36 - Moral Saints 2: Why Be a Saint?

This episode is about Wolf’s “Moral Saints,” Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” and Larissa Macfarquhar’s Strangers Drowning.  

Susan Wolf thinks that devoting your life to helping others would be a real drag. It’d interfere with playing tennis and reading Tolstoy. 

True enough but some people might have philosophical and personal reasons to do it anyway. 

For example, Peter Singer argues that, if you think a child’s life is worth more than your shoes, then you’re morally obliged to give away all your money to charity.  

Larissa Macfarquhar helps out with the personal reasons. She’s written a book that profiles a whole bunch of real-life do-gooders. And it turns out that even though the saintly life is tough, the saints are getting something out of it.  And from their perspective, a life of Tolstoy and tennis might not be a great as Wolf makes it out to be. 

References
Macfarquhar, Strangers Drowning
Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”
Wolf, “Moral Saints” 

Transcript

Clif Mark: 0:14

Today, drowning strangers do gooders in the moral upside of war. I'm Clif Mark. And this is good. In the last episode, I talked about Susan Wolf's article moral saints. And in that article, wolf says, there's this assumption that a lot of people make, that we should all be the morally best that we can, that we should all be striving to be like moral saints. And her argument is that this assumption is wrong, that trying to be a moral saint is a terrible goal in life. Because if you're always looking at the moral side of things, you'll lose sight of all the cool stuff that actually makes life worth living. You won't be able to laugh at a Marx Brothers movies appreciate Tolstoy be a foodie or a style icon or an athlete or whatever. You're just going to spend your whole life slavish Lee trying to satisfy the bottomless demands of your conscience. Now, wolf doesn't want to abolish morality altogether. She just doesn't want it to take over people's lives. So she recommends that we all step out of the moral point of view every so often, and look at things from what she calls the point of view of individual perfection. And by that, she just means that we should take a more holistic view of what's valuable in our lives, a view that includes sports and art and gourmet food and everything else. And this sounds like solid, reasonable advice. Why shouldn't we consider all aspects of our lives when we're deciding what to do? It sounds reasonable. But here we are. Another episode and I'm still talking about Susan Wolfe. Why? Well, last episode, I gave as clear and generous an interpretation of her argument as I can manage. But when I was done, I still had a lot of questions. There were still things that bothered me about her argument. So I decided to come back to the topic of moral saints and bring two more authors into the mix. Peter Singer, and Marisa MacFarquhar. And the idea is that these two authors can bring in aspects of the topic that will fluffed out singer, he brings in an argument for why we should all be more like mortal saints, and malarkey har, she tells us what real life saints are actually like, and gives us an idea of the upside of leading that kind of life. One of the big questions that will doesn't answer in her article is when we should take the moral point of view. And when we should take the point of view of individual perfection. All she says is that we can't be in the moral point of view all the time. But beyond that, just use your intuition. And so I tried to use my intuition. And my intuition is telling me that there are some situations that call for a moral point of view, and some that don't. For example, I'm most sympathetic to Wolf's argument that we should focus a little less on morality. When I'm thinking about that habit, people have have tried to turn every tiny little detail into a charged moral issue. If you watch the news, or read it, or are online, even to a moderate degree, then you know what I mean? I've read articles on the morality or immorality of biking to work, what kind of food you eat, what songs are okay to listen to at Christmas, whether you capitalize the word black, you name it. And once you get used to thinking in this way, it can be insidious. You want to pick a lunch spot, you wind up asking yourself things like, how much packaging does the restaurant use? Is it recyclable? How do they treat their livestock before they kill it and feed it to you? Is this one of those homophobic chicken restaurants? Or suppose you're watching a movie and all anyone wants to talk about is whether the movie is harmful or offensive to anyone. If bad people might be encouraged in their badness by watching it if the directors or producers or actors have a record of immoral behavior, and so on. And I'm not saying these aren't important things for someone to consider at some point. But the worry is that thinking too much about them can make you forget why you even like watching movies in the first place. is these kinds of situations where I'm most sympathetic to wolf. I want to ask people to take a step back, to let go of that perspective and to remember that there's more to life than being completely morally spotless.

