Now, I have come to the crossroads in my life. I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew. But I never took it. You know why? It was too damn hard.
- Lt. Col. Frank Slade, “Scent of a Woman”
An even stronger conclusion for this quote might still feel familiar to you, as it certainly does to me: “because doing the wrong thing was a little easier.” You probably already know the classic drowning child thought experiment, due to Peter Singer:
You’re walking along a river when you notice a child drowning. However, if you jump into the river to save the child you will ruin your expensive suit. Is it ethical for you to ignore the child? If not, is it any more ethical to ignore the fact that the monetary equivalent of an expensive suit could save the life of a child in an impoverished country?
This thought experiment has been fundamental to the Effective Altruist movement, but lots of people (like me) hear about it, agree with it, and don’t immediately become EAs. I think this is actually one of the biggest problems in ethics: that it’s actually very difficult to become an ethical agent. By ’ethical agent,’ I mean someone who is compelled by their own ideas of right and wrong. A good example might be Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, who, as he endangered himself and his family to stand up for his beliefs, said, “the one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” And yet, I think most people’s consciences are either asleep, running on default mode where they mostly agree with their in-group without really having a reason why, or else lack any normative force, such that, like Lt. Col. Slade, they “know what the right thing is,” but choose something easier instead.
Along those lines, I have an admission to make: a few weeks ago, I started eating meat again. I don’t really have a good reason for it, except that meat is delicious and cheap and nutritionally dense. But in my heart, I think it’s wrong to eat meat unless you have some good way to ensure that the animals were well-treated and sustainably raised. The embarassing truth is that I started eating meat again not because I found a way to meet this standard, and not because I made a principled change to my ethics that weighted thriving (by eating nutritionally dense foods) more highly relative to non-harming, but because I felt like it.
And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to be said for feeling like it. Most of the vegans I’ve met are, on some level, vegan because the feel like it: they learned about the brutality and environmental destruction endemic in the livestock industry and it resonated with them so strongly that they completely changed their livestyles. But most of the people I’ve met also know enough about that same brutality and environmental destruction to make the same choice, and don’t. And none of the vegans I know are also EAs. And so, it seems clear to me that as far as feeling like it can take you (and I do think it’s quite far), you can’t rely on that alone. Getting better as a person, probably requires ethics.
And look, I have my own ideas on what it means to get better as a person, but you don’t have to agree with me on those ideas to agree with this point. Personally, I’ve been biased against ethics for a while now, partially because the professor of my mandatory undergraduate ethics class was one of the worst people I’ve ever met and I’m frankly still upset about it. But as I’ve thought about it, I’ve changed my mind about ethics, because I think the issue with that professor was that he was using ethics the same way most people use it: for post-hoc rationalization for doing what he felt like doing. In fact, that ethics class explicitly demanded that we do such rationalizations by giving assignments where we were instructed ahead of time to arrive at some specific conclusion, without giving any kind of disclaimer that this is exactly why ethics can be dangerous to smart people.
And yet I think ethics can also be helpful, especially to spiritual practice. As we develop psychologically and spiritually, our default behaviors and the pressure we experience to conform to social norms restrict us less and less. Our awareness of the actions we could take at every moment opens and eventually softens - and this can lead to weirdness and bad outcomes, because we’re simultaneously dissolving both the systems we use to limit our awareness into something more manageable and the systems we use to make decisions. Simultaneously doing something more constructive - while recognizing the ultimate nebulousness/transparency/unreality of that thing - can help us with do that dissolution in a more smooth/stable way.
Like most of my essays, this one will be missing a conclusion. I’m not sure what, concretely, an ’ethical practice’ looks like, aside from the fact that it needs to involve both becoming more capable of being compelled by your ethics while also developing the ethics themselves. These things have to happen in tandem: you’re very unlikely to be compelled by your ethics unless your specific ethics are specifically compelling to you, and there’s no point in having ethics that you’re not compelled by.
I also haven’t fully explored the consequences of not considering most people ethical agents. Certainly I don’t think it means that they deserve less ethical consideration. But it does mean that debating or explaining ethics to/with most people is a waste of time, unless you think those ethics will probably have normative force for yourself or the other person.