Seligman does well basically to refuse to engage in the endless philosophical debate over what happiness is, exactly. And he does seem to have taken seriously, and largely accomplished, his goal of providing a descriptive account of the constitutive elements of happiness and how to achieve and sustain them. In other words, Seligman does not suggest that the body of evidence regarding happiness necessarily has normative force for all readers; you may have some reasons — prudential and/or moral — not to do some of the things that conduce to happiness. (For example, you may have a principled commitment to retributive justice such that you reasonably choose not to forgive some wrongdoers in your life, even though research shows that forgiveness is an important element of happiness).

However, I’m worried that Seligman’s descriptive task goes notably off the rails towards the beginning of the book, in the midst of a cursory discussion of positive emotions. Seligman describes his friend Len who, despite “having made it big both in work and play,” remains “constitutionally at the low end of the spectrum of positive affectivity” (p. 34–35). Although Len is a high achiever, his achievements don’t do as much to make him feel as great, good, joyful, etc. as they would for most other people. Yet, Seligman maintains that, like Len (who eventually finds a compatible spouse for his “chilly” personality), “a person can be happy even if he or she does not have much in the way of positive emotion.”

This will come as welcome news to anyone who, like Len (and Seligman), finds himself on the low end of the positive emotion scale. But why believe it’s true? To claim that happiness doesn’t require much positive emotion is to commit to one particular — and controversial — normative conception of the best kind of life for a human being. Seligman has, in essence, defined away the possibility that happiness consists primarily in the positive emotions. It may be true that we can’t change where we fall on the positive emotion scale, and that it’s better to focus on what we can change than what we can’t. But Seligman’s statement is quite strong: happiness is ultimately independent of how much positive emotion one experiences. This entails a thick, normative, and controversial account of happiness; a matter that ought not to be settled by postulation.

Without having given it too much thought, I have the following pretheoretical view: Positive emotions either aren’t an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, or they are. If they aren’t, then why pay special attention in the book to people who don’t experience many of them, and point out their ability to partake in other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life (e.g., achievement)? On the other hand, if positive emotions are an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, then those with low positive affect have reason to want them, apart from the other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life they may have achieved, even if this is a difficult or even impossible task.

For those who tl;dr-ed, here’s the gist: Seligman claims to be providing a descriptive account of happiness, and not a normative one. However, in his extending the umbrella of happiness by definition to potentially cover those with somewhat or even drastically low positive affect, he makes important assumptions about the happy (or “good,” or “flourishing”) life for a human being. This isn’t necessarily bad or wrong, but it isn’t value-free.

In my opinion, it is better to keep the positive affectivity and achievement/satisfaction/etc. components of happiness entirely distinct, calling neither by itself “happiness,” for the sake of conceptual clarity. More on this later, maybe.

“In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas.”

Relevant experiments have been extensively replicated, and the depletable self-control hypothesis seems reasonably well-confirmed. The implication for poverty is this: the less money you have, the more situations you will encounter in which you must restrain yourself and make difficult purchasing tradeoffs, and this means you’ll have less willpower leftover later to deal with other situations in which you might need it. In other words, of two individuals who have the same baseline level of natural and/or cultivated willpower (assuming there is such a thing), the richer one will make better choices, ceteris paribus, than the poorer one, where those choices require willpower and self-control.

In light of these findings, and to put some words in Dr. Cholbi’s mouth, we might wonder whether it is reasonable to maintain a commonsense view that willpower and self-control are virtues: stable states of character with rational, affective, and behavioral components, and which agents cultivate over time. Instead, the depletable self-control hypothesis suggests that the behaviors of individuals are largely subject to the circumstances in which they find themselves, financially and choices-wise. The fact of the psychological matter may be that willpower is less of a trait that one develops and more of a force to which one is susceptible.

