On Morality: A Brief Žižekian Word

The logic of consumer capital is, in Žižek’s terms, immoral. Žižek’s distinction between morality and ethics, for all its geometric pretenses, evinces an unmistakably Christian mode of being in the world: “Morality is concerned with the symmetry of my relations with other human beings; its zero-level rule is ‘do not do to me what you do not want me to do to you’; ethics, on the contrary, deal with my consistency with myself, my fidelity to my own desires.”1 “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is how I recall it. (In the terms of the King James Bible, Matthew 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”) The effect of moral “symmetry,” then, is that Action I, because it is equal to Action II (I = II; II = I), prevents any aberrant (unfair, unjust) behavior. (This is morality as Newtonian science, as least as it pertains to Newton’s Third Law of Motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Morality secures “equilibrium” between actors. Or, as a deterrent, the Cold War logic of mutually assured destruction.)

It is its inherent “asymmetry” that makes of postindustrial capital an “immoral” force: the refusal to “do unto the Other as you have the Other do unto you”; that is, not insisting that there should be the universal imposition of fair labor practices, which include the outlawing of child labor, that environmental standards should be globally enforced, that the health and safety of all workers must be protected.