Two Styles of Moral Thinking: Reciprocity vs. the Unique Rightness of the In-Group

Philosophers have been debating the nature of justice since antiquity without ever coming to agreement. Formally, justice means “giving every man his due.” In other words, it concerns the distribution of rewards and punishments or (more broadly) of the good and bad things of this world to human beings. The debate really concerns what principle ought to determine the distribution. This is what philosophers are trying to establish when they argue over the nature of justice.

Although no conclusive agreement has ever emerged on the question, some general principles appear to have been thrown up by the debate itself. One such principle is reciprocity. The idea is that one necessary (but probably insufficient) condition for justice is that the same principles a person (or group) applies to himself (or itself) must also be extended to rival claimants.

The issue of reciprocity arises in debates over racial nationalism. White nationalists seek to create White ethnostates, and this may appear prima facie unjust because it requires the exclusion of other possibly quite decent and worthy people from such states. This is, of course, precisely the injustice of which nationalists’ opponents accuse them.

The nationalists’ answer is that they want nothing for their own group that they would not be happy to allow others: every ethnicity should be free to form its own ethnostate. So, while these other groups may indeed be excluded from our countries, this does not deprive them of a homeland of some kind—one from which they are even free to exclude us in their turn.

We can see from this example that the nationalist and his opponent—whom we may call the integrationist, the antiracist, the cosmopolitan, or any of a number of other terms—actually do agree on something: both argue in terms of reciprocity, supporting political arrangements as just only if they apply the same principles to all. The integrationist wants every country opened up to everybody, while the nationalist wants a particular homeland for every group—and thus (indirectly) for every individual. Both agree, in other words, that justice requires reciprocity, and both apply this principle in their thinking, even though they arrive at different and contradictory political programs.

One consequence of this situation is that no appeal to justice-as-reciprocity can decide the point at issue between integrationists and nationalists. Any verdict in favor of one doctrine or the other must be based on some other consideration, such as its relative compatibility with human nature. I would suggest that the tribal nature of man might be especially relevant in this context.

It is likely that the disposition to reason morally in terms of reciprocity is stronger in some people than others, like virtually all human dispositions. And racial realists will easily understand that if this is the case, such a disposition almost certainly differs across genetic groups as well. I would expect to find thinking in terms of reciprocity most common in Europeans and their descendants, although I admit never having made an empirical study of this.

One great European expression of the importance of reciprocity, or applying the same principles to others that we would claim for ourselves, is what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called his categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” A maxim is a rule of behavior. So what Kant means is that rules of behavior possess moral legitimacy only if they can be applied in the same way to everyone. The essence of morality, in his view, lies in not making exceptions in one’s own favor.

For example, it would be advantageous to me to take anything I wanted from anyone else: in other words, to steal. But if this principle were applied universally, there could be no security of property for anyone, and civilization would quickly collapse back into savagery. So the maxim “steal whatever you desire” fails to conform to the categorical imperative, whereas the maxim “do not take things that do not belong to you” does conform to it. The latter rule can thus be morally legitimate, while the former cannot. A similar argument could be made about lying, which if it became universal would completely destroy social trust and thus also result in the collapse of civilization. The rule that we should tell the truth, on the contrary, can be universalized and is therefore morally legitimate.

In his book Why Race Matters, the Jewish-American philosopher Michael Levin suggests that conformity to the principle of reciprocity is a basic feature of what he calls “Caucasoid morality.” In tribute to Kant’s formulation of this principle in his categorical imperative, Levin calls persons who think morally in terms of reciprocity “kantian:”

A kantian can be expected to see things from a variety of perspectives. He will follow general rules, not constantly seek to make an exception of himself. He knows that other people take their own ends as seriously as he takes his, so he does not treat others as mere resources. Nobody wants his own preferences overridden for the sake of someone else’s, so a kantian will not selfishly override the preferences of others. A kantian who wishes others to serve his own ends attempts to recruit them as he would wish to be recruited, by persuasion or bargaining rather than threat, coercion, or deception. Kantians are aware that they sometimes need help, so they are inclined to help others. Since a kantian like everyone else wants to be able to rely on promises, he is trustworthy. (Why Race Matters, 211–212)

