Why It's Hard To Be Good

Al Gini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135473679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In a series of brief chapters, Al Gini lays out ideas for 'stepping out of the shadow of the self' - an argument for stopping thinking of yourself as the centre of the universe. It's hard to be good, he explains, until we realize that being good only has meaning in relation to other people. Ideas of justice, fairness, and ethical behavior are just that - abstract ideas - until they are put into action with regard to people outside ourselves.We may worry too much about good versus evil - big concepts that give us plenty of room to sit on the right side of the equation, he argues. Instead, we need to be thinking about how being good involves an active relationship toward others. Being good all by yourself may not be good enough. This warm and generous book is for anyone who wants to know how to use ethical thinking as way to live, work, and be with others.

1. Ethics Means What?

Those who are concerned with making the world more healthy had but start with themselves. Finding the center of strength within oneself is, in the long run, the best contribution we can make to our fellow men.

—William James

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool, shun him. But he who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a wise man, follow him!

—Eastern proverb

The most famous phrase in the history of the literature of philosophy is the Socratic dictum, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Perhaps the second-best-known philosophical nugget is René Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” It is at best a far distant second, however, and most often conjured up only while playing a game of Trivial Pursuit.

Less famously, Chicago Tribune essayist Terry Sullivan has said, “The examined life may be the ideal, but it’s too hard to do. It requires too much of us. It requires us to be responsible to ourselves and others for the outcomes of our choices and actions. It requires us to be in charge of who we are.” There are real truths to be mined from Socrates’ and Sullivan’s statements. And when closely examined side by side, these statements represent the Gordian knot or the central question of the entire ethical enterprise: What is the right thing to do? Or, more accurately, What ought I to do in regard to others?

The English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once said that “all of philosophy is but a footnote to Socrates/Plato.” (Plato, of course, was a student of Socrates for 20 years and served as the chronicler and creator of the Socratic dialogues. As a teacher, Socrates would have perished long before he was ordered to drink hemlock, because he never published.) What Whitehead meant by this statement is that Socrates and Plato laid the groundwork for what Western philosophy was to become. Certainly, they were not the first philosophers; they were preceded by Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, and others. However, they were the first who left behind an entire corpus of work, and within this body of work we find most if not all the basic philosophical questions itemized and asked, even if they were not satisfactorily answered or resolved. For Whitehead, after Socrates and Plato, the rest of the history of philosophy has been an attempt to unpack, embellish, and formulate answers to the questions, topics, and problems that they raised.

Students of classical Greek history have long debated exactly where Socrates’ thoughts and ideas left off and where Plato’s began. Though there is no unanimity on the matter, most scholars agree that the dialogue The Apology is a reflection of Socrates’ most fundamental philosophical beliefs. In The Apology, Socrates argues that the first principle and the first job of philosophy is to be able to grasp and understand the admonition of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi: Gnothi seauton, “Know thyself.”

Socrates was “curiously unscientific” about his outlook on life. He said of himself that he had “nothing to do with physical speculations.” Nor was he especially interested in one of Aristotle’s primary preoccupations, metaphysics, which is the study of ultimate cause(s), purpose, and meaning of life. Rather than questioning the nature and structure of the cosmos, Socrates believed we would be better off questioning the cosmos within, our inner nature, our most intimate selves. For Socrates. the first question of philosophy is the self: Who am I? To answer the question of self, Socrates believed that we must ask questions that disturb, provoke, anger, and intimidate us. We must be willing to ask questions that shake and shift the ground under our feet. For Socrates, the question of self (Who am I?) precedes all other considerations, including the related question of self and others (What ought I to do with others?). As Socrates clearly stated in The Republic, “He who would rule the world must first rule himself.”

In The Apology, Socrates argues that the first step toward wisdom is the discovery and acknowledgment of our own ignorance. He tells the story of his friend Chaerephon, who climbed up the slopes of Mount Parnassus and asked the oracle if there was a wiser man in all of Greece than Socrates of Athens. The priestess replied that there was no one wiser, and Socrates was shocked by the oracle’s answer. “What can the god mean?” said Socrates. “I have no claim to wisdom, great or small.” So Socrates decided this was a test, and he set out to find the wisest man in all of Greece. He talked to politicians, poets, skilled craftsmen, and many others thought to be wise. But all of them, said Socrates, although they appeared and pretended to be wise, were not. Moreover, he said, even when they did not know, they denied their ignorance and claimed wisdom. In the end, Socrates decided that the oracle was correct. He was the wisest man in all of Greece, or at least he was wise to this small extent: “I do not claim that I know what I do not know.”

