Originally published on Medium on May 2, 2018.
The goal of ethics feels obvious… until you try to define it. What are we trying to achieve with an ethical system? Good outcomes (consequentialist)? Good actions (deontological)? Good character (virtue ethics)? We can go a level deeper and say, for example, that utilititarianism is trying to achieve good outcomes for the greatest number of people. Yet these first answers are not satisfying. They are really no more than descriptions of what a particular framework is optimizing for.
So what are we really trying to get out of an ethical system? At their most fundamental, ethical systems exist to allow people to live together successfully. At its core, this requires balancing the needs of individuals and the needs of groups. Need, in this sense, includes not just the bare needs for living but also our needs for individual fulfillment and for community. It includes all of the things that culture and society help us to achieve.
There are two key concepts here: living successfully and living together. What do they mean? Let’s start with what it means to live successfully. Few people will live their best life if they are hungry or threatened with violence. Most people will, under those conditions, live a pretty miserable life. Yet saying that a successful life is one that fails to be miserable sets a disappointingly low bar. We could set the bar higher and say that an ethical system should aim to make everyone happy. That is standard. It acknowledges that there is more to life than merely not dying. Still, it has obvious failings. We cannot make people happy. Plus, phrased this way, it’s easy to conflate happiness with the pursuit of pleasure, with a selfish hedonism that, when pursued exclusively is as insubstantial as the fog.
Eudaimonia, human flourishing, the life well lived. This gets more at a sense of meaning and fulfillment. However, as commonly described in virtue ethics, it has a problem opposite to that of hedonism. It puts too much weight on elated properties such as wisdom and moral virtue. It puts too much emphasis on living an objectively “right” sort of life. Yet human experience shows there is not one right way of living. There is not even one a singular right way of living for a single person. Sometimes we flourish when we have an experience that illuminates our understanding. Sometimes we flourish when we drink that delish hot chocolate. Flourishing and meaning are so personal that no single impersonal definition of a successfully lived can fully capture what it means to live a good life.
Perhaps, we can capture the idea of individual variation by calling our goal subjective eudaimonia. By that I mean that we should acknowledge that well being is a personally relative state, while also acknowledging that it is more than mere hedonic pleasure. There is a deeper state of well being which we should all strive to achieve, but it is not any one person’s place to define how we can each achieve it — although we can learn much that can guide our own journey from the experience and wisdom of others. For me, this striving provides the heart of what it means to live successfully. Ethical system should not try to maximize any prescribed form of happiness. They should aim to maximize the ability of each person to strive for their own happiness. As the US Declaration of Independence holds, it is the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right, not happiness itself.
The ability to pursue happiness is harder to measure than good outcomes, good actions, or good characters. This is not just because it is harder to measure potentials than actualities. It is also because the ability to strive for well being is inherently a system property. It involves doing the right thing, aiming for the best outcomes, and the pursuit of virtue, but it is not identical to any of those things. Successful striving requires setting conditions for people to play out their lives and then trusting them to pursue those ends for themselves.
That brings us to living together. Allowing each of us to strive for a life well lived may sound like a call for a world of individuals independently pursuing their own goals. If we could all pursue our goals in isolation, we wouldn’t need ethics. However, humans are relational. Our lives are lived in groups. Thus, the real problem of ethical system is allowing us to each strive for our own well being while not diminishing the ability of others to do the same. Read one way, this may sound like a call for libertarian style minimal intervention. However, it does not follow that the best system for allowing people to pursue their own good is the one that leaves people the most to their own devices.
A system that allows the pursuit of the good should be non-interventionist in that it cannot force a particular conception of the good upon others. However, it may require shaping the system to avoid affects that systematically reduce the ability of others to pursue their own happiness. Often system shaping rules impose a burden on some while overall making it easier for people to pursue their own happiness. It is unrealistic to say that there should never be any burden. Instead, we need to look at the burdens through the lens of its impact on their ability to strive for what is meaningful to them.
In the end, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow puts it better in “A Psalm of Life” (from which the title of this post is taken):
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, — act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.