Disney don't preach

the limits of the turn to ethics

original source unknown

A few years ago, my teenage kids staged a revolt in our TV room. They refused to watch anything produced by Disney because, according to them, its content became “preachy” and “annoying.” If even the kids noticed this, I thought, then it must be real, and I was not imagining it. My suspicion was vindicated shortly after, when Disney’s CEO publicly admitted that the company had been focusing on “movie messaging” a bit too much.

Everything, it seems, from education, medicine, mass media, to entertainment is now presented and judged through the lens of specific ethical expectations. When the online world exploded over Google’s Gemini generating images of racially diverse Nazis, I knew that even algorithms had been enlisted to provide a moral pedagogy no one had asked for.

What the general public may call “moralizing” has a more formal, sophisticated academic term: the turn to ethics. I first encountered the idea in a book discussion of C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, of all places. In one of the chapters, Lewis explores the human propensity to love and even idolize non-personal objects. He chose patriotism as an example, which is an obvious choice of a love that can turn toxic. He wrote this back in 1960:

“Patriotism has, then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step and have already begun to step into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to prepare for their defense. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed, this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light.”

The ever-insightful Lewis intuited that ethics steps in whenever conventional means of producing the good are no longer available. But why should ethics, of all things, emerge as a default replacement? What kind of dark magic makes the turn to ethics inevitable under certain conditions?

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In the early 2000s, in one of his interviews, Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered a partial answer to this question. He reflected on the demise of liberal humanism in the twentieth century; it is something he said few had contemplated or analyzed at the time. He defined humanism as the product of the Enlightenment, a movement that retained some of the best of Christianity, such as human freedom, dignity, and concern for the oppressed, while removing God from the framework. Humanism reigned unabated in the West for several centuries until the twin disasters of the twentieth century: two self-annihilating world wars of “infinite cruelty.” After these wars, he argued, humanism was at a crossroads: admit its uselessness and defeat or elevate itself even higher as the arbiter of peace, human dignity, and justice worldwide.

Proponents of humanism chose the second option, which in a way signified its own turn to ethics, a kind of death bloom in a bid for survival. As a human-centered movement, liberal humanism failed to prevent the terrible wars of the early twentieth century. And in the latter half of the century, as it went global through international organizations and watchdogs, it failed once again to ensure peace and prosperity for all, turning instead to prescriptive moralizing.

Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the failures of humanism underscores that the turn to ethics occurs when conventional means—whether political, scientific, or social—for achieving promised results or consensus have failed. His insight into the failure of liberalism and its bid for global reach may also help explain why the anti-liberal countermovement will likewise be global.

Drawing on their insights decades ago, C. S. Lewis and Solzhenitsyn intuitively grasped the contours of a phenomenon that has since become a pervasive feature of our lives. But the most comprehensive explanation of the actual mechanism behind the turn to ethics appears in Martti Koskenniemi’s essay “The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Turn to Ethics in International Law” (Modern Law Review, 2002). In this article, Koskenniemi, a diplomat and international lawyer, maps out eight steps that lead the profession of international law from formalism to ethics.

Turns out, international law lacked a firm foundation from the start. Birthed within Western Liberalism tradition, it has no independent metaphysical ground for the idea of the good nor proper theory of its own. Instead, it borrows heavily from political theory and legal language designed for local contexts under normal conditions. In other words, legal and political frameworks developed for local contexts could not be generalized or expanded to the global scale.

And yet, the UN Charter (the main law of international relations) was supposed to be a one-size-fits-all solution for any conflict worldwide. From its very inception, international law thus began its descent into ethics. Koskenniemi regards this turn as a tragic revelation of international law’s weakness and failure to act within legal bounds. To illustrate this failure, he examines NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia, in which roughly 500 Serbian civilians died.

According to Koskenniemi, most international lawyers supported the bombings of Serbia, knowing that it exceeded the strict reading of the UN Charter, or to put it simply, that it was not entirely legal. In his article, Koskenniemi demonstrates that international law was effectively powerless in dealing with Serbia’s situation. Consequently, lawyers supported bombing of Serbia and even presented it as legal because Kosovo was framed as a moral issue requiring urgent action. When the moral duty to intervene with violence was invoked, nobody attempted to negotiate with the Serbians or consider any other political tools. Once again, ethics stepped in where, in this case, law could not provide a solution.

Even though Koskenniemi’s essay focuses on international law, the process he describes in his article shares features characteristic of the phenomenon more broadly. These include distortions of reality when exceptional and peripheral cases are treated as normative and thrust to the center of public discourse; the decision-making of a select few who claim a moral high ground; shallow moralizing; and the ostracizing of opponents as immoral. All these features persist across domains touched by the same phenomenon. The turn to ethics usually provides an expedient solution for those who wish to wield moral language across the political spectrum, but its effects are usually short-lived, precisely because the turn to ethics marks the failure to provide real solutions.

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Meanwhile, we are at a crossroads of a different kind. While the public is inundated with incessant moralizing, many are either growing numb to it or, worse, violently recoiling from it in full-blown cynicism. Clearly, the ethical discourse has stretched way beyond its limits. What we need instead is a strong metaphysical framework for the idea of the good to ground our institutions and solutions that correspond to the nature of the problems we face: political solutions to political issues, economic solutions to economic problems. It is undoubtedly hard; it requires negotiation and abandoning the zero sum game mentality. Yet, it may be our only way out.

Though my kids never went back to watching Disney movies, or most of the traditional media for that matter, their little TV room rebellion gave me a great deal of hope. It occurred to me that they were not indifferent to moral questions. Quite the contrary: their moral instincts were kicked into high gear; rejecting coercion, however subtle, they looked for genuine persuasion. Perhaps in this moment, when so many, especially young people, are getting tired of moralizing, there is an openness, a longing even, to recover institutions that are built on a strong foundation of the common good, which is not abstracted or imposed from top to bottom, but rooted in shared human experiences, practices, and ends.