However, I think it makes better sense to think about the depletable willpower hypothesis not as evidence that willpower isn’t a virtue, but as supporting the view that developing the virtues requires a sufficient amount of certain external goods (such as money, health, being born into a good family, etc). At first blush, the external goods requirement may seem as somewhat elitist, entailing as it does that privileged people are more likely to become virtuous. But really this is a reasonable alternative to the Socratic-ish view that only morally bad acts can truly harm us, and therefore that virtue can be developed essentially independently of one’s circumstances. Tragic as it is, our life possibilities are in fact constrained by the situations in which we find ourselves, situations that may not be entirely or even partially under our control, and this includes our prospects for flourishing or not. If you are poor, the moral deck may be stacked against you when it comes to willpower (and becoming well educated, and reserving time for contemplation, and having aesthetic experiences, and so on).

But, even assuming that the external goods requirement is correct, we can and should take up the further question of the extent to which an individual bears responsibility for her continued lack (or possession) of some external good or other. A clear example is to what kind of family  you’re born, an external good potentially contributing to human flourishing for which no one ever bears responsibility. People will be responsible for their financial situations (and, relatedly, the extent to which their willpower is continually taxed) to varying degrees.

This picture pretty much comports with standard Aristotelian virtue ethics, and with commonsense morality too, I think. Its most important implication for the depletable willpower hypothesis is actually not related to understanding how virtue theory applies to impoverished individuals themselves, but for correcting how we morally appraise those individuals. If the hypothesis is true, and a person is impoverished for reasons substantially beyond her control, compassion and wisdom require that we refrain from labeling her as merely lacking in willpower, or as having anemic self-control. This may cause us to treat impoverished people better (policy-wise or on an individual level) than we would if we were thinking of them instead as weak, depraved, akratic, etc.

Finally, notice that there are still rich people facing few willpower-taxing situations who still make bad choices. The external good of financial security supports willpower, self-control, and temperance, but it doesn’t guarantee them. These qualities may indeed be virtues, but virtues that are more dependent upon the having the external good of wealth than some other virtues.

To be charitable, we should not assume that speakers have in mind some characteristic of persons that is easily expressible in other ordinary terms. So, taking onself too seriously must not be reduced to simple arrogance, selfishness, egoism, self-absorbedness, pretentiousness, etc.

In wracking my brain for alternative meanings of the phrase, I was reminded of The View From Nowhere, written by philosopher Thomas Nagel while he was still awesome, before he jumped the shark. Nagel describes two distinct viewpoints that human beings commonly assume: subjective and objective. From the subjective point of view, our own lives (desires, plans, projects, ambitions, hopes, loves, etc) seem to be of the utmost importance. We doggedly pursue our own ends (whatever they may be), day in and day out, and often at great cost. However sometimes we are, for various reason, compelled to assume the objective point of view, or “the view from nowhere;” this is a presumably uniquely human capacity. When we do our best to mentally and emotionally detach from our particular lives and to think about stuff in general as if disembodied, we come to question the importance or value of the things with which we are preoccupied from the subjective point of view. Startled by this finding, we can’t just reject the objective point of view altogether because we have a prior belief that impartial views ought to be taken as normative over partial ones. Still, we find ourselves psychologically incapable of rejecting the subjective point of view, even if we’d like to do so. According to Nagel, the problem of the meaning of life is just that these two viewpoints irrevocably clash and cause a philosophical sort of cognitive dissonance.

If I were able just to choose a meaning for “taking yourself too seriously,” this is what I’d say: A person takes herself too seriously when she fails to assume the objective point of view (i.e., to “look at the big picture” or to “put things in perspective”) at a time when doing so would be conducive to her welfare. Something along these lines may actually be what users of the phrase have in mind. They imply that they don’t want to be, or to be around, people who work all the time and/or who are unable to kick back and have fun. And we can understand relaxing or having fun as a manifestation of a person’s belief that life is short, being a perfectionist about work isn’t valuable, and that one ought not “sweat the small stuff.” These attitudes are just reflections of one’s having assumed the objective point of view in a way that promotes the person’s welfare across her lifetime.

