Moral Metaphors

Moral Metaphors

A solid moral vocabulary would seem essential to sound moral judgement and action. Yet we are signally lacking in that regard. Our language doesn’t aid the cause of morality. Can it be revised and improved? Are we conceptually lacking in our moral attitudes? These are important questions, especially in a time of moral…moral what? What is the name of the state we are in when we are thinking and acting immorally (unethically)? There are two old standbys repeated with numbing frequency: “morally bankrupt” and “lacks a moral compass”. Notice immediately that the latter has the antonym “has a moral compass”, but we can’t say “is morally solvent” or “is able to pay his moral debts”. To be bankrupt is to lack money, whether through one’s own fault or by bad luck. But we don’t think that you can be morally bankrupt and yet not to blame for it (if we believe in blame at all). We don’t say, “He is morally bankrupt, but it’s not his fault, he fell on hard moral times”. Nor do we suppose that he might receive a moral windfall and return to moral solvency. The metaphor is extremely limited and mostly inapt: to be morally bad is not the same as lacking some desirable quantity of something; it isn’t like being short of food. Moreover, a person generally suffers from bankruptcy—it is not prudentially desirable—but moral bankruptcy is not invariably associated with personal catastrophe. A person can be morally bankrupt and not give a damn, even revel in it. The state of being financially bankrupt is not like the state of being a vicious psychopath. The only point of analogy is lack: the bankrupt person lacks money and the evil person lacks morals. You might as well say a bad person is morally shirtless or shoeless. The bankruptcy metaphor is singularly unapt. But we keep falling back on it, as if nothing else comes to mind. In a logically perfect language, we would have a much better description. When I use the phrase, I always feel a shudder of semantic inadequacy—is that the best you can come up with?

The talk of a “moral compass” is hardly any better. Who came up with this? Again, it is clearly metaphorical; you don’t literally have a compass in your hand or head. It suggests the idea that a person without one of these has no sense of direction morally. A moral problem is a navigation problem, a problem about getting from A to B. We need to be pointed this way not that. Is that what a moral problem is? Don’t we often know the direction we should go but lack the moral strength to go there? You can’t say, “He knew just what to do, but he didn’t have the moral compass to point him in the right direction”. He had the compass; he just didn’t have the motor. Virtue isn’t just knowing what you should do; it’s having the will to do it. Moreover, whether you have a compass is a matter of luck for which you are not responsible; you might lose your compass over the side of the ship. But to lack a moral character is not a matter of luck in this way: you can be blamed for lacking a moral compass but not for lacking a physical compass. Is lacking a moral compass like lacking a moral map or written directions? These don’t seem like good metaphors, so why is the compass metaphor any better? A good person judges rightly and acts on that judgment; he doesn’t have an instrument that helps him figure out where to go. And notice that we don’t say, “He has a moral compass” if we wish to commend a person morally; that seems much too weak, a necessary condition perhaps but not a sufficient condition. Again, the metaphor is feeble at best—and only a metaphor. What is the literal truth we are trying to capture?

The trouble is we don’t have much to fall back on. Some people like to say, “That’s not who we are” or “That’s not who you are”, but this attempt to de-normativize morality falls flat and invites the response, “That is exactly what we are, though it’s not what we should be”. We can of course say, “He is morally bad”, but it lacks in punch and descriptive power; it cries out for articulation (hence compasses and bankruptcies). Suppose I want to say in urgent terms that the country I am living in has become morally bad, seriously so: what linguistic resources can I call upon? Not much springs to mind: I can try “morally blind” but that doesn’t really cut it (like “morally blinkered”); it’s too weak and seeing-oriented. I might try “morally lobotomized”: that has the right amount of punch, but is rather recherche and lacking in accusations of culpability. Nor will it do to say “morally insane” or “morally broken” or “morally subpar” or “morally deformed”. We are faced with real lexical poverty just where we need lexical richness. There is nothing wrong with “morally corrupt”, but that only covers taking bribes and the like. We have only inadequate metaphors to express our most serious moral opinions. What were the Nazis—“morally bankrupt”, “lacking in a moral compass”? These locutions just don’t cut it. Of course, we can say they were “evil”, but that leaves us with a rather colorless term with little descriptive content (sometimes people report to animal imagery at this point, but that is obviously no use). I thus declare an emergency situation, linguistically speaking: we don’t know how to describe the things we most deplore, which lets those things get away with it linguistically. If only there was a term that hit the nail squarely on the head and conveyed a suitable sense of outrage! Vague analogies to bankruptcies and compasses land far from the mark.[1]

[1] The demise of religion has left our moral vocabulary distinctly diluted and thinned out. We can no longer deploy words like “ungodly”, “satanic”, “devilish”, “wicked”, “sinful”, “demonic”, “damnable”, “infernal”, “fallen”, etc. We don’t know how to describe serious moral badness anymore, so we resort to feeble metaphors. The time is ripe for linguistic innovation.