A Bear – Poles Apart

We are limited to what we are. We can only become what is already in us as a potential. A seed of an oak tree can only become an oak, never a pinetree, and a human offspring cannot be anything but human. That is a rather severe limitation, isn’t it? But it gets much worse when we are reminded that we don’t have the full range of possibilities even within the human species. Contrary to what most advertisers will have us believe we just can’t shape ourselves by picking freely from the supermarket of opportunities. Material resources surely place a restraint on us but that is not the main obstacle. Lotteries can be won, however unlikely, but the definite restrictions inside us cannot be overcome. Anyone cannot become an inventive rocket scientist, a great artist and maybe not even a top class waiter. Sure, hard work and diligence can get you far, very far, let’s say any profession is ninety percent hard work and only ten percent talent, or make it ninety-nine percent hard work, the remaining one percent is still an absolute obstacle. 

But why let lack of talent stop you? Many are those who have defied depreciating judgments and proven all wrong, or those who have reached more than far enough without having to climb to the top. Yes, really, what counts is your enjoyment of the activity, whatever anyone says and whatever the prejudice. That brings us back to the land of boundless opportunities, doesn’t it? Not at all. If anything it is an even greater restriction. 

You may have the capacity for a decent performance in a fairly wide range of activities, but how many of them would you find fulfilling? The flattering super-self of modern consumerism that is told he can do anything because his autonomy is without limits, is not really complimented when told such fairy tales. If the individual were to be given the respect that is properly his, he would be told that he is so special that he has a unique area of performance that belongs to no one else. Personal fulfillment is so personal that you cannot and should not expect to find it in a path that has already been throdden by so many others. Maybe you can indeed do anything but if you are to believe in your individuality, your goal is to find yourself and obviously you can’t do that just anywhere. 

The fulfillment of one’s potential is more than just achieving what can be done but to do what is truly good for oneself. For a plant and an animal it means blossoming and growing into its maximum health and strength, and for a human being it also means happiness. The pursuit of happiness is a self-evident urge that surely ought to be respected, but it does not imply the necessity of recognizing every choice as an acceptable choice. 

The range of options that is rationally available to any person is in fact quite limited, but that does not mean that the number of actual choices is low or indeed any more restricted than most people imagine. Within the field of natural pursuits and potential for happiness available to one human being the differentiation is huge. In fact, considered as an imaginable number it is as infinite as what would be found within a larger area. Inside a sphere as small as a dot there is a world of details and an endless diversity. Even if a person knew what was right for him and thought he knew what the stars were expecting of him, there would be more than enough to choose from making his life far from predetermined.

 At birth there are an infinite number of lives potentially available for one human being. That includes an infinity of both good and bad choices. (Infinity cannot be divided into parts.) It includes a range of potential lives that could make the individual a fulfilled and harmonious being. 

Just as Aristotle does not recommend only one form of government but considers what would be more suitable to different circumstances, a human being can find himself in a variety of conditions that, even if they are all favorable, require a different response. Moreover, at a crossroad one path is sometimes as good as another but will require different reactions further down the road. 

There are pluralities of rights and wrongs. Some things are possible, others impossible but all of it comes from within you, the unique individual. Don’t listen to them. Maybe you can or maybe you can’t.

Be yourself! It is one of the mantras of our time, but as it stands it is quite meaningless, for how many of us really know who we are?

Yes, be yourself! That is a truly ethical encouragement and if correctly understood, maybe the only one you will ever need.

Be yourself! It promises great freedom – and great restraint.

Who are you? Clearly that is the first thing you need to find out, for how can you make an effort to be something if you don’t know what it is? 

Know thyself! No one truly knows himself, of course. How could you fully get to know the intricate complexity of your psychology, your innate structure as well as what life has made you? How can you achieve a complete comprehension of your potentials and your limitations? You can’t, but you can always improve your knowledge of yourself.

But let’s imagine someone who has achieved as much self-knowledge as humanly possible. This Socrates would have a much clearer vision of what he wanted to do than the rest of us. He would not attempt to pursue a path that was against his nature but would be wholeheartedly devoted to his true calling. Is he free? If freedom is to have an unlimited set of options, he is not free. His highly advanced knowledge of himself has brought him to a point where his alternatives are very limited. All the endless offers that are presented to us as viable temptations, are for him closed off. He never even considers an action he knows will be injurious and he does not waste his time on pursuits that lead to nowhere. In fact, as he approaches perfection in his self-knowledge, his actual range of choices will be all the more narrow, and a fictitious being of perfection would have no choice at all. Therefore, if there can be no freedom without choice, the better you know yourself, the less freedom you have. Be yourself and you are not free!