This is, in fact, a reasonably good description of our everyday conception of what a good person is, although it may not include the whole of moral virtue (e.g., heroic self-sacrifice for the group). Levin points out that applying such moral principles requires some intelligence, since it involves an ability to abstract from one’s personal interests. So while there certainly exist bad persons of high intelligence, there may be limits to how good (in the kantian sense) a person can be without some intelligence. This helps to explain why kantian behavior may be more common among races with higher intelligence, e.g., among Whites than Blacks.

My impression, as already stated, is that European descended people are especially prone to moral reasoning in terms of reciprocity. I will not try to prove this thesis conclusively within the confines of an essay, but I can point out how it might explain certain cultural misunderstandings which arise in our age of mass immigration and multiculturalism.

For example, I once came across a story about a Christian pastor who visited a Mosque in an immigrant neighborhood in Europe. During his visit, the resident Imam presented him with a copy of the Koran, which the man politely accepted. The pastor then extended an invitation to the Imam to come visit his church, which the Imam proceeded to do. There, the pastor politely presented him with a copy of the Christian Bible. The Imam drew back in horror, fearing contamination from the infidel’s disgusting and sacrilegious book, in such clear contradiction to everything contained in the Holy Koran.

It would, I think, be safe to observe that this Muslim Imam did not reason morally in terms of reciprocity. But that does not make it impossible for us to understand his behavior. He was a Muslim, after all: he believed in the divine origin and unique rightness of his particular faith tradition. If God really did dictate the Koran and reveal his will to Muhammad in a way he never did to any other human prophet, then the Imam was correct to act as he did. Infidel dogs such as that polite Christian pastor are bound for the flames of hell, and such a fate is no more than what they deserve for their inexplicable failure to recognize the obvious truth of Muhammad’s claim to be God’s final and most perfect prophet!

In other words, rather than reasoning morally in terms of reciprocity, the Muslim reasons in terms of the unique rightness of his in-group, the ummah or worldwide community of Muslim believers. Many writers have noted this aspect of Islam. Frithjof Schuon, e.g., writes of Muslims’

curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the Muslim powers of imagination, precisely because Islam coincides in his mind with the irresistible logic of things. (Quoted in Serge Trifkovic’s The Sword of the Prophet, p. 199)

Their implicit faith in the rightness of the authoritative traditions of their in-group is so powerful that they are unable to place themselves outside of it even in their imaginations, as Schuon notes. This is, of course, directly contrary to the practice of the kantian as described by Prof. Levin, who “can be expected to see things from a variety of perspectives.” Communication between an observant Muslim and a European who thinks in terms of reciprocity is thus inherently difficult and cannot be overcome by mere good will on either side: that European pastor will inevitably see the problem as getting the Imam to reason in terms of reciprocity, while the Imam will see the problem as the pastor’s failure to convert to Islam. The two ways of reasoning are simply incommensurable. This is one reason the presence of any significant number of Muslims within Western societies will always be problematic.

The same failure of communication due to different styles of moral reasoning can be met with in other contexts as well. One example is holocaust commemoration. Many European gentiles are easily recruited to support this cause out of a sincere horror for the killing of the innocent. They see the holocaust as an especially horrifying example of man’s inhumanity to man. It is irrelevant for them that the particular case involved Germans killing Jews; it would have been just as wrong and just as horrifying if it had involved Jews killing Germans instead.

But some European gentiles eventually come to the realization that many Jews do not see matters in this way at all. For Abraham Foxman, e.g., the holocaust “was not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and thus on God himself.” It would have been an entirely different matter if Jews had been killing Germans rather than the other way around, for the Germans are not God’s chosen children! In Foxman’s way of looking at things, there can be no reciprocity when one is a Jew, for his in-group is unique and not commensurable with any other human group. It would be positively wrong to apply the same standard to Jews as to the other peoples of the world. He even comes close to identifying his own group with Almighty God.

