That the world is lacking morality, everybody says is a fact.
All loudly documented incidents in the comprehensive lack of common sense, sense of responsibility, humanity.
In this almost all people fail before the standards of the good, which the members of bourgeois society always have ready as retrievable and all-purpose explanations for the social and interpersonal nastiness that they experience. If only everybody was as virtuous and responsible as they should be, the world would be in order, and everybody would get what he is entitled.
That he himself is lacking in morals, hardly anybody says. One obeys the law, pays taxes, does his job and his family duties, 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 one above all who is particularly virtuous: oneself. This is only one of the self-righteous stupidities of the 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 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 springs from, and of individuals’ own and others’ interests, which it enforces. A short presentation on the relationship of law, justice, morality, conscience and hypocrisy.
Everyone in this country is called upon – in addition to, together with and apart from the usual pursuit of their interests (when “giving work” just like when “taking work,” in family life, as tenants or as landlords, etc.) – to practice consideration, to show responsibility, to not only use but to respect others.
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 – beside and in addition to them – morality as 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 the interests a subject of investigation (then one would quickly arrive at liberty, equality, property) but assumes them. On the basis of these interests, an outward restriction on their pursuit – to certain degrees – is demanded, which should then point the world towards the good.
The desire of moralists for a decent world, which would adjust 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 himself, of everything that he experiences, the question whether it is right or not, divides all actions (those of the neighbor, the colleague, the President) into good acts and bad deeds, and thinks according to the method of a lawyer, summarizing every human act into two categories: permitted and forbidden.
With this method, the moralist not only follows the legal professional as an amateur: when approving or rejecting actions he also measures them, thus judges whether they fall under the national legal order, which can be examined for legitimate rights: someone who steals gets not only trouble with the police and the law, but also the consternation of all honest citizens.
Morally calculating subjects do not simply bend themselves to the dominant rights that are implemented by force, but in comparing the social handling of citizens with one another to their use of rights they internalize it, so to speak: they make it their own, demand their observance and their monitoring and demonstrate that they may stress this right because of their own good behavior.
A wrong conclusion underlies the internalization of the law, which people draw from their subordination: they interpret the forcibly ordered set of rules of the capitalistic social order as the condition to follow their interests into a positive condition, into a means for organizing their life.
How do they make this deduction? On the one hand, this set of rules would be sufficient in the end 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 appoint themselves its beneficiaries as testers of law and order. However, they do not make their careers as policemen and lawyers, but open up a vast area for the exercise of their freedom.
With the internalization of the legal order, 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 national rights in a changed form: as completely his own view of the generally valid standards for behavior, for morality.
Once the moral understanding is formed, it sets loose: for every small or large affair of private and 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 as the 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 civil society would ever let it be said of himself 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 his responsibility and constantly tries to act after careful consideration for property and is always conscientious as to whether others also succeed.
If one inspects the whole world’s values to see whether one’s own motives and those of one’s fellow men 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 recognition: one’s own advantage is never aimed at; what one wants always serves a higher value, the larger whole, the general public or that for which one demands something. This is imagined to hold in all social spheres.
All bourgeois humans 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 a bad conscience becomes apparent. Usually, however, the circumstance that one has a bad conscience proves to oneself that one is finally an honest fellow nevertheless.
Moralists are notoriously disappointed, constantly exposing every kind of crime, sneaky competitive practice, inter-human tactlessness and abuse. That is modest, 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 except them there are only bums out there, which is also why they (can) observe their moral imperatives not so strictly “under these circumstances.”
Disappointment over the continuous futility of moral renewal consistently flows into two supplemental continuations: One concerns those individuals who infringe on 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 implement 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 table, reserved only for family members, up to murder out of love) or in the form of state violence, which one calls upon in order for morality to finally break through.
Subjects who accept all the demands and limits of the 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 fight, ask no other question than whether everyone functions as counted on with one another; such subjects, who make a moral arithmetic of all successes and defeats – these subjects carry out a reliable assistance for the state authority: their habit of the moral world view prepares a stable, morally consolidated political system.
Because the conversion of the nationally set 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 from nature.
The image of humans who show themselves to be sheep or wolves is easy to have: 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 order, is misrepresented as the human nature. And so an unquestioned (“from nature”) and apparently provable (“but look at how people behave!”) human image is designed.
In addition, “fortunately morality exists in humans, who can bring its bad side to reason.” Where that comes from and why humans do not simply ignore it – since they are bad – is not worth a look: 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 turned upside down:
The state does not make the law, which the subjects accept and make their own in the form of moral convictions, but the other way around: first morality exists in the world, which initiates the universal need for state violence, so that good prevails against evil.