Everybody says that the world lacks morality:
These are all widely documented incidents in the widespread lack of common sense, feelings of responsibility, humanity.
Almost all people fail before standards of the good which members of bourgeois society always have ready as retrievable and all-purpose explanations for the social and interpersonal nastiness they experience. If only everybody would behave as virtuously and responsibly as they are supposed to, the world would be in order and everybody would get what they are entitled to.
Hardly anybody says that they themselves are lacking morality. One obeys the law, pays taxes, does one’s job and duty to one’s family, shows consideration for others, and is even sometimes involved in environmental causes and donates to the poor. One’s appraisal of oneself and of others deviates quite a lot from each other.
Everyone sees himself surrounded by egoists, con artists and scoundrels and knows someone who is particularly virtuous above all: oneself. This is only one of the self-righteous stupidities of moral consciousness. With this consciousness, people conceive themselves as – valuable – members of bourgeois society and see themselves appointed as guardians of the correct behavior of their fellow humans. This in itself creates a lot of hostility among people.
Our thesis:
The world suffers by no means from not enough morality; rather it already has too much of it. Moral thinking is the biggest obstacle for an objective assessment of the society that it originates from and of individuals’ own and others’ interests, which it enforces. So we offer a short presentation on the relationship of law, justice, morality, conscience and hypocrisy.
Everyone in this country is called upon – in addition to, along with and apart from the usual pursuit of their interests (when “giving work” just like when “accepting work,” in family life, as tenants or as landlords, etc.) – to practice consideration, to show responsibility, to not just use others but to respect them.
This call for moral behavior contains a reference to the nature of the socially legitimate interests: they are in conflict. The success of one is the failure of the other. Competitive interests are assumed if – next to and in addition to them – morality is held to be a necessary corrective.
The call for morality is the uncritical self-criticism of the competitive subjects. It is uncritical because it does not openly make the material content of interests a subject of investigation (then one would quickly arrive at liberty, equality, property) but assumes them. On the basis of these interests, an internal restriction – of a certain degree – is demanded in their pursuit, which then should lead the world towards good.
The desire of moralists for a decent world, one which would correct itself if only everybody would restrain themselves a little in favor of others, remains illusory: the conflict of social interests exists nevertheless – but nobody wants to deny them their legitimacy; which is why morality is eternally in demand.
Anyone who asks of everything that they experience whether it is right or not divides all actions (those of the neighbor, the colleague, the President) into good and bad deeds; this thinking follows the method of a lawyer, summarizing every human act into two categories: permitted and forbidden.
With this method, the moralist not only emulates the legal professional as an amateur: in approving or rejecting actions he also measures them, thus judges whether they fall under the national legal order, which can be consulted for whether rights are legitimate: someone who steals not only gets in trouble with the police and the law, but also the consternation of all honest citizens.
Morally calculating subjects do not simply bend to laws that are implemented by force, but in comparing the way citizens socially interact with one another to their use of their rights, they internalize it, so to speak: they make the law their own, demand its observance and monitor it and demonstrate that they may stress this because of their own good behavior.
A wrong conclusion underlies this internalization of the law, one which people draw from their subordination: they interpret the rules of the capitalistic social order, which are imposed by force, as conditions for following their interests, seeing them as positive conditions, the means for organizing their life.
How do they make this deduction? On the one hand, this set of rules would be sufficient to guarantee the possibility of exerting one’s private advantage, which one pursues because one is directed to. On the other hand, in the pursuit of his private advantage, the citizen is dependent on the restriction of all the others, in that the others must keep within the law. Thus the citizens identify in principle with authority and, as its beneficiaries, appoint themselves to be testers of law and order. However, they do not do this as policemen and lawyers, but open up a vast area in which to exercise their freedom.
With the internalization of the justice system, this changes into subjective conceptions of justice. If the honest citizen puts his own actions and those of strangers under a magnifying glass and judges them, then he does not have the fine print of the law in his head but the yardstick of rights in an altered form: as completely his own view of the generally valid standards for behavior, of morality.
