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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
The challenges we face today are unprecedented, from the existential crisis of climate change to the global security threats posed by aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere. Add to this the crisis of liberal democracy and we seem to be swirling in a state of moral disarray, unsure whether there are any principles to which we can appeal today that would be anything other than particularistic.
In contrast to this view, Markus Gabriel puts forward the bold argument that there are guiding moral principles for human behaviour. These guiding principles extend across cultures; they are universally valid and form the source of universal values in the twenty-first century. In developing what he calls a ‘New Moral Realism’, Gabriel breathes fresh life into the idea that humanity’s task on our planet is to enable moral progress through cooperation. It is only by achieving moral progress in a way that incorporates universal values – and thus embraces all of humanity – that we can avoid the abyss into which we will otherwise slide.
Written with verve, wit and imagination, Gabriel's call for a new enlightenment is a welcome antidote to the value relativism and nihilism of our times, and it lays out a moral framework within which we can work together – as surely we must – to deal with the great challenges we now face.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Preface to the English Edition
Notes
Introduction
Notes
1 What Values Are, and Why They Are Universal
The good, the bad and the neutral: basic moral rules
Moral facts
The limits of free speech: how tolerant is democracy?
Morality trumps majority
Cultural relativism: the law of the strongest
Boghossian and the Taliban
There are no Judeo-Christian values – and why Islam is clearly part of Germany
North Korea and the Nazi machine
Value pluralism and value nihilism
Nietzsche’s ghastly confusion(s)
Notes
2 Why There Are Moral Facts but Not Ethical Dilemmas
Universalism is not Eurocentrism
Ageism towards children and other moral deficits in everyday life
Moral tension
Susceptibility to error, a fictional messiah and the nonsense of postmodern arbitrariness
Moral feelings
Doctors, patients, Indian police officers
The categorical imperative as social glue
‘A?’: Don’t contradict yourself!
Self-evident moral truths and the descriptive problem of ethics
Why the federal chancellor is not the leader
The day of judgement, or, how we can recognize moral facts
With or without God in the kingdom of ends
Beating children was never good, not even in 1880
Notes
3 Social Identity: Why Racism, Xenophobia and Misogyny Are Evil
Habitus and stereotypes: all resources are scarce
Lifting the veil of dehumanization: from identity politics to difference politics
Coronavirus: reality strikes back
A different side of Thuringia: in Jena, racism is debunked
The value of truth (without a hall of mirrors)
Stereotypes, Brexit and German nationalism
The effectiveness of presumed communities
The society of populism
The contradictions of left-wing identity politics
Everyone is the other: from identity politics to difference politics (and beyond)
Indifference politics: on the way to colour-blindness
Notes
4 Moral Progress in the Twenty-First Century
Slavery and Sarrazin
(Supposedly) different conceptions of humans do not justify anything, least of all slavery
Moral progress and regression in the time of the coronavirus
The limits of economism
Biological universalism and the viral pandemic
For a metaphysical pandemic
Morality ≠ altruism
Human beings: who we are and who we want to be
Ethics for everyone
Notes
Epilogue
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Moral Progress in Dark Times
Universal Values for the Twenty-First Century
Markus Gabriel
Translated by Wieland Hoban
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Moralischer Fortschritt in dunklen Zeiten. Universale Werte für das 21. Jahrhundert © by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2020 by Ullstein Verlag
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4948-1 (hardback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934661
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Epigraph
The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question.
Albert Camus, The Plague
Preface to the English Edition
I started thinking about the contours of this book in 2015 during a research stay at New York University. At that time, I began to wonder how the idea that ethics, and thus moral judgement, has some form of unconditional and universal scope that could be reconciled with the fact that many of our large-scale, socially orchestrated moral achievements are historically contingent. Let us call these achievements ‘moral progress’. If, as I believe, there is objective moral value in reality which we are capable of grasping, how do we account for the equally important observation that such large-scale social formations as whole societies can miss them in systematic ways, with resulting harm to the victims of morally pernicious, evil practices?
My answer to this question of the relationship between the universality of moral judgement and the historical and social embeddedness of moral progress consists in realizing that moral facts concerning what we ought to do or ought not to do are never entirely hidden. Their truth can be repressed, distorted, twisted and violated in manifold ways, but this will never make it the case that the perpetrator who transgresses ethical norms of goodness can eventually win and gets it right by changing the moral code. Values are too objective (though they relate to human mindedness and are thus not fully mind-independent) for them to change at the will of any kind of group, let alone a single dictator.
In light of this conviction, I began to be worried about the historical trajectory of our era of nested crises (from populism, fake news, and the rise of authoritarian systems wreaking havoc in brutal wars, such as in Syria and now in Ukraine, to the environmental crisis, which always looms large in the background to any of our current global problems). In 2019 I returned for the fall semester to NYU as the Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair, where I wrote the first draft of the book you are about to read in its English translation. I remember talking to my German publisher about possible book titles and how they could not immediately see back then in what sense we live in ‘dark times’, times that require a serious return to the perennial ideas of moral realism, universalism and humanism – ideas that, despite a common narrative, are not in any interesting sense specifically ‘European’, let alone ‘Eurocentric’, as they originated in many different cultural settings long before such a thing as ‘Europe’ came into existence.
