The Capacity for Ethical Conduct

On psychic existence and the way we relate to others

David P. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135075477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

What is the root cause of ethical failure? Why is preoccupation with ethics more a part of the problem than a part of the solution? What makes ethical conduct a natural expression of who we are? What enables us to be ourselves in our relations with others?

Ethical failure has become a significant concern in public life, in organizations and in educational institutions. The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores how qualities of character and personality either make ethical conduct possible for the individual or foster ethical failure.

David Levine discusses how ethical conduct is a special way of relating to others, one that secures respect for their integrity by assuring that what they do can express who they are. He argues that this special way of relating to others results not from knowledge of, or a stated commitment to, rules, norms and values, but from the way we experience ourselves, especially from our ability to make a positive emotional investment in being and having a self. Traditionally, emphasis on the importance of values and ethics in shaping conduct tends to be connected to the need to find fault in self and others, fostering an atmosphere where the self is put at risk in its relations to others. This means that an excessive emphasis on ethics, rather than assuring ethical conduct, tends instead to create interpersonal settings marked by emotional assault. Because of this, talk about ethics often expresses ambivalence about ethical conduct, which makes the familiar combination of preoccupation with ethics and ethical failure unsurprising.

The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores the ways in which the interpersonal world of work either fosters a feeling of safety or encourages various forms of emotional assault. Presenting case studes and applying psychoanalytic object relation theory and self psychology, this book explores the factors underlying ethical failure and the capacity for ethical conduct. It will be of interest to scholars and practioners in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, sociology, organizational dynamics, management and public administration.

Chapter 1

Truth

What is true about the true self? I think we can approach an answer to this question if we consider what Winnicott refers to as the “false self.” Winnicott uses the term false self to refer to the self that exists for others (1986, pp.65–70). The self as it exists for others differs from the true self because, for Winnicott, existing for others means complying with them. When we comply with others what they see in us is an extension of themselves; so, in our relationship with them we do not exist. For Winnicott, the true self is true because in connecting with it we feel that we exist. The false self is false because in occupying that self we do not exist. True and false used in this way, then, express an observation about how people experience self and other and an implicit ethical judgment about the value of psychic existence.

The problem of the false self arises when relatedness comes to depend on compliance, so the opposition briefly considered in the Introduction dominates in both psychic and intra-psychic life. You can either relate or exist, but not both. The opposition between relating and existing develops not because the existence of self threatens the existence of others, but because existence provokes shame and envy in those who do not.¹ The problem, then, is the dominance in social settings of those whose existence is, for themselves, deeply problematic. If there is an impulse to dominate others (which is to say to assure that they do not exist), it comes not from our impulse to exist in our own right, but from the unconscious conviction that, lacking a secure internal source of being, we do not exist and therefore must rid our world of those who do because their presence provokes shame. Where shame for the self dominates, others perceived not to share that shame become objects of envy. Envy can promote in us a powerful desire to take from others what is lacking in us: the capacity to make contact with the self and thus become a center of initiative. Then, our intent in relating to others is not to affirm their presence but to negate it so we can moderate or dispel our feelings of shame and envy. Loss of connection with our selves is, then, the starting point for ways of relating that attack the self in others.

The false self disconnects the inner world from the world outside. It presents to others something that is not real in order to assure that what is most important about us will not be known to them. This something that is not real is a façade of pride meant to replace the reality of shame. There is embedded in this a kind of correspondence theory of truth only taken in reverse. Truth is the correspondence of what appears for others with what exists in the inner world. The two do not correspond when all others have of us to know and relate to is the false self. But, the less it is safe for others to know our true self, the less safe it is for us to do so as well. Where the disparity between what others know of us and what we know of ourselves is too sharp, it becomes difficult for us to sustain our knowledge of ourselves, and we have a tendency to lose track of that knowledge so we can live with others. The result is to re-establish a correspondence between subjective (inner world) and objective (the world of others), but at a considerable cost. When external reality is the world of the false self, then, paradoxically, we experience what is real as also unreal; the world of relating to others is disconnected from what is real about the self. In this world, what is spoken about the self is not true, and, indeed, this activity of speaking what is not true becomes the main purpose of relating.

The falsity that matters psychically is not the failure of the inner world to correspond to something outside, but the failure of what we present to the world to correspond to something inside: the reality of the self, and most importantly the reality of how the self feels about itself. Because this second failure involves misleading self and other, it hides, distorts, and lies. What matters is not only the truth, then, but the ability to tell the truth (Erikson 1964, Chapter V). The obstacle to psychic truth is the need to tell lies, especially lies about the self.

***

To illuminate the need to tell lies and the related link between psychic truth and ethical conduct, I turn to someone for whom hiding and seeking truth is the sum and substance of virtue: Raymond Chandler. Chandler is one of the preeminent practitioners of a genre of fiction that is all about the search for truth and the triumph over lies, about someone who is “in the hide-and-seek business” (Chandler 1958, p.27; hereafter PB). The following is a rough and general outline of his story.²

The story begins in the office of a not very well off or successful private detective. To find him, you pass through “a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization” (Chandler 1949, p.3; hereafter LS). He is competent enough, but too honest to make much money. As he puts it: “You can’t make much money at this trade, if you’re honest,” which he is, “painfully” (Chandler 1939, p.56; hereafter BS).

