The Moral Spectrum
Broadening Our Perspective on the Right Thing to Do
How Do You Know What's Right?
Recently you made a moral decision. You faced a situation with moral import and decided what was the right thing to do. (This doesn't necessarily mean you did what was right; you may have, for a variety of reasons, done quite the opposite.) It may have been a question of minor importance: whether to tip a waiter at a restaurant to which you'll never return. Or it may have been one of far greater consequence: how to care for an aging relative in the last few months of his or her life.
Regardless of the weight of the question, you probably employed some principle in answering it. You probably used some guidelines for determining the most appropriate course of action. You probably appealed to something beyond the particular facts of the situation at hand, something that determined what was the right and wrong thing to do. In this sense, you engaged in moral reasoning. You turned your attention away from the particular moral question at hand: What is the right thing to do? You focused instead on the more theoretical question: What makes it the right thing to do? By doing so, however, you were able to solve the practical problem and come to the decision you needed to make. Such appeals to principle, to guidelines, to something beyond the situation at hand are standard features of our moral practice. Without them, our moral decisions would essentially be ad hoc. And lacking any consistency, they'd hardly be considered moral.
However, despite the importance of these principles to making wise moral decisions, we're often unaware of what they are. This is in part because we've so internalized them. We don't have to be conscious of how we're coming to moral conclusions to come to them. Like skilled athletes who don't have to think about how to play the game, we too can just do it when determining what's right and what's wrong.
Nevertheless, if we examine the manner in which we arrive at our moral conclusions, we can increase the likelihood that those conclusions will consistently reflect our deepest, most abiding values. Even the world's best athletes are constantly reevaluating their swings, strides, and shots in an effort to improve upon them. They know that the more conscious they are of what makes them succeed, the more they'll be able to make the adjustments necessary to keep them at the top of their games.
The same goes for those of us who want to do the best we can at choosing the right thing to do. Examining the manner in which we make such choices enables us to continually improve upon them. Looking “beneath the hood” of our particular moral judgments allows us to tune up the machinery that generates those judgments.
Most of us spend plenty of time looking in the mirror to enhance the outward appearance of the person who stares back at us; shouldn't we spend a comparable amount of time reflecting on our internal characters in order to make them more attractive as well?
The first step, then, is to hold up the mirror. We can then look into it by considering the way we typically make moral decisions. The principles and guidelines that are reflected back will help us see what's at the foundation of our particular choices—and indeed, if those choices are the ones that, on reflection, we would still be happy to make.
Horns of the Dilemma
All of us have, at one time or another, faced a moral dilemma. We've experienced the troubling nature of the question: damned if I do and damned if I don't. Somehow though, we've made a decision—and the way we have says a lot about who we are.
The 20th-century existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes the following moral dilemma. During World War II, a young French student faces a choice between leaving his village to join the Resistance forces or staying home to care for his aged, infirm mother. His brother has been killed by the Germans, so he feels it is his duty to avenge the death. But his mother is wholly dependent on his support; if he leaves, she will be plunged into despair and will probably die. According to Sartre, there is no principle on which to decide this matter; the young man must simply choose. No rule of general morality can show us what we ought to do in the world; we are free and must invent ourselves through our choices.
While no one would deny that Sartre's student faces a difficult choice, not everyone would agree that there is no principle to which the young man can appeal. Most of us, were we in such situation, would use some sort of criterion to tell us what to do. We might, for instance, try to figure out which choice would lead to less unhappiness. We would decide what to do based on whether our mother or our country would suffer more from our absence. Or we might rely on a rule that we believe ought not to be violated at any cost—say, honor one's father and mother. We might think of the most virtuous person we know and try to imagine what he or she would do. Or we might, not unlike Sartre, say that the best way to choose is simply to “trust our gut.” But if we did, unlike Sartre, we'd be appealing to a principle—one that basically says, “When facing moral dilemmas, trust your gut.”
We can see this more clearly when we think of the more common sort of dilemmas we regularly face in our personal and professional lives. Many of us, for example, confront a dilemma in caring for our children: Should we work longer hours to provide them with material advantages even though it means spending less time together? Or should we forego career opportunities to have more time with them, although this means they won't have all the neat stuff that their friends do? To solve this dilemma, most of us will sit down and reason it in some way; we'll weigh the pros and cons and eventually come up with a decision. What's particularly interesting though—and what Sartre's analysis of our moral decision-making process does capture—is that our final decision may not bear a direct relationship to the decision we made by weighing the pros and cons. Often, as a matter of fact, our final decision is the opposite of our reasoned decision. But this doesn't mean that there's no relationship between the reasoning and the final course of action. It's like flipping a coin to decide what to do, and when heads comes up we suddenly realize that what we really want to do is tails. The process of reasoning serves to jump-start our intuition so we can arrive at a decision that best reflects our deepest values.
Many of us had similar experiences with moral dilemmas on the job. My friend Dennis, who's a general contractor, told me about a carpenter he knows about who insists on being paid in cash. The guy obviously does so to avoid paying taxes on his income. But he passes his savings along to his customers, so there's an incentive to play along. Plus, he does excellent work.
Dennis decided not to use him even though it meant he would have to charge his own clients a bit more. He said, “Look, here's a case where the benefits of working with the guy obviously outweigh the disadvantages. I mean, think of how glad my customers are gonna be to save a couple hundred bucks. And who's really gonna notice if this guy doesn't pay his taxes? It's not gonna impact the national debt, that's for sure. Still, the thing is, I think of the effect of my choice to work with him and I think: ‘Suppose everybody chose like me—what sort of people would those be?’ Not ones I want to be associated with, anyway. So, I'm sorry, no dice for this carpenter.”
Here Dennis is weighing several principles against one another. He realizes that, ultimately, people would be happier if he worked with the carpenter; so if the principle is “maximize happiness,” he ought to. But he balances that against something like a principle of universalizability: don't do things that, if everyone did them, would make for a world you would find unacceptable. Choosing between these principles is, for Dennis, a matter of intuition; one of them just feels right.
Examining the way a person resolves moral dilemmas provides insight into his or her decision-making process. And when it's our own process we're examining, the insight is even more telling.
I was trying to decide whether to include a fairly personal story in this book about a friend of mine. It didn't represent her in the most flattering of lights, but it did illustrate very well a point I wanted to make. I asked her what she thought. She said she preferred I didn't use it but that, ultimately, it was up to me. After all, I was the one writing a book about moral choices; shouldn't I know the right thing to do?
After some soul-searching, I decided not to include the story. It seemed to me that the pain I would cause my friend by doing so outweighed any benefits to potential readers. I tried to put myself in my friend's shoes: How would I feel if she did something like that to me? Plus, I tried to imagine how I would regard myself if I included it. Wouldn't I feel like a traitor or at least like someone whose priorities were a bit skewed?
Examining the way I came to the conclusion I did helped me see some of the criteria I was using to determine the right thing to do. And it got me thinking about the various considerations we all tend to appeal to when faced with difficult moral choices.
Considering the Considerations
When trying to figure out the right thing to do, people generally appeal to a variety of considerations that can be broken down as follows:
Feelings vs. Principles: People either tend to rely on their emotions or to consciously consider rules when making moral decisions. Some try to “get a feel” for the issue; they trust their moral sensibilities to tell them what to do. Others use their heads more than their hearts; they rely on reason to be the guide about what makes something the right or wrong thing to do.
Motives vs. Outcomes: People tend to be more concerned with either the motives underlying a choice or the outcomes that follow from it. Some concentrate on why a person is choosing as he or she is; they want to make sure that the reasons for a particular decision are morally praiseworthy. Others look at the consequences of a particular choice; they want to make sure that valuable ends are attained by a particular attitude or behavior.
Individual vs. Societal Considerations: In determining the right thing to do, people tend to refer either to their own moral intuitions or to the more generally accepted societal declarations of right and wrong. It's a question of individual character or societal character. Some concentrate on the type of person they will become as a result of making a given choice; they are interested in the type of person who is reflected by their morality. Others turn their attention to the sort of society they are manifesting through their decisions; their interest is more on what a group of people who choose as they do are saying about themselves.