When I was about to finish the manuscript, the still ongoing coronavirus pandemic hit humanity and undermined several assumptions about our globally connected life form, our economic system, the role of nation states, etc. At the beginning, there was reason for hope. For it immediately became obvious that we needed moral notions (such as solidarity with the vulnerable) in order to bear through what had obviously become dark times. By the time I was adding thoughts on the pandemic to the almost finished manuscript, it had become clear to everyone that we are indeed living in dark times.
Unfortunately, moral progress is never isolated from the threat of powerful forms of regress. In various interviews and publications right at the beginning of the pandemic, I therefore warned explicitly against closing borders and rewinding human connectivity, regardless of the evident epidemiological truth that we needed some form of distancing (very inappropriately called ‘social distancing’) of human bodies in order to protect us from the virological threat. For this reason, I argue in the book that we actually need a ‘metaphysical pandemic’, meaning a gathering of humanity under the banner of different layers of universalism. These include the biological universalism of our animal species, which has been under attack by a virus which hits us regardless of our more local identities and forms of cultural belonging.
Instead of a ‘metaphysical pandemic’ as a response to the viral crisis, we have witnessed a series of backlashes accompanying various forms of moral progress over the past few years. On the one hand, we saw a heightened sensibility for modes of evil discrimination, which led to moral progress in the wake of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and so on (just think of the George Floyd case, which triggered further awareness of the urgency of moral progress during the pandemic). On the other hand, governments shut down borders, discriminated against many African countries (remember the recent reaction to the detection of the Omicron variant in South Africa), cut down civil liberties and hoarded vaccines for wealthy nations, who then even rejected this rich scientific resource on account of various forms of anti-scientific delusions, conspiracy theories, and so forth. In a word, very recent history is a turbulent struggle for moral progress, the detailed history of which has still to be written.
Today, I find myself writing this preface while Russia is raging an unjust, evil war of aggression against Ukraine. We all (including very many Russians, to the extent to which they still have access to the facts concerning attacks against civilians) feel the horror of historical evil in our bones, although we ought to have been feeling it for much longer: horrific crimes against humanity never ceased to take place, in this century or the last. Syria, like many other unjust wars (such as the invasion of Iraq in the fake news and bullshit era of George W. Bush), should have been our warning that the ‘end of history’ does not mean that from now on everything will be fine, in the sense that moral progress will eventually become automatic and no longer require our efforts and even our sacrifice for the higher ideals of human goodness.
By now, it should have become clear that we live in dark times. But I hasten to add that I have not become a pessimist. The project of a new enlightenment which I propose in this book is still entirely valid, as it is a normative recommendation, a call to action grounded in the idea that there are moral facts, that moral progress is possible, and that we can do better than we have been doing for the best part of modernity.
Here, I want to seize the opportunity to correct a widespread misconception of Francis Fukuyama’s diagnosis of an ‘end of history’.1 It is not the case that he predicted that eternal peace would automatically be realized in the aftermath of 1989. Rather, he made a normative case according to which liberal democracy corresponds to the project of providing an institutional framework for enhancing the likelihood of moral progress.
During a fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center in March 2022, I had the opportunity to talk to him about this. He had just completed Liberalism and its Discontents,2 a book that clarifies the way in which he articulates a normative vision of intangible goods, of moral universalism, and of an informed optimism that allows us to read even the current critical situation of humanity as a potential contribution to history in Hegel’s sense – i.e., to the ‘progress of the consciousness of freedom’.3 Hegel precisely does not argue that history takes care of itself. On the contrary, history for Hegel is a normative concept – i.e., a concept that permits us to see human action and institution formation in light of our human capacity to improve our condition.
The overall critical situation of humanity in the twenty-first century need not unfold as catastrophe. There is room for moral progress even in dark times. This claim is not naïve optimism but one of many modes of perceiving history through a normative lens, in this case the lens of our capacity for good and evil. Those who become pessimists about the human condition in the face of the various orders of evil with which we are confronted also apply a normative framework for making human action intelligible in terms of value judgements.4 When thinking about human action, we simply cannot sidestep thick value judgement – i.e., judgement related to moral facts – whether we like it or not. Therefore, I am convinced that moral realism and a renewed philosophy of history can be combined without falling into the traps of the earlier dialectic of enlightenment. Thanks to the various interventions and ramifications of critical theory, it is now clear that history is not a single trajectory but a meshwork of social complexities. Yet this should not, of course, mislead us into thinking that history is an obsolete concept. Such is not the claim of an end of history. That I open the following book with the theme of a resurrection of history under novel conditions is not, therefore, in tension with Fukuyama’s fundamental idea that history and thinking in terms of ends are compatible. In order to renew serious philosophical and ethical interest in history in the face of evolving catastrophes, we need a thorough commitment to the possibility of ethical insight and moral progress, a commitment strong enough to help us overcome the incoherent, erroneous and politically dangerous idea that morality is at best the expression of one’s belonging to some kind of social group or other.
Stanford, March 2022
Notes
1
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(London: Penguin, 1992).
2
Francis Fukuyama,
Liberalism and its Discontents
(London: Profile Books, 2022).
3
G. W. F. Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
, vol. I, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 88.
4
On this concept, see Adi Ophir:
The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals
, trans. Rela Mazali and Havi Karel (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
Introduction
There is great agitation. The values of freedom, equality and solidarity, which have been taken for granted in recent decades, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, seem to have become uncontrollably shaky along with their market-based realization. This process, which can be viewed as a resurrection of history, is accompanied by a confusion of moral fundamentals.1 We seem to be in a deep crisis of values that has infected our democracy.
