ethics for assholes, part 2

Now that I’ve cleared my throat a little by talking about assholes, there are a few pieces of this idea that I want to develop. One is that the standards for being ethical can’t be very hard to achieve. Another is that our ideas of perfection belong to a pursuit that is ethics-adjacent, not ethics proper. I’ll see what I can get to today.

Ethical theories can lead us to think that ethics is hard, or at least being an ethically ideal person is hard. There are two reasons that I’m suspicious of this. The first comes from Susan Wolf’s justifiably famous Moral Saints, in which she says that a moral theory has, within itself, no standards for limiting itself. Kantian ethical theory doesn’t tell you when something other than Kantian ethical theory might be more important.

Second, but related, is the idea that various practices and systems have their own standards of excellence. Sculpture making and appreciation is a system with its own standards of excellence. I don’t know what those standards are, and I’m certain whatever standards there are up for debate in lots of ways, but I’m sure sculptors can discuss them and point to examples in a way that other sculptors can understand and appreciate, even if not agree on. The same with cooking, or with specific cuisines. Or with travel or seduction or basketball or trampoline jumping. All of these things have standards of excellence, likely contested, but internal to the practice. And none of those practices have standards for limiting themselves either.

If you’re talking about how to be an excellent trampoline jumper, you might realize that it’s not worth practicing more than four hours a day because you’ll get too tired and risk injury: those are standards internal to trampoline jumping, since being tired and injured will make you a worse trampoline jumper, regardless of most other things you might want to accomplish in your life. But nothing about being an excellent trampoline jumper tells you that it’s not worth practicing more than four hours a day because your children are only young once and you’re missing valuable, irreplaceable time with them. Spending time with your children is a value external to trampoline jumping.

That example is silly, but the case of seduction isn’t: there are standards of being a good seducer, and one thing that is so objectionable about a “pickup artist” is that he cares (at most) only about those internal standards of excellence, which contain within themselves no standards for when to limit the practice itself. So a person might be excellent at seduction and terrible at relationships (or trampoline jumping or basketball); indeed, to the extent that having a relationship interferes with excellence in seduction, the excellent seducer who cares only about that form of excellence actually has a good reason not to have relationships.1 Excellence in one area is just that: excellence in that area.

Now, is ethics an area like that? It looks like it, because it also has its own internal standards. Or, maybe more accurately, each ethical system has its own (somewhat overlapping) standards, so an excellent utilitarian is one who works to bring about the greatest happiness to the greatest number and an excellent Kantian is one whose rational will commands freely. Within those systems, there’s no internal limitation: the ideal utilitarian might take the night off from bringing about the greatest happiness to the greatest number, but only if taking the night off is part of their overall plan to bring about the greatest happiness to the greatest number—just like the trampoline jumper should take a break from practicing if it will make them better in the long run.

There are debates within ethics about what the standards are, or should be, and some of those standards seem incommensurate, just as various debates about standards within cooking and sculpting and seduction are incommensurate. Is happiness what matters, or a person’s intentions, or character? Utilitarian theories agree among themselves about the value of maximizing happiness, and then they disagree about other things within that general standard, whereas the virtue theorist also agrees that happiness is supremely valuable, but doesn’t agree that it should be maximized, so they disagree at a more general level, and the Kantian doesn’t think anyone moral should ever be happy. Ok, that’s a joke (mostly), but Kant does think that one’s own happiness—at least happiness as the utilitarian would understand it—isn’t a moral goal, so there’s an even more fundamental disagreement.

What all of these ethical theories have in common, though, is that they are all ways to reason about what is best to do overall. Not just what is best to do on any particular occasion, or for some purpose—though there might be such a purpose as part of the reasoning—but in general, reasoning practically.