Each of these pairs of considerations represents a spectrum along which our decision-making process may fall. We may think of these spectra as moral spectra, along which we can locate some of the better-known moral theories in Western philosophy.
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These seven theories can—at a general level—be understood as approaching the resolution of moral issues by appealing more or less to feelings or principles, motives or outcomes, individual or societal effects. Briefly, we can characterize each of these seven theories as follows:
Existentialism: Existentialism, that much-misunderstood and often-parodied 20th-century philosophy, offers its own way to think about right and wrong. Basically, existentialists deny that there is any objective meaning to be found in the universe. It is incumbent upon each of us to determine the meaning of our own lives. Human beings have no “essence” apart from what we choose it to be. There are no principles in nature that will tell us how we ought to behave. Existentialism is thus often misunderstood as saying there is no right or wrong; anything goes. Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism's most famous proponent, however, offers a profound admonition to guide our choices. Since there are no objective principles in the universe, each of us must realize that, in any choice we make, we are implicitly choosing for all of humanity. When I say, for instance, that I should not steal CDs from my local record store, I am saying no one should. The awesome responsibility that this places on each of us every time we make a choice is the source of our deep existential anguish. But the realization that we are completely free to choose what's right and what's wrong involves a recognition that freedom is the foundation for all values. Thus, says Sartre, actions of people of good faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of such freedom.[3] Enlarging the realm of human freedom becomes our guiding principle. An existentialist ethic will therefore filter the world through the maximization of people's liberty. The right thing to do will be the choice that best expresses and sustains the enlargement of the realm of human freedom—the choice that sets people most free.
? Deontology: Deontology is “duty-based” ethics. This is the moral theory of the 18th-century philosopher, Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, an action is morally worthy only if it is undertaken out of a sense of moral duty. The principle that underlies morally worthy actions is what Kant calls the “categorical imperative.” Basically, the categorical imperative says that we should behave only in ways that we would be willing to have everyone else in the world behave in. It's the general principle with which we are all familiar: if you wouldn't want everyone else to act in a certain way, then you shouldn't either.
An Ethic of Caring: A number of contemporary feminist philosophers, notably Nel Noddings and Carol Gilligan, have developed a moral theory in which the right thing to do is to be found through an emphasis on the relationship of caring between human beings. This theory explicitly rejects the longstanding emphasis in morality on principles, reason, and judgment. “An ethic of caring,” says Nodding, “locates morality primarily in the pre-act consciousness of the one-caring.”[4] Right and wrong emerge in light of an ethical ideal, a vision of our best self. This best self is who we are—or who we remember being—in those moments when we experience the sentiment of natural caring such as parents feel for their children. So, when trying to decide the right thing to do, we must focus on the particulars of the situation at hand and try to behave in a manner consistent with this best self, one that maintains and enhances the caring relationship between ourselves as the one-caring and others as the ones cared-for.
Communitarianism: Communitarianism, which currently is experiencing newfound interest among educators and social policy-makers, is informed by—among other things—the moral theory of 18th-century British philosopher David Hume. According to Hume, our judgments of right and wrong are a matter of spreading our feelings over the world. As members of a community, we enact rules that reflect these feelings. To do the right thing, therefore, is to follow these rules and, in doing so, express our moral sensibilities through our choices. Assessing the rightness or wrongness of someone's actions is a matter of assessing someone's motives for the choices they make. Consider how different our judgment of Robin Hood—who robs from the rich to give to the poor—is from our judgment of the Sheriff of Nottingham—who does just the opposite—and you'll see what Hume means. It turns in large part on people's motives; if their reasons for behaving a certain way are admirable, we're likely to judge their actions as admirable, too.
Utilitarianism: Utilitarianism was developed by the 19th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and expanded by his pupil and colleague John Stuart Mill. According to Mill, an action is right insofar as it maximizes total utility, where utility is generally reckoned as the sum of total pleasure over pain. To determine if something is the right thing to do or not, we calculate how much pleasure and how much pain will be generated by doing it; if the consequences lead to more pleasure and less pain—not just for ourselves, but for everyone everywhere—then the action is morally justified.
Virtue Ethics: Virtue ethics has its roots in the moral theory of Aristotle. According to Aristotle, virtuous acts are those performed by a virtuous person. To become a virtuous person, we must undergo the proper training of our feeling and attitudes. Having done so (assuming our character is of the right sort), we will take pleasure in virtuous action. We will consistently choose the mean between the vice of excess and the vice of deficiency and so will manifest courage, temperance, friendliness, and other moral virtues in our choices.
Egoism: Ethical egoism is the view that the right thing to do is whatever best succeeds in helping us achieve our rationally chosen ends. The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist Adam Smith, for instance, argues that a kind of rational self-interest should be the determining factor in what makes right acts right. Thomas Hobbes, whose moral theory is also based in egoism, reminds us that the best way for people
to escape the “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” state of nature in which everyone is continually at war with everyone else, is to establish self-interested convenants with one another. People should act egoistically—that is, they ought to try to maximize the benefits to themselves—and in doing so, will maximize the common good. An egoist ethics filters the world through people's reasonable desires. When trying to figure out the right thing to do, egoists ask themselves what choice would best help them get what they really want. (And presumably, since very few egoists want to go to prison, very few would do just anything.) The “invisible hand” coordinating human interactions will then ensure that as each of us egoistically pursues our own individual goals, our common goals—peace, stability, abundance—are likewise achieved.
These seven theories do not constitute an exhaustive list of all the ways people might possibly determine the right thing to do. They do, however, define a range of possibilities along the three continuums: Feelings/Principles, Motives/Outcomes, and Individual/ Societal Considerations. While there's certainly room for discussion about exactly where any theory lies along a particular scale, we can easily see that different theories stress different criteria for determining right and wrong. Compare, for instance, the explicit rejection of principles on the part of an ethic of caring to the single-minded focus that utilitarians place on the utilitarian principle. Or notice how important motives are to a deontologist in determining the right thing to do as compared to how critical outcomes are to a utilitarian. Or contrast how an ethic of caring locates the core of morality in an individual's response to a particular situation with how communitarianism determines right and wrong in light of a shared perception on the part of social groups.
Because these seven theories do span such a broad array of possible approaches across the three spectra under consideration, they provide for a virtually unlimited number of combinations to explore when trying to develop a nuanced perception of how we ought to behave. In the same way that the seven colors of the visible spectrum (remember your colorful friend, ROY G. BIV)—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—make possible an incalculable number of shades and hues, so the seven “colors” in the moral spectrum (think of your ethical friend, ED C. CUVE)—existentialism, deontology, an ethic of caring, communitarianism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and egoism—give us an incredibly rich palette of possibilities for perceiving, and ultimately choosing, the right thing to do.
A Richer Palette, a Sharper Prism
The previous brief discussion of moral theory is in no way meant to capture the intricacies of the theories discussed. Rather, it is primarily intended to help us identify the various ways in which most of us tend to go about making moral choices.
We can think of each of the perspectives as a kind of prism. When you hold a prism up to the light, it breaks what's invisible into all the colors of the rainbow. The prism allows you to see the full spectrum of colors that make up each ray of light. In a similar manner, the moral perspective you take on a particular issue enables you to see what had been invisible to you before: its ethical dimension. And, as with a prism, the colors you see depend on the perspective you take. It's not as if you're seeing something that isn't there, but it is the case that unless you put the prism up to your eyes, you won't see it.
If you think about how you usually determine what you ought to do, you'll probably find that you generally incline toward one—or maybe two—of the seven moral theories we've looked at. You'll probably find that you usually ask yourself a characteristic question associated with that particular theory. It is useful, therefore, both as a way to clarify your own perspective and to prepare for expanding your moral palette, to have in mind the central question each of the perspectives asks when assessing an issue. What, in other words, is the prism through which each perspective views the world?
Imagine that you are considering whether something is the right or wrong thing to do. The way you question yourself provides a pretty good guide for which one (or more) of the seven prisms you are using.
The existentialist prism asks: “What course(s) of action will set people most free?”
The deontological prism asks: “What would I do if everyone in the world were to do as I did?”
The ethic of caring prism asks: “What course(s) of action will best sustain and nurture a caring relationship between myself and others?”
