In defence of moral laxity

We should do what we're obligated to, and not feel guilty if we don't do more.

Richard Y Chappell

recently had a lovely post asking people to disagree with him. I obliged by expressing my misgivings about what he calls beneficentrism, "The view that promoting the general welfare is deeply important, and should be amongst one’s central life projects." I argued instead for

a relatively strong partialist account, in which one is obligated to promote the welfare of those one is directly engaged with - co-workers, family, friends, fellow organization members, maybe neighbours - but going beyond that is supererogatory. (Beyond that circle there are harms that one is obligated not to cause, but harm and benefit are not symmetrical.)

I liked Chappell's main response, which seemed to deemphasize obligation, and I didn't find much to object to:

we would do well, morally speaking, to dedicate at least 10% of our efforts or resources to doing as much good as possible (via permissible means). Whether this is obligatory or supererogatory doesn't much interest me. The more important normative claim is just that this is clearly a very worthwhile thing to do, very much better than largely ignoring utilitarian considerations.

But he also linked to a backgrounder on obligation, and there I found much more to disagree with. I agree with Chappell's most basic point in the backgrounder: that it is "unfortunate" that "Delineating the boundary between 'permissible' and 'impermissible' actions… has traditionally been seen as the central question of ethics". But I disagree entirely with his reasoning for this view.

I take particular issue with this paragraph:

It encourages moral laxity. We should not be aiming to act in a minimally permissible way. Calling a good act “supererogatory” (above and beyond the call of duty) has an air of dismissal about it. When asking “Do I have to do this?” the answer may indeed be “No,” but that wasn’t the best question to begin with.

From my perspective, if you think there's something wrong with "aiming to act in a minimally permissible way", you're too close to a view that does focus on the permissible. Rather, you should indeed make sure that your actions are minimally permissible – that you're not doing anything blameworthy, anything wrong – so that you can get on with all the rest of your life, the areas beyond obligation, justice, and what I think most people would consider morality.

Consequentialists and deontologists generally agree that the subject matter of ethics should be moral actions (often moral decisions). We virtue ethicists (a motley crew including Buddhists, Stoics, Epicureans, Nietzscheans and others as well as Aristotelians) generally disagree with this. We are concerned with what it is to live a good life – in ways that include our feelings as well as our actions, but also in ways that go beyond morality per se. Bernard Williams rightly redirects our attention from "What should one do?" to "How should one live?", and in so doing, from morality to ethics. The questions "Should I eat tomatoes or pancakes?", or "Should I attend McGill or the University of Toronto?", are important questions for a good life – for our flourishing – but I don't think it makes sense to call them moral questions, because they don't have to do with blame, with justice, with obligations to others. Morality is one sphere of life, and deontic concepts like obligation are helpful to demarcate it from the rest. Chappell and I agree that ethics shouldn't be primarily about obligation, but I think that that's precisely the reason concepts of obligation are important – in order to put obligation in its limited place.

This all is important because we live in a world suffused with guilt! Every day we are bombarded with emails from charities and political organizations telling us to contribute more of our income, not to mention the panhandlers we pass on the street. Anti-racist activists claim that we are always so suffused with implicit bias that we must continually hunt it down within our souls. American employees are often expected to work on evenings and weekends and vacation days – a mechanism enforced by many means, but a key one among them being guilt. ("You really should get that report in before Monday morning.") Families impose on us similarly. Actually doing the things they ask – giving lots of money to the charities, working 60-hour weeks – rarely results in fewer demands being made. And this guilt economy reinforces patriarchy, because women are typically expected to feel such obligations more than men are. The world keeps telling us we're not doing enough; it's up to us to figure out when we are.

Some of the people who think that I really should be giving them more money right now.

It is essential to living well to be able to say: you have done enough. Among the reasons we need to be moral as part of a good life is in order to have a clear conscience – and from it, self-respect. On Robin Dillon's feminist concept of self-respect, "the self-respecting person has a keen appreciation of her own worth" – an appreciation we lose when we are feeling guilty about how much more there is to do. Even if there is more to be done in the future, it is important to know that you have satisfied your obligations to this date, you are good enough, you have done what is required, what you need to do. Anything more is great, but you don't have to do it and you can breathe easy, no matter how many moral entrepreneurs are trying to call you "morally lax". We should have an air of dismissal toward them; it's vital to.

A real text message I got last week.

Once one has done what one is required to do, there are many good things one can do with the rest of one's life – creating art for connoisseurs, taking care of one's family, meditating, promoting the general welfare – and bad things, like taking heroin, scrolling for hours on Reddit, or getting angry at news reports. Perhaps the proportion of this remainder that one should typically devote to the general welfare should be 10%; perhaps it should be even higher. But the criterion for determining that must have to do with one's flourishing, in a way informed by one's own cares and aims; it should not be about "laxity".

The use of "moral laxity" implies that Chappell believes something is wrong (and probably even blameworthy) with someone who doesn't do the "very worthwhile" thing, something wrong in a specifically moral sense. That is, something is wrong with this person that isn't wrong with someone who smokes a pack a day or rides a motorbike without a helmet. All of this indicates to me that, in the moral (rather than legal) senses of "supererogatory" or "permissible", he doesn't actually believe such an action to be permissible. To put it in the simplest language, he believes that acting in that way is not okay. And that’s what I have a problem with.

Living a good life means, among other things, not just making others happy but being happy oneself. And one is not going to be happy if one is always haunted by the fear of being "morally lax". The idea of supererogatory acts is important precisely so that we are able to live with ourselves: to be able to say that, in fact, we have done enough – amid all the people who tell us we haven't.