Once we’re engaged in reasoning about what to do, we’ll come up with arguments, and practical arguments have certain standards. Likes must be treated alike, for example. A person shouldn’t both do something and not do the very same thing. These are standards that come, not from a system of ethics, but from the nature of practical reasoning: the first (treat likes alike) is true of any reasoning, and the second (you can’t do and not do) comes from the reasoning’s being practical.

So what’s true of ethics is that it’s reasoning about what to do in general. This is how it’s different than, but similar to, reasoning within those other areas. The trampoline jumper is reasoning about how to be an excellent trampoline jumper, which is a kind of reasoning about what to do, but the conclusion about what to do always has in the background the addendum “to be an excellent trampoline jumper.”

Ethics comes from our asking what to do more generally. This is a point that Aristotle makes when concluding that all of our actions aim at eudaemonia and that Kant makes in concluding that morality commands categorically. The point is that we can always ask what we ought to do, and the answer to that question includes, but is not limited to, the standards of any one practice that we want to be excellent at.

Now I suspect that the reason that the standards of ethics seem like they’re more important (or “supreme”) than those of any other practice is because, while any other practice can reason about what is best, those practices always have the “…in order to be a good…” in the background, whereas ethics can concede all the conclusions about what it takes to be a good trampoline jumper and seducer and chef and basketball player and father and then ask the general practical question: practice trampoline backflips will make you a more excellent trampoline jumper and going to the bar (?) will make you a more excellent seducer and spending time with your son (not at the bar) is a way to be a better father, but what ought you to do this evening? Practical reasoning happens within any particular practice and can also happen outside of those practices.

Some people (Alastair McIntyre, for one) think it’s incoherent to reason outside of any practice, and that might be right, but it’s beside the point for this discussion. My point here about how general ethics is can all be situated within a very general practice, or not. I assume there’s no one general practice we’re reasoning within for simplicity, but I don't believe that. Regardless, the point is that practical arguments are the coin of ethical reasoning, and any practice that has a standard of excellence has to use that coin in arguments about how to be excellent at that practice. Ethical reasoning is everywhere, in all of our practices, and also apart from any particular practice (or, to pacify McIntyre’s objection, apart from any particular practice but the one most general one that we’re in). So ethical reasoning simpliciter seems, as a result, not just ubiquitous but more important that all those particular forms of practical reasoning.

This is already making it less obvious why the answer to the question “what should I do?” is, structurally, higher than the answer to the question “what should I do to be a better trampoline jumper?” But it also ignores that those other practices have non-arguments as well that they can provide. If someone wants to convince you of the value of learning how to cook a particular cuisine, they can reason with you, and they can also give you some bites of the food. If someone wants to demonstrate the value of spending the afternoon trampoline jumping, they can reason, and they can also show you how impressive their current trampoline-jumping routine is. And this is all the more important for the way that they demonstrate to themselves the value of what they’re doing. They enjoy the food, they enjoy the mastery of the routine, so they answer for themselves the question of what they ought to do.

I don’t want to argue this here, but ethics doesn’t have any of those incentives: there is no way of demonstrating the value of ethics other than reasoning about it. We might feel good when we do what we we think we should, but only if we’re raised a certain way and live in a certain environment. (I want to write about this more later, because I think there’s an interesting question of whether there can be multiple, only partially overlapping ethical theories that are internally coherent but command different actions in some cases.)

Ok. That’s enough words, even if this isn’t wrapped up. So, does ethics have high, maybe impossibly high standards? The examples of high ethical standards are internal to particular systems of ethics, and ethics, understood more generally, needn’t have standards of any particular height. Ethics itself is the practice of reasoning practically about what to do. That, on its own, doesn’t suggest high or low standards, and it doesn’t suggest that the answer to the practical question of what one should do gets to trump the practical questions of what one should do to be a practical trampoline jumper. It does suggest that there could be some idea that acting ethically is acting excellently, in the way that practically reasoning about trampoline jumping is with the goal of jumping excellently. But whether we should talk about excellence of actions or a person in general is precisely one of the questions I want to look at. More to come.