Anachronism of the moral sentiments? Integrity, postmodernism, and justice.

• Author: Boyle, James

After all, what is self-restraint but hypocrisy? If you despise Jews the most honest thing is to burn them up. And the fact that it costs money, and uses up trains and personnel--this only guarantees the integrity, the purity, the existence of their feelings. They would even tell you that only a Jew would think of the cost.(1)

This is an article about the relationship between postmodernism and justice. My topic is the apparent disjunction between postmodernists' moral and political intuitions on the one hand and their philosophical views and cultural leanings on the other. Crudely put, the article asks what we can learn from the fact that someone who rejects the notion of "integrity" as either a psychological, moral, or textual quality nevertheless condemns the dean or the senator for having "no integrity," and admires the display of principled consistency in public life or the interpretation of the Constitution. To put it differently, can you be a postmodernist and still believe that the laudable difference between, say, Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, is the difference between a principled ascetic who would go to jail for his beliefs and a pack of cut-out caricatures, reshuffled at every shift in public opinion, held together only by an expensive suit and a set of selfish appetites?

We appeal to integrity so often in part because of the way that it fits into our moral world and our political culture. The claim of moral certainty, of objective goodness, is seen as "illiberal," incredible, even repulsive. Integrity, with its connotation of principled coherence inside a single person, allows us to praise someone for moral virtue while bracketing the issue of whether or not we actually agree with the principles he espouses. In many ways, integrity is the cardinal political virtue for a world of disputed moralities. Conversely, hypocrisy, inconsistency, cover-up, and perjury become the cardinal political sins. If I say that you are a bad person because you knowingly adopted policies that would throw children into poverty, I am seen as making a contentious claim, outside the narrow world of consensus normativity in which journalists or commentators feel comfortable. If I say that you are a bad person because you violated your own announced principles, or because you declared a particular course of conduct reprehensible but then lied about your own history, I am seen as merely holding you to a standard you have set yourself. As a quality, moral integrity seems to escape relativism by bringing ethics back home, inside the walls of a particular subject and a particular life-plan. Similarly, when we talk about the integrity of a text or an artistic work, we offer a view that promises meaning without hermeneutic dogma or aesthetic imperialism. In our most ambitious moments, when we speak of the integrity of law, when we personify the state and seek principled consistency in its norms, we hold out the prospect of noble legal determinacy without illiberal moral faith. Integrity, then, fulfills a need; yet its ability to do so is profoundly challenged by postmodernism, by the skepticism that continues pursuit even inside the walls of the individual subject, inside the tenets of an individual faith or aesthetic tradition, inside the covers of the apparently harmonious text.

I want to stress the magnitude of the apparent clash between the spirit of postmodernity and the idea of integrity. When we think of personal integrity, we think of psychological "oneness" and principled moral consistency.(2) But to the extent that postmodernism has any philosophical content at all, it is its hospitality to a series of arguments--some of them very old indeed--that point out the insoluble difficulties in postulating a coherent, unitary self, text, or set of moral principles. In persona, hermeneutics, and & ontological argument, integrity is all that postmodernism tells us is impossible, indeed undesirable. And yet the moral intuition in favor of integrity remains. For some, this the final proof that postmodernism is just wrong.(3) For those who are more convinced of the philosophical and aesthetic strictures of a post-modernist, anti-foundationalist worldview, however, the answer must be something else. Is it that we believe postmodernists but we wouldn't want to be one, or marry one? Is it that principled integrity, with its Kantian overtones, is just another way of thwarting the justice claims made by various subordinated groups, abstracting norms to some level of "consistency" at which point they lose their force--replacing "black equality" with color-blindness, the actual oppressed person with some universal stick figure? (Yet to equate all claims made by particular subordinated groups and to oppose them to all universalist norms makes it sound as though postmodernism is marred by the same combination of sanctimonious ineptitude and moral tunnel vision that made political correctness such an easy target.)