Before our eyes, countries such as the USA, Poland, Hungary and Turkey are moving further and further away from recognizing the democratic law-based state as a morally underpinned system of values. Orbán is allying himself with regressive autocratic rulers and the Polish government is attacking the separation of powers and weakening the independence of the courts. In Germany, far-right terrorism is on the rise; German society, somewhat like that of the USA, seems to be splitting up into progressive liberal forces and groupings that are sometimes openly racist, sometimes ‘only’ xenophobic and fond of German nationalism.
This crisis of values has been intensified by the coronavirus crisis, which infects not only our bodies but also our society. Admittedly, it initially had positive effects. From March 2020 onwards one could sense a new solidarity, triggered by an unprecedented moral decision in politics: in order to save lives, keep the health system running and break the pandemic’s infection chains, the neoliberal principle that the logic of the market is the foremost rule of society would be suspended. While the far more disastrous climate crisis has so far failed to make us accept far-reaching economic losses for the sake of doing what is morally right, the novel coronavirus abruptly threw a spanner in the works of global production chains.
It is already clear for economic reasons, then, that we cannot go on as before when the crisis is over. But for that we need a new model of society, one with more stable foundations than the project of a purely economic globalization; for this project collapsed like a house of cards in the face of the coronavirus and, if one takes the financial crisis of 2008 and the foreseeable consequences of the 2020 coronavirus crisis together, it may even have incurred more costs than it has generated profits since 1990 compared to a more sustainable economic model.2 Here it is a matter of not only the gigantic sums that the German state had to provide to save banks and other businesses, but also the collateral damage of an uncontrolled market logic, which significantly includes the negative effects of social media on the value concepts of liberal democracy. Digitalization, especially the rapid expansion of the internet and the smartphone’s infiltration of our everyday lives, has set off a race for data, eavesdropping operations, targeted manipulations via tech monopolies and cyberattacks by Russia, North Korea and China with the aim of destabilizing liberal ideas.
Alongside the risks, every crisis also offers the chance to improve social conditions. The coronavirus crisis holds a mirror up to us: it shows us who we are, how we do business, how we think and feel, and thus opens up potential spaces for positive human change. Ideally this change is based on moral understanding; we can only improve social conditions if we pay more attention than before to what we should and should not do for moral reasons.
Identifying ethically untenable ways of thinking and formulating suggestions for overcoming them is one of the tasks of philosophy. But philosophy cannot carry this out alone; it must rely on cooperation with the natural, technological, life and social sciences, as well as the humanities. This is not simply an academic matter but a matter of who we are as humans and who we want to be in future. In order to work on this form of self-knowledge and the formulation of a sustainable ‘vision of good’, as the American philosopher Brian Leiter has called it, it is indispensable to build up a far-reaching cooperation between science, politics, business and civil society that is characterized by mutual trust.
This presupposes that we give up the deep-seated idea that a society is fundamentally controlled by competition and distribution battles that can only be kept in check through state regulation and supervision. Rather, the aim of an enlightened society is autonomy – the self-regulation of its members through moral understanding. Given the conditions of the modern division of labour, we need an equally global ‘spirit of trust’ – that is, more of what we commonly refer to as ‘solidarity’.3
In the spring of 2020, an accumulation of crises (the crisis of liberal democracy, flaws in the health system, the global competition between systems or an increasingly out-of-control digitalization) revealed some of the systemic weaknesses of a world order based almost exclusively on the principles of economic globalization. In times of crisis, however, it becomes apparent that solidarity and cooperation do not work if the markets are the sole authority, since they rely on competition, greed for profit and increasingly also nationalism. This is demonstrated as much by Chinese state capitalism as by Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policies, and unfortunately this also applies to the intra-European competition for medical supplies that began immediately after the declaration of the pandemic and the catastrophic scenes in northern Italy.
In the last decade, at any rate, in the course of the increasing spread of social media (especially via the smartphone), it has become clear once more that history does not automatically lead to moral and legal progress. The more we can inform ourselves about world events every minute, the more clearly this seems to lead in the direction of unknown, alarming conditions: from the end of democracy, new pandemics and an unstoppable climate crisis to an artificial intelligence that threatens our jobs and perhaps even – as in Terminator – humanity as a whole with (self-inflicted) annihilation. In the light of these gigantic packing problems, the urgent question for all sectors of society is: what on earth are we supposed to do?
Yet before we decide whether this impression is accurate or not, we should first of all clarify our concepts. For how are we to speak of a matter if we have not clarified what we mean by it?
In the following, I will refer to something that we as humans should and should not do as a moral fact. Moral facts assert general demands that concern all people and define categories by which we can assess our behaviour. They show us what we owe ourselves as humans, what we owe other living creatures, and what we owe the environment shared by all life forms (to use a famous formulation by the American moral philosopher Thomas M. Scanlon).4 Moral facts divide our deliberate, rationally controllable actions into good and evil ones; between these lies the domain of moral neutrality – that is, the domain of what is allowed.
