The conscience of huckleberry finn jonathan bennett summary

Applying Philosophy To Life

C H A P T E R 1GOOD AND EVIL

Almost no one doubts that cruelty is wrong. But philosophers differ on how to explain what is wrong about acting cruelly and even about the meaning of right and wrong. So we have various systems of moral theory. Inevitably we have the possibility that a philosopher may devise a pseudo-ethical doctrine that loses sight of basic intuitions about human dignity and elementary decency. When such a doctrine achieves currency and popular respectability, it becomes a powerful force for evil. For then, what passes as conventional wisdom allows the average person to behave in reprehensible but conventionally acceptable ways.

In Chapter One we find examples of the ways the moral intuitions of the indi- vidual may conflict with publicly accepted principles that are not grounded in re- spect for human dignity. In the first two selections, “From Cruelty to Goodness” by Philip Hallie and “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” by Jonathan Bennett, the moral failure of principle is easy to diagnose. A dominant group adopts a phi- losophy that permits it to confine its moral concern to those inside the group, treat- ing outsiders as beyond the moral pale; their pain, their dignity, even their very lives merit no moral consideration. Huckleberry Finn, being white, is within the moral domain. His mentors have taught him that he does not owe moral behavior to slaves. Yet Huck treats Jim, the runaway slave, as if he too deserves the respect due a white person. And therein lies Huck’s conflict. Everything he conventionally believes tells him he is doing wrong in helping Jim elude his pursuers.

Mark Twain’s account of the conflict between official “book” morality and the ground-level morality of an innately decent and sympathetic person is one of the best in literature. Usually the conflict is embodied in two protagonists (Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables is an example), but Huck Finn’s conflict is within himself. And we are glad that his decency is stronger than his book morality. Both Jonathan Bennett and Philip Hallie quote the Nazi officer Heinrich Himmler, one of the fathers of the “final solution,” as a spokesman for those who advocate suspend- ing all moral feeling toward a particular group. Interestingly, Himmler considered

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himself all the more moral for being above pitying the children and other innocent victims outside the domain of moral consideration. Indeed, we hear stories of Germans who were conscience-stricken because—against their principles—they allowed some Jews to escape.

Our dismay at man’s inhumanity to man is qualified by the inspiring example of the residents of the French village Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who acted together to care for and save 6,000 Jews, mostly children, from the Nazis. Le Chambon is said to have been the safest place in Europe for a Jew during World War II. From his studies of the village, Hallie concludes that Le Chambon residents successfully com- bated evil because they never allowed themselves to be blind to the victim’s point of view. “When we are blind to that point of view we can countenance and perpetrate cruelty with impunity.” The true morality of Le Chambon drives out false and hyp- ocritical Nazi “decencies” that ignore the most elementary moral intuitions and that permit and encourage the horrors of Himmler’s and Hitler’s Germany.

The advent of totalitarianisms in the twentieth century has given rise to large concentration camps in which millions of innocents were incarcerated, tormented, and murdered. Moral philosophers have written much about the amorality of the people who planned, built, and administered these camps. Tzvetan Todorov and Anne Applebaum, in the selections we have chosen, focus their attention on the morale of those who lived in conditions of unspeakable horror but who managed to survive to tell their stories. Experiments such as those conducted by Yale Univer- sity Psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s dramatically suggest that even ordi- nary men and women living in ordinary times can be moved to inflict grave harm on hapless innocents.

In his selection, Josiah Royce defends a morality that respects human dignity. Beginning from the axiom that we owe respect and decency to our neighbor, Royce confronts the question that the Nazis and all those who ignore the humanity of spe- cial groups pervert: Who, then, are our neighbors? Royce answers that our neigh- bors include anyone with feelings: “Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere even as in thee.” Royce calls this the moral insight. He points out that treating strangers with care and solicitude is hardly unnatural; for each of us, our future self is like a stranger to us, yet we are naturally concerned with the welfare of that stranger.

The moral blindness that is the opposite of Royce’s moral insight has tragic consequences for the victims whose humanity is ignored. The point is taken up by Hallie, who complains that some moral philosophers who concentrate on the motives and character of evildoers often fail to attend to the suffering of the victims. Hallie argues that it is not the character of evildoers that is the crucial element of evil, but rather that evil mainly consists in the suffering caused by the perpetrators of evil. For Hallie, evil is what evil does. He therefore takes sharp issue with Bennett for saying that the Nazi who professes to be affected by the suffering he causes is in some respects morally superior to theologians like Jonathan Edwards who never actually harmed anyone but who claim to have no pity for the sinner who would suffer the torments of the damned.

