by Todd May
As is often noted, the assumption that virtues will not conflict is a shaky one. Bravery, for instance, does not necessarily help us become more temperate. In fact, there could be tensions between the two, as when performing a brave act requires me to lay aside my temperance and focus on the dangers I’m confronting. But even if we abandon this assumption, we should still ask how much guidance a theory like this can give us in our moral lives. Yes, we might become better people through being more temperate or wise or generous, but how do we do that and where in our lives are we supposed to display this or that virtue? There seems to be some distance between the virtues that Aristotle recommends to us and the answer to the question of how one should live.
This is not to say that the distance cannot be bridged. But even if it can, it leaves a deeper question, one that is characteristic of all three moral approaches. Aristotelean virtue ethics offers an account of how we should live. Consequentialism and deontology offer us views of how we should act. Each of these views is an account of what a proper moral existence would consist in. Each tells us what we should do or how we should live. We might ask which of these views is more nearly right. Philosophers do that all the time. My concern here is different. No matter which view we pick, we will find it difficult to live up to its requirements. Very difficult. In dictating the proper moral form of our existence, all these theories ask more than most of us are capable of. This is not hard to see.
To be a consequentialist, for instance, is to be concerned always with the best consequences of one’s actions. That involves a lot of sacrifice. Am I really to count my own interests, as well as those people I care about, as having no more of a grip on me than the interests of others? Am I to be expected always to abandon my commitments to those I love or to those projects I’m committed to when it would do more good to do so? That is certainly asking a lot of me.8
But it seems to be no less demanding than holding the categorical imperative to be the only source of my moral existence. Perhaps I shouldn’t help a friend of mine cheat on his exams or claim more hours at work than he has actually put in, but must I really keep a promise to go to the movies with my brother when, on the way to the theater, I get a call from an acquaintance in deep distress who just needs someone to talk to? Or can I never act in a way that benefits me at the expense of another? Am I to treat everyone around me with the same moral solicitude that I treat my friends?
Or in virtue ethics does the cultivation of virtues have no letup? Does it allow for no moral holidays? Aristotle himself recognized the difficulty of living the good life, even though he thought it was the telos—the goal—of being human. It requires rigorous training in an environment conducive to developing the habits each of the virtues requires. It also requires friends, adequate material resources, and a physical appearance that is at least not ugly. Moreover, he seems to doubt that most of us will get there. While not impossible, it seems that the good life, the life of eudaemonia, is difficult to attain and often difficult to maintain over the course of a lifetime.
From the perspective of all these theories, the moral life is a difficult one. It requires a great deal of sacrifice and focus, often turning us away from our most important commitments and toward ways of living that, while admirable, are onerous or even impossible for many of us to achieve.
Does Traditional Moral Philosophy Ask Too Much?
Are the moral burdens these views place upon us unnecessary or unfair? Maybe instead we should just live different lives from the ones most of us inhabit now. Does the difficulty of embracing one or another of these moral theories tell against them? Perhaps the problem lies not in the theories. Perhaps it lies in us, in our own unwillingness to commit ourselves to better lives. Perhaps, rather than rejecting the prescriptions of these moral theories as beyond our capacities, we should learn to develop those capacities to meet the challenges the theories present to us. If morality indeed does ennoble us, our proper task might well be to make ourselves more noble that we currently strive to be.
One of the most famous of contemporary moral philosophers, Peter Singer, has offered an argument for an extreme form of altruism that still has a grip on many people today. In his seminal article, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” he provides us with an indelible image: “If I am walking by a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in a pull the child out. This will mean I will get my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”9
We can all agree that I should pull the child out of the pond. It would be irresponsible of me not to. I am deeply obliged to save the child. It is not an act of charity on my part but rather a moral duty. But what is the relevant difference, Singer asks, between the effort required to save this child and the effort required to save a starving child somewhere else on the planet by writing a check to an organization that delivers food to starving children? He argues that simple physical distance can’t make the former an obligation and the latter a matter of voluntary charity. Why should geographical proximity be relevant? What moral bearing could it possibly have? I am just as obliged, he argues, to write the check as to wade into the pond. In fact, I might be more obliged to the starving child. It costs me less effort to write a check than it does to clean off muddy clothes. If we count the difficulty of the effort to help someone as morally relevant (so, for example, I might not be required to save the drowning child at the risk of my own life), then I should write the check even before I consider wading into the pond.
