The zen master and the failure of “morality as outcome”
Can you judge the morality of an outcome when consequences are endless?
Since the Academy Awards just wrapped up, it seems appropriate to begin with a movie.
This weekend I finally got around to watching Charlie Wilson’s War, an excellent biographical film by Aaron Sorkin about the congressman who from 1979 to 1989 organized covert CIA support for the Afghan mujahadeen in their fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
In one of the final scenes of the movie, at a party celebrating the Soviet withdraw from Afghanistan, Charlie Wilson pulls his closest ally at the CIA, Gust Avrakotos, aside to congratulate him. But Gust is in no mood. He tells Charlie the following story:
“There’s a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse and everybody in the village says, “how wonderful, the boy got a horse” And the Zen master says, “we’ll see.” Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, “How terrible.” And the Zen master says, “We’ll see.” Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight except the boy can’t cause his legs all messed up. and everybody in the village says, “How wonderful.’”
At which point Charlie interjects: “And the Zen master says, “We’ll see.”
Gust was telling Charlie that while today it may seem appropriate to celebrate the Soviet defeat, the CIA’s funding of the mujahadeen could very well turn into our worst nightmare. Fearing the rise of religious extremism in the region, Gust pleaded with Charlie to invest money in rebuilding the country, particular its schools. Charlie tried, but failed to win support in Congress for Afghan development. Gust, of course, had great foresight. Just 12 years later that U.S. would invade Afghanistan and face a resistance using those very same weapons and tactics we had given them not two decades earlier.
The point of Gust’s story was that we never know what consequences our actions will have in the end. Why does this matter to the public philosopher? For those that buy into the “morality as outcome” theory I’ve detailed before, the morality of an action is based on the outcome it achieves. A political system, for example, would be judged good or bad based on the ends it achieves, not how it achieves them. But if the Zen Master is right and the consequences of our actions never lead to a final end, then there can never be an outcome on which to judge the morality of an action. Hypothetically, health care reform might insure 30 million new people within five years, but it could also double the national debt within a decade and cause the economic collapse of the United States within two decades. The chain of consequences go on forever.
So what are we to do? Does the zen master story, along with the problem of causal uncertainty, prove the failure of the “morality as outcome” approach? Must we then accept “morality as process”? Or might there be a way to keep “morality as outcome” alive? As someone who has long preached the “morality as outcome” approach, my understanding of right and wrong hinges on the answer to this question.
I have no solution myself. though I pose the question here in search of one. As you will know if you’ve been keeping up with my stuff recently, my posts have been more about asking questions then answering them. I began my education in political philosophy with one goal: figure out what I believe as quickly as possible and then move on to more practical activities. Of course, I was naive back then. The more I studied philosophy, the more questions I had. For every one question you answer, it seems, two new ones arise. I hope you will not mind me sharing some of these questions with you. I look forward to any help you may provide me in answering them.
-Marc
Related posts:
- Cash for Morality
- The morality of amateur cyberwarfare
- What morality “means”
- TNR’s morality tease
- Manipulating morality
ShareComments
Leave a Reply
