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Against moral sainthood As philosopher Susan Wolf argues, life is far more meaningful and rich if we do not aim at being morally perfect Photo by Angus R Shamal/Gallery Stock Daniel Callcut is a freelance writer and philosopher. He is the editor of Reading Bernard Williams (2009). He lives in Stamford, United Kingdom. 3,100 words Edited by Nigel Warburton I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’. This declaration is one of the opening remarks of a landmark essay in which Wolf imagines what it would be like to be morally perfect. If you engage with Wolf’s thought experiment, and the conclusions she draws from it, then you will find that it offers liberation from the trap of moral perfection. Wolf’s essay ‘Moral Saints’ (1982) imagines two different models of the moral saint, which she labels the Loving Saint and the Rational Saint. The Loving Saint, as described by Wolf, does whatever is morally best in a https://aeon.co/users/daniel-callcut https://www.routledge.com/Reading-Bernard-Williams/Callcut/p/book/9780415771900 https://aeon.co/users/nigel-warburton https://www.jstor.org/stable/2026228?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents joyful spirit: such a life is not fun-free, but it is unerringly and unwaveringly focused on morality. We are to think of the Loving Saint as the kind of person who cheerfully sells all of her or his possessions in order to donate the proceeds to famine relief. The Rational Saint is equally devoted to moral causes, but is motivated not by a constantly loving spirit, rather by a sense of duty. The Loving Saint might be more fun to be around than the Rational Saint, or more maddening, depending on your own personal temperament. Would the constant happiness of the Loving Saint make being with her easier, or would it drive you around the bend? There is an instruction associated with Buddhism – in fact, coined by the American scholar Joseph Campbell – that asks you to ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world’, and the Loving Saint does this to the maximum: but perhaps you would find such joy sustained in the face of the world’s worst horrors inane or inappropriate. On the other hand, the Rational Saint, with his relentless commitment to duty, might be very grating company, too. Both types of moral saint are likely to present difficulties if you are not a saint yourself. Would they be constantly bothering you and urging you to give more? Perhaps they have joined the effective altruism movement, and are repeatedly suggesting the most effective ways that you can use your time and disposable income to help. How does such a person make you feel when you give much of your spare time and attention not to Oxfam but to video games? And when you give a sizeable chunk of your spare income to luxuries such as wine and chocolate rather than providing others with basic nutrition? Do you want to be friends with someone whose 100 per cent moral focus always seems, in effect, to be encouraging you to feel guilty? The aspiration to be a moral saint, Wolf suggests, might turn someone into a nightmare to live with and be around. The British writer Nick Hornby offers a comic version of this scenario in his novel How to be Good (2001). But perhaps a true saint, being as decent a person as possible, wouldn’t want you to feel bad all the time: what would be good about that? In fact, wouldn’t true moral saints be as sensitive about their effect on your life as they are about their effect on the world at large? Wolf suggests that the problem then would be that the moral saint would have to hide her true thoughts about your degree of moral commitment. Moreover, can a moral saint laugh sincerely at your cynical jokes when they cut, as Wolf says, against the moral grain? And, in any case, when would they have the time to hang out with you? If they are morally perfect, then they have far more morally important things to be doing. https://aeon.co/essays/art-is-a-waste-of-time-or-so-effective-altruism-claims It’s not only friends that don’t really fit into a life devoted to maximum moral achievement. Can the moral saint, if perfect, ‘waste’ time watching films and television? How about spending any money on fine food or travel? Or expending energy on sport rather than seriously important causes? Or going birdwatching or hiking? No time either for theatre or the pleasures of curling up with a good book. The problem with extreme altruism, as Oscar Wilde is reported to have said about socialism, is that it takes up too many evenings. Moral saints might be able to find time for some of these activities when they happen to coincide with their ethical projects: watching sport, for example, at a charity fundraiser; or admiring the scenery en route to a troubled hotspot in need of aid. But these experiences have to be seen as lucky extras if the only aim in life is to do as much moral good as possible. If