Prospective Morality
“What is it that our great-grandchildren will condemn us for?” Last month, two cultural essayists, Stefan Klein and Stephen Cave, posed this question in an article titled “Once and Future Sins.” Published by Aeon Magazine, the Anglo-German pair’s article proposes a society where ethics will be debated not in the context of the present, but through speculating the moral landscape of the future.
Legend speaks of a German officer during World War II who intervened against the execution of a captured Jewish family. “One day history will judge us,” he said. Through this act, he became a chronicled part of humanity. And judged we have. Our society has looked back on the bloodied trail of mankind, the despair of the woeful billions who once walked the earth shackled by slavery, feudalism, fundamentalism and autocracy. This retrospective analysis confirms that we are “modern” and “progressive.”
Yet the infallibility of hindsight bloats our ego. Let us imagine our world under the lens. A century from now, what would be viewed as the Jim Crow laws of this society? What would be the parallel to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or perhaps the institution of apartheid? To a citizen of the early 20th century, the concepts of homosexuality, women’s rights and racial equality were unbearably irreconcilable with convention. Today, these liberties reside in our dogmas, as well as our institutions. But do we still shut our doors to unwelcome strangers—those whom we deem as radical?
As Klein and Cave admit, our current views of morality are ill-equipped to deal with the summative eye of the future. Not to mention the fact that too often our personal convictions form the backbone of our principles. As John Loche said, each of us has a tabula rasa, or blank slate, inscribed with the biases of our character. Those who embrace change are, in the most classical sense of the term, liberals. Conservatives are the personification of our second thoughts, and occasionally the hand that reins in the horse.
Both outlooks fail to encapsulate the nature of a prospective, yet applicable, morality. In his pursuit of idealism, the diehard liberal runs into the philosopher’s conundrum. Unable to compromise with the incremental nature of social change, he is left to rant on the sidelines, like a parent at a youth-soccer game. On the other hand, staunch conservatives seem unable to make the pragmatic observation that for much of modern history, the wind has been blowing to the left. Tradition is an asinine cause.
With no clear-cut solution, it seems a tragic consequence that our descendants will remember us as a moralistic blunder. Perhaps we do not deserve to carry forth the human race. Klein and Cave, however, propose a redefinition of morality. Their suggestion is inspired by the works of Hierocles, a second century Greek Stoic. Hierocles philosophized that each of us stand at the center of a series of concentric circles. The circles closest to us contain friends and family, while increasingly distant circles contain increasingly larger communities of life. Morality, Hierocles said, was the act of drawing these circles closer and closer to ourselves, hence extending our compassion to the entirety of mankind.
This doctrine forms the crux of a prospective morality. According to Hierocles, the very labor of systematically extending our concerns is a legitimate moral advancement. We may not understand the implications of these changes, and we may have to make compromises, but as long as we are focused on increasing “the group of those whose interests are to be respected,” we can be satisfied in the knowledge that we are making tangible progress. Klein and Cave call this a “for the better” approach.
Those too enthralled by the past often shy away from forging the future. A prospective morality lets us bestow a legacy onto our heirs. We can trust that this legacy will be looked on favorably, as our descendants will certainly include those otherwise absent in our radius of compassion. To be remembered this way is nothing less than to immortalize ourselves. It is already certain that our great-grandchildren will associate us with the generation that stood by as North Korea conducted its holocaust. We will also be known for our gross naiveté in the shadow of an American oligarchy. The question is, what achievements will we stand beside these shortcomings?