John Altmann

11/14/15

Media, Massacres and Moral Judgments

ISIS is a terrorist organization void of any kind of rational dimension. Their moral judgments stem from an extremist interpretation of the Quran which sees them commit atrocities as they have done tonight in Paris which has seen upwards of 153 people dead in their God's name. When I look at ISIS, I see David Hume's moral Frankenstein. Hume believed that human beings arrive at moral judgments through their emotions. So when a crowd of people see that a person has been shot, they react with horror and revulsion. This response would indicate to Hume that this crowd sees people being shot as immoral. In the case of ISIS, when one sees a woman walking the streets and not adhering to what they deem to be proper dress, the response to that is repugnance and anger and the result is severe physical punishment. This emotional response would, again following Hume, indicate that a woman having autonomy over her body as it pertains to how she dresses is also immoral.

We can see that there is a very clear disparity between these two examples but they share one commonality. That is that they're missing a rational component. There is a distinct lack of intellect being used when arriving upon these moral judgments. This is where Immanuel Kant enters the fold. Kant believed that human beings arrive at moral judgments not through emotions but rather, through the use of rationality. What does a moral decision based solely on intellect look like? One could argue that the decision by the U.S. to use atomic bombs against Japan in World War II fits the bill. The Japanese refused to relent and the U.S. had at their disposal the means to finally bring an end to the war and any further loss of life on the Allied side. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later and Japan formally surrenders thus ending the war.

However there seems to be a problem with this view as well. Given what we know about atomic bombs and the effect of radiation today, we know the suffering we inflicted upon Japan with them was not painless and immediate. We incurred suffering upon an entire nation's people many of whom were ordinary citizens with no relation to the war other than being citizens of a country the Allied powers deemed adversarial. Warfare calls at times for cold logic but had an emotional response risen to the surface, one might have pondered what they were about to do to an entire people and upon further deliberation, felt disgusted and chosen a different path entirely.

So we can say at the risk of sounding aphoristic, that whether it is emotion without intellect or intellect without emotion, the end result is blindness. This blindness is what we cannot permit to cascade over us in the wake of this mass bloodshed. If we were to rely purely on our emotions in the spirit of Hume to arrive at a moral judgment, the end result would be not only the condemnation of ISIS, but the condemnation of Muslims more generally. Proof of this is found in Donald Trump's persisting strength in the polls for the GOP nomination for President in 2016. After all, at a New Hampshire rally back in September when a man asked Donald Trump

how they were going to get rid of the Muslims Trump replied by saying that his camp was going to be looking at a lot of different things. This dominant GOP voice offered not chastisement to the man's feelings against Muslims, but affirmation.

Conversely, when one witnesses the events in Paris and tries to render a moral judgment intellectually, they may arrive at the conclusion that the answer is for Paris to be more aggressive with their borders and so too should we. The problem with this view however is that it is being expressed in the face of a widespread refugee crisis and this crisis will only seemingly become aggravated with more extensive border security measures. Not to mention that these same refugees are immigrating from destabilized regions that became that way because of ISIS and the war that we and other world powers have waged against them. To turn them away at the border, to forcibly remove them from what might have been their salvation is akin to victimizing them all over again. So if we do not respond morally to the horrors that have taken place in Paris either emotionally or intellectually, how do we respond?

German Philosopher Theodor Adorno would say that the dichotomy presented is a false one and that in fact we arrive at moral judgments through cohesion between both our emotions and our intellect. When we abandon one or the other in Adorno's view, we also abandon the chance to make any sort of judgment at all. Adorno would look at ISIS as a product of this very abandonment, for their act of evil tonight was not just an absence of emotion but an absence of reason as well. However, Adorno's critique goes even further. For Adorno was against mediums of mass communication because he believed that such mediums proved corrosive to both our emotions and our intellect and so subsequently, our ability to make moral judgments is also corroded.

It is this point of view that should make a sense of weariness and caution wash over us. We have developed a culture of communication that sees the media around us pump out one minute images and videos from the 9/11 attacks and then in the next minute pump out a movie about a war veteran and his actions against Muslims in the Middle East as was the case with the movie American Sniper about veteran Chris Kyle which was met with much praise and a kind of Islamophobic fervor in the film's aftermath. All of this media saturation and consumption has dulled our moral faculties. We no longer see Muslims as individuals comprising a group but as an indiscernible swarm threatening Western civilization. I say this, with the full knowledge that our institutions of mass communication will be hyperactive in the wake of this atrocity and some of the media that is circulated will perpetuate and attempt to strengthen this notion.

So what are we to do? I believe we would be wise to adhere to Adorno's ill will towards mass communication but since it would be irrational to think we can do it through isolation I propose a kind of active as opposed to passive consumption. Active in that we constantly challenge the narratives presented, active in that we are vigilant of any and all forms of racism that may emerge and do not permit that racism to permeate the discourse, active in that we fully recognize that images, videos, tweets, etc. are all fixated in particular spaces at particular times

and does not account for the complete picture. In short, we must mediate between our emotional response and our intellectual one. It is the mediation of emotion and reason that lends itself to a strong and healthy democracy. The abandonment of emotion or reason, makes us no better than ISIS themselves.