But on the other hand, an advanced level of self-knowledge implies a great insight into what you really want. This Socrates character does not consider all those options the rest of us think we have because he knows he would not want them anyway, and the very meaning of freedom is to be able to do what you want. He is the one who does what he wants, so he is the one who is free. Be yourself and you are free!

Well, there is no escape from the paradox of freedom, so maybe we better not talk about it at all. You want what is good for you and whether that is to be given the technical designation “freedom”, may be less important. You want to be yourself, so that you can live in harmony with yourself and be happy. 

Without self-knowledge you will choose what is good for you only by a lucky chance, and the more choices you have the greater the risk of going wrong.

With self-knowledge a great variety of choices will not distract your attention from what is right for you.

What is right for you is to be yourself.

Duty is necessarily the opposite of freedom in that it poses a constraint on action and limits options. If there is something you have to do, you are not free to do something else instead. However, philosophers of duty are always quick to point out that the way they see it duty is actually a fulfillment of freedom. Kant tries to achieve this trick by insisting that our duties should come from laws that we impose on ourselves so that it is actually we who decide what we are to do. But even putting it in such terms is a bit of a stretch from what we usually understand by freedom. A Kantian does not make up the law according to personal inclinations but rather depersonalizes himself and does what he considers to be a universal requirement. He detects the law rather than chooses it and his obedience is categorically necessary. This is not what we normally call freedom.

We must grant that freedom is a slippery term. Someone who always does what he immediately wants, becomes a slave to his passions and is thereby not free at all. Freedom easily contradicts itself and cancels itself out, so it may not be unreasonable to think that what initially looks like restraint can actually lead to more freedom than otherwise possible. That is of course a long and winded discussion. For now let us just acknowledge that there is a potential problem with freedom: What it is, may not be what it seems, and given that, there may be other ways to self-realization than simple licence. 

But to suggest that the concept of duty can lead the way appears rather far fetched if only from an analytical (linguistic) standpoint. “You can” is the essence of freedom while duty is to be expressed as “you must.” To be meaningful, “you must” has to be presupposed by “you can” (no one can demand the impossible), that much is clear, but it does not quite work the other way around. “You can” indicates a possibility while “you must” entails necessity. Obviously, possibility does not imply necessity. If you can do something, it does not mean you must do it. It is not strictly a logical contradiction but it removes the force of the initial statement. A: “I can do x.” B:“Yes, you must.” A’s statement likely implies “if I want to” while B indicates “whether you want to or not,” so in reality B contradicts A. If something is done out of duty, it appears to be rather inconsequential to insist that it was also a free choice. The essence of the former somehow swallows the latter.

Duty and freedom are in effect incompatible when they occur in the same object. Freedom is an ideal, but not in all instances. We have some duties, but not only duties. It may be a task of ethics to identify the domain of both freedom and duty, but it should not insist that they be pressed into the same category.

A duty must be perfect. You have to do it, or you don’t; there is nothing in between. To say that something is not a duty but it would be a very good thing if you did it, is not to say that it is half a duty, a third of a duty, or ninety percent of a duty. A duty is always a hundred percent, or it is nothing.

That is not to pretend that every obligation is an equally strict requirement – of course it isn’t. There is a definite law against killing random passers-by in the street and your teacher is adamant that you do your homework, but no one thinks those two duties are in any way comparable, yet they are both absolute. As long as no room for options are given by the recognized authority, the demand is total, which is to say it is a duty, although nothing is said about the importance of that particular duty.

This is a mere conceptual analysis of the term “duty” and I don’t mean to express anything about its practical importance. Some ethicists think duty is everything while some leave it on the fringe of morality, but it is to be expected that the simple definition is the same for everyone. When the task at hand is accompanied by an absolute expectation that it is fulfilled, we call it a duty, if not it is a recommendation. The latter term may vary in strength depending on the authority of the advisor, ranging from a friendly suggestion to something close to a demand, but it is never absolute. That is reserved for the word “duty” which always designates something absolute, something perfect, that is.

Recognizing this it may seem odd that Kant the philosopher introduces the combination “imperfect duty” and thereby employs a contradiction in terms. But he is forced to do it since ethics for him is duty and duty only, while at the same time there clearly exist ethical considerations that cannot be fully covered by laws and commandments. There is an unlimited amount of good deeds that we could conceivably do although it would be unreasonable to demand it. The saintly character has attained a height of moral life that is beyond the reach for most of us, and we need a way to convey the idea that their conduct is highly admirable. Since they act morally they necessarily act dutifully in Kant’s terminology, but because we don’t absolutely have to act like them, the qualifier imperfect is added. The result is an artificial construction that doesn’t make much linguistic sense: It says we have duties that are not duties. 

