Session 10: Yak! Yak! Yak!
3rd Global Conference
Thursday 15th March – Saturday 17th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
Is There a Difference Between Being Moral and Being Polite?
Regan Lance Reitsma
Department of Philosophy, King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA
Is there a difference between being moral and being polite? Between morality and etiquette?
The French moral philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville thinks so. In his (surprising) best-seller A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, Sponville attempts (in his opening chapter) to capture what, at bottom, this difference is.
To begin with, Sponville remarks that morality and etiquette often prescribe the same behavior. For instance, under normal conditions it is both right and polite to say ‘thank you’ after being given a gift. But Sponville believes—correctly, I think—that these normative standards sometimes diverge in their behavioral expectations: “honesty sometimes demands”—unlike etiquette—“that we displease, shock, or offend those around us” (13). Even more, Sponville regards being moral as, broadly speaking, more important than being polite: “Better a generous oaf than a polite egoist” (13). As I agree with these claims, I’ll call them “the platitudes about morality and etiquette.”
In Sponville’s view, these platitudes, however true, simply don’t get us to the very heart of the matter. The distinction that marks the essential difference between being moral and being polite, he thinks, is that morality “cares about” intentions, politeness doesn’t (10). Morality expects a person not only to act in accordance with the rules it prescribes, but to do so from the right kinds of motives and character traits. Etiquette, on the other hand, requires nothing more than that we conform to its rules, all of which are for external (or “publicly observable”) behavior, such as saying ‘please’ when making a request. In this vein, Sponville describes being polite as (nothing more than) “attention to form” and “compliance with usage” (10); etiquette, he says, “makes no moral claims for itself” (9).
To make his fundamental thesis vividly clear, Sponville claims that polite behavior cannot coherently be accused of hypocrisy: “there’s no difference between seeming to be polite and actually being so . . . in the case of politeness, appearance is reality: what you see is all there is” (8). To be guilty of hypocrisy implies a discord between, say, what you actually care about (“on the inside”) and what you’ve in some way publicly claimed to care about (“on the outside”). But according to Sponville’s definition, etiquette is merely about “the outside,” about overt, publicly observable behavior. Accordingly, Sponville is compelled by his account to say that the person who says ‘thank you’ without feeling a proper level of gratitude is without qualification polite—he’s done all that etiquette demands—though his lack of gratitude is morally objectionable. This “ungrateful” person violates only the “internal standards” of morality, not the thoroughly “external standards” of etiquette.
Is Sponville’s fundamental thesis correct? Here’s one significant reason to think not. Sponville’s account is ill-equipped, it seems to me, to analyze the (psychologically rich) case of the sneering ‘thank you’. Imagine you very kindly give a child a piece of candy, and her ‘thank you’ drips not so much with sweet and gooey chocolate as ugly and acidic sarcasm. It seems natural to say that this girl—who has overtly said the words required by etiquette—is both very rude and unduly ungrateful. She flouts not only morality (by being very publicly ungrateful), but etiquette, too, as her sneer undermines her ‘thank you’. But this is exactly the judgment Sponville—very wittingly—calls flat mistaken, a conceptual gaffe.
In my view, the best response to this counterexample requires that we significantly modify Sponville’s account. “Being polite” should be defined, contrary to Sponville, not merely in terms of etiquette’s “lack of concern” about intentions, but also in terms of etiquette’s broader social function or governing purpose, the easing of social tensions. Notice that the rude girl’s behavior, though it conforms to one of etiquette’s behavioral requirements (namely, to say ‘thank you’), is very much not geared to ease social tensions. (On the contrary, it seems geared to do the opposite, to raise your hackles.) On my modified, more complex account of etiquette, this girl violates the demands of both morality and etiquette—of etiquette because her behavior does not fit with, even tears against, etiquette’s governing purpose.
In addition to handling the case of the sneering ‘thank you’ better than Sponville’s, my account, I submit, has several other theoretical virtues: (a) it doesn’t collapse the distinction between etiquette and morality (as these two normative standards, in my view, have importantly different governing purposes); (b) it captures (at least as well as Sponville’s account) the various “platitudes about etiquette and morality” mentioned in paragraph three; and—bonus points—(c) it helps to clarify and to strengthen Sponville’s attempt to sketch (later in his book) the essential difference between garden-variety immorality and serious wickedness (or moral evil).
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
How to Talk to Evil People
Peter Barry
Saginaw Valley State University, USA
There can be little doubt that evil exists, so long as we are fairly catholic about the semantics of the term ‘evil’. But skepticism about evil also undoubtedly exists. Evil-skeptics need not be skeptical about morality generally; they might well be full-blown realists about moral properties and propositions yet hold that there are no evil people (or that there are trivially few such people). The weakest versions of evil skepticism hold only that, as a matter of material fact, there are no evil people while stronger versions entail the modal claim that evil people are impossible—not just that there aren’t any, but that there can’t be any. By contrast, evil-revivalists maintain that evil people are possible and that they do exist—that is, that a non-trivial number of actual people are evil.
Evil-skepticism will seem most plausible if an implausible conception of evil or evil personhood is embraced in the first place. Conversely, if plausible conceptions are embraced initially, evil-revivalism will seem rather more plausible. It would beg the question against evil-skepticism to insist that evil people, properly understood, do exist, but taking some independently implausible conception of evil personhood for granted similarly begs the question against the evil-revivalist. The best argument for evil-revivalism and against evil-skepticism is to, first, provide an independently plausible account of evil personhood and make it clear what evil people are like and how they differ from the rest of us merely bad people and, second, to show that there are plausible examples of actual people like that. Presently, I shall be content to get clearer about how we ought to talk about evil people in the hope that clarity here will disarm a series of arguments for evil-revivalism.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Bullshit as Evil
Gary Thompson
Independent Researcher, USA
In On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt calls attention to an aspect of evil far removed from the usual archetypes: the sometimes deliberate use of rhetoric to mislead through claims so inflated and absurd as to escape the category of outright lying. Lies are characteristically aligned with evil, but bullshit, seemingly unserious, escapes that label; nonetheless, because of its ubiquity and corrosive effects, it may ultimately be more evil than classic propaganda. Frankfurt’s definition has been expanded by subsequent discussion; an updated taxonomy would include not only outright lies, but equivocation, irrelevancy, spin, and bluffing. Attention to accurate use of language, advocated long ago by Orwell, is a necessary (though probably not sufficient) step toward addressing the situation.
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