The communitarian prism asks: “How would I act if everyone in my community knew exactly what I were doing?”
The utilitarian prism asks: “What course(s) of action will best maximize total happiness in the world?”
The virtue ethics prism asks: “What would the most virtuous person I know of do in this situation?”
The egoist prism asks: “What course(s) of action will most effectively ensure that my short- and long-term goals are reached?”
The way to use the moral spectrum model is, in keeping with the many-hued theme, as a palette. When considering a moral issue, most of us tend to paint with a limited number of colors. Using the moral spectrum model enables us to expand our palette and see different perspectives that we can then bring to the issue. For instance, if we generally gaze through the deontological prism, we're apt to be focused less on results than on motives, which may lead us to making choices that underplay their effect on people's happiness. It may be worth our while, therefore, to gaze through the utilitarian prism and see if our judgment of what we ought to do changes. Considering the issue from this new point of view won't necessarily change our mind, but it will bring new options to the table.
In short, the moral spectrum model enables us to expand our moral perception and with any luck, choose more wisely.
The first step in doing so, then, is to identify which of the seven prisms you tend to rely on. You can then expand your moral palette by blending in the perspectives you tend to downplay.
Your Own Moral Prism
Recall how my friend Dennis solved the dilemma about whether to hire the carpenter who worked only for cash. He based his decision on a principle that says not to do things you wouldn't want everyone else to do. He considered what would happen if everyone modeled their behavior on his choice. So, he's pretty obviously deciding from the deontological perspective; we can say that his moral prism refracts the deontological perspective.
Or reflect back on one way of solving the dilemma Sartre's student faced. Suppose you said that he ought to care for his aged mother because she would suffer so much if he didn't. And you might add, one should always follow the rule that says, “minimize suffering whenever possible.” Here then, you'd be considering consequences, specifically, the unhappiness the student's mother would experience versus the unhappiness the student or potential Resistance fighters would feel. Clearly, you'd be looking through the utilitarian moral prism.
Determining the moral prism you usually employ is a matter of reflecting on choices you have made—or are making—observing the kinds of questions you ask yourself, and identifying which prism(s) you are employing.
Of course, few of us always choose from a single perspective. Most people shift around, depending on the circumstances. With our families, since we're particularly interested in their pleasure, we may tend to be more utilitarian. On the job, we're apt to be more focused on motives and principles, and so may come from a more deontological perspective.
Still, nearly everyone has a preferred mode of operating. In the contemporary United States, for example, most people are utilitarian of some stripe. Our heritage of majority rule tends to make us see right and wrong in terms of what makes the most people happy or unhappy. The next most common prism is probably deontology. Many people, especially those with a strong religious heritage, are quite focused on particular moral duties and judge accordingly. The virtue ethics perspective is also often employed by individuals with strong feelings for religion. The question, “What Would Jesus Do?” is a way of thinking about how the most virtuous person they know of would act. Another not uncommon prism is the communitarian perspective. Young people especially tend to see morality as mainly a matter of social convention; right and wrong are determined by one's community and that's all there is to it. The existentialist perspective is probably used more often by young people—especially teenagers—than adults. When we are still experimenting with lifestyle and values, we tend to put a premium on the freedom to express ourselves. An ethic of caring is less frequently used; it is more often viewed as a way for parents to meet the needs of their children than as a strategy for dealing with moral issues outside the home. Finally, egoism, while often held up as an economic ideal, does not generally enjoy such popularity in the moral arena. Still, the egoist perspective, especially if it is tempered by one or more of the other prisms, does represent a manner in which some people will typically choose the right thing to do.
When we think about how we usually decide what we ought or ought not to do, most of us will probably realize that we do tend to favor one perspective over another. Most of us have a characteristic moral prism through which we view the world. It's apparent, therefore, that we can benefit from expanding our moral palette by learning to take into account the other perspectives.
To do so, we need to familiarize ourselves with each of the seven moral prisms. The following stories are intended to help us do so by, in part, highlighting some of each prism's strengths and weaknesses.
The Existentialist Prism
“What course(s) of action will set people most free?”
In 1979, TWA was having a contest in which you could win a free round-trip ticket to any destination they served. There were two ways to enter: you could buy a ticket on the airline, or send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and receive a game ticket by return mail. The regulations said that a person could request only one entry per day. To circumvent that constraint, I had everyone I knew address envelopes for me. I realized that I was breaking the rules, but I didn't care; any guilt I might have felt was mitigated by having a mailbox full of scratch-off sweepstakes entries waiting for me every day when I returned from work.
One day I arrived home to find my girlfriend Rita excitedly waving a game ticket at me. “You won! You won!” she cried.
I was too delighted by my good fortune to be upset that she'd not only opened my mail but had also scratched off my entries. I took the winning ducat from her and began fantasizing about how I'd use it. The round-trip permitted two stopovers, so I would fly to Paris, then to Athens, then to Moscow before returning home—if I returned home at all. With 12 months to complete my travel, anything could happen.
As I waxed rhapsodic about my upcoming adventure, I didn't notice Rita's face turning darker and darker. Suddenly, she snatched the ticket out of my hand. “I can't believe you think you're going to go flying all over the world without me! Well, forget it! This ticket came in an envelope addressed to Looey!”
Looey was my roommate, co-worker, and best friend. We had been living together for about six months.
“Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “It's my ticket. Looey just addressed the envelope. I asked him to. He knows it's mine.”
“Yeah? Well, why don't you ask him yourself?”
As if on cue, Looey walked in the door. Rita rushed over to him with the winning game card. “Look what came in the mail for you today!”
“All right,” deadpanned Looey, checking out the scratched-off stub. “Morocco here I come.”
“That's mine and you know it,” I said.
“Rita said it came in an envelope addressed to me.”
“But I was the one who asked you to address it. You knew you were addressing it for me!”
“I did? That's news.”
“That's bullshit!” I cried and snatched the ticket away from him. Then, before he could grab it back, I ran into my room and locked it in my desk.
“We'll see whose ticket it is,” I announced, returning to the living room.
“Yeah,” replied Looey. “We will.”
Over the course of the next few days, everyone we knew divided into a Looey camp or a David camp. Our entire office was split down the middle. You couldn't take a break without hearing co-workers arguing about who really had a right to the ticket.
Looey and I tried not to get too caught up in it, but it wasn't easy. Our friendship was strained and tested as it had never been before.
For some reason, though, we seemed to hit on the same strategy for dealing with it: avoidance. Rather than working toward a solution, we just pretended there wasn't a problem. As the weeks went by, we acted pretty much as we always did—riding the bus together to work, eating lunch at the same restaurant, having a few beers at our local watering hole at quitting time. Meanwhile, the winning sweepstakes ticket remained locked in my desk.
As it turned out, the right thing to do emerged by examining things through the existentialist moral prism. We were sitting at one of our usual lunchtime hangouts, an Italian restaurant called Original Joe's, when it dawned on us what we ought to do.
“You know, I don't really care about going to Morocco,” said Looey. “I'd just like to get out of town for a few days.”
“And to tell you the truth,” I admitted. “I just like the idea of having the resources to go somewhere sometime if I want to. Like money in the bank.”
We decided that there was a way in which both of our desires could be liberated: if we found someone who was planning on taking a trip anyway, we could sell them the ticket and split the money. Moreover, their freedom to travel would be maximized, too, since we could sell them our winning stub for cheaper than they could purchase their airfare.
So that's what we did. Our mutual friend, Larry, was getting ready to tour England and Scandinavia. A regular fare ticket to the destinations he had in mind would cost $1200.00. We sold him the game ticket for $800.00. Looey went to Reno for a weekend. I put the money in my savings and used it to help me move to L.A. a few months later.
In this case, the right thing to do was determined by an action that gave all of us involved the greatest possible range of free choice. Looey was able to express his wish to get out of town, I was able to realize my goal of having a kind of financial safety-net, and, Larry, by saving some money, was given the freedom to extend his tour a little longer. This maximization of freedom is in keeping with the ideal of the existentialist prism—and highlights both some of its strengths and a few of its weaknesses.
