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Article Excerpt
MY CHIEF INTEREST IS TO EXPLORE THE QUESTION, IS SELF-SACRIFICE A necessary part of morality?. Think of a person who gives away millions of dollars to those in need while keeping millions for himself. He does not appear to sacrifice anything, but he acts morally by preventing or alleviating an appreciable amount of suffering. He could prevent even more by giving more millions away, but unlike some others who have discussed this theme, I have no wish to declare him immoral because he does not do so. Yet most people do not have the millionaire's resources; for them to act morally they will on occasion have to engage in a measure of economic self-sacrifice beyond paying taxes. Then, too, giving away money is not the only kind of morally relevant self-sacrifice: a person may feel called on to risk or lose other good things besides wealth. (Although it is callous to say so, even a miserably poor person will have some moral responsibilities.) So let us say that even though self-sacrifice is not intrinsic to the concept of morality, it is in varying degrees often essential to acting morally. The fact that cannot be mastered is that there are always unaddressed wrongs in society or the world that should receive a moral response that requires some self-sacrifice. Countless are the occasions and situations in which moral persons might feel importuned by the possibility of self-sacrifice.
At the center of my concern is the person who wants to be moral and who therefore would not initiate public or personal wrongdoing. But he might believe that his moral responsibility is limited to not taking the lead in wrongdoing and otherwise minding his own business. Surely, however, moral responsibility extends to those who do not contrive and initiate actions or policies but take part only as followers. For that reason, I wish to concentrate on two main concerns in exploring what it means to act morally: refusing to go along or cooperate with wrongdoing led by others, and performing some positive act of assistance to those who are oppressed or in need.
Morality means saying no or saying yes more often than we think it convenient to do so; some self-sacrifice might be morally required when we would like to think that it is not. However, when one abstains from harming another by selfish or passionate violation or dispossession in personal life, inside or outside the law, one is simply being moral without self-sacrifice, no matter what amount of painful frustration one feels. I also want to emphasize that abstention from selfish and aggressive wrongdoing in personal life, morally desirable as it is, is only a part of being moral.
My secondary interest is in self-denial, which I find especially pertinent in thinking about Christian teachings. Self-denial takes many forms, but in my account none of them is squarely in the realm of moral conduct; some forms are indirectly moral, while some forms are at or past the limits of morality. Martyrdom that is indirectly moral--perhaps that of Socrates or Jesus--may emerge from extreme self-denial. But in less extreme self-denial, magnanimity is perhaps the principal virtue. I will eventually attend to the distinction between self-sacrifice and self-denial.
I concentrate on Socrates and Jesus because they ask the most of people and back up their teachings with their lives. In the long view, they show a deep affinity, for all their cultural differences. Strictly speaking, neither dies in the course of refusing to act immorally. What really matters is that they both move moral thinking in a more moral direction, so to speak. They have an unsurpassed ability to sensitize people to the reality of moral questions, and they promote the supremacy of moral goodness above all other values. Socrates is an exemplary moral hero, and Jesus is the most radical moral teacher. They see in complacency reinforced by gullibility the most durable antagonist to moral understanding and action. They are also both martyrs for the sake of their principled divergence from the established structure of authoritative teaching about life, and their martyrdom, though not inflicted because of any direct defiance they put up in the name of morality, must naturally affect the way in which their moral teachings are received.
However, in asking the most of us, and when taken at their word, both Socrates and Jesus, whether in the same or in somewhat different ways, ask too much of us morally. In this essay I try to restate a few reasons for revising their moral precepts. The precept of Socrates is never harm the innocent, no matter the cost to yourself. The precept of Jesus is to treat others as you would be treated by them, not as they have treated you or would be likely to treat you in the future. I work with those revisions that have been produced in theory and practice, here and there, under the influence of the modern doctrine of individual rights, the politicized premise of which is the moral equality of all human beings. This doctrine guides but does not fully determine my treatment. To a considerable extent, the doctrine of human rights itself stems from the spirit and influence of Socrates and Jesus, but from Hobbes and Locke onwards, the need is felt to make morality unheroic in order to make it more pervasive. The doctrine of rights sets morally acceptable limits to moral self-sacrifice. Moral conduct, however, remains demanding. As for self-denial, no formula captures its fate.
AT THE LIMIT OF SELF-SACRIFICE IS THE WILLINGNESS TO DIE FOR THE sake of acting morally; at the limit of self-denial is the willingness to die for the sake of principle, even when a moral issue is not always directly at stake. I start with Socrates because he is the first moral hero and the first martyr for intellect. He is the first to say that it is better to risk death than to be the agent of harm to another; he is the first to die for no doctrine but simply for the honor of free inquiry.
Socrates is a teacher of moderation but a man of extremes. He is extreme precisely because of his urgency in teaching moderation. In defense of the principle of moderation he becomes a hero of morality. On behalf of the same moral principle, he would be (to use an ancient Greek word in the later Christian sense) a martyr, if it were necessary, for the perpetuation of the life of the mind; and at the end he is an actual martyr. He has always been a potential martyr because he says he would never stop his inquiries if he is commanded to do so; but it must be said that as he leads the life of the mind through the years, he does not constantly suspect that he is endangering himself. That he is actually put to death for persisting in his inquiries results from what he thinks are trumped-up charges, but perhaps his accusers and a small majority of his jury thought otherwise, thought he had been a danger to the unity of the democratic city for some time. Who can say for sure? Then awaiting death in prison, he turns down the chance to escape and go into exile because, it could be said, he does not wish to associate the spirit of inquiry with physical cowardice. Moderation is the moral principle for the sake of which Socrates acts heroically, and is the same principle that underlies his readiness to be a martyr for freedom of inquiry, which he believes is indispensable for the barely possible emergence of moderation in society or among individuals. His immoderate conduct turns out ultimately to be the best way of teaching the excellence of moderation.
