This is the third chapter of my book NOT SO STRAIGHT-AND-NARROW. This work --which contains some surprising twists and turns-- is an exploration of morality that addresses a core part of the moral divide around which American culture has polarized.

::::::::

The earlier installments of NOT SO STRAIGHT-AND NARROW can be found at

 click here is Part I of the introductory chapter, "Shaken to My Moral Foundations"

 click here is Part II of the introductory chapter, "Shaken to My Moral Foundations." 

click here is chapter 2, "Searching for Bedrock:  What Makes Something Good."

 Here now is chapter 3:

***********************************************

<em>Chapter 3
By Their Fruits:
How Can We Know What's Right to Do?

The appeal of moral structures.   </em>

    Something you should know about me.  As far as I can remember, I have never --and I think I would remember any exceptions-- broken a promise.  Honest.  I swear I am telling the truth about this, to the best of my knowledge.

    Keeping promises is very important to me.  I do make promises, and I make them very carefully.  If you are among that small group of people (I believe I'm actually the only one) who has read everything I've ever published, you know that my first marriage did not last forever.  But I never broke a marriage vow.  We wrote our own ceremony, and instead of "until death do us part," which we didn't believe in, we swore "as long as our love shall last."  When I promise things to my kids --like "tomorrow I'll play soccer with you"-- I throw in some boiler-plate like, "if the weather permits and no unforeseen circumstances intervene to make it impossible."  Given those caveats, my kids know they can count on me to do what I said I would.  

    My second and final wife, April, was elected Most Dependable by her high school class.  I really appreciate that quality, in my role of promisee as well as promisor.  It matters a lot that, if she says she'll be there, she'll be there, that if she says we've got a deal, we've got a deal.

    You already know [from the introductory chapter at <a href="click here that I can't say that I have never lied, but I haven't done it much.  As you've gathered, my moral thinking got more complex on me in my early adulthood, so although solemn promises have somehow escaped my moral revisionism, I no longer treat as a completely firm rule that I should invariably tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth in all my dealings with a world I consider somewhat corrupt.  But in my dealings with those people with whom honor and intimacy are at the core of the relationship, I do not lie.

    I have always aspired to be a "good man," and deeply enmeshed in my image of a good man has been, from the beginning, the concept of integrity.  Of the qualities of my father that I appreciated and admired, I can't think of any that stand higher than this:  that he was a man of integrity.  The kind of integrity revealed by a man like Thomas More --in Robert Bolt's play <em>A Man for All Seasons</em>-- also embodies that ideal for me.  So many people are willing to sell out whatever they believe in to advance their own interests --to get ahead, or to protect themselves from harm-- it is inspiring to contemplate a man who will place the ideals that are important to him above his own selfish concerns.   That's my idea of a hero, a man like Thomas More who had the courage to stand on principle, whose heart was guided by the passion to do the right thing, and who grasped  that all it takes to do it is moral commitment and courage.  Like the Gandhi of the movie, whose commitment to the principle of non-violence he held more dear than his life.

    These elements of morality I would call structural, for they represent our attraction to the notion of the moral life in terms of things fixed and unbending.  A principle or a rule provides a kind of moral North Star to guide one's course.  The concepts of "integrity" and "character" speak of an enduring form of the person that is unified and coherent and unchanging.  The keeping of promises anchors the connections among us, giving our social bonds something solid that one can depend upon.  "I give you my word" means that you can incorporate my pledge into the architecture of your life, because it will provide reliable support.  

    I still love this kind of structural morality but, in this chapter, I have not come to praise it but to challenge it.  "How can we know what is the right thing to do?" is the question we are now ready to tackle.  And while the answer I will provide will be articulated in terms sufficiently broad that it will leave a great many important issues unaddressed, there is one quite essential point that I hope will be established unambiguously.  And acknowledging that point will imply recognizing that --with its rules and forms and absolutes-- structural morality, whatever its value may be, has significant inadequacies as a moral guide.

<em>From the good to the moral.   </em>    

In terms of structure, the one component that remains indispensable is the foundation.  And the foundation is what I believe I laid in the previous chapter, "Searching for Bedrock."  What can we call, with no element of arbitrariness, "good"? we asked.  And the answer I proposed was that, ultimately, what is good is the good-feeling experience of sentient creatures.   After more than a quarter century of thinking about it, I can still see no sensible way of looking at the good other than with this as its foundation.  The proposition seems to me quite strong in two ways.  First, it seems to me that the goodness of positive and welcome felt-experience is self-evident and not arbitrary.  And second, that nothing can be good except that it is grounded ultimately in such experience.

    If that were to be accepted, it would seem that some clear inferences could be drawn about what morality requires of us.  Morality is about what we should do, i.e. the way of conducting ourselves that we judge would be best.  Thus morality is inseparable from goodness.  By "moral conduct," I would think that we mean that way of acting that serves goodness.  I don't see how we could mean anything else.  If we did, that would mean that we should act in some way that serves something other than goodness.  But what can be "good" about that?  What can be "better" than goodness?

    If goodness is ultimately grounded in sentient creatures having experiences that are felt by them to be good, then moral conduct must have as its defining goal the fostering of such good-feeling experience.    And the most moral conduct is that course that best fosters such experience.