Unknown: 4:57

However, I wouldn't say that in all situations. In some situations, my intuition tells me that you should be taking the moral perspective. And that thinking about aesthetics or about what you're going to have for lunch would be the wrong thing to do. For example, if there was a child drowning in front of you. This, of course, is the famous example from the 1972 article. That's 10 years before Wolf's piece, the 1972 article by Peter Singer called famine, affluence and morality. This is a super famous piece. I talked about it a bit with Paul Sager back in Episode 31. So if you're curious about it after you can head back there, and listen to that one. Anyway, singers argument goes like this. Imagine you're walking by a shallow pond dressed in a nice new outfit. You see a child drowning, and you can save the child, but you'll ruin your clothes. What do you do? Now, obviously, you jump in and you save the kid, you're morally obliged to do that if you can. And if you tried saying something like, well, I, I would have saved the kid. But these, these shoes were really expensive. Well, you'd sound like a monster. This is a situation where you should be seeing things in moral terms that singers first move, he gives you something obvious. Then his second move, is to ask, What if the child isn't drowning right in front of you? What if it's drowning faraway in a different country? But you can still save it. It's just that instead of jumping in and getting wet, you have to make a small cash donation equivalent to the cost of the clothes, you would have ruined? Aren't you still obliged to save that kid? Because what's the moral difference between the two cases in this one is a little less obvious. Because on an emotional gut level, each child drowning right in front of you is a lot more compelling than a child that you can't see because it's across the world. But on a rational, philosophical level, what kind of arguments you make, it's kind of hard actually, to say why exactly the life of the nearby child is more important than the faraway one. And it's really hard to explain why the lives of foreign children are worth less than the pleasure of getting new shoes. So a lot of people, when they hear this argument, they're inclined to say, Fine, Peter Singer, you have a point, maybe we are morally obliged to send a few 100 bucks if it will save someone's life. But once you admit that, you've walked right into his trap, because singers the third move, is to point out that, as a sad, matter of fact, our world is just full of poverty, and suffering, and disease, and famine. And all of these things can be somewhat relieved by cash donation, made to some charitable agency or other The world is an infinity of shallow ponds packed with drowning kids. And if you're obliged to help one, you're obliged to help the next. If you're obliged to give 100 bucks or 1000 bucks as singer, then according to the logic of the argument, you're obliged to keep on giving right up to the point where you give away so much, that you're about to make your own life worse than the lives of the people you're trying to help, then you can stop. That's just the logical end point, singer will settle for less, he'll probably be happy if you just give away half your income, or 10%. What his point is that morality requires that people should be giving away way more than they actually do. He's saying that if you live in an affluent country, you're morally obliged to basically hand over your entire life to help those who need it most. And he knows he's asking a lot. He just thinks that's what morality requires. And maybe if we all did more to relieve the suffering in the world, then the world wouldn't be so bad. And morality wouldn't require us to drop everything to help others all the time. But we don't end it is and it does. This argument is very uncomfortable to hear, because obviously, singer is asking for way more than almost anyone is willing to give. And then he's pointing his finger and calling them morally bad when they don't give it so wolf in singers arguments go in opposite directions. Wolf says that if you start thinking like singer, you're never going to enjoy a novel or a gourmet meal or a game of tennis again, and singer saying, how can you think about tennis when people are dying? We'll think singers doing too much and singer thinks that wolf isn't doing enough.