But to say that all ambitious and work-oriented people necessarily take themselves too seriously would be inaccurate. Whether or not taking oneself very seriously is a vice will depend on the context, as well as on individual differences in temperament and character. For at least some people who apparently take themselves very seriously, living in the way that they do is in fact maximally conducive to their individual welfare. “Lightening up” or “taking it easy” would make them not better off but worse off.

I think a main source of confusion is the distinction between what empirical claims virtue ethicists make, imply, or are committed to, and what their normative claims are. Here’s my interpretation of at least part of the story:

Empirical Claim: People ordinarily have various states of character, which regulate their behavior (and emotions) across time and across situations. Some of these states of character are virtuous (full honesty when called for), some are vicious (dishonesty), and some are in between (partial honesty when called for).

Normative Claim: People ought to cultivate all and only those states of character that are virtuous (because that fulfills their human function and allows them to flourish, blah blah blah).

Situationists aren’t really attacking the normative claim, or the rarity of people meeting its demands. Rather, they are using various bits of empirical evidence to challenge that people have states of character at all. Virtues are only a subset of the possible states of character a person can have. But, if people don’t have states of character in the virtue ethicists’ sense at all, then they cannot by extension have virtues. So the situationists only indirectly make trouble for the normative claim.

Virtue ethicists who are sensitive to the empirical nature of their presuppositions must explain what they mean not just by “virtue,” but more importantly by “states of character” such that it is consistent with the situationists’ data. And this is where things get tricky, and people in the literature start talking past each other, and everyone sounds correct. With that, I’ll quit beating this dead situationist horse for a while :-)

Adam writes, about the concept of “character”:

“All I’m talking about is any regularity of behavior across particular circumstances.  Anything where, after getting to know someone, one person may be able to guess with reasonable accuracy at how the other person will behave within certain circumstances.”

“Any regularity” is actually difficult to define. Even personality psychologists (e.g. Mischel) are often happy with what seem like weak relationships between the character traits they study and the outward behaviors of subjects. But that’s not too important for now. The rest of Adam’s quote above is actually consistent with even rather radical forms of situationism.

Here’s what I failed to emphasize previously: Situationists do not, and need not, deny that people may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy how some other people will behave some of the time. That’s because they may hold the following: People do have character traits, but they range over a limited set of circumstances. Since we usually see people in the same situations, they appear to have traits that we assume range over all possible situations — but that inference is bad. Moral theories (such as traditional Aristotelian virtue ethics) which posit the existence or possibility of robust traits that do range over all situations are therefore on the rocks of empirical adequacy. (I discussed this a little here: snapshots of moral character)

Adam again:

“So if situationism, at one extreme, argues that people’s behavior is determined entirely by what the circumstance is, to me that sounds tantamount to saying that everyone has the same, identical character.  That is, we all behave the exact same way when our circumstances are the same, and any difference in behavior just reflects a difference in situation.”

Situationists also do not, and need not, claim that a person’s behaviors are totally determined by situations, or that at bottom we all have the same traits or character. Most of them just make some claim to the effect that, in some interesting subset of cases, whatever traits people may have are overriden, or prove impotent. In these cases, behavior tends towards a norm, for reasons that are unclear and worthy of further study.

For instance, in some iterations of the  Milgram experiment, it appeared that subjects would shock the confederate all the way to a high and allegedly dangerous intensity approximately 2/3 of the time. If people were really all the same character-wise in any important sense, then this significant split in their behavior would presumably not occur. Just from a naturalistic point of view, there has got to be some reason why any given participant acted the way he did — but it might be a reason we do not take to be of moral relevance or to be something for which we are morally responsible (silly made up example: the ratio of one chemical to another in the brain at that moment in time).  What situationists seem to want to press is that if character traits cannot explain these and other surprising situationist experimental results, then some morally unimportant factors (of the situation and/or of the person) have great causal power in at least some even high-stakes moral situations.

Then, new moral problems emerge. In what situations do character traits play an important role? In which are they of little behavioral influence? In the latter, what ought we to think about moral responsibility? And so on. There is a good deal of literature on these and other related issues.