These three areas – good, neutral and evil – are the ethical values whose validity is universal, meaning that it extends across different cultures and times. Values are not only positive; they also dictate both what we should and what we should not do. In addition, moral reflection naturally leaves space for actions that are neither good nor evil. Many of our daily activities are not subject to any moral evaluation, and one of the important tasks of philosophical ethics is to show the difference between morally charged and neutral actions. Only thus can we recognize where there is leeway for freedom that is not clearly morally regulated.
Not everything that we do falls into the categories of good and evil. Many everyday actions are morally neutral; in earlier times, humanity had to learn this with reference to human sexuality, for example. Much of what was once considered immoral (such as homosexual sex) has long since been recognized as morally neutral – which leads to moral progress.
Moral facts are articulated as exhortations, recommendations and prohibition. These can be distinguished from non-moral facts, which are explored and, in successful cases, discovered by the natural and technological sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences. Non-moral facts do not make any direct demands of us. We know, for example, that alcohol consumption is harmful to our organism, but this does not provide an answer to the question of whether we should drink alcohol or how much. We also know that the discoveries of modern physics and their technological realization can annihilate humanity or serve its continued existence. Yet it does not follow from the structure of the physically explorable universe that humans should exist or how we should treat them.
How we should treat people suffering from a neurodegenerative disease (such as Alzheimer’s), for example, depends on the course of the illness and its effects on the personality of the sufferers and their loved ones. But examining the disease is certainly not sufficient on its own to determine an ethically responsible way of dealing with those affected. Moral progress is possible only if we acknowledge that what we owe ourselves, other people, other living beings and the environment is connected to non-moral facts, but it cannot be deduced purely from them.
We have long known in ethics that moral questions are not all limited to our spatial and temporal vicinity. In modernity, what we should and should not do directly or indirectly concerns all people of the present and the future – that is, also future generations that do not yet exist. Furthermore, our duties go beyond the human domain and affect other living beings and the environment (in the sense of non-animal nature).5 Ethics deals with universal values and goes beyond the horizon of the small communities in which we move every day as members.
When people lament ever more loudly that the foundations of Enlightenment values and liberal democracy have been shaken and history is being turned back, they usually forget to say what values actually are and what exactly one means when one claims they are in crisis. Such fundamental conceptual clarifications have been carried out by philosophy for millennia and have repeatedly triggered advances in enlightenment.
The present book deals with moral values, which differ especially from economic values (see below, pp. 26ff.). Contrary to what one often reads, moral values are not subjective in the sense that their existence is an expression of value judgements that humans (whether individuals or groups) have made. Rather, values are the measure by which we assess value concepts. Value concepts can define individuals or groups and their way of life and group membership. Value concepts can then be classified as valid or invalid when they are measured against the moral facts.
Good and evil constitute the extremes of our moral reflections and are especially familiar to us in the form of fairly obvious examples. For millennia, saints, founders of religions and heroes who advanced humanity have thus stood for the principle that there is a moral compass. Conversely, since the atrocities of totalitarian dictatorships in the twentieth century at the latest, we have known examples of radical evil as manifested in the use of weapons of mass destruction, total war and extermination camps. Remembrance culture in Germany, which shows us the Holocaust as an incomparable extreme of evil that leaves us speechless time and again, performs the important function of reminding us that evil really exists. Evil did not disappear with the end of the Second World War but appears today in the guise of such figures as Assad and many other war criminals and mass murderers.
Good and evil are universal values: good is a universal moral imperative – regardless of group membership, historical juncture, culture, taste, gender, class or race – whereas evil is a universal moral taboo. Good and evil exist in each and every one of us and show themselves in our daily thoughts and deeds. These universal values and their application to concrete, unclear action situations in which we find ourselves daily are the subject of this book.
There would be no democracy, no democratic law-based state, no separation of powers and no ethics if humanity had not kept asking itself how we can jointly contribute – every person at every moment of their life – to improving ourselves morally as individuals and legally as political communities. Given the current heightened state of crisis, is it not high time for a new enlightenment? My aim in the following is no less than that.
I will argue that there are guiding moral principles for human behaviour. These guiding principles extend across cultures; they are universally valid and form the source of universal values in the twenty-first century. Their validity does not depend on being recognized by the majority of people; in this sense they are objective. Truth and facts exist in ethics just as in other areas of human reflection and research, and, in ethics too, facts are more important than this or that opinion. It is a matter of searching together for the moral facts that we have not yet registered. For every period presents new ethical challenges, and the complex crisis of the still young twenty-first century can be mastered ethically only with innovative tools of thought.
This book is a committed attempt to bring order to the actually existing, genuinely dangerous chaos of our time. I would therefore like to develop a philosophical toolbox for solving moral problems. It is my aim to breathe new life into the idea that humanity’s task on our planet is to enable moral progress through cooperation. If we do not succeed in achieving moral progress in a way that incorporates universal values for the twentieth century – and thus all people – we will find ourselves in an abyss of unimaginable dimensions. The socioeconomic inequality on our planet, which will increase through the coronavirus crisis because many millions of people might slide into poverty, is not sustainable in the long term. Hence we cannot use the borders of nation states, for example, to keep away people who experience unimaginable suffering because of the consequences of our own actions. Such a strategy of defensive fortification is both morally reprehensible and doomed to failure in economic and political terms. Whether we like it or not, all humans are in the same boat – i.e. the same planet, which is surrounded by a thin, fragile atmosphere that we destroy through unsustainable production chains and irresponsible actions. The coronavirus pandemic is a wake-up call; it almost seems as if our planet had activated its immune system to curb the high velocity of our self-annihilation and protect itself from further abuse, at least temporarily.
