Chapter 18: Rationalization
I. Evil’s Best Friend
I want to draw particular attention to this chapter, because I think it describes a phenomena that can be found at the core of a great portion of the evil that gets done in the world.
The greatest evils in the world have not been conducted by people who have simply cast off social norms to pursue their own interests above all others. It has its roots in the minds of those who pervert and twist those norms, thereby giving evil a nice polish and shine that whole populations can embrace. Inquisitions, holocausts, slavery, civil wars and wars of conquest, terrorism, discriminatory legislation, all are executed by people convinced that they are doing the right thing. Yet, the arguments they have offered in defense of what they do can easily be recognized as feeble rationalizations.
This is certainly the case for those massive evils that spread misery over whole populations. It applies just as much to day-to-day evils such as theft, fraud, rape, and murder. Almost always, the perpetrator of one of these crimes will offer some justification that makes it seem right, in his or her own mind, to execute the evil act. If we weigh the sum of these lesser evils against the more massive but less common greater evils, it is hard to know which would win.
I am here to suggest that, perhaps the best way to avoid both of these realms of evil, is to take a good solid look at rationalization, learn to recognize it, and take a much stronger stand against it than we have done to date.
II. General Comments
In the papers I read and the arguments I witnessed concerning all sorts of moral issues, I heard the charge of ‘rationalization’ leveled against others. At one point, I do not remember where or how, I heard or read mention of an article where the authors had examined this issue in more detail. So, I found that article.
Sykes, Joshua and David Matza. “Techniques of Neutralization”, American Sociological Review, 1957, pp 664+.
The article specifically focused on the techniques that ‘juvenile delinquents’ used to recast their delinquent activities from appearing “wrong” to appearing “right”. It placed these techniques into five categories:
(1) Denial of Responsibility
(2) Denial of Injury
(3) Denial of the Victim
(4) The Condemnation of the Condemners
(5) The Appeal to Higher Loyalties
When I get to discussing these five categories in detail, you, the reader, will start to become familiar with them. When that happens, I expect that you will begin to see these rationalizations at work whenever people get together to argue any issue of government or social policy. You may even discover instances in their own arguments (at which point, I would like to request, ‘please stop’).
However, before discussing specific categories, I would like to address some relevant general points.
A. Breaking the Law
A part of the general tone of the Sykes and Matza article that I had immediate trouble with is that it defined delinquency in terms of breaking the law, or violating social norms. They wrote with an implicit assumption that laws should never be broken, and that social norms should always be followed.
Those who ran the Underground Railroad in the 1850s were breaking the law, yet I would take exception to the idea that its participants were rationalizing wrongful action or that preserving, promoting, and defending the institution of slavery should be given any type of moral priority.
Those who hid Jews from the Nazis also violated the law — yet I have trouble conceiving of them as performing some condemnable epistemic trick in order to make their delinquency seem more appropriate, at least in their own eyes.
I could very easily imagine a Nazi propagandist in Hitler’s organization promoting a theory about how ‘le Resistance’ in France was employing techniques of neutralization such as “The Appeal to Higher Loyalties” in order to justify blowing up a railroad bridge, or as practicing “Denial of the Victim” when they assert that the Nazi general they assassinated deserved to be killed.
A sensible interpretation to the works of Sykes and Matza, I thought, would not offer it as a tool to be used in the defense of slavery and the holocaust. Instead, if anything, it was the defenders of slavery and the participants in the holocaust who were the most significant practitioners of these techniques of neutralization.
This then lead me to a further position. Sometimes a whole society or culture can be swept up in a custom of neutralization, rationalizing away practices that victimize whole populations within that society.
Slavery provides a paradigm example. All over the ante-bellum American South there were writings that argued that blacks were not truly being harmed by slavery. Blacks, these defenders claimed, were much like children, and no moral objection could be raised against having a child perform chores in exchange for the practice of providing children with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
Within this institution, it was also permissible to punish children that misbehaved, and to retrieve the runaway child and return him to his home.
