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In 2013 I traveled to a remote part of Nicaragua with one of my professors to do some research and service work. This is the same professor with whom I traveled to Nepal later that year, a journey that I documented in the episode “Pilgrimage to Kathmandu.” She had established her nonprofit organization in Nicaragua, and made yearly trips with her students to check on things. While passing through the capital city of Managua, we stopped outside a compound of sweatshops, a sprawling campus of massive factories that employed workers (including young teenagers) by the tens of thousands. We interviewed them as they left the compound at a shift change—the workers were eager to tell us what was going on and hoped that we might be able to do something about it—and we were horrified by what we heard: 16-hour shifts of intense labor in high heat without breaks under constant threat of beatings for underproduction, just to start. When I returned to the states, I was determined to never again wear anything that might have been produced through such labor practices. I contacted different brands to ask about their supply chain, but wasn’t able to get very far. Perhaps my investigative journaling skills just weren’t up to the task, but no one seemed to know where all their stuff was coming from or how it had been made. Even buying locally-made clothing (which was generally more than I could afford anyway) was no guarantee that the raw materials hadn’t been processed under inhumane conditions. And even if I did know who was buying textiles from sweatshops, would my not buying their clothing make things better for anyone? If enough people stopped buying such clothing, the factories might shut down, leaving the workers without any jobs at all, and if their government passed stronger labor laws, the companies might pack up and relocate to somewhere that hadn’t. I was stuck.
I found myself isolated and alienated from the moral consequences of my choices. I’ll refer to this kind of alienation as moral alienation, which is a term that has appeared in philosophy before, and while my usage is related, it’s also a little bit different in some key respects.
The earliest description of moral alienation that I can find is in an essay by the late-20th century philosopher of ethics Bernard Williams entitled “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” which appeared in the collection Utilitarianism: For and Against in 1973. Indeed, Williams’ conception of moral alienation and his thoughts on how to avoid it appear to be central to his philosophy. The idea is that adopting a moral theory as a personal philosophy can lead to alienation from oneself or from others. Williams is responding in this essay to utilitarianism, the moral position that those actions are morally right which maximize good, but I think the concept is applicable to any moral theory. And for a proper definition of alienation, I believe the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will serve us well: “The concept of alienation identifies a distinct kind of psychological or social ill; namely, one involving a problematic separation between a self and other that properly belong together” (Leopold). To take an example, I’m an animal, and my animal nature is part of my human nature, but the way that I live is very different than the way that most animals live or the way that humans would live in a hypothetical state of nature, so one might say that I’m alienated from that aspect of myself.
Williams helpfully provides an example to illustrate the kind of moral alienation he’s talking about. George, a recent doctoral graduate in chemistry, is having trouble finding a job. A friend offers him a job at a company that pursues research into biological and chemical weapons, to which George is morally opposed. This friend says that George should take the job anyway, reasoning that someone will be doing the job regardless, and if it’s not George, the friend happens to know that it will be someone who is especially zealous about biological and chemical weapons research, which would, relative to George’s morality, be a worse situation. So, while George has a moral standard of not supporting biological and chemical weapons research, utilitarian moral reasoning indicates that more good will come from George taking the job than from not taking it, so from that perspective, despite his reservations, taking the job is the right thing to do. This alienates George from himself: his stance on biological and chemical weapons is part of his identity, but his actions (assuming he takes the job) do not align with that, except in a very abstract way that would seem more distant to George than his own immediate conviction that it would be wrong to work for a biological and chemical weapons researcher (Sommers and Sommers 124–25).
Philosopher and conceptual artist Adrian Piper responded to that in 1987 in a paper titled “Moral Theory and Moral Alienation,” claiming that while this kind of moral alienation may be a problem for some agents (particularly narcissistic personality types), it does not necessarily and inevitably follow from the adoption of moral theories. I’m inclined to agree, though Williams’ conception of moral alienation remains useful for my purposes here, and as well, Piper develops several other concepts in her paper that I’ll be referring to later on.
