Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints”
Summary
This episode is about Susan Wolf’s 1982 article “Moral Saints.”
You’re probably a moral enough person. But have you ever had that nagging feeling that you should be even better? That if you were really good, you would devote your life to the cause, whatever cause that might be? That you should become some kind of moral saint?
People who devote their entire lives to being as morally good as possible are held up as objects of admiration, as a kind of saintly standard that the rest of us feel vaguely guilty for not living up to.
Susan Wolf says we shouldn’t feel bad about not being saints because no rational person should want to be a saint in the first place. In this episode, I explain her argument for why it makes more sense to be cool like Paul Newman than good like Mother Teresa.
References
Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints”
Transcript
Note: this is transcribed using an online transcription service so it’s probably going to have a lot of errors. We do don’t have time to go through these all carefully but still thought that it would be more helpful than having no transcript at all.
Clif Mark
Today, moral saints, your nagging sense of guilt, and why Paul Newman is a better role model than Mother Teresa. I'm Clif Mark. And this is good in theory.
Most of us like to think of ourselves as morally good people. And usually it's not that hard. We can avoid doing the really bad things like killing and stealing and lying for the most part. And then to be safe, we can do some good things we can give to charity, volunteer somewhere, return our shopping cart from across the parking lot.
But the trouble is, that no matter what we do, sometimes we start to notice that we could be doing more. And that can make us start to question ourselves. And this happens with any moral goal that you happen to have in mind. You gave to Oxfam, why not a monthly donation? Why not volunteer? If you did one day a week, why not two? why not three? You posted a black square in support of BLM, you went to a march you gave to some bail funds, is that it and now you're just going to relax? Well, racial injustice rages across the globe. In principle, the demands of morality are endless. And that's just considering one moral goal at a time. Of course, there are infinite good causes that you could be contributing to right now.
If you start listening closely to the voice of morality, it will keep telling you to do better, and keep asking for more and keep provoking feelings of uncertainty and guilt until you devote your entire life and being to the cause. At which point, we could fairly call you a moral saint. Is that the answer? Should we all devote our lives to becoming moral saints?
Susan wolf says Absolutely not. Wolf is a big shot philosopher. And early on in her career in 1982, she wrote a breakout article called moral saints. This article is very popular, it's been reprinted in a ton of collections. It's still taught in ethics classes today, and obviously talked about on podcasts.
The article opens like this, quote, I don't know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them. And quote, Susan wolf doesn't want to be a moral saint, and she doesn't want to be around all things.
She defines a moral saint as a person whose life is dominated by a commitment to being as morally good as possible. Even if interpretations of morality may vary. Of course, there are differences between saints, they might have different motivations, different personalities, they can choose different moral projects. Some will tend to the sick like Mother Teresa. Some will become political activists like Gandhi, some will rescue animals.
But all the same, wolf says they'll all have a lot in common. Because if you really want to be a world class good person, you're going to have to develop the kind of character that will enable you to be that good. According to Woolf, saints will necessarily be exceptionally patient, and considerate and even tempered and hospitable and charitable. They'll avoid making any negative judgments about people. And they won't be racist or sexist or anything like that.
And will says that once you start thinking of all the different moral virtues that a saint has to have, in the high degree to which they're supposed to have them, you may start to wonder if the saint isn't too good for their own good. Because if you're maxing out your moral virtues, that doesn't leave much room left for anything else in your life, if you're devoting every hour to raising money for Oxfam, then you're not reading novels, practicing your tennis game, developing your fashion sense.
And it's true that any single one of those interests might seem trivial compared to the demands of morality. But wolf thinks that they're important that these non moral interests and activities are what give meaning to our lives, and make them worth living. And if we had none of them will think our lives would seem pretty empty. Now you might think, so what? Why do we have to give them up, you can be a moral person and also pursue all kinds of interesting hobbies, right? Well, kind of
Wolf doesn't think there's a logical contradiction between being a moral saint and having normal human interests. She just thinks there's a kind of practical contradiction. Because none of these things are forbidden by morality you're allowed. It's just that when it comes down to it on a day to day basis, it would always seem to the moral saint, that they'd be better off devoting their time to feeding the hungry than to reading novels or picking out the perfect outfit for the gala, or going to the gala. The moral interests be the non moral interests by attrition. They soak up all the saints time and resources and leave them with nothing left for anything else.
In addition to the neutral things like tennis and fashion that just lose by attrition. Wolf says there are also some other things that we admire, and that we find valuable, but which nonetheless, go against the moral grain. She picks out humor as an example. We'll think that a darker, cynical sense of humor is a valuable thing that a lot of people get a lot out of. And she gives Groucho Marx and George Bernard Shaw as examples, but you can really think of any popular comedian. And the trouble with humor is that if you're trying to be as moral as possible, if you're always attempting to give people the benefit of the doubt, and never say anything unfair or mean about anyone, then you're probably not going to be very funny. In fact, will says, You're not even going to be able to laugh in good conscience at the jokes that other people find funny.
