Here Is a radically different approach to describe morality, which is usually thought of as adding something to the descriptions of the world so as to provide a fuller picture of life. Kant put that usual view clearly and succinctly. It was inevitable, he thought, that people came up with the word “should” to describe the fact that people chose to do one thing rather than another out of obligation rather than just custom or taste or else people would not have real choices and that was clearly part of the nature of the world. I am saying otherwise. People use moral categories for a particular reason, which is to blame people, and they do so by noticing the aggregation of individuals into types or roles that are in opposition to one another and find that satisfying, which means that morality is in most cases unnecessary even if blaming people, including oneself, is an easy thing to do to explain people, as when one says that all people are subject to original sin or that some part of people can be clumped together as deficient morally because of their poverty or race. Aggregation is a useful device for illuminating the social world but it is a dangerous one because it breeds unnecessary anger and allegations and, like a good medicine, should be attributed only advisedly. The significance of this proposition is that morality is an attribute for manipulating language to different purposes rather than a discovery about morality as an inevitable feature of the universe that is.
Moreover, the Kantian construction breaks down by itself. Kant is saying that every sentence is a description that is totally altered by adding the word “should”. That word added, it is about what ought to happen, something not reducible to descriptions, the should being axiomatic or deduced from axioms, such as when you say I should be kind to people because it is a basic principle or because God said so or because it is included in a Utilitarian principle that says kindness provides pleasure for most people most of the time. But that isn’t the way moral argument works. I can observe that I hate Jessica-- or Donald Trump. The supposedly very different proposition is that I should hate Jessica or Donald Trump. In the first case, that is a factual matter while the second case is a moral one where arguments have to be given for why to hate Jessica. Maybe she is mean to her mother or that she lies or that she votes Republican. In that case, we would have to invoke some argument about what is a sufficient cause to make someone hate someone. Is being a Republican bad enough or is being mean to your mother grounds sufficient for thinking badly or in a hateful manner towards Jessica. But those arguments also allude to matters of fact, such as how bad the Republican Party has become in recent years, or whether Jessica just has a playful way of interacting with her mother even though I would not act in that disrespectful way. So you have to refer to descriptions to satisfy a moral claim and so moral life is not independent, made distinct, by the addition of “should”.
A Kantian might save the inviolability of “should” by saying that every descriptive reason for supporting a “should” statement is to be implicitly interpreted by adding whatever ‘should” statements as are required to make the assertion a moral one. So Jessica is hateful because she is mean to her mother is justified by saying People should not be mean to their mothers and so on, as one might say that people should not vote republican. But then we beg the question and have to offer the empirical question of why Republicans are by nature bad and, anyway, having to complement every descriptive sentence with a should statement to justify it is not the way language operates in that, as a matter of fact, people do offer descriptions as the reasons for morality. You should hate Jessica because she is mean to her mother .Let us instead try a different way to engage blame by engaging in a different linguistic twist, not to find “is” and “should” words parallel, but by referring to the linguistic twist of aggregating people, moral judgments made upon people simply because they have been aggregated. Morality, in short, is a judgment inferred by the fact of aggregation.
The best way to see how the verbal trick of aggregating some people into groups can be seen is by going back to the seminal thinker Karl Marx, writing as he did, and influenced by the intervening Hegel, just two generations after Kant. Marx makes a crucial difference between people who are victims and those who are oppressors. In fact, society can be accurately described, so Marx thinks, as coming down to this bi-polar opposition.
Who are the victims and who are the oppressors? Marx would argue that the relation between the two, which is known as exploitation, can be given objective definition. In that case, the moral category of oppressor is not a matter of inclination or intention, but resides in the nature of the relationship, and so is a description of a relationship rather than simply a term of moral opprobrium or a rhetorical device but the short hand identification of something that is very complex, such as the relation between a lord and a peasant.
In Marx's early work, oppression seems to mean alienation, which is to say when people are less than fully engaged in their nature; in his later work, oppression seems to mean something economic, the less than just wage which results from the confiscation of some of that wage, as is determined by the value which the worker adds to the product, by the powerful employer from the less powerful employee. Such theories are, however, empirical in the sense that the moral impulse rests on an economic calculation or a measure of mental state that may be very difficult to make. It is more accurate to redefine moral victimization as the result of the process whereby Marx arrives at his result and so also demoralizes a role by pursuing the alternative process of neglecting the general categories for the particularities of kings and war recruits and other categories that are contained within the largest oppositional ones. Forget what you can see in flesh and blood and remember the bipolar types. The real people are workers and capitalists and people side with one or the other and morality means being on one side or the other, meaningless without that designation. As Marxist philosophers will argue, even the mentalities of capitalists or, as it is called, the bourgeois, have a different sense of the world and different values than will be held by the new proletarian, collective spirit. Kant has disintegrated into collective conflict.
