Lingua Franca #8: Ethics and Morals

ASSIGNMENT: JAPAN

“The Japanese were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle. In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking. […] Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese. It made the war in the Pacific more than a series of landing on island beaches, more than an unsurpassed problem of logistics. It made it a major problem in the nature of the enemy. We had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it.”
 
-- from the introduction of Ruth Benedict’s “ The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ”, 1947
 
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SOURCES OF PRINCIPLES
 
“Ethics are external standards that are provided by institutions, groups, or culture to which an individual belongs. For example, lawyers, policemen, and doctors all have to follow an ethical code laid down by their profession, regardless of their own feelings or preferences. Ethics can also be considered a social system or a framework for acceptable behavior.
 
“Morals are also influenced by culture or society, but they are personal principles created and upheld by individuals themselves.”
 
--  Diffen: Ethics vs. Morals
 
***
 
LINGUA FRANCA #8: ETHICS AND MORALS
 
A puzzle.
 
How to go about getting at the difference between ethics  and morals ?
 
I think it’s important – it might be important – but it seems like hair-splitting. Certainly, ethics and morality overlap very often. Certainly, the words  “ethical” and “moral” have subtly shifted meanings over the last 200 years… in both valence and common parlance. Tracing their roots and the shifts of these words would be easy enough.
 
But what to do with it? How to illuminate it? It will be easy enough to show the difference in how lawyers think about “legal ethics” – which is straightforward and easy enough to understand – and “legal morality” – a phrase I’ve never once heard spoken and which seems almost an oxymoron… but how does this apply to that sizeable majority of us who are not lawyers?
 
And then a single word sprung to mind.
 
Banzai!
 
Oh. That’s how we’ll do it.
 
***
 
THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD
 
During the Pacific Theater of World War II, the American Office of War Information – a precursor to the modern Central Intelligence Agency – commissioned an in-depth study of Japanese culture and traditions, to understand how and why Imperial Japanese soldiers and the population of the Empire Japan would think, feel, and act under a variety of different circumstances.
 
American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict was unable to visit the Empire of Japan – the countries were engaged in total war – and so she made an extensive study of Japanese newspapers, books, essays, and war documents, alongside doing extensive interviews with Japanese expatriates and foreigners who had lived abroad in Japan.
 
The totality of Japanese thinking and actions were really a puzzle to the Western Allies; their whole framework of beliefs and living differed very greatly from the American and Western traditions in large and small ways. Benedict was attempting to figure this out and make pragmatic recommendations on how the war could be ended, and what would lead to a stable peace. Thus, Benedict studied deeply and tried to puzzle through Japanese culture and traditions –
 
“The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. They are terribly concerned about what other people will think of their behavior, and they are also overcome by guilt when other people know nothing of their misstep. Their soldiers are disciplined to the hilt but are also insubordinate.”
 
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword  is one of those books that everyone has heard of, but no one has actually read. I was familiar with a broad outline of the book’s themes, but I figured it would be terse and boring reading.
 
Boy, was I wrong about that.
 
The book is absolutely fascinating – tracing how Japan’s feudal origins and the emphasis on hierarchy and public social decorum greatly differed from the American views of liberty and individualism.
 
***
 
FIGHTING TO THE DEATH
 
“Japanese seamen [Imperial Japanese navy sailors] were warned that in case they were torpedoed and the order given to abandon ship, they should man the lifeboats with the utmost decorum or ‘the world will laugh at you. The Americans will take movies of you and show them in New York.’ It mattered what account they gave of themselves to the world. And their concern with this point was a concern deeply imbedded in Japanese culture.”
 
Benedict found a number of very strange things – strange from the American perspective – about Japanese culture.
 
One of the most interesting was that the Japanese military officials had an official policy of no surrender ever  which was typically followed through – in Western armies, when a battle was hopeless, forces would tend to surrender and still believe themselves honorable soldiers –
 
“In the armies of Occidental nations [i.e., American, English, French, etc] it is almost a truism that troops cannot stand the death of one-fourth to one-third of their strength without giving up; surrenders run about 4:1.”
 
So, if 40,000 Western soldiers were surrounded and the battle was hopeless, after around 10,000 soldiers were killed-in-action, the other 30,000 soldiers would surrender.
 
The Japanese ratios were entirely flipped, and sometimes to an extreme extent – Benedict noted that in Hollandia, there was 1 surrender for every 5 soldiers killed… in North Burma,  there was only 1 Japanese surrender for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed.
 
