AMKent books

“If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you’re a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.” – Nietzsche

A recursion is when a problem is solved internally by itself, with continuous feedback of slowly fragmenting the issue until it is solved. This method is well known to programmers, often used in Python and the famous Fibonacci sequence. In this article, I’ll explore recursion not as a coding mechanism but as a metaphorical structure for understanding how morality processes itself, breaking ethical problems down until they resolve or mutate into new ones. We are entering an era of moral ambiguity, maybe more so than ever. The UK has just legalised full-term abortions up to the day of birth, whilst this requires extraordinary circumstances to be applied, it raises questions on ethics and morality. It is legally permissible to terminate a pregnancy up to the day of birth under extraordinary circumstances, yet one day later, the same act becomes criminalised as infanticide. This is a more modern moral conundrum, although nothing new to the ambiguous ethical laws of man. In war, to kill is fine; on the streets, you are a murderer. This is not a political take on reproductive rights or acts in war; I am merely using these polarizing concepts as examples of moral ambiguity arising within society. Morality in society acts as a recursion; this is where the nuance of fragmenting an act essentially solves the ethical problem. An example, to kill a child is morally wrong; to terminate the life of a child whose existence is the product of extreme circumstances or whose life would be heavily impeded is now justifiable legally. There is a recursion of two kinds here: first, the usage of language, ‘kill’ turns to ‘abort’ or ‘terminate’, secondly, the mother, the child, or both, and their quality of life is considered.

This is all fairly obvious, life is not black and white, there are grey areas and idiosyncrasies. So, with that in mind, let us take the recursion of morality somewhere more complex. With Foucault came social constructs, and now, it is accepted within mainstream academia and media that things traditionally thought of as absolutes are constructions of spectrums. Take Gender, a fragmentation of biological sex, or race, or even age. Now let us take one of these, race, for example. Race is a social construct, but it is not constructed ex nihilo; it often reflects minor, population-level biological variations, such as skin pigmentation, which have been imbued with social meaning. The recursion arises when acknowledging race becomes necessary to fight racism, yet doing so seems to affirm a category we know to be artificial. It is morally wrong to be racist, but race is a social construct, so the act of being racist is both an acknowledgement of race as a reality, but also obsolete, as race is socially made and therefore does not really exist past human labels. The recursion here is more complex, a kind of paradox of two opposing binaries. So, culture is introduced, heritage, intersectionality, and further identifiers to help the internal recursion of human morality solve the problem that racism is morally incorrect.

The semantics of moral recursion provide further exploration, words have weight, and those words can change the weight of a morally unjustifiable act to a justifiable one.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable…”

– George Orwell, Politics and The English Language.

A classic example of this can be seen within human rights law. To torture someone is illegal; however, to use ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ is perfectly legal. Propaganda becomes government messaging, or perhaps even shared realities. Will you die for two old bureaucrats who do not even know your name? How about for your country? For your way of life? Your morals! Jacques Derrida sees this movement of words as a signifier; it is not neutral, it is a moved meaning for the recursion of linguistic expression to moral reshaping. Civilian deaths become collateral damage, necessary evil. Even on a less morally charged note, are you a productive member of society? Re-encoding morality until it solves itself, no matter how strong the initial problem may seem, there is either a sanitisation or engorging. Wittgenstein thought of all philosophical problems as nothing more than linguistic problems; there are no real problems. Was he right? Is morality, ethics, even philosophy just a linguistic recursion, the reshaping of the moral concept into the palatable sentence?  Is morality, ethics, even philosophy nothing more than linguistic recursion, a process of continually reframing the unbearable into the bearable, the unjust into the justifiable? If so, then perhaps the deepest truths of our moral world are not found in the acts themselves, but in the words we choose to describe them.