This concept of moral alienation, as Williams and Piper have developed it, chiefly concerns alienation as a result of moral theories, and according to Piper, there are two possibilities for what it is that we are alienated from. We may be alienated from others, as might happen if, for example, a vegan decided to stop dating someone who decided to start eating meat, despite the vegan otherwise having a great deal of affection towards the now meat-eater. Or, we may be alienated from ourselves as a result of the moral theory conflicting with “tastes, convictions, or aspirations that are centrally definitive of one’s self” (103), which is what happened with George in Williams’ example. What I’m going to explore here is this latter kind of alienation, not as a result of one adopting any particular moral theory (though that may play into it) but rather as a result of the moral difficulty of a modern, globalized world in which the consequences of our actions are distant and hidden.
My analysis here has its roots in the alienation theory of Karl Marx, who, in his masterwork Capital, describes how the worker’s labor is alienated from the worker:
Since, before [the worker] enters the process, his own labour has already been alienated from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him. Since the process of production is also the process of the consumption of labour-power by the capitalist, the worker’s product is not only constantly converted into commodities, but also into capital, i.e. into value that sucks up the worker’s value-creating power, means of subsistence that actually purchase human beings, and means of production that employ the people who are doing the producing. Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.
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Through a complex dialectical process which Marx explicates at length, a worker’s labor is converted into commodities and then into money, and as Marx says elsewhere:
From the mere look of a piece of money, we cannot tell what breed of commodity has been transformed into it… Money is the absolutely alienable commodity, because it is all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation… Since every commodity disappears when it becomes money it is impossible to tell from the money itself how it got into the hands of its possessor, or what article has been changed into it.
204–05
I can’t tell by looking at my bank account which dollars I earned from teaching and which I earned from my patrons. Once the checks are deposited, it doesn’t even make sense to say that these dollars are from teaching but these are from my patrons. Even if I kept my money as cash, I wouldn’t be able to tell this dollar from that one except by happenstance, such as if someone had drawn Batman’s cowl over George Washington’s head on one of the dollar bills that I was paid with. What’s more, while I know in a general sense what money comes from my own various activities—in the sense that I earn this much from doing this and this much from doing that—I rarely have any idea at all where it came from before that, and I think that the question itself is often entirely meaningless. If someone writes me a check and I deposit it, the bank subtracts a quantity of dollars from their account and adds that same quantity to my account. Let’s say that the person who wrote me a check works part time as a veterinarian, taking loving care of sick and injured animals, and part time as a human trafficker. Does it make any sense for me to say that the money that ends up in my account comes from either one of those activities? Or from both? Or from neither? If I cash the check, the bills I get will likely never have been possessed by the check writer, and I won’t have any way of knowing where those bills came from either. If the check writer earned all of their money from human trafficking then I might have a more concrete basis for saying that the money comes from human trafficking, but that would remain true only as an abstraction: neither numbers in my account nor bills in my hand actually made a journey through the human trafficker’s possession to my own. I would still disassociate myself from this person and contact the authorities if I ever found out about it, but that wouldn’t be the money’s fault, and I couldn’t then go back and select from my account the specific dollars that I had received from this person and donate them to an anti-human-trafficking organization; I could only donate an equivalent amount.
And yet my money, and money in general, does ultimately come from somewhere. It has to, because it didn’t always exist. Marx describes the origins of money in a general, historical sense, but I’m talking about the specific money represented by the numbers in my bank account or the bills in my wallet, or even the physical bills themselves, putting aside what they represent. While the money is mine and therefore forms an aspect of my identity (in the sense that I can say that I am someone with x amount of dollars in my checking account, which also influences my social class, which is unavoidably an aspect of my identity as well), I am alienated from its origins, which is to say, going back to our definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that there is a problematic separation between my self and my money, which, despite it being nominally mine, is entirely alien to me.
And what happens when I use this alien thing for its intended purpose of exchange for goods and services? At this very moment I am surrounded by things for which I have exchanged money: my desk, my computer, various books and notebooks, a water bottle, my phone, a pair of headphones, my fountain pens and inks, and other assorted bric-a-brac. Let’s take one of my books as an example, the one sitting on top of the closest book pile on my desk, One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, which I’ve been referencing for its own discussions of alienation. Considering it as a physical object, I bought it from Amazon, and that’s about all I know about it. I could probably track down which shipping service delivered it to my mailbox, but I would have a very difficult time figuring out who delivered it, whether it was shipped from the warehouse by plane or truck and who piloted or drove it and what route they took, which warehouse it was shipped from, or where it came from before that. I don’t know where or to whom the money I paid for it went. I don’t know who might have had a direct hand in its manufacture, or whether anyone did at all, and I certainly don’t know where the paper came from, or which trees were cut down to make the paper, or who cut them down.