Do we punish people for the evil they do or for what they are? Herman Mel- ville’s Billy Budd is a classic on this question. Billy Budd is an exceptionally pure and good person who has committed a crime. We are tempted to say that Budd’s fine character exculpates his crime. But this could be a dangerous doctrine if

2 GOOD AND EVIL

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applied generally, since it challenges the principle that moral agents—including those of especially superior moral character—must be responsible to society for the consequences of their acts.

Friedrich Nietzsche challenges the tradition of Western morality with its moral insights and its Golden Rule to do to others what you would want them to do to you. He characterizes this tradition that enjoins us to protect the weak and whose origins lie in the teachings of Judaism and Christianity as “sentimental weakness” and a “denial of life.” According to Nietzsche, the tradition emasculates those who are strong, vital, and superior by forcing them to attend to the weak and mediocre. Nietzsche was especially effective in suggesting that morality often is used in hypo- critical ways to stifle initiative. Yet, on the whole, philosophers have rejected Nietzsche’s heroic morality as tending to encourage a morally irresponsible exercise of power. This is perhaps unfair, since Nietzsche himself almost certainly would have looked with contempt upon such self-styled “heroes” as the leaders of Nazi Germany. Another reason seems more valid: Nietzsche’s own ideal does in fact den- igrate sympathy with the weak and helpless, and so fails to convince those of us who see moral heroism in the likes of Huckleberry Finn and the people of Le Chambon.

GOOD AND EVIL 3

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From Cruelty to Goodness

Philip Hallie

Philip Hallie (1922–1994) was a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University. His published works include The Paradox of Cruelty (1969), Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979), and In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (2001).

Philip Hallie considers institutionalized cruelty and finds that, besides physically assaulting its victims, it almost always assaults their dignity and self-respect. As an example of the opposite of institutionalized cruelty, Hallie cites the residents of the French village of Le Chambon who, at grave risk to their lives, saved 6,000 Jews from the Nazis. For him the con- trary of being cruel is not merely ceasing to be cruel, nor is it fighting cru- elty with violence and hatred (though this may be necessary). Rather, it is epitomized in the unambiguous and unpretentious goodness of the citizens of Le Chambon who followed the positive biblical injunctions “Defend the fatherless” and “Be your brother’s keeper,” as well as the negative injunc- tions against murder and betrayal.

I am a student of ethics, of good and evil; but my approach to these two rather melodramatic terms is skeptical. I am in the tradition of the ancient Greek skepti- koi, whose name means “inquirers” or “investigators.” And what we investigate is relationships among particular facts. What we put into doubt are the intricate webs of high-level abstractions that passed for philosophizing in the ancient world, and that still pass for philosophizing. My approach to good and evil emphasizes not ab- stract common nouns like “justice,” but proper names and verbs. Names and verbs keep us close to the facts better than do our high-falutin common nouns. Names refer to particular people, and verbs connect subjects with predicates in time, while common nouns are above all this.

One of the words that is important to me is my own name. For me, philosophy is personal; it is closer to literature and history than it is to the exact sciences, closer to the passions, actions, and common sense of individual persons than to a dispas- sionate technical science. It has to do with the personal matter of wisdom. And so ethics for me is personal—my story, and not necessarily (though possibly) yours. It concerns particular people at particular times.

But ethics is more than such particulars. It involves abstractions, that is, rules, laws, ideals. When you look at the ethical magnates of history you see in their words and deeds two sorts of ethical rules: negative and positive. The neg- ative rules are scattered throughout the Bible, but Moses brought down from

FROM CRUELTY TO GOODNESS Copyright © The Hastings Center. Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder.

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Mount Sinai the main negative ethical rules of the West: Thou shalt not murder; thou shalt not betray.… The positive injunctions are similarly spread throughout the Bible. In the first chapter of the book of Isaiah we are told to “… defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” The negative ethic forbids certain actions; the pos- itive ethic demands certain actions. To follow the negative ethic is to be decent, to have clean hands. But to follow the positive ethic, to be one’s brother’s keeper, is to be more than decent—it is to be active, even aggressive. If the negative ethic is one of decency, the positive one is the ethic of riskful, strenuous nobility.

In my early studies of particularized ethical terms, I found myself dwelling upon negative ethics, upon prohibitions. And among the most conspicuous prohibitions I found embodied in history was the prohibition against deliberate harmdoing, against cruelty. “Thou shalt not be cruel” had as much to do with the nightmare of history as did the prohibitions against murder and betrayal. In fact, many of the Ten Commandments—especially those against murder, adultery, stealing, and betrayal—were ways of prohibiting cruelty.

