Given the choice between rescuing a drowning relative or a total stranger in a situation of disaster, which do we go for? Does a thirty-year-old mother of four have more claim on me than my own ageing parent or unmarried sibling? It seems at first sight that a truly disinterested, truly generous love would make no fundamental differentiation between those who happen to be close to us and anyone else, so any decision about which one to give priority to would have to be made on grounds that had nothing to do with accidents of connection or instinct.
.. MacFarquhar frequently discusses the ideas of Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist whose passionate insistence on a fully rational morality based on detailed calculations of the effectiveness of specific acts and policies has had a huge influence on popular movements such as the Oxford-based Giving What We Can network. Many of the people we meet in the book have been deeply marked by Singer and his followers, who offer a lucid and practical programme for maximising the effectiveness of charitable generosity through painstaking research and unsentimental assessment of results
.. Singer and others are clear that the most effective way you might help in – say – relieving global poverty or disease may not be to work as a grassroots development economist or a medical volunteer in South Sudan, but to take a highly paid job in your own country and donate a correspondingly large sum.
.. But what if ‘goodness’ also had something to do with a quality of relation with those who receive help, not just with the long-distance solving of their problems for them? What if morality had more to do with habit and character, with the grace of receiving as well as of giving, rather than being just the sum total of right actions?
“Bravery” is not a Virtue without a Worthwhile Goal
French president François Hollande called the attacks cowardly, but if there was one thing the attackers were not (alas, if only they had been), it was cowardly. They were evil, their ideas were deeply stupid, and they were brutal: but a man who knows that he is going to die in committing an act, no matter how atrocious, is not a coward. With the accuracy of a drone, the president homed in on the one vice that the attackers did not manifest. This establishes that bravery is not by itself a virtue, that in order for it to be a virtue it has to be exercised in pursuit of a worthwhile goal.
The transformation of David Brooks
There are many explicitly Christian descriptions of sin: fallenness, brokenness, depravity. Keller suggested Brooks try a more neutral phrasing: “disordered love.” When we blab a secret at a party, for example, we misplace love of popularity over love of friendship.
.. Brooks thinks a tradition of journalists fluent, or at least conversant, in moral concepts dissipated in recent decades. Theologians were walled off within their denominations, and public discourse about values grew dysfunctional. A life of “meaning” by today’s standard, he wrote in his Times column to begin 2015, “is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life.”
.. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.”
.. She remembers a unifying creed on campus: “The more you know about the past, the better equipped you were to defend civilized life from barbaric perversion.
.. the 18th-century Irish philosopher, spoke of dispositional conservatism, which Brooks defines this way: “It’s a reverence for the past, a belief in incremental change, a distrust of abstract, permanent truths, at least about political matters.”
.. A 2003 column endorsing gay marriage has one of the most jarring ledes he’s ever written: “Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide.” He concluded, “The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments.”
The Big Decisions
I’d say to really make these decisions well you need to step outside the modern conception of ourselves as cognitive creatures who are most sophisticated when we rely on rationality.I’d say to really make these decisions well you need to step outside the modern conception of ourselves as cognitive creatures who are most sophisticated when we rely on rationality.
The most reliable decision-making guides are more “primitive.” We’re historical creatures. We have inherited certain life scripts from evolution and culture, and there’s often a lot of wisdom in following those life scripts. We’re social creatures. Often we undertake big transformational challenges not because it fulfills our desires, but because it is good for our kind.
.. When we’re shopping for something, we act as autonomous creatures who are looking for the product that will produce the most pleasure or utility. But choosing to have a child or selecting a spouse, faith or life course is not like that. It’s probably safer to ask “What do I admire?” than “What do I want?”