Depending on how many degrees of separation we’re willing to allow, I have a connection to anywhere from dozens to thousands of other humans via this book, this particular physical object, and I’m completely alienated from every single one of them. Like my money, this book (or the owning of the book, if you prefer) is now part of my identity, but I pressed a few buttons one day and it appeared in my life a few days later as if by magic, when in fact a complex network of humans and machines worked to create it and deliver it to me and had been doing so before I had ever even heard of the book in the first place.
My actions have consequences for all of the people in this network and for the world which we share, but I’m alienated from those consequences as well, and that’s the kind of moral alienation I’m talking about here. For example, I know that deforestation is a global problem, and that my book is made of paper which came from trees. To what degree did my purchase of the book contribute to deforestation? While I might be able to figure out how much the book industry in general contributes to deforestation in general, I don’t think I could ever say how much I personally contribute as a book-buyer. My copy of One-Dimensional Man was printed before I purchased it, so my not purchasing it wouldn’t have prevented its printing or prevented the trees from being cut down to make the paper. At most, my not purchasing the book would make a minuscule impact on a potential decision by the publisher to do a smaller run next time, which in turn might make the particular timber company that supplies the publisher’s paper supplier choose to chop down fewer trees, but that’s all very abstract and well beyond the reach of any proper moral reasoning on my part. I think that Marcuse’s book has an important message about advanced industrial capitalism and that the world would be a better place if more people knew its contents, but how can I weigh the good that might come from my buying, reading, and promoting the book against whatever evils might be contained in the process that allows me to do so? One might offer that I could have bought it as an ebook, but even putting aside that a big part of my process is writing in the books that I buy, I still have to weigh the trees and the other moral considerations that go along with the paper book against the sweatshop labor and environmental impacts involved in creating the devices on which ebooks can be read.
This is a major theme of the excellent television show The Good Place, which I’m about to spoil a little bit. The premise of the show is that four people die and end up in what they believe to be the titular Good Place, a generalization of the concept of Heaven, although the show is admirable in being essentially non-doctrinal. They discover later on that they’re actually in the Bad Place and were only made to think that they were in the Good Place so that they could be punished and tortured for their earthly misdeeds in a more subtle and effective way. The cosmic system for deciding who goes where is a straightforward utilitarian point system: actions that do a net positive of good yield a net positive of points, actions that do a net negative of good yield a net negative of points, and those with enough points at the end of their lives go to the Good Place. In the episode “The Book of Dougs” (season 3, episode 10), the protagonists discover that no one ever gets into the Good Place, because the world has become so morally complicated that even well-intentioned actions that seem moral in themselves have extensive unintended consequences that make the net result evil, so almost every action yields negative points for the acting agent in question (Whittingham). This, again, is moral alienation. If people want to act morally but are functionally unable to do so because of the unknowability of their actions, they are alienated from morality.
One might look to remedy this by taking an alternative look at morality, limiting those actions which we understand as being right and good as being only those that exist within the sphere of our immediate understanding, so that unintended consequences are simply not taken into account. That’s essentially where we’re at right now anyway—not knowing the ultimate effects of our actions, we assume that those actions are right that do good locally because we don’t and often can’t know how they might have gone wrong, but regardless of what things we’re choosing to call moral or ethical, right or wrong, good or evil, that doesn’t address the underlying problems in the slightest. Let’s take morality out of the equation entirely for a moment and look at actions in terms of desirability. If I desired to take a certain voluntary (i.e. not compulsory) action but then learned that said action would cause a net harm, I might be disinclined to do it because causing unnecessary harm is undesirable to me. This actually serves to illustrate why my moral alienation concept is alienation first and foremost, even when the moral considerations are put aside. Citing Kant, Piper, in her paper, clarifies the distinction between purpose and motive: purpose is what specifically I’m trying to accomplish, and motive is the underlying psychological cause of action, the reason I’m trying to accomplish that thing (112). For example, perhaps I pick up my water bottle and drink from it. My purpose is to satisfy my thirst by drinking water from the bottle; my motive is the thirst itself. Consequences are directly relevant to my purpose: I drink because it will have the consequence of satisfying my thirst, and also because there are no further undesirable consequences. If we were to suppose that I had two water bottles on my desk, one of them mundane and the other one enchanted so that whatever water I drink is magically transported from the body of an infant somewhere in the world, causing their death, I’ll drink from the first one but not the second even though both of them will address my motive. If I don’t know which bottle is which and have no other source of water available, I’ll either die of dehydration or find myself alienated from my actions because I won’t know whether my motives are being fulfilled without undesirable consequences.