Regrettably, it is absolutely true that we have fallen into a very deep crisis of values at least since the 2008 financial crisis. In the course of a palpable regression of liberal democracy, the last years have seen a rapid spread in models of authoritarian governance represented by Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Jair Messias (sic!) Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Mihály Orbán, Jarosław Aleksander Kaczyński and many other heads of state. On top of this we have Brexit, new forms of right-wing extremism in Germany (which have developed on the right wing of the AfD) and a general distrust in some parts of society towards scientific expertise in the face of partly anthropogenic climate change. Furthermore, advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics seem to present a genuine threat to employment, with the result that some people, such as the legendary entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk or the recently deceased physicist Stephen Hawking, even surmise that we humans will, in the near future, be surpassed, subjugated or wiped out by a coming superintelligence that will take control of evolution and the Earth in this manner.6
But climate change, which was made possible by scientific and technological progress, is not the only so-called existential risk – that is, a threat to the existence of our species through self-annihilation. In addition, the two world wars led to rapid armament in the realm of information technology, the coding and decoding of messages, which has resulted in a computerization of our lifeworld since the Second World War. The latest phase of computerization, so-called digitalization, is one in which smartphones, social media, search engines and control systems for our means of mobility (cars, aeroplanes, railways, etc.) influence our movements and our way of thinking.
This is a process that genuinely threatens our existence, for this entire architecture of control employs procedures from artificial intelligence. They are capable of infiltrating our thought processes in order to outdo us there, like today’s chess or Go programs, which even the best human players have not had any chance of defeating for a long time. A few years ago, the company DeepMind succeeded in developing an AI system called Alpha Go that beats the best players of the ancient Chinese board game Go, even though it is yet more complex than chess.
Anyone who is active in today’s social networks is kept in front of the screen by newsfeeds, text messages, images and videos selected by artificial intelligence. This means that we are playing a kind of social chess, as it were, against a superior opponent that will consume more and more of our time and attention. We are bombarded so relentlessly with serious information and fake news that we may one day have lost the ability to think for ourselves.
The rearguard action of liberal democracy and the analogue human, which is still resisting control by the software and corporate interests behind and inside artificial intelligence, threatens that ideal of modernity which relies on scientific-technological progress only succeeding when moral progress keeps in step with it. Otherwise, the infrastructure for a benevolent regulation of our behaviour (which includes the modern welfare state) turns into a dystopian horror scenario like those conceived in classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, or – closer to our own time – in science fiction series such as Black Mirror, Electric Dreams and Years and Years.
What characterizes the dark times in which everything suggests we are living, and which will be at issue in the following, is that the light of moral insight is sometimes systematically concealed, for example by the dissemination of fake news, political manipulation, propaganda, ideologies and other worldviews.
Enlightenment helps to combat dark times; it rests on the light of reason, and thus moral understanding. An important foundation of enlightenment is the idea that, in reality, we usually know what moral demands a situation makes of us. Extreme cases such as ethical dilemmas are rare. An ethical dilemma consists in several possible courses of action being open to us yet leading to a situation in which we cannot fulfil what is morally necessary. If we do something good in a dilemma, we are automatically refraining from some other good, which means we are doing something morally wrong.
When such cases arise, we need clear moral understanding from other situations in order not to lose our moral orientation when faced with the great challenges of our life. If we then cannot gain access to our own moral understanding, things look dark for us.
It is the poorest of the world who feel most acutely what dark times we live in, for they often lack the bare necessities. While we have virologists who are employed to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus together with politicians and health experts, the poorest – who not only live far away but are also herded together in our refugee camps – are fully at the mercy of the coronavirus and many other diseases. We, the well-off, bear some of the responsibility for this, but we block it out in our daily lives because our transactions and consumer habits disguise the fact that we are all in the same boat, on the same planet.
The darkening of the moral horizon is not restricted to the global historical and economic developments of recent decades to which people in poor countries have fallen victim, for it has long since established itself among us, among people who grew up with the canon of values underpinning the democratic law-based state, which would never have existed without the great wave of enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The coronavirus pandemic brought to light underlying weaknesses in our health systems, as well as revealing moral shortcomings in our way of thinking about one another. Nationalist politicians such as Orbán, Xi Jinping, Putin and Trump seized the opportunity and used the pandemic as a pretext to achieve political outcomes that would previously have been inconceivable (these include closing the USA’s borders to European travellers, to which the EU responded with closures of its own). Without exception, the political state of emergency based on the virological imperative that we must interrupt infection chains and get statistical curves under control is, in one way or another, used by politicians in all countries to score points, but also by entire nation states. Germany, for example, displays the superior equipment and organization of its own health systems to the world – part of a symbolic arms race primarily with China, which is posing as the perfect crisis manager in order to spread its model of a capitalist dictatorship adorned with communist slogans.