Adam’s opinion here, then, is consistent with situationism:

“My personal belief is that biology sets the bounds on the sort of character we can become, and when combined with experience and the decisions we make throughout our life, we end up with who we are at a given moment.  There are parts of ourselves that are more flexible and others that become more rigid with time.”

Neither he nor the situationists must “buy the idea that the situation here and now is the only or even the primary thing that determines what choices we make,” in general at least.

The short answer: No, in all my moderately extensive reading on this subject, I have not found any “studies that actually involve the observation of a person’s behavior across a wide range of relevant circumstances,” as opposed to studies which deal with only a kind of “snapshot” of a person’s behavior.

The longer answer: I think only the virtue ethicists, and not the situationists, think such a study would vindicate the idea of robust character traits. Here’s why (very generally speaking, from my reasonably informed point of view on the subject).

The virtue ethicists (like Aristotle) have accounts on which it could be the case that a person does have a rather robust character trait, but that in extreme situations this trait is, in a sense, prone to being overriden (e.g., in Milgram scenarios containing an authoritative experimenter, or whatever). The existence of compassion in a person who acts cruelly in the snapshot captured by the Milgram experiment could be vindicated by a long-term study of some kind showing compassion manifested most of the time in compassion-relevant situations.

It seems to me that the situationists have a different interpretation of the force of the Milgram experiments and similar evidence. At least some of them appear to think that, if character traits have any real role in determining behavior at all (as virtue ethicists hold), that they would prevent at least the totally egregious moral transgressions witnessed in the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. And, if the data is indeed sufficient for disproving the kinds of traits that virtue ethicists postulate, then it’s understandable that the situationists would have limited interest in other patterns of behavior. (John Doris does think that there are narrow, as opposed to robust, character traits, such as academic honesty as distinct from personal relationship honesty. These could probably be verified by empirical observation. Also, notice that the situationists’ explanation here — if it is at all how I explain it — would not pertain to the dime in the phone booth-type experiments, which do not involve egregious moral transgressions).

As for this part of Jim’s comment:

Suppose that everyone who really knows Fred considers him to be a reliably compassionate person. But two psychologists who were hiding behind a ficus tree, watching as Fred walked past a poor soul who’d just dropped a bunch of papers, insist that he clearly could not have so robust a character trait. Surely, the people who really know Fred are in a better position than any psychologist hiding behind a ficus tree (or worse, any philosopher sitting in an armchair) to judge the robustness of Fred’s putative traits, right?

What the situationists tend to say about this is the following: Because people who know each other well see each other in the same types of situations over and over, it is unsurprising that Fred’s friends have formed apparently accurate conceptions of what his moral character is like. But when people who work with Fred see him at home, or people who go to school with Fred see him in a restaurant, it is rather likely that he will act in a way that is incompatible with the traits they thought Fred had (and this is even more likely to be the case when Fred is put in an extreme situation, such as a war or an emergency). This evidence is compatible with both the interpretation that there are no character traits (Gilbert Harman) and that there are narrowly defined and not robust character traits (John Doris).

In my opinion, it is not very useful at that point to debate whether people have “character traits” at all or not, because everyone seems to have a different definition for what a “character trait” is. Instead, we should try to figure out what kind of virtue ethics, if any, remains consistent with the empirical evidence, and work backwards to what the empirically adequate notion of virtues or character traits might be. See Maria Merritt, Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology for a good starting point. I am still thinking it over myself.

Adam claims that people object to his point of view on the basis that it is “unforgiving,” apparently in that it encourages us to judge badly of people when they act badly. I actually agree with Adam that his position is not unforgiving, at least not in any objectionable sense, because if it’s true that bad actions indicate bad character, then there is nothing wrong with making the inference, and nothing wrong with acting on it by, for instance, dissociating from such persons.

However, I do object to Adam’s point of view not on the basis of its being unforgiving, but because it is grounded in a folk psychological theory about moral character that is very likely to be false. So I’m going to take this opportunity to explain a little bit about situationism and a big reason to be skeptical about moral character, something I’ve been studying for quite a while.