    It follows from this broad perspective on the domain of the good that to be moral, a human being must look beyond the "good" of the self's own direct experience and move into caring about the "good" of a larger whole of which he or she is part.   That is to say, morality moves us beyond the selfish caring about the felt-quality of our own experience into a concern for the quality of experience that is not our own.  

    It is readily seen how morality --as a broadening of the realm of the creature's concern-- would be essential for the success of human social life, which, as we are inherently social creatures, means for human life itself.  "Value" at the level of positive-or-negative-feeling experience was built into sentient creatures generally, who-knows-how-far back in the evolutionary picture, as a means of directing choice toward what is life-serving.  The extension of caring beyond one's own direct experience doubtless begins among sentient creatures before the emergence of our species:  the sacrifices made by an animal for its offspring, or for its social group, are well-documented in ethnography.  But it seems clear that only with humankind does the moral issue become so major a component of life.  Two principle reasons for this centrality occur to me.  First, we are less constrained by pre-wired instinct, and thus in need of greater regulation from other forces to guide our actions into life-serving channels.  And second, the magnification of human powers has necessitated that our actions be brought into greater conformity with the needs of a wider whole.  Without the operation of powerful moral forces, arguably, human social life would be something between a nightmare and an impossibility.

    For us humans, the unbridled pursuit of self-interest by everyone would lead to disaster for all, and hence the success of the human project has been dependent upon our being able to comprehend, and being motivated to adhere to, a moral vision that makes us care about more than ourselves.

    The question why we would choose --or how we are led-- to be moral is an important one.  The human is probably by nature an "ethical animal" to some degree --to use the title of a book by D.H. Waddington-- but the intensity of the human struggle with morality suggests that to some extent the demands of morality do go against the grain.  That is why, though we are designed naturally to want a "good" quality of experience, to speak about what we ought to do is not just another way of speaking about what we want to do.  But whatever the roles are of our natural moral inclinations and of the forces of socialization, we do develop into creatures are more or less strongly motivated to be moral.   Part of the motivation may be from fear (of punishment), part of it may be from love (for those for whom we set aside some of our selfishness), and part from a desire to think well of ourselves (by conforming to our own ideals).  

    But whatever the mix of motivations, and however they come to reside in the human heart, this work will take as a given what is worthy of an inquiry of its own:  that most people do indeed wish to be moral, "good" people.  However interesting the question of how it is that people do move beyond purely selfish concerns, it is sufficient for our purposes here simply to note that in fact most of us do care about being moral, for whatever reason.  

    It is clear from various of our traditions that getting beyond selfishness is indeed central to morality (that is, that morality requires us to broaden the knowledge of "good" we have from a selfish perspective in order to give proper weight to the experience of others, understanding that they also inhabit an inner realm in which the good and the not-good are bedrock reality).  The Golden Rule of Christianity illustrates this essential component of morality:  "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."  And this rule, of course, is not just confined to the Christian tradition.  Asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one leg, Rabbi Hillel said essentially the same thing in its negative form, do not do to others what you would not wish done to yourself.  And in the Buddhist teachings of compassion, we find the same powerful bridge to take the moral agent outside the narrow confines of the self and imaginatively to enter the realm of others' felt-experience.  

    Thus the morality I am proposing  --which declares that the most moral course is that which best serves goodness;  that goodness resides in the quality of  felt-experience of sentient creatures, and that therefore the most moral course is that which best fosters good-feeling within the realm of all those creatures, capable of joy and of suffering, who are affected by what one chooses to do and not to do-- has resonance with the moral core of some of humankind's greatest religious traditions.  But that morality also has implications that place it in deep tension with those traditions.


<em>A morality of consequences.  </em>

    What does a moral person do?  The broad answer I just formulated above --act in such a way as to make the world as good a place as possible, which is the equivalent of making the felt-experience of sentient creatures as positive as possible-- says that our purpose in acting morally is to produce good consequences.  "Consequences" is the key word here.  We are --or rather, we should be-- interested in results.  

    Wait a minute, you might say.  You aren't really saying very much there, are you?  You want the consequences to be good.  OK?  But look how vague that is.  First, just what do you mean by "consequences?"   Second, how are you going to deal with the inevitable conflict among various possibilities you consider good?  And third, how are you going to know what the consequences of your action are going to be?

    All good questions.  It is such a pleasure to be challenged by so astute a reader.  Let me cave in on all of them, so as to leave my core assertion as unencumbered and unobjectionable as possible.  For that core assertion, which you suggest isn't saying much, is really rather powerful.

    First, as to the nature of the consequences to be considered, let me dispose of that problem by saying that all consequences that bear upon the felt-experience of all creatures affected, present or future will be included in the weighing.   That is, all consequences that have an impact on the totality of bedrock goodness.  In a subsequent chapter, when we discuss the highly freighted issue of ends justifying the means, the importance of this inclusiveness will be evident.  For the present, be assured that no pertinent consequences are left out.  The importance of such ideas as the "dangerous precedent" and the "slippery slope" will be given due recognition whenever we contemplate breaking some usually good moral rule for some ostensibly greater good.  Our morality of consequences, therefore, will weigh the possibility that our breaking the rule for good reason will increase the likelihood that in the future that rule will be violated --by ourselves or others-- for unjustifiable reasons.

