Against moral sainthood
As philosopher Susan Wolf argues, life is far more
meaningful and rich if we do not aim at being morally
perfect
Photo by Angus R Shamal/Gallery Stock
Daniel Callcut is a freelance writer and philosopher. He is the editor of Reading Bernard Williams (2009).
He lives in Stamford, United Kingdom.
3,100 words
Edited by Nigel Wa
urton
I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that
neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’. This
declaration is one of the opening remarks of a landmark essay in which Wolf
imagines what it would be like to be morally perfect. If you engage with
Wolf’s thought experiment, and the conclusions she draws from it, then you
will find that it offers liberation from the trap of moral perfection.
Wolf’s essay ‘Moral Saints’ XXXXXXXXXXimagines two different models of the
moral saint, which she labels the Loving Saint and the Rational Saint. The
Loving Saint, as described by Wolf, does whatever is morally best in a
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joyful spirit: such a life is not fun-free, but it is une
ingly and unwaveringly
focused on morality. We are to think of the Loving Saint as the kind of
person who cheerfully sells all of her or his possessions in order to donate
the proceeds to famine relief. The Rational Saint is equally devoted to moral
causes, but is motivated not by a constantly loving spirit, rather by a sense of
duty.
The Loving Saint might be more fun to be around than the Rational Saint, or
more maddening, depending on your own personal temperament. Would the
constant happiness of the Loving Saint make being with her easier, or would
it drive you around the bend? There is an instruction associated with
Buddhism – in fact, coined by the American scholar Joseph Campbell – that
asks you to ‘participate joyfully in the so
ows of the world’, and the Loving
Saint does this to the maximum: but perhaps you would find such joy
sustained in the face of the world’s worst ho
ors inane or inappropriate. On
the other hand, the Rational Saint, with his relentless commitment to duty,
might be very grating company, too.
Both types of moral saint are likely to present difficulties if you are not a
saint yourself. Would they be constantly bothering you and urging you to
give more? Perhaps they have joined the effective altruism movement, and
are repeatedly suggesting the most effective ways that you can use your time
and disposable income to help. How does such a person make you feel when
you give much of your spare time and attention not to Oxfam but to video
games? And when you give a sizeable chunk of your spare income to
luxuries such as wine and chocolate rather than providing others with basic
nutrition? Do you want to be friends with someone whose 100 per cent
moral focus always seems, in effect, to be encouraging you to feel guilty?
The aspiration to be a moral saint, Wolf suggests, might turn someone into a
nightmare to live with and be around. The British writer Nick Hornby offers
a comic version of this scenario in his novel How to be Good XXXXXXXXXXBut
perhaps a true saint, being as decent a person as possible, wouldn’t want you
to feel bad all the time: what would be good about that? In fact, wouldn’t
true moral saints be as sensitive about their effect on your life as they are
about their effect on the world at large? Wolf suggests that the problem then
would be that the moral saint would have to hide her true thoughts about
your degree of moral commitment. Moreover, can a moral saint laugh
sincerely at your cynical jokes when they cut, as Wolf says, against the
moral grain? And, in any case, when would they have the time to hang out
with you? If they are morally perfect, then they have far more morally
important things to be doing.
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It’s not only friends that don’t really fit into a life devoted to maximum
moral achievement. Can the moral saint, if perfect, ‘waste’ time watching
films and television? How about spending any money on fine food or travel?
Or expending energy on sport rather than seriously important causes? Or
going birdwatching or hiking? No time either for theatre or the pleasures of
curling up with a good book. The problem with extreme altruism, as Oscar
Wilde is reported to have said about socialism, is that it takes up too many
evenings. Moral saints might be able to find time for some of these activities
when they happen to coincide with their ethical projects: watching sport, for
example, at a charity fundraiser; or admiring the scenery en route to a
troubled hotspot in need of aid. But these experiences have to be seen as
lucky extras if the only aim in life is to do as much moral good as possible.