It is also in The Apology that Socrates declares for all Athenians to hear:

I spent all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and your chief concern not your bodies or your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls. . . . Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state. . . . Let no day pass without discussing goodness. . . . [This] is really the very best thing that a man can do, and . . . the life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

For Socrates and his modern successors in the “study of the mind” (psuchē-logos)—among whom we can identify Abraham Maslow, founder of “Third Force Psychology,” and Sigmund Freud—the “examined life” is the result of self-awareness, self-reflection, and ultimately self-knowledge. It is only in coming to know ourselves, both our strengths and weaknesses, that we can begin to know and have sympathy, care, and concern for others. As Maslow so elegantly phrased it, “What we are blind and deaf to in ourselves, we are blind and deaf to in others.” For Socrates, the art of living together in the polis (the city-state) and the science (by “science” the Greeks meant an activity that is studied rationally and systematically) of human behavior and conduct (in Greek ethikā, in Latin mores, moralis) start with self, but are lived out with others. For Socrates, the good life for self, the good life with others (an ethical life), is a life lived “according to what is reasonable” (kata ton orthon logos).

Ethics Is a Lived Activity

Many scholars believe that one of the central features of the Socratic dialogues is their lack of doctrinaire ideology. Socrates did not preach “a system.” Rather Socrates was a teacher, and what he taught was not so much a philosophy as a philosophical system, a way of looking at the world, and a way of looking at self. The essence of his lesson plan was an elegant one: Let us all reason together. Let us talk with one another. For Socrates, clear thinking, clear reasoning, is a communal event, not a singular activity. Truth, as a way to achieve good behavior, is the result of thinking with and talking to others, a dialogue.

The dialectical method requires us to enter into conversation with others and to mutually debate and examine an idea or a subject matter. Theoretically, the dialogue proceeds from a less adequate definition, or from a consideration of particular examples, to a more general definition. (Metaphorically speaking, the dialectical method is the practice of holding a problem out at arm’s length to better see it and gain a modicum of objectivity. In so examining the problem, alternative solutions are applied until the best possible one is hit upon.) Socratic scholar Gregory Vlastos described Socrates’ method of inquiry as “among the greatest achievements of humanity.” Why? Because, says Vlastos, it makes philosophical inquiry “a common human enterprise, open to every man.” Instead of requiring allegiance to a specific philosophical viewpoint or analytical technique or specialized vocabulary, the Socratic method “calls for common sense and common speech.” And this, says Vlastos, “is as it should be, for how a man should live is every man’s business.”

Christopher Phillips, author of the charming and insightful Socrates Café, argues that the Socratic method goes far beyond Vlastos’ description. The method, says Phillips, does not merely call for common sense in our lives, but it also examines and critiques what common sense is in our lives. The method asks, Does the common sense (conventional wisdom) of our day offer us the greatest potential for self-understanding and ethical conduct? Or is the prevailing common sense in fact a roadblock to realizing this potential? According to Phillips, the Socratic method forces people to confront their own dogmatism by asking such basic questions as, What does this mean? What speaks for and against it? Are there other ways of considering the issue that are even more plausible and tenable? In compelling us to explore alternative perspectives, says Phillips, the method forces us to think outside the box and be open to the opinions of others.

For Socrates, we are “questioning beings,” and it is only through questioning life and others that we begin to have a better understanding of self. In fact, he suggests that the process of questioning is more important than the answers arrived at. When Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” what is implied is that in examining life, in questioning life, we may not come up with an answer. Or we may simply generate a series of new questions, or worse yet, arrive at an answer that we cannot or will not accept. Nevertheless, Socrates seemed convinced that the greater error, the bigger danger, lies with not asking any questions at all. In asking questions we say and assert something about ourselves. In asking, we have hope, but we also recognize that there are no guarantees. And, in asking, we reveal a great deal about who we are and who we would like to be.

In The Apology, with his very life in the balance, Socrates retains his conviction that the greatest danger of all is to dispense with questioning and examining our lives.

As long as I breathe and have the strength to go on, I won’t quit philosophizing. I won’t quit exhorting you and whomever I happen to meet, in my customary way: Esteemed friend, citizen of Athens, the greatest city in the world, so outstanding in both intelligence and power, aren’t you ashamed to care so much to make all the money you can, and to advance your reputation and prestige—while for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul you have no care or worry?

For Socrates, philosophy was a way of life, a way of approaching and seeing the world, a way of thinking. In the end, the Socratic method is as much about the process as the product, as much about the journey as the destination. In fact, I think it is fair to say that what Socrates left us was not a series of answers, but, rather, a process and a purposeful way of thinking. In the words of Ludwig W. Wittgenstein, “Philosophy is not (just) a theory but an activity.”