Once moral consciousness is formed, it sets loose: in every small or large affair of private or public life in which people come into conflict, the moralist examines advantages and damages to see whether the participants correspond to his conceptions of justice or not. The eagerness to condemn immoral actions finds plenty of material in the world of competition with its winners and losers; likewise in the hierarchies of political power and in the vagaries of private fortune.
Controversies are continually inflamed because nobody wants to explain the socially legitimate interests to be the very reason for the strange distribution of success and failure, power and weakness, but wants to put to everyone the question of their authorization. Pure arbitrariness is certainly the norm.
Once the area of moral argumentation is opened:
One can marvelously use the legitimacy of moral criteria in the heads of one’s fellow citizens for oneself: morality as a means for successful self-representation. No member of bourgeois society would ever say that what drives him is simply habit or calculation. It is much more popular to proclaim a personality that in all life situations is conscious of one’s duty, that constantly tries to act in accord with careful considerations of good and is always conscientious as to whether others also succeed.
If one inspects the whole world to see whether one’s own motives and those of one’s fellow citizens follow morality or not, then one also represents one’s own interest to everyone accordingly, in order to set it in the right and gain its recognition: one’s own advantage or whatever it is that one demands is never what is aimed at; what one wants always serves a higher value, the common good, the general public. This is imagined to hold in all social spheres.
All bourgeois people believe their conceptions of themselves correspond to morality: they are self-righteous. Sometimes they discover a deficit in the fulfillment of their duties that has to be rectified. Then they show a bad conscience. But usually the circumstance that one has a bad conscience proves to oneself that one is ultimately an honest fellow nevertheless.
Moralists are notoriously disappointed, constantly exposing every kind of crime, sneaky competitive practice, inter-human tactlessness and abuse. This is presumptuous because it is an idealistic assumption of authority. Moralists constantly announce which misdemeanors of their fellow citizens they would prevent. Usually, with their worldview, they arrive at the conclusion that there are only bums out there, except for themselves, which is also why they themselves do not have to observe their moral imperatives so strictly, “given these circumstances.”
Disappointment over the constant futility of a revival of morality consistently leads to two supplemental continuations: one concerns those individuals who violate the moral code: it makes a character judgment, because they remain guilty of not fulfilling one or another duty; they are bad.
The other aims to finally impose one’s own conceptions of justice: but – as with the really-existing legal order – only one means is available: violence in the form of private violence (from the slap at the dinner table reserved only for family members up to murder out of love) or in the form of state violence, which one calls for so that morality finally arrives.
Subjects who accept all the demands and limits of the socially valid rights that justify and determine a whole mode of production (and thus what one has from life); who in all the adversities that they must struggle with ask no other question than whether everyone does his duty as they are supposed to; such subjects who make a moral arithmetic out of all successes and defeats – these subjects perform a reliable assistance for the state authority: their habit of the moral worldview prepares a stable, morally consolidated political system.
That's why the conversion of the state-established subordinate positions into a canon of values and obligations, which the people understand themselves responsible for out of their free will, is good for nothing other than – besides pedantry – the confirmation of the status quo.
Morality has a good reputation in bourgeois society. It is needed to tame humans who are bad because of their nature. It is easy to have the image of humans as sheep or wolves: a member of the competitive bourgeois society is someone who must look out for himself at the expense of others. This social role, forced on people by the state legal system, is misrepresented as human nature. And so a human image is concocted that is unquestioned (“from nature”) and apparently provable (“but look at how people behave!”).
In addition, “fortunately humans have morality which can tame their bad side.” Where this comes from and why humans do not simply ignore it – since they are bad – is not worth a look: so there is morality nevertheless! Everyone knows it and maintains it – at least more or less! And the second element of the construction is already created and the whole world is turned upside down: the state does not make the laws which the subjects accept and make their own in the form of moral convictions, but the other way around: first exists morality which initiates the universal need for state force so that good prevails against evil.