    Second, as to how to weigh the competing goods, let me say I'm willing in the present discussion to stipulate that the priorities given will be whatever you think appropriate.  Or, to put it another way, I'm asking you to assume that in our calculations of outcomes the various elements will be given their proper weight.  Resolving the conflict among competing values is beyond my purview here not because I  think the question unimportant;   on the contrary, I think it deserves a whole book (or bookcase) on its own.   

    Trade-offs among competing legitimate values is a part of the human condition. When different societies, or different cultures contemplate each other, thoughtful people often believe they discern the vices and virtues of different systems to be inextricably connected.  Canadians enjoy a more orderly and more civil society than that of the United States, it is sometimes said, for the same reasons as the American society is more creative and dynamic.  We in the U.S. see Singapore as far too heavily regimented, but the Singaporeans, and many members of the Confucian societies of Asia, prefer their way of organizing a society because it results in more cohesion and less pervasive, free-lance violence than they see in America.   Among traditional Islamic societies, the way of the West appears decadent and morally chaotic, with insufficient regard for maintaining the institution of the family, but those societies, it seems to Westerners, preserve the family by denying women what the West sees as inalienable rights of liberty.  And so on.

    However valid those particular interpretations may be about the necessity for trade-offs, what is incontestable is that all our moral choices require us to weigh the values of different things all of which we regard as good but that may not be simultaneously achievable.  How much is good health worth compared with spiritual peace?  How much is the life of a chimpanzee worth compared with that of a human being?  What’s the worth of the liberty of a million people for three generations compared to the pain of the war wounds of the soldiers it took to achieve it?  Tough questions.  Big questions.  And what's worse, unavoidable questions for human beings.  Trade-offs are unavoidable:  lions aren't vegetarians, and even the plants the zebras eat may have felt-experience of some kind.  

    But, as important as the trade-off issue is,  I would like for us here to assume a wise balance in the weighing.  If you do that, you say, you're not asserting much.  I agree, but I am asserting something.  And it's something that, I gather, a lot of thinking people have disagreed with.  And it is that focal issue --the centrality of consequences-- I want to join here.

    Now, third, as to the question of our inability to know with any certainty just what the consequences of our actions will be, let me weasel my way out of that one.  This problem of uncertainty will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 6.  But for now, I ask your indulgence in a thought experiment that will magically wish that problem away-- again to focus the issue solely on my proposition that, fundamentally, consequences (broadly construed) are all that can matter.

    So here's the thought experiment.  Our quest in this book is to know in each of life's situations just what the morally right thing to do would be.  Imagine that you have an angel perched on your shoulder at every twist and turn of your life, whispering in your ear what a wise and sound morality would have you do.  This angel has some marvelous abilities, but also --for a representative of the Lord-- a regrettable limitation.  The limitation is that this angel can do nothing.  She can't part the Red Sea for you.  She can't stop a speeding bullet.  She can't even butter your toast.  

    But as powerless as she is, her ability to envision the consequences of events is limitless.  Whatever you might consider doing, this angel can see how it would ramify out into the world like ripples in a pool, beyond the scene of your action all across the planet, and from the present all the way to the nth generation.  While we’re at it, let’s throw in the notion that this angel has perfect moral judgment that allows her to solve that second problem, too—the weighing of competing goods, when any get of alternative actions entail costs and benefits that have to be assessed and compared.  (And are there any choices in our lives that do not require such weighing and comparing?)  She’ll know precisely which corporal in the German army will, if he survives World War I, become the Fuehrer of the Third Reich.  She’ll know what Senator, if he is elected, will torpedo a vote on a good treaty.  And she’ll be able to tell you whether your refusing to read another gentleman’s mail will affect the outcome of the Cold War.  

With such an angel perched on your shoulder, you are fully equipped to practice the morality of consequences that I am advocating.  

Or perhaps some other morality.  For wherever you go, this angel is there telling you what is the morally right course of action for you to take.  One way of posing the overarching question of this book is to ask:  what would such an angel tell you that you should do, and on what basis would she come to that judgment?   

OK?  Are you willing to proceed with such a thought experiment.  I certainly hope that you are not one of those people who refuse to discuss hypotheticals.  I've never understood why some people are reluctant to play along on such experiments.  How else can you clarify what your position is on some of these issues?   Have you ever tried to imagine what the world would be like if all the people in it were unable or unwilling to conceive of hypotheticals?  

Anyway, what I am asserting is that the angel would practice a morality of consequences.

<em>Hitting the speed bumps.   </em>    

Our hypothetical angel serves the purpose of guaranteeing that we are capable of knowing that our conduct is maximizing goodness as I defined it.   Thus, anyone who disagrees with my assertion about the angel's counsel must disagree with either my definition of goodness or my proposition that the purpose of morality is to maximize the good.  Those who conceive of morality fundamentally in what I earlier called "structural" terms do seem to disagree.  It is time to slow down the forward movement of my argument and consider some alternative ideas apparently held by thoughtful people of goodwill.  