On the plus side, the existentialist prism recognizes the critical connection between liberty and justice. As a general rule, whatever maximizes people's autonomy is also whatever's most fair.
Moreover, because the existentialist prism is based in Sartre's contention that, when we make choices, we are implicitly choosing for all of humanity, it reminds us that we should choose wisely and with regard to the legacy we are leaving. The only moral truths are human moral truths, and only our actions, not our words, are evidence for them. So it is incumbent upon each of us to take action that maximizes human freedom and, in doing so, create a moral legacy of which we can individually and collectively be proud.
On the minus side, though, it's not obvious that we should always hold freedom as our highest ideal. Lots of times, the right thing to do seems to require that we constrain people's liberty—especially if those people are children and the highest expression of their liberty would involve say, playing in traffic or with sharp knives. Freedom is a worthy goal, but certainly not the only one. Compassion, honesty, and safety, among others, may sometimes provide us with a better guide to what we ought to do.
We should also question Sartre's contention that our choices always reflect the manner in which we believe all humanity should behave. As Nel Noddings reminds us, the particular features of our lives are unique. It's a mistake to abstract away from the particulars in an attempt to universalize our experience. The right thing to do is sometimes right precisely because it does take into account the uniqueness of each situation. The existentialist prism may lead us to overlook the special relationships between people in particular situations. Also, since it is focused so heavily on active expression, it has a tendency to run roughshod over people's feelings, especially people who are reticent to expose them. Given this, it seems apparent that our moral choices will be wiser if we use one or more of the other perspectives in conjunction with the existentialist moral prism.
The Deontological Moral Prism
“What would I do if everyone in the world were to do as I did?”
My wife, my best friend Harley, and I were in Las Vegas—admittedly, not the first place in the world that comes to mind when one thinks of moral behavior. We were in a casino downtown playing some slots, some craps, and having a few drinks. As is not uncommon in Vegas, a stranger approached and started talking to us as if we had known him all our lives. And before we knew it—as is often not uncommon in Vegas—we all felt like we did.
We were drinking, laughing, sharing our slot machines, having a grand old time. That's when the stranger, who we now knew by the name of Kenny, proposed we go to another casino and play poker. Harley, Jen, and I were hesitant; for one thing, none of us was very good at cards. It didn't seem like a fun prospect to go and sit in a room with a bunch of cigar-chomping card sharks who would probably fleece us of our gambling stake.
But Kenny assured us that this isn't what would happen. His friend was a dealer, he said. He could rig it so we would be certain of being dealt winning hands. All we would have to do is slip him a small percentage of our take. It was a sure thing, no strings attached.
I wondered out loud why Kenny himself didn't take advantage of this opportunity. Why was he turning us on to his friend instead of putting some money in his own pocket?
Kenny said he couldn't do that because they knew him at the casino. He'd already won too much and had been barred from playing there. But we were new in town; we could win plenty before anyone got wise.
Harley and I thought it sounded like a good deal. What did we have to lose? After all, even if Kenny's friend didn't come through and we lost our money, we'd be no worse off than we would normally. And if he did come through, we'd be sitting pretty. So why not go for it?
We were just about to head to the other casino with Kenny when Jennifer posed a question that made us reconsider our decision. “What would happen,” she asked, “if everyone cheated like this?”
“That's the beauty part,” said Kenny. “Everyone doesn't. It's only the suckers who don't cheat. And you guys aren't suckers.”
“But what if everyone cheated? What would happen?”
“I guess it would be the end of Vegas,” I said. “There wouldn't be any games if nobody played the game.”
“Exactly,” said Jen. “And so where would we be?”
“In the middle of the desert with not much to do,” said Harley.
I concurred. “Yeah, not where I'd want to be.”
At this point, our interest in going with Kenny to the other casino essentially evaporated. And so, in a few minutes, did Kenny. He couldn't understand why we were being such suckers. And suckers weren't the kind of people he wanted to be friends with.
But I don't think we were being suckers. We were just being good Kantians, looking through the deontological moral prism and asking ourselves whether we could reasonably universalize our actions. We wondered what would happen if everyone behaved like us. And we concluded that, by doing so, we'd land ourselves in a blatant contradiction: we'd be trying to cheat in a world where cheating couldn't exist. It would be like saying (to use one of Kant's examples), “I am going to break a promise in a world where there is no such thing as promising.” But that's irrational. And since, for Kant, we have a duty as rational beings to behave rationally, it is—broadly—immoral to be irrational. As the deontological moral prism tell us, it is immoral to act in ways that we couldn't reasonably be willing to have everyone else act. So, in our case, it would have been wrong for us to take Kenny up on his offer to cheat at poker with his friendly dealer.
Kant's first version of the ultimate moral principle, his so-called “categorical imperative,” says that we must act only in ways whereby the “maxim” (something like the motive) of our action could at the same time be made universal law. We have to be able to imagine a world in which everyone did as we do; if in such a world, our motive contradicts itself (like willing to cheat in a world with no cheating, or to promise in a world without promises), then the action we're considering is wrong. If the motive isn't contradictory (like willing to not cheat in a world where cheating is possible), then it's morally acceptable.
This principle, along with the example above, reveals some of the strengths and weaknesses of the deontological prism.
On the plus side, deontology provides a clear principle for resolving moral dilemmas. Regardless of what it is, whether it's “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or “Never take actions you wouldn't want everyone else to,” principle, for deontologists, is paramount. This makes it easy to appeal to principle in the attempt to find answers and resolve disputes. The deontological prism also recognizes the importance of moral duties. Although it's not particularly fashionable anymore to think this way, it has long been agreed that we do have certain moral duties, such as honesty, benevolence, and loyalty. The deontological perspective holds these duties as preeminent and guards against the tendency to downplay them. And, perhaps most important, it attempts to apply a universal standard to all people, everywhere. The principles by which the deontological perspective operates are meant to have universal scope. This holds everyone everywhere to the same standard and protects us against injustices that might seem justified by circumstances or outcomes.
On the other hand, the deontological prism can be overly inflexible. A dyed-in-the-wool deontologist says that we must adhere to our duties, no matter what. Kant is infamous for maintaining that one has a duty not to lie, even if someone's life is at stake. But the world doesn't always seem to work this way; sometimes rules are made to be broken.
By the same token, the deontological prism seems to underplay the importance of consequences to our determinations of right and wrong. Again, if all we're focused on is our duties, we can sometimes not achieve the best results. We might, for instance, have a duty to punish wrongdoers, but in certain cases, this would create such unhappiness that punishment would be highly inappropriate.
Finally, the deontological moral prism may be too focused on people as autonomous agents; many of our moral responsibilities, in contrast, have to do with relationships between people. Deontology tends to assume that people have equal opportunities to fulfill their duties. But as we all know, there are mitigating factors that impinge on this. Moreover, some of our duties are based on our not being free agents: duties to our children, for instance. For these reasons and more, we're apt to make wiser moral choices by using the deon-tological prism in conjunction with one or more of the other six.
The Ethic of Caring Prism
“What course(s) of action will best sustain and nurture a caring relationship between myself and others?”
I was 11 years old when Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered, but I understood what had happened well enough to weep. I hid in the bottom bunk of my bunkbeds, huddled against the wall, crying into the fur of my teddy bear, whom I had earlier decided I was far too mature for anymore.
My parents were deeply involved in organizing a response to the tragedy. My mother, a past president of the local League of Women Voters, was planning a meeting at the organization's headquarters. My father talked on the phone with fellow physicians who were preparing to respond to the violence that would inevitably result.
Hearing his voice echoing down to my bedroom, I crept silently upstairs to his attic office. He had the telephone cradled in his neck and was quickly jotting down notes on a yellow legal pad. Even through my tears, I could see he was terribly busy, and from the look on his face, I could tell it was something terribly important. I bit my lower lip trying to be brave as, noticing my entrance, his gaze caught mine.
Without hesitation, though, my father spoke a few concluding words into the receiver and hung up. He crossed the room to me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders. We sat on his big easy chair, and my head fell to his chest. I smelled his lemony sweat-smell and the tickly scent of tobacco on his fingers.