Elad Barashi is an Israeli television producer with ties to the current governing coalition in Israel. Regarding that country’s ongoing war on Gaza, he recently unbosomed himself as follows:

[W]ho is the man who doesn’t want to see Gaza burned to the ground by the IDF’s fire? Who is the man who defends and has mercy on these Nazis? Who is the fool who says there are ‘innocents’ in Gaza? Who is the despicable scoundrel who wants to let them flee to Arab countries or Europe freely?… The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death!! They deserve death!! They deserve death! Men, women, and children—by any means necessary, we must simply carry out a Shoah against them—yes, read that again—H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! In my view—gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel methods of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without weakness—just crush. Eliminate. Slaughter. Flatten. Dismantle. Smash. Shatter. Without conscience or pity—children and parents, women and girls—all of them are marked for a cruel and harsh death…. Who is the brave man who will decide to bring a total Holocaust to Gaza, so that rivers of blood will flow from it, so that rotting Gazan corpses pile up in mounds…. (X post, since deleted but available here)

He goes on, but this sample of his thinking is perhaps adequate for our purposes.

Mr. Barashi’s reflections might be usefully understood in the context of frequent Jewish warnings against facile holocaust comparisons which trivialize that event’s allegedly unique horror. Here we see someone not simply comparing current events with the holocaust but actually calling for a new one: no “never again” for this Jew!

But, of course, the holocaust Mr. Barashi wishes to see is not really the same as the late unpleasantness in Eastern Europe. In fact, it will be the farthest thing imaginable from the Nazi holocaust, because this time it will involve Jews killing Palestinian “Nazis.” For the essential question in assessing holocausts is not how many deaths they involve but whose ox is getting gored. The case where Jews are being killed is not simply distinct from the case where Jews are doing the killing: they are polar opposites. One is the greatest horror in all of human history, while the other is more than justified and rejected only by the unpardonably weak—such as Jews who want to make peace with their neighbors.

If European gentile thinking turns decisively upon the principle of reciprocity, much Jewish thinking turns upon the principle of Jewish uniqueness. It is easy to see that the two principles are precisely opposed to one another. For Kant, the essence of right behavior lies in not making an exception of oneself, and the principle can apply to groups as well as individuals. For the Jew, the fundamental fact about the world is the Jew-Gentile distinction, along with the entirely exceptional status of his own people.

However, we must not rush to conclude that this un-Kantian way of thinking, so difficult for many European-descended people even to wrap their minds around, is a specifically Jewish trait: the Muslim, as noted above, also sees his religion as universally and uniquely true, something that gives the ummah or community of Muslim believers a status not unlike that which the Jewish nation holds in Jewish thinking. Both are, of course, entirely incompatible with justice-as-reciprocity, and problematic in any group residing among Europeans prone to thinking morally in those terms.

Even if I am correct that such thinking is especially characteristic of Europeans, it is only fair to ask whether the contrary style of thinking—viz., in terms of the unique rightness of an in-group—has not also sometimes characterized us. One can certainly make a case that it has, citing certain teachings of historical Christianity in support. The Gospel of John depicts Christ as saying “No one comes to the Father except through me.” This has traditionally been understood to mean that there is no salvation outside Christianity (although Catholics and Protestants argue over whether this means communion with Rome or personal faith in Christ). That would make Christians the unique depositories of spiritual truth, and thus incomparable with all other people in the world. If this sounds vaguely Jewish, that is no accident. For most of Christian history, most Christians have held to the doctrine of supercessionism, which understands Christians as heirs to the divine promise made to Abraham (Genesis 12: 1-3) and understands the Christian Church as having replaced (or “superceded”) the Jewish nation as God’s chosen people.