    Such conversations, I understand, have been going on for centuries.  It is not my intention in this book, nor is it within my qualifications, to enter into a technical discussion involving the details of the arguments of various moral philosophers.  Indeed, though I address some of those philosophic positions, I cannot warrant with certainty that I have characterized those positions with complete accuracy.  After a stint of reading or of intense discussion, I'll sometimes find myself figuratively scratching my head and thinking, "Either I don't understand what you're saying, or I don't understand how you can believe that!"  And I genuinely cannot feel sure which it is.  On the one hand, it doesn't seem to me likely that the other fellow is so much smarter than I that his argument, if it made sense, should be over my head.  On the other hand, it doesn't seem likely that I am so much smarter than the other guy that I should be able to come up with sound and reasonable answers that would escape his grasp.  Especially if it is a direct exchange --written or spoken-- I'm puzzled about why my presumably clear and persuasive arguments have not won over my interlocutor.   And especially when the ideas that seem to me untenable come from some prestigious source --like the moral philosophy of  Kant, or an encyclical of Pope John Paul II-- I wonder whether I'm irredeemably dense or prejudiced, or whether the Emperor really has no clothes!

    Sometimes I am amused at my own relationship with my Reason.  About 99% of the time, I act as if I have deep-seated faith in its power to yield valid conclusions.  But then there are other times when I see how limited it is.  There is a certain category of issues --the mind-bogglers-- before which my rational capacities seem simply to break down.

    One of these mind-bogglers that had unsettled me since I was a young kid has to do with beginnings and endings.  Take time.  (Yeah, good luck, take all the time you want with this puzzle.)  My reason tells me that either time had a beginning or it didn't.  If it did begin at some point, my mind is boggled by the question, "And what was there before that?"  If it didn't, I am completely mystified by the questions, "How can there be no beginning?  How can an infinite amount of time already have passed?"  There are lots of questions to which I don't know the answers, but questions like this are much worse:  I can't even imagine an answer that would make sense to my reason.  As with time's beginning, so also with space:  "What is there beyond the universe?"  Existence itself turns out to be a mind-boggler.  A philosopher friend of mine used to joke by throwing into various conversations the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?"  I’d laugh.  Years later, I realize I cannot grasp how there could be either something or nothing at all.  Yet obviously there is something.  Somehow the universe has found solutions to all these obviously insoluble problems.

    So confronted with my Reason telling me that what is demonstrably is true is also impossible, I sensibly turn away from such ponderings and try to pretend that such boggling of my mind never happens.  Eventually I manage to return to my customary sense of the adequacy of my reason.  Which seems to serve well enough on less mind-boggling matters than the origins of time and existence.  And it seems to me that these moral issues are, if somewhat wild, at least a great deal tamer than those "Where did the universe come from?" kinds of questions.  The sensible conclusions of my rational process thus seem persuasive to me.  And I don't see how sensible people can think otherwise.  And despite my humbling encounters with questions way over my head, I continue to act as if I should take my reasoning seriously.

    A philosopher friend of mine --who has encouraged me to write this book, and to do so and with my mind not "dulled" by the mastery of the philosophical literature –the fresher my moral vision was, he imagined, the more likely that I might contribute something original-- gave me a quick review of some of the main ideas in the field of moral philosophy.  A variety of these thinkers, he told me, have assumed that reason could produce incontrovertible moral truth, and proceeded to articulate that truth.  Unfortunately, he continued, they all came to different conclusions.

    With all those cautions in mind, let me to proceed to explore what I believe are put forward as serious moral positions that regard the moral project in very different terms from my morality-as-consequences.  Whether or not I do justice to those other positions, this exercise should at least help to clarify where my own quest for moral understanding has brought me.  And it is this, rather than an account of previous philosophical thought, that is the purpose of this investigation.

<em>But what's so good about it?   </em>

    Though rules are fine, I argue that any rule with specificity --like all those rules of our usual structural moralities-- are inadequate and must be trumped by that unspecific, results-oriented rule I say the angel would operate by:  namely, "Do your best to act in a way that will result in fostering the greatest possible good-feeling experience for sentient creatures."

    Let's take promise-keeping.  It's a good place to start because I myself am obviously attached to the maxim, "Always keep your promises."  Clearly, in most situations, keeping promises is not only compatible with my Angel Rule but actively supports it.  As my children have grown up, I've been very conscious of serving them with my promise-keeping.  Particularly for my older two children, who were the fruits of a marriage that broke apart when they were still very young, I quite deliberately made of my promises a solid underpinning for their lives, feeling deeply as I did their pain at having a most important solidity taken away from them.  When I was supposed to pick them up after school, I would move heaven and earth to make sure that when they came out, there was Daddy.  Not only did my keeping those commitments contribute to the good-feeling of my kids, but obviously just thinking about my serving them in this way still gives me good-feeling even now.  