Thus, if there had been 40,000 Japanese soldiers in a hopeless position, you’d see over 39,700 fight to the death in a hopeless fight, with only around 300 soldiers surrendering.
 
This was, of course, seemingly insane to the Western forces.
 
***
 
BUT THEN BEING A MODEL PRISONER
 
Amazingly though, those who had been captured because they were unconscious, or those few who had surrendered, became model prisoners with almost no resistance –
 
“The shame of surrender was burned deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese. They accepted as a matter of course a behavior which was alien to our conventions of warfare. And ours was as alien to them. They spoke with shocked disparagement of American prisoners of war who  asked to have their names reported to their government so that their families would know they were alive. The rank and file, at least, were quite unprepared for the surrender of American troops at Bataan for they had assumed they would fight it out the Japanese way. And they could not accept the fact that Americans had no shame in being prisoners of war.
 
“The most melodramatic difference in behavior between Western soldiers and the Japanese was undoubtedly the cooperation the latter gave the Allied forces as prisoners of war.  They knew no rules of life which applied in this new situation; they were dishonored and their life as Japanese was ended . Only in the last months of the war did more than a handful imagine any return to their homeland, no matter how the war ended. Some men asked to be killed, ‘but if your customs do not permit this, I will be a model prisoner.’ They were better than model prisoners. Old Army hands and long-time extreme nationalists located ammunition dumps, carefully explained the disposition of Japanese forces, wrote our propaganda and flew with our bombing pilots to guide them to military targets.  It was as if they had turned over a new page; what was written on the new page was the opposite of what was written on the old, but they spoke the lines with the same faithfulness.  […]
 
“ Americans had not expected this right-about-face from prisoners of war. It was not according to our code. But the Japanese behaved as if, having put everything they had into one line of conduct and failed at it, they naturally took up a different line.  Was it a way of acting which we could on in post-war days or was it behavior peculiar to soldiers who had been individually captured? Like the other peculiarities of Japanese behavior which obtruded themselves upon us during the war, it raised questions about the whole way of life to which they were conditions, the way their institutions functioned and the habits of thought and action they learned.”
 
(Emphasis added.)
 
***
 
APPEARANCES OF RULES
 
Benedict’s book was published to general audiences in 1947, after the war had been won.
 
Nevertheless, even now 70 years later, many of the points of Japanese conduct remain strange to us –
 
“ Americans tell, too, of how rigorously [Japanese] sentries required that the prisoners should cover up evasions of rules; the great crime was to evade openly.  In camps where prisoners worked off-bounds on roads or installations during the day the that no food be brought back with them from the countryside was sometimes a dead letter – if the fruit and vegetables were covered up. If they could be seen, it was a flagrant offense which meant the Americans had flaunted the sentry’s authority. Open challenging of authority was terribly punished even if were mere ‘answering back.’”
 
In other words, Japanese sentries didn’t particularly care to investigate closely if American prisoners were breaking rules – so long as they didn’t do it openly.
 
But the slightly disrespect or talking back to a Japanese sentry would be punishable by the harshest measures. Appearance of respect for the rules and the hierarchy is what mattered; breaking rules without overtly threatening the hierarchy or insinuating disrespect was condoned.
 
***
 
SHAME CULTURES AND GUILT CULTURES
 
Wikipedia  –

“In cultural anthropology, a shame society is a society in which the primary device for gaining control over children and maintaining social order is a the inculcation of shame and the complementary threat of ostracism. A shame society is contrasted with a guilt society, in which control is maintained by creating and continually enforcing the feeling of guilt (and the expectation of punishment now or in the afterlife) for certain condemned behaviors…”
 
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword popularized the difference between societies that aim to inculcate shame  and guilt  as primary means of establishing control and discouraging prohibited behaviors.
 
Japanese society was a shame society – built on following rules and understanding oneself as part of the larger whole, which would be devastatingly to be ostracized and broken away-from.
 
American society ran primarily on guilt  – an inner feeling of right and wrong, as opposed to decorum as part of a group.
 
Guilt is an individual emotion, felt internally, judged and arbited by the individual.
 
Contrarily, shame exists in a social context – it is applied by other members of a group to an individual who is out of line with the group’s ethics.
 
And there’s that word – ethics . The idea of guilt and shame cultures is interesting enough, and any Westerner who lives in Asia for a while eventually comes across the concepts as they learn how to navigate that world.
 
But, if you don’t wind up living in a culture that differs from you in terms of guilt vs shame, who cares? Isn’t it only mildly interesting at best, and probably irrelevant?
 