In addition, the defenders of slavery argued, slavery not only did no harm, but benefited, these individuals who were slaves because it gave them the opportunity to leave their pagan cultures behind and adopt (be forced into accepting) Christianity.
Some argued that slaves were deserving of what happened to them in virtue of biblical references to the sins of a mythical ancestor, Ham, whose guilt was passed on from him to all of his descendants, which was all dark-skinned people. The idea that a child can inherit the guilt of a parent has its own very strong religious pedigree; where the guilt of the parent condemns all of the children to hell for three generations.
Similarly, Hitler cast the Jews as deserving suffering and death in virtue of made-up crimes against a higher good – a fictitious Jewish conspiracy against the master race. They were identified as shifty money-hungry thieves who spread suffering among the working masses of Germany in order to line their pockets. They were cast as traitors who would sell Germany itself to the highest bidder.
B. What is a Rationalization?
Ultimately, the techniques of neutralization are fallacies. They are mistakes of reasoning. More than that, they are blameworthy mistakes of reasoning. Those who make these mistakes show evidence of a desire to accept certain types of conclusions that is so strong that it outweighs concern that the individual should have (that a properly motivated individual would have) for the well-being of others, particularly those who would suffer as a result of accepting the mistaken conclusion.
For example, denial of harm does not count as a rationalization unless there really is harm, and the harm is so obvious that there is evidence of a defect in character of any who allow themselves to believe that the harm does not exist. The youth who paints graffiti on somebody’s fence cannot rationally believe that he is doing no harm. But he irrationally believes it. He wants to believe it. It is this desire that overshadows reason and causes the agent to accept a conclusion that no person properly concerned with the truth, or properly concerned with the well-being of others, could ever have accepted; at least, not on the basis of the information available.
In other words, an honest mistake does not count as a rationalization. If an individual receives compelling evidence that a liquid is safe to drink, and offers it to another, only to discover that it contained a deadly poison, the individual is not guilty of the rationalization ‘denial of harm’. We do not, or should not, count his argument as a rationalization unless there is evidence of the presence of poison that any properly motivated person would have paid attention to.
It is not the mere fact that slavery was harmful to blacks, or the holocaust was harmful to Jews, that made those who practiced and defended these institutions guilty of rationalization, but the fact that they blinded themselves to obvious evidence of wrongdoing that seals their guilt.
I want to warn against a possible mistaken interpretation. I am not saying that a properly motivated person does not, from time to time, allow his desires to determine his beliefs. It may be an inherent part of being human that desires influence our beliefs – we believe what we want to believe. However, a properly motivated person — a person with good desires — would have beliefs influenced by good desires (desires that tended to fulfill the desires of others). The evil person has beliefs influenced by bad desires (desires that thwart the desires of others).
For example, the properly motivated person would be reluctant to believe that an individual is deserving of harm, and would only be willing to accept ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt.’ The properly motivated person would leap, perhaps unjustifiably, to the prima facie conclusion that executing or enslaving large segments of the population is wrong until compelling evidence could be provided to the contrary. That compelling evidence would only be reluctantly accepted. In fact, the agent’s good desires may even compel him to overlook solid evidence that populations need to suffer some harm.
This is something that the participants in the institution of slavery and the Nazi holocaust (not to mention the wars against Native Americans and the Internment of the Japanese), crusaders, inquisitors, and participants in a long line of religious wars, among others did not do.
There will, of course, be instances that are hard to judge. The line that determines “sufficiently strong” is not this clear, bright, easily recognizable boundary. It exists in a field of gray, and reasonable people can disagree over whether the imaginary line of “sufficiently strong” has yet been crossed in a particular case. The fact that there is no clear dividing line is not an argument against a difference — any more than the ability to create different shades of gray implies that there is no difference between black and white (or light gray and dark gray).