So far, so good. What Singer seems to have shown us is that we have more moral obligations than we thought we did. But he goes further. After all, there are a lot of starving children I can save by writing checks, and a lot of other children whose suffering I can relieve in many other ways. If it costs me little effort in each case to do so, then why would I be less obliged to each of these children than to the first one? Consider this admittedly strange example. Suppose I muddy my clothes and save the drowning child. Then I continue on my way. But a few minutes later I see another drowning child in another shallow pond. Am I less obliged to save this child than the first one? Is this next child’s life worth less, or will my effort to save them be decidedly more? My clothes are already muddy, so in that sense it would be less effort to save this next child. And what of the child after that? (Perhaps it has been extremely rainy recently.) And the following one? And further, what is the difference between each of these drowning children and all the starving children that I can save through writing checks?
You can see where this leads. It is not that there is no end to my obligations. But they don’t end very soon. Singer argues, “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”10 This principle tells me where my obligations end: when fulfilling the obligation would require me to sacrifice something “of comparable importance,” in this case my life. That’s a pretty strict moral principle. Singer thinks it is the right one. But he does concede that a weaker principle might also be applied, that we be willing to sacrifice something up to the point where what we would be sacrificing is “morally significant.”11 The difference here is that on the stronger principle I would be obliged to reduce my level of well-being to something near that of a starving child before my obligation to save starving children would end. Since my life is worth no more than any of theirs, why should my well-being matter more?
However, even if we take the weaker principle, we would still have to sacrifice a good bit. Most of us don’t consider eating at restaurants, or buying the occasional nice outfit, or attending sports events, or traveling on vacation, or enjoying an evening drink, or taking our children to a play to be subject to moral criticism. But in Singer’s view they are. We can get by well enough without doing any of these things. Even on the weaker principle, then, we would still be required to forgo a good bit. And think of this: in each case we have a particular enjoymen
t on one side of the scale and the life of a starving child on the other. How morally significant would any of these activities really seem to be then?
If Singer is right, we are obliged to act according to a very strict morality. This obligation is different from the one we saw in Aristotle and Kant. For them, the reason for rigor lay in our essence as human beings. We are essentially rational creatures and so to act on something less than our rationality is a betrayal of our human character. Peter Singer doesn’t care about our human essence. What matters to him is simply the fact that each of us is only one among many whose interests have equal moral worth. Therefore we have no moral justification in treating our interests better (or, on the weaker principle, much better) than anyone else’s.12
But is he right? Are we really obliged to act in accordance with a morality that would ask of us to sacrifice our deepest personal commitments and projects if these conflict with moral requirements, be they consequentialist, deontological, or virtue ethical?
There are reasons to think not. First, consider this.13 There are aspects of our lives that make them worth living, that contribute to their being meaningful lives. Some of these aspects are individual. There are people for whom painting is so important that their lives would be significantly diminished if they couldn’t paint. For others, a life without the opportunity to read novels or watch movies would be a diminished one. I have a friend—fortunately one whose body seems immune to injury—who is convinced he would be existentially at sea if he could not run every day; running is central to his sense of who he is (and it shows in his performance—he is one of the best runners in his age group in the country).
These are aspects of people’s lives that are not generally shared. There are other aspects to people’s lives, ones that furnish them with the significance they have, that most of us do share. Perhaps chief among these are ongoing friendships and love relationships of various kinds (with a partner, with children, and also with certain close friends). Many of us have careers whose activities help give our lives the point they have. Of course there are elements of any career that don’t do that—the tedious parts that one just has to soldier through—just as there are moments in friendships and love relationships that one could do without. But the overall arc of a good career is one that, for someone engaged in it, lends their life a good bit of the meaningfulness it possesses.
If we are asked to contribute to the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves, presumably this is because it will make their lives more worth their living. We should contribute to feeding someone who is starving, for instance, not simply to feed them but to allow them to live in a way that is meaningful to them. To feed someone who did not consider their life worth living, who thinks their life is pointless, would be a bit beside the point unless we could contribute in a broader way to helping them find a meaningful life. There are probably very few people like this. Most people value their lives, which is to say that they find them to be meaningful, even if they don’t reflect on that fact. Nevertheless, the key point is that feeding people is not an end in itself but rather a means to allow them to live in ways they consider worth the living.
If this is right, then the point of aiding others is to contribute to their ability to live meaningful lives. But if everyone deserves to live a meaningful life, then it would seem that I deserve to do so as well. And to ask that I sacrifice things that make my life meaningful in order to assist others in their quest for a meaningful life is actually treating my life as less worthy than theirs. That is to say, even if we accept that we have an important duty to assist others in desperate straits, that duty is limited to activities that will not undermine aspects of my life that make it worth living for me.
This limitation is one that still demands a lot of me. After all, there are plenty of things I do that, while enjoyable, don’t have a place in conferring the meaning my life has. I could forgo a number of restaurant dinners, movie outings, fancy coffees, and other forms of entertainment while still living in a way I find to be meaningful. The point here is that, even if we accept that we have an important duty to aid those who are starving—or oppressed or marginalized or dying of preventable illnesses—this does not require that I sacrifice the central aspects of what confers significance on my life to do so. Otherwise put, there is a limit to the strictness of the morality to which I am required to submit.