It is worrying that, in Germany too, China’s measures are admired and people are exploring digital ‘surveillance capitalism’, in the sense that, in the spatial isolation of a ‘social distancing’, we are all producing data like never before and thus giving up our privacy step by step.7 For now we almost all of us sit in front of our screens all day; workplace and private retreat are merged into the new construct called ‘home office’,8 and it is to be expected that many businesses will seize the opportunity to save costs for premises and continue to infiltrate private households after the coronavirus crisis. These are questionable processes that expedite a new ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’ (Habermas) by connecting the last place of privacy – the residence, the private home – entirely to the public network of data and commodity production.9
Such extreme measures exacerbate the crisis of values in liberal democracy, which was not so much overcome as deferred through the feeling of solidarity in the spring of 2020. The regressive forces of right-wing populism are already waiting for us at the other end of the coronavirus tunnel, and what is crucial is to vaccinate ourselves now against this danger by developing suitable intellectual formats that offer us better insight into what we should and should not do for moral reasons.
Modernity, initiated with a bang by the French Revolution, rests on the utopia of enlightenment, which essentially consists in the idea that our institutions – which means primarily the state – become instruments of moral progress. This is only possible if science, business, politics and every single citizen contribute through their daily behaviour to creating a situation in which we attempt in all conscience to do the right thing, both individually and collectively. The French Revolution made the utopia of enlightenment seem within reach, but it slipped away through a fierce backlash from mostly nationalist interests – starting from the waves of terror carried out by the different revolutionary factions in France and the subsequent Napoleonic tyranny.
However, we have progressed further than the late eighteenth and nineteenth century in many ways, both positively and negatively. We have seen the disastrous consequences of advancing scientific and technological progress without keeping step in moral terms. This has led to the development of weapons of mass destruction, for example, which were already unleashed on humanity at certain points in the twentieth century. And without the unfettered economic progress that goes hand in hand with modern technology, we would be not facing a climate crisis.
We can confront the twin dangers of new wars through the resurgence of nationalism and the ecological crisis threatening hundreds of millions of people onlythrough moral progress. What is required now is for humans to be mindful of their moral abilities, to begin to acknowledge that only a global cooperation beyond the egotisms of nation states can halt our ever accelerating movement towards a world-historical abyss.
Moral progress means becoming better at recognizing what we should and should not do. It presupposes insight and generally involves uncovering moral facts that were partially concealed. What we should or should not do is connected to the nature of reality – that is, the facts. What measures are suitable for reducing environmentally harmful emissions, how one diagnoses and heals diseases, how one distributes resources fairly, what forms of verbal expression must be classified as psychological violence, how one overcomes sexual harassment and other forms of gender discrimination based on power and violence, how we can regulate assisted dying – these are all moral and legal questions that can only be answered if one faces reality.
The character of non-moral facts can ideally be ascertained through cooperative research in the natural sciences, the humanities, the social sciences and technology, by giving universities and other research institutions the assignment of examining reality with reference to the urgent moral questions of our time. Philosophy also depends on natural science and technology; it must not ignore what we know about humans, other animals and the environment, of course, but it must integrate this knowledge into a philosophically informed image of humanity. Conversely, it is equally important for natural and technological scientists, but also economists who increasingly speak about philosophical issues, to acknowledge the state of philosophical research. Without such interdisciplinary cooperation, where all partners in the conversation take the others’ insights seriously and translate them into their own language, the ideal of enlightenment is doomed to fail.
If we want to find out what we should undertake or avoid in the face of a morally striking, dangerous situation that may concern all of us, we must take on board every form of expertise that can help us to assess the non-moral facts as precisely as possible. For example, it is more urgently necessary than ever to acknowledge the massive environmental risks of our consumer behaviour and our global production chains so that we can take the corresponding moral, political and socioeconomic steps. Whether we need more or less wind power to reach our climate goals as soon as possible is central to the question of how many wind turbines we should put up, and where. At the same time, we must take into account other non-moral parameters that also affect the environment (for example: How many storms arise, and where? How much woodland can we clear for wind turbines without attacking the green lung of a region?), so that we can ensure the best possible future both for our living children and yet unborn generations through productive cooperation between science, business, politics and civil society.
This aim has been undermined through an infiltration by postmodern arbitrariness, which still expects us to believe that there is ultimately no objective truth, no such thing as facts that can be brought to light using suitable research methods – only politically coloured opinions. Many even believe that science can never be liberated from ultimately senseless, politically motivated spin, such that it has meanwhile become a widespread belief, especially at leading universities in the USA and Great Britain, that universities are a place to wage identity-political conflicts.
It is in this spirit that the postmodern sociologist of knowledge Bruno Latour has claimed for decades that there are no ‘matters of fact’, only different ‘matters of concern’ that are examined or produced in laboratories. For example, he asserts that Ramses II cannot have died of tuberculosis, as examinations of the mummy have shown, as the tuberculosis pathogen has only been known since the nineteenth century.10 Latour thinks that we should protect the environment not because we would otherwise be putting ourselves and other life forms in massive danger (as we have recognized through natural science) but, rather, because there is an ecological ‘parliament of things’ in which rainforests, insects and the ozone layer all have a vote.11 Like many others among the first postmodern theorists, Latour has been insisting since the 1980s that we should forget about facts and instead take a stand in society for the oppressed, a group that, in his eyes, now includes the environment.
But this form of identity politics is verifiably nonsense, as it rests on a denial of facts. If Latour’s theory of science were correct, we could simply do away with the coronavirus by ceasing to examine it in laboratories, as it would only be in effect – indeed, it would only exist – if it were discovered (or more likely invented). This is postmodern claptrap.
