Rethinking Autonomy: A Critique of Principlism in Biomedical Ethics

Chapter 6 Emotion, Aesthetics, and Moral Action

Chapter 6 Emotion, Aesthetics, and Moral Action Belief in karma is not a blind submission to fate, but a step towards a strenuous effort to overcome selfish motives and to emerge from the vicious narrowness of individual life. . . . Buddhist fatalism, as it is often called, teaches how to renounce self for broader selfhood and a higher cause. —Anesaki (1963:73) 6.1. Situational Ethics in Japan Throughout this book, I have explored several key points related to how Japanese conceptualize ethics and think about autonomy, and it is helpful to summarize these ideas before we move on. First, although Japanese recognize and value individuality, there is a powerful sense that humans cannot truly act autonomously. The fact of being embedded in social contexts and the reality that humans are by definition interdependent necessitates moral decision making that is sensitive to the needs of others and to the context in which an act takes place. Right and wrong are not grounded in concepts of Truth, but in terms of context.1 Selfishness is 119 1. This should not be confused with the utilitarian emphasis on analyzing costs and benefits. Rather, the idea here is that right and wrong are determined on the basis of the circumstances of an action, not on the basis of an absolute notion of right and wrong, nor on the basis of a calculation of individual benefit, or general benefit. There is a sense in which individuals take into account the broader needs of the community, and in that sense there can be a linkage with rule utilitarianism, but as is seen in this chapter, the aesthetic features of the action also must be taken into account. 120 Rethinking Autonomy widely viewed in a negative light because it fails to situate the individual in a social context, instead emphasizing personal wants over awareness of the wants and needs of others. Second, specific types of acts, such as suicide, are not viewed as inherently moral or immoral. Rather, the moral value of an act is understood as arising within a context in which multiple agencies are expressed by multiple players. In order to judge the moral value of an act, it is necessary to understand the circumstances that stimulated a set of actions. Thus, although I have never done so, if I were to ask someone in Japan to respond to the moral dilemma in which one is asked about the ethics of going back in time to kill Hitler as a child, thus saving millions of lives, I would not be surprised to find the response to be an unequivocal yes, without a great deal of consternation over the moral content of the act. As Takie Lebra writes: “The clear-cut dualism of good and bad, right and wrong that is characteristic of unilateral determinism is not congenial to the Japanese sense of morality. For the Japanese, goodness or badness is a relative matter, relative to social situation and impact. . . .” (1976:11). Thus, as discussed in Chapter 5, in one context, the act of suicide may be viewed as horrifying and sad, in another it may be viewed as sad but honorable, and in another it may be viewed as sad, but in some way beautiful and an appropriate, if unfortunate, act. Suicide itself is neither moral nor immoral; its moral value is the product of interpreting the context in which it occurred, a process that will involve understanding not only the particulars of behavior, but the aesthetics of that behavior as well. Indeed, Japanese do not find aesthetic content simply in objects of art set off in places like museums; the things of everyday life, such as food presentation or daily rituals are viewed as aesthetic-laden (cf. Keene 1971:13). Objects associated with the arts often have very practical uses, such as pottery for the Tea Ceremony, which for Japanese is an example of high art that is used in the doing of a ritual activity that itself is viewed as an aesthetic experience (see Anderson 1991, for a good discussion of the Tea Ceremony). Rather than conceptualizing right and wrong in terms of an “objective” absolute that grounds moral action, or for that matter judgments drawn from the subjectivity of human experience connected to moral relativism, the Japanese concept of the good at least in part arises out of a transcendence of objectivity and subjectivity through the awareness of the beauty of an event or act. As such, moral truth coincides with virtue conceptualized...