Last week, I gave a podcast interview and we ranged over a number of interesting questions. I got asked one by the host that, you know, it seems sort of a easy question, almost a softball at first. And I suppose for some people, if they have oversimplistic views on ethics, it might really be one. But for me, it was a tough question. I had to think about it quite a bit. And so here’s the question as far as I remember it.

I mean, we’ll find out when the podcast actually comes out what the exact wording was. But it was something along the lines of, “if you can only say one single thing, make one point for the average person or the audience of people out there in general about ethics, what would it be?”

And like I said, that is not an easy one for someone like me who thinks that ethics is kind of deep and complicated. And it’s not that people can’t get it, but there’s a lot of as we say moving parts, and you don’t want to leave them out any more than you’d want to say: “hey, let’s simplify the toaster or the car, we’ll get rid of all the parts that aren’t absolutely necessary.” And then you find out you’ve actually gotten rid of some of the necessary parts when you try to use it.

So I think for people who are committed to some sort of very hardcore substantive ethics that they think covers everything, like you know, you could be a Kantian and be like, just follow the categorical imperative. And then, of course, you have to explain the categorical imperative, which has at least three formulations. But we’ll put that aside. Or if you’re a utilitarian and you’re saying, follow the greatest happiness principle. Well, okay, that sounds good, but it requires a lot of explaining and then showing how it actually works in practice and answering objections. And you might think of the old Google motto, just don’t be evil. Well, that’s so contentless, it doesn’t tell you anything actually helpful.

But I think a lot of people do approach ethics in that way, because they’ve already got some point of view staked out that they think really covers everything. And I just don’t have that sort of approach. I have a much more complicated and messy approach that is you know what we sometimes call “ethical pluralism”, thinking that there’s multiple principles that we need to bring to bear. I am of course a virtue ethicist, but virtue ethics isn’t as simple as just be virtuous or do what virtue would tell you, because there’s a lot more to it than that.

So I did have an answer, and I’m fairly satisfied with this answer, and I’m going to give it to you here. But it’s one that as I think about it, more each time that I mull it over, which is what I’m doing here with you, it winds up getting a little bit more complicated. I’ll probably have to write a piece about this before too long. So I’m kind of working my thoughts out here.

So when I was asked the question, after I took a tiny little pause and bought myself some time by saying wow, that’s a tough question there. I didn’t have a Twix bar like in the commercial to chew on or anything like that. I said something along these lines.

What I would want to say is that whatever good you’re doing by a particular choice or action that you are intending actually doing, what you need to keep in mind is that even if the action fails or somehow goes astray, there are factors that you didn’t know about, or it just goes unnoticed. Maybe it was to help somebody and they don’t realize that they’re being helped. Or if something else undoes it, or even if it’s just like seemingly a little drop in not just the bucket, but an ocean that is the wider world, The good that you accomplish or even just intend (intending is a sort of accomplishing), is real.

And even though it’s limited, that doesn’t take away its reality. And its reality is not just that it exists, but that it is indeed true. Even if it’s not perfectly good, because most things aren’t, that doesn’t take away what goodness it has.

And why do I think this is the most important thing for me to say? Because I’ve seen so many people who are on one side of this or the other. They’re the doer of the good action and they see it somehow not come to full fruition and they feel as if what they did was nothing. it didn’t accomplish anything. It didn’t embody any good. It didn’t improve anything. And they can get discouraged and that might lead them to not do it in the future. But even if like their universe was to end right there, I would still give them that advice and say, the good that you did is still good. Keep that in mind.

And on the other side, I think there’s a lot of people who are perfectionists, not just for themselves, but for lots of other people as well. They’re kind of critics, they’re naysayers, they’re the ones who say: well, you think you did something, but look at it. Oh, it’s not really a good thing at all, because it’s not a perfect good, or an eternally lasting good, or the best or anything like that. So we live in a world where this happens an awful lot.

And I just think it’s really important for somebody at least to be consistently putting that message out. And maybe I’m not the only one to do that, thank goodness. But if I have to be the one to stress this over and over again, well I’m happy to do so, because it was a hard-won insight that for me that took a long time and experience and thinking about things for it to stick for me and I know that other people would benefit from hearing it as well and

I do have a couple you know like corollaries and follow-ups to this as well which goes a little bit against the “hey, what’s the one thing that you want to say”? If you’re smuggling in corollaries, now you’re saying two things, three things, four things. But indulge me for a moment while I bring up another thing that I did say in the podcast, and then one other thing that I didn’t say in the podcast but I’ve been thinking about

So the first thing is that there’s a kind of perfectionism that a lot of people succumb to and try to impose on other people in ethics. And we have this phrase, “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” meaning don’t let the fact that you’re aiming at some imaginary, not real best, some superlative, become the impediment to you actually choosing and doing and perhaps even sustaining something that is genuinely good, albeit not the best.

So I think everybody’s heard that phrase, or at least if you hadn’t before, now you’ve got a good idea what it means and you can relate to it. And I want to add a little bit more there. So, you know, we can talk about the superlative, which is the best. We can talk about the whatever we want to call it, maybe substantive, the good. And then in between, we have something else that we call the comparative, and that is the better term, right? It’s not the best, and it’s not just the good. It’s where one good is more good than another good, and we can compare them back and forth. And that’s why we call it the comparative.

So we could say, you know thinking about ice cream, and this is going to seem completely arbitrary to you: Vanilla that’s good. Vanilla is nice to have. Butter pecan, well that’s better. What’s the best? I don’t know. For me, it probably is mint chocolate chip. For you, it’s going to be something different. But you notice we’ve got like a hierarchy that we set out there.

So what’s the upshot for this? I think we need to watch out not just for the best being the enemy of the good, but also for the best becoming an impediment to discerning and choosing and recognizing the better, as indeed a greater good than other goods, but not necessarily the apex of goodness itself. Because a lot of what we’re doing in ethics is not simply choosing between the good and the bad.

It’s nice when things are that straightforward and obvious. Instead, we have to look at different kinds of things that are good and decide, well in this situation, which of them is better than than the other one. And we’d be foolish if we pick the lesser good instead of what we recognize to be the greater good, the better. But if we’re being perfectionists, if we’re always needing the best, we could have just the same attitude towards the better as we have towards the good, and we might think: ah you know, maybe the better isn’t even really better. And we might even come to think that it’s not even truly good. So I think this is a corollary.

The other one that I wanted to bring up is that if we can say that the good that we do, even if it doesn’t last forever and seems to be easily dissipated or disappearing in an entire ocean where it’s a mere drop or anything along those lines, we can say the same thing about the opposite of the good the bad or the evil however you want to put it and some people will try to justify the bad that they do by, you know reference to some greater good. Or they’ll say: well it’s really not so bad, or they’ll say: well I did a bad thing, but nobody caught me, or I intended to do something bad, but it didn’t come off, so everything’s okay.

Well, if we’re going to say that whatever good we do is something positive and real, I think we also need to be honest with ourselves about the bad as well and say,if there weren’t bad consequences that resulted from it, if I had a bad intention, even though it wasn’t fulfilled, it’s still bad. And that’s a thought that I think needs to go along with this one single thing. So another corollary.

And like I said, I’m in process of working out my full thoughts on this. It’s not as if I haven’t had plenty of time indeed to think about these things over the course of time in the past. But these are murky matters that I think could use some additional reflection and articulation. So you can look forward to seeing me writing something about this down the line. But for now, that’s where my reflections stand.

I hope this is something helpful for you. And if it is, you know, feel free to leave a comment about that. And don’t just say that it is helpful, but maybe say how it’s helpful for you.

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