Although it embarrasses many contemporary Christians, the traditional understanding of these doctrines was that non-Christians are bound for eternal damnation after death. The early North African Christian writer Tertullian wrote graphically of his fantasies of seeing Christ’s pagan enemies suffering in the flames of hell. This is not so different from what we find in Islam. When I ask Christians about this awkward aspect of their faith tradition, they usually admit that it makes them uncomfortable, but say they have faith in God to do whatever is right. In their minds, this probably does not include roasting all Buddhists in eternal fire.

Europeans did not always view their religious traditions as having a unique claim to truth. First-time readers of Herodotus’s Histories are often surprised to find him writing of foreign peoples worshiping Greek gods: e.g., the Egyptians worshiping Apollo. Of course, the Egyptians did not have any god named “Apollo.” Instead, they had a god named “Horus.” When Greeks heard Egyptians telling stories about Horus, he sounded more like Apollo to them than like any of the other Greek gods. So they concluded that “Horus” was simply the Egyptians’ name for Apollo. This is called an interpretatio Graeca. Herodotus uses the procedure in describing the religious life of all foreign peoples he describes.

What Herodotus never does is claim that only the Greek gods are the true gods, while the Egyptians and everyone else worship false gods, for which blasphemous practice the Greek gods are sure to punish non-Greeks after death. At one point he declares: “I have no desire to relate what I heard about matters concerning the gods . . . since I believe all people understand these things equally.” In other words, no one stands in a privileged relation to the divine. It is a kind of reciprocity concerning religion: your gods are probably as valid as mine. When modern European Christians think in a similarly tolerant and easygoing way about alien religious traditions, they may be succumbing to liberal modernity—but they may also simply be returning to a way of thinking long characteristic of their non-Christian ancestors.

Where did the less tolerant aspects of historical Christianity come from? Many would say they first came into the world with monotheism itself: in other words, with Judaism, the world’s first monotheistic religion. It does not seem to have occurred to Jehovah’s first worshipers that Baal and Ashera might be alternative Canaanitic names for their own God. Why not? One obvious possible explanation is that Jews are not Europeans—and neither were their ancient Israelite ancestors who first formulated monotheism. The same goes for Islam, which shares with Judaism the idea of a special and particular relation to the divine in which outsiders do not participate.

Just as intolerance and the unique rightness of in-group tradition are not absent from European history, the ability to think in terms of reciprocity is not necessarily entirely lacking in non-European peoples. It was, after all, the Jewish academic philosopher Michael Levin whom I cited as formulating justice-as-reciprocity in a useful way. And even Orthodox Jews who recognize the authority of the Talmud and rigorously separate themselves from all gentiles may understand the value of practicing justice-as-reciprocity among themselves. Indeed, such Jews are especially noted for high levels of in-group trust.

Finally, we should ask ourselves whether or not it is acceptable or even advisable for European-descended people to think partly in terms of the inherent claims of our in-group rather in terms of reciprocity. We might point out, e.g., that this is simply how the game of evolution is played: all persons and groups want to get their genes into the future for no other reason that the genes are theirs. Why should Europeans be any different from platypuses in this regard? We all want to survive and reproduce, and if any group does not wish to do so, it will not be long before another, healthier group comes along that will be happy to replace it.

So while we are sincere in acquiescing to the existence of homelands for non-Europeans from which even we ourselves may be excluded, our ultimate political aims have a purpose which transcends a mere willingness to practice reciprocity. Fundamentally we want what all living organisms want: to perpetuate our kind. Justice-as-reciprocity is an important component of European moral thinking, but not its sole and ultimate horizon.

In sum, while all human groups reason to some extent in terms of both reciprocity and the interests of the in-group simply because it is the in-group, Europeans are probably especially prone to the former style of thinking and non-Europeans to the latter. As a practical matter, we must be aware of both styles of moral reasoning. We should be willing to practice reciprocity with all who are willing to practice it with us—in other words, to practice reciprocity reciprocally. But when we encounter outsiders committed to the supposedly unique claims of their in-group, we must counter with an unapologetic commitment to our own.