Within Reason

In the previous post here I complained that I didn’t want to refer to ethical theories and theories of the good life using the blanket term “ethics”. One way to resist this is to insist that any worthwhile ethical theory should show how the good life and fulfilling our duties will or tend to converge. I’m skeptical that any theory is out there.

Fulfilling your obligations may not always make your life go better. Here’s a good example: you have a co-worker who is a real jerk, but conducts herself ethically and is up for a promotion to be your boss where she will make your department’s life terrible. In the hiring process, it’s revealed to you that she’s going to get the job unless you can name something unethical she’s done in the past. What you say would never be revealed to her and she would never know you’re the source. There is no other way to keep her from getting the job.

I think this is a pretty clear case where one’s obligations and one’s pursuit of the good life diverge. Not that it’s hard to find these. If you’re skeptical of the eventual convergence like I am, you have to deal with responses to these examples. You can say, for instance, that while lying in this instance doesn’t make your life go better in the short-term, it may in the long term. (Say, because you will think of yourself as a more ethical person and that’s psychologically beneficial.) Here is another response: even if it doesn’t make your life better, it may still make everyone’s (or a lot of people’s) lives better in the long run. These responses aim to save the inherent connection between ethical duties and the good life. The first appeals to ethical egoism or one’s enlightened self-interest. The second appeals to utilitarian thinking about value. So both appeal to roughly consequentialist grounds.

I’ll guess I need to discuss this further in one of the next installments, but it seems like either I’ll have to give up the idea that ethics and the good life are separable, or say that egoism and utilitarianism are actually theories of the good life in disguise.