He asked me how I was feeling. Was I scared? Yes? He was, too. I raised my head and met his eyes. His were glistening, just like mine. My father tightened his arms around me, and I filled his shirt pocket with tears. Soon I fell asleep, and he carried me down to my room and tucked me in to bed. All that remained of my fear was the wet stain on his pocket.
In this case, my father made the maintenance of the caring relationship between us his highest priority. He chose the right thing to do by asking what course of action would best sustain and nurture the caring relationship between himself and me. This meant he had to set aside other duties to which he was attending, but—given the prism though which he was gazing—those duties paled in comparison.
We can see from this example that one of the great strengths of an ethic of caring is its compassionate nature. Actions deemed appropriate by this moral prism will typically be those that protect and cherish the feelings of others. Using an ethic of caring to determine the right thing to do will usually lead us to make choices that are extremely sensitive to the needs of the people involved in the situation.
This focus on particulars, however, reveals a possible shortcoming in the ethic of caring perspective. Nel Noddings reminds us that an ethic of caring explicitly rejects the notion that moral principles must be universalizable: that is, that they must apply to all sufficiently similar people in sufficiently similar circumstances. The problem with trying to make moral principles universalizable, she argues, is that in doing so, we can't help but abstract away from the concrete facts of the situation at hand that render it problematic. So we have to consider each situation on its own, taking into account the unique features and feelings of the people involved.
The difficulty here is twofold. First, it makes us have to do a lot of work to figure out what we ought to do. Since there are no general principles to appeal to, we have to critically assess each and every situation by examining it quite carefully. This may be time-consuming to say the least and often, in fact, quite impossible.
Second, there is a danger with the ethic of caring of falling prey to relativism. Because right and wrong depend so heavily on the particular features of particular cases, it may turn out that we're unable to condemn an action that we generally deem to be wrong. Noddings herself admits: “The lessons in ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are hard lessons—not swiftly accomplished by setting up as an objective the learning of some principle. We do not say: It is wrong to steal. Rather, we consider why it was wrong or may be wrong in this case to steal. We do not say: It is wrong to kill. By setting up such a principle, we also imply its exceptions, and then we may too easily act on authorized exceptions.”[5]
Viewing situations only through the ethic of caring prism may cause us to make choices that overemphasize mercy at the expense of justice. (You could imagine a case where a parent, for instance, would be unwilling to punish his or her child, even if that child did something that any reasonable person would say merited redress.) Consequently, as with any of the seven perspectives, we are apt to make more sophisticated choices by using the ethic of caring prism in conjunction with one or more of the others.
The Communitarian Prism
“How would I act if everyone in my community knew exactly what I were doing?”
In a business ethics class I was teaching, we had explored a case study about the allegedly deceptive marketing practices of certain liquor manufacturers. Students were intrigued by the material, and we had a number of very lively discussions about whether it was morally acceptable for companies to sell highly alcoholic “fortified wines” in bottles that resembled low-alcohol wine coolers.
So, I thought that for the last class of the quarter it might be fun to bring in a sample of one of these so-called “wine foolers” for students to sample if they wanted. After all, it was a summer class—where things are pretty casual—and all my students were over 21 years of age.
In thinking about whether I ought to do this or not, I noticed that I was being extremely secretive about my preparations. I was terrified that my faculty advisor would find out what I was up to. I refrained from discussing it with any of my graduate student colleagues. My plan was to sneak the beverages into class, swear my students to secrecy in tasting them, and deny that I had done so if anyone asked me about it.
But on my way to the corner store to pick up the drinks, a little light went on in my head. If I were so nervous about being found out, didn't this suggest pretty strongly that I had real reservations about whether I was doing the right thing? After all, nearly every other time in my life that I had tried to hide what I was doing was one in which I knew I was doing what I shouldn't be. Like when I was 8 and tried unsuccessfully to cover up how I was stealing matches from my mom's downstairs “junk drawer” under the guise of getting repeated drinks of water from the kitchen faucet.
By asking myself how I would act if everyone knew what I was doing, I came to the conclusion that I really ought not to bring the alcohol to class. It was perfectly obvious that doing so would violate norms of behavior that were operative in my community. And it was obvious that I was kidding myself if I pretended I didn't know this—or if I tried to convince myself that I didn't think those norms were justified.
We can see here what works and what doesn't about the communitarian perspective. On the positive side, it reminds us that, in some ways, right and wrong are socially constructed. Often, determining the right thing to do is a matter of getting a clearer picture of what our society has to say about the matter. While we want to be careful about saying that culture defines right and wrong, the communitarian perspective helps us maintain an awareness of how different societies have at different times held different viewpoints. This enables us to be more open to reflecting upon and improving our own beliefs.
Moreover, the communitarian perspective respects the value of our moral intuitions. Most of us probably have a better-developed sense of right and wrong than we're always aware of. That's why everyone from truck drivers to presidents skulks about when they're doing something they know they shouldn't. It's not as if everything that we'd like to keep private about ourselves is something that's morally questionable, but it is the case that nearly all the morally questionable things we do are things we'd like to keep under wraps.
Of course, this also reveals what can be problematic about the communitarian prism. First, and most important, why should we necessarily believe that our community norms reflect the proper moral perspective? Plenty of communities throughout history, from ancient Greece to 20th-century America, have had plenty of norms that are positively reprehensible. The communitarian perspective seems, therefore, to offer an overly relativistic perspective on morality; tolerance can devolve to “anything goes.” If morality is defined by a community, how can we judge the obviously flawed morality of a community of racists, for example?
And second, even if our community norms are acceptable, who's to say that we'll be sufficiently guilty or ashamed of violating them? Maybe I just don't care what other people think. And if I'm the sort of person who regularly does awful things, then it's even more likely that I don't. So wondering how I'd feel if everyone in my community knew what I was doing would be unlikely to stop me from doing them.
Here again, then, we can see that we're better positioned to make sophisticated moral choices by using one or more of the other perspectives in conjunction with the communitarian moral prism.
The Utilitarian Prism
“What course(s) of action will best maximize total happiness in the world?”
My friend Johnny was dying. In spite of his illness, though, he remained in good spirits. His sense of humor was as lively as ever, and he never missed an opportunity to make jokes about himself, his visitors, or the incredibly ironic and absurd nature of life in general.
He was having trouble eating; he hadn't much of an appetite and there weren't many foods he could keep down. In fact, during his final few months, he subsisted mainly on bottled water and Triscuit crackers. But in his own inimitable style, he turned this into a production: he created a shrine to the sacred Triscuit and developed an entire quasi-religion to honor them. Every time he finished a box, he'd pile it onto the Great Pyramid of Triscuit that was growing next to his bed. He'd often make light of his fetish for Triscuits and even joked that he'd like his coffin to be constructed out of tasty wheat snacks instead of wood.
I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was planning a visit out to L.A. to see him one last time. Shopping for a gift to bring him, I spied the perfect thing. In a cooking supply store, affixed to a mini-refrigerator, were half a dozen Triscuit magnets! Fashioned out of rubber, with the fanatic attention to detail one sees in the displays of fake food in the windows of Sushi restaurants, they were perfect replicas of the Nabisco? snack cracker. I knew Johnny would go crazy over them. I just had to have one for him.
I peeled one off the refrigerator and brought it up to the checkout counter, beaming. “How much?” I asked the owner holding out the fake Triscuit for her to see.
“Those are not for sale,” she said, removing it from my hand.
“You're kidding.”
“Sorry. I had to go all the way to Japan to get those and they are simply not for sale.”
“But you have six of them,” I complained. “Just one? What's the difference?”
“Not for sale.”
I tried to tell her the story of why I was buying it—how ill my friend Johnny was, how much Triscuits meant to him, and how happy he would be to get it—but she didn't budge. I offered her fifty bucks for it but still no dice. She said there were plenty of other beautiful gift items in the store and I was welcome to look around all I wanted, but the Triscuits, unfortunately, were not for sale.