We cannot give meaningful answers to urgent moral questions without acknowledging reality. We all know this from experience: someone who denies facts for too long and evades reality will sink deeper and deeper into a life crisis. At some point one must face facts and ask who one is and who one wants to be. The postmodern denial of reality, facts, knowledge and truth is no help in this, as one can see in almost every speech by the current [2020] American president, who is no doubt in perfect agreement with the postmodern opinion that there is no such thing as truth or reality, only expressions of group membership.
On closer inspection, postmodern identity politics is no less destructive than a digitalization gone wild that toys with the notion both of replacing the welfare state, indeed democracy itself, with Chinese models of governance, and of expediting economic revival through computerization and automatization of industrial processes.
Modernity, as the Enlightenment ideal that led to the democratic law-based state, is under fire from all sides, and all of us are deeply unsettled by this shock in different ways. In this book, I combat the creeping erosion of the pillars of the democratic law-based state – which is closely connected to postmodern arbitrariness – by developing the outline of a new enlightenment that I will call New Moral Realism.12
As stated above, we are currently witnessing a darkening of the historical horizon. Globally interconnected humanity is currently working towards its own annihilation, assisted by the globalized production chains of sometimes pointless consumer goods that are produced at the expense of human beings purely out of greed for profit. No one needs a new car as often as the people who can actually afford one every few years, and who want one because they admire the latest interior options and technology. The same applies to smartphones, tablets, items of clothing and the many luxury items that we buy for ourselves and our children without noticing how it harms their future. We complain about plastic and know that it is destroying the oceans in which we want to swim and fish, yet simultaneously we buy plastic toys that replicate maritime scenes.
Our consumer behaviour is thoroughly contradictory. One relies on digitalization to reduce the amount of travel in the business world, for example, but easily overlooks the fact that digitalization also contributes to the ecological crisis. I was once invited to a conference that was held by a ministry in one of Germany’s federal states to investigate the dangers of social media for the democratic law-based state, and the organizers were proud that it was being streamed live on YouTube. Treating social media as the problem while employing them as an act of resistance is a fairly obvious contradiction.
The many such contradictions that we encounter on a daily basis are far from harmless. The question of whether we achieve the necessary moral progress to guide a potentially dangerous scientific-technological progress in the right direction starts in everyday life. Physics and chemistry have given us modern infrastructure and the preparation of drinking water, but also the nuclear bomb and chemical weapons. Scientific-technological progress alone does not guarantee any more than economic prosperity that people will do what is morally right and implement it institutionally. At every moment of our life, each one of us is called upon to do good and thus reduce the magnitude of evil and devastation. Responsible action does not only take part somewhere ‘out there’ or ‘up there’ among influential people in politics, the media or business; it plays a role in the behaviour of each one of us.
As an example, we can present a fictional person I will call Antje Kleinhaus (in the hope no one really goes by that name). Antje lives in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district, sponsors an African child, donates to charity and generally feels empathy towards the migrant children who, as she sees on TV in the evenings, are harassed by some members of the public as well as the European border guards. Every day, she is appalled anew by the current dark times and tries to dissuade her acquaintances from voting AfD,13 as she is in favour of tolerance and open-mindedness. One fine day her young daughter Luna wants to invite her new kindergarten friend Ayşe into the Kleinhaus household for her birthday party. Antje, however, feels that Ayşe does not quite fit in, and that she has a totally different culture, as both her parents came to Germany from Turkey and Ayşe speaks broken German. On top of that, they will be eating pizza with salami, and Antje is reluctant to confront Ayşe with pork. To honour Ayşe’s culture, she is ultimately not invited, because Antje thinks it better for Ayşe to grow up happy in her own milieu – just as the donations for her sponsored African child serve to ensure that it can grow up in its homeland, in Africa, and will not have to brave the difficult journey to Germany.
This kind of mendacity shows that all of us, even the seemingly quite innocent and somewhat progressive Antje Kleinhaus, harbour potentially dangerous prejudices in some part of ourselves. If someone in the subway gives a start when a person who somehow looks ‘like an Islamic terrorist’ enters their train, this expresses a potentially racist, or at least xenophobic, prejudice. Please ask yourself: What does a typical German look like? If you think you have an answer, you have just become acquainted with a racist prejudice of your own – as there is no such thing as a typical German, let alone a typical German appearance.
We all pollute the environment, especially the Germans, whose history includes the invention of the automobile with a combustion engine by Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Friedrich Benz. The beautiful state of Baden-Württemberg has seen not only the founding of the Green Party but also the invention of the vehicle whose existence is a major reason why we need ecological policies in the first place.
To resolve all these contradictions, what we need is not only large-scale global and political solutions; we must also start with ourselves, with our own prejudices and our own actions. Moral progress is only possible if we acknowledge that evil is not only ‘out there’ – among the Americans, the billionaires, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Russian hackers or whatever actors one would like to blame for the dark times.
Next to the climate crisis, one important current danger in Germany comes from political extremism and the accompanying terrorism, which have led in recent years to political murders (of Walter Lübcke)14 and terrorist attacks such as the recent one in Hanau.15 This is, among other things, the result of a fundamental problem that will be one of the subjects of this book: post-truth emotionalism. This means that the creation of group memberships and majorities through sometimes targeted narratives of identity formation is more significant, both for minor and major decisions, than the attempt to work together on choosing a path of action that is recognizably correct by adducing rationally communicable reasons and establishing facts. Simplistically put, what matters today, often more than the relevant, verifiable facts that are at issue, are short, emotional messages in the Twitter format, pictures series on Instagram, or catchwords in a political confrontation blown up by the media.