According to Wolf, moral saints have to be very, very nice, inoffensive, and therefore, she's worried that they will also be dull witted, humorless, and bland. Her words, wolf contrast moral saints, with the people that we actually admire, the people that we make into role models or character ideals. She says, we pick athletes, writers, Cowboys, rock stars, YouTubers, private investigators. She doesn't say YouTubers, but you get the picture. Wolf names fictional characters from Tolstoy and Henry James. And she talks about how we might strive to be graceful like Katharine Hepburn, or cool like Paul Newman, who was a big heartthrob actor in the 60s and 70s. Now, these celebrity references do sound a bit funny, 40 years later on, but you get the idea. And anyway, even in 1982, they were a bit archaic.
Her point is that we admire people who have exceptional standout personal qualities. But usually, these qualities and achievements are not specifically moral ones. Of course, we want our role models to be moral, we might stop admiring them. If we find out they did something really bad. But that's not why we like them in the first place. We like our moral virtues mixed in with other kinds of non moral personal excellence. As Wolff puts it, there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand. And for Wolf, moral saints go beyond that limit.
Not only are they bland and humorless. Wolf also seems to think that saints have something not quite right about them psychologically. She says, Why would anyone be motivated to be a saint? One reason is that they just happened to love doing good more than anything else. they genuinely enjoy political organizing, or feeding the hungry more than going on holiday or reading a good book. Wolf calls these kinds of people loving saints, because they love doing good so much. And she says there might be something wrong with them. Because if you're so eager to give up your chocolate sundae your softball league or holiday, in order to go do good. Maybe you didn't like those things that much to start with. Maybe it's not that loving saints enjoy doing good so much. Maybe they're just missing the part of their soul that's capable of enjoying the things that bring meaning and satisfaction to normal people. In the people, Wolfe calls rational saints, or even worse, rational saints are people who have all the normal desires, they could enjoy the things that the rest of us enjoy. But they also have a super strong sense of duty that holds them back and keeps them focused on being morally good instead. And wolf suggests that this kind of person is motivated by, quote, a pathological fear of damnation, or an extreme form of self hatred that interferes with his ability to enjoy the enjoyable in life, and the quote. So for Wolf, saints either lack the human capacity to enjoy life, or their self hating disciplinarians who won't allow themselves to enjoy it. In either way. Being a saint is not a good life choice.
At this point in the argument, wolf considers an objection. Maybe it's true that if you're absolutely obsessed with being moral, you're not going to have much time or money to do anything else. But isn't that true? Everything. If you decided you wanted to be an Olympic skater or an artist, you'd also have to give up a lot. You practice all the time, you'd make sacrifices, everything takes sacrifice. So why is morality different? Why does we'll think it's a bad idea to try to be like Mother Teresa. But a good idea to try to be like Paul Newman.
Her explanation for this, I think, gives the key to why morality and moral saints bug her so much. And it's that morality speaks to us in a different way than our other interests or passions. To take Wolf's example, if we really just want to be cool, like Paul Newman, it's because we're drawn to that quality intrinsically. We have other desires, it's just, our desire to be cool is stronger. So instead of playing bridge, or practicing skating, or whatever, we spend time shopping for cool accessories and practicing a roguish grin. But morality is different. Because the voice of morality takes the kind of self important high handed tone. It says that it's more serious and all your other desires, and that your non moral desires are lower, or less worthy. The voice of morality basically implies that if you're still picking out sunglasses, while there are children going hungry, you might not be a good person. So one way to understand the difference between our non moral and immoral desires is that when we sacrifice something for our non moral interests, for example, when we give up bridge to practice tennis, it still feels like a choice. But when we sacrifice something for morality, wolf says it feels like a command.
So we're in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, morality won't leave us alone until we become full on saints. But on the other hand, being a saint is a bad life choice, because it means we have to give up all the things that matter to normal human beings and give our lives meaning.
So what can we do? One potential solution that wolf considers is to change our idea of morality? If the problem is that our current idea of what it means to be moral, excludes all this important stuff that gives our life meaning, then why don't we invent a new form of morality that includes this stuff that we want to keep? So instead of saying that morality is just about helping others or praying to Jesus, or doing activism or whatever, we can see that the really moral thing is to be a well rounded person with lots of different interests and commitments. And that way, you get to keep the moral virtues, but you balance them out by including all the other previously non moral things as well. Wolf associates this strategy with Nietzsche and Aristotle. But she doesn't think it will work. Because the problem with morality isn't just that it focuses our attention away from interesting things. Instead, it changes our relationship to those things. Wolff thinks that once we put all these non moral interests into the moral category, will turn them from things that were intrinsically and genuinely interested in doing into things that we ought to do. And then we won't be working on our tennis game and sculpting bonsai and reading books for the pure love of the game. We'll be doing it as a kind of moral CV building exercise, and will start to feel guilty if we don't do these things, and will start to judge each other about them. Because now, if you don't keep up your watercolour painting hobby, it's not that you just miss out on a nice afternoon, you're committing some kind of moral failure that you have reason to feel bad about.
