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Prompt: Ethics #4

There are two main ways of approaching moral issues, or “right and wrong” actions,

other than through Aristotelian virtue ethics. These two theories are Utilitarian and Kantian

ethics. The two approaches differ greatly, for Utilitarian ethics is a consequentialist theory

primarily, while Kantian ethics centers on moral duty. Utilitarianism states than an action the a

right action to take in a certain circumstance if it produces the highest net happiness or pleasure

of all the actions available to you. Utilitarian ethics are the brainchild of John Stuart Mill. He

believed that in order to act morally, you must act to produce the greatest amount of happiness

for the greatest number of people possible.

While utilitarianism might sound like a selfish moral theory due to its focus on happiness,

it is not. What matters to Mill and utilitarians is the total sum of utility, meaning that no one

person’s pleasures or pains are of greater importance than another person's pleasures or pains.

This misunderstanding is why some critics used have called it a doctrine of “swine”. They

focused on the pleasure aspect as a major negative to the moral theory. There are many moments

though, according to this theory, in which your own happiness will not be a enough to warrant a

certain action, and you will have to act against it in order to produce more happiness for others.

For example, say on the street you find and pick up a $50 bill. There is no way to return it to the

owner, as it is a street in the middle of New York City with no one around. You can keep the 50

dollars for yourself and achieve a certain level of happiness. Or, you can go and buy 10 meals

from McDonalds and give them to all the homeless people on the streets of NYC. Feeding the

homeless people will increase total sum of utility, as 10 peoples’ day will be bettered. Thus,

utilitarianism is an unselfish theory, even if it is focused on pleasure.

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To better understand utilitarian ethics, I can break it down into three further categories,

hedonism, maximizing consequentialism, and consequentialism. The hedonism version of

utilitarian ethics states that pleasure is the only kind of good and pain is the only kind of evil. In

contrast, maximizing consequentialism states that an action is the right action in some

circumstance if it brings about the highest net good, including goods beyond mere pleasure. The

goods which consequentialists seek to maximize along with pleasure include the satisfaction of

the desires of people, beauty, friendship, love, and any other objectively valuable states of affairs

in the world.

The last version of utilitarianism, consequentialism, argues that an action is the right

thing to do in a particular circumstance if it brings about the best outcome. For example, some

might say that lying is inherently an immoral thing to do. Imagine a situation where the only way

to save someone’s life was to lie. According to consequentialism, lying would be okay in certain

circumstances if it brought about the best outcome. The best outcome in this case is to save the

person’s life, so lying would be okay. For my purposes today, I will focus on only one type of

utilitarian ethics: consequentialism. With this understanding of utilitarian ethics as a

consequentialist doctrine primarily, I will now compare it to Kantian ethics as I understand them.

Kantian ethics proclaim that an action is the right action to perform in certain

circumstances if it is what duty requires be done. In contrast with consequentialism ethics,

merely doing the right action is not enough for the action to have moral worth. An action only

has moral worth if it is the result of a person with good will acting from moral duty. Good will is

a will that chooses an action solely because it is the action we have a moral duty to perform.

According to Kant, good will is the only thing that has value in and of itself. This is

demonstrated by the fact that a moral person a person would never give up their moral goodness
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for some other thing. In order to act from moral duty, you must be motivated to take that action

solely out of respect for the moral law. In other words, your motivation to act cannot stem from

your personal wishes and desires, even if they might coincide with a morally altruistic decision.

The following is Kant’s explanation of our moral duty. As humans, our moral duty is to

act only according to maxims that we could will to be a universal law. That is Kant’s categorical

imperative. Why must we only act on those particular maxims? If a maxim were a universal law,

it would be a rule that everyone obeyed. Thus, universal laws in this sense are like laws of nature

that rational moral agents obey. In certain situations, this formula is not easy for a person follow,

so Kant also simply instructs that one must treat others as ends and never as means. This is his

second version of the categorical imperative, and helps once again to figure out what moral duty

requires in a certain situation.

