A Democratic Ethics

                We have mostly thought about ethics as a rational enterprise.  Often ethics classes use scenarios or cases to deliberate and debate which action is more ethical.  Now those scenarios play out in automobile companies where programmers try to decide who dies in the crash, or they a resolved using algorithms to decide who gets medical treatment and who doesn’t.  But democracy isn’t a simulation, a game played in endless iterations seeking the best outcome.  Our interactions with people are often dominated by our feelings and senses more than they are by a rational calculation.  What modernity left out of democracy were the aesthetics of ethical choice.  A radical democracy is more about experience than objectification.

                When Dewey called art an experience, he was arguing for an aesthetic dimension to what he called “felt intelligence,” the mastery of feeling and technique developed over a lifetime of action and reflection.  That means we have to do more than rationalize our behavior, we have to experience the totality of its impact.  Dewey thought art was one way of developing the other experiential aspects of thought and action.  In that sense, perhaps it makes more sense to think of ethics as an art, developed over time, than it does to think of it as game playing in a poorly attended philosophy class.  I would argue that we know unethical behavior as much by how it feels as how rationally justifiable it might be.  In fact, we live in an administration that rationalizes the horrific and insane in the most mundane terms. Separating children from their parents is a matter of ‘immigration policy’ and degrading the environment is an ‘economic policy.’ 

                If we ground ethics in experience, we are grounding ethics in our bodies.  We are grounding our ethical choices not in abstractions but in the world.  Modernity has stripped the world of its cosmic significance, its connection to something we might consider sacred.  We’ve created a world full of things that are no more important or significant than any other random thing in the universe.  We don’t feel and do not act as if we were connected to the biosphere that sustains us or the social context that defines us.  We think of wealth as an arbitrary collection of abstract value that has nothing to do with the value of life.  In all these ways, we have constructed such a limited idea of ethics that it is hardly worth promoting it.  An ethics of experience resituates us in a world that is also alive.  It redefines us as part of a social nexus that values people and their existence.

                An ethical practice requires humility, the ability to see ourselves not as individual and independent actors but as interdependent beings who rely on other people and other living things for our being.  Diversity in modernity is mostly about advertising and marketing, about the desire and reproduction of difference.  Diversity in a radical democracy is a felt sense of entanglement grounded in the realization of our interdependence.  An ethical political and economic system wouldn’t burn the rain forests or lock children in cages.  The notion that a country or a religion can insulate us from the injustice supported by that country or religion is myopic.  Nothing that disconnects us from the larger context of life, some would call it a ‘deep ecology,’ can be considered ethical, no matter how many philosophers or corrupt Attorney Generals argue otherwise. 

                We will never value diversity among people if we cannot see the diversity in the biosphere.  We will never protect civil rights if we are not also protecting the environment.  Consciousness is not a distinctly human quality.  Our consciousness is shared by everything around us. The computerized out- sourcing of ethical decisions is a step away from a radical democracy and not an improvement.  The point of being ethical is not to be ‘right,’ the point of being ethical is to be in harmony with what sustains life.  Some of that life will confound and insult me, but it deserves its place as much as I deserve mine.  We cannot tolerate violence and greed.  If we want to live democratically, we have to accept the limitations of rational thought and embrace an ethics grounded in aesthetic experience.