    But it does not take a great deal of imagination to conceive of situations in which breaking a promise would be the morally right thing to do.  I hate to think of my little kids wondering "Where's Daddy?" but if something even more important required me to break my promise --maybe saving a life, or taking care of some other emergency that won't wait  -- I would regard my choosing instead to keep my promise as immoral.  What would justify it?  The distress of the kids is a factor, but greater suffering by far might weigh on the other side.  And it hardly would be worthy to let someone drown in the river, say, so that I could keep saying, "I've never broken a promise."  No way the means can justify the ends there.
    
That situation, you might say, isn't really promise-breaking because it is not really bad faith.  All promises, it might be argued, have some unstated boiler-plate attached that says something like "Unless some unforeseen circumstances make it really necessary to break it."  If that qualification were always implied, what would be left of the rule about the morality of promise-keeping?  Breaking promises to achieve a greater good sounds like following my non-structural maxim.  Perhaps it is the unforeseen nature of the greater good.  Maybe the maxim would be, "Never make a promise you don't intend to keep."  Would that hold?

    Not with me.  Imagine this situation.  I find myself in a concentration camp in Bosnia.  The Serb guards think I'm on their side.  They've rounded up a group of women, and are planning to begin their systematic rape.  But first they want to have dinner.  Will I make sure that the women don't go anywhere?  Sure, I say, go, enjoy your dinner.  I'll guard them.  Do I promise, they ask, that I'll stand my post for them, and make sure all ten of these women are still ready for their cruel fun-and-games when they return from dinner?  Yes, I say with resonant sincerity in my voice, already thinking about how I'm going to get them out of the camp as soon as they are out of sight.  I promise.

    Do you think the angel on my shoulder would object?  I don't.  The angel might say that she regrets that those Serbs will have this experience of someone acting in bad faith with them.  But better they have that experience than that the Bosnian women have the experience the Serbs had planned for them.

    As with promise-keeping, so also with any other moral maxim I can imagine.  "Thou shalt not kill" is a pretty good maxim.  But if a Nazi was about to burn down a barn into which he had locked two hundred innocent people, and I had a weapon with which I could kill the Nazi and prevent his terrible crime, would it be moral for me to refrain from pulling that trigger?  Not in my book.  I'd regard that as unjustifiable non-homicide.

    Another friend and I are emailing an exchange about another rule.  He is a philosopher (not the one who advised me not to dull my mind on too much of the philosophical literature), and a proponent of Kant.  According to my friend and, I'm given to understand, to Kant, "It is always morally wrong to tell a lie."  Of course I raise a choice-for-good-while-dealing-with-evil situation, and I'm told it's a commonly adduced dilemma:  if a Nazi asks me if I know where the Jews are hiding, and I do know, would it be morally wrong to lie?  I say I'd lie without any hesitation or moral qualms whatever.  He says it's still wrong.  No amount of concern with consequences, he says, can make something right that is inherently wrong.  I should not lie to the Nazi.

    We're evidently talking in different moral universes, and I don't understand his.  Just what's so good about it, I'm trying to find out, that it can outweigh such immense value as all these rich and worthwhile human lives that might be snuffed out by evil?  

    (At one point, it sounds as though he'll concede that maybe I should lie, but it is still morally wrong.  To me that sounds like a contradiction:  how can it be morally wrong to do what I should do?  how can it be morally right to do what I shouldn't do?)

    Sometimes it sounds as though, in the view of my Kantian friend, there is something inscribed on our nature as human beings, and the knowledge that it is morally wrong to lie is one of them.  To me, that sounds indecisive even if it were true.  I have Christian friends who believe that we have an inborn nature that is morally sinful --that "Look out for # 1" or some such immoral maxim-- is what is inscribed on our nature; but they do not conclude that the most important thing is to live according to what has been inscribed in our nature.  Thus it is not persuasive to me that, even if we come with the moral maxim "Thou shalt not lie" pre-programmed into our software, that means that deference to our inborn moral sense is necessarily the moral course for us.  Whatever inborn moral telos (Greek for purpose) we may have, it would seem to me that, like the other "authorities" considered in Chapter 2 (God, law, tradition), it needs to be evaluated according to a moral understanding derived otherwise before it can be certified as an adequate guide.

    Sometimes it seems that those who uphold moral rules as absolutes are making the fulfillment of the rules a kind of bedrock on their own.   "It is good because it's important to be a moral person and a moral person is one who follows the rules."  I'm on the radio discussing what's right and wrong, and my caller is talking about the rule "Thou shalt not commit adultery" as one to which there can be no exceptions.  I inquire, "What if, God forbid, your husband has Alzheimer's disease.  He's no longer aware of you as a wife, has no concept of your being faithful or unfaithful, is no longer really a husband to you.  But by the nature of this terrible disease, he may yet live for a long time, and you are still a young woman with a woman's needs.  Would you still feel bound by that rule?"  Yes, she would.  It would be a terrible situation, but it's still wrong.  "But what good is served by the rule?", I wonder.  That is not the way she is thinking:  the rule has become its own bedrock.  The fact is that, given her belief, she probably would suffer from such bad conscience if she did otherwise than follow the rule that it would not be worth it to act more freely.  But that does not validate the moral wisdom of taking that rule as an invariant guide.  A person crippled by inappropriate moral inhibitions might well be wise to obey them, in order to avoid the pain of real (albeit uncalled-for guilt), but would be wiser still to work to become free of them.