After evaluating the two theories and their differences, I believe the stronger theory is

utilitarianism in the form of consequentialism. This is because I find many issues in Kant’s

theory when applied to daily life. According to Kant, no moral action that coincides with a

personal wish can be called a moral action. The famous example of this is the honest grocer and

the sad philanthropist. The honest grocer acts morally not out of Kant’s version of “moral duty”,

but rather because that is the only way to keep his business going and keep customers returning.

The sad philanthropist donates money against his will and passions merely due to his moral duty

to do so. I understand both of these actions to be morally good. Maybe the sad philanthropists

action is morally powerful to the common eye, but ultimately the outcome of both actions are the

same. Moral good is put into the world and a positive outcome is the result of a moral action.

Another reason why utilitarianism is the stronger theory is simply due to its formulation.

Kantian ethics are hard to describe, let alone act on in daily life. Moral duty is difficult to
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understand as a concept itself. Therefore, it is hard to understand what each person’s moral duty

is in order to act on it. Simply searching for the best outcome from one’s actions will have the

same result as acting out of supposed moral duty, and will take much less thought and

contemplation. In order for the most people to act morally in the world, a moral doctrine must be

simple and easily applied to the masses. Lastly, it is clear that sometimes it is okay to treat

someone as a means to achieve a moral good. A person might, for example, seek the advice of a

priest in order to learn how best to handle a sticky moral situation. In layman’s terms, this person

was “using” the priest. Speaking with the priest was not an end. Yet, very few people would

argue that this was an immoral action. Getting advice from the priest could also not be willed as

an universal maxim. People have different religions, and it is not necessary to speak to a

religious clergy member in order to handle every sticky moral situation. In conclusion, due to

Kantian ethics’ apparent flaws and consequentialism’s strength, I prefer the consequentialist

approach to morally right and wrong actions.

Now I will consider the ethical theory of moral saints. According to Susan Wolf, the

common-sense definition of a moral saint is ‘a person whose every action is as morally good as

possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be… [their life is] dominated by a

commitment to improving the welfare of others or society as a whole.’ The moral saint is a

person whose every action is motivated by achieving moral perfection. There are two types of

moral saints: loving saints and moral saints. According to Wolf, a loving saint and a rational

saint are similar in the fact that they both strive for absolute moral perfection. Their difference

lies in their motivations and/or intent behind that moral perfection. The loving saint is a person

who genuinely finds “the promotion of the welfare of others” their source of happiness, and thus

he/she “devote[s] himself to others gladly” (Wolf 420). In other words, the loving saint finds
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enjoyment from striving for a completely perfect morality, and every successful moral choice is

key to the moral saint’s happiness. Service to others is the ultimate form of happiness for this

form of moral saint.

A rational saint is very different. Rather than having their source of happiness guide their

moral choices, a rational saint “pays little or no attention to his own happiness in light of the

overriding importance he gives to the wider concerns of morality” (Wolf 420). Wolf’s rational

saint is interpreted as having little motivation for achieving happiness, but rather motivation to

be moral out of a sense of inherent duty. The rational saint is sacrificing his own wishes to serve

the world and other people’s happiness. The rational saint has the same urge to, for example, sit

and watch netflix, but out of his deep belief in moral perfection, will never do so and instead

always spend any second of free time acting out of moral duty and volunteering at a soup

kitchen.

Wolf thinks we should not be either of these two types of moral saints and take time to

cultivate non-moral virtues mainly due to the fact that moral saints would be unattractive

persons. Due to their inability to have time for music, arts, sports, or anything that was not driven

by moral actions, these saints would have incredibly tedious lives. This would lead them to be

boring and difficult people to be around. Most importantly, moral saints would not be well-

rounded. Any sort of qualities, talents, or skills they could gain from non-moral actions would

not be gained due to their insistence on only moral virtues as important to a life well-lived. In the

process, moral saints might lose out on achieving certain non-moral virtues that in the end might

have allowed them to achieve more moral goodness in the world. For example, while focusing

on the poor, a moral saint might have been unable to garner the ability to schmooze and interact

with the wealthy of the world. While not a moral virtue, the ability to “schmooze” would be
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important for a moral saint to receive more money to improve the lives of the poor. If they had

put aside some of their time striving for moral absolutes, and took some time to learn this non-

moral virtue instead, greater good could be put out into the world. There is no guarantee that this

scenario is true, as it is hard to quantify the maximum amount of moral goodness possible to be

achieved and put into the world. The mere possibility of non-moral virtues having positive

effects on future moral actions should encourage the belief that the life of a moral saint is not the

ideal life.

