Cooperation and Social Justice by Joseph Heath

Author:Joseph Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCSH: Social justice, LCSH: Cooperation, LCSH: Equality
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

What Dalrymple is obviously eliding in this passage is the distinction between harm to others and harm to self. It is somewhat dramatic, but certainly not an abuse of terms, to describe making choices that will foreseeably lead to the misery and suffering of one’s own children as “evil.” But what about bringing suffering upon oneself? Most of the behaviour patterns that Dalrymple is lamenting among the underclass are primarily self-destructive, not actively harmful to others (“public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality”34). They almost all involve failures of self-control. Calling these “evil” is one way of explaining why they should be punished, or stigmatized, but there is a serious question as to whether they merit that description. Why is it “evil,” and not merely “tragic”?

It should, of course, be acknowledged that the failure to draw a moral distinction between harm to self and harm to others is a long-standing feature of the Christian tradition. Of the “seven deadly sins,” for instance, sloth and gluttony are listed alongside wrath and greed, despite the fact that the former are self-regarding, the latter other-regarding. Much of this is due to the influence of classical Greek morality, where the ideal of “self-mastery” was considered central to the ethical life.35 Many of the medieval catalogues of sin were just Christianized versions of Aristotle’s table of virtues and vices – a table that listed rashness and intemperance as vices, alongside more evidently other-regarding traits. Furthermore, Aristotelian virtue theory is a moral framework that encourages stigmatization, precisely because of the way that it categorizes actions as right or wrong only through reference to character traits (i.e., the “virtues” or “vices”) of the individual who performs them. In this view, bad actions are the sort of thing that bad people do, not the other way around. Thus the generalization from a specific sanction to the ascription of some impairment of the person, which is the hallmark of stigmatization, is actually the recommended form of moral reasoning within the Aristotelian system. Despite the Christian injunction to “hate the sin, not the sinner,” much of this Greek ethos was absorbed into Christian ethics. The result is a framework that encourages significant moral disapproval of the character of individuals who suffer from self-control failure.

This is what I suspect is going on in Dalrymple’s thinking. At certain points, he claims that the misery he sees all around him is a consequence of declining belief in an objective order of values. (“Life in the British slums demonstrates what happens when the population at large, and the authorities as well, lose all faith in a hierarchy of values.”)36 And indeed, in order to make his argument, such an objective order of values is what he requires. To make the case that the behaviour of the heroin addict is “evil,” and thus deserving of punishment, he must say that drug abuse is intrinsically wrong, above and beyond whatever impact the addict’s choices have upon anyone’s welfare, including his own. Drug abuse is a vice, vice is evil, and evil deserves to be punished.

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