientist can then say one of two things: either the horror was merely my emotional reaction or the horror was an objective property somehow attached to the event. These are the alternatives Cordner rejects. The first reduces my response to psychology; the second treats "horror" as though it were analogous to weight or color. Neither captures what actually happened.

    What happened is that my response disclosed the meaning of the act. That the disclosure required my emotional and personal engagement. Without that, the meaning would be invisible. In science, failure to see what is there normally suggests ignorance, bad observation, or faulty reasoning. But moral blindness is different. The minister's son may have known every empirical fact that you knew. He may have been just as intelligent. He may even have reasoned perfectly well. What he lacked was not information. Nor was it logical competence. What he lacked was a way of seeing, which Murdoch and Weil would call attention. A certain quality of soul is needed to perceive certain realities. That sounds dangerous to modern ears because it seems to threaten objectivity but the reverse is true. A person who responds with horror to cruelty is not necessarily projecting something onto the world; he may be seeing something that the detached observer cannot see. Thus reason / rationality is no longer the elimination of personal response. It becomes the disciplined attempt to understand what is disclosed through the responses that belong to love, pity, reverence, grief, and wonder.

    Cordner, writing of the horribleness of rape and murder and the inadequacy of a Kantian-like explanation of its evil as a violation of autonomy, writes: 

In contexts such as these, the kind of being personally engaged I have spoken of is a condition of our encountering reality. To realise the kind of violation involved in rape, is to realise a depth of meaning in it to which talk of the denial of autonomy does not take us. One can realise such a depth of meaning only if there is an answering depth in oneself which enables one to rise to an understanding of the phenomenon. 

One can realise such a depth of meaning only if there is an answering depth in oneself. What was the "answering depth" in a nine-year-old boy? Surely not profound moral reflection. Surely not a developed philosophical understanding of the sanctity of life. So what could it be?

     I think Cordner's phrase can be interpreted more broadly than he explicitly does. The "answering depth" need not be intellectual depth. It may be a depth of openness to the world. In my case, perhaps my wonder at the life of the pond, my fascination with living creatures, my unselfconscious delight in their existence, my wanting care for them – a kind of untheorized respect for life. Not philosophical achievements but perhaps they may nonetheless constitute an "answering depth." The child does not possess a theory of dignity but the child does possess the capacity to be struck by dignity. The boy with the syringe and the boy caring for frogs (myself) were looking at the same creature. Empirically, they saw the same thing. But at that moment we did not inhabit the same world. For him the frog appeared primarily as an object upon which something could be done, whereas for me it appeared as a living being. The meaning of the act was disclosed only against the background of a prior relation to the frog. Without that background, there would be no violation to perceive. One cannot perceive the violation of something one does not first perceive as significant.

    Perhaps this is why I felt to need to risk the word innocence (or perhaps childishness or naivete from the minister’s son’s perspective). Perhaps what I possessed, city boy as I was new to the country, was not moral depth in the sense of wisdom but a kind of uncorrupted responsiveness. Not innocence as purity or moral perfection (I had my faults like any other kid). But being new to the place and rather amazed by it, innocence as an openness to being affected by reality. The pond was the place where a relationship of attention was formed. The violation became visible because something had first become visible. The cruelty could be seen only because the life of the frog had already appeared as something worthy of wonder, interest, and care. Without that prior disclosure, there would have been nothing there to desecrate. I had not yet learned to place a protective layer of theory, irony, detachment, reduction, or even routine between myself and what I was seeing. In that sense, the "answering depth" might not be depth acquired through reflection but depth given in wonder. In Cordner’s language, to realize the kind of violation involved in that act required an antecedent responsiveness to the life of the creature involved. Only because there was an answering depth of wonder, care, and receptivity in myself as a child could the meaning of the act disclose itself as a violation.

    Only what has first been disclosed as meaningful can later be disclosed as violated. My child self did not first infer the value of the frog and then conclude that the act was wrong. The life of the frog had already become meaningful through attention and wonder, and therefore the violation could appear immediately as a violation. That is very close, I think, to what Cordner means by an "answering depth," even if in my case the depth is the depth of innocent attention rather than the depth of mature moral experience. 

. . . 