At this point, I did a little utilitarian calculus. I reckoned how happy Johnny would be to receive the magnet as well as how pleased I would be to give it to him, and compared it to the pain the store owner would experience to be out one of her six magnets, along with the guilt I would feel to have gotten it without paying. The result was obvious. The right thing to do according to the utilitarian moral prism was to steal one of the magnets. So that's what I did. I waited until the owner was out of sight and when she wasn't looking, I slipped one of Triscuits into my pocket. Then, after browsing a suitable amount of time to allay suspicion, I strolled from the store with my purloined magnet hot in hand.
Johnny, of course, was thrilled to receive it. And he was delighted that I stole it. That made it even more precious, more deserving of inclusion in the Triscuit shrine. He stuck the magnet to his bedside lamp where he could see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It gave him great pleasure to look at it and be reminded of how strange and wonderful the world and all the people in it are and how he had friends who loved him and who were willing to take risks for him to show that love.
I don't know what happened to the magnet after Johnny died a few months later. I like to think that someone slipped it into the pocket of the suit he was buried in and that it remains with him now in his final resting place, a small testimony to my undying affection for my departed friend.
That the utilitarian moral prism would cause us to judge that I did the right thing by stealing the Triscuit reveals both its strengths and its weaknesses.
On the plus side, it makes good sense to appreciate the critical importance of people's happiness when choosing the right thing to do. A morality that ignores people's feelings runs counter to the way we usually move through the world. The utilitarian perspective recognizes that, in general, we are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and it builds its perspective on that foundation. Moreover, most of us tend to be natural utilitarians; it's the way we approach not only moral issues but practical matters as well. In this sense, the utilitarian perspective is quite common-sensical; it's not nearly as esoteric as some of the other points of view. And its central principle is quite straightforward. What could be less complicated than “Maximize total happiness”?
On the minus side, utilitarianism is infamous for seeming to let the “ends justify the means,” no matter what those means are. If maximizing happiness is all that matters, then it seems that injustices can be committed in the name of making people happy. So, for instance, if it would maximize total happiness to roast national politicians over an open fire (and perhaps it might), we ought to do it. But, of course, that's not right, so utilitarianism is flawed. Moreover, utilitarianism can be unfair to minority viewpoints. Since what is trying to be maximized is overall happiness, the pain of someone who falls outside the mainstream can be minimized, if not ignored altogether. Finally, the utilitarian principle, though simply stated, is hard to satisfy. It's easy enough to understand the rule, “maximize happiness,” but it's extremely difficult to figure out what particular actions would have that effect.
For all these reasons, we are likely to make better, more sophisticated moral judgments if we temper the utilitarian moral prism with one or more of the others.
The Virtue Ethics Prism
“What would the most virtuous person I know of do in this situation?”
Liz Raibil, a philosopher I know, was teaching an evening course in Introductory Ethics at a community college in the midwest. One night, about halfway through the class, a young man entered the classroom in a state of high agitation. He brandished a revolver and ordered everyone to leave except one woman. She was his estranged girlfriend and he “just wanted to talk to her.”
Liz quickly shepherded all her students out the door. But when it was her turn to follow, she paused: should she really leave her student alone in the room with a gun-toting ex-boyfriend? Even if she rushed immediately to alert security, it might be too late to prevent a tragedy. On the other hand, if she stayed, who knows what sort of danger she would be in. And didn't she have some responsibility to the students she'd just evacuated?
Ultimately, she stayed and—in part by her willingness to bear witness—managed to convince the man to put away his gun and surrender to the authorities.
When I heard through the grapevine about what Liz had done, I was amazed. How had she had the heart to stand up for her student in such a potentially explosive situation? How was she able to steel herself, set aside her justifiable fears, and behave in a way that so clearly demonstrated the moral virtue of courage?
I saw her a few weeks later at a philosophy colloquium and asked her how she did it. She told me that she had put a single question to herself: “what would my great-aunt Elsie do in this situation?” Elsie was an 83-year old former schoolteacher who lived in Northern Minnesota on a farm she had run herself since her husband died some thirty years earlier. In her career as an educator and a farmer, she had stood her ground against, among others, religious groups, irate parents, land developers, snowmobilers, and county tax assessors, and her fearlessness, Liz said, was an inspiration. She couldn't imagine that Elsie would have allowed one of her own students to be left alone under life-threatening circumstances.
“I pretended I was Elsie,” said Liz. “And I almost felt myself becoming her. Suddenly, I seemed to be seeing the guy with the gun as Elsie would see him—a confused little boy. And he no longer appeared so dangerous as he did sad and lost. I was still scared, but I felt pretty confident that in acting as Elsie would act, I was doing the right thing. At least I was sure that I'd be able to look back on what I did without regret.”
Liz was lucky on two counts: first, that everything worked out all right, and second, that she had someone in her life like great-aunt Elsie to appeal to as an ideal. This suggests some of both the strengths and weaknesses of the virtue ethics prism.
Perhaps its greatest asset is that it provides for a straightforward, real-world approach to solving moral problems. We just have to think of our virtuous ideal and imagine what he or she would do in our shoes. But the weakness of this is twofold. First, we may not know someone whose moral judgment we invariably respect, especially in situations that we ourselves find particularly troubling. And second, even if we do, it's not at all clear that we can accurately predict how this person would act. Since virtue ethics doesn't provide a principle to which we can appeal in determining how we ought to act, we're left guessing about the choices someone else would make.
Added to this is the potentially troubling way in which the virtue ethics perspective tends to downplay the consequences of one's choices. In Liz's case, we can unproblematically celebrate her courage because no one got hurt. But suppose the man had shot her for staying? The virtue ethics prism doesn't give us the wherewithal to criticize her decision. As long as a person behaves as a virtuous person would, then it doesn't really matter if things turn out badly. Consequently, as with any of the seven perspectives, we are apt to make more sophisticated choices by using the virtue ethics prism in conjunction with one or more of the others.
The Egoistic Prism
“What course(s) of action will most effectively ensure that my short- and long-term goals are reached?”
My tenth wedding anniversary was four days away. Unfortunately, it was an incredibly busy time for me in my work. I had several deadlines all crashing together simultaneously and was scheduled to go out of town for an important meeting the following week. Although I dearly wanted to do something special to celebrate the occasion, I felt overwhelmed and nervous about the prospect. I was far too preoccupied by work-related stresses to imagine what my wife, Jennifer, and I could possibly do to mark the event. The very thought of even taking an evening off filled me with a kind of dread; if I lost a whole night of work, I'd never finish what I had to on schedule.
At the same time, though, I felt incredibly beholden to Jennifer. I knew how important it was to her that we not let the occasion slip away. Rituals are a big deal to her; if there was one thing I had learned in a decade of marriage, it was that I needed to be especially sensitive to important events. More than once I had failed to realize how much a birthday or a holiday meant to her and had, as a consequence, hurt her feelings. So I felt that it was my duty not to blow off our anniversary. But I didn't know how I could give it the attention it deserved; I just didn't have the time to do it right.
Unbeknownst to me, Jennifer was going through pretty much the same thing. She had several grant-application deadlines coming up and was also behind schedule on a sculpture that was due for an exhibition in less than a month. Even though she had big plans for our big day, putting them into action seemed beyond her reach.
The day arrived and we still hadn't agreed on what we were going to do. At breakfast that morning, I tentatively broached the subject. Jennifer's slightly evasive answer made me even more worried that I was dropping the ball. So I took a chance and admitted to her that what I really wanted to do today was to work on my projects. I knew it was our anniversary, but I was just feeling so swamped that the best way for me to celebrate it would be to use the time we would normally spend going out to get caught up. Then we could celebrate the occasion right at some other time.
Silence. My heart dropped through my chest and went thudding across the floor. Jennifer sighed and looked away.
I was just about to say that I was kidding when she turned to me. “You know what?” she said. “I'm feeling the same way. This is just not the day. I need to make some progress on my sculpture, and if I could just get a good long stretch in the studio, I'd feel a lot better about it. So why don't we each take care of our business today, and we'll celebrate our anniversary when you get back from your trip?”
I was floored. A huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. Jennifer and I embraced and set about clearing the breakfast dishes so we could each go off to work. We set a date for our anniversary a couple weeks in the future. And when it came around, we celebrated.