This argument is what might be called permissive. That is to say, the importance of what makes life meaningful gives me permission to limit my aid to others. But perhaps we can go further. Perhaps we can say that living something other than an altruistic life (bearing in mind that I’m using the term altruism to mean adherence to a very strict morality of whatever kind) might actually be a positive good. It might, in some ways, make the world a better place, or at least a more interesting one. It may be that certain pursuits and ways of being that don’t contribute to the elimination of starvation, and so on, actually make the world a better place to live in the sense of being a place with a greater variety of activities and ways of living.14
There are people who dedicate themselves to excelling at a sport. Think of Serena Williams or LeBron James. There are others whose passion is to paint or to write or to create music: Van Gogh, Chinua Achebe, Beethoven. Still others seek to be great lovers or dedicated parents or loyal friends. None of these activities would necessarily conform to a strict morality, and even if one did, it would do so in an odd way. Imagine Serena Williams or Beethoven striving to be good at tennis and music because it would cause the most good or conform to the categorical imperative or express virtue. The contributions they make to the world are rooted in their desire to do what they do: play sports or create art or engage with others they care about. They do not stem from an adherence to a set of moral ideals, regardless of what those ideals are.
Now imagine a world without people like this. Such a world seems impoverished. Not only would the variety of the world be eliminated, many of the activities that enhance our lives would no longer be available to us. Our lives might be morally better, but they would also be less meaningful to us. The world would be less engaging. It is precisely because there are people—including many of us—who are not dedicated to moral improvement but rather to some other practice that we have access to many of the things that make our lives worth our living.
This vision is not shared by people like Peter Singer. In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” one of the examples he offers of money that could have been better used to end famine is that spent on building the Sydney Opera House. Singer might point out, rightfully, that there is something odd about contributing to the maintenance of opera when others do not have enough to eat or are dying of curable diseases. And in the individual case this is certainly true. If I have money to give, it would probably be better for me to give it to an organization that feeds the hungry—or, perhaps better, an organization that seeks to militate against a political and economic system that allows for hunger in the midst of plenty—than to the creation of an opera house. But what holds for me as an individual does not hold for all of us collectively. Let’s suppose that nobody contributed to the creation of centers for music or art, that nobody dedicated themselves to sports or personal relationships or even hiking the Appalachian trail. Under those conditions, the world would be leeched of many of its hues.
It is possible that in a world like this, if everyone was solely dedicated to being an exemplary moral person, it wouldn’t matter. The only thing that would matter is achieving moral ideals. However, that would be a world of moral Stepford wives, wouldn’t it? The richness that our lives possess or at least have access to would be gone. To be sure, there would likely be no starvation, and that is not a little. But the projects and practices that are built upon having the basics—food, shelter, health—would not be available to us. And there’s the rub.
The two arguments we have seen against a strict morality converge. The first one says that if the goal of aiding others is to make me
aningful lives available to them, then I should have permission to create a meaningful life for myself as well. The second one says that if everyone acted in accordance with a strict morality, there would be less access for many of us to live a very meaningful life. Taken together, these seem to make a strong case against the relation to morality that Singer and other strict moralists propose.
I want to add a third consideration. This is a much more pedestrian one, but I believe it applies to almost all of us. It is not unrelated to the first two but is distinct from them as well. The fact is that the vast majority of us are incapable of the kind of strict morality that Singer and others endorse. Even if it were a good thing—and ending starvation would certainly be a good thing—dedicating ourselves to an extreme form of altruism is beyond us. Very few of us don’t care about morality. But we are too dedicated to our nonmoral engagements to be able to drop all of them when morality seems to require it.
Think of the commitments you have that may not conform to the moral requirements of, say, consequentialism. Would much of the time you spend with your lover, your friends, or your kids not be better spent raising money for a charity that helps cure river blindness or educates people about the effects of climate change? Should I really be writing this book when I can instead visit kids with cancer in hospitals, bring them gifts, and cheer them up? And shouldn’t I spend a lot more time convincing people to be vegetarians, given the cruelty to animals of factory farming and the effects of such farming on the environment? (More on this in chapters 3 and 4.) There is no doubt that I could do more good if I arranged my life in accordance with a utilitarian calculus.
What is true for consequentialism is also true in different ways for Kantian deontology and virtue ethics. Should I never favor my loved ones through small exaggerations to others about their fine points, or never fail to keep a small promise when breaking it might allow me to join my old friend who is just passing through town in watching a beautiful sunset? Or should I ensure that I am always hitting the best mean in my comportment, never being rash in my actions or unmeasured in passions?
