The Problem With Universal Principles and the Normalizing Argument
By: George Hahn-Sittig
Tags: Philosophy, Discrimination, Bias, Truth, Values

Introduction

We are in love with universal principles; clutching for north stars; desperate for absolute standards around which to order our lives. To understand and justify our actions, we require them. To be certain of truth, lacking in doubt, and complete in trust, we require them. To judge, interpret and compromise with others, we require them. For without the universal, how could we ever have agreement? Certainty? Sanity? Our whole understanding of the world that we have carefully buttressed against its own absurdity would collapse.

So we carefully build, rooting our reality in universal standards ranging from the laws of physics to human rights and religion, to conservativism and the sanctity of tradition, even to the sanctity of innovation and change. All of these facilitate a concrete understanding of the world, ourselves and of others.

Yet these also serve as footholds for bias, discrimination, and failures of understanding ranging from microaggressions to blatant hatred and paternalism. In our desperate clawing for order, we have ignored utterly our self-bias and particularity. We hide the dagger of the singular, of ourselves, under the cloak of the universal.

This is complicated by the fact that we have not engaged in this individually, but socially. We share our values and so together lash them tightly to our hearts. Yet at the same time we are each the wellspring of our own values. Whether this is solidarity or subjugation I know not, but still we cause harm every day.

The only way the stubbornness of this phenomenon can be addressed, however, is within the individual thinking of individual minds. The stubborn roots of harmful patterns can here be identified. Identified but not wholly hacked off. This identification, which I have named The Normalizing Argument, articulates how we use normality and idealism to justify the enforcement of selfish ends.

The Normalizing Argument

The core of the Normalizing Argument is an interpretation of the bond between the normal and the ideal. Taken together within its bounds, these two provide the motivation, the direction and the basis for realizing a better world. The ideal motivates the normal, pushing us to realize it. Yet a dissection of The Normalizing Argument disintegrates this assumed relation, and further reveals incentives to a refusal of understanding and the imposition of paternalism.

The Ideal

The first necessary declaration is that there are universal values and thus common principles shared by all things. This gives an ideal form to be strived for, and for the true believer naturalizes and normalizes this striving. The greater the certainty of the belief, the more that this striving will be the normal and natural state for the believer.

From this, I understand what is ideal, providing me with direction for my interaction with the world.

The Normal

Secondly it must be said that the normal is the array of things that I am by default not in doubt of. It is the underlying net of assumptions that supports all other thinking. These assumptions, if unquestioned, will be necessarily perceived as absolutely true.

Yet to determine this normal, I can only use myself and my situation as reference. From the first, all things seem absolutely normal and without doubt. Yet soon doubt arises and I am forced to admit abnormality and to adjust my net of assumptions accordingly. I and my situation are perceived as normal in every way except those in which I admit we are not, and what remains unquestioned is absolute normality.

From this, I understand the world around me, providing me with a basis for my work towards the ideal.

The Entanglement

From these initial conceptions, the Normalizing Argument concludes that, to the extent that I am committed to my values, I can achieve the ideal by maximizing the normal. If I am truly devoted to my values, and do what is natural and normal for me, I will come as close as possible to achieving the ideal. Yet it also generalizes this relation. Since my principles are good universally, the striving for them represented by my normal is also good universally; immune to the influence of context. Due to this, if I export my striving, my practice, my normal, I also export the movement towards the universal ideal and so make the world itself more ideal. By making others and my surroundings resemble my normal, I can improve them.

From this I firstly gain a basis to comfortably assert my own goodness and the goodness of my actions. If I can identify what I do as the movement towards the ideal, I can make sense of my actions and justify them absolutely. Secondly, this gives me ground to stand on when attempting to convince others of the goodness of my ends and means. If I am working towards universally motivated ideals, then it is good for others to share in and agree with my goals and methods.

Yet this also provides me with a perverse mandate: that others should be made to conform to my standards, to my normal, and ultimately to resemble me. Since my principles are the universal good, those who are not following my normal — or nearly following it — are not working towards what is good and so are misled. It is my duty to correct them, and to fundamentally reject their contrary principles as morally wrong. This is due to the established goodness of my ideals and thus my normal that works towards them. These contrarians must be either foolish or evil — either way requiring correction. This would indeed be the case if I had discovered or could discover universally good and true principles.

