The moral intellectual's dilemma

If I have one general dissatisfaction with myself, it's that I don't seem like that effective of a person. I mean, I certainly get stuff done, and have made something of a life and all, but conventional success has been elusive.

Naturally, from time to time I've pondered why this might be. And the simplified answer seems to be that it's because of an unfortunate collision between my sense of ethics and my general intellectual orientation towards things.

Permit me to explain.

I'm an atheist, but consider myself highly ethical. That is, deeply concerned with being ethical, with doing the right thing at all times. I consider it pretty much the highest obligation a person has.

And what do I consider being ethical? Let's start with the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's pretty hard to beat. When I was in college, though, I ran into what I thought was a slightly superior formulation, Kant's Categorical Imperative. According to Wikipedia, this says one should "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will it that it should become a universal law." In other words, you should as as you would want every person in similar circumstances to act.


What this seems to do for me is turn ethics into a practical exercise of reason. You are presented with a practical question, what is the best action in this circumstances, the one that in the best of all worlds everyone would take?

This seems to me an eminently reasonable and highly enlightened approach to ethics. It also might make choosing one's actions a little problematic.

If one were to honestly apply the Categorical Imperative to one's actions, then one would be forced for each action to evaluate the possible consequences of that action, and determine which are the preferred consequences. Now this is where the intellectual gets hung up.

Because to honestly evaluate the likely consequences of all possible actions, sheesh, that's a friggin' tall order.

Recycling is an excellent example of this. I think most people by now realize we need to start doing right by our planet. Six billion people, we can clearly cause some damage. So you want to recycle. Now, you get an item that's mostly paper, but has some plastic mixed in. How should you act? Should you throw it in with the recycling, hoping that someone on the other end will somehow separate the paper from the plastic, or do you spend three minutes trying to peel the plastic off of the paper? What about staples? Will they just reject your cardboard and throw it out if it has staples, or will they remove them? Or maybe when they process the recycled paper the staples kind of sink to the bottom or something. Who the hell knows? This isn't the best example, but the point is that when posed with a simple question, what should I do with this box that has so much plastic attached, you're forced to consider a bunch of empirical questions, the answers to which you might no have at your fingertips.

Ergo, the person who's trying to be ethical can get really bogged down in details, and may be slow to act, or maybe won't act at all. And the more of a reasoning, careful intellectual that person (i.e. me) might be, the more likely this inaction.

But then, perhaps this isn't just an issue of morality, perhaps it's just in general a problem of the intellectual. For you could say the same thing vis-a-vis self interest as about ethics. Given a range of possible actions, it can be hard,or impossible, to thoroughly evaluate those actions for their possible consequences not for the world at large, but just for yourself.

This is why, I suppose, successful people, people of action, are often thought of as making decisions more instinctually, more gut-level, than rationally. Rationality bogs things down sometimes.

It's tough being a child of the Enlightenment!