The North Coast times-eagle., December 01, 1997, Page 4, Image 4

PAGE 4
THE CORPORATE MEDIA
ETHICAL RELATIVISM &
UNETHICAL ABSOLUTISM
BY J.C. DUFFIELD
When our corporate masters are caught in the act
of polluting the public mind in the Mainstream Media, Public
Relations rushes in to justify the ordure of the day on the
grounds that the mass media are only in the nonjudgmental
business of entertaining the public and so only democratically
reflect the tastes of the sovereign consumer, vtfio, in America
at least, enjoys the inalienable freedom to wthhold those Dollar
Votes that make capitalism the best of all possible economic
systems. The argument is usually clinched with the crow! pleas­
ing observation that those foolish enough to dispute public taste
are at best misguided do-gooders and at worst unpatriotic elitists
preaching political correctness. The inexhaustible spectacle of
human degradation does not miss a beat, and we all go home
and watch it on TV; vaguely feeling perhaps that our intellectual
pockets have been picked once again.
As indeed they have. The polite silence of academic
departments of the humanistic disciplines notwithstanding,
our philosophical tradition offers much by way of disabusing
ourselves of the fallaciousness that animates the vignette just
rehearsed. We must first recognize that the PR defense amounts
to the protestation that the Mainstream Media have no standards
of their own — moral, aesthetic, scientific or otherwise; or, wrfiich
comes to the same thing, that the consuming desires of the
public are the supreme arbiters or right and wrong in all that is
purveyed to the public. That such a protestation of amorality
passes as a defense against the charge of retailing immorality
is itself a measure of contemporary degradation; the point of
philosophical interest, however, lies in the claim that morality
(or immorality) is constituted solely by the desires of the moral
agent, whether private citizen or public corporation.
This is the classic standpoint of Ethical Relativism,
which promotes "feelings" to the first rank; a view that popularly
holds that there's nothing Good (or Bad) but thinking it's so
make it so, Beauty is only in the eye of the beholder, there are
no Truths, just Stories, and so on.
Philosophy has long know the fatal flaw in the exalt­
ation of feelings: When we make feelings our ethical criterion,
we have no criterion, for a criterion is precisely a rule or stand­
ard that may overrule (or confirm) the feeling of the moment,
however compelling. That slavery felt right to so many good
monotheists in the last century did not make it right; that the
earth feels like solid ground does not make geocentrism true.
The person wrfio thinks that Beauty is only in the eye of
the beholder is not a person vtfio will show up at the theater, let
alone compose a drama, leam to act, build an auditorium, etc.
— that is to say, the person v4io sees the Beautiful (or True, or
Good) as nothing more than a mote in his eye is not a person
who has anything worthwhile to offer to the rest of us. But cri­
teria, ethical or otherwise, promise just such standards of worth,
and "to the rest of us" demarcates human criteria as essentially
social. (It's a human thing: l/Ve ought to understand...)
The Ethical Relativist's claim of justification by feelings
palpably begs the question of any criterion, for it can be sensibly
asked of such a claim: 'Yes but what makes your feelings the
right ones for all concerned?"
In spite of evident difficulties, Ethical Relativism has
never enjoyed a broader currency than in today's acquisitive
society, and not only as a PR pitch or even as a generic
expression of egoism. In the shape of "utility" (or "marginal
utility") theory, the Ethical Relativist appraisal of humanity
provides the conceptual heart of the professional economic
doctrine that is palmed off as bedrock science in the university
curriculum. We are all little-contained calculi of pleasure and
pain, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, runs the refrain; which
adds the modest assurance that our wants are even infinite.
Alas, poor nature provides only limited resources to
satisfy our insatiability, which dismal disparity constitutes,
eternally, The Economic Problem. Q.E.D. The good news for the
"haves” is that economic "value" (the measure of satisfaction) is
thus rendered as potentially infinite as the insatiability imputed
to homo economicus, so rendering profitability (a function of
economic value) as eternal as infinity itself.
It then comes as no surprise that while Professor A
declares the profit system the best of all possible expressions
of Human Nature, down the hall Professor B is solemnly
announcing "the end of history” on the occasion of the recent
victory (by default) of aforesaid system. The bad news for the
"Have-nots' is that the Rat Race, as it is affectionately known,
is also rendered eternal: Since "we" can never get enough, "our"
best efforts will never be good enough In this vein Professor A
can be heard intoning — no matter what the year — that this
year's level of "productivity" is insufficient and that the necessity
to "stay competitive" requires incessant technological innovation
along with endless reorganization, regulatory reform, more math
and science education, cutbacks, downsizing, givebacks, and
the like. The cyclical change in euphemisms only declares the
underlying permanence of economic insecurity, revealing the
hapless consumer as anything but sovereign.
The opposite but complementary extreme to Ethical
Relativism, no less defective, is represented by Ethical Abso­
lutism, which proclaims that the criterion of morality subsists
independently of the human moral agency subject to that cri­
terion. The grain of truth in Ethical Absolutism is that, as we
have seen, any ethical (or otherwise) criterion worthy of the
name must stand above any particular person, just as the rule
of law demands that law stand above the vtfiims of any particu­
lar individual, however important. But the Ethical Absolutist
heaps his grain of truth into absolute falsehood by the further
claim that the ethical (or otherwise) criterion must hold true
irrespective of humanity in general, whether regarded historic­
ally or conceptually.