The right thing to do in this situation emerged when each of us decided to pursue our self-interested goals. Before that, when we were both trying to predict and meet the other person's needs, confusion, discomfort, and even a measure of resentment were the result. But when we finally agreed to practice what the novelist and unabashedly egoistic philosopher Ayn Rand calls “the virtue of selfishness,” things turned out fine. As a matter of fact, we could have both spared ourselves some real heartache if only we had copped to what we truly wanted in the first place.
We can see here the obvious strength of the egoistic moral prism: the right thing to do will generally accord with what we want. Since what's morally appropriate is determined to be actions that are legitimately within our rational self-interest, we won't experience a tension between what we want to do and what we ought to do. As long as we can figure out what we really want and how best to go about getting it, we can be sure we're doing the right thing.
Of course, the weakness here is equally obvious. Self-interest hardly strikes us as the right touchstone for morality. The selfish choice often seems inimical to the right choice. Doing the right thing is famously all about putting one's own interests aside; charity, generosity, and altruism are moral virtues we hold in the highest esteem.
A dyed-in-the-wool egoist will respond that those virtues are perfectly in keeping with self-interest. Being charitable, generous, and altruistic are good for us; in the long run, they help us get what we want by making others admire and trust us more. In fact, the egoist will say, people who claim they're altruists are kidding themselves. If they really did some soul-searching, they'd realize that their motivation was ultimately selfish.
But this response seems to run headlong into the main problem that egoism faces: the egoist's motivation seems questionable. Even if people do the right thing, if the only reason they're doing it is to get something they want, are they truly behaving morally? Should we really praise the behavior of the rich industrialist who gives to charity so his company can get tax breaks? Or the actions of a “hero” who captures an escaped criminal just to get the reward? Because of this, egoism alone may not present the most solid foundation for determining the right thing to do. And as with the other perspectives, we may be more apt to make wise moral choices if we use the egoistic prism in conjunction with one or more of the others.
Blending the Spectrum
As we've seen, there are a number of different ways of determining the right thing to do, all of which have unique strengths and weaknesses.
And while each of these approaches intends to provide an answer that any reasonable person would accept, disagreements often arise. This happens, in part, when advocates for one perspective over another focus solely on the judgment that their particular prism makes visible. Here, people are disagreeing not because of the underlying moral issue, but rather because they do not share a common perspective on how to determine what's right. And in these cases, becoming aware of the prism that each party is using can help to resolve existing conflicts.
Consider, for example, a disagreement over the morality of paying bribes to foreign officials. Someone applying a utilitarian moral prism might say that doing so is morally acceptable because, after all, societal happiness is maximized if bribes are paid. Conversely, someone applying a virtue ethics moral prism might say that doing so is wrong because a virtuous person wouldn't pay bribes. The disagreement here centers around a difference in focus along the Individual vs. Societal Considerations spectrum: the utilitarian prism is concerned about societal benefits; the virtue ethics prism is concerned with individual improvement. On the other hand, if we recall the Feelings vs. Principles spectrum, we'll note that both prisms care about feelings, so it may be possible, in the attempt to find common ground, to start with a discussion of the emotional response to paying bribes. It may be the case that the utilitarian prism will reconsider its definition of happiness. Or the virtue ethics prism may review its consideration of the feelings involved. Similarly, since both prisms focus more on motives than outcomes, a discussion of the consequences of paying bribes may be a place to begin discussion.
It's easy enough to see where there is common ground between each of the seven prisms:
Between prisms that focus more on societal considerations than individual considerations (utilitarianism and communitarianism), consider the effects upon society. Ask, “How does this judgment reflect on the society we hope to create and live in?”
Between prisms that focus more on individual considerations than societal considerations (ethic of caring, deontology, virtue ethics, egoism, and existentialism), consider effects upon the individual. Ask, “What sort of person will result from making this type of judgment/choice?”
Between prisms more focused on principles than feelings (deontology, utilitarianism, and egoism), consider the underlying determinant of right and wrong. Ask, “Is there a principle we can apply here that both of us can agree to?”
Between prisms more focused on feelings than principles (ethics of caring, virtue ethics, communitarianism, and existentialism), consider the underlying emotional states of the people involved. Ask, “Why do these people feel the way they do about the issue under consideration?”
Between prisms more focused on motives than outcomes (deontology, communitarianism, existentialism, and virtue ethics), consider what the people involved hope to accomplish through their judgments. Ask, “What are the goals that those involved in these judgments are trying to reach?”
Between prisms more focused on outcomes than motives (ethic of caring, egoism, and utilitarianism), consider the overall effects on the choices that people are considering. Ask, “What will happen to all of us if these judgments are passed?”
Consider some possible moral conflicts:
An offer of undocumented raw materials from a supplier.
Lying about a sick day to take your child to the beach.
You've acquired some inside information about a competitor from a supposedly confidential source; how do you use it?
A good customer is especially rude to you; what do you do?
You and your colleague are vying for the same position, and you are given some useful information that you would normally share with him; do you?
You have some information about upcoming layoffs, and your co-workers ask you about it; do you tell the truth?
How would each of the seven perspectives likely judge these? Consider the first one. Perhaps the communitarian would say that since there is no law against taking undocumented materials, there's nothing wrong with doing so. A utilitarian might say that it would please both parties, so why not? An existentialist might see accepting the materials as an expression of human freedom and so would advocate it. An egoist would have no trouble justifying it, as long as both parties benefited. On the other hand, a deontologist might object on the grounds that if everyone accepted undocumented materials, businesses would suffer. The virtue ethicist might say that it's wrong because virtuous people don't do that sort of thing. And someone using the ethic of caring prism might say that accepting the materials would damage the caring relationship between both parties, so it ought not to be done.
With all these different perspectives, how could we work toward a mutually satisfactory resolution? Here are some examples.
The communitarian and existentialist might find common ground by discussing the big picture: Would they be satisfied with the societal implications of such a choice? The communitarian perspective might reconsider whether there ought to be a law prohibiting such transactions; conversely, the existentialist might be able to temper its perspective by considering what would happen to the freedom of people other than the parties involved. Would the liberty of competitors who weren't similarly advantaged be constrained? This isn't to say that agreement would be reached, only that a strategy for accommodation is possible.
Likewise, in the apparent impasse between the utilitarian and virtue ethics perspectives, common ground might be approached by considering the end picture: Would they both be satisfied with the individual and societal results of such a choice? The utilitarian perspective might reconsider whether—in light of the sort of person one becomes by overlooking regulations—overall happiness really would result; conversely, the virtue ethics perspective might compromise by examining more carefully what the effects of such behavior on a person's character would really be given the particulars of the situation at hand.
Or, the ethic of caring perspective might achieve a compromise with the egoist by imagining how the individuals involved would be affected. What would happen to the emotional state of both persons? The egoist might reconsider whether, taking into account the guilt that the customer and vendor might feel, it really was in his or her best interest to take part in such a shady transaction. The ethic of caring perspective might wonder whether the feelings of care that each person had for the other would indeed be nurtured by allowing the deal to take place. Again, doing so wouldn't guarantee that a compromise would be reached, but thinking in these terms could provide a forum for further discussion.
Here we see how apparently intractable moral disagreements can at least be explored—if not solved—by different perspectives on the issues. The lesson is not that all such disagreements are resolvable, but only that, by expanding the moral spectrum, we can discover potential ways to work toward common ground. We can recognize that it may indeed be possible to reach mutually acceptable but previously unseen solutions.
When we're able to resolve moral conflicts peacefully and productively, our personal and professional lives are improved. One might even say the world is made a little bit better place. And it all begins with broadening our moral perspective. This is how we improve our ability to perceive and choose the right thing to do.
Expanding the Palette
Each of us can improve our ability to perceive and choose the right thing to do by expanding our own moral spectrum. By drawing each of the seven perspectives into our own and coming to conclusions from the standpoint of, not just one, but seven different ways of looking at the issue, we naturally arrive at choices that are more likely to reflect our deepest, most abiding values.
Of course, it's easier said than done. But not impossible. Consider the experience of my friends Bev and Brian, who were having a lot of problems with their 17-year-old daughter, Kelly.
