“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one." — Marcus Aurelius
In the 2020-2021 academic year, American postsecondary institutions conferred more than 2 million bachelor’s degrees. That year, colleges and universities gave out only 11,988 undergraduate degrees in philosophy or religious studies. And one of those diplomas went to me.
It’s a rare thing to study philosophy, and it’s a strange thing, too. I’m not sure what most people would expect a philosophy program to entail, but what I expected was very different than what I got. I ended up with an informal concentration in epistemology, a term I couldn’t even define when I first entered the program.
(If it’s a strange thing to study philosophy, then it’s a stranger thing to explain what studying philosophy is like. It’s almost a somatic experience — slamming yourself into the upper bound of your own intelligence over and over again, finding that it doesn’t really budge. Philosophy is thinking to failure. That’s the best way I can explain it.)
I just said that I’m not sure what most people would expect a philosophy program to entail, but that’s not true. Most popular understandings of the field — from shitposts to The Good Place — slant decisively toward the ethical. I’m pretty sure most people equate philosophy with ethics. Entering the program, I figured I’d mostly study ethics.
The odd thing is that I never took an ethics class. I guess I took two classes on so-called value theory — a course on political philosophy and a seminar on legal philosophy — but I never took a straight-up, down-the-middle ethics class.
There were about ten professors in the philosophy department, and I took classes with all but one of them. That was the one ethics professor. (That was also, someone later pointed out to me, the one woman in the department.) My one experience with her was when I attended a meeting of the Ethics Bowl team she coached. The team was discussing a case that seemed a pretty clear application for care ethics. She advised them to take a utilitarian approach instead. That didn’t sit well with me.
I like to think about ethics and write about ethics, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve never put much stock in the formalized study of ethics. Let me tell you why.
The taxonomy of ethical frameworks is necessarily complicated and incomplete, but here are some categories you might know: care ethics, consequentialism, deontology, divine command theory, egoism, existential ethics, pragmatic ethics, relativism, rights-based ethics, social contract theory, virtue ethics.
In a thought experiment you likely know: a runaway trolley is headed toward five people tied to a track. You can pull a lever to divert it to another track, where it will kill one person instead. A consequentialist, especially a utilitarian, would likely pull the lever, choosing the action that minimizes total harm. A deontologist, especially a Kantian, might refuse — arguing that actively causing harm, even to save more lives, violates a moral duty not to use others as a means to an end.
But in these discernments, the ethicist shows his hand. Here are two of the most important approaches to justice — with a fairly stark distinction between the two — and what does he need to show you the contrast between them? A bizarre would-you-rather about runaway trams.
I don’t want to disparage the intricacies and utilities of ethics, but I want to keep their applications in check. Of course, there are important issues where people are sharply divided — abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and so on — but real dilemmas are few and far between.
The way I see it, the vast majority of people already know the right way to act in the vast majority of situations. All too often, it’s ethical reasoning that gets in the way.
Has philosophy — or something by that name — ever been so visible in the wider culture? For better or worse, it’s all around us. At some point in the last ten years, the reign of popular psychology lapsed into a regime of popular philosophy. No longer are metaphysical conversations smuggled under the guise of blockbusters — Fight Club and The Matrix and Inception — but handled openly by all sorts of people. The whole world has gone peripatetic.
There is effective altruism, a reworking of utilitarianism to suggest that making an unconscionable amount of money is not only morally permissible but morally optimal. There is broicism, a rebranding of stoicism to suggest that wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance are most reliably accessed through podcasts and preworkout. There is Catholic integralism, a restructuring of Church doctrine into a defense of white nationalism. Each of these takes some viciousness — greed or vanity or wrath — and works it into some kind of moral mandate.
One of the more concise explanations of philosophy I ever received was this cute line: philosophy is less in the business of answering questions and more in the business of questioning answers. That’s not what’s happening in these cases.
The skepticism of questioning answers becomes the satisfaction of answering questions. The work of truthseeking becomes the project of truthsetting. A rational framework becomes a rationalizing framework. You can hear that happening in these cases — the high-pitched whine of self-service.
It’s an issue of register, so far as I can tell.
“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”
These are the words of Norman Schwarzkopf, the U.S. Army general who led all coalition forces in the Gulf War. I’ve long considered it the most important idea in moral philosophy.
Of course, the claim that “you always know the right thing to do” is at once understandable and disconcerting coming from a career officer. On the one hand, an order is an order. On the other hand, Befehl ist Befehl.
Nevertheless, we’d do well to remember that the superior orders defense was cut down to size at Nuremberg. As Principle IV of the trials put it:
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
When a hierarchy operates through a person, the individual always knows his professional task. But when a person operates in a hierarchy, the individual never loses his moral charge.