Alas I cannot. Rather I have flipped the relation of normal and ideal on its head; confusing which is subject and which is master. It is the normal which comes first, discovered based on my doubts and dislikes. The uncertainty generated by these contrasts with the certainty of my likes and of mundane constants, weaving a net of assumptions and so constructing my normal. It is this normal then that I mistake for the striving towards the ideal, and I settle on my principles based on it. Upon their establishment, I slip under the cloak of the Normalizing Argument, hiding my self-centered impulses under the guise of the universal. This disguise shields me from all eyes, even my own. Under its guidance, I fight to be the representation of universal principles and spread them to the world, not realizing I am their architect and blueprint rolled into one. I stringently protect my values, subservient to the universal, not realizing I am merely protecting my normal and enforcing it wherever I can.

Examples

The Forest

To understand the simplest form, imagine a people living in a jungle. They know only the trees and the environment on which their lives depend. The forest is utterly unchallenged in its obviousness. As such, the trees easily work their way into the normal. From this, a set of ideals is made that implicitly includes the forest and its trees. They are ever-present in their mythology, science, and morality. One day a young boy attempts to cut down a tree. His family views it as an insanity of the highest order and correct him at once; trees are essential to an ideal world where such pursuits as science and morality are done. One day loggers from outside the forest enter. Their anti-tree lifestyle leads to them being initially attacked for the same reason the boy was admonished: trees are essential to an ideal world. If these others are destroyed, all well and good. If they are not, then the ideal nature of trees will come into question. Yet the erosion of the tree as part of the ideal was not due to a challenge to what was fundamentally good about the trees, but by the challenge to the normality of the forest. A challenge, moreover, that is resisted on ideal grounds.

Human Rights

A more complex example is the status of Human Rights as ideal. For many in the western world, these principles essentially go unchallenged. Even if their implementation is not always absolutely the norm, their uplifting as principles and thus the striving for them is. This striving is seen in things that we live with every day — such as the rule of law, freedom of speech, etc. — that themselves go unquestioned and bring good to our everyday lives. These apparent things make the striving towards human rights part of the normal, and so creates human rights as a universal principle in our minds. We do not adopt these principles directly, but rather we adopt them from the concrete basis of the normal. This normal is created all around us by normalizers who have themselves adopted these principles based on their normal, and so as we grow up in this normal, we adopt these principles ourselves. Those who have a different normal and so have developed different principles through the same method as us, we label as wrong and immoral. We then seek to normalize them and thus correct their imperfections, forcing them to follow our principles and become like us, due to the mandate provided by the Normalizing Argument. This occurs not just at a social level but also an individual one.

Religion: Christianity

A final, and perhaps completely unsurprising example is religious commitments such as Christianity and Islam. In their conversion-mandating and value-correcting nature they clearly follow the initial reasoning of the Normalizing Argument and its ensuing mandate. Yet a quick glance towards Christianity affirms that they also exhibit the flaws outlined here: a lack of ideal basis for their ideal claims. Even laying aside challenges to the possibilities of ideal principles being imparted by God through scripture, it can be widely observed that many Christian ideals are not acquired ideally but simply based on the normal of their situation. Conservative sexuality, anti-abortion sentiment, and even a great many habits of prayer and belief are all imparted by the normal of the situation and then later uplifted as ideal principles. This can be seen in that different groups supposedly following the same ideals have widely different practices and beliefs, particularly over ideals that do not feature prominently in the scripture at all.

Conclusion

The Normalizing Argument allows us to pass off the constants of our “normal” experience of life as universal ideal principles that always hold true. The application of these principles then ultimately drives us to enforce our conception of normal on others, mandating us to try to make them like us or at least to react critically to their differences.

To escape this there is one path: the giving up of one’s own normality and of the sanctity of absolute universal principles. If I admit I am not normal in certain ways, I will not translate those into ideal principles, and the desire to make others like me can be assuaged. If I am to admit the flaws in my principles, I will not be so eager to apply them. This already limits all of our normalizations to some extent, yet to do this completely requires absolute particularity and thus a giving up of universal values and principles.

Yet such a giving up boggles the mind and cuts off hope for a better world at the stem.

Rather, we constantly apply and adjust the normalizing argument to balance what pieces of normality have been cast into doubt, yet it ultimately pushes us to reject what is other and to push back against anything that requires too much adjustment. Yet there may be hope for the moderate application of doubt and giving up, and for an understanding and identification of our own flawed natures.