And I like this passage in Wolf, because I think it hints at the horror of a world where we translate everything into the medium of morality, where we only see the moral dimension of everything. In this kind of world. We don't watch movies because we enjoy them. But because they have a good political message. We don't order a salad because we love vegetables, but because it's less cruel to animals. We ride bicycles only for environmental reasons. And we only post edifying content. It gets to a point where we can't take a bath, without telling some story about our duty of self care that we're obliged to fulfill. So we can be fully refreshed, to get back out there tomorrow, and do some more good. This is why wolf doesn't want to include the non moral virtues in the category of morality. She wants us to be able to do things for their own sake and not just because we get moral credit for it.
Despite the fact that the article is called moral saints, and the fact that Susan wolf spends a lot of time bad mouthing moral saints. I don't really think she cares about actual saints. Remember, in the first sentence of her article, she says she doesn't even know if any exist in at the end. She explicitly says that her point is not to condemn them if they do.
What wolf actually cares about is this nagging implication that she and Everyone else ought to be a saint, that we all need to justify everything we do, according to some moral standard. Wolf wants to show that we don't have to get defensive. Every time something in our lives or on our social media timelines reminds us that we're not quite as moral as we could be. She wants to show us that we don't need to explain ourselves. Every time we want to read a novel, or laugh at a dark job. Well, things that are non moral goals are good reasons on their own.
And to see this, she thinks that we need to recognize that the moral point of view, the perspective that sees and evaluates everything in moral terms, isn't the only important one. It is easy to fall into. Because morality has a self important tone that tends to shut over other considerations. And if you spend a lot of time looking at things from a moral point of view, as do priests and prudes, and presumably professional philosophers like Wolf, then it's an easy perspective to get stuck in.
But there's also a more holistic perspective, that wolf calls the point of view of individual perfection. It's called that because it's about, quote, what kinds of lives are good lives, and what kinds of persons it would be good for ourselves and others to be. And, quote, she's talking about perfecting the individual, and the kind of life that would be good to have. This is not necessarily the most moral life, but the kind of life you'd wish for yourself or for others. So this gives us two perspectives that we can use to view and evaluate human lives and activities. From the moral point of view, the non moral stuff is still kind of relevant, we still want people to have meaningful and enjoyable lives for moral reasons. But it's not that important. when push comes to shove, moral considerations always trumped these other values. And from the point of view of personal perfection, morality is part of the good life. You wouldn't say that a serial killer or a compulsive liar led an amazing life. But it's not the whole thing.
And depending on which point of view you take, things will look different. For example, if you think of the saintly as people you know, or that you can imagine, the people that are always kind and nice to everyone the Ned's flenders of the world. Well, these people are fantastic from the moral point of view. When you look at them from the point of view of individual perfection, they might look unremarkable, even boring. On the other hand, take someone like recently dead comedian Norm Macdonald. As far as I know, he was morally unremarkable. I never heard of him doing anything very bad. But I also never heard of him doing anything particularly saintly. I know he did a lot of gambling and sent a lot of mean things to a lot of people. But he was fantastically funny and charming and insightful. He spent a lifetime training his talent, and eventually became the only person I know of, who could keep a TV audience spellbound for five minutes, talking about a depressed moth. For comedy fans, norm was a towering genius, one of the best. And we can't see any of that with the moral point of view. That's why we'll thinks we need the point of view of individual perfection, you can show us the significance of all the talents and characteristics and projects that are invisible from the moral perspective, but are still hugely important in people's lives. As Wolff puts it, it can remind us that a person may be perfectly wonderful, without being perfectly moral.
We need both points of view to make sense of what matters in our lives. And so the question is, when should we take either point of view, when is the moral point of view appropriate and when is the point of view of individual perfection appropriate? wolf says it doesn't really seem like we're ever obliged to take up the perfectionist point of view, because obligation is more of a moral thing. As for the moral point of view, wolf says there's no way to decide ahead of time in a systematic way, when you have to take the moral point of view. She just says that it can't be all the time. Because if we did that, we lose touch with all the non moral values and interests that give people's lives meaning. And we'll probably feel constantly guilty about not being a saint. Or even worse. We become one.
Like I said, at the top of the episode, this essay is hugely popular. People love it, it gets reprinted all the time. On the scale of analytic philosophy, the writing is pretty nice. And I think it really does capture something important. The moral voices in our head can get annoying. And looking at life, from an exclusively moral standpoint seems to me to be a truly miserable way to live. And there's also a lot going on in media and politics these days. that encourages people to take on a moral, and usually morally outraged point of view on pretty much everything. So I think it's useful to be reminded of what we lose when we see things only through a moral perspective.
But the question about when the moral perspective is appropriate is important. And wolf has an answered it. What circumstances and factors in life incline us to taking a moral perspective? When should we take a moral perspective? Because, presumably, there are some situations where the moral considerations are so urgent, that thinking about novels and sunglasses actually would be the wrong thing to do. Next episode, I'm going to talk about some philosophers and saints who think that this kind of situation is always happening. And that therefore, we should probably be listening more closely to the nagging voice of morality that wolf wants to shut up. As ever, thank you for listening and to everyone who left us a review or decided to support us on Patreon thank you again I appreciate your help you're really helping me keep this pod going. And I would like to dedicate this episode to be perfectly wonderful nor McDonald rip to a real one