Ethics of Identity

One-Way Systems

There are three major ethical systems in North America and Europe. All three center on the individual decision maker, with moral discernment, choices, and action emanating from an agent accountable for the decisions made.

Virtue ethics, first developed systematically by Aristotle, is rooted in the way moral behavior of specific persons shapes character. Consequentialist ethics since Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill focuses on the ordinary human motivation to avoid painful results and pursue pleasurable ones. The duty ethics of Immanuel Kant considers moral obligations to be a person's imperatives without any exceptions.

In all three cases, the moral subject is first of all an inner space—a mind or mechanism—capable of processing representations. The first-personsingular is an independent being with his or her unique consciousness. Autonomous moral agents apply rules consistently and formally to the decisions they face.

These moral systems move one way, from the actor outward, and open important pathways for an ethics of identity. Skeptics, however, discredit them as alien to the two-way discourse of identity ethics. A recent version of ethics, the dialogic model, starts from the same premise as identity negotiation and therefore warrants examination also, even though it is not as prominent as the mainstream versions.

Dialogic Ethics

Humans are dialogic agents within a language community. Sociocultural systems precede their occupants and endure after them. Language as a whole is presupposed by any one of its speakers and hearers. Discourse is a community's language with common meanings embedded in the community's institutions and practices. Language does not merely represent reality but constitutes humans in their different dimensions and relations. Humans live in a reality of their own making. Humans have enveloped their species in linguistic forms, artistic images, and religious rites and cannot see or know anything except through the symbolic artifice they have constructed. In dialogue, humans do not merely reflect reality from the outside but recompose the world into discourse, thus ensuring that reality can be comprehended at all.

Because dialogue continually interprets and makes distinctions, it is not neutral but value-laden. As a species, for its survival, humans need to identify important issues and goals and then assess where they stand relative to them. Humanity exists inescapably in a space of ethical questions. In this kind of dialogic morality, transcendental criteria shift from a metaphysical plane to the horizon of community, world, and being, but norms remain nonetheless.

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