Issues in Ethics | Page 3

What should prevail: the imperative to spare the lives of innocent
civilians - or the need to safeguard the lives of fighter pilots? Precision
bombing puts such pilots at great risk. Avoiding this risk usually results
in civilian casualties ("collateral damage").
This moral dilemma is often "solved" by applying - explicitly or
implicitly - the principle of "over-riding affiliation". We find the two
facets of this principle in Jewish sacred texts: "One is close to oneself"
and "Your city's poor denizens come first (with regards to charity)".
One's affiliation (to a community, or a fraternity) is determined by one's
position and, more so, perhaps, by one's oppositions.

One's sole organic position is the positive statement "I am a human
being". All other positions are actually synthetic. They are subsets of
the single organic positive statement "I am a human being". They are
made of couples of positive and negative statements. The negative
members of each couple can be fully derived from (and are entirely
dependent on) - and thus fully implied by - the positive members. Not
so the positive members.
Consider the couple "I am an Israeli" and "I am not an Indian".
The positive statement "I am an Israeli" implies about 220 CERTAIN
(true) negative statements of the type "I am not ... (a citizen of country
X, which is not Israel)", including the statement "I am not an Indian".
But it cannot be fully derived from any single true negative statement,
or be entirely dependent upon it.
The relationship, though, is asymmetrical.
The negative statement "I am not an Indian" implies about 220
POSSIBLE positive statements of the type "I am ... (a citizen of
country X, which is not India)", including the statement "I am an
Israeli". And it can be fully derived from any single (true) positive
statement or be entirely dependent upon it (the positive statement "I am
an Indian" being, of course, false).
Thus, a positive statement about one's affiliation ("I am an Israeli")
immediately generates 220 true and certain negative statements (one of
which is "I am not an Indian").
One's positive self-definition automatically yields multiple definitions
(by negation) of multiple others. Their positive self-definitions, in turn,
negate one's positive self-definition.
It is possible for more than one person to have the same positive
self-definition. A positive self-definition shared by more than one
person is what we know as community, fraternity, nation, state, religion
- or, in short, affiliation.
One's moral obligations towards others who share with him his positive
self-definition (i.e., with whom one is affiliated) overrides and
supersedes one's moral obligations towards others who don't. As an
Israeli, my moral obligation to safeguard the lives of Israeli fighter
pilots overrides and supersedes (subordinates) my moral obligation to
save the lives of innocent civilians, however numerous, if they are not
Israelis.

The more numerous the positive self-definitions I share with someone
(i.e., the more affiliations) , the larger and more overriding is my moral
obligation to him. My moral obligation towards other humans is
superseded by my moral obligation towards other Israelis, which, in
turn, is superseded by my moral obligation towards the members of my
family.
But this raises some difficulties.
It would appear that the strength of one's moral obligations towards
other people is determined by the number of positive self-definitions he
shares with them (i.e., by the number of his affiliations). Moral
obligations are, therefore, not transcendent - but contingent and relative.
They are the outcomes of interactions with others - but not in the
immediate sense, as the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
postulated.
Rather, they are the solutions yielded by a moral calculus of shared
affiliations. The solutions are best presented as matrices with specific
moral values and obligations attached to the numerical strengths of
one's affiliations.
Some moral obligations are universal and are related to one's organic
position as a human being (the "basic affiliation"). These are the
"transcendent moral values". Other moral values and obligations arise
as the number of shared affiliations increases. These are the "derivative
moral values".
Yet, moral values and obligations do not accumulate. There is a
hierarchy of moral values and obligations. The universal ones - the
ones related to one's organic position as a human being - are the
WEAKEST. They are overruled by derivative moral values and
obligations related to one's affiliations - and are subordinated to them.
The imperative "thou shall not kill (another human being)" is easily
over-ruled by the moral obligation to kill for one's country. The
imperative "though shall not steal" is superseded by one's moral
obligation to spy for one's nation.
This leads to another startling conclusion:
There is no such thing as a self-consistent moral system. The derivative
moral values and obligations often contradict each other and almost
always conflict with the universal moral values