Self and others

When I began this chapter I assumed that you knew what I meant by “morality.” I didn't try to explain what sorts of judgments or attitudes were moral.

In the course of the chapter, however, we have considered some attempts to define the range of morality. For if prescriptivism is correct, then morality consists of all our universalizable action-guiding judgments; if Kant is correct, then morality consists of all the universalizable categorical imperatives. These ways of defining morality are purely formal. They specify what moral judgments are without saying what they are about. More precisely, these metaethical theories tell us that moral judgments are judgments of a certain form about what we should do, but the theories do not tell us what those judgments say we should do.

When it comes to thinking about the content of morality, however, it helps to make a distinction between two different sorts of reasons for action. On one hand are those—like K, the proscription of the killing of the innocent—that are other-regarding. They have to do with what sorts of treatment we owe to other people. The sorts of questions about rights we have just been discussing are other- regarding questions.

On the other hand are self-regarding considerations that have to do with what we owe to ourselves. Many of the more familiar moral virtues and vices—kindness and cruelty, generosity and stinginess, thoughtfulness and lack of consideration—have to do with how we treat others. And much of what morality prohibits—theft, murder, lying, adultery, breaking one's promises—consists of actions that affect others. But it is important that we also evaluate our own and other people's behavior in contexts where we or they owe nothing to anyone else.

Johnny, who procrastinates, need not be doing any harm to anyone else. He may simply be making a mess of his own life. Yet it seems reasonable to say that he ought not to do it, at least if by “procrastination” you mean something like: doing things at the last minute, when they're harder to do than they would have been if he'd done them earlier. And this judgment looks universalizable. What's wrong about procrastination is wrong not just for Johnny but also for anyone else similarly situated. So too, Mary, who take absurd risks with her own life—everything from not bothering to prepare for important exams to stepping into the street without looking—may be harming no one else in doing what she does. She is being, as we say, imprudent. And, once again, we are inclined to say that she is acting wrongly, and that anyone who acts as she does would be acting wrongly also.

Aristotle, Plato's student, who is in may ways the first great Western moral philosopher, wrote two books on the ethics, called the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics, and these books deal both with other-regarding and self-regarding practical considerations. Aristotle's aim, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is to say what it is to live one's life well; he uses the Greek word eudaemonia to describe the state of someone who is living well. (Eudaemonia has often been translated as “happiness.” But this, as we shall see, is misleading.) Among the things that Aristotle thinks we need if we are to live well is

a) a good character (which means, for example, courage, temperance, and a sense of justice);

but he also mentions

b) money, friends, children, pleasure, and good looks.

While most sensible modern people might agree that the things on list (b) can contribute to living a good life, we would not ordinarily think of them as having much to do with morality.

In fact, we'd probably be inclined to think that morality recommended us to count good looks as morally irrelevant, friendship as desirable but not especially moral, and children, pleasure, and money as things that stand a good chance of getting in the way of doing what is right.

Nevertheless, it is important, in thinking about how we should behave, to bear in mind that each of us has one life to live and that living that life well—making a success of one's life—is important. And the fact that it is important to make a success of one's life provides a connection between self-regarding and other-regarding considerations. For among the most important things that we owe to other people is that we should recognize that they have a life whose success matters. It is in part because I recognize that many goods are important to me if I am to make a success of my life that I can see that I should not deprive you of the goods you need for your success. Theft, murder, lying, adultery, breaking one's promises: all of these are things that interfere with other people's abilities to make a success of their lives. The Golden Rule urges us to “do as we would have done unto us.” But in order to make sense of this command, we need to have a sense of what sorts of things matter to people and their search for eudaemonia. In that sense, when it comes to thinking about the content of morality, it is important to reflect on the social and material circumstances within which human beings conduct that search. That is why we can still learn from Aristotle's approach, which considers moral questions in the light of what he called “ethics,” which is the study of what it is to live a successful life. In recent moral theory, the study of ethics, in this broader sense, has become central again. And, as we shall see in the next chapter, this has important consequences for political philosophy.

5.13

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Source: Appiah Kwame Anthony. Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford University Press,2003. — 425 p.. 2003

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