We think morality must be necessarily universal and apply to everyone equally. But, following his debate with Alain de Botton at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival, philosopher Tommy J. Curry argues that universal moral concepts like democracy, equality, and liberty conceal deep-rooted racial and political hierarchies. Far from protecting the dignity of all, these ideals often reinforce the dominance of kinship groups, marginalize outsiders, and rationalize violence in the name of progress.

I. Philosophers and the illusion of the universal good

It is often the prerogative of philosophers to claim that they possess somewhat magical, if not prophetic, insight into the primordial order of the world. The academic philosopher, drawing from the mythos of a time more ancient, refined by analytic specters such as reason, proclaims to the world that they understand the “good” and are duty-bound to advance the world toward it. I find any discussion of the failure of morality to prevent the advent of grave harm towards individuals from groups thought to be alien, or strangers to dominant racial or ethnic groups within nations, to be tedious and fraught with revisionism. This brief reflection aims to articulate the suggestion that the supposed universality of morality conceals racialized and political hierarchies that privilege neighbors over strangers.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Morality and prejudice With Tommy J. Curry, Michael Huemer, Melis Erdur, Barry C. Smith

Since their beginning, the humanist sciences have focused on the concept of “the good” and the behavior of (white) human beings regarding good and evil. Kant wrote in The Critique of Practical Reason: “Morality is not really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy but of how we are to be worthy of happiness.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, in The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, noted: “Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.” This reading of Kant, however, misses what I believe he refers to in his real-world study of human beings.

II. Anthropology, race, and the limits of universal morality

In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant says that: “A doctrine of knowledge of the human being, systematically formulated (anthropology), can exist either in a physiological or in a pragmatic point of view.” One can understand human beings physiologically—primarily composed of bone and flesh—or pragmatically—which requires “the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself.” Understanding human beings as they are while participating in the world, or in the role of citizens of the world, is vastly different than the theoretical knowledge that insists upon imagining a rationally formalized relationship that melds the analytic presentation of moral goods to reasons presumed ability to enact these moral goods by individuals and societies. This presumption has been the basis of the philosopher’s endeavor to lay claim to morality as a universal endeavor.

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In reality, those who do not know or act according to the “good,” or follow the behaviors of those who do, face punishment. 

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The world acts differently upon individuals and groups. Universal pursuits of morality become more insidious than simple exercises in pure philosophy. Considering what individuals do as members of groups or nations is an endeavor beyond Appiah’s formulation of Kant’s practical philosophy. Acting as a member of a society or group challenges the efficacy of reason to direct behavior and dissolve in-group affinities. In reality, those who do not know or act according to the “good,” or follow the behaviors of those who do, face punishment. European history shows that people failing to adhere to the good of white nations have been called savages, undesirables, and evil. Markers like skin color, religion, and language have indicated supposed barbarity. Race, above all, has become an anthropological marker linking existence to wrongdoing. History also shows that denying whole groups humanity and excluding them from moral communities has been common throughout Western eras.

Universal morality presumes the existence of shared goods and evils among all people. It claims a rational human would hold eternal truths, regardless of location, culture, or language. The connection between reason and morality leads to another claim: those rejecting a certain morality are irrational or lack reason entirely. In the real world, nations and groups act with self-interest and power. Morality reflects the dreams of those in power. The good favors majority groups and helps them benefit at the expense of outsiders.

The sociobiologist Pierre L. van den Berghe has explained that:

…there were three main mechanisms of human sociality: kin selection, reciprocity, and coercion. Ethnic and racial groups command our unreasoned loyalty because they are, in fact, or at least in theory, superfamilies. But ethnic and race relations are not only relations of cooperation and amity with the in-group; they are equally importantly relations of competition and conflict between groups. While intra-group relations are primarily dictated by kin selection, real or putative, intergroup relations are typically antagonistic…More commonly, there is open competition for, and conflict over scarce resources, and not infrequently the establishment of multi-ethnic states dominated by one ethnic group at the expense of others. Coercion then becomes the basis of interethnic (or inter-racial) relations.

Morality provides the basis upon which states govern and establish rules for those like them. In forming kinship relationships to sustain ingroup dominance within geographies over time, morality establishes patterns of behaviors that govern how members from the same kin or related families are treated. These rules simply do not apply to those designated as outgroups and alien to the ingroup.

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Liberalism, education, and moral knowledge have done little to arrest cruelty and death towards those thought to be different in color and creed from white majorities or powerful ingroup populations.

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III. Modernity, civilization, and the rationalization of violence

This tendency has not only been noted among sociologists, but also by social theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman. In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, he explains that it was modernity—its technological advancement, its bureaucratic society, and its debt to morality being born of civilization and social regulation—that made the Holocaust possible. Bauman (1989) argues: “The etiological myth deeply entrenched in the self-consciousness of our Western society is the morally elevating story of humanity emerging from pre-social barbarity.” Philosophers routinely assert that the moral progress of nations such as the United States or the United Kingdom demonstrates the triumph of rationality over pre-social savagery. Liberal democracy, widespread knowledge of morals, and rationality, it is claimed, make slavery, apartheid, or even genocides less likely. When such events do occur, says the philosopher, they are aberrations, mistakes of reason, or remnants of uncivilized savagery.

While these explanations have remained magnificent apologiae for philosophy’s inability to predict and govern reason, liberalism, education, and moral knowledge have done little to arrest cruelty and death towards those thought to be different in color and creed from white majorities or powerful ingroup populations. Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, much like Dr. Huey P. Newton’s War against the Panthers, explains that morality—the good and evil thought to plague societies—is thought to be addressed by the state. To maintain the illusion of good citizens who desire peace, democracy, and order, members of the dominant ingroup often surrender the power to kill dissident populations to the state so that the myths of liberty, equality, and democratic order can be endorsed personally despite the tyrannical costs of such values socially.

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The universal morality long heralded by philosophers collapses under the weight of its historical exclusions and political hierarchies.

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Whereas Cesaire insists upon the need to “reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon,” Bauman simply states: “At no point of its long and tortuous execution did the Holocaust come in conflict with the principles of rationality.” Morality does not inhibit the coercive and murderous tendencies of liberal democratic societies, laying claim to civilization and progress, against those who disown such labels. Outgroups are extinguished for the preservation of ingroups, and neighbors are preserved over strangers. This tendency has been the foundation of modern nation-states and the basis of commonwealths. Reason simply does not have the force to challenge the society it claims to have birthed.

IV. Conclusion: The failure of moral universality

In short, morality fails to protect the dignity and humanity of strangers over neighbors or kin. The universal morality long heralded by philosophers collapses under the weight of its historical exclusions and political hierarchies. What remains is not a doctrine of shared human good, but a taxonomy of belonging—a moral geography that protects proximity and punishes distance. To speak of a universal morality, then, is to invoke an aspiration yet unrealized, one that will remain empty so long as the stranger is made to stand outside the circle of moral concern.