That is why, as stated above, it is time to bring the central idea of the Enlightenment into play again: that, by means of reason, we can work together on finding out what we should and should not do. We need an updated form of enlightenment, however, one that is immune to edifices of ideas that attempt to convince us that there are, in moral matters, no universally acceptable solutions that are just for all people but only ever a defence of the law of the strongest. In the following, such edifices of ideas are accordingly subjected to clearly comprehensible criticism and rejected. This book, then, is an opening move of a new enlightenment whose necessity has already been pointed out by others.16
The new enlightenment aims for a co-immunism, to use a well-chosen formulation by Peter Sloterdijk (albeit with an entirely different meaning): the concern is to adapt the content of the canon of values comprising freedom, equality, solidarity, etc., to each period and to assess the respective dangers that are mobilized to bring about the fall of reason. Reason, after all, must always wrestle with unreason on account of numerous factors. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell was probably quite right when he suggested in his central book, The Claim of Reason, that ‘Nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s humanity.’17
My book is aimed at the largest possible group of people who are both disturbed by the current palpable and observable coarsening of the sociopolitical discourse and open to an attempt to employ their reason for the purpose of moral judgements. One cannot speak to everyone to convince them that communicable reasons, grounds that can be shared with other people, form the moral foundation of successful coexistence. The power of arguments cannot, for example, help us combat violent far-right extremists and the intellectual agitators who encourage them any more than notorious climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers. In a society whose institutions fundamentally strive to ascertain the truth, to acknowledge facts, and to adhere to the principle that every person should treat all others as equal in moral questions, it is harder for the intellectual evil of these agitators to bear fruit than in a discourse where reasons are replaced by catchphrases and imperfect argumentation is overpowered by the evocation of emotional states. The post-truth age, which is deliberately reinforced via social media, is the soil in which radicalizations flourish, be they religious, political or otherwise. There is no point debating with an Islamic State hate preacher or a radical Stalinist to establish who is right through an exchange of reasons, since the basic rules of such an exchange are not accepted by the ideology of the interlocutor.
Radical intolerance whose aim is to undermine the foundations of the democratic law-based state by any means available (including violence against innocents) is nothing that one should tolerate. Therefore, this book is directed at those who wish to deal rationally – that is, not in a manner driven purely by their personal opinions – with the questions of whether there are such things as moral facts and moral progress in dark times and of how we can develop a system of values for the twenty-first century on the basis of universal values. The fact that increasing numbers of people are not interested in this is part of the problem, and I wish to contribute to the solution with these reflections from a philosophical perspective.
Notes
1
See the famous thesis of the end of history in Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(London: Penguin, 1992). Contrast this with the more recent work by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes,
The Light That Failed: A Reckoning
(London: Penguin, 2019).
2
See the calculations in Maja Göpel,
Unsere Welt neu denken: Eine Einladung
(Berlin: Ullstein, 2020), p. 50; naturally it was too early to take the coronavirus crisis into consideration.
3
The American philosopher Robert B. Brandom recently took a new interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy as a point of departure for a sophisticated philosophy of trust whose socio-ontological deep structure might become part of the blueprint for a successful global socialization. See Robert Boyce Brandom,
A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
4
See Thomas M. Scanlon’s ground-breaking book
What We Owe to Each Other
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a defence of a moral realism similar to the position I develop in the present book, see, by the same author,
Being Realistic about Reasons
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). In his most recent book, Scanlon shows why, from an ethical perspective, socioeconomic inequality leads to moral imbalances. See
Why Does Inequality Matter?
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
5
This goes hand in hand with a far-reaching revolution in ethics that was first brought to light in all its clarity by Hans Jonas. It implies that we need a new form of bio- and techno-ethics that goes far beyond what was conceivable in classical and modern philosophy, when human actions mostly affected only small groups. The effects of modern advanced technology apply to everyone, however, which makes it a more urgent task than ever to develop universal values for the twenty-first century. I would recommend Hans Jonas’s central work to all my readers:
The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age
, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
6
See the at times remarkably irrational and fairly unsubstantiated overview of fictitious scenarios of a coming superintelligence in Nick Bostrom,
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Contrast with Markus Gabriel,
Der Sinn des Denkens
(Berlin: Ullstein, 2019). For an introduction to the novel thematic complex of the ethics of artificial intelligence, see Mark Coeckelbergh,
AI Ethics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).
7
See the highly topical book by the Harvard economist Shoshana Zuboff,
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
(London: Profile Books, 2019).
8
In English in the original text (trans.).
9
Regarding the digital ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’ with reference to the famous book of that name by the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas, see Markus Gabriel,
Fiktionen
(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020), §§16f., as well as Armin Nassehi,
Muster: Theorie der digitalen Gesellschaft
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2019).
10
See Bruno Latour, ‘On the partial existence of existing and non-existing objects’, in Lorraine Daston (ed.),
Biographies of Scientific Objects
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 247–69. The American philosopher has gone to the trouble of thoroughly refuting Latour’s fallacies, contradictions and false assumptions. See Paul A. Boghossian,
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
11
Bruno Latour,
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
12
I have already laid out the New Realism in (hopefully) easily understandable terms in my trilogy
Why the World Does Not Exist
,
