Social in Orientation: Discovering Ethical Individuality

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This is the third in a series of posts adapted from chapter 4 of my book, The Decline of the Individual: Reconciling Autonomy with Community.

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In the last post, we discussed how our tastes, preferences, and attitudes are socially influenced, but must be actively endorsed by us as individuals in order to retain our autonomy and authenticity. There is another equally important but more direct way in which the more nuanced conception of the individual is social: how we express our sociality through our actions or choices. Just as we are free as individuals to accept social influences into our personal identities, we can also choose as individuals to act in the interests of others in society. Simply asserting that we have autonomy does not imply that we will use that autonomy solely in our own self-interest.

As we saw in the first post in this series, the conception of the human being as intrinsically selfish has been challenged by many scholars—including psychologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and economists—who have provided evidence and arguments that human beings evolved to be altruistic, at least in certain situations and toward certain groups. Evolved moral sentiments are great for showing that some sense of ethical behavior comes naturally to human beings, but we should consider this a bare minimum—and in fact, this is what we often see in children, where claims of “that’s not fair” while playing are common and loud while displaying very little positive social behavior.

Ideally, as children mature, they develop more of a conscious, reflective sense of morality in which they recognize the importance and interests of the people they know, and eventually those of people around the world whom they may never meet. They absorb moral lessons, directly or not, from many sources, including relatives, teachers, religious leaders, and stories they learn from books, TV, and movies. All of these sources provide examples of ethical behavior, often in the form of moral exemplars or role models, people who demonstrate moral character we admire and whom we can emulate (including superheroes).

However we acquire our sense of right and wrong or good and bad, we carry it into every decision-making context that evokes it. Only a psychopath goes through life with no care whatsoever for other people; the rest of us take the interests of others into account to some extent in most of the decisions we make, whether or not our final choices always reflect that. We may not articulate it like a philosopher would, of course, but we “know” when our actions have a negative impact on others. We may think of ethical situations in terms of fairness, justice, respect, or harm—all of which have formal analogs in moral philosophy, which at the end of the day describes commonsense morality rather than creates it from nothing.

Immanuel Kant, in particular, explicitly saw his moral philosophy—and his infamous categorical imperative—as representing the ordinary moral thinking of average people, writing in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals that it “agrees completely” with “the ordinary reason of mankind in its practical judgments.” This is true especially if you avoid the formalisms of the categorical imperative itself and focus on the moral concepts at its heart: the equal dignity of all persons and the respect and reciprocal treatment it demands.

This dignity, in turn, is derived from autonomy, which we know from the last post is both a capacity for independent decision-making and a responsibility to use it well. Not only must we make moral decisions regardless of external pressure or internal desire; we must also make them according to “the moral law,” preferably with the assistance of the categorical imperative, to result in ethical decisions regarding other persons as well as ourselves. Put more generally, despite the individualistic orientation of Kant’s ethics, his conception of autonomy does not equal a license to be a libertine, but instead implies a responsibility to be a moral person to others (and to ourselves).

While Kant maintained that we must always act morally and do the right thing, determining exactly what the right thing to do is in any given situation is much less clear. The duties that come from the categorical imperative are nothing more than guidelines, such as “do not lie” or “help others,” which don’t give us precise instructions on what to do to be moral. We shouldn’t lie, of course, but neither do we have to be completely forthright: when asked a direct question, we can change the topic, respond with another question, or simply say nothing.

By the same token, when we see an opportunity to help someone, we are free to choose what we do to help, how much we do to help, or even whether to help at all. Literally, all the categorical imperative tells us to do is “do not be indifferent to the suffering of others,” but this merely demands that we maintain an attitude of helpfulness that we should put into action when we can. It is up to each of us to decide if we can be of help of certain situations: Bending over to pick up a dropped book would normally be expected, but for most of us, running into a burning building to save a child would not be.

This highlights the role of judgment in Kant’s ethics, which balances three important factors: the role of duties as guidelines to doing the right thing, the fact that duties often conflict, and, when they do, the difficulty of determining which duty takes precedence. There is no rule or formula to judgment; as Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason, “though understanding is capable of being instructed… judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught. It is the specific quality of so-called mother-wit; and its lack no school can make good.”

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Each of us develops a moral sense or intuition, a feeling of right and wrong, informed by making ethical decisions throughout our life, which helps us make these judgment calls in cases of conflicting obligations. Because every person’s experiences and choices are different, each of us has our unique faculty of judgment, which in turn defines our ethical identity or moral character.¹ Understood this way, a focus on Kantian autonomy allows each of us to construct our own character through the way we choose to balance obligations, while also ensuring that we act with respect and care towards others based on their equal dignity and autonomy (as described by Christine Korsgaard in her book Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity).

In other words, even as we make decisions in consideration of others, we do so as individuals—individual in essence and social in orientation.

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In the final post in this series, we'll see how the failure to acknowledge the social nature of the individual results in presumptions of moral incompetence which leads to the devaluation of the individual him or herself.