Oppression is the aggregation of all those who are subordinate in some particular respect into a role that defines the condition of the aggregation. The classic example of this is provided by E. J. Thompson, who argues that the working class comes to see itself as a working class because the conditions under which different workers work can be reduced to the single dimension of their economic exploitation. In similar fashion, slaves are oppressed because the different statuses of work subordination-- indentured servitude, involuntary servitude, chattel-- are reduced to a single status. It isn't that people are not treated badly under every one of these conditions. But maltreatment rises to the point of oppression only when there is a singular role on which all the forms of maltreatment converge. Slaves in ancient Greece received more respect because they were captured prisoners with a culture of their own, while peasants are strictly speaking “oppressed” because all the different forms of their subjugation-- the taxes they pay in kind, the disrespect in which they are held, etc.-- make them into a single kind of dependency, from which they break out not because of revolution from above but because there develop rich peasants who have some standing before the law and who have something to pass on.
This analysis of aggregation creating morality applies beyond the end of the Soviet Union and the central binary between worker and employer. There are still the very lively debates over race and women, these groups aggregated into bipolar ones where morality resides in either the oppressed or the oppressive group, there is no quarter in the war between the oppositions because each of the two sides, on principle, cannot understand one another. The Women’s Movement as well as, inclusively, the abortion issue, was one of the most important moral issues of the second half of the Twentieth Century, even if Roe v. Wade now seems to be accepted law and accepted practice, even if it is still opposed by white Evangelicals though no longer, mind you, by a majority of Roman Catholics. What might seem merely history has not been clarified, in part, I think, if I may be so bold, because the Women’s Movement never came up with a spokesperson who had the intellectual clarity of W. E. B. Debois or Martin Luther King, Jr., but was largely in the hands of journalists such as Gloria Steinem. And yet the movement is itself of great and continuing importance for the way it contributed to a redefinition of what was moral. Role theory, as I have said, can’t solve moral problems; what it can do is trace out, in structural terms, the ways in which moral debates get transformed and even, in some of their specifics, resolved.
Oppression is the aggregation of all those who are subordinate in some particular respect into a role that defines the condition of the aggregation. The classic example of this is provided by E. J. Thompson, who argues that the working class comes to see itself as a working class because the conditions under which different workers work can be reduced to the single dimension of their economic exploitation. In similar fashion, slaves are oppressed because the different statuses of work subordination-- indentured servitude, involuntary servitude, chattel-- are reduced to a single status. It isn't that people are not treated badly under every one of these conditions. But maltreatment rises to the point of oppression only when there is a singular role on which all the forms of maltreatment converge. Slaves in ancient Greece received more respect because they were captured prisoners with a culture of their own, while peasants are strictly speaking “oppressed” because all the different forms of their subjugation-- the taxes they pay in kind, the disrespect in which they are held, etc.-- make them into a single kind of dependency, from which they break out not because of revolution from above but because there develop rich peasants who have some standing before the law and who have something to pass on.
The process of aggregation remains the way to conceptualize an oppressed people even when the concept of oppression is separated from its Marxist roots or its Marxist conclusions. People of color, for example, is a term that allows the aggregation of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans, so that all of those ethnicities can be regarded as sharing a common subjugation by Whites. Jews, who two generations ago were regarded as a separate racial category, became included among whites, and that resulted in the color category remaining bipolar for a while longer.
As with all other bi-polarizations, it is presumed that the two categories of white and black are in necessary conflict with one another when, in fact, it was recognized by enlightened white people that it was in the interests of white people to see more people of color join the professional classes and so provide American society with the human capital it needs to compete with other nations. Moreover, this and any other bipolarization is accomplished by neglecting or diminishing the conflicts that exist between the groups that have been aggregated. Asians and Blacks, for example, have opposite views on the usefulness of Affirmative Action, since Asians profit from promotion based solely on merit. Each group also has a different culture that they want to promote. The catch phrase “multiculturalism” represented and still represents an uneasy truce imposed by anti-white politics when, given their druthers, nationalists within each group want their children to learn their specific cultures rather than the culture of other peoples, whites or otherwise.
Moreover, racial bi-polarization decreases when there are more and more mixtures of racial types. Increased numbers of multi-racial children makes it difficult to apply affirmative action quotas “fairly” in that multi-racial children would self-select as white or not or else such a designation would have to be made by authorities loath to decide who is of what race. Where does President Obama or Tiger Woods belong? Is there to be a quota for Chinese Black students? If any drop of Black blood suits you for that quota, then we are enforcing Ante-Bellum standards of race. In miscegenation lies the freedom of us all in that it leads to the disaggregation of groups.