The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do.
The hard part is doing it.
The way I see it, the vast majority of people already know the right way to act in the vast majority of situations. I make some exceptions for people who have not yet grown into their minds or who have gone out of their minds, but I think the average person has very reliable moral intuition.
I make some exceptions for cases that fall at the bounds of human experience — the ethics of birth and death, the nature and endurance of the soul — but these are not day-to-day experiences for most people. For those who regularly deal with such matters, our species has developed fairly robust moral theories and packaged them as professional ethics for attorneys, doctors, soldiers. Confidence. Consent. Civility.
Moral failure is not a failure to know the right thing but to do the right thing, not a lack of ability but of will.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
These are the words of Maya Angelou, the American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. They’ve always struck me as vaguely Spinozist.
Spinoza’s ethics are grounded in his theory of affects — those states of feeling that move us, for better or worse. Just as all material things are bound in a web of cause and effect, so too are our minds caught in a network of psychological causes. We form ideas of the things that act on us, and in doing so, we experience affects: joy, desire, sadness, and scores of variations. Affects that increase our power to act — like joy — are to our advantage. Those that diminish it — like sadness — are to our detriment. Our task is not to suppress these feelings but to understand them. Through this understanding, we may begin to master ourselves.
So far, I’ve given you — or tried to give you — four distinct ideas.
First, people have a decently reliable sense of moral intuition.
Second, people have a tendency to slip from rationality to rationalization.
Third, human immorality usually lies in the will.
Fourth, the will is determined mostly by feelings.
These are the loose premises of my moral philosophy.
I’ve written before of the heady buzz of rulebreaking, the heady buzz of transgression. This affective state is too broad to be entirely just or entirely unjust.
When a Quaker activist and a Methodist minister broke into a secure military facility to damage warplanes before they could be used to commit atrocities — a crime for which they were later acquitted on moral grounds — their actions seemed motivated by righteousness and sustained by thrill. This is the meaning of “good trouble”.
But there is a more sinister form of this state, which I would call the Bully’s High. It can feel good to be bad. It can seem virtuous to be vicious. It can be easy to get the wires crossed, to mistake the domination of another as dominion over the self.
This vice works like other vices. It’s carried by vicious cycles and furthered by self-sabotage. A person rushes ahead of his conscience in the hope it cannot catch up with him, digs a hole so deep he won’t be able to claw his way out, and otherwise doubles down.
In these situations, I don’t think it’s helpful to explain to someone why they’re wrong. In my experience, this moves the conversation into a rational exchange which in turn devolves into a rationalizing endeavor. I think your best bet — as anti-philosophical as it might seem — is to simply assert first that the person is wrong and second that the person knows they’re wrong. Then the burden is theirs. Let them explain to you why they’re doing something they know to be wrong. If this sounds like how an adult talks to a child — good. There’s a reason we talk to children this way. Ask them why they lack the will to do the right thing. Tell them about their feelings.
While people tend to arrive at the same conclusion, they get there in different ways. They have different focuses and different priorities. I don’t usually think that one sense is better than another, and I tend to think that a diversity of sensibilities is a strength — not a weakness — of moral communities.
All this writing about moral sense has got me thinking about my own. I think I have enough of a grasp of Western philosophical history to understand how my moral sense reached me.
I’m probably closer to the lineage of virtue ethicists than to any other school. I’ve received an understanding of virtue that flowed from Aristotle to the Stoics to the Christians. People who know me might be surprised to hear me put Christianity so squarely in my ethical genealogy, but I met those ethics through two traditions.
The first is Unitarian Universalism, which gave me my understanding of communities. I tend to think that people are better off in congregation than in solitude. I tend to think that congregations are built on formal or informal covenants. I tend to think that the only worthwhile communities are rooted in dignity, justice, acceptance, responsibility, conscience, aspiration, and perspective.
The second is Alcoholics Anonymous, which gave me my understanding of individuals. I’ve never been in the program myself, but it was all around me growing up. It was from this wisdom that I came to develop a skepticism of the will — especially my own — a deeper appreciation for human frailty, a reluctant embrace of fallibility, and a fundamental reliance on humility.
I said earlier that philosophy is thinking to failure. I don’t know of any field of other study so complicated and so difficult that many people enter it simply to make law school feel easy. For this reason, it’s difficult for me to really fix ethics within the wider discipline. Good living, so far as I can tell, is simple and — with enough practice — pretty easy.
It’s borderline tautological. If you want to be a good person, all you have to do is be a good person. Make more good choices than bad choices. Trust that this will be enough.
Being a good person is good for the people who live with you. And at the end of the day, the only person who really has to live with you is you.