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Show Chapter X. The Criterion of Inclusiveness 412 legitimizes harm to moral victims as a necessary means to the preservation of equilibrium - and the benefits of equilibrium - among moral transgressors. It condones the protection of moral transgressors from the punitive consequences of their transgressions; spreads the benefits of that protection among all such transgressors; and concocts a pseudorational ideology that simultaneously rationalizes those benefits and denies or dissociates the rights of the transgressed whose pain pays for them. In essence, a bully system comprises a community of übermenschlichen free riders who, when it promotes self-interest, violate their social covenant with their Untertanen victims. This is a particularly cynical travesty of moral principle. In general, a moral theory that aspires to conform to the metaethical requirement of impartiality cannot condone social practices that even occasionally permit harm to the innocent in order to evade punishment and accrue benefits for the guilty, on pain of perverting the meaning of the words "innocent" and "guilty". By treating the innocent as guilty and the guilty as innocent in those cases in which the moral victim is seen as outside the social network, bully system practices make impossible the consistent application of punitive sanctions to all those ostensibly picked out by a rationalist moral principle. And by thus violating the requirement of impartiality, they thereby, in this case, violate that of inclusiveness as well. We may attempt to capture this conclusion as follows: (4) Nonrecognition of Bully Systems: A practically adequate moral theory K assigns greater weight to protecting an agent from harm than it does to protecting a bully system from the punitive consequences of harming her. (4) ensures that the moral laws that govern a network of moral agents are not distorted or tailored so as to effectively legitimize harmful behavior by its members. Although it does not provide a specific answer to the question of how best to rectify the harm done to Washington by Vogeler, it does ensure that preservation of a morally corrupt network does not become an end in itself, to which the value of morality itself is subordinated. And it stipulates that in a run-off between rectifying injustice to an individual and preserving unjust practices that stabilize and benefit a group, the former will take clear precedence over the latter. This means that (4) rules out Anti-Rationalism as a valid moral theory, since it permits the opposite order of precedence in some cases. (4) thus elaborates the criterion of inclusiveness to cover those situations in which, although an agent may be acknowledged by the group as an agent and his pain ascribed full moral importance, his agency and his legitimate demands for assistance or restitution are not considered sufficiently weighty to take precedence over preserving intact the corrupt but stabilizing practices that cause that pain. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