C. Arguments and Conclusions
Finally, it is important to recognize that a person does not have to disagree with another’s final position to see that the other person is guilty of neutralization. On any issue that I care to name, I encounter others who defend the same conclusions I defend, using arguments that are pathetically weak.
For example, I tend to be against capital punishment. I have heard others who are against capital punishment argue that if you kill a murderer then you are doing to him what he did to his victim. And if you hold that the latter is wrong, then you must hold that the former is wrong as well.
Yet, this logic leads to the further implication that we ought not to imprison kidnappers, or to fine thieves, or send under-cover agents in to discover fraud and deceptive business practices. Isn’t the jailer simply doing to the kidnapper what the kidnapper did to his victim? Does a fine not involve forcing the robber to give up their possessions under threat of force? Isn’t the undercover agent guilty of lying and deception just like the con men he is trying to capture? If we cannot do to criminals what they did to their victims, we can do nothing criminals.
The argument has no merit. It can only have power in the mind of the person who has already decided that capital punishment is wrong, and is so emotionally wrapped up in a conclusion that he can no longer assess the arguments for or against capital punishment on their merit.
Any outlandish claim or clear invalidity in defense of a moral position, even in support of a particular conclusion which is still the subject of reasonable debate, is evidence of neutralization. It is evidence of a moral failing, evidence of a person who no longer cares whether his beliefs are justified, and will clutch at any excuse that would give his prejudices an aura of legitimacy.
That, in itself, is a moral crime.
III. The Techniques of Neutralization
Now, it is time for an examination of the specific ‘techniques of neutralization’ in detail.
A. Denial of Responsibility
The denial of responsibility is substantially the same excuse that, in Chapter 17, I called ‘accident’. It is a claim that the forces of nature intervened in order to create the result that everybody says is bad. “The brakes failed, which is why the car plowed into the row of pedestrians. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”
(a) Responsibility for who we are
Sykes and Matza assert that delinquents inappropriately extend this argument to claim that they are not responsible for the outcome because they are not responsible for who they are. The authors wrote, “It may also be asserted that delinquent acts are due to forces outside of the individual and beyond his control such as unloving parents, bad companions, or a slum neighborhood.”
In previous chapters, I argued that the ultimate object of moral evaluation concerns an evaluation of desires — whether the agent has the desires that a good person would have. The defense of “accident” works, with respect to denying responsibility for consequences, if it shows that the consequences resulted independent of the agent’s desires. If the breaks failed on a car, then no matter what the driver wanted, no matter how badly he wanted the car to stop, he could do nothing to actually get the car stopped before it hit the pedestrians.
The rationalizer, on the other hand, does not say, “no matter what I wanted, I could not have changed the outcome.” The rationalizer admits to having bad desires — is missing the desires that a good person would have and having desires the good person would not have — and says of this, “It is not my fault!”
Yet, if the analysis that I have been giving to both morality and law are correct, this response is irrelevant. Moral institutions aim at causing individuals to acquire the desires of a good person, or at least generally acting as if they had those desires. It is the goal of such institutions to bring about to the best of its ability the case that people generally have an aversion to murder, theft, rape, and assault, or at least act as they do.
At best, the rationalizer can claim, ‘Those moral and legal institutions were not affective in my case.’ This is certainly true. If they had been effective, he would not have committed the wrongdoing. Yet, the fact that the institution failed in this instance is no reason to throw out the institution. This is because the institution does not have to work in every instance to be worthwhile — just as a car need not start with every turn of the ignition to be a good car. The institution serves its purpose if it works generally.
This is particularly easy to demonstrate in the criminal law, which is a second line of defense against those people who escape the effects of the moral institutions, and end up missing some good desires or obtaining some bad desires. The purpose of the criminal law is to provide such people with a second set of reasons to act as a good person would act — reasons such as ‘do it, or else’. The rationalizer’s defense can best be understood as, “My wrongdoing is your fault because you did not come up with a law and a system of punishment sufficiently severe and certain enough to cause me to act like a good person would act.”