Kelly has never been a particularly studious sort of girl; she's been always much more interested in hanging out with her friends and exploring the great outdoors than in reading or doing school-work. She's a good kid, though, with a great sense of humor and a sensitivity to others that seems pretty rare, especially in younger people. But around the time she turned 16, Kelly really started acting out. Maybe it's partly because her parents didn't always have a lot of time to spend with her—both Bev and Brian have full-time careers. Maybe it's partly because she has no strong sense of community—Brian's job as a sales manager for a growing high-tech company has led them to move to three new cities in the past seven years. Or maybe it was just the teenage hormones kicking in. In any case, almost overnight, Kelly went from being your typical moody teenager to an unusually disturbed adolescent. She started hanging out with a different crowd of kids, some of whom supposedly had affiliations with street gangs in the L.A. suburb where Bev and Brian lived. She started cutting school regularly, sometimes taking off for two or three days in a row. She apparently began experimenting with drugs; Bev and Brian, nonsmokers, could easily detect the telltale odor of marijuana on her clothes when she came home. But worst of all for them, who, as children of the 70s, had fully expected that some recreational substance use would be part of their daughter's adolescent challenges, was that Kelly was arrested for driving while intoxicated.
When they brought Kelly home that night and failed miserably in trying to engage her in a discussion about the unacceptability of her behavior, Bev and Brian knew something had to be done, but they didn't know what. Should they enroll Kelly in a residential treatment program of some type? Should they investigate boarding schools? Should they quit their jobs and devote themselves full-time to their daughter's care? Should they just look the other way and pretend nothing was happening? Bev and Brian were convinced that there had to be a right answer—an answer that worked best for Kelly and them—but they felt overwhelmed at the possibility of finding it.
I talked to them about the moral spectrum model. Bev and Brian realized that their typical perspective on such issues was best represented by the deontological prism. They usually kept in mind a principle—something like, “Kids have a duty to obey their parents”—and how failing to follow this principle would affect someone: “Well, if they don't, that is, if Kelly doesn't, she'll turn into an obnoxious, disrespectful, and unruly person.” On the basis of this perspective, Bev and Brian were leaning in favor of having their daughter packed off to a boarding school of some kind, some place that would really teach Kelly to take responsibility for her behavior. They knew that all three of them would be unhappy if this happened, but it seemed to them the right thing to do.
They began by considering what an ethic of caring perspective would say. No particular answer leapt out; however, it made it clear that whatever the right thing to do was, it would allow Kelly to see how deeply Bev and Brian cared for her. Any sort of “tough love” choice would need to emphasize love over toughness.
Taking the utilitarian perspective, the parents could see that a choice that would make them all miserable could never be considered the preferred choice. While this alone wasn't enough to sway them, it did help them continue exploring other options. “I'm sure it would be most painless if we just ignored things,” said Bev, “but that doesn't seem right to me either.”
Nevertheless, taking into account the utilitarian perspective did convince them to go a little easier on Kelly and themselves. “I've got to learn to pick my battles,” Brian said. “Not everything has to turn into a contest of wills. I know she's going to do things that I disagree with. But if they're basically harmless and if they make her happy, why should I complain?”
How could the communitarian perspective inform Bev and Brian's decision? Trusting their natural feelings of sympathy and compassion, they were both inclined to quit their jobs and devote full-time care to Kelly. But keeping in mind the societal implications of that choice put the brakes on it. They figured a communitarian would ultimately say that we should appeal to the institutions that we, as a society, have developed to rear difficult children in the most loving way possible. This inspired them to explore counseling resources that they hadn't previously investigated.
Taking the virtue ethics perspective made Bev and Brian curious to find out what people they admired would say. They talked to their daughter's high school principal, a woman whose judgment they had both long respected. They also got in touch with their family physician, a man who always seemed to them to be the embodiment of a virtuous person. They even solicited the opinion of one of Kelly's childhood friends, a girl named Sarah, from whom Kelly had drifted some but whom Bev thought was one of most level-headed kids she'd ever known.
The existentialist prism seemed at first to say they ought to just let Kelly do her own thing. Her freedom would be maximized if she were allowed to explore her own choices; and Bev and Brian would have the liberty to carry on with their lives, as well. But on closer examination, it became clear that Kelly's long-term freedoms would be compromised if she continued behaving in the way she was. If she didn't start applying herself more in high school, she wouldn't have many options to attend college and her life's prospects would be constrained. So it was obvious that getting Kelly back on track with her education was a priority; otherwise, she would be facing many closed doors in the future.
Finally, the egoistic perspective made Bev and Brian aware of the urgency of doing something. Every day that the issue wasn't resolved was a day in which their own interests—and Kelly's, too—were being thwarted. Whatever decision they came to, therefore, had to be done as quickly as possible.
Nevertheless, combining all the perspectives and coming to a final decision on what to do wasn't something that happened overnight. Bev and Brian took weeks going back and forth over the various ways of looking at the problem. And in the end, it wasn't as if one of them won out. When all was said and done, they ended up opting for a variety of steps inspired by the different approaches. Bev cut back on some of her hours at work to spend more time with Kelly. They made a commitment to joint counseling; the family agreed to meet once a week with a psychologist to discuss what was going on with them. They arranged to have Kelly transferred into a special program in her school district for kids with disciplinary problems; they attend an alternative “school within a school” that's both less and more structured; their curriculum is more free-form, but the requirements for attendance and participation are stricter. Finally, they tried to help Kelly find some sort of mentor in her life. This wasn't easy, since Kelly was singularly uninterested in what any of her parents' adult acquaintances had to say about life. Bev was, however, successful in encouraging Kelly to reestablish a relationship with her old friend Sarah, whose influence, Bev thought, seemed to be pretty positive.
From Bev and Brian's example, you can see the value of expanding the moral spectrum. It may not necessarily yield the one and only one right answer. Sometimes the process will reveal previously unrecognized possibilities. For my friends, the right thing to do was a combination of options. Pursuing all of these represented the right strategy for them to take. It involved a kind of balancing act. They held in their minds each of the seven perspectives and examined the implications. Although they weren't contradictory, they did suggest different courses of action. Bev and Brian were, however, able to draw upon the combined intelligence of these possibilities to see which ones were right for them.
In many ways, Bev and Brian's experience is typical of how the moral spectrum approach works. Key to it is the generation and exploration of options. From this, it may sometimes happen that the one right answer will emerge. In such a case, it will be the combined perspectives of all seven moral spectra that provides our direction. But this sort of result is more typical when we're facing a relatively simple “yes” or “no” type question.
Imagine that you're trying to decide whether to fudge on your income taxes about your home office expenses. You might reason as follows. Existentialism would indicate you should fudge: having the extra few dollars would allow you liberties you otherwise wouldn't have. The deontological prism would recommend against fudging: imagine a world in which everyone adopted your willingness to cheat: The effects on society would be disastrous; you wouldn't want to live in such a world. The ethic of caring prism also would say don't cheat; to do so would be to undermine the caring relationship between you and your fellow citizens. Examining the issue through the communitarian prism would indicate you ought not to fudge; if everyone in your community knew what you were up to, you wouldn't do it. The utilitarian prism would indicate you ought to: the relatively large amount of happiness that you will gain outweighs the relatively small amount of unhappiness of cheated-upon government officials—who aren't likely to find out anyway. The virtue ethics prism would say it's wrong since the most virtuous person you know wouldn't do what you're considering. Finally, egoism unproblematically would say “go for it.” So, in this case, by a 4 to 3 vote, not fudging wins out.
More often as not, though, several possibilities will come to the fore. Choosing among them may be a matter, as it was for Bev and Brian, of trying things out and seeing what works. Or it may be a process of elimination that results in one or more choices taking precedence. In any case, the benefits of having a rich array of possible options makes the approach extremely useful when faced not only with moral choices but with choices of all types. The likelihood of arriving at decisions that truly are reflective of our dearest and deepest values increases as the sophistication of our available alternatives goes up.
The moral spectrum approach thus does not always immediately yield the easy and obvious answer. Sometimes it is part of a process that moves us incrementally closer to where we need to go. But this in itself is real progress—and often just the push we need to eventually discover the right answer. And this is the case, as we will see in the chapter to come, not only in our personal lives but in business and professional experiences as well.