Morality After Boston

I don’t know whether, in the aftermath of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, our sense of morality becomes clearer or not. My initial reaction of revulsion - both at the human cost and at the very idea that someone somewhere thought this was the way forward – seemed to present morality in clear black and white terms: the bombing was about as wrong as you can get morally. It was indiscriminately destructive of human life, and young life at that. It was so incredibly sad. It was pointless. It was evil.

And those runners, organisers and spectators who instantly thought of others and who helped and comforted the wounded, despite the immediate risk of further bombings, deserve our total moral approbation. These are good men and women, showing true humanity, whom I hope I might emulate if ever I am placed in similar circumstances.

But morality cannot rest there. At its core morality is not about our yesterdays but what we should do right now, this moment. And right this moment, to use Obama’s words, there is a need to understand why. Yet the reason why is not clear at all.

Kant - we should remember - never asked why. His most important question, underpinning even his highest moral philosophy, was how ("How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?"). ‘How’ gives us a clearer object to investigate. In the confusion ‘how’ gives us focus. 'How' allows means to be assessed relative to ends, but also subjects those ends to a fair bit of questioning too. "How", we must ask, "is your goal valid?" "It just is" is no answer.

So perhaps we too should ask how instead of why. Not just in the detailed forensic investigation now underway (and certainly not in the brow-beating sense of "How could we have allowed this?"), but much more fundamentally. We should ask how the perpetrator(s) came to view ordinary, everyday people as somehow being legitimate targets. To plant a bomb is an evil act, but the seed of such evil germinates in the failure to appreciate other people as real individuals, and instead dismiss them merely as an undifferentiated mass under the heading of ‘Americans’ or ‘Bostonians’ or 'Runners' or whatever category your cod philosophy suggests. Behind such indiscriminate evil there is always a superiority complex that pathetically employs such categories.

When it comes to questions of morality ‘how’ is more significant than ‘why’. In the end ‘why’ can only come from the mouth(es) of the perpetrator(s) and, to be honest, I do not want to hear their irrational rationalisations of why they did what they did. Naturally they will have their superficial reasons but nothing they could say would make their actions any less evil; it would only add stupidity to their enormity.

‘How’ stands a better chance of telling us what we want to know. 'How' might get us to the point of seeing how such people are created. 'How' might help us see how certain ideas can be used to reduce whole masses of real, individual people to subhuman categories ready to be slaughtered. Asking ‘how’ is what we need to do right now. And of course keep running.