Situationists are a diverse bunch of psychologists and philosophers who argue that the way people act has more to do with the situations in which they find themselves (and less to do with their characters) than psychologists, philosophers, and regular people have historically assumed. This can range from thinking there is literally no such thing as a moral character, to thinking that character exists but in a much different form, to thinking that our moral characters are usually pretty stable except in a few oddball situations.

I am most interested in the kind of situationism espoused by John Doris in his excellent book Lack of Character. Doris argues against Aristotelian virtue ethics, which holds that virtues are “robust,” in that they regulate behavior both across time and across relevantly similar situations. There is reason to doubt that people have robust character traits (virtuous or vicious) on account of evidence such as the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram obedience experiments.  In these experiments, subjects who displayed absolutely no measurable psychological abnormalities were induced by experimental environments into behaving in violent and even sadistic ways.

This gives us some reason to believe that actions are not in fact reliable indicators of character. In at least some cases, people behave in ways that do not reflect the character traits they seem otherwise to have. Then, the difficult task becomes figuring out whether this skepticism about moral character infects all inferences from actions (good or bad) to character assessments, or whether only some kinds of situations have this power (and, if so, which ones).

I don’t mean to come off as overly critical of Adam or the folk — I myself espouse some version of virtue ethics. But this is a real problem. I have been reading and thinking hard about it for over two years now and just don’t know what to make of it. Now that I’ve given an intro to skepticism about moral character here on TFIR, I will be more inclined to discuss it further in the future, which will maybe help me to come to some kind of defensible position on the matter.

PS — If you’re looking for something academic-lite-ish to read on situationism, I highly recommend pioneering situationist Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Zimbardo provides a fascinating retelling of his famous Stanford prison experiment, which still haunts him, and also discusses his experience testifying for the defense of a man accused of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib. In closing, he provides some helpful tips for resisting being influenced by situations which pressure us to behave immorally. A must-read.

Comment from abeala

I have some disjointed things to say in response.

First of all, yes, it can definitely be difficult to have a significant other who does not eat the same way as you. Around the time I started testing the veg waters, my now-husband and I became engaged. He was very supportive, but had no intentions of going veg himself. Honestly, I was at least a little disappointed that he was not responding to the moral arguments that had moved me.  Depending on the couple, the dynamics of this kind of situation can go a thousand different ways. So that is at least one respect in which being veg can disrupt even healthy social relationships.

There is a problem with the arguments for veg*ism that is relevant but which neither of us has brought up yet, and that is the collective action problem. As the argument goes, no animal food producer is literally sensitive to the change in demand caused by one person ceasing to buy their products. So, the producers continue to raise the same amount of animals as they were raising even before you were veg. Although veg people like to talk this way, it is not true that you are saving any animals by being veg, strictly speaking.

At this point, a person can bite the bullet, and agree it is a collective action problem, but then she would need to quit talking as if she herself were saving any animals by being veg. Or, a person can argue that being vegetarian/vegan/flexitarian is a symbolic gesture more than one intended to affect change in the animal industry. In that case, it is probably less blameworthy than we had previously assumed to fail to adopt any of those eating patterns, because symbolic gestures are supererogatory or at least not as morally pressing as preventing suffering that is within your control. Preventing the suffering is –not– really within your control, at least not unless you are a famous vegan activist.

I don’t think we need to say that human flourishing *requires* supporting an industry that tortures sentient beings. If people could make meat in a laboratory, or if there were enough social stigma surrounding meat consumption, then that would be false. People who flourish are those who make wise judgments regarding what they can do with the life circumstances they’ve been handed, including the states of affairs they inhabit and their pre-existing qualities of character. Some people, because of their temperament and their social circles, are probably well-suited for being vegan, and do well that way. But many others will come to the all-things-considered judgment that veganism is bad for them, and I think we [people who care about animals, but not at all costs] should take that seriously instead of just saying “oh, you don’t care enough,” or “oh, you didn’t try hard/long enough.”