Clif Mark: 9:57

Think wolf in singer both make Good points. On the one hand, I agree with wolf that being a saint does really seem like a drag. I wouldn't want to devote my life to helping strangers. But also, I do kind of find it morally sketchy that things like truffle oil and champagne. And I don't know indoor skydiving exist. Well, something like 25,000 people a day die of hunger. I can't really settle the question between them in any satisfying way. But I can fill in some of the details about how it might actually be to live that same life. And I'm going to do it by talking about a book that I really enjoyed called strangers drowning, grappling with impossible idealism, drastic choices and the overpowering urge to help. The title strangers drowning, that's a reference to singers article and the author who is called Larissa MacFarquhar Johar, she was inspired by Susan Wolf's article as well. So she knows about all the arguments I've been talking about. And she decided to write a book about the people that Wolfe calls moral saints, though she calls them do gooders. These are the people who devote their entire lives to being as ethically good as possible. They go to extremes, they go to the point where they seem weird, and they make other people uncomfortable. And although MC frog Johar is working in the same general topic as Wolf, her approach is very different. singer and Wolf, they're professional philosophers. And they travel mostly by armchair. Remember, wolf says, she doesn't even know if anything's exist. And then she just kind of invents how she thinks they must be, and then gets annoyed at them. She figures they must be boring, and totally offensive and super nice, in that their lives must be pretty miserable. But she doesn't actually go out and meet anyone who fits the description. And in a way, it doesn't matter. Because wolf doesn't care that much about actual saints, she cares about that nagging feeling of guilt that she gets for not being one MacFarquhar harp. She's not a professional philosopher. She's a profile writer for The New Yorker. So instead of imagining what do gooders must be like, she actually goes out and meets them, she finds a whole bunch of them, she researches their lives. And her book is filled with in depth profiles of these people. She doesn't just explain their good deeds, she gets into their motivations, their personal lives, their relationships, the rationales, they get for their actions, all sorts of stuff. There are all kinds of do gooders in the book. There's a chapter on a guy who was born a prince, but gave up the family fortune to start a leper colony. There's a couple who adopted more than 20 kids. There are missionaries, nurses, people who donate their organs to strangers. And even though the book isn't social science, per se, it's still real world research that can help us see what we've got right and what she got wrong. And one thing that we've got wrong is that new gutters are not all these super nice, inoffensive Ned Flanders types. A lot of them are really odd and interesting characters and willing to make other people very uncomfortable. And I can't tell you about all of them. But obviously, I need to tell you about at least one who, oddly enough, was inspired by Peter Singer. I know I've been talking a lot about singer. And I want to make it clear that not all people who care about morality are followers of singer, do gooders come from all kinds of backgrounds. And they come to their do getting in different ways. And most of them haven't heard of singer and his utilitarian style arguments about drowning children. But some of the people that park Johar writes about were genuinely inspired by him. And I find this really interesting that the same argument that 1000s of people have read that gets thrown at every student who takes a class in ethics. It affects people differently. For some people when they hear singers argument, it just seems ridiculous. It doesn't seem serious because it's obvious that nobody's obliged to ruin their lives for strangers across the globe. And it sounds a bit unhinged to say that buying a pair of new shoes is morally equivalent to watching a child drowned before your eyes. But people who have an interest in philosophy, they often find it annoying. It's not like they find it so annoying that they're going to give away all their money or change their lives at all. But it's a tough argument to answer and it can make people feel uncomfortable. Some people like Susan wolf feel so uncomfortable that they'll launch their career by trying to prove that being a saint is stupid anyway. But there is a tiny percentage of people I don't know, there's something special about their brains. But there's a small fraction of a percent of people who just are really into this argument. This argument was made for them. It gets into their mind and takes over their life. Aaron Pitkin, he's one of the do gooders in MacFarquhar Hart's book. He's like this. He was an idealistic teenager who listened to metal and had a pet snake. And he eventually becomes a full time animal rights guy and devotes his life to improving the welfare of chickens. Because that's just how he calculated he could reduce suffering in the world the most not because he thought chickens were cute or anything. But before all that, back when he was in college, Aaron Pipkin, read Peter singers, famine, affluence, and morality, and it changed his life. pickin becomes super cheap, he starts going dumpster diving for food, that kind of thing. And that's because after reading singer, everything he buys every penny he spends, he feels like he's taking money away from someone who's dying. When he looks at a soda vending machine, he sees a starving child next to it. Aaron Pitkin basically starts living inside singers thought experiment, the world has become an endless series of pawns full of drowning people that Aaron feels he's responsible for saving. And he's not the only one in the book who's like this. There's another woman who completely melts down because she lets her fiance buy her a $4 Candy Apple, and then feels guilty because he could have given that money to someone who needed it more. Now, like I said, not all do gooders are obsessed with donating every last dollar in singer style. They do good in different ways. But what all of them share is that they're driven by an enormously powerful sense of duty. It's not that they don't have other desires. They do. She wanted to eat the candy apple, it's that their sense of duty makes them suppress those other desires, so they can focus on doing good. So these people usually become workaholics who never take time off. They train themselves to sleep less so they can have more waking hours to do good in. They give away their money. They were thrown safety. They all make