What this actually means, translated into a language we are more familiar with, is that the notion of duty fails to cover the entire domain of ethics even for a deontologist. Another term is needed, and the only way the term “imperfect duty” can be thought to fill the gap, is if it represents something that is not a duty at all.

Having a duty is a moral relief. The moment you know what you must do, the tormenting considerations have found rest and all that is left is simple automatic thoughtless action. The private soldier who always follows order and never doubts his duty possesses an enviable peace of mind that is not available to ordinary moral actors cursed with independence and freedom. That is why any constraint and reduction of freedom represent a freedom from oneself and that unbearable human condition of lonely choice. 

But a paradox is not a solution and the conscripted man’s denial of responsibility is an illusion. We cannot renounce our humanity and achieve an animal’s liberation from ethics. Still, moral theorists have been trying to do just that. They have noticed that beasts have instincts that are equivalent to laws of nature within themselves. When a wolf kills it does what wolves are programmed to do, and with the necessity of a stone that falls to the ground. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, the theorists seem to reason, if humans also had a law of nature that commanded with the force of necessity – categorically and imperatively? Kant has given us such a substitute law, and many a self-appointed policeman has found comfort therein. A person who can’t do otherwise can’t be wrong.

We are always wrong and there is no escape from blame, for even if our constructed law were perfectly right and hit the mark on every occasion, it can never regulate all our movements the way nature leads an animal to its prey. Even Kant did not envision us having perfect duties to do what has not yet suggested itself as a definite alternative. You have a duty not to kill Mr. Smith and hopefully that ought not to be such a difficult task, but the opposite, to save his life, might prove more complicated, especially if you don’t even know this gentleman. Kant calls the first requirement a perfect duty but sensibly refrains to extend such an epithet to the second instance. Still, he insists on calling it a duty – an imperfect one. Imagine that. Mr. Smith is currently in mortal danger since he is hesitant to get vaccinated, but a word from you might make him change his mind. Clearly it’s your duty to talk to him, right? But Mr. Jones suffers from the same delusion and so do crowds of others and you just don’t have the capacity to reach them all. Nevertheless, you have a so-called imperfect duty to do so. What could that possibly mean? Not much really.

A duty that disappears into a mere hint without even having the character of a recommendation is not much of a duty according to any plausible interpretation of the word. Kant’s promising project that was to furnish us with a clear path through the wilderness of right and wrong disappears into the same quagmire of uncertainty that we are already so all too familiar with: The more we think about it, the less we know what to do.

Ethics is the science of asking that exceedingly difficult question: What am I to do?

It’s a desperate question, isn’t it? When confronted with the endless possibilities of human life and the seemingly limitless freedom of the will, a little man may be forgiven for sitting down in despair and covering his eyes so as to not see the infinity of the starry heavens. Better to live in a bubble where the range is narrow and the alternatives are few and manageable. 

But even in the minimal scope of our daily world there is no escape. Problems appear; dilemmas constantly pop up and ruin our peaceful indifference. What is the right thing to do in this situation? My options may not be many, perhaps as few as two, but the agony of the choice may still be overwhelming.

The science of ethics is there to help… and to make everything many times more difficult. Maybe you didn’t even know you had a problem until you made the mistake of exposing yourself to the precepts of an ethical theory. Your quiet world may have been shattered forever the moment you realized that the answer was not a self-evident given and that another course of action might always be considered. 

However, chances are you were already a reflective sort of fellow and knew the twitch of conscience that occurs when one doubts one’s own action. In that case you were familiar with the essence of ethics even if you had never been bothered by any of those distressing theories. You may have been considering such notions as good and bad, right and wrong, and racked your brain about what was the appropriate thing to do at a certain moment, but you may not have had the method for sorting it out. That’s when systematic ethics can actually come in as a relief.

You hear the voice of the esteemed scholar Immanuel Kant instructing you to act as if the maxim of your action were to become a universal law, and you would immediately grasp the necessity of your next move. Or you could lend your ear to the venerable jurist Jeremy Bentham who would tell you to choose the action that would result in the greatest amount of happiness, and a few simple calculations would suffice to settle the issue. Being a devout deontologist (like Kant) or a utilitarian (like Bentham) does make life easier in certain respects. 

