Aegis 2011
70
An Implicit Ethics >>> Zach Hopper “I’ve worried some about why write books when Presidents and Senators and generals do not read them, and the university experience taught me a very good reason: you catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world” (author’s emphasis Bryan 5). —Kurt Vonnegut An Implicit Ethics Over the course of his literary career, Kurt Vonnegut has subtly built an ethics centered on the notion of common decency. But despite the fact that he advocates this position in most of his novels, short stories, interviews and speeches, his ethics has been largely overlooked by scholars.1 Todd Davis, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, notes that “To date, only a small number of book critics have mentioned Vonnegut’s desire to enact social change, and even fewer academic critics have examined Vonnegut’s moral posturing” (140). Maybe this is because Vonnegut never explicitly states his ethical viewpoint in his works, but rather articulates it through his characters and their situations, making it difficult to identify a coherent system of ethics without a working knowledge of his canon.2 Furthermore, critics have labeled him as a science fiction writer since his first novel was published in 1952, which identifies his work as something separate from— and inferior to—literature proper. Despite longstanding critical attention to Vonnegut, which continues today, his use of science fiction conventions and his recurring interest in questions of technology have caused many scholars to classify him as a writer of genre fiction and thus not as a serious literary figure.3 But perhaps the greatest obstacle readers face in trying to understand Vonnegut’s ethics is that we do not really know what common decency is—a point that Vonnegut himself made and criticized time and again in his novels. Common decency, it turns out, is not really all that common. If it were, then Vonnegut would not spill so much ink imploring us to embrace it as an ethical principle. In our everyday speech, we often use the term as a synonym for kindness, but this cannot be the definition in Vonnegut’s case because the notion of kindness alone certainly is not sufficient to ground an ethics. A principle of kindness to others as the sole proviso of an ethical system oversimplifies morality, as it divides moral actions into those that are kind or unkind. This would commit us to saying things like ‘murder is unkind’ and ‘self-sacrifice is kind,’ when clearly these actions have a moral gravity that cannot be accounted for by appeal to a principle of kindness. Morality, it seems, is far too complex to be dissected in terms of mere kindness. Broad though it may be, the maxim ‘be kind to others’ excludes several important virtues—e.g. honesty, charity, courage and tolerance—that we value and consider essential to any account of ethics or morality. Equally problematic is attempting to define common decency by breaking down the term into its two constituent parts. ‘Common’ assumes the inherence of or capability for decency—whatever its definition may be—to humans, which is a very broad claim that, based on our experiences, we may have good reason to doubt. And ‘decency,’ whether it means kindness, adequacy, respect or something else altogether, does not seem like a good foundation for an ethical system on its own (for the same reasons as listed above for kindness), and hardly seems to be common in any sense of the word. Moreover, the notion of common decency is not action-guiding, which