I will now examine the two types of moral saints in reference to each of the two ethical

theories I laid out earlier in this paper, utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Wolf believes

Utilitarians will not be be able to value non-moral virtues in their own right or for their own

sake. A good utilitarian ultimately values them for their contribution to maximizing goods or

pleasure. This echoes my personal understanding above of why non-moral virtues are important,

and why the life of a moral saint is imperfect due to the lack of non-moral virtues which can

increase moral good in the world. Wolf further believes Kant would not encourage us to be

loving saints. Kant believes that in order to act purely from a good will, one must act from duty,

not inclination to be morally good in order to be personally happy. A motive that is focused on

happiness means there is no moral credit for the action. As Kant puts it, it is better to be a sad

philanthropist than a happy grocer. In other words, it is better to dread a moral choice and still

make it due to one’s inherent duty than to be happy to make a moral choice and make it. The

loving saint’s need to strive for moral perfection, when based on his own happiness in serving

others, results in the fact that he is not acting from goodwill. Thus Kant would not think it is

possible to be a loving saint, for the loving saint would not be a true morally perfect agent. Kant

might support the idea of the rational moral saint, but once again, the person is not pursuing non-
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moral virtues for their own sake, but rather doing it out of duty, similar to Wolf’s analysis of

utilitarians.

Based on the insufficient nature of the life of a moral saint, and the two ethical theories’

failure to agree with idea of moral sainthood and a life of ultimate moral perfection, Wolf states

that morality must not be the only source of reason for acting. Wolf argues that “a person may be

perfectly wonderful without being perfectly moral.” She is pursuing the conclusion that there is a

“point of view of individual perfection”. This differentiates from the moral point of view. If

moral actions are the sole reason to act, pursuing goodness in one’s own life has limited value.

From the point of individual perfection, there are reasons beyond moral reasons to live a certain

way. It is unclear, according to Wolf, from this understanding, how often one must act morally

then. Based on her theory of moral saints, “as much as possible” cannot be the correct answer.

Therefore, this reinforces the idea that non-moral actions are necessarily allowed in life.

Wolf’s argument against the view that morality is the only source of reasons for acting is

persuasive to me. Her discussion of certain idealized characters whose personal excellence relies

on character traits that are not moral in their nature is very convincing. Non-moral reasons for

acting are intertwined with our daily lives and the characters to whom we look up to. A clear

objection which is raised in her paper is the problem of knocking down a hierarchical system of

values with morality of the top. What can be placed there instead of morality? This further leaves

the question of when and how a person decides to be moral. Wolf comes the conclusion that the

only possible answer is to act normatively in various situations, and possibly deviate from our

established ethical systems.

I believe that there are are non-moral reasons for acting. Expanding upon Wolf’s own

ideas of the moral point of view and individual perfection, and reflecting upon the previously
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discussed ethical theories of Kantian ethics and utilitarianism, I keep coming back to the famous

“Trolley” problem. Each ethical theory has its own proposed solution to the Trolley Problem.

Each would argue that their own is a moral choice. But if you act from the point of view of

individual perfection, even if you act from the morally incorrect side, there will be a non-moral

action made that has worth. Further, I believe a life well-lived full of both moral and non-moral

virtues is valuable in of itself. Our lives should not be of lesser value because there are other

people in the world. Therefore, it is up to us to act as best we can when approached with the

trolley problems of life.

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Claire Marie Kuhn