To feel compassion for someone begging on the street is to tacitly condone their situation and the world’s organisation with respect to it. Or so says post-war German philosopher Theodor Adorno. The mere act of compassion does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the beggar, and more importantly for Adorno, is devoid of the critical self-reflection and critique of the administered world that are required for living morally.
Adorno uses the beggar as an example of our inability to be moral in a world with such pervasive injustice. To explain this fact, he provides a genealogy of reason, showing how it has become distorted by history to the point of irrationality—where the most irrational event in history, the Holocaust, can follow a mere two-hundred years after a supposed breakthrough in reason, the Enlightenment.
To Adorno, reason and power have been intertwined from the start: reason emerges as a tool for self-preservation, but is immediately tied to authority in the form of priests or shamans. This authority and control only becomes more pervasive over time through interactions with technology—agricultural, industrial, and from our present position we can certainly add: informational. Reason is thus continually distorted so that what we take to be reasonable in modernity is in fact highly irrational.
But it could be otherwise. One touchstone we have for rational acts is the critique of reason itself. For ethics—insofar as reason is presupposed for its operation—this means that to ask the ethical question is to ask about the possibility of ethics at all.
The marking of reason by history has allowed for the unwitting construction of second nature, a set of contingencies which have become so normalised they appear as natural and immutable. These are restrictions on our freedom as rational subjects. To Adorno, if we are not free, we cannot be ethical: individual good acts are impossible in the broader context of a badly organised world. Thus the impetus to get right the organisation of the world. For Adorno, this is achieved by critical self-reflection and a critique of the administered world so that we never ‘lapse into mere administration’ and pursue a private ethics, accepting as natural the world as it is organised.
Adorno’s argument that morality cannot be deaf to the organisation of the world explains why the contemporary Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s injunction to give monetarily to the point of marginal utility seems so intuitively baffling: yes, of the two options of giving and not giving, giving may be the better one, but these are not the only two options. We should follow Adorno’s advice and question the naturalness of the state of the world in which we find such suffering. Here, also, Adorno’s edict to scrutinise political praxis becomes relevant. For it is at the moment of a call to action that it is possible for the germ of irrationality to take hold. In the case of global aid, such irrationality in the midst of good intentions can be seen in the existence of countries now dependent on aid for their survival.