If you don’t have enough time for friendship or fun, or works of art or
wildlife, then you are missing out on what Wolf calls the non-moral part of
life. Wolf does not mean to suggest that non-moral equals immoral: just
ecause something doesn’t have anything to do with morality (playing
tennis, for instance) it does not follow that it is therefore morally bad. The
point is that morality is, intuitively, focused on issues such as treating others
equally, and on trying to relieve suffering. And good things these are: but so
is holidaying with a friend, or exploring the Alaskan rain forest, or enjoying
a cu
y. Moral goodness is just one aspect of the good things in life and, if
you live as if the moral aspect is the only aspect that matters, then you are
likely to be very impoverished in terms of the non-moral goods in your life.
And that means missing out on a lot.
Wolf imagines the Loving Saint as perfectly happy to live a life in which
non-moral goods play no part. The ultra-ascetic moral life – no friendships,
no ho
ies, no distractions from the ethical – doesn’t come at a cost for the
Loving Saint in terms of contentment. But Wolf wonders how this can be.
Does the Loving Saint not see everything that he is missing out on and, if so,
how can this not affect his happiness? Perhaps, Wolf suggests, the Loving
Saint is almost missing a piece of perceptual equipment: an ability to see that
there is more to life than morality. Perhaps this explains why the Loving
Saint can stay happy. By contrast, Wolf does not suppose that the Rational
Saint fails to see that there is a huge area of life that she is missing out on.
Wolf imagines the Rational Saint persisting in her ba
en life through a
sense of duty alone. But why go so far as to live a life entirely and
exclusively devoted to moral causes? Wolf suggests answers that makes the
Rational Saint look not so rational after all: perhaps self-loathing and/or a
pathological fear of damnation.
Wolf’s two versions of moral sainthood are modelled on the two most
influential moral philosophies of modern Western philosophy: utilitarianism
(which inspires Wolf’s Loving Saint) and Kantianism (which inspires the
Rational Saint). What would your life be like, Wolf asks, if you lived these
moral worldviews to the max? Wolf suggests that neither worldview, if lived
comprehensively, delivers a very appealing life: each, as we have seen,
produces a vision of the good life that consists so thoroughly in devotion to
the needs of others that there is no time for personal enjoyment of the many
non-moral good things in life – no time, in fact, for a life of one’s own. You
would spend your whole existence, to echo some words of Bernard
Williams, as a servant of the morality system.
Things have gone wrong with modern morality if the expression ‘the good
life’ is ambiguous
It is a significant feature of both utilitarianism and Kantianism that neither
value personal happiness very highly, if at all. Utilitarianism is a philosophy
of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ and so, if the needs of the
many require you to make enormous personal sacrifices, including
sacrificing your happiness, then so be it. Wolf rightly imagines the perfect
utilitarian, the Loving Saint, as a happy person: and indeed that would be
ideal. But no one should become a utilitarian for reasons of their own
personal happiness or wellbeing: that isn’t the point of utilitarian morality.
Your individual happiness, considered in the context of billions of conscious
lives, is just a drop in the ocean. If doing the right thing for the general good
– eg, selling your main assets and devoting the proceeds to charitable action
– would make you unhappy, then that’s a shame, but your unhappiness
doesn’t stop the right thing from being the right thing.
Kantian morality is even less concerned with personal happiness.
Kantianism, derived from and named after the 18th-century philosopher
Immanuel Kant, is a philosophy that emphasises our rational responsibility
to other rational beings (hence Wolf’s ‘Rational Saint’ label). The reason to
do the right thing is because it is your duty to others, not because it will
make you happy. If other rational beings need our aid – if they are starving
or oppressed, for example – then we owe it to them, just as they would owe
it to us if the positions were reversed. Kant did think that being moral made
you worthy of happiness but that was all he would allow. One suspects that,
had he lived to hear it, Kant would have liked the remark attributed to the
20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: I don’t know why
we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
If modern moral theories, followed as ideals, produce unappealing visions of
life, then you might think that something is wrong with the theories
themselves. Perhaps what is needed is a more well-rounded conception of
the good life. In fact, you might believe it a sign that things have gone badly
wrong with regard to modern morality that the