     One possible objection is that my response to the frog incident was merely the product of social conditioning. I had learned to care about animals, and therefore I reacted with horror when I saw one treated cruelly. But the fact that a response is conditioned does not show that it is illusory. My ability to see a tree as a tree is conditioned by learning a language, but trees are not therefore social constructions. A student must be educated to hear harmony in music, to perceive irony in literature, or to recognise significance in history. The formation of a capacity and the reality disclosed through that capacity are not the same thing. Social conditioning may explain why I was receptive to a certain aspect of reality without explaining that aspect away.

      This implies a different understanding of moral education and moral understanding. Perhaps experiences of wonder, care, and attention had prepared me to see something in the frog that another child did not see. The creatures of the pond had become meaningful to me through a relationship of attention; they appeared not merely as objects but as living beings. Against that background, the act with the syringe disclosed itself immediately as a violation. The significance of what happened was not inferred from a moral theory, nor was it simply projected onto the event by my feelings. Rather, the prior formation of attention enabled a reality to become visible. In this sense, moral education may be understood not primarily as the transmission of rules or conventions, but as the cultivation of those capacities through which aspects of reality, such as dignity, cruelty, reverence, or desecration, can first come into view. 

      The question is not whether love, grief, cruelty, beauty, and dignity – and the things disclosed by such (the preciousness of the beloved in love and grief) are part of reality. The question is what kind of reality they are. Modern thought often assumes that what is most real is what can be described in the language of science. Yet the world we actually live in, which we are supposed to mistrust, contains not only atoms and forces but also friendships, betrayals, acts of reverence, experiences of beauty, and violations of dignity. These are not physical objects alongside electrons and molecules, but neither are they merely subjective projections. They belong to the fabric of reality as meaningful realities, disclosed through forms of attention, love, wonder, grief, and moral understanding. The scientific picture of the universe is not so much wrong as incomplete. That is a source of hope. 

    Meaning reveals reality (or aspects of reality) because some realities are realities of meaning. That sounds circular at first, but it is not. The Enlightenment picture assumes that reality is fundamentally composed of value-neutral facts, and that meaning is something human beings subsequently impose upon them. On that view, meaning can reveal only our interpretations of reality, not reality itself. The alternative picture says that this misunderstands the nature of many of the things that exist. A friendship, a betrayal, a marriage, an act of cruelty, a moment of reverence, the dignity of a person, the preciousness of a life . . . these are not merely interpretations laid over a value-neutral world. They are themselves realities, though realities of a different kind than atoms and forces. Consequently, meaning does not merely tell us what we think about these things; it is the medium through which they become accessible to us at all. Just as sight reveals colour and hearing reveals sound, certain forms of attention, love, wonder, grief, and moral responsiveness reveal dimensions of reality whose very nature is meaningful.

      Or in other words, meaning reveals reality because reality itself is not exhausted by structure, mechanism, and causation. The universe contains not only things and events but also significance. A betrayal is not merely a sequence of physical movements; it is a betrayal. A death is not merely a biological event; it is the loss of a life, an occasion for grief. An act of cruelty is not merely a rearrangement of matter; it is a violation. Such realities can be grasped only through understanding their meaning. Meaning is therefore not something added to reality from the outside. It is one of the ways reality becomes present to us, the key way moral reality becomes present to us. 

     And that, I think, is what my frog story has always been trying to tell me. My child self standing by the pond . . . something about the reality of the situation became visible through a form of attention shaped by wonder, care, and receptivity. The meaning of the act disclosed a reality – the reality of callousness, violation, perhaps even desecration of something real – that could not be captured by a purely physical description of what occurred. If that experience was in tune with what really exists, then meaning is not merely a human add-on to the world. It is one of the ways the world itself comes into view. My guess is that my neighbor still suffers from remorse for that childish act of cruelty. I feel for him as I carry my own remorse for other acts. 

 

There is a lot more to be said about this. I don’t think I have defended the view as much as just present it, tried to make minimal sense of it. I am well aware that my argument, such as it is, will seem circular to those attached to the Enlightenment picture in its various keys.

 

p.s. On animals, I highly recommend

Gaita, Raimond. The Philosopher's Dog: Friendships with Animals. Routledge, 2002.