We find him sitting alone, drinking whisky, feeling that his life has lost its core. He’s an alcoholic, or something close to it, and he’s at least moderately depressed.³ He has no close friends, although he knows many people. He has little that he can call his own except his virtues. Others can take him or leave him. “I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me” (BS, p.158). The room he lives in contains everything connected to him: “Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing” (BS, p.158).

His private world is saturated with the sense of loss, the feeling that something important is missing. This something is the most valuable thing, but he cannot quite remember what it is: “I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again” (Chandler 1942, p.262; hereafter HW). He does not think that what is missing can be had. What he does think is that the things that can be had are not this something of importance he is missing, and therefore are not worth having.

He has an invitation to meet a prospective employer. He arranges a meeting at which the job is explained to him: a missing person, a stolen item, someone needs protection. His prospective employer tells him a story. The story does not add up. He knows it isn’t true; his client is holding back vital information, even lying. “There was something wrong with the job from the start. I could feel it. But I needed the money” (Chandler 1940, p.75; hereafter FML). Whatever the initial premise of the story, it will become a story about finding something that has been lost, or run away, or been taken.

His search is for the truth. He encounters considerable difficulty in his task, but not primarily because the truth is obscure in itself. The man or woman who hires him may know much of it, as do the people he interviews in his effort to find out what happened. The primary difficulty is that no one involved in the case—the police, the witnesses, his client—will tell the truth. Some refuse to say what they know; others lie. His is a world of avoidance and lies: “She’s a grifter, shamus. I’m a grifter. We’re all grifters” (BS, p.168).

The most honest policeman he meets is only as “honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style” (BS, p.204). “The law isn’t justice”; it’s only a mechanism (Chandler 1953, p.56; hereafter LG). Lawyers are “the kind you hope the other guy has”; and doctors are “discouraged men who know exactly where they stand, what kind of patients they can get and how much money they can be squeezed into paying” (LG, p.128).

Women are cold and seductive. They have “little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain” (LG, p.5). While “worth a stare,” they mean trouble (BS, p.17). After a phone conversation with such a woman, the detective experiences “a curious feeling of having talked to somebody that didn’t exist” (BS, p.271). These women dominate the detective’s experience, but they are not real: “In a couple of days I would forget what she looked like. Because in a way, she was so unreal” (LS, p.237). Women treat the detective as an object to be used and manipulated. Indeed, for them, the detective’s fears and desires are the material of their control over him: “If I can’t scare you, lick you, or seduce you, what the hell can I buy you with?” (LS, p.74) To women such as this, the heart is the weak point. A man is killed by a bullet that “had been fired by someone who knew where the heart was” (LS, p.198). Women in the detective’s world are all promise without fulfillment, love as deprivation of love.⁴ They are beautiful, but it is an odd beauty that cannot survive the truth. When confronted by the truth “without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful” (FML, p.279).

Sometimes he runs into the opposite sort of woman, a woman from the Midwest, who wears “no make-up, no lipstick, and no jewelry.” She has the look of a librarian (LS, p.6), and wears “a hat that had been taken from its mother too young” (LS, p.6). The detective does not quite believe she is different from the others. He sees something underneath the appearance: “Anybody ever tell you you’re a cute little trick?” (LS, p.7). She turns out no less dangerous than the women who look that way. “I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk” (LS, p.5).

There are other sorts of women, honest and attractive, though not quite beautiful, not quite perfect, who are also attracted to him. But they are not for him: “She’s a nice girl. Not my type ... I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin” (FML, p.196). The “smooth shiny girls” live in expensive houses, houses that reflect their qualities. They dazzle; they impress; they seduce. But, they are empty inside, filled with the dead, the dying, or the only seemingly alive. “And, there were flowers. There were a million flowers” (FLM, p.122).

His client claims to want him to find the truth, but this claim is no more true than the story he or she tells. The client really wants something else. This something else might be money, or it might be protection for a way of life placed in jeopardy by events associated with a loss or disappearance. At some point the detective might be offered a share in the money or in that way of life if he will only collude in hiding the truth. What those involved, sometimes including the client, really want is to corrupt the hero of the story, to appeal to desires other than his desire to find and know the truth. In this, the client and others eventually fail.

The detective seeks a moral truth, and the untruth he encounters is also a moral untruth. But, correspondence to reality and coherence are important. The truth is what really happened, not what the people involved tell him happened. Telling a good story is not good enough; it is part of the problem not its solution. After all, along the way everyone has a story to tell, but few tell much that is true. He finds the truth by discovering pieces of reality hidden in a fabric of lies.

He also finds truth by sensing when stories don’t add up. Pieces are missing or conflict with each other. The truth for him has a kind of ugly purity about it. In this it is not the psychic reality of those around him, which in the end he does not understand, but a kind of overly pure moral truth: the truth of guilt.

