Transcript The Good Left Undone

What is Morality?
Feraco
Search for Human Potential
7 December 2010
Some Starting Points
• While the terms “ethics” and “morals” are
related, they aren’t interchangeable
• When I speak of “morals,” I’m talking about
codes that govern your personal/private
behavior – whether you choose to help
someone, wear something, relate to someone,
abandon something, etc.
• When I speak of “ethics,” I’m talking about
codes that govern your professional conduct
– the beliefs that determine my teaching
style, for example
• For the sake of our lecture today, we’re going
to assume that you have free will
• I know your first question asks you to
suspend that assumption, but we’re aiming
for simplicity today (believe it or not)
Slamming the Brakes
• Morality itself is an interesting concept
• In What is Choice?, we established that
choices mattered to us because they allowed
us to deviate from an automatic course –
manual override, so to speak
• Morals function in much the same way
• Assuming we adhere to the values we say we
hold, we use morality to arrest our worst
impulses – to resist temptation and
corruption, or to avoid harming others or
ourselves unnecessarily
• In other words, morals slam the brakes on
the parts of human nature we don’t like
• One wonders, then, whether we aim to be
something other than human
Restriction and Direction
• However, morality really doesn’t have
to be restrictive
• Nor do ethics, for that matter
• Rather, it’s about trying to study the
“best” way to live life
• Without those twin senses of
“goodness,” we simply survive
without growth; as I mentioned
earlier, our frameworks give us
direction
• That direction shapes more than your
career goals; how many friendships,
for example, would you lose if you
only made relationships based on who
could help you survive?
Shifting the Framework
• More importantly, that combination –
choice and morality – profoundly
impacts individual senses of identity
• You should consistently check your
own sense of morality; does it limit or
free you?
• In what ways does it affect you – and
are you comfortable with those
effects?
• If you’re not, you’re allowed to shift
your framework
• I imagine none of you have the same
values you held as a five-year-old; your
needs have changed a great deal since
then
Civil Disobedience
• If you have free will, you have the ability to
choose your actions based on your individual
needs – which, in turn, means you’re responsible
for their consequences, and thus get to choose
whether you’ll lead a “moral” life
• But what is a “moral” life?
• It’s not simply a matter of following accepted
rules, although that’s usually a good place to
start
• After all, historians have documented numerous
acts of civil disobedience – immorality in the
legislative sense – that contributed to human
progress
• Was Gandhi’s resistance of British rule immoral?
Was King’s resistance of racial bigotry?
• For that matter, would it have been immoral for
those men, both of whom were capable of so
much, to stand by and do nothing in the name of
following society’s established laws?
Instincts for Good or Ill
• In the example above, “legal” and “moral”
existed at odds with one another
– Should one follow the rules or follow one’s
instincts when they’re mutually exclusive?
– What if your instincts are wrong?
• We form moral/ethical frameworks in order to
make sense of such situations – to take the
things we comes across and contextualize
them in a way that allows us to act on our
interpretations
• In short, that framework allows you to make
the choices you’d want to make
• Therefore, those codes eventually – inevitably –
shape your hopes and dreams…which is why
you have to construct your framework
carefully, lest you accidentally build a prison
for yourself
– Remember the box from the Revenge Therapy
thread?
Insight Over Ignorance
• The ability to choose to live well is
essentially the ability to choose
insight over ignorance, to elevate the
rich, varied lifestyle above the
thoughtless and bland
• You can choose either one, of course
– We’ve decided you have free will for today
• Now, what if I want to live well, to live a
“good” life? How do I decide to do so?
• It seems like an awful lot of people
have a lot of ideas about how to do
things...how do I choose?
What Does It Mean???
• Let’s start with that word: “good”
– What does it mean?
