Event-based Morality
by Joseph Rowlands
How do you judge a person's moral commitment? How do you tell whether someone is virtuous or not? The answer to these questions can change the way you see morality.
One of the more common views of how to judge a person's moral commitment is what I call the event-based morality. The goal is to look at how a person handles certain scenarios. An example I've used to describe this view in the past is a man who cheats on his lover. Afterwards, he must decide to tell her and come clean, or to live a lie. You can stack the two sides anyway you want, but the choice will provide some insight into how committed the man is to his moral principles.
One problem with this event-based morality is that to judge a person's commitment to morality, the choice needs to be difficult to make. Generally, the greater the cost, the greater the commitment. The cheating man example may show a commitment to honesty in the face of losing the woman he loves, the security of the relationship, the difficulty of admitting his guilt, etc. The cost is so high that the decision is a tough one. If he goes with honesty anyway, it shows that even in the face of great adversity, he is committed to this moral principle.
If the cost was not significant, it wouldn't have the same meaning in terms of commitment. If for instance you actually benefited clearly and significantly by acting on your moral principles, it wouldn't prove your commitment. Say you find yourself in a situation at work where your boss asks who came up with some brilliant idea, and in fact it was you that came up with it. Honesty in that situation would be easy. It wouldn't prove you were committed to honesty. Even an unprincipled person would take the credit in that situation.
In one approach to this event-based system, a person's moral commitment is judged by a single event. The cost for that kind of event would have to be huge, to measure the person's commitment to their moral principles or values. The more difficult the choice, the more commitment it shows. To take a single event as the means of measuring a person's virtue, it would have to be one with staggering costs or risks. This would be like jumping on a grenade to save your friends, or rushing into a burning building to save a child.
That isn't the only approach to this event-based system, though. You could measure a person's virtue by taking a number of these costly choices into account. Each time you incur the cost, it adds to your total measured commitment. A person could have many opportunities to show their moral virtue. It may not add up to the staggering cost examples, but there's more opportunities for lesser cost examples.
Notice that to be able to judge yourself as moral by the event-based system, you need to periodically be in situations where the cost of acting morally is significant. But one of the goals of morality should be to avoid such situations. You don't want to be in tough situations where the costs are large and the benefits are vague. If you act well before you get there, you'll avoid the situations and won't be stuck making such difficult decisions.
In fact, if you live life well, you'll find yourself in easy situations where the benefit is obvious and the cost is small. Imagine you get into a situation where you're offered a dream job, with a much higher salary, for a company you really respect. In the event-based system, this choice would not be at all indicative of being moral. It's too easy. Even an unprincipled fool would accept the offer. But putting yourself into that kind of situation is exactly what morality should be seeking.
The bigger issue is that the event-based morality actually prefers the difficult and costly choices. It has little to say about easy and life-affirming choices. Those are inconsequential in terms of moral virtue. What kind of morality seeks costly situations over easy situations?
A better system uses a consistency-based morality. You don't try to judge the moral worth of a person by these individual, difficult choices. If you follow a proper morality, you should always be working to avoid these choices. The difficult choices you'll have will generally be because the value of both choices is so high, it's difficult to pick your favorite.
If you don't have these difficult, costly choices, how do you judge someone as committed to their principles or values? You do it by seeing how consistently they pursue them. Do they consistently practice the virtues? Do they continuously pursue values and enhance their lives? Do they always look ahead at the consequences of their choices and avoid bad situations before they happen? And if they're constantly finding themselves in easy situations where the benefits are obvious, isn't that an indicator that they're doing something right?
It should be obvious that these two different views of morality are not equal in terms of rational self-interest. The event-based morality, always looking for costly situations, is judging morality primarily by those costs. The cost of the situation determines the moral commitment. But we already know of a system that judges moral commitment by cost: altruism. It doesn't change it much if you still claim that there is a miniscule net advantage to the act. Once the focus is on costs, instead of values, it emphasizes a life full of difficulty.
The consistency-based morality breaks away from this idea that moral commitment needs to be tested by difficult choices. The goal of morality is not to be a "good person", as if the morality was an end in itself. The goal is to live a successful life. Commitment to morality is really a commitment to living life well. The consistency-based morality emphasizes this by recognizing that a real commitment to a morality of self-interest will manifest as a consistent use of the virtues, and a dedication to life-enhancing values.
Discuss this Article (8 messages)
|