If this is the defense, a ready response comes to mind. “Not sufficiently severe or certain enough? Well, we can fix that.”
I am not advocating the policy of hanging every jay-walker to prevent jay-walking. There comes a point where institutions of punishment thwart far more desires than they fulfill, or requires that punishers themselves adopt a set of desires that is not compatible with desire fulfillment generally. The only conclusion that legitimately follows from these examples is that extending the defense of ‘accident’ to cover one’s own character flaws is not legitimate.
(b) Responsibility for what we do
Sometimes, a person might simply deny that he had control over an outcome where he, in fact, had control — or which he could have at least worked harder (and a person with good desires would have worked harder) to try to prevent.
This includes cases such as that of a person who sells a fake work of art as if it was an original, who could have, and should have, done more to check its authenticity. It includes cases of drivers who claim that ‘everything happened so fast,’ when a few precautious (such as staying a little further behind the car ahead of him) such would have given him time to react — precautions that a good person would have taken specifically for the purpose of avoiding accidents when ‘everything happened so fast’.
(c) An Example: Homosexuality and Choice
I have witnessed instances of individuals who use the choice argument in criticizing those who condemn homosexual acts. The defenders of homosexual acts make the claim that homosexuality is not a matter of choice. They speak, as if to argue, “The homosexual does not choose to be homosexual, therefore the homosexual should not be condemned.”
First, I want to state that I see nothing wrong with engaging in homosexual acts per se. Still, this particular defense is so poor that it should be counted as an instance of denial of responsibility.
Even if the homosexuality is not chosen, the acts themselves are no less voluntary and intentional than any act. Furthermore, to say that there is nothing immoral or blameworthy in homosexual acts is to say that there would be nothing wrong with choosing to engage in homosexual acts. If there is truly nothing wrong with being a homosexual, or in engaging in homosexual acts, then there is nothing wrong with choosing to be a homosexual or choosing to engage in homosexual acts. Conversely, if there is something wrong with homosexuality — as there is something wrong with rape — then discovery that the desire to perform these acts is not chosen does not make the act right. It simply leads us in a different direction about how best to prevent the evil done by those who have this desire.
B. Denial of Injury
A widely used set of excuses fits under this heading
Example 1: A secretary pilfers office supplies and ‘justifies’ it to herself by saying, “They have so much money and so much stuff, they will never miss it.”
Example 2: A construction worker who chips a tooth in a construction accident and asks the dentist to fix the one next (that was damaged as a child), and claims, “The insurance company has more money than it knows what to do with anyway.”
Sykes and Matza bring up the option that one can seek to minimize a wrong of taking property by conceiving of the act as ‘borrowing.’ “I intended to return it when I was done with it, I just wasn’t done with it yet.” By returning the item (or, more likely, by convincing oneself that one will some day return it even though that day will never come), one minimizes the harm done to the victim.
Denial of injury can also take the form of denying the severity of the harm. We hold to a principle that says that the ‘punishment should fit the crime.’ So, if one can, in his or her own mind, reduce the magnitude of the crime — of the wrong done — one can reduce the level of his or her own guilt. “It didn’t hurt that bad,” or “It didn’t cost you that much to get it fixed,” are claims that would fit into this category. Vandalism becomes a ‘practical joke’, like ringing a doorbell and running, while assault and harassment becomes ‘teasing’ or ‘having a little fun’.
This form of rationalization can, and often does, sweep through whole societies. As was already mentioned above, some who defended slavery did so on the basis that the slaves had a better life here, in a civilized society with the conveniences of modern medicine and the opportunity to become good Christians under a master that provided them with food, clothing, and shelter, than they had in Africa. Women also were denied their freedom for millennia on the grounds that they are weak-minded and that they are better off being cared for by their husbands/fathers/brothers who will make the important decisions on their behalf.
