Ethics Against Morality

There is a significant, if half-erased, difference between morality and ethics. Let me try to sharpen it. Morality is comprised of a set of rules and norms for appropriate behavior; ethics is a way of life, a manner of existing. Whereas morality is regulative and prescriptive, ethics is a living text that cannot be scripted in advance at all, except as a projection of the more or less predictable habits of acting, linked as they are to modes of habitation, of inhabiting the world. By a living text, I mean the necessity of attending to the context and singular circumstances of ethical action, which eludes formalization. But one should go even further: morality is not just a positive code of conduct, because its formalism is shaped by negativity through and through. That is why it can be so destructive, from the all too easy degeneration of moral precept into self-righteous moralizing through to the Kantian transcendental principle that prefers following the moral law over the continued survival of the world (“Perpetual Peace,” fiat iustitia et pereat mundus—let justice be done even if the world perishes).

Curiously enough, the most flamboyant twentieth-century attempts to formulate the ethics of radical otherness (for instance in Levinas or Derrida—who was more skeptical on the subject of this possibility in the early years than in his late period) imbibe the pure negativity of morality, against which they react so vehemently and almost allergically. This hyper-ethics seems to be utterly positive: it affirms the absolute singularity of the Other. And yet, it is driven by the (productive) failure to ever reach or capture the Other. Here, the good conscience of following the moral law is supplanted with the bad conscience of never doing enough for the Other, which infuses an even greater dose of negativity into such an ethics. More than that, operating with absolutes—unconditional hospitality or absolute alterity—it undercuts the innumerable conditions, positions, and minute articulations that ethics implies and requires.

As a system of rules, any moral economy emulates and supplements scientific systems of classifications. Dietary morality is not an exception: it categorizes what can and cannot be eaten in good conscience, where sentience begins and where it ends, what is and what is not respectable in this or that creature… There is always some kind of calculus, including of the transcendental kind, involved in considerations reliant upon the arrest and, indeed, the entombment of categorized beings within the more or less arbitrary limits of the categories. In sum, morality is inconsistent with life itself, with the aliveness of life.

That said, I agree with St. Adorno that morality makes a violent and unjust social, economic, or political order barely tolerable and, therefore, livable to the extent that it either carves out small private niches where one can take refuge from the prevailing barbarity or yields generally valid pronouncements that are incredibly empty. So, morality is a lifeless system of rules that sustains a semblance of life in the midst of its barbaric, massified devastation.

Typically formal and ineffective, moral tenets make us feel good about ourselves while maintaining intact, if not strengthening, the status quo by giving a controlled outlet to our dissatisfaction with the prevailing state of affairs. Progressive moral codes may prescribe respect for humans, animals, plants, ecosystems, etc., but the notion will sound like a hollow word, an unattainable ideal at best and useless theoretical handwringing at worst. (Actually, “respect” is a perfect example of moral vacuity with regard to any recipient of that attitude.) For the most part, moral recommendations will be met with dismissive indifference; after all, they do not arise from the thick of existence but are thrust onto life from a feigned space outside it, as a series of abstract desiderata.

Ethics, by contrast, is amoral, which is not the same thing as immoral. Of a piece with habitual and habitational existence, it is not a matter of application, commencing from immutable principles and proceeding toward their practical ramifications. Whereas morality is a form of judgment that takes it upon itself to mold raw existence, ethics is a form (I’ve called it a “manner” or a “way”) inseparable from life. An ethics can only come about in the course of living—needless to say, living with oneself and with others, whether human or not.

Consider the following closing example. If living “on” plants is unavoidable, so is living with them, including those instances when we make use of them. Plant ethics does not demand that humans stop using plants and vegetal products for our purposes; ironically, such a demand would have been unethical were it to try and expunge, once again, the “with”-character of living. Nor does it ask that our goals be weighed against those of plants, leaving the calculations of the sort to theoretical exercises in morality. Aware that we are fated to live on plants, an adherent to plant ethics would insist that we are equally destined to live with them, transforming that fate into a destiny. Can we somewhat abstrusely (but promisingly, I think) define ethics as a place where fate becomes destiny?