The Ethical Absolutist flatters himself to the effect that
he is privy to some supra-human source of guidance, to which
the commonalty of humanity must submit or be damned. Indeed
the most familiar and pervasive form of Ethical Absolutism in
the land of the free and home of the brave is none other than
the Judeo/Christian "command ethic"vtfiich piously holds that
the criterion of good and evil is infallibly determined by the
unfathomable dictates of an alien supernatural creator-god.
While the Ethical Absolutist is fond of casting the moral
problematic into an exclusive dilemma — such that, as Plato
argued in the Euthyphro centuries before Christianity, one must
either be an Ethical Relativist or else an Ethical Absolutist —
humanistic philosophy has long pointed out that the dilemma
alleged is false in light of the circumstance that, taken to their
logical limits, Ethical Absolutism and Ethical Relativism turn out
to coincide exactly. That is to say, the failure of the divine "com­
mand ethic" to afford a rational ethical criterion is as complete
as the failure of the profane my-x-right-or-wrong Ethical Relati­
vist on the same score: The creator-god, said to be all powerful
as well as good, or morally obligatory; for, to state such a
Reason Why would require that the allegedly Supreme Being
defer to a rationality higher than his mere Word, or command.
Thus both Ethical Relativism and Ethical Absolutism boil
down to the identical do-it-because-/-say-so illogic of immoral
tyranny, denying all rational justification. Thus it is no accident
that in Genesis 2:17 the creator-god expressly prohibited to man
any knowledge of good and evil — a prohibition that ipso facto
"even" the all-powerful deity was powerless to explain, lest man
leam that wrfiich was prohibited — and instead relied upon (and
still relies upon) the thuggish threat of individual annihilation;
leaving us wth fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, as
poor Job discovered. Similarly, the heathen Ethical Absolutist
Plato, in the Crito, the Republic and elsewhere, reduced ethics
for the multitude to blind obedience on the master/servant
model, with Plato and kindred intellectual aristocrats issuing
the commands in point.
The coincidence of Ethical Relativism and Ethical Abso­
lutism is a demonstration that unfortunately does not limit itself
to the arcana of philosophical dialectic.In contemporary America
the religion of money and the money of religion have attained
their historical zenith in a system of world domination that
brooks no obstacle, human or environmental Money is free
speech, eminent jurists assure us, and it is left to the impolite to
observe that this can be true only in a land where the dollar is
almighty, a land where it just so happens that the few are freer
than the many.
J.C. Duffield is a "tallish, middleaged gent, slim with a
gray mustache" who is "an adjunct professor of philosophy and
logic from Boise and Kansas City now appreciating walks on
the beach in Ocean Park (Wash) wth the wfe and a new travel
trailer in tow."
3 speculations
1. A sparrow unsettles
the apple branch.
Burst blossoms' petals
fall in avalanche.
Shall the entire tree
feel a catastrophe?
2 Maybe fate is gone out of date
where all the play
of joy and fear and rage
is acted on a stage
directed by DNA: modern day
prelude for some other
mythology
if you'd uncover
a where-with-all to see.
3. When this child
saw the stars
through a misty sky
and smiled...
I ache for exemplars
that can mystify
THE COMPLEAT PHOTOGRAPHER
475 14TH ST., ASTORIA & 303 S. HOLLADAY, SEASIDE
325-0759
736-3686
\Ne hear regularly of the peccadilloes of our holy men,
but nothing that would reveal that the real business of religion is
the mortgaging of personal insecurity, guaranteed toward the
purchase of post-mortem real estate (lots in heaven); offering
the believer a pay-now-go-later plan where, conveniently, the
complaint department is likewise post-mortem (/.©., forever
closed). Observing the corruption of the democracy invented
in Athens, the ancient Greeks coined the term "sophistry" to
characterize dishonest argumentation for hire to the highest
bidder. The Greeks could only marvel at the complete and
incorporated victory of Public Relations, the modem cure for
the common truth, which has institutionalized sophistry as
the dominant idiom of business, politics and religion.
Where money is freedom, plutocracy is the soul of
democracy and the PR man is its priest. The Ethical Relativism
peddled by PR is, by its own freely advertised terms of sale, be­
lied by the unethical absolutism of the command of the "bottom
line" of private aggrandizement. But like any "codependent" of a
victorious pathology, we find our common truths unsaid, and We
The People look in vain to our professional intellectuals, who
mouth PR clichés about the Free Marketplace of Ideas while
proving by their don't-rock-the-boat servility that what we have is
but a Company Store trading in the usual lies that bind, a Theme
Park whose theme is business as usual. ('The learned pate
ducks to the golden fool," as Shakespeare put it.) Thus the tree
of knowledge of the good and evil that molds us is as effectively
foreclosed today as it was for our mythical forebears in the
Garden of Eden.
The Ethical Relativism of the mass media is relative
only to the absolute degradation, moral and intellectual, of the
mass. Because this degradation is an absolute demand of our
corporate way of life, we should not wonder that nothing better is
commonly supplied.
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