Morality and Politics
What is right, and what is wrong? This question is perhaps the most divisive, politically. If I were to claim that it were right to use the state to ensure freedom for another person at the expense of a third party, then what does that mean. Well, let’s get to it.
What do I mean by morals? First, we have to question whether we’re discussing actions, outcomes, or intentions. The actions we do to produce an outcome influences the nature of the outcome; for instance, it would be foolish to assert that the violent overthrow of a government would be the same as a peaceful overthrow of a government. Of course, a violent overthrow of existing social institutions tends to lead to a more complete break from the previous society. The peaceful means of achieving political power often leaves old power structures in place; it is for this reason that some states underwent drastic and violent revolutions and some underwent peaceful ones. The relative difference in structure required to achieve the outcomes were different; the violent means of overthrow were used in cases where the existing power structures were wholly inconsistent with the desired outcomes.
Let us, for example, consider the Russian Revolution; the czarist regime controlled a significant portion of the army, the aristocracy, etc. The liberal government of Kerensky, because it transferred power from the czarist dictatorship to an existing aristocratic regime, required little violence to achieve its aims. The Communist government required far more violence in order to achieve its aims; it sought the total restructuring of Russian society, not a simplistic reshuffling of the old ruling class.
What does this mean for our morality? It means that the actions we take, as well as the intentions we have for those actions, affect the outcomes of the situations, and the moral interpretation thereof. Aristotle claimed that the goal of all governments was to instill virtue in their citizens; of course, he seems to place a great emphasis on actions and less of one on intentions. A significant question, if we look to Aristotle’s example, is how to instill virtue in citizens. Furthermore, who are the citizens? Aristotle’s view of ethics was limited in this sense.
The most important question, when we come to differences in political morality, is who that citizen is. Althusser notes that we can enforce a pattern of behavior upon a person, just by making them a citizen, and when we look at that person acting now, in a social context, the citizen themselves must act in a certain way. Why must the citizen act in a certain way? It is because if they do not, they are no longer considered a citizen, they become a criminal, a degenerate, or some other social group which no longer holds the full rights of a member of society. And in this, they may be denied the right, not only to live in the society, but to exist in the sight of the society.
This seems to be the crux of our political problems. I can state, repeatedly, and will do so, that trans, gay, queer people, etc. are citizens, but it is not in the interest of the conservative morality to permit that. They have violated a fundamental rule of the existence of citizens, and as such, the group that has political power must exclude these people; ultimately, this is the only thing that differentiates the two parties in the United States. Both use this same framework of exclusion and inclusion, with little variation. Both are ironically guilty of the same crime.
What does that mean. Intent disappears behind the wall of action and outcome. The liberals, using different tools to define citizenship, define trans people as citizens, without actually consulting them; it does this similarly with colonized groups, queer people, and other marginalized populations. Of course, what this means is that they distort citizenship in a way more insidious than the Republicans; they create the identities of the marginalized instead of creating their own identity. The Republicans do not seize upon the subaltern people’s identity to form it; they attempt to deny it, but if we turn, again, to Foucault, “where there is power, there is resistance.” The Democrats seize upon the creation of a false identity for the subaltern, rather than allowing them to, as the Germans put it, sich verantworten, to be able to answer for themselves.
Morality is intimately attached to politics, and as much as the Democratic Party wishes they could abstain from making moral judgments, pretend to objectivity, that is not possible. They only create the same morality and give to it a science; they make their whole ideology scientific, bureaucratic, investigatory, but do not realize that in this, there is no possibility of impartial treatment either. The question is not “how do we construct morality,” it is implicit in our political actions. The question must be “who constructs morality.”