    In the case of the faithful wife, to follow blindly the invariant rule imposes costs on her --costs that are not offset by any benefits to anyone else-- which I would regard as a kind of personal tragedy.  For that woman, I only hope that life never deals her that particular card that her morality gives her no way of discarding.   But, as one would expect with the workings of probability, such cards do get dealt, and one hears of such personal tragedies, when someone's rigid attachment to a structural way of thinking about morality condemns a person to a life of suffering unnecessarily.  

    But there are also situations where it is other people who suffer the consequences of a person's making a moral fetish of observing a rule.  What if I said to the Nazi, "I cannot tell a lie --it would be morally wrong for me to do so-- yes I do know where they are hiding," would I then be a "good" person?  To me that course of action would appear, rather, as a monstrous form of self-indulgence.  Morality, I suggested earlier, is supposed to act as a counterforce to what we may surmise is a tendency to give excessive weight to our own selfish concerns.  But a morality that bids us to observe certain rules whatever their cost, or that directs us to cultivate some image of "good character" without regard to consequences, is in danger of being not a morality but a dressed-up form of selfishness.

    I find very appealing the image of the hero as the man-of-good-character, the one who stands on principle.   But not all of that appeal is to the part of me that is really devoted to goodness.   That part of myself that is self-centered is also involved in that attachment I have to the ideal of "character."  And I think that kind of ambiguity is not peculiar to me.  While the "I can do no other" kind of guy is admirable, he is also vulnerable to a kind of moral recklessness.  Thomas More could not in conscience sign that document that King Henry VIII insisted he sign, and in the end he was decapitated for his integrity.  I don't know how that very famous struggle ramified through the England of his time, but I hope that More was at least concerned with what the effects would be.  If it were the case that he would be willing to withhold his signature even if that meant that all England would burn, I would find something morally terrible about such a man.  "What is so all-fire precious about your honor that a whole people should suffer so that your sense of honor remain unsullied?"  My own integrity has kept me from doing a lot of things, mostly to my credit in my own eyes.  But I can see in myself a capacity to refrain from getting my own hands dirty because of some inflated sense that I should be above such dealings, where a more truly moral person might make himself more truly the servant of goodness.

    When structural elements are treated as bedrock --when fixed rules or principles or virtues are regarded as being good in themselves-- what results is a morality floating on a void.  What's so good about it?  What is it that's being treated as a good in itself?  Promise-keeping, truth-telling, fidelity-to-spouse, law-obeying--- all of these contribute to the good-feeling of human beings in the great majority of circumstances.  But what about those instances where the fixed guides of structural morality diverge from the course that leads to the best outcome in terms of the overall quality of experience?   It is here that we come to grips with what seem to me the inescapable limitations of all structural morality.

    Imagine that one rejects a morality of consequences.  Such a rejection means that one will knowingly, and in the name of morality, choose a course whose consequences are worse than what one was in a position to achieve.  To justify this, one must have an answer to the question:  what is the good that can justify the net sacrifice of human (and other sentient) well-being?  I cannot envision a satisfactory answer.   If following some fixed rules of morality would, in a particular instance, inflict avoidable injury on creatures that experience suffering and joy, with no countervailing benefit that's also in the experiential realm, how can one have done right?   (Is that person moral who would allow "Thou shalt not steal" to prevent her rescuing a starving person from death?)   If obedience to any authority --however often otherwise it is a wise and benign authority-- would have the net result of worsening the experiential realm of the sentient community, can there be any sound justification?  (Does this "nation of laws" not celebrate the vandalism of the Boston Tea Party?)  Where the unwavering practice of specific virtues does not yield any improvements in the realm of  felt-experience, how can such conduct be virtuous?  (To cite a previous example, if we knew that Thomas More would protect his "integrity" no matter how bitter the consequences for his countrymen, should we think him a hero?)  I see no way.

    All these moral structures deserve to be honored.  But their true merit, I would suggest, must lie in their general tendency to lead to beneficial consequences.  We are therefore compelled to choose between two main moral alternatives:  that which treats moral structures as good in themselves, though they are not, and though at times they are opposed to the service of goodness;  and that which seeks to find in each instance the best way to serve goodness itself, where goodness is understood as necessarily residing in the realm of experience, which requires us to see morality as necessarily aimed toward consequences.  The absence of any fixed guide to achieving the best consequences means that a morality of consequences demands of us the exercise of an autonomous and inevitably improvisational moral judgment.  One who chooses to obey structural morality only most of the time, must therefore choose when not to obey it, and is therefore on my side of the dividing line.  It is the tension around this dividing line that will be at the core of our exploration throughout this work.


<em>Absolutely not.</em>


    From the standpoint of the morality of consequences that I am proposing, to treat the elements of any structural morality as "good in themselves" is a kind of moral fetishism.  By fetishism I mean treating the instrument as the purpose.  A lie may hurt someone, and for that reason be bad.  It may corrode the bonds of human trust that our security and fulfillment may depend upon, and be regrettable for that.  But a to call a lie bad-in-itself is to give a value to something that is, separate from its impact on feeling creatures, morally like an asteroid striking a lifeless planet in a lifeless universe.

