This is Chapter 27 of my advice to a hypothetical baby. I’m using this website to act out my time-travel fantasy of going back give myself pointers on how to avoid some of Life’s potholes. If I only knew what I now know . . . All of these chapters (soon to be 100) can be found here.

Today I’m here to warn you to watch out for those who cast about moral rules when they try to get you to obey them. Our most popular moral rules include these:

• The Golden Rule
• Utilitarianism
• The Categorical Imperative

These rules do a very bad job of telling you what to do with your life. They don’t even do a good job of telling you what to do next. I know, I know.  I already shat on the usefulness of moral rules back in Chapter 10, but it’s time for another deep dive.

Let’s assume that you are Hitler trying tact in accordance with any of these rules. Imagine Hitler hearing about the Golden Rule of “Do Unto Others” at the peak of his tyrannical reign. Sure, he would think. “If I were any other intelligent person, then I would want me to run Germany exactly how I am running Germany!” If you think that Hitler would be applying the rule incorrectly, he would disagree. Further, there are no rules on how to apply the Golden Rule.

Utilitarianism has the same problem. It rule requires you to maximize well being by doing the thing that is the greatest good for the greatest number. Hitler would say: “I’m doing everything I can to bring the greatest good to the greatest number! You won’t believe how good this empire will be when I’m finished building it.” Again, you might disagree with Hitler here, but the way you apply utilitarianism depends on how you define “good,” and even reasonable people disagree intensely about what is “good.” Even massively dysfunctional and dangerous people like Hitler think they know what it means to be “good.”

Kant’s Categorical Imperative demands that we take the maxim by which we propose to act and ask ourselves whether we could make that maxim a universally applicable maxim. Hitler would say that he was doing great things for Germany so, absolutely yes, everyone should act in accordance Hitler’s personal maxims of conduct. BTW, Kant famously declared that a proper maxim is to refrain from lying. He concluded that if a madman with a weapon asked you to tell him where your friend was (so he could kill him), you should not lie.

I’m not done kicking around our simplistic moral rules. People cavalierly state that we need to properly “apply” our moral rules as though “applying is a simple action akin to “applying” a band aid to a paper cut. It’s clearly not that simple. There are many ways for people to consciously (and unconsciously) interpret our simple moral rules. They must:

• Decide what particular words of rule means.

• Distinguish the connotation from the denotation.

• Decide whether to read the rule narrowly or broadly.

• Decide whether the rule is persuasive and thus applicable in this particular case.

The bottom line is that our moral rules are hopelessly vague. They would never pass Constitutional muster. “Your Honor, we have alleged that the Defendant failed to act in such a way to result in the greatest good for the greatest number.” Although such a rule would tell us that we shouldn’t set a forest on fire because we are bored and cold, we already knew that without the rule.

Whenever we deal with rules, we have a major problem of how to “apply” a rule. Stanley Fish once wrote: “Every rule is a rule of thumb,” and this follows in the steps of Aristotle, interpreted by Nancy Sherman (who was discussing Aristotle’s position on legal rules) in her book, The Fabric of Character (1989):

[Aristotle] cautions against [the] … intrinsic defects and the dangers of over-rigorous applications [of rules]. … [They are not] external or rigid, but … an expression of ongoing and active reason. What is final is not the deliverances of written law, but rather the best judgments of those who, guided by experience and the law, can improve upon it . . . . Law is … inevitably general . . . determining responsibility depends upon a m ore rather than less complete rendering of the circumstances of action; this is an aspect of sympathetic judgement. Compulsion, duress, ignorance of particulars, unforeseeable consequences all m ay conspire to limit ascriptions of responsibility. And the presence of these conditions is often grasped only upon a complete account of what happened. . . [T]he benefits of proceduralism never obscure the fact of written law’s uneasy fit to the particular case.

I have taken three courses in moral philosophy in my life. In each of these courses, I asked the professor whether he had ever considered the works of a moral philosopher when struggle to make a moral decision. All three told me “never.” I then asked why we are pretending that these writings give real life guidance, but I never received a helpful answer.

Jonathan Haidt is a scientist who studies how people make moral decisions. We discussed him earlier in Chapter 24 on “social intuitionism.” In his book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt wrote: “Deontology (the Categorical Imperative) and utilitarianism are “one-receptor” moralities that are likely to appeal most strongly to people who are high on systemizing and low on empathizing.”

As discussed in Chapter 24, people can be seen as double personas, one an emotional elephant and the other a small Rider who serves as the Elephant’s PR department. Moral