But as already suggested there is more to ethics than the resolution of definite dilemmas where a limited number of possible acts are to be scrutinized. If you are careful enough, maybe by taking shelter on a deserted island and living there far from the risk of causing injury to anyone, you may not do much morally wrong but you wouldn’t do much right either. On the other hand, by positioning yourself in the midst of a busy society, not only do you risk wrongdoing, but the possibility for doing right may just be too overwhelming for a frail soul. How do I know where to begin, and where to stop? How do I know what to do? Please give me a theory!

If ethics is not necessary, it is not ethics. If it does not have to exist, it does not exist.

Ethics describes what you need to do to be good, but if you don’t want to be good, is that an option? No, for if it were, it would no longer be a requirement and ethics is essentially a requirement.

Therefore it does not really make sense to ask “Why be ethical?” It is like asking “Why do I have to do what I have to do?” 

But why is ethics a requirement? How can anything be required of you, a human child who never chose to be born? No one can make demands on you if you in no way have forced your presence on them. A demand is something that is imposed on you from outside as a claimed repayment for something, but if no such thing is presumed to exist, the demand is at best unfair and at worst meaningless. However, if the requirement comes from yourself, it is not a demand and not a duty, it is just something you must do following the logic of your being. Do you have to eat? Yes. Is it a demand? Your duty? No. Do you have to be ethical? The answer is the same.

Is it a stupid question then? The reason why we need food may be too obvious to ask, but if a really deep and exact answer was wanted, it might be profitable to ask a nutritionist and then it would turn out that the question made sense. 

Nothing in life should remain unasked and especially not the matters of highest importance. What could be more important than what we are to do and how we are to live, and how can an answer to it be accepted if a reason for it is not provided?

Yet they keep telling us what to do. Be nice, be good! Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill! And they refuse to tell us why. It makes intuitive sense, sure, but so does many an illusion and until an investigation is made the risk of deception is greater than we can afford. 

Why be ethical? Because it is a duty imposed on you from nowhere? Because society would fall apart if you did not contribute? An affirmative answer to this may have a pragmatic advantage but that does not make it true and if someone calls the bluff we are powerless.

No, it is not your duty to be ethical and society does fine without your tiny contribution, but you cannot do without it.

Why eat? It is not your duty and society may not need you to, but you need it yourself. It is a function of your being that you retain your being. Likewise it is also a function of your being human that you live like one. Being ethical is being human and since that is what you are, it is what you must be. Why that is so is another question, but it’s the only path of explanation available. You don’t have to be anything, including ethical, unless it is necessary for being what you are.

Utilitarianism professes to give ethics a foundation: It is happiness. The distribution of the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people is the measure of the ethical worth of an act. That may be well and good, but it does not explain why I should bother about being ethical and care about your happiness at all. It would surely be a nice thing to do, and you in particular would approve of my action, but what is there in this incomprehensible universe that can reasonably make such a demand on me? 

The greatest happiness principle is in harmony with the fact that we all want happiness. That is simply an analytic truth (inherent in the definition) since happiness is defined as “that which we want” without specifying what exactly it might consist of. Perhaps we could then rephrase it as an encouragement to give to people what they truly want. However, that only slightly shifts the problem: “Why would I care about what you want?”

One might think that since we are presumably all born free, we are at liberty to care about whatever we wish, and if that includes reducing the freedom of others, that might not be such a nice thing to do, but it wouldn’t count as a fundamental reason. It’s nice to be nice, but not strictly necessary. 

Some ethicists consider this general admonition to be the best we can do: you are strongly recommended to take your fellow humans into account, but if you simply refuse, nothing will convince you. 

A deontologist, on the other hand, a follower of the branch of ethics that holds that definite duties decide what we must do, has an edge on the utilitarian in this respect. Duties are as such fundamental: They are not asking for your agreement; they command and the origin of the commandment is necessarily to be found beyond the obedient subordinate. If God is the commander, nothing could of course be more absolute and fundamental and it is not up to you if you want to comply with the precepts. But of course, if you are in doubt as to what is really God’s order, you have not reached any farther. 

Deontological theories have ways of determining what our absolute duties might be. Most famously Kant tells us that we are obliged to obey the laws that follow from being rational creatures. If such laws could really be formulated, there should no doubt that a foundation for ethics has been found, but for one that is skeptical of the morality that emerges from Kant’s system, there is reason to suspect that something has gone wrong. At the very least we thought ethics consisted of being nice to people but the follower of a Kantian law cares more about obeying its letter than worrying about actual people who might suffer from our action.

If ethics has anything to do with kindness, a cold law, however fundamental, is likely to fail. Where then is the foundation of ethics?