A particularly sad example concerns the vivisection of animals in the 19th century. A researcher would tie down a living animal and cut it open, so that he could see the functioning anatomy inside. The animal would live like that for days. When the researcher was asked if the animal was in any pain, he would answer, “No. Animals sometimes act like they are in pain, but they are purely mechanical entities. They have no soul, so they cannot feel pain or experience genuine suffering.”
Where did they get an idea like that? They did not get it from watching the animal, because the animal’s behavior surely indicated that it was in a great deal of pain. Nor did anybody conduct any experiments to determine if ensouled beings (humans) experienced pain differently than unensouled beings (animals). Of course, it would be hard to construct such an experiment, given that souls do not exist.
Given these uncertainties, why not give the animal the benefit of the doubt — either in favor of having some type of soul, or against the idea that pain was some type of soul-dependent phenomena?
What happened instead is that scientists picked the answer they liked, merely because they liked it. It must have taken a deliberate act of will to look at the animal laying on the table, alive and fully conscious, with his side opened up and flesh retracted so the doctor can see the organs within, and say, ‘Obviously, this is purely mechanical. There is no true suffering here.’
This is the case of rationalization generally. The conclusions are not reached through an objective scrutiny of hard data demonstrating a fact of the matter. They came from prejudice, from a desire to believe. They came from a desire to obtain the profits of slavery without the psychological burden of guilt. They came from the men’s desire to become unquestioned masters in their households and to have their dictates unquestioningly obeyed.
(a) An Example: Abortion
As I did with the case of homosexuality above, I want to use a case of rationalization used in defense of a conclusion that I think is right. I hold that abortion is morally permissible in most cases where it actually occurs. Yet, there are others who also hold that abortion is permissible who use arguments that can only be described as “denial of harm”.
The argument I will focus on here is the ‘unwanted child’ argument in favor of legalized abortion. Some defenders of a “right to choose” argue that abortion should be permitted because there are already too many unwanted children in the world. Introducing more of them would simply cause too many problems. Adoption is not an answer because most adopters are rich white people who want perfect white children; and most unwanted children do not fit this criterion.
This argument says nothing about whether the fetus is a ‘person’ or not.
If the fetus is not a ‘person’, then this argument is moot; one does not need to try to justify one’s behavior toward mere things (like pencils and cars).
If the fetus is a ‘person’, then this argument says that it is permissible to kill a ‘person’ in virtue of the fact that it is an unwanted ‘person’. If we accept this principle, there should be no objection to digging some nice long trenches, lining up those children who already exist who are unwanted, and getting rid of them as well. We can do the same thing with adults, for that matter.
If there are unwanted children around, then our moral task is not to kill them for our own convenience, but to care for them. If a fetus is an unwanted ‘person’, then it is still entitled to exactly the same treatment that we would give to a three year old unwanted ‘person’.
The argument is a non-starter. It is a clear example of a ‘Denial of Injury’ because it draws on the claim that the fetus is better off being aborted than coming into the world and experiencing the suffering of being an ‘unwanted child’. It is an argument that can only be embraced by somebody who has decided not to base his conclusions on the soundness of the argument, but has decided instead to view as sound any argument that supports his favorite conclusion, no matter how poor those arguments are in fact.
Against this, one cannot say that I am a pro-life zealot who has blinded myself to the truth of the pro-choice cause. I share the view that abortion is permissible. However, when somebody steps up beside me and starts shouting, ‘What about all of these unwanted children?’, I want to stop and answer, “You want a policy of slaughtering unwanted children? Go away. We are having an intelligent discussion here.”
C. Denial of the Victim
A person who practices denial of the victim admits that the act was an intentional act — he meant to do it. He also admits that he harmed another. However, he denies that he wronged another because he claims that the ‘other’ deserved to be harmed.