Early in my research it became clear that there are various approaches to cru- elty, as the different commandments suggest. For instance, there is the way reflected in the origins of the word “cruel.” The Latin crudus is related to still older words standing for bloodshed, or raw flesh. According to the etymology of the word, cru- elty involves the spilling of blood.

But modern dictionaries give the word a different meaning. They define it as “disposed to giving pain.” They emphasize awareness, not simply bloodshed. After all, they seem to say, you cannot be cruel to a dead body. There is no cruelty with- out consciousness.

And so I found myself studying the kinds of awareness associated with the hurting of human beings. It is certainly true that for millennia in history and litera- ture people have been torturing each other not only with hard weapons but also with hard words.

Still, the word “pain” seemed to be a simplistic and superficial way of describ- ing the many different sorts of cruelty. In Reska Weiss’s Journey Through Hell (London, 1961) there is a brief passage of one of the deepest cruelties that Nazis perpetrated upon extermination camp inmates. On a march

Urine and excreta poured down the prisoners’ legs, and by nightfall the excrement, which had frozen to our limbs, gave off its stench.

And Weiss goes on to talk not in terms of “pain” or bloodshed, but in other terms:

… We were really no longer human beings in the accepted sense. Not even animals, but putrefying corpses moving on two legs.

There is one factor that the idea of “pain” and the simpler idea of bloodshed do not touch: cruelty, not playful, quotidian teasing or ragging, but cruelty (what the anti-cruelty societies usually call “substantial cruelty”) involves the maiming of a person’s dignity, the crushing of a person’s self-respect. Bloodshed, the idea of pain (which is usually something involving a localizable occurrence, localizable in a tooth, in a head, in short, in the body), these are superficial ideas of cruelty.

PHILIP HALLIE: FROM CRUELTY TO GOODNESS 5

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A whip, bleeding flesh, these are what the journalists of cruelty emphasize, follow- ing the etymology and dictionary meaning of the word. But the depths of an understanding of cruelty lie in the depths of an understanding of human dignity and of how you can maim it without bloodshed, and often without localizable bodily pain.

In excremental assault, in the process of keeping camp inmates from wiping themselves or from going to the latrine, and in making them drink water from a toilet bowl full of excreta (and the excreta of the guards at that) localizable pain is nothing. Deep humiliation is everything. We human beings believe in hierarchies, whether we are skeptics or not about human value. There is a hierarchical gap be- tween shit and me. We are even above using the word. We are “above” walking around besmirched with feces. Our dignity, whatever the origins of that dignity may be, does not permit it. In order to be able to want to live, in order to be able to walk erect, we must respect ourselves as beings “higher” than our feces. When we feel that we are not “higher” than dirt or filth, then our lives are maimed at the very center, in the very depths, not merely in some localizable portion of our bodies. And when our lives are so maimed we become things, slaves, instruments. From ancient times until this moment, and as long as there will be human beings on this planet, there are those who know this and will use it, just as the Roman slave owners and the Southern American slave owners knew it when—one time a year— they encouraged the slaves to drink all the alcohol they could drink so that they could get bestially drunk and then even more bestially sick afterwards, under the eyes of their generous owners. The self-hatred, the loss of self-respect that the Sat- urnalia created in ancient Rome, say, made it possible to continue using the slaves as things, since they themselves came to think of themselves as things, as subhuman tools of the owners and the overseers.

Institutionalized cruelty, I learned, is the subtlest kind of cruelty. In episodic cruelty the victim knows he is being hurt, and his victimizer knows it too. But in a persistent pattern of humiliation that endures for years in a community, both the victim and the victimizer find ways of obscuring the harm that is being done. Blacks come to think of themselves as inferior, even esthetically inferior (black is “dirty”); and Jews come to think of themselves as inferior, even esthetically (dark hair and aquiline noses are “ugly”), so that the way they are being treated is justified by their “actual” inferiority, by the inferiority they themselves feel.