Socrates' challenge can be put this way: "If I can do so much, why can't you do a little more?" He does not expect others to be prepared to act as he acts, to act like moral heroes. In teaching moderation and living moderately, he strives to reduce in others the private and public desire to act unjustly out of ambition or aggrandizement. Whatever the rhetoric of justification, private or public, may allege about necessity as the cause of unjust behavior, he sees excess, not necessity; he sees not self-defense but transgression. He laments what he sees and tries to counter it. He risks everything to avoid helping transgression; perhaps his heroism, his extremism, can inspire others to change their lives. Struck by the example of his greatness, they might be inspired to be more moral: not to act as moral heroes but instead as moderate human beings. Indeed, to become moderate might feel heroic because the surrounding culture is so full of immoderation. One feels as if one is making great sacrifices, when what one is actually doing is giving up the chance to inflate oneself by acting unjustly. The key is to fight off those beliefs that favor serious wrongdoing; namely, those beliefs that push people toward ends that can be pursued only immorally.
But there is more to morality than avoidance of transgressive pursuits. One must be prepared to take some risks and endure some losses--none as great as Socrates' own--to refuse complicity or cooperation with wrongdoing that one does not initiate or even think desirable. Perhaps Socrates' example of readiness to risk and eventually to lose every worldly interest can motivate his admirers to think that they would be immoral if they do not follow his example up to a certain point that is short or well short of his moral heroism.
The question is whether we are able to be struck forcibly by the example of Socrates' greatness. I hope to indicate that Socrates' relation to death tends to perplex our consideration of both his moral heroism and his martyrdom.
IT IS REMARKABLE HOW MANY POSSIBILITIES OF DEATH SOCRATES FINDS when he contemplates action, how many deeds he would rather die than do. We could come to believe that his moral heroism, just like his martyrdom, is too intimately associated with seeing death as perhaps (or probably) as good as life, or even better. It seems that he holds every life dear except his own, and that he holds the lives of others dear only because they hold them dear, so dear that they would do just about anything to stay alive, including killing others if that were the cost. (Or is it possible that he cares more about their lives than they do, even though they think their lives worth living, and he does not agree with them?) He knows that more than a few men show physical courage, unto death, in battle; he himself is not unfamiliar with battle and its closeness to death. But in thinking about Socrates, we are dealing not with participation in mobilized and collectivized death but with individual choice when there is neither camaraderie nor glory--indeed, not even the socially authorized expectation of self-sacrifice.
There is surely some doubt as to whether Socrates, when he acts riskily, is acting as morality demands. Socrates has always had admirers. But not many of them have followed him on the path of individual self-sacrifice so as not to become agents or instruments of serious injustice (or to die rather than give up the precondition of their moral agency, which is intellectual freedom). They were attached to life with an intensity that Socrates appears to lack. Mustn't I be friendly to my death in order to be able to risk or give up my life for a stranger? I am not saying that Socrates was always incipiently suicidal. That would be cheap with a cynical cheapness. Are we not allowed to say that he hated injustice more than he loved life? Yet his orientation toward death is so unusual, few if any could imitate him. To say it again: he does not expect us to be moral heroes. Nevertheless, we may feel that to meet him only part way, with his permission as it were, is to be granted a concession to our weakness and thus come to realize that we are so imperfect as to count as moral failures. How shamed should we be by our refusal to be moral heroes and incorporate extreme self-sacrifice into the practice of morality?
WHEN I SPEAK OF SOCRATES AS A MORAL HERO, I REFER TO THE SOCRATES of the Apology. This Socrates is a moral thinker and actor without metaphysics; he claims to have no wisdom about the origins, meaning, and destiny of the human world or the cosmos. He is also bereft of the myths that try to bribe people into morality by promises of rewards in the afterlife. Yet the apparently inconclusive speculation about the possible goodness of death in the Apology becomes certainty in the Phaedo, a dialogue that takes place in prison (like the Crito) and that recounts Socrates' death. In this dialogue, the soul is immortal and the death of the body is understood as the finish of but one incarnation. The Phaedo is not true to the Socrates of the Apology. Plato appears to transform Socrates in a manner that not only exaggerates tendencies in Socrates but also introduces elements of character and novelties of argument that create another Socrates. This other Socrates also defends moderation but does so by means of doctrines that Plato's incomparable speculative power originates. In contrast, Socrates' resources, as the Apology describes and illustrates them, are those of argumentative method, and the effect of the method is much more to dispel illusion than to fill the metaphysical (and theological) emptiness that is left when a person is freed of illusion. The Socrates of the Apology would have been too scrupulous to claim mythical or elaborate metaphysical support for the statements that are attributed to him in the Phaedo.
Let us say that in his pursuit of a comprehensible reason to think well of death, Plato in the Phaedo introduces a Socrates who at the end of his life is brought to praise death on the grounds that the body is the good soul's prison, and death is its release into a better condition. The prison that is the...
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