Piper describes the idea of the morally integrated agent: “…[O]ne whose dispositions, prescribed by her moral theory, are sufficiently deeply instilled, preferably in the normal process of socialization, as to be motivationally effective most of the time” (117). This describes someone who adopts a moral theory as a personal philosophy but who doesn’t (or at least doesn’t need to) rule their moral lives through reference to the theory itself, but rather to the affective sense of morality—the morality of one’s moods, feelings, and attitudes, to use the google definition—that the theory has established, modified, or reinforced. This is a desirable ideal, because people make most of their decisions at least partially on an intuitive level, and a morally integrated person is going to be able to make those decisions without their resulting in conflicts with the moral theory and—more importantly for Piper’s purposes—without resulting in alienation as a result of the moral theory. This neatly handles the problem of moral alienation as posed by Bernand Williams, but it actually makes things worse for us with regards to my own proposal.
To illustrate this, consider that it is possible in theory to rationally evaluate all humans on a moral plane of equal consideration. What I mean is that, if I’m considering a moral question through a purely rational process, I can put all humans on the same level and weigh them all equally. For example, if I’m considering the moral implications of climate change, I’m thinking about how climate change affects all humans. I’m not thinking that climate change is worse because it affects me and my loved ones in particular, or not as bad because me and my loved ones won’t be affected by it to the same degree as, for example, those among coastal populations in developing countries. To be clear, I’m not saying that people ever actually achieve that level of rational detachment, but that we can at least conceive of such an approach to moral questions. This means that, if I had perfect knowledge of the consequences of my actions out to at least a few degrees of separation, I could make rational moral decisions about things like buying a book and the kind of moral alienation I’m talking about wouldn’t be a problem (or would, at the least, be a different kind of problem, one in which I’m alienated by being forced to choose the least among possible evils rather than being alienated by my lack of knowledge about the consequences of my actions).
But I don’t have that kind of knowledge—no one does—and I can’t affectively evaluate all humans on a moral plane of equal consideration, by definition, because I simply don’t feel the same way about all humans. To put it another way, some people carry more moral weight for me without there being any rational reason for it. My mother does not warrant special moral consideration in general moral questions based on the fact of her being my mother, but I give her special moral consideration nevertheless, and that is a moral consideration that I do not give to, for example, a car dealer in Mumbai, India whom I have never met, but who might nevertheless be affected by the choices I make and the actions I take here on the other side of the planet. This means that moral alienation, as I’m stating it, is even more of a problem for the morally integrated agent than the one who might base their decisions on rational appeals to a moral theory.
So, why does all this even matter? After all, there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it. We can’t simply take the world and simplify it until it’s morally comprehensible again (if it ever was in the first place); trying to do so would likely yield even greater evils.
I think that this problem is worth considering for a few reasons. The first is that I think we’re better off if we better understand the nature of evil. There’s a book by the 20th century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt called Eichmann in Jerusalem which reports on the 1961-62 trial of Holocaust-architect Adolf Eichmann for war crimes. Arendt’s thesis is neatly expressed in the book’s subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” and her book was controversial, not only for its criticisms of the trial itself but for the suggestion that the kind of evil enacted in the Holocaust could be rooted in anything unremarkable. Many of the criticisms that I’ve read seem to fault Arendt primarily for having the audacity to think about and analyze something so horrible, rather than simply being repulsed by it; or for suggesting that the trial of even such a criminal as Eichmann for what may be the most heinous crime ever committed might not necessarily, in itself, serve the interests of justice; or for her having painted Eichmann himself not as a sadistic monster but rather a very ordinary and even stupid person.