Some actions are bad enough that a wise person would not engage in them even at great social cost (participating in the Holocaust, perhaps). I don’t think animal food eating falls into this class of actions. There is still something bad and regrettable about using animals for these purposes in the current manners, and a morally sensitive person will realize this. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he will successfully become vegan and stay that way happily for life. Assuming that a person rejects consequentialism/utilitarianism for whatever reason, then at least some of her judgments will be made not strictly on the basis of whose welfare outweighs whose. An individualistic reading of virtue ethics can issue the result not that we merely assign our own interests greater weight in the utility calculus, but that we see things from a different point of view entirely, in which wise moral decisions cannot be made according to any rules or procedure.

There are some options for translating moral concern for animals into action other than by becoming vegan. I try to purchase most of our animal foods from Whole Foods, which to my knowledge has the best animal welfare standards of any grocery store (although of course they are not as high as many people would like). These products cost more, but I like to put my money where my mouth is. In fact, I wonder whether purchasing these products actually sends a stronger message to the food industry than abstaining from animal foods altogether. It’s also a good idea to cut back on meat consumption, for health reasons in addition to animal welfare reasons. As I recall even PETA has said, two flexitarians is as good as one vegan, from the perspective of overall animal suffering. Finally, I encourage you to adopt homeless companion animals instead of buying them in pet shops or from breeders. You can make a big difference in those animals’ lives, at least.

Moral of the story: Being a flexitarian because you think animals’ suffering doesn’t matter, or because vegetarian food weirds you out, is probably not morally commendable. But we can’t infer a person’s quality of character from what she puts on her plate. Reasons to be, or not to be, veg*n are more complicated than most people interested in such matters seem to realize.

So, I’ve been thinking about it on and off since then. As it turns out, it’s actually a great example of a problem case for the leading three types of normative moral theories. Today, I’ll show why. Next time, I’ll discuss how I think we can productively think about the matter “on the ground,” so to speak, and apart from any particular moral theory.

The three basic types of normative moral theories are: consequentialism, deontological (duty– or obligation-based) theories, and virtue ethics. The most often discussed examples of these theories are, respectively, Bentham & Mill’s act utilitarianism, Kantianism, and Aristotelian virtue ethics. I have neither the time nor the inclination to reproduce for you the arguments in favor of these theories, so just assume for the time being that they exist and are decent. I’m more interested in seeing how they fail to account for the line problem adequately.

The question of the day is: what is the moral status of allowing a person to “cut” in front of you in a line? Is such an act morally impermissible, permissible, obligatory or even supererogatory? (see definitions here).

Act Utilitarianism

According to traditional AU, an act is both morally permissible and obligatory if and only if it produces more total utility (pleasure minus pain, impartially considered, in the long run) than all other acts available to the agent. All other actions are morally impermissible because they produce less than maximal utility. No action is supererogatory, in the sense of going morally above and beyond what is required, because if any act would produce more utility, even at a cost to the agent herself, then the agent is already morally obligated to do it. And every permissible act is also obligatory; AU is commonly understood not to offer any moral options, except in case that two or more acts tie for best in their ability to produce utility.

How can we use AU to think about the moral status of letting someone cut in front of you in line? It would seem to be pretty straightforward: just figure out if the person cutting in the line has some important and pressing need to go first that outweighs the minor inconvenience to everyone else in the line. But actually, the line case makes obvious some knowledge & time problems with AU. You really need to know quite alot about not only the person cutting, but also about everyone else behind you in the line, and whether or not a slight delay will affect them greatly. You also need to know about their personal psychologies: maybe someone back there has an acute sense of line justice and will get super stabby if they see someone else cut. The time it would take to figure these things out would end up costing everyone a bunch of utiles. To this sort of objection, John Stuart Mill says we can use time-tested moral rules of thumb to avoid wasting time doing utility calculations. For instance, we might adopt the rule that allowing one person to cut is generally conducive to the overall good. But JSM is still committed to the position that, should the rule fail in a particular case, that you have acted wrongly even without knowing so. And that is weird. So AU is not particularly helpful in our line case.