    Many moralists have complained about the idea that desirable ends might justify the use of questionable means.  But I think it still more difficult to explain how the employment of desirable means can justify the achievement of questionable ends.

    Any declaration of a moral "absolute" strikes me as moral fetishism.  When the Pope declares something --abortion, for example-- to be an "absolute evil," what does he mean?  By absolute, I imagine that he means that no amount of countervailing moral considerations can ever outweigh it.  Even if the whole world were to be saved by performing an abortion, it would still not be justified.  To admit that it would be justified, would be to make the evil of the abortion less than absolute.  If abortion is an absolute evil, we are compelled to let the rest of the world go to hell rather than perform a single one.  But what can justify treating a finite thing as infinite, one moral component of a larger picture as so limitless that nothing can outweigh it?  I can't see the logic of it.

    It's time for me to give some hypothetical ground.  I promised that my notion f "consequences" would include all the ramifications of what we do.  Now if one posits an afterlife in which adherence to certain rules is rewarded for eternity, and violation of those rules is punished by equally eternal torment in hell, then the whole calculus of consequences to our actions is tilted practically toward the vertical, so that a great many decisions might well slide down into the grooves carved out by a structural morality.  Eternal damnation for a single soul will weigh heavily against such finite matters as a hundred people being burned in a barn or shipped off to Auschwitz.  That is not my own assessment of how in fact the consequences of our actions ramify, but I recognize that I could be wrong, and that someone who calculates on that basis will come to very different moral decisions than I.  

    But about that, I will make two points.  First, that this is still consistent with my overall point in this chapter about the necessity of our orienting our morality in terms of the consequences of our action.  And it is still a matter of understanding good consequences in terms of the felt-experience of sentient creatures.  And second, that if the universe is ruled by a Being that rewards and punishes for an eternity according to our observance of such structural rules, that doesn't prove that those rules are good.  Accommodating to rules, I would suggest, that might damn us for, say, lying to or killing a Nazi SS man to defend the innocent, I would place under the heading of "What's the best way of conducting ourselves in a universe ruled not by an all-good God, but rather someone more like Saddam Hussein?"

    But if we suppose, as I indeed do, that our concern should be with the goodness that is visible to us in this world, and that a good God would want the quality of his creatures' experience to be good, then the structural elements of a morality cannot reasonably be treated as absolutes.  Even the best of rules can only serve as general guides that are less than adequate simplifications of a profoundly complex human reality.

    Our best structural moral principles are wonderful achievements.  I will concede that they are usually good to follow.  My only point is that they are not always good to follow.  Thus they are not moral absolutes.  My quarrel is with those who claim that they are, who equate them with goodness itself.  I would not quarrel with a person who, conceding the occasional divergence between structural morality and the most moral course of action, takes the position:  "Since I can't tell which are the exceptions, I'll follow the rules, acting 'as if' they're moral absolutes, but knowing that sometimes I'll do the wrong thing."

    My Kantian friend quotes to me Kant's famous Categorical Imperative.  "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." But why such a maxim should command great respect among moral philosophers escapes me.  It seems to reduce human complexities to useless oversimplifications.  My interlocutor is employing this Categorical Imperative in support of the idea that it is always morally wrong to lie.  What kind of world would it be if everyone always followed the maxim I would be following in telling the Nazi the falsehood that I have claimed I would tell with a perfectly clear conscience?   I agree with him that I would not want to legislate lying as a universal law.  But I deny that I am acting according to any such maxim.  To suggest that I am, I argue, is a terrible oversimplification.

    In a complex world, an action is a complex matter, and any one action can be said to embody a variety of possible maxims.  In the situation with the Nazi hunting for Jews, Kant would say that he is acting according to the maxim, "Tell the truth,"  and I am charged with acting according to the unrecommendable maxim, "Tell a lie."  But I would respond to Kant, "No, that's not the maxim I'm following.  What I am following, rather, is something more like "Do what you can to protect the weak and innocent from the depredations of their unjust persecutors."  And then I would go on the offensive and challenge Kant, saying "How would you like for the whole world to follow your maxim of 'Act in such a way that you can tell yourself you've kept your moral purity, regardless of how much damage you do to other people's lives thereby?"

    Any time we have to act in real life, we have to deal with a variety of moral issues at once.  That means that we are continually required to weigh one moral value against another, which in turn means that no one of them can be treated as an absolute.  Any weighing requires that all the competing values be translated into some common units of goodness, else the goodness of truth-telling and the goodness of life-saving can never become commensurate.  And by that means, we are led out of the realm of the specifics of structural morality back into the overarching generality of something like my morality-as-consequences.


<em>Probability is not a pat hand.  </em>

    That doesn't mean that rules are unimportant for our moral thinking.  Not at all.  They can be extremely valuable guides.  But they are not infallible guides, and they are not by themselves adequate to tell us what is the best thing to do.  They may serve as good first approximations.  Or as probabilistic statements:  "Except in exceptional circumstances, this is a good rule to follow."  But that means embedding the rules in a larger moral perspective, so that the exceptions can be examined with sound moral judgment.  