Sykes and Matza provide a list of examples. “Assaults on homosexuals or suspected homosexuals, attacks on members of minority groups who are said to have gotten ‘out of place’, vandalism as revenge on an unfair teacher or school official, thefts from a ‘crooked’ store owner — all may be hurts inflicted on a transgressor, in the eyes of the delinquent.”
It is so depressingly easy to add to this list, not only on the level of individual wrongs, but on the level of wrongs that have swept through whole societies and resulted in the oppression, enslavement, or slaughter of whole populations.
Hitler knew the importance of vilifying the Jews in order to implement his final solution, blaming them for everything that was wrong in Germany. Yet, I think it would be a mistake to cast this as a clever marketing ploy that Hitler decided to use in order to win power for himself. It is likely that Hitler was able to convince others of the Jewish menace, because he believed it himself. Yet, he did not believe that the Jews were guilty of these wrongs because of the evidence. He believed it because he wanted to believe it. Indeed, he grew up in a culture where large segments of the (Christian) population unquestioningly adopted a hostile attitude toward Jews. Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism, he inherited it. He then infected others with a will to believe that was strong enough to surpass any attempts at reason.
The slogan in the United States in the 19th century, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” tells the same tale. The Native Americans had land and resources that the European immigrants wanted. In order to take it, it was useful to cast the Native Americans in the role of wrongdoers who deserved what they got. Savages. Barbarians, Heathens. Pagans. The Indians, it was said, drank until they could not stand, mutilated the dead, and practiced a nomadic lifestyle that failed to make use of the land God had allowed them to settle. It would certainly be far better — and in keeping with God’s commandments — for the European Christian to take the land, till it, and profit from it as God had intended.
(a) An Example: Religious Fundamentalism
Another argument that I think falls into this category, though it is often used by people I agree with, emerged from the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack. There are those who argue that this was caused by ‘religious fundamentalism’, and paint all religious fundamentalists as evil on the basis of what this subgroup of fundamentalists did.
Yet, in fact, what a particular fundamentalist believes — what he is a fundamentalist about — makes a great deal of difference. In this broad category of “religious fundamentalists,” we must include the Buddhists in Vietnam in the 1960s. To protest government policies, they would step into a public square, pour gasoline on themselves, and set themselves on fire in protest. Their actions made a dramatic and powerful statement both of the magnitude of their disapproval of the Vietnam government, and of their unwillingness to harm others in combating this evil. This was religious fundamentalism, but it is of a type that could never carry out or condone activities like those on September 11, 2001.
There are some objections that can be raised against all religious fundamentalism, regardless of its content. It is out of touch with the real world, it breeds ignorance and it guides its practitioners away from practical real-world solutions for real-world problems. Yet, none of this is consistent with the idea that all fundamentalists should be regarded as guilty of terrorism.
The voice from the back of the room may then ask, “Have you not done the same thing yourself? Have you not talked about the contribution that religion has made to the perpetuation of slavery, inquisitions, crusades, jihads, holocausts, the subjugation of women, and the heartbreak of psoriasis?”
No, I have not.
I have not said that each evil can be attributed to all religion — it would be foolish to make such a claim. My argument has been that one cannot use religion as a reliable guide to the difference between good and evil. I offer, as my evidence, those who have sought to use religion as a guide and made horrendous mistakes. In fact, rather than argue that all religion is bad, my arguments depend on the shared observation that Christians of today are better people than the Christians of a thousand years ago, even though the Christians of today follow the bible less religiously than their spiritual ancestors.
None of this is consistent with the interpretation that no Christian is to be condemned for the mistakes that they, personally, have not made.
D. The Condemnation of the Condemners
What recourse does a person have, who has done something for which he may be condemned, when he cannot deny that his was an intentional act, or that it caused harm, or that the person harmed was deserving of that harm?
He can go on and say, “Well, yes, what I did was wrong. However, you have done worse.” He still has the option of condemning the condemners.