Alternatively, is the problem fundamentally a philosophical one? Are our intuitions about public morality, or legal justice, dependent on assumptions that we would reject as a philosophical matter? Is it simply that "integrity" doesn't mean anything anymore? Is this feeling for integrity the coelacanth of our moral sentiments, a creature that has outlived its own epoch and now lives on as a grotesque anachronism, a living fossil?

My answer to these puzzles is unsatisfactory. (Do not mistake this confession of failure for a rhetorical flourish. You will soon find out its truth.) I picked this issue because I have sympathy for some but not all of the postmodernists' beliefs and because I think that these stubborn intuitions about integrity present the hardest questions for postmodernists to deal with. In other words, this is not the usual performance piece in which the writer first carefully constructs the top hat before removing the bunny from it. It is more like the exploration of a nagging toothache, painful but impossible to leave alone. There is a lot to be said for confronting the areas where one secretly thinks one's ideas are the weakest. It is, however, a virtue much more comfortably urged on others than practiced oneself.

On the other hand, the trouble with confronting really hard problems is that you probably won't be able to solve them. As different drafts of this article accumulated, I revised my aspirations downward to meet my performance so many times that I began to feel like a defense contractor. The final version attempts merely to move the debate forward a little, to clarify some of our assumptions about integrity, morality, and postmodernism. The clash between moral intuition and postmodern practice does not disappear, but it does change, I think. From a discussion of Ronald Dworkin's idea of "integrity" in law and of the idea of principle in public life, I argue that many of our moral assumptions are constructed reasonably, but incompletely, around a binary opposition between self-interest and morality. From a comparison of the effect of Hume's guillotine on the one hand and Hume's critique of induction on the other, I develop an argument that celebrates, rather than laments, the conflicts within both our moral and legal traditions. Finally, and least satisfactorily, by introducing the notion of "practice" into moral and legal argument, I explore the apparent tension between postmodernism and tradition, be it moral or legal tradition.

1. DEFINITIONS

   1. Postmodernism: What?

      Given the topic, it seems magnificently inappropriate to begin with a set of definitions. Accordingly ...

      What do we mean when we talk about postmodernism? I am going to avoid the term "postmodernity" because I don't believe in "postmodernity": an epochal label strangely at odds with the protean discourse it purports to represent.(4) It conjures up for me the image of a New Yorker cartoon in which characters muse to each other that, now that they are in the Enlightenment, things will be easier to understand.(5)

      Instead, it seems useful to distinguish between postmodernism as a kind of arch cultural schtick and postmodernism as an earnest epistemology whose natural habitat is the Modern Languages Association annual conference.(6) The cultural form, which I shall refer to as "pomo," is built on kitsch quotation and the flight from ponderous sincerity, on the juxtaposition of contradictory styles and modes so that each impliedly mocks the other without any assistance from the "speaker," on the use of tension and internal inconsistency to make a point. Pomo celebrates the co-optation of '50s soap operas as markers for forms of sexuality sternly denied during the '50s. It glorifies the parodic personality and the sardonic aside, or the incongruity between the three-piece suit and the eyebrow ring. Above all, pomo is the world of irony, irony, irony.

      Postmodernism is an altogether different kind of beast, more serious altogether. Pomo would jokingly conjure up a seminar on "Sexuality on Gilligan's Island"; postmodernism would hold it. At length.

      Much philosophy described as postmodernist actually consists of the retreading of ideas that were first described as poststructuralist, deconstructionist, social constructivist, pragmatist, Wittgensteinian, or simply relativist. (Since many of these ideas are interesting and useful, postmodernism has much to recommend it.) The recycled ideas are then linked to an aesthetic of irony and juxtaposition that, while not required by the philosophical structure, nevertheless seems to fit. Thus, in practice, to call some piece of work postmodernist normally means something like "anti-foundationalist with a twist" or "not mainstream and with an aspiration to campy outrage." It is hard to be more precise than this; we are not in the world of analytical philosophy.(7) But if postmodernism does have a central catechism, it revolves around a belief in two ideas, both of which are at odds with a notion of...