    Even the best of moral rules –like, for example, the Golden Rule-- can lead to morally disastrous results if it is treated as an invariable truth.  Even a rule that is a good moral guide 99% of the time can lead to serious moral errors, I believe, if treated as if it were always adequate.  Imagine a situation in which I have Hitler in the sites of my rifle.  The angel on my shoulder is telling me how many millions of lives I can save if I will pull the trigger.  Should I tell the angel, "No, I wouldn't want someone to shoot me, therefore I should treat Hitler in accordance with the maxim, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'"?

      In the world as it is, there are times when treating another person as you would want to be treated is not the right thing to do.  The problem with structural morality --if it is treated as if it were an adequate guide-- is that it reduces complex reality to more manageable and therefore comforting simplification.   Another problem with that Categorical Imperative, as I see it, is that it is predicated on dealing not with the world as it is, but rather explicitly conjures up a magical fantasy.   "Act as if you were legislating for all humanity."  

    Now, if I were acting in front of such a mirror, so that whatever I did would somehow magically be emulated by all humankind, that would be a consequence that would be powerfully determinative of my conduct.  If I had the power --say by telling that Nazi the truth-- to make all people honest, that would weigh heavily in my decision.  But in the world as it is, my conduct would have no such effect.  The people whose whereabouts I betrayed would be herded off to their deaths, and humankind would still be as dishonest as ever.  Admittedly, what we do does probably increase the probability that other people will do likewise, for better or for worse, and I will concede the possibility that my lie to the Nazi will have an infinitesimal effect on the general human propensity to lie.  And on very rare occasions, an extraordinary person like Gandhi, by acting on his belief in non-violence, for example, will inspire many others to do similarly.  Presumably, the angel sitting on Gandhi's shoulder would take into account his capacity to bring about such consequences when he whispered in Gandhi's ear, while still subordinating the ideal of non-violence to the more fluid maxim that I have proposed would guide the angel's counsel.   Even Gandhi came to recognize that with a man like Hitler, non-violence was not going to suffice, that with some people there was no access to that better self on which his non-violent approach was predicated.  The angel's advice is based on our real choices, not on what we might like to imagine they are.

    A structural moralist like Kant seems to be saying that morality is not about what is but what ought to be.  I would say that a worthwhile morality must deal with both.  It must help us answer the question:  given what is right now, how best can I act to help move things toward how they ought to be?

    We should demand of our moral system that it deal with things as they are, even if that makes things harder to manage.  What's the purpose of pretending that one has solved a problem --the problem of knowing what the moral thing to do is in each situation-- if one has not?  

    Only striving for a morality of consequences, such as the guidance I'm saying the angel would whisper in our ear, has any chance of meeting what I regard as the most ambitious virtue of a moral system.  That is the virtue of being uncompromising.  Just as the virtue of not being arbitrary was paramount in a definition of goodness so, I would argue, should we regard as most highly desirable in a moral perspective that it not define itself in ways that are compromised from the outset in the pursuit of the right course of conduct.

    An uncompromising moral system, as I mean it, is one that strives to do everything possible to promote goodness.  That means several things:   that it is not satisfied to rest with a rule that is usually adequate, but sometimes quite inadequate;  that it not be set up in a way that defines as true what is not or that ignores parts of the picture that are true and morally relevant; and that is not content to choose one course when a better course is possible.  

    I suggest that the structural approaches to morality, which appear to be uncompromising in their moral stands, fail to meet these criteria of an uncompromising moral approach.  And that the way to strive for such an approach is to adopt a morality of consequences such as I have imputed to that hypothetical angel.

    If I'm going to have to compromise, I want to have tried first really to know what the best service to goodness would require of me.  And if I do end up compromising, I want to be honest with myself that this is what I have done, and not delude myself into thinking that I am in possession of adequate moral guidance when in fact I am not.

 For the sake of simplicity, I am speaking of fostering the "good," but it should be understood that the avoidance of fostering the "evil," or the not-good, is just as important and is continuously implied.  To do good and not to do evil, to benefit and not to harm, are inextricably connected here as part of the same moral calculus.

 (Indeed, I touch upon some aspects of it in my book <em>Fool's Gold:  The Fate of Values in a World of Goods</em>.)  

 I am lumping together, under the category "structural morality," an admittedly very diverse set of moral philosophies.  This is not to deny that the differences among these form of (what I'm calling) structural morality are important.  Following God's commandments is not the same as seeking to embody certain virtues, which is not the same as following other maxims generated by reason, which again is not the same as obeying the law or adhering to tradition, etc.  

    But despite all these differences, all these approaches do share one element:  in all of them, there is presumed that there is a fixed guide, or principle. which is presumed to be invariably good to follow.  This common element is so vital in its contrast with the morality of consequences that it seems legitimate and clarifying to class this disparate group together for the present discussion.

    If the adherent of one of these structural moralities concedes that her fixed guide is not always good to follow, then she has broken out of the framework of that morality.  For she evidently has some other, more fundamental, moral perspective that enables her to distinguish those times when the guide is morally valid from those when it is not.

Authors Bio:
Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.