Like Socrates’ general approach to philosophy, ethics is best understood as a general attitude and orientation toward life. In other words, ethics is as much a methodology and an activity as it is a theory. It is a way of looking at the world, a way of thinking. It is not just a fixed body of knowledge. It is not just a doctrine with specific rules. It is not just a series of answers. Ethics is something we live out with others. And in this “living out” we are constantly asking ourselves three fundamental questions: Who am I? What do I owe others? What ought I to do?

It is of course impossible not to recognize the brute fact that since Socrates’ time, ethics has become, to say the least, a growth industry. As a formal discipline there are many different schools of thought (theories) regarding the ethical enterprise. These theories range from Aristotle’s virtue ethics to Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory of justice, Immanuel Kant’s logic of duty, Jeremy Bentham’s and J. S. Mill’s utilitarianism/consequentialism, Thomas Aquinas’ natural law theory, Ayn Rand’s virtue of selfishness, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical existentialism. Although these ethical theories, and a long list of others, offer radically divergent approaches and perspectives on what constitutes an ethically acceptable act, they are all equally committed to answering the same philosophical question: How should we live together?

Psychologist and pundit Robert R. Provine has suggested that although ethics is a laudable endeavor, he’s not at all sure that Socrates’ dialectical method is the best way to approach the issue. “Philosophy,” he says, “is to science what alcohol is to sex: It may stir the imagination, fire the passions, and get the process underway, but the act and implementation may be flawed, and the end result may come up short.” Provine believes that many philosophers fail because they have “an overly optimistic estimate of the power of naked reason and a dependence on anecdotal evidence.” Well, maybe we do! No, in fact, we definitely do! But what alternative do we have? Not all things regarding the mind and the heart are susceptible to measurement and quantification. Not every problem of human life and relationships can be clinically diagnosed and remedied by following a recommended pharmacological protocol. In resolving most ethical problems, says philosophical practitioner Lou Marinoff, what we need is Plato, not Prozac.

Ethics begins with the recognition that we are not alone or the center of the universe. We are not herd animals, but we are communal creatures. We are dependent on one another. We are born by others, live with the help of others, and function, survive, and thrive only with the assistance of others. We are collective by nature and necessity. For Jean-Paul Sartre, like it or not, we are by definition moral creatures because we are “condemned” by the fact of our collective existence to continually make choices about what we ought to do in regard to others. Ethics is, I think, primarily a communal collective enterprise, not a solitary one. It is the study of our web of reciprocal relationships with others. When Robinson Crusoe found himself marooned and alone on a tiny Pacific atoll, all things were possible. But when Friday came along and they discovered pirates burying treasure and each other on the beach, Crusoe was then involved in a universe of others, an ethical universe. As a communal exercise, ethics is the attempt to work out the rights and obligations we have and share with others. What is mine? What do I owe you? An act is not wrong (unethical) simply because it advances the well-being of an individual, but an act is wrong if it is unfair and inconsiderate in regard to the rights and just claims of others.

All ethical judgments are in some sense a “values versus values” or “rights versus rights” confrontation. Unfortunately, the question of what we ought to do in relation to the values and rights of others cannot be reduced to the analogue of a simple litmus test. In fact, I believe that all of ethics is based on what William James called the “will to believe.” That is, we choose to believe, despite the ideas, arguments, and reasoning to the contrary, that individuals possess certain basic rights that cannot and should not be willfully disregarded or overridden by others. In “choosing to believe,” said James, we establish this belief as a factual baseline of our thought process for all considerations in regard to others. Without this “reasoned choice,” says James, the enterprise loses its “vitality” in human interactions.

According to Harvard philosopher John Rawls, given the presence of others and that we need others, ethics is elementally the pursuit of justice, fair play, and equity. For Rawls, the study of ethics has to do with developing standards for judging the conduct of one party whose behavior affects another. Minimally, “good behavior” intends no harm and respects the rights of all affected, and “bad behavior” willfully or negligently tramples on the rights and interests of others. Ethics, then, tries to find a way to protect one person’s individual rights and needs against and alongside the rights and needs of others. Of course, the paradox and central tension of ethics lies in the fact that although we are by nature communal and in need of others, we are by disposition more or less egocentric and self-serving.

John Dewey has argued that at the pre-critical, pre-rational, pre-autonomous stage of our lives, morality is experienced as culturally defined rules that are external to us and are imposed or inculcated as habits. But real ethical thinking, said Dewey, begins at the evaluat...