I have said that these techniques of neutralization qualify as fallacies, and no principle more clearly illustrates this fact than ‘condemnation of the condemners.’ Indeed, logicians have their own name for this fallacy (or, at least, one version of it); “ad hominem to quoque”, or “I have done no worse than you.”
Condemnation of the condemners takes to heart the biblical statement, “let he who has not sinned cast the first stone”, and ‘deflects’ the metaphorical stone-throwing of blame by saying that all of the blamers have themselves sinned, thus they are unqualified to be blaming others (such as the Agent).
Yet, there clearly it twists logic to try to get from the premise, “You have done things just as bad,” to the conclusion that, “Therefore, what I did was not bad.” The person making such a claim is playing mind games.
(a) Universalization
When people discuss morality, they typically make claims that make sense of something near to “condemnation of the condemners”. This involves the search for universalizability. Moral claims are supposed to be, in some sense, universal. As a result, it is sometimes possible to criticize a particular claim by arguing against its universalizability.
For example, some who argue in favor of capital punishment do so by claiming that “those who are executed cannot kill again, therefore we gain the benefit of preventing that possible future murder.” Now, let us take this principle that “capital punishment is a justifiable means of preventing a possible future murder,” and see what happens to it when we apply it to a relevantly similar situation.
Assume that a psychologist invents a test that can be conducted on high-school students. It turns out that those who “fail” this test are precisely as likely — or even more likely — to commit a future murder as those arrested for murder and ultimately get out of prison. Now, we have two people: the high school student who failed the psychological exam, and the murderer who had committed his crime 10 years previously. Both are assumed to have the same likelihood (X%) of committing a future murder.
If, as the above principle states, execution is justified for those people who are X% likely to commit a future murder, and we are justified in executing those who have committed murder to keep them from killing again, then we are also justified in executing these high-school students keep them from killing the first time.
Some may protest against this that we cannot execute the high-school student because he hasn’t done anything wrong (yet). The person who makes this objection is confusing two different issues. These two issues are: (1) Retribution (executing a person because of what he did in the past), and (2) specific deterrence (executing a person because of what he may do in the future). The first principle is a separate issue that requires a separate discussion. My purpose here is to examine the universalizability of the second principle.
The second principle — the principle of executing a person because of what he may do in the future, fails on the basis of universalizability. If the innocent person who fails the psychology test is more likely to commit murder in the future, the principle of executing a person because of what he may do in the future argues for executing the high school student. If we are not permitted to prevent the student’s future crime by execution, then we are not permitted to prevent any similar future crime by execution.
This is how the principle of universalizability works.
However, it does not lend itself into making “concemnation of the condemners” a legitimate defense against wrongdoing. The question of whether “you have done worse than I” has an answer that is substantially independent of the question, “Can a universalizable moral principle condemn both of us?”
E. The Appeal to Higher Loyalties
A man, on the side of a road, comes up to a parked car. The keys are in the ignition, and the owner is nowhere in sight. Quickly, he jumps in the car, starts it up, and drives off.
It is a sure sign of evil, right? But, wait. We discover that the man was with his young son on a hike. The son was stung by a bee, and is having an allergic reaction. There’s no time to look for the owner of the car.
Talking another person’s car without his permission is wrong. The taker in this example cannot argue that he took the car accidentally. He cannot deny that the person who owned the car was harmed (at least insofar as his car was taken from him). He can’t defend his actions by saying that the owner deserved to have the car taken. He cannot likely claim that the owner’s rights do not pass muster on the grounds of universalizability.
However, he can offer, in his defense, that taking the car was necessary to save his son’s life — and taking the car was the lesser evil.
It is possible to sometimes defend what would normally be called wrong by appealing to a greater concern.