huge sacrifices and lead very focused and intentional lives, and hold themselves to ridiculously high moral standards. In a way, this is Susan Wolf's nightmare, having a conscience that is so domineering, that it won't even let you enjoy a candy apple. And actually reading MacFarquhar hearts profiles. It seems even worse than I thought from reading wolf. Because when wolf is talking about the things that you have to give up to be a moral saint, she focuses on personal activities, hobbies, characteristics, your sense of humor, taste and literature, that kind of thing. But according to MacFarquhar Johar, this isn't the most important thing that do gooders lose out on. They also have a really tough time, keeping up good relationships with their families and friends. normal human beings are very partial distance matters to most people's moral intuitions. And this is true in the literal sense, where the child drowning in front of you matters more than the child drowning across the world. But it's also true in the figurative sense, where you have more duties to the people that you're connected to. So for most people, family comes first, and friends, that maybe people from your city or religion or fandom, citizens of the same country, the Workers of the World, almost any connection creates more moral obligation than no connection. And these connections, especially the really close ones, are subjectively very important to people. And that's probably why we give them such moral significance. But do gooders are different. They're impartial, they believe in the equal moral worth of all human beings. Now, of course, we all say that we believe in the equal moral worth of all human beings, but maybe we believe it abstractly, but we don't believe it emotionally. We don't let it affect our actions in any way. Because if we seriously put strangers on the same level of concern as our family and friends, we wouldn't have family and friends for very long. Because we never buy a birthday dinner for our friend. We never take a nice holiday with our spouse. How could we win there are hungry people to be fed, homeless people to house orphans to be adopted, and so on. Now do gooders, they do put these people on the same level, and they do make those sacrifices. It's not that they don't love their families. It's that they put Strangers on a moral par with them and Since there's always someone in the world suffering more than their families, their families fall off the priority list. And if you don't prioritize your relationships, they tend to fall apart. According to MacFarquhar harm. This is the biggest sacrifice that do gooders make. And it's also what makes them seem so disturbing and weird to most people. So make Farquharson studies of actual do gooders does confirm one of Wolf's main points, which is that the life of the do gooder really would seem pretty bleak to most people. And that's because do gooders are dominated by a sense of duty that is so demanding that it crowds out the things that most people build their entire lives around and care about most. But MacFarquhar also seems to support singers idea that morality is way more demanding than most of us recognize. Susan Wolf, she doesn't like the saintly outlook. She suggests that moral saints are how they are because they're missing something, they lack the capacity to understand and enjoy the things that bring joy to normal people. mcfar Kihara says almost the opposite. She thinks that do gooders are different from us, not because they lacked some capacity, but because they can see something that we can't or are not willing to. I quote, would do gooders lack is not happiness, but innocence, the lack that happy blindness that allows most people most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable, do gooders have forced themselves to know in to keep on knowing that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes they're not always, their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And remembering that they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility. And quote, it's worth saying here that MacFarquhar heart doesn't just do profiles in her book. In between the chapters on profiles, there are chapters about theory, she talks about Wolf and singer, she runs through the intellectual history of critiques against do gooders from philosophers and novelists and psychoanalysts. She's done the reading. And even so, she still can't come up with an adequate response to a challenge like singers. She thinks the only reason we think we don't have to become saints is because we ignore what's really going on in the world. And this leaves us in a bit of a dilemma. Because on the one hand, it looks like wolf has a point, devoting your life to doing good would completely mess up most people's lives as they understand them. And on the other hand, singer has a point, if it really comes down to choosing between sending food to starving people or buying new sunglasses, choosing the Sunny's can seem pretty callous. And the only reason that most of us can live with that is because we close our eyes. And we refuse to acknowledge all the preventable misery that do gooders spend their whole lives fighting against. And the reason this is a dilemma is because whichever kind of life we pick, we lose on the other one. If we want to be moral, we have to give up so much that will ruin our lives from the point of view of individual perfection. But if we take the point of view of individual perfection, and we try to lead a good life full of interesting activities, and good movies and close relationships, then we're inevitably going to be moral failures. It looks like there is just no way to live a life that's good and moral. In this shitty world. I don't have a solution for this problem. It may just be the case that you've got to choose between hating your life because it sucks in hating yourself because you're bad. But I don't want to leave it there. Because so far, I've been talking about things mainly from Wolf's perspective. And that's a particular perspective. It's the perspective of a person who has enough privilege to be able to be deeply involved in literature and tennis and fashion, and watching Criterion Collection movies. And just the kind of person who thinks their life would fall apart without all those things. When wolf read someone like singer, the call of morality seems like a massive, unfair chore and to guilt trip. I've taught singers article to classrooms. And this is a very common reaction. But it's not the only reaction. The people who actually become do gooders, they're getting something completely different from that. enormously demanding morality. That wolf doesn't even mention. You remember the chicken man, Aaron Pitkin. When he read singers shallow pond argument, he didn't find