An even larger aggregation is conceptualized through the term "minority", since that term covers not only ethnicities but gender and matters of sexual inclination. Women and gays are minorities along with Blacks and Hispanics and the rest. They are therefore presumed to share with the ethnic minorities a degree of exploitation by the residual category, which in this case is now limited to white heterosexual males, and sometimes even, in cultural fights, to dead white heterosexual males, who are supposed to have had hegemony over culture. This is to neglect the fact of differences between the minorities: that women are not, in fact, a numerical minority, but simply do not vote a separate set of interests; that women share the social class if not the social privileges of their mates, while ethnic groups do not share the social class of their oppressors; and that the marginality that comes from sexual orientation gives gays a closer connection to Jews than it does to other ethnic groups which, however much oppressed, have functioned as distinct ethnic groups within the context of the larger society.
Some Feminists are ready to shed worker as the primary role of aggregation and substitute for it the role of woman, arguing that the Marxist division of labor tells too narrow a story since it is a special case of that more enveloping division of labor between men and women that underlies history, pre-history, and the present. Angela Davis, for one, was less inclined to shed the idea of the worker as the final aggregation, even if that means that women and Blacks are subsumed under that category and so find meaning as Black women workers-- i.e. as female slaves who are exploited for their bodies as well as for their work-- who are in solidarity with, rather than opposed to, the black male workers, whose bodies and minds are so tormented by their work and treatment that they may take out their frustrations upon Black women. Such abuse is not essential even if it is usual because it represents one subgroup of an essential role that has been set off against another subgroup of that same role, and so is a distraction rather than a true opposition or oppression.
The general procedure for ceasing to regard a group as oppressed is to disaggregate a role that is taken to be essential. That means the role is conjoined with some other category of role so as to show the differences between the parts of what had before been considered an essential role. The interests of middle class African Americans are different from those of poverty class African Americans. Middle class African Americans profit from Affirmative Action because it helps them gain entry into professional occupations; poverty class African Americans profit from overall jobs programs or entitlement programs. That does not mean that the role of being an African American is not a real one, or just a cover for social class issues, since some marks of oppression, as well as a reservoir of cultural resources, exist across the African American experience. Everyone can feel good about Barack Obama having become President. One of our boys did it. But that does not mean that Chicago gang life has gone away or that there is still a residual stigma in being African American in many spheres of American society. What it does mean is that you can get hold of the facts about the life of one or another subgroup of African Americans only by disaggregating the category.
So the nature of morality is that language can aggregate or disaggregate and that blame comes to those who are aggregated and especially into a bi-polar divider. Morality is avoided if you deaggregate and so judge people as individuals, not knowing whether a particular person, such as Kyle Riddenhouse or Ahmaud Arbery, are to be judged only on the particular facts of the case. That is what trials are supposed to be about: just looking at the facts rather than the types. But language is more complex than that. People can always aggregate by recognizing a person as a member of a group, as sharing a role, and then draw inferences of guilt from it, and that process is ubiquitous. Rittenhouse can be categorized as a troublemaker vigilante and regarded therefore as having acted as irresponsible and with malice, while others say he was a conscientious though not sufficiently trained person ought to protect property. Similarly, Arbery was jogging twenty miles away from home and so not a jogger but a troublemaker and those who killed him had gotten wind of that even though that was not presented in evidence. There are always aggregations or characterizations and people fight over which ones they prefer to offer and so tell their own stories again and again and so have no need to differentiate cases. That is easier but it is lazy, another characterization I am offering to distinguish those who as a whole think carefully or not very well about social and linguistic life. The idea of a trial, which is to attend only to the particular facts and without prefigured characterizations, also seems impossible, an ideal never realized.
How much to rid our aggregations so as to be objective while retaining the wisdom of the categories we employ is a difficult question. We can take a neutral tone and so regard remarks that are loaded with categories as emotionally neutral, when we recognize that Black urban areas have high crime rates, just another fact to be managed rather than disdained.But that takes sophistication and categories lend themselves to bi-polarization and so moral onus even if we are talking about one person. Should we hate Jessica? Only if you find her to belong to a category that is identified with one bi-polar group or another, and that is easily enough accomplished by seeing daughters as necessarily critical of mothers, or Republicans as the alter to Democrats. Otherwise, she is just one, multi-faceted person. Poor Jessica. Let’s just get rid of morality and just think about her own particular situation and so have no need to hate anyone, just serve their particular needs.