This is not saying that “the ends justify the means.” The man would not, for example, be justified in killing another person to get a kidney that would save his son’s life. There are certain ‘means’ that would remain unjustified. Even taking the car is not fully justified by the need to save the son’s life — the man still has obligations to return the car as soon as possible, to compensate the owner for any loss, and more importantly should still ‘feel bad’ about what he had to do — to offer apologies and regrets. These are not the signs of an action that is ‘justified’. They are signs of an action that was, in fact, the lesser of two evils — though still, importantly, an evil.
An appeal to a higher loyalty counts as a rationalization when the agent makes an unsupportable claim that some legitimately greater concern was at stake. He either asserts a concern that is not, in fact, legitimately greater than the wrong he has done, or he has ignored options that were available for carrying out the greater good that did not involve the lesser evil.
A child, for example, may appeal to loyalty to a friend to justify helping is friend shoplift something from a local store. An employee may cite personal financial distress, (perhaps caused by excessive gambling, or just bad luck), as a justification for taking money out of the store’s cash register. A person may cite the need to see the season premier of a favorite TV show to justify speeding through a school zone.
These appeals to a higher loyalty have more to do with rationalization than with making a rational claim.
IV. Two Lessons
This discussion of rationalization brings up two components of morality that I think deserve a second mention.
A. The Essential Elements of Morality
First, an examination of rationalization provides useful information on what ‘morality’ is really about.
The elements of “denial of responsibility” tell us that morality is intimately concerned with assignments of responsibility, which in turn is concerned with the desires of individuals as evidenced by their actions.
“Denial of injury” and “denial of the victim” says that morality is essentially concerned with preventing “harm to others”, except when the others are deserving of harm – except when harm is truly necessary
We learn from “condemnation of the condemners” that moral principles must be universal, and those who assert principles that cannot be universalized may be considered hypocrites.
Finally, morality is not concerned with absolute and inviolable principles, but with weighing different concerns — where an aversion to taking another person’s car without permission should outweigh the desire to see one’s favorite television show, but not outweigh one’s aversion to watching one’s child die from an allergic reaction.
B. Reasonable Belief
Second, this chapter made heavy use of the idea of a ‘reasonable belief’. It is sometimes difficult to determine if a particular belief is reasonable or not. Yet, the fact that it is sometimes difficult to tell does not change the fact that it is sometimes very easy.
Ways of distinguishing rational from rationalization have been known for at least 2,500 years. Aristotle outlined the first rules of logic — the first principles of sound reasoning – that long ago. He also identified the first fallacies, textbook cases of rationalization when they are used in moral arguments.
It is very often the case that people ‘sense’ an argument as being sound, or accept a premise as being true, merely because it pleases them to do so, and not because of the weight of the evidence. Perhaps this is an immutable part of human nature.
However,, where it happens, we can still make judgments of the type of person an individual is by the things he wants to believe. A good person may easily be seen as one who wants to believe that a person is innocent until provided with enough evidence of guilt to override this assumption. A person with the opposite trait — of presuming that another individual, race, religion, sexual orientation, or whatever is deserving of harm unless he can be provided with overwhelming proof of that individual or group’s innocence can easily be seen as evil.
V. Conclusion
Sykes and Matza created this list to apply to rather trivial violations of the social order — the minor abuses of juvenile delinquents. In fact, they point out elements that can be found in the greatest abuses in human history; religious and secular wars, slavery, holocausts, inquisitions, crusades, the subjugation of women, tyrannical dictatorships.
The greatest wrongs that humans have committed against each other are not the street crimes that fill the papers each day, but the sweeping crimes turned into law to please cheering crowds.
A person who is concerned with fighting wrongdoing has to be concerned with much more than putting more cops on the streets. Those cops can be used as efficiently for carrying out injustice on a massive scale as for promoting justice.
The person concerned with fighting wrongdoing also has to be concerned with the techniques of neutralization, and their use as tools in creating injustices that enforcement agencies cannot protect us from, because it is their job to carry out, not prevent, abuses and wrongdoings on a society-wide scale.