I think – not. I think the concept is very important to understand and to clarify in one’s own thinking.
 
***
 
LINGUA FRANCA: THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY AND ETHICS
 
The words “ethical” and “moral,” I think, are very important words. You should clarify which standards you live under, and gradually sort out contradictions and dissonance in your own thinking around these concepts.
 
As with all of our exploration of the Lingua Franca , we look at the words and the meanings they correspond to.
 
Both “Ethics” and Morals” have actually flipped once from their original meanings. The word “ethic” comes from the Greek “ethos,” meaning character.  The word “moral” comes from the Latin “mos”, meaning custom.
 
That’s strange enough – the words flipped meanings from ancient times. Originally, “ethics” were who you were , and “morals” were following the customs of the day.
 
But the meaning flipped once before coming into modern English. Fair enough.
 
Interestingly, I think the meanings are starting to flip once again over the last 50 or so years.
 
***
 
FROM MORAL TO ETHICAL
 
The contrast between “ Ethics vs. Morals ” at Diffen is a good starting point on understanding the modern meaning of ethics and morals –

It notes that ethics are rules of conduct recognized by a particular group or profession, that it comes from an external social system, and that we do them “because society says it is the right thing to do.”
 
Morals, on the other hand, are a personal compass of right or wrong, that come from individual and internal feelings, and that we do “because we believe in something being right or wrong.”
 
In other words, ethics corresponds to shame and external sanction , and morals correspond to one’s inner beliefs about right and wrong.
 
This was the most recent understanding of ethics and morality in the modern West.
 
***
 
UNDERSTANDING ETHICS AND MORALS
 
This can seem somewhat abstract – and anyways, who cares?
 
But to throw the distinction into clarity, you can think of professional ethics , like a lawyer’s ethics.
 
Lawyers have attorney/client privilege and always are supposed to provide the most vigorous defense of their clients in a criminal case. These are lawyer’s ethics.
 
This doesn’t mean that a lawyer’s defense of a client is moral  – that’s up for the individual to decide. If a lawyer really deeply believes that their client is guilty of a heinous crime and might repeat it if they get off at trial, it might or might not be immoral  for the lawyer to defend that client – it’s the lawyer’s personal, moral decision. But it’s certainly ethical-in-a-legal-ethics-sense  to provide a vigorous defense to that client.
 
Ethics aren’t good or bad in a moral sense – they just are . There were certainly samurai ethics  in feudal Japan, rules of conduct that samurai lived under. One such ethic was to kill anyone of a lower class who disrespected you in public. An individual could believe this was immoral – most people in the modern world do believe that’s immoral – but it was ethical-in-a-samurai-ethics-sense.
 
There’s many such examples. The Ancient Spartans had an expression, “with your shield or on it” – meaning, never lose your weapons or armor. It was ethical  for a Spartan warrior to die in combat, and ethical for them to gain victory in combat, but it was unethical  for them to retreat without their equipment. Ethics always related to conduct under societal or professional guidelines.
 
And again, ethics aren’t good or bad in a moral sense – they just are. I personally believe it’s immoral for a criminal defense attorney to defend a client they believe is guilty of a heinous crime who is likely to repeat offend – but it’s not against lawyer’s ethics.  Lawyer’s ethics are just a set of professional codes and rules laid down by organizations like the American Bar Association, and various traditions of American and English Common Law.
 
***
 
WHEN AN ETHICAL SYSTEM BREAKS DOWN
 
When you read Ruth Benedict on the conduct of Japanese prisoners-of-war again, it starts to make sense –
 
“The most melodramatic difference in behavior between Western soldiers and the Japanese was undoubtedly the cooperation the latter gave the Allied forces as prisoners of war. They knew no rules of life which applied in this new situation; they were dishonored and their life as Japanese was ended. Only in the last months of the war did more than a handful imagine any return to their homeland, no matter how the war ended. Some men asked to be killed, ‘but if your customs do not permit this, I will be a model prisoner.’ They were better than model prisoners. Old Army hands and long-time extreme nationalists located ammunition dumps, carefully explained the disposition of Japanese forces, wrote our propaganda and flew with our bombing pilots to guide them to military targets. It was as if they had turned over a new page; what was written on the new page was the opposite of what was written on the old, but they spoke the lines with the same faithfulness. […] Americans had not expected this right-about-face from prisoners of war. It was not according to our code. But the Japanese behaved as if, having put everything they had into one line of conduct and failed at it, they naturally took up a different line.”
 
