Is it Bad to Make an Exception?
For just a minute, Jean Cau was worried about Jean-Paul Sartre’s lying. Cau would often witness Sartre, his employer and mentor, make back-to-back phone calls to his mistresses, telling them different things to keep them in the dark and make things easier for himself. How, Cau wondered, could his beloved mentor remain “internally intact” under such conditions?
As it turns out, at least in Cau’s view, he didn’t have to be concerned. According to biographer Hazel Rowley, Sartre explained to his secretary that in some cases, it was necessary to draw on a “temporary moral code” to weather the storm. Cau was impressed by this explanation. A temporary moral code would allow Sartre’s “huge moral edifice” to remain undamaged when apparently left with no choice but to voluntarily mistreat other people. As Cau saw it, having a temporary moral code was a bit like opening an umbrella in a storm. Sometimes you need to take emergency measures.
Not many modern commentators are likely to be quite as impressed as Cau by Sartre’s solution. No one can be faulted for thinking that his “temporary moral code” might have been a bit slimy. But the broader point stands: while we might raise an eyebrow regarding Sartre’s adulterous relationships, there are times when we really can’t do the right thing. Sometimes we have to make exceptions.
What is an Exception?
Exceptions are tricky. Theorists have long pointed out that an exception is a little puzzling insofar as it is a situation in which a system is in effect by not being in effect. That might sound daft, but the logic is sound: an exception is a way of keeping a system active while suspending it. It’s a part of the normal order that entails ignoring the normal order. An exception carves out a sort of paradoxical gap.
Sartre’s explanation has a certain litigious vibe, which is appropriate given that legal scholars have been particularly sensitive to the complexities of exceptionality. Theorists like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben have reflected at length on the challenges regarding legal exceptions or “states of emergency.” A state of emergency is a type of legal exception. The idea is that in a state of emergency, normal juridical workings and safeguards need to be suspended for the sake of protecting citizens from some (presumably temporary) challenge, such as a natural disaster, civil unrest, or armed conflict.
On the one hand, emergencies are of course real. A crippling storm might not be the best time to stick to the normally scheduled programming of going to the ballot box for an election. On the other hand, suspending the legal system is never a particularly stable course of action—even (perhaps especially) when done lawfully. By definition, there’s no law when you’ve suspended the law (at least in the sense of it having any real content), which on a first pass isn’t the most comforting of circumstance.
Beyond that, politicians have this funny tendency of acting an awful lot like dictators when they can do whatever they want. Somehow, those temporary emergencies can seem to get longer and longer. Things certainly aren’t guaranteed to go wrong during a state of emergency, but they can be tricky, as anyone paying attention to recent events in Venezuela, detainments at Guantanamo Bay, or a host of other circumstances will know. Some have argued the entirety of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany took place during a legal state of emergency.
Ethical Exceptions
Does an ethical exception run the same risks as a legal exception? The parallel is clear: as Sartre’s example illustrates, calling your actions an “exception” can be a way of letting yourself off the hook while leaving untouched the “moral edifice” that allows you to continue to think of yourself as a decent person while acting terribly. If you can convince yourself that doing the right thing isn’t up to you, it can be easy to justify almost anything. Sartre gets to have his adulterous cake and eat it too.
Exceptions are no simple matter. What to do? None other than the mighty Immanuel Kant (known for writing such lightweight beach reads as The Critique of Pure Reason) famously threw up his hands when confronted with the challenge. His solution? No exceptions, homie. The classic Kantian example has to do with lying to a murderer who plans to harm your friend. If that murderer asks you where your friend is hiding, and you know the answer, then according to Kant you pony up the gory details even if they might lead to a gory outcome. Lying is wrong, and there are no frou-frou temporary moral codes around here.
The Kantian answer has a certain harsh appeal, but it’s an open question how workable it actually is. Kant is said to have lived a life so regimented that the people of Konigsberg could set their watches according to his walks, but even in a life that spartan, it’s hard to imagine some emergency not getting in the way at some point. Speaking for myself, I’d rather live with being a liar than having exposed my loved ones to knife-wielding murderers. My guess is I’m not alone in that.
Not all is Lost
Emergencies, exceptions, and unconventional events are real. We have to learn to live with them. There’s risk in that, but it’s easy to overstate the challenge. Calling something an “exception” can provide the basis for a troubling justification, and some people live what seem to be their entire lives in an ethical state of emergency. At the same time, it’s an open question how far the structural similarities between ethical systems and legal systems go. Besides, while calling something an exception is an effective way to let yourself off the hook, we have no shortage of clever psychological tricks to make that happen. Why dwell on this one?
Language is often as expressive as instrumental. Maybe calling something an exception is as much a cry of lament for having stumbled as it is a slippery slope to amorality. Circumstances can conspire to make us be someone we’d rather not. Sometimes we let the selfish part of ourselves drive for a time. Maybe calling something an “exception” is a way to express grief, recover from that slip, and ultimately preserve our ethical core. It might be a way of saying, this is not who I always am or always will be, but for a brief time that’s who I was. A different type of exception, indeed.
Conclusion: An Exception to the Exception
I guess the upshot of this is just to say that when moved to the sphere of human experience, exceptions are exceptionally complex. So much is contextual. I wish our social scientists did as much on the logic of exceptionality as our logicians and legal theorists have done.
Does any of this help Sartre and his temporary moral code? One assumption we’ve made along the way is that the normal order is good—or at least better than having no order. I guess the “normal order” in the analogy here would be Sartre’s personality. Unfortunately, in this case, his life gives us pretty solid grounds for questioning whether the norm is always better than the exception. Maybe Sartre should have made an exception to his exception. Even if that logic just turns out to be turtles all the way down an infinite regress, it might be better to run the risk of being capable of justifying anything than being guaranteed to be a jerk.