Kantian Deontology

To make a long story obscenely short, Kant thinks that moral permissions and obligations can be derived from either of two categorical imperatives. The first categorical imperative gets translated as something like this: “Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a universal law.” It means that you ought not act on principles that either are logically impossible for everyone to follow (such as making promises that one knows one cannot keep — comment if you would like an explanation) or that would be really terrible if everyone followed (a principle never to give aid to others). The second categorical imperative says to “act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never as a mere means.” This basically says not to use people in ways to which they could not or would not consent as rational agents.

Is allowing people to cut in line required, permitted or forbidden by either categorical imperative? When we test it with CI #1, it seems that making into universal law a rule allowing people to cut in line is not logically impossible nor catastrophic in practice. This suggests that it has the same status under Kantianism as imperfect duties of beneficence to others: one ought to give to charity some of the time, and to give others a place in the line some of the time. Trouble is, Kantianism doesn’t really have anything more to say as to when and where imperfect duties ought to be discharged. So it isn’t really helpful in the line cutting case. It only verifies the commonsense intuition that sometimes line cutting should be permitted and sometimes it shouldn’t.

It isn’t particularly helpful to resort to the second categorical imperative, either. I agree with Fred Feldman that, while the moral intuition that using people is morally bad is surely correct, it is not a particularly informative guide to action (“On Treating People as Ends in Themselves: A Critique of Kant”). The most plausible interpretations of CI #2 read it as requiring that either one help others achieve their goals, or specifically their rational goals. But, presumably, both a person who wants a place in line and the people behind you in line have goals, even rational ones, which conflict. You can’t help both. So Kantianism doesn’t seem to generate any kind of specific answer to our question.

Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

Aristotelian virtue ethics examines what kind of life is good for a human and how one comes to lead that kind of life, rather than assessing particular acts for rightness or wrongness in isolation. In short, a flourishing human life consists in developing and exercising both moral and intellectual virtues. The moral virtues in particular are probably familiar to you: honesty, kindness, generosity, etc etc. Aristotle proposes the Doctrine of the Mean as a way of thinking about virtues: find a pair of opposing virtues, and aim at the middle in thought, feeling, and action. For instance, true courage lies at the mean between rashness and cowardice. But the mean is relative to us and our situations; what would be rash for me might be courageous for someone larger and stronger than me. Young people can be habituated to acting well (e.g., not lying, not hitting) by the rewards and punishments of authority figures.  Then, with time and maturity, their proto-virtues can be perfected by their coming to understand the reasons why those are good actions & coming to take pleasure in acting well. Even so, perfect virtue is an ideal that no one or almost no one will reach.

Try as though I might, and much to my chagrin, I am thoroughly unable to come up with any virtues that are clearly related to the line cutting issue. Generosity is not quite right, because a place in line which, say, costs 10 people 2 minutes is not entirely or even mostly yours to give. Allowing the person to cut costs you 2 minutes and 9 other people a total of 18 minutes. Surely true generosity does not consist in giving away others’ time to which you have no right. And, if the line were such that the amount of time you’d lose were equal to the time one other person behind you would lose, then there would be no compelling reason for another person to ask to go ahead of you, or for you to let them. Patience isn’t really right, either, because generally allowing people to cut in front of you probably represents an excess of patience, and not the mean. So, at this point, I have no idea how to make the line cutting issue fit the virtue ethics mold at all.

So, at this point, you should know a thing or two about the three main kinds of moral theories, and why the line cutting issue is at least prima facie not adequately addressed by any of them. I don’t mean to say that no form of consequentialism, deontology or virtue ethics is properly equipped to deal with the line issue. It’s just interesting that, for all I know about ethics (which I like to think is kind-of-quite-a-bit), I have not been able to use these theories to fruitfully think about what seems like a rather trivial matter. But actually, standing in line is something we do alot more often than we find ourselves in a trolley car case, for instance. So I think we need to dig a little deeper into the ethics toolbox to get at the heart of the matter. And that’s what I intend to do, when I follow up on this post later this week.