The Good Life v. the Moral Life

Let us return² to the tension between the good and the moral to contrast one area of divergence between the Humean and rationalist positions. One way to do this is to borrow Nagel’s five-part classification of various possible relationships between the moral and the good:³

(1) The moral life is defined in terms of the good life.

(2) The good life is defined in terms of the moral life.

(3) The good life over-rides the moral life.

(4) The moral life over-rides the good life.

(5) Neither the good life nor the moral life consistently over­rides the other.⁴

Nagel himself opts for the fourth alternative.⁵ He concedes that in some circumstances a moral life can be less good than a non­moral one (pace attempts like Plato’s to show that the opposite is the case in this world or approaches like Kant’s in which the moral man ultimately can be assumed to realise the highest long-term good by postulating a Godly creation of immortal, responsible souls) but that in those cases morality gives us reason to sacrifice our good anyway.⁶ And this choice of either (4) or (2) by the moral realist seems to me to be an overwhelmingly likely one. If moral claims really did have some objective, mind-independent foundation then to advocate (1) would also require one, inter alia,¹ to accept the existence of a range of objective, mind-independent goods and ways to happiness which are always right, which apply equally to all people, and which by supposition form the basis for evaluating the moral life. Few would accede to those implications. Meanwhile to advocate (3) or (5) would involve a partial or total yielding of what objectively should be done to what furthers the agent’s ability to live well — be that living well from a short-term, long-term or ideal observer perspective. Yet if what should be done is in its essentials somehow independent of the agent and his society — and more so, perhaps, if it is logically necessary — then it must also be compelling and prescriptive, and thus failure to comply, however beneficial and productive of happiness, is never commendable.

There is a variation on (2) which is not untypical amongst other moral realists and which may be thought worth mentioning. It is to respond that the moral life should always win out and be better but that the reason why it does not is due to faults in the social, political and economic structures of the society. Thus, in the actual world in which we live the good life is not the same as the moral life, at least for the majority of people. Nor does the Kantian solution have any basis in the practical world. However, continues this line of thought, if the good life is not matching up with the moral life then we must change the world so that moral necessitation and happiness do align.

This type of response, whatever merits it might have, is flawed in two ways. Firstly, it is every bit as much a deferral as Kant’s, merely substituting future possible worlds here on earth for Kant’s postulated hereafter. Indeed it is weaker than Kant’s solution in so far as it offers no explicit advice about what to do right now and in the meantime — the good or the moral — save subtly, implicitly and without argument to suggest one be moral, not happy, but set about changing the world. The unspoken suggestion, I suppose, is that the individual actor identify her interests with those of the species. Secondly, this type of response usually avoids confronting directly the very possibility of aligning the good life with the moral life. Certainly the historical and observable evidence seems to me to be massively against such a possibility, even more so when adopting a moral realist’s inflexible view of morality.

Rather than pursue any further ramifications of the moral realist stance, however, I want in the rest of this section to attempt to slot the Humean moral sceptic into one of the five alternatives.

A second matter to be clarified before considering into which, if any, of the five alternatives the Humean sceptic best fits is the equivocation involved in talk of an ‘impersonal morality’. Hume looks to why people approve and disapprove as they do precisely because he rejects the possibility of higher, true or mind-independent rights and wrongs. But the notion of an impersonal morality need not be linked to a metaphysical or ontological world-view. The notion can have other significations. As a system of constraints on action which has evolved in a society, and which generally does evoke attendant sentiments of approbation and disapprobation in the preponderance of that society’s people, a morality can be observed to exist as a matter of fact. Moreover, this observable moral system is, in terms of its content, virtually independent of any one individual. No one person had much, if any, of a hand in the creation of the standards and content of the particular governing moral system. Certainly in this latter sense, of the generally prevailing, public morality, Hume would accept the notion of an impersonal morality. Indeed he would applaud such an impersonal (or more accurately, inter-subjective) morality and see it as desirable for the good consequences it generates for society.

We can now return to the tension between the good life and the moral life to interpret that conflict from a moral sceptic’s perspective. The ‘moral life’ from this perspective is shorthand for actions which conform to the particular moral system’s inter- subjective rules and their attendant sentiments. The ‘good life’ is also a shorthand way of talking about certain actions, only in this case those that conform to sentiments about an individual’s best course of living. These are but bare, initial formulations but they are sufficient to rule out alternatives (1) and (2) which, by definition, require an exact correspondence between the two types of sentiments.

At this point the Humean can note that in a healthy society the socializing process is effective in aligning the good to the moral for most people, most of the time, and in pre-disposing them towards the latter when they conflict. A Mackiean would expand and explain that the process of objectifying projected sentiments is one notable cause in that alignment. As far as telling others how best to choose is concerned, however, the Humean can only give advice based on the consequences that generally tend to accompany choosing the moral or the good. Such advice would admittedly vary with and depend upon the particular individual (what his or her sentiments happen to be) and the particular society (what moral rules happen to have evolved). As goods and sentiments differ amongst people and as societies establish differing values the choice between (3), (4) and (5) must remain contingent. Any advice about these alternatives could never be more than hypothetical nor go beyond what experience suggests is generally prudential.¹⁵

It is also true, though, that some further clarification of the alternatives is possible which may help in more accurately offering those generalisations based on experience and then, as I do next section, in approaching the ‘free-rider’ problem.

One might conceivably even suggest the un-Humean view that well-being be envisaged from a fictional, disembodied perspective which observes the multitude of experiences and notes what actions generally lead to happiness and thus is distinct from the perspective of any one single person.¹⁷

But even with these qualifications the good life still remains independent of Hume’s conventional public morality. The moral life may frequently be a part of the good life but the two are distinct and, given his subjectivist theory, Hume cannot assign any absolute priority to either. Choosing between (3), (4) and (5) is contingent on the chooser and her society. Hume can only indicate his own preference¹⁸ and point to the usual results of a disregard of morality. The option to be amoral or immoral is not foreclosed by Hume’s moral theory.

b)