Moral Action

                One of the things that a deep epistemology has to account for is moral action.  Just as knowing can’t be reduced to the abstract rational intellect, moral action does not grow out of abstract principles of morality.  Morality is not a principle or theory, it is a concrete and relational element of our daily experience.  Because of this, morality is less concerned with consistency and adherence to an ideal sense of the good than it is with variations of relationships and situations.  Moral action isn’t sustained by platitudes or pronouncements but by the concrete associations of people trying to act intelligently in specific situations.  Like fractal constructions, morality may have one organizing principle one day and another principle the next.

                The melding of Greek philosophy and early Christian theology around Plato’s ideal of the good has inverted both the direction and construction of a moral dimension.  That mashup creates a world where the ‘good’ already exists and every action is a poor attempt to realize it.  We live in a cultural context that tries to impose a definition of morality independent of our lived experience.  In a deep epistemology, morality is created in the opposite direction.  Rather than starting with an idea of what is good or moral, the goal is to build the good and moral out of the specific and contemplative actions we take every day.  It might be helpful to think of it as an ecology that is based on billions of small acts that sustain the evolving of higher and more complex forms of moral actions.  If the billion small ‘bacterial’ acts disappear, so do the larger structures that depend on them.

                From the perspective of a deep epistemology, it makes no sense to talk about laws or principles as the source of a moral life.  Morality is lived and not articulated.  Its presence is only obvious by outcomes it creates, not by the labels it claims.  We build the potential for a moral life in the relationships we engage in.  Most of these relationships are with other people, but we also have relationships with non-human fields of reference, such as the environment.  If actions at the ‘bacterial’ level lack just and moral outcomes, no constitution or system of justice will evolve.  All morality happens at the level of individual responsibility and resonates within the relational constructs we share with other people.  It is not enough for the individual to claim a moral purpose, it can only emerge in the context of relationships with others that we are always already a part of.

                To me – and I claim no academic validity for this comparison – it seems that this is the root insight into the Buddhist idea of the Bodhisattva, the one who is enlightened but stays to work with the rest of humanity and the world.  We may see the way and know what to do, but only in action with others can we bring forth a world that is attuned to what we see.  Knowing and moral action live at the connecting point of our divided nature, linking autonomy to connectedness.  We are always operating in this paradox.  We can never be just one or the other.  Without autonomy there is no insight and reflection.  Without connection there is no avenue of expression or realization for insight and reflection.  We can experience this paradox as a dissonance or as a harmony, but we can’t escape the paradox.

                Maturana is fond of saying that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  With every word and action we are building and/or destroying a world.  There is no free lunch.  We are always challenged, no matter what we think we know or what we have already done, to know and do more.  The context of our relationships and the actors we share them with change.  Sometimes our roles are well defined and sometimes they are vague at best, but our responsibility is the same.  ‘Know thyself,’ sounds to us like a call to individual awareness.  It is not.  In the context of its utterance, it is a call to a deeper knowing that connects us with not just our self but the conditions and relationships that bring that self into being.  Deep knowing is moral action.  Moral action is deep knowing.