In his introduction to the book, Israeli journalist Amos Elon writes:
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in the bitter controversies about it that followed, [Arendt] insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
xiii–xiv
Bringing this into our moral alienation problem, we find not only a banality of evil but the impersonality of evil. That may be taking it a step further than Arendt did, but I actually find the notion implicit in her book, as she described Eichmann not as any sort of evil mastermind but rather an ordinary cog in the monstrous bureaucratic machine of Nazi Germany, though Arendt states quite clearly in her postscript to the book that this in no way excuses or exculpates him (289). She continues from this refutation, saying:
Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is. Only one must realize clearly that the administration of justice can consider these factors only to the extent that they are circumstances of the crime—just as, in a case of theft, the economic plight of the thief is taken into account without excusing the theft, let alone wiping it off the slate.
Let me be explicitly clear about something here, because there may be those among my listeners who hear this and think to themselves, “This is starting to sound like a Little Eichmann argument.” And for those who aren’t familiar with the “Little Eichmann” concept, I’ll just grab the definition from Wikipedia, which states: “‘Little Eichmanns’ are people whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually complicit” (“Little Eichmanns”). I’ll phrase the relevant premise of my actual argument in the same language for comparison: “People’s actions, which on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, collectively create destructive and immoral systems” full stop. So one, I’m not singling anyone out—moral alienation is potentially applicable to anyone and everyone—and two, the degree to which I would say that people are complicit in these systems is extremely limited and is not in any way intended to imply the same level of blameworthiness as Adolf Eichmann, and in fact I think that those who make that comparison in earnest are guilty of a supreme intellectual treason. Moral alienation itself is the key distinction: Eichmann was not morally alienated either in Williams’ sense or in mine. He had adopted the moral theory of Kant, though he failed utterly to understand it, and saw the desirability of his actions as according perfectly with that theory (Arendt 135–36). Furthermore, he understood the direct consequences of his actions and was thus not morally alienated from those consequences. Indeed, the Final Solution was his morality.
The point of bringing Eichmann into the discussion was not to describe ordinary people in terms of Eichmann or to downplay the evil of Eichmann’s actions, but rather to look at evil in the world as it is generated by sources that are very different from each other, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and try to understand what they have in common, what basis we have for calling both things “evil.” Arendt says this of Eichmann:
…[O]fficialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché… The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.
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What this amounts to for me is a kind of stupidity. Arendt says in her postscript that Eichmann “was not stupid. It was shere thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (287–88), but while I agree that it may be better to categorize Eichmann in particular as being “thoughtless” (which implies a willfullness or complicity) rather than merely “stupid,” I would argue that thoughtlessness is a kind of stupidity, which I define here as a general simplicity of thought (and thought could be no more simple than not being there at all), opposed to a complexity in which differing perspectives might be contemplated and, to some degree, understood. And I see moral alienation as reflecting a kind of stupidity as well, an inability to comprehend the world and human society in their full complexity. In that sense, we’re all stupid to varying degrees—to quote Gandalf, “Even the very wise cannot see all ends”—though understandably so, given the complexity of the problem, and I think we’re only blameworthy in that respect if we don’t work towards becoming less stupid. This answers a basic and pervasive question about human nature: are humans basically good or basically evil? Moral alienation leads me to believe that we’re both: evil in that we are limited in our perspectives, and good in that we are capable of expanding our horizons of knowledge and understanding.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.
Works Cited or Consulted
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books, 2006.
Elon, Amos. “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt.” Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt, Penguin Books, 2006.
Leopold, David. “Alienation.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2018, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/alienation/.
“Little Eichmanns.” Wikipedia, 18 Nov. 2019. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Little_Eichmanns&oldid=926759936.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, 1991.
Marx, Karl, et al. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981.
Piper, Adrian M. S. “Moral Theory and Moral Alienation.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 84, no. 2, Feb. 1987, p. 102. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.2307/2026628.
Sommers, Christina Hoff, and Frederic Tamler Sommers, editors. Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics. 9th ed, Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2013.
Whittingham, Ken. “The Book of Dougs.” The Good Place, S3E10, 10 Jan. 2019.