A similar process happens in the minds of the victimizers in institutionalized cruelty. They feel that since they are superior, even esthetically (“to be blonde is to be beautiful”), they deserve to do what they wish, deserve to have these lower crea- tures under their control. The words of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, in Posen in the year 1943 in a speech to his SS subordinates in a closed session, show how institutionalized cruelty can obscure harmdoing:

… the words come so easily. “The Jewish people will be exterminated,” says every party member, “of course. It’s in our program … extermination. We’ll take care of it.” And then they come, these nice 80 million Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Sure the others are swine, but his one is a fine Jew.… Most of you will know what it means to have seen 100 corpses together, or 500 to 1,000. To have made one’s way through that, and … to have remained a decent person throughout, that is what has made us hard. That is a page of glory in our history.…

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In this speech he was making a sharp distinction between the program of crushing the Jews and the personal sentiments of individual Germans. The program stretched over years; personal sentiments were momentary. He was pleading for the program, for institutionalized destruction.

But one of the most interesting parts of the speech occurs toward the end of it:

… in sum, we can say that we fulfilled the heaviest of tasks [destroying the Jews] in love to our people. And we suffered no harm in our essence, in our soul, in our character.…

Commitment that overrides all sentimentality transforms cruelty and destruction into moral nobility, and commitment is the lifeblood of an institution.

Cruelty and the Power Relationships

But when I studied all these ways that we have used the word “cruelty,” I was nagged by the feeling that I had not penetrated into its inner structure. I was classi- fying, sorting out symptoms; but symptoms are signals, and what were the symp- toms signals of? I felt like a person who had been studying cancer by sorting out brief pains from persistent pains, pains in the belly from pains in the head. I was being superficial, and I was not asking the question, “What are the forces behind these kinds of cruelty?” I felt that there were such forces, but as yet I had not touched them.

Then one day I was reading in one of the great autobiographies of western civilization, Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times. The passage I was reading was about Douglass’s thoughts on the origins of slavery. He was asking himself: “How could these whites keep us enslaved?” And he suddenly realized:

My faculties and powers of body and soul are not my own, but are the property of a fellow-mortal in no sense superior to me, except that he has the physical power to compel me to be owned and controlled by him. By the combined physical force of the community I am his slave—a slave for life.

And then I saw that a disparity in power lay at the center of the dynamism of cru- elty. If it was institutional cruelty it was in all likelihood a difference involving both verbal and physical power that kept the cruelty going. The power of the majority and the weakness of a minority were at the center of the institutional cruelty of slavery and of Nazi anti-Semitism. The whites not only outnumbered the blacks in America, but had economic and political ascendancy over them. But just as impor- tant as these “physical” powers was the power that words like “nigger” and “slave” gave the white majority. Their language sanctified if it did not create their power ascendancy over the blacks, and one of the most important projects of the slaveholders and their allies was that of seeing to it that the blacks themselves thought of themselves in just these powerless terms. They utilized the language to convince not only the whites but the blacks themselves that blacks were weak in mind, in will power, and in worth. These words were like the excremental assault in the killing camps of the Nazis: they diminished both the respect the victimizers might have for their victims and the respect the victims might have for themselves. It occurred to me that if a power differential is crucial to the idea of cruelty, then

PHILIP HALLIE: FROM CRUELTY TO GOODNESS 7

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when that power differential is maintained, cruelty will tend to be maintained, and when that power differential is eliminated, cruelty will tend to be eliminated. And this seemed to work. In all kinds of cruelty, violent and polite, episodic and institu- tional, when the victim arms himself with the appropriate strength, the cruelty diminishes or disappears. When Jews joined the Bush Warriors of France, the Maquis, and became powerful enough to strike at Vichy or the Nazis, they stopped being victims of French and Nazi cruelty. When Frederick Douglass learned to use the language with great skill and expressiveness, and when he learned to use his physical strength against his masters, the power differential between him and his masters diminished, and so did their cruelty to him. In his autobiography he wrote:

A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise.

When I looked back at my own childhood in Chicago, I remembered that the physical and mental cruelties that I suffered in the slums of the southwest side when I was about ten years old sharply diminished and finally disappeared when I learned how to defend myself physically and verbally. It is exactly this lesson that Douglass learned while growing up in the cruel institution of slavery.

Cruelty then, whatever else it is, is a kind of power relationship, an imbalance of power wherein the stronger party becomes the victimizer and the weaker be- comes the victim. And since many general terms are most swiftly understood in relationship with their opposites (just as “heavy” can be understood most handily in relationship with what we mean by “light”) the opposite of cruelty lay in a sit- uation where there is no imbalance of power. The opposite of cruelty, I learned, was freedom from that unbalanced power relationship. Either the victim should get stronger and stand up to the victimizer, and thereby bring about a balance of their powers, or the victim should free himself from the whole relationship by flight.

