Towards an Integrated Moral Standard
by Joseph Rowlands
The critical function of ethics is to provide a means of choosing between various choices. Morality is essentially a method of decision making. Morality is inescapable. Everyone must have some means of making choices. But not everyone identifies their method explicitly. They may end up with a hodgepodge of different methods, ruled by whim, tradition, passions, long-term goals, or even social pressure. The goal of ethics is to provide some means of evaluating the various choices, and picking the one with the highest value.
If you want to make an objective comparison between two things, you need a standard to judge them by. If you say your car is better than your neighbor's, you need to be clear in what way it is better. Maybe it has better gas mileage. Maybe it is less likely to break down. Maybe it just goes faster. Each of these comparisons are based on some criteria, and the two cars can be judged according to it. That may be fuel efficiency, reliability, or speed.
So Objectivism holds that morality requires some standard. The standard is used to evaluate the various choices we have. When we determine which of them is the most valuable, according to that standard, then we know which value we should choose. That makes this standard supremely important. Whatever is judged best by this standard is the decision made by this ethical system.
Objectivism holds life as that standard. In this way, you can evaluate which of your options is most conducive to a well lived life. But what does it mean to use life as a standard of value? How do you evaluate whether one option is more conducive to life versus another? To effectively use morality, we need a very clear image of what life as a standard means. How can we approach the problem of clarifying this standard? Here I'll try to outline the approach I've taken.
To start, we could interpret life as the standard to mean choosing which action would put us more firmly away from death. So obvious choices like eating poison versus eating food are easily compared. But we also can see more subtle choices. We can decide whether our money is better spent on a new computer, or a new set of clothes. We can decide that since we have to produce our own wealth, that getting a good education will provide us with a better ability to survive. In each case, we can see whether the end result is better, in terms of survival, then the other choices. We can identify objective human needs, weigh them based on their relative importance, and choose values that will best achieve them.
There are some problems with this approach. The biggest one is that life is not simply a state of not being dead. I discussed this in much more detail in my "Meaning of Life" speech. Life is a process of self-generated, self-sustaining action. To account for the fact that life is a process, we have to interpret life as a standard in a slightly different way. Instead of looking for whether the final state of an action leaves us further from death, we have to take into account the process itself. Ultimately, we're trying to evaluate whether the action improves our process of self-generated, self-sustaining action. Does it enable us to choose more and better actions to sustain our lives? Does it allow us to more readily self-generate our actions, such as achieving intellectual or financial independence?
In this way, we haven't rejected the original criteria of measuring the results based on their relationship to our survival. But we've expanded it to more fully recognize that life isn't simply a matter of not dying. It's a process of living. In this way, we have a more fully integrated understanding of life as a standard of morality.
There are still some complications in applying this standard. The next one I attempted to tackle, with the speech titled "Time and Value" brought up the idea of how to choose between values at different times. For instance, how does a value in the present compare to one in the future? This has caused some confusion, as Objectivists will sometimes argue that morality is about improving the long term, presumably at the expense of short term enjoyment.
Again, the goal is a better integration. If you envision your short-term self as being different from your long term-self, and consequently you are either short-changing one or trying to "balance" between them, you don't have a clear enough standard. You'd be judging it based on two different standards (your life now, and your life in the future), and then you'd have no clear way to choose between these.
You need a standard that can integrate all of this. You need a conception of life that integrates your current life and your projected life. Life can't be just a simple state, or even a current process. You need to be able to see it as a progression and a continuity. Each of the parts is combined into a single whole.
Your conception of life needs to expand to include your entire projection of your life. It needs to form a connection between your present and future self. I suggested in a speech titled "The Story of Your Life" that this integrated view of life could be in the form of a story, like a biography. Instead of evaluating them each in isolation, you evaluate them as part of this larger whole.
Each step along the way, we look to gain a more thorough understanding of life as a moral standard. If we want a single standard to guide our evaluations and decision making process, it needs to be complete enough, and robust enough, to guide every choice. It must provide guidance to choose between means and ends. It needs to provide a means of choosing between values over time. It needs to work towards a better future, but not at the expense of sacrificing the present.
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