Japanese society inculcated and ran on strict ethical  rules. These were enforced by shame  and ostracism  if broken. But once the ethical rules they knew were entirely broken and the maximum shame and ostracism was reached, many of these soldiers did not have a moral framework  to fall back on in regards to resistance, or what their moral duties should be. They fell in line with a new ethical and hierarchical framework, accepting that they were largely dead to Japanese society, and falling in with the ethics and hierarchy of their American captors.
 
This is ever and always the danger with ethics – the person who runs entirely on ethics alone  is at a loss for what to do in a radically different situation, once their old framework and system of ethics has broken down.
 
***
 
THE RECENT TRANSITION FROM MORALS TO “ETHICS”
 
But why is this relevant?
 
The word  “morality” has been under siege almost nonstop since the mid-1800’s; Nietzsche famously savaged almost all of Western morality in books like Beyond Good and Evil  and The Genealogy of Morals .
 
Nietzsche wasn’t the only one, of course; merely the most famous. Around 50 years ago – let’s say, roughly, 1967 – both Nietzschian and Marxist critiques of morality became very prominent in the Western world.
 
The word  morality – not the concept, but the word  – transitioned from a positive valence to a negative valence. Morality came to be associated with Christian morality alone , and Christian morality has been on the constant wane in Western society over the last 50 years.
 
That might be a good thing, or might be a bad thing, but it left a certain void in our thinking.
 
Surely, in the West we still believe people should understand right and wrong, and we still look to instruct children in right and wrong, and developing a strong moral conscience.
 
With the word  morality in disrepute, another word was needed. And what word happens to be most similar?
 
Ethical.
 
Think for a moment, if it’s still near the year 2017, of how silly it would be in public discourse to say, “That company is acting immorally.”
 
People just don’t talk that way.
 
But we do say, constantly, “that company is acting unethically.”
 
The problem is – and I do believe it’s a problem – is that it’s trying to get two distinct concepts out of a single word.

We still have the concept of “legal ethics,” “soldier’s ethics,” “medical ethics,” “police ethics,” and so on – the professional codes of conduct in those fields.
 
But when we critique a person or organization for “acting unethically,” we’re really saying they’re acting immorally  – as judged by our inner sense, and which we believe they should  feel from their inner sense too.
 
***
 
CLARIFYING ONE’S THINKING, ETHICS, AND MORALS
 
The ethical and moral often come into conflict – it’s a common theme in movies. Often, a “good cop” needs to break their professional ethics in order to do the moral thing. The Dirty Harry  movies, the Lethal Weapon  movies, all sorts of cop movies look at this dichotomy.
 
The shortest way to understand this –
 
There’s a concept of an internal sense of right and wrong . The word for that in modern English, up until 50 years ago or so, was morality.
 
There’s also a concept of an external set of rules of right and wrong.  The word for that in modern English, up until very recently, was ethics.
 
When we criticize a company that’s broken no laws or conventions of its industry for behavior we still feel is wrong , we’re making a moral critique  of them.
 
I think it’s very important to clarify your own thoughts on this matter – often the word “unethical” or “ethical” is used to designate the concept of morality, because the word  morality has fallen into disrepute.
 
I don’t know if the word “moral” can or should be re-claimed, but I do know it’s unstable to invoke the word “ethical” to mean both “systems of rules” and “internal sense of right and wrong” – it leads to confused thinking, and in my opinion, doing the wrong thing in many situations.
 
The Imperial Japanese Army committed many atrocities when the people under their rule seemed to be defying their ethics ; likewise, if you believe captured soldiers shouldn’t assist the enemy, Imperial Japanese soldiers were often adrift and lost morally when their ethical system no longer held.
 
It’s dangerous to run on ethics and shame alone – and perhaps even more dangerous to have a confused understanding of right and wrong.
 
For your own thinking, do sit down at some point and ask yourself why you do things.
 
Ethics  – because the external rules say it’s right and wrong.
 
Morals  – because you think it’s right and wrong.
 
You can throw the word  “morality” over the side of the boat if you don’t like it – “principles” might be an adequate substitute if you think the word “morality” is too tarnished.
 
And yet, though often used in a confused and interchangeable way in modern language, there’s a gigantic difference between doing things because you’ve been told it’s the way they must be done (ethics), and out of a fear of shame and ostracism (ethics), and because you believe something is genuinely right or wrong (morals).
 
Throw the word “morality” over the side of the boat if you like – that’s fine. But the concept of right and wrong, for internal or external reasons  is a distinction you absolutely must make in your own mind, and one that will serve you well in any chaotic, fast-changing, or unusual situations.