you don’t have enough time for friendship or fun, or works of art or wildlife, then you are missing out on what Wolf calls the non-moral part of life. Wolf does not mean to suggest that non-moral equals immoral: just because something doesn’t have anything to do with morality (playing tennis, for instance) it does not follow that it is therefore morally bad. The point is that morality is, intuitively, focused on issues such as treating others equally, and on trying to relieve suffering. And good things these are: but so is holidaying with a friend, or exploring the Alaskan rain forest, or enjoying a curry. Moral goodness is just one aspect of the good things in life and, if you live as if the moral aspect is the only aspect that matters, then you are likely to be very impoverished in terms of the non-moral goods in your life. And that means missing out on a lot. Wolf imagines the Loving Saint as perfectly happy to live a life in which non-moral goods play no part. The ultra-ascetic moral life – no friendships, no hobbies, no distractions from the ethical – doesn’t come at a cost for the Loving Saint in terms of contentment. But Wolf wonders how this can be. Does the Loving Saint not see everything that he is missing out on and, if so, how can this not affect his happiness? Perhaps, Wolf suggests, the Loving Saint is almost missing a piece of perceptual equipment: an ability to see that there is more to life than morality. Perhaps this explains why the Loving Saint can stay happy. By contrast, Wolf does not suppose that the Rational Saint fails to see that there is a huge area of life that she is missing out on. Wolf imagines the Rational Saint persisting in her barren life through a sense of duty alone. But why go so far as to live a life entirely and exclusively devoted to moral causes? Wolf suggests answers that makes the Rational Saint look not so rational after all: perhaps self-loathing and/or a pathological fear of damnation. Wolf’s two versions of moral sainthood are modelled on the two most influential moral philosophies of modern Western philosophy: utilitarianism (which inspires Wolf’s Loving Saint) and Kantianism (which inspires the Rational Saint). What would your life be like, Wolf asks, if you lived these moral worldviews to the max? Wolf suggests that neither worldview, if lived comprehensively, delivers a very appealing life: each, as we have seen, produces a vision of the good life that consists so thoroughly in devotion to the needs of others that there is no time for personal enjoyment of the many non-moral good things in life – no time, in fact, for a life of one’s own. You would spend your whole existence, to echo some words of Bernard Williams, as a servant of the morality system. Things have gone wrong with modern morality if the expression ‘the good life’ is ambiguous It is a significant feature of both utilitarianism and Kantianism that neither value personal happiness very highly, if at all. Utilitarianism is a philosophy of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ and so, if the needs of the many require you to make enormous personal sacrifices, including sacrificing your happiness, then so be it. Wolf rightly imagines the perfect utilitarian, the Loving Saint, as a happy person: and indeed that would be ideal. But no one should become a utilitarian for reasons of their own personal happiness or wellbeing: that isn’t the point of utilitarian morality. Your individual happiness, considered in the context of billions of conscious lives, is just a drop in the ocean. If doing the right thing for the general good – eg, selling your main assets and devoting the proceeds to charitable action – would make you unhappy, then that’s a shame, but your unhappiness doesn’t stop the right thing from being the right thing. Kantian morality is even less concerned with personal happiness. Kantianism, derived from and named after the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, is a philosophy that emphasises our rational responsibility to other rational beings (hence Wolf’s ‘Rational Saint’ label). The reason to do the right thing is because it is your duty to others, not because it will make you happy. If other rational beings need our aid – if they are starving or oppressed, for example – then we owe it to them, just as they would owe it to us if the positions were reversed. Kant did think that being moral made you worthy of happiness but that was all he would allow. One suspects that, had he lived to hear it, Kant would have liked the remark attributed to the 20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. If modern moral theories, followed as ideals, produce unappealing visions of life, then you might think that something is wrong with the theories themselves. Perhaps what is needed is a more well-rounded conception of the good life. In fact, you might believe it a sign that things have gone badly wrong with regard to modern morality that the