On Morals and Ethics

I consider the difference between them to be this: ethics are how we live with each other, morals are how we live with ourselves. I think of myself as an ethical person. I observe the politenesses that was taught and generally try to make my interactions with others as pleasant for them as I can. I don't steal (except for illegal downloading but since copyrights are a form of legal crime I consider this a moral position rather than an ethical flaw). I don't cut into lines. I try not to interrupt. I am a boring person. Since I am also deeply interested in the phenomenon of cities, I spend a lot of time thinking about ethics as it applies to politics.

I also try to be a moral person. As you know if you read the preceding post I'm currently reading Joan Didion's essays. In a short one specifically about morals, she defines morality as something close to what I think of ethics. And by every one of her criteria I fail miserably. She identifies morals with what people used to call character - something her parents' generation had in spades. They were raised with the recognition most of life is some form of tribulation and you get on with it because that is your lot. And because there will presumably be some reward for all that work. Whether it is an earthly reward or the heavenly reward promised by so many Protestant sects on precisely the same terms (do everything you are supposed to and nothing you aren't and you won't go to hell) is something I can't tell.

I think Didion is wrong in this analysis. And yet it isn't a bad essay. It isn't even mediocre. It's very good but it is more about the difference between the generation before her and the one she is watching come into its own. And if you forget that she is being less than rigorous with her terms, the piece conjured an image of me I was not very pleased with. In an early essay about keeping a notebook, Didion remarks it is a good thing to have at least a nodding acquaintance with all the previous iterations of ourselves. Her essay on morals re-introduced me to several previous iterations of myself I wish had remained forgotten.

There is a kind of relationship I am assuming with Didion as I read her essays that I haven't formed with a writer in a long time. When I read Orwell it is as tho I am I receiving writ. Somethings I disagree with, many I wish I had written (and everyone had been forced to read), and some strike with the force of revelation. But it is always Orwell and his subject. As I read Didion I am somehow included. Didion and her subject and me. I don't mean I am interposing myself between her and her subjects or that I feel more free to criticize. Didion somehow, without ever explicitly saying so, invites her readers to participate. It would take me some serious effort to put it more clearly than that. Maybe it's her habit of including the contexts in which she is writing - the piece on morality was at least partly composed in a motel room in Death Valley. That isn't an irrelevant detail; the first stab at a definition involves events particular her circumstance. But it is also a kind of invitation. I'm sure it is usually taken as an invitation to deconstruct the works until nothing remains. I prefer to think of it as an invitation to reconstruct the process of writing the work - to wonder at the segments that didn't make the final edit.

Back to the title. I think Didion is wrong in equating morality and character. Perhaps this is because I live in an age where the politics of oppression and identity as so present. The willingness to just get on with the work in front of you is a fine notion if you can forget the work in front of you was probably put there by someone. As she uses the term I am a man of low character and that I cannot admit. So, judged purely by how closely the text fits the title, the essay is a failure. Of course if that was a useful test, almost everything I have ever written would be a failure.