<i>Ugly</i>: Part 3, Ugly ethics

Thinking over my last post on ugly and in response to comments and questions raised by you and in my class at church (where I'm teaching about this) I want to come back and clarify my project. (And to be honest, "project" is too grand a word. It's more like some half-baked ideas I think, maybe, might hold together in an interesting way. We'll see.)

The clarification has to do with ugly and ethics. In my last post I stated that when push comes to shove things in life boil down to "aesthetics," the felt experiences we have in the face of life events. If this is the formulation I'm positing then am I not open to the charge of ethical relativism?

First, I could state that the ugly model is a pedigreed ethical theory. This position was, famously and notoriously, articulated by David Hume. Specifically, Hume claimed that ethics really just boils down to sentiments (what I'm calling aesthetics). That to say "X is wrong" is merely a different way of saying "I disapprove of X" or "I don't like X." Or, in my words, there is no right or wrong, just aesthetic judgments.

Obviously, people recoil at the relativism in Hume's position. Immanuel Kant, for example. The critique is if ethics boils down to sentiment then what do we do with people who like to hurt others? Where is our leverage against their unethical behavior? Also, ethical judgments are qualitatively different from other aesthetic judgments. We allow each other to disagree on all sorts of issues. But we don't allow this latitude on moral judgments. We don't tend to treat issues of, let's say refraining from murder, as something you can choose to opt in or opt out of, like choosing wallpaper for your living room. Moral judgments are universalizing.

At this point the the whole of Ethics 101 opens up before us. I don't want to go down that road, just to note that the "ugly as ethics" formulation isn't new but does has a historical tradition behind it if I wanted to defend in on those grounds.

But what I'd actually like to do is clarify and change some of what I said last post and offer something that is less extreme. What I would like to say is that ugly is prior to ethics, not a replacement for ethics (although, as I noted, you could make that claim). That is, as we move through life we carve up the world into like/dislike, approach/avoidance, love/hate, or, in the dichotomy of this series, ugly/beautiful. Buddhism has long noted that this bipolarity of sentiment is a root problem in human suffering. The problem as I see it is that this slicing of the world often comes to us instinctively and unreflectively. A feeling of wrongness (or rightness) just comes to us. The problem is that this felt wrongness (or rightness) is taken to be authoritative, ethically speaking. We use our emotions as ethical guides and warrants.

This tendency is deeply problematic. Too often I allow my feelings and instinctive judgments to lead me astray. A truly ethical response might ask me to linger with the ugly and seek to transform it. But if I act unreflectively, simply moving quickly away from the ugly, then I never get the opportunity to act ethically and lovingly. This is what I meant when I said that ugly is prior to ethics. Ugly is an unreflective, instinctive sensory or emotive appraisal of a situation, a felt experience of rightness or wrongness. These feelings might be accurate, ethically speaking, or they might not. But for ethical reflection to take place the ugly must be suspended and mastered. Too often it isn't.

Let me be concrete. Too many Christians can't think ethically about how homosexual persons are treated in society because the ugly is trumping the conversation. That is, the aesthetic judgment of "wrongness" (I've heard someone call it the "yuck factor") is dominating the conversation. The ugly here is, perversely, prior to ethics. It's getting in the way.

Another example is the Christian response to the poor and homeless. There are sensory obstacles and aversions that must be mastered in working with very poor and homeless populations. Smells, lice, trash, illness. It is easier--less ugly--to deal with these populations from a distance (e.g., charity). Too few Christians move into the ugly, because, well, it's ugly. Ugly is again trumping ethics and love.

So in the end, although my model could be situated in Hume's ethical tradition, I think it is a better fit with the virtue ethics tradition. That is, I'm less interested in using ugly to create ethical warrants or to adjudicate between ethical principles and acts. Rather, standing with the virtue tradition, my interest is in the transformation of the sentiments and behaviors of people. The goal is to sanctify our sentiments so that we might begin to master the dichotomizing tendency of ugly/beautiful in the hope that if we suspend and transcend the ugly we might be able to move into forsaken places with grace and mercy.