it annoying and burdensome. He found it clarifying Woolf she finds the Call of Duty oppressive, but for Pitkin, it was liberating. Before he read singer picking always had this strong sense that there was a lot wrong in the world. And he didn't have a clear idea of what he was supposed to do about it. So he always had this vague sense of guilt and uncertainty, like he was tainted somehow. And reading singers argument, hope, give a shape to his sense of unease. Now, of course, it was intimidating, because the argument demands such huge sacrifice. But he also found it bracing. It gave him direction, and strength. And a lot of the do gooders in the book are like that. They're bothered and dissatisfied, until they find their own calling their particular way of doing good. And after that, they're not necessarily happy, but they do gain a sense of clarity and purpose. They're not always wondering if they're doing the right thing. They know what they have to do, and they just try to get on with doing it. In the huge sacrifices they make, they seem like less of a chore, because they're doing it for a higher purpose. They're just doing what they have to do. Wolf emic, fog Johar. When they talk about do gooders and moral saints, they talk about them like they're these rare, exotic creatures. And they are, but they're not aliens. These people are still motivated by really common human impulses. It's just that they take them to an extreme degree. Most people can see the appeal of committing to something bigger than ourselves, or the appeal of having conviction about what the right thing to do is, and then doing it. And I also think that most people, at least when they're in the right kind of bad mood, can see why the life of individual perfection that wolf recommends, could be unsatisfying, Wolf, she wants you to spend all your time trying to pursue your intrinsic interests, to pursue your passions for literature, and film and working on your tennis game. She wants you to develop your sense of grace and personal style. But it's all about individual development and enjoyment. You're always asking yourself, what do I really want? What am I passionate about? What kind of things do I truly enjoy. And that means you never get beyond yourself, you're never part of something bigger. And if you're even a little bit idealistic as a person, and you get in a bad mood, all of this self development stuff can seem so small stakes that it's hardly worth bothering with. A donkey get me wrong. I play sports, I like to read. But I can also see why someone might think that this kind of life is kind of petty and hollow and self absorbed. Even I can see that, and I've lived a life that's way closer to wolves than to any of the do gooders in MacFarquhar Hart's book. And so what I'm saying here is that the basic impulses to help others and to be part of something greater than oneself are pretty common. It's just that we don't hear as much about them. And we may not even recognize them, because these impulses don't get that much play in our current ideological situation. We live in individualistic, liberal, consumption oriented societies, at least I do. In in these societies were encouraged to think of things in terms of personal preference and development. The do gooder mindset is kind of discouraged. You got people like wolf saying that, to be a saint is a kind of mental disorder that you wouldn't wish on herself or anyone she loves. But this is an interesting part of MacFarquhar Hart's book. she points out that there are some circumstances in which the moral perspective of the whole society can kind of shift towards the perspective of the do gooders. And so the saintly outlook becomes common, it's not just for a few moral freaks. Now she's thinking of different kinds of emergencies, natural disasters, that kind of thing. When these kinds of things happen, our sense of duty expands. People make sacrifices, they take risks to help people they've never met, they might go out to actually rescue people, they could organize relief drives, they might welcome strangers to stay in their own homes, is not a chore. When you see interviews with people in these kinds of situations who are working in relief, even if they're doing something really exceptional, they usually just act as if they're doing what they have to do. And I can't remember any of them complaining that they had to miss a tennis match. MacFarquhar was a big example of a social circumstance that shifts all of our conceptions of duty is War. She says, Yeah, war is hell. That's when we do the cruelest in most evil stuff to each other. But it also makes duty more demanding, it brings out a big shift in what's expected of everyone. People are expected to drop the regular pursuits, dropped their jobs and their leisure activities and risk their lives and work for the war effort in all kinds of capacities. It's no longer cool just to ignore your public duty and devote your life to cinema and sports. And the more time a lot of people rise to the occasion, and they show courage and sacrifice and devotion to their comrades and countrymen. And even if you hate war, you do have to admire some of the heroics that wartime produces. Of course, some people find life during wartime miserable, and can't wait to get out of it. That might be most people. What is not everyone? Some people find these states of emergency invigorating. Some people who lived through war, say that was when they felt most alive. And that life in peacetime can seem boring and without purpose By comparison, life during wartime. It isn't fun. It's no party or disco. It's tough, but at least you know what you're supposed to do. And according to MK Johar, that's the difference between do gooders and ordinary people, for do gooders. It's always wartime, they live under an expanded and more intense sense of duty. And that gives them the enthusiasm and purpose of wartime but without the cruelty and violence. And if that's true, then the perspectives are a little more balanced than it may have seemed at the end of last episode. Sure. From the point of view of a young Harvard Prof. The life of the moral saint may seem like a real drag. But from the point of view of someone with a clear sense of the rightness of their cause, and a passion for fighting for it. The life of individual perfection might seem a little pointless, confused, and shabby. Today Special thanks go out to Antonia foul, and Nick Weaver, thank you for support on Patreon, and you listener, if you'd like to support us on Patreon, go to patreon.com slash good in theory, send us some money and if you want to support us otherwise, leave a review rate the podcast, tell your friends, spread the word. Thanks around again and then going on.

Unknown: 33:10

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