In pursuing this line of thought, I came to believe that, again, dictionaries are misleading: many of them give “kindness” as the antonym for “cruelty.” In study- ing slavery in America and the concentration camps of central Europe I found that kindness could be the ultimate cruelty, especially when it was given within that un- balanced power relationship. A kind overseer or a kind camp guard can exacerbate cruelty, can remind his victim that there are other relationships than the relation- ship of cruelty, and can make the victim deeply bitter, especially when he sees the self-satisfied smile of his victimizer. He is being cruelly treated when he is given a penny or a bun after having endured the crushing and grinding of his mental and bodily well-being. As Frederick Douglass put it:

The kindness of the slave-master only gilded the chain. It detracted nothing from its weight or strength. The thought that men are for other and better uses than slavery throve best under the gentle treatment of a kind master.

No, I learned, the opposite of cruelty is not kindness. The opposite of the cruelty of the overseer in American slavery was not the kindness of that overseer for a moment or for a day. An episodic kindness is not the opposite of an

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institutionalized cruelty. The opposite of institutionalized cruelty is freedom from the cruel relationship.

It is important to see how perspectival the whole meaning of cruelty is. From the perspective of the SS guard or the southern overseer, a bit of bread, a smile is indeed a diminution of cruelty. But in the relationship of cruelty, the point of view of the victimizer is of only minor importance; it is the point of view of the victim that is authoritative. The victim feels the suffering in his own mind and body, whereas the victimizer, like Himmler’s “hard” and “decent” Nazi, can be quite un- aware of that suffering. The sword does not feel the pain that it inflicts. Do not ask it about suffering.

Goodness Personified in Le Chambon

All these considerations drove me to write my book The Paradox of Cruelty. But with the book behind me, I felt a deep discontent. I saw cruelty as an embodiment, a particular case of evil. But if cruelty is one of the main evils of human history, why is the opposite of cruelty not one of the key goods of human history? Freedom from the cruel relationship, either by escaping it or by redressing the imbalance of power, was not essential to what western philosophers and theologians have thought of as goodness. Escape is a negative affair. Goodness has something posi- tive in it, something triumphantly affirmative.

Hoping for a hint of goodness in the very center of evil, I started looking closely at the so-called “medical experiments” of the Nazis upon children, usually Jewish and Gypsy children, in the death camps. Here were the weakest of the weak. Not only were they despised minorities, but they were, as individuals, still in their non-age. They were dependents. Here the power imbalance between the cruel experimenters and their victims was at its greatest. But instead of seeing light or finding insight by going down into this hell, into the deepest depth of cruelty, I found myself unwillingly becoming part of the world I was studying. I found my- self either yearning to be viciously cruel to the victimizers of the children, or I found myself feeling compassion for the children, feeling their despair and pain as they looked up at the men and women in white coats cutting off their fingertips one at a time, or breaking their slender bones, or wounding their internal organs. Either I became a would-be victimizer or one more Jewish victim, and in either case I was not achieving insight, only misery, like so many other students of the Holocaust. And when I was trying to be “objective” about my studies, when I was succeeding at being indifferent to both the victimizers and the victims of these cruel relationships, I became cold; I became another monster who could look upon the maiming of a child with an indifferent eye.

To relieve this unending suffering, from time to time I would turn to the litera- ture of the French resistance to the Nazis. I had been trained by the U.S. Army to understand it. The resistance was a way of trying to redress the power imbalance between Hitler’s Fortress Europe and Hitler’s victims, and so I saw it as an enemy of cruelty. Still, its methods were often cruel like the methods of most power strug- gles, and I had little hope of finding goodness here. We soldiers violated the nega- tive ethic forbidding killing in order, we thought, to follow the positive ethic of being our brothers’ keepers.

PHILIP HALLIE: FROM CRUELTY TO GOODNESS 9

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And then one gray April afternoon I found a brief article on the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. I shall not analyze here the tears of amazement and gladness and release from despair—in short, of joy—that I shed when I first read that story. Tears themselves interest me greatly—but not the tears of melancholy hindsight and existential despair; rather the tears of awe you experience when the realization of an ideal suddenly appears before your very eyes or thunders inside your mind; these tears interest me.

And one of the reasons I wept at first reading about Le Chambon in those brief, inaccurate pages was that at last I had discovered an embodiment of goodness in opposition to cruelty. I had discovered in the flesh and blood of history, in people with definite names in a definite place at a definite time in the nightmare of history, what no classical or religious ethicist could deny was goodness.