The detective finds the truth partly because he refuses to give it up or to take anything in its place, partly because of the acuteness of his intuition. When intuition plays a large role, one gets the feeling that the detective knows the truth all along but cannot gain access to it until he has considered all the lies. The detective has a “strange, clarified moment” when he suddenly knows something he has “no reason for knowing” (PB, p.136). Taken together, the lies establish the truth as their own hidden pattern.

In the end, the truth comes out. But what does it matter? People are not made happier; indeed, it is not unusual for his investigation to make virtually all those involved considerably less happy. They are disturbed, their lives torn apart, the guilty are made to suffer one way or another.⁵ In light of the truth, the detective is no less depressed, his life has no greater meaning for him. “I was a grain of sand on the desert of oblivion” (LG, p.136); “I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the wastebasket” (LS, p.179).

The detective feels no better because acting in the world, which is what he does, never alters psychic reality. He does not seek to expose wrong because he thinks doing so will enable truth to regain its place in the world. He does it because he believes that what is wrong, especially what is wrong inside, cannot be set right; it can only be demonstrated to exist in the world. The detective lives with his guilt, and so, he believes, should others live with theirs.

The detective’s story is his “adventure in search of a hidden truth” (Chandler 1950, p.18; hereafter SAM). Wilfred Bion says of certain kinds of hope, that “[o]nly by remaining a hope does hope persist” (1961, pp.151–2). This holds in its way for certain kinds of truth, which remain powerful so long as they remain hidden, so long as we search for them rather than finding them. For the detective, the point is to confront the lie and make it give up its secret. For him, the truth is not so important as the lie.

Because this is a moral truth, if it matters at all, it must matter on a moral plane. What is this moral truth established by the end of the story? The reason the detective takes the job in the first place is his sense that there is a long-standing disturbance in the moral universe: “something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot” (LS, p.81).

The disturbance in the moral universe is a wrong done in the past for which no one (or possibly the wrong person) has paid the price in guilt and remorse. It is the detective’s job, or his need, to assure that the price gets paid by the guilty party. This is the price he himself pays every hour of every day. His work is to make others see that they must pay as well. The moral truth, then, is the truth of justice, but only the justice of imposed guilt and remorse. The pursuit of this truth, like the chess master, is cold and remorseless, “almost creepy in its silent implacability” (HW, p.265). No wonder the detective is depressed.

The detective holds a mirror to those around him. This is the mirror in which we are made to see the truth of our false selves: “Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had” (LG, p.186). He tells those he encounters a truth about themselves: that they are living a lie. They respond with anger and violence.⁶ It is obvious then, why he is by himself, why he works and lives alone. He knows that he will be alone and he knows how long he will be alone:

Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my own conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I know you won’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good.

(HW, p.120)

The detective does not care what he says to people, what his destruction of their false selves costs them (LG, p.193; see also pp.133–6). But, he cannot get beyond the truth of the false self. For him, there is only the false self and its negation. The negation of the false self is not, however, the true self, but emptiness and despair. Beyond the destruction of the lie, there is no moral truth. The detective is driven by his anger and despair over a lost world, a world whose beauty acts as a painful reminder:

After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not very much, but as if they had kept this much just to remind people this had once been a clean open beach where the waves came in and creamed and the wind blew and you could smell something besides hot fat and cold sweat.

(FML, p.239)

This world was not just lost, it was taken away, even wasted, by those who own and live in the expensive houses. It cannot be restored, but the pain of its loss can be remembered and imposed on (some of) those responsible. This is justice for the detective; it is what he lives for.

It is no wonder, then, that the detective lives in fear. He fears “death and despair ... dark water and drowned men’s faces and skulls with empty eye sockets.” He is afraid of “dying, of being nothing” (FML, p.251). He fears that he will find what he seeks, and that he will not. There is much to fear in his world, dangerous men and women, filled with hatred and violence, who care not a bit for anyone but themselves, and not much for themselves either.

But this threat coming from outside is a small thing compared to the danger from within: “It got darker. I thought; and thought in my mind moved with a kind of sluggish stealthiness, as if it was being watched by bitter and sadistic eyes” (FML, p.237).

So, he drinks to make his “brain fuzzy enough to stop thinking” (HW, p.255). But the truth he finds outside does nothing to eradicate the thought in his mind. So he acts tough, because someone “with a bad conscience always acts tough” (LG, p.100).

***

The detective searches for the truth of justice as punishment, justice that places the burden on the guilty party. The detective stands in the way of those who would shift their burden onto others. Something more, however, is hidden, even from the detective, something he searches for but does not expect to find, something he does not quite know he wants and does not believe he can have. He experiences this something else as a dream. He looks back at the house of a lover. It “seemed completely dark. No one lived there. It was all a dream” (PB, p.79). It is this dream that haunts the detective ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Capacity for Ethical Conduct
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Truth
• 2 Taking responsibility
• 3 Judgment
• 4 Normlessness
• 5 The attack on connection
• 6 The unhappy consciousness
• 7 The public trust
• 8 Virtuous intent
• 9 Knowing and caring
• 10 Wishes and words
• Notes
• References
• Index