• We defined ethics and morality before we did
anything else because goodness could be relative,
and my impression of living well could be entirely
off-base
• One thought-school holds that true good and evil
exists in the universe, completely independent of
any perspective-related bias or moral relativism
• Another holds that good and evil are human
constructions in a universe that’s much larger than
them, and thus too shallow to accurately describe
the things they do
• Still another holds that all morals are relative,
subject to dozens of factors per individual, and
that no one can point to something absolute and
say, “This, here, is unambiguously, incontrovertibly
good” without facing opposition – that, indeed,
every individual is responsible for defining
“goodness” for himself or herself
Death Cab for Cutie
• But if you are able to shape the concept of
whatever qualifies as “good” yourself, does
“goodness” lose all real value?
• You, for example, may believe Death Cab for
Cutie is awful; I may believe they’re excellent
• If we’re listening to the same music at the
same time, doesn’t that just invalidate the
value of both our reactions?
– Think of the darker version of the P/Not P dilemma
from What is Choice?
• The worries here aren’t minor; we’re talking
about the words we use to make sense of the
world and those around us, words whose
definitions are assumed to be static during
most human interactions
This is What We Mean
• When we say something is “good,” what do
we really mean?
• Does the use of “good” in “One Tree Hill is SO
GOOD!” match the use of “good” in
“Kindness is good for the soul”?
• In some cases, we seem to be stating a fact
about our opinions – when we say One Tree
Hill is good, we’re expressing a favorable
opinion toward the show with the
expectation that others will agree (or be
interested)
• In other cases, we seem to be stating a fact
or truth about something – “kindness is
good,” for example
• We call this evaluative objectivism
Evaluative Language
• Evaluative language assigns a “quality
label” to something – this is good,
that’s bad, this is right, that’s wrong –
and there are different schools of
thought relating to our uses of such
language
• Is there a “universal bad” or
“universal good”?
• An evaluative objectivist would
answer in the affirmative, while an
evaluative skeptic would disagree
Four-Letter Word
• If you’re an evaluative skeptic, you
tend to think that there are shades of
grey in everything – that is, that good
and evil are relative concepts rather
than moral absolutes
• There are ways to deal with the
skeptical thinker, just as there are
ways to deal with the objectivist
thinker
• The point, however, is that our
personal understanding of that single
four-letter word – “good” – has a
tremendous impact on how we see the
world – and, therefore, on how we
make moral and ethical decisions
The Good Life
• Let’s test this hypothesis with a simple
question: are you living a good life?
• Obvious follow-up question: “Well,
what defines ‘the’ good life? What
defines ‘a’ good life?”
• I know that a bunch of different
responses will pop up around the
classroom
• This is because you each have your own
interpretation of goodness, and you
assign your own value/weight to
goodness as well
Can You? Should You?
• Can you set up my own ethical/moral
codes?
• Well, sure – morals aren’t (usually)
carved in stone, and the construction
of those codes plays a huge role in
determining any person’s sense of
identity
• It’s hard, however, to separate what
one is taught from what one teaches
oneself; I’m not sure morality can
develop in a social vacuum
• The bigger question: should you do so?
• Well, it’s hard to subscribe exclusively
to someone else’s ethical beliefs
Social Exile
• But what about society? The whole concept of
society as a body rests on the assumption
that the people who live together in a certain
region did so because they believe similar
things
• Although politics are a factor in the
equation, we’re not talking specifically about
political beliefs; this is more about sociallyaccepted criteria (don’t throw things while
teaching, etc.)
• As long as my codes meet the criteria my
society uses to define “good,” I’ll probably
be fine in its eyes
• This is why many peoples’ ethical/moral
frameworks are deeply influenced by
religious or social precedents; few among us
want to be exiled
The Final Balancing Act
• The problem, of course, occurs when it’s not
possible to align your beliefs with societal
norms
– The King/Gandhi example from above
• A society full of people with wildly divergent
ideas of ethics/morals cannot stand
• We use “consensus morality” to define
criminality, and a total lack of agreement on
basic standards simply leads to the collapse of
law
• Yet there’s an equal danger in “groupthink,”
where progressive ideas are instantly feared,
dismissed, or ridiculed simply because they
don’t match pre-existing standards
• That’s the balancing act, then, that falls to
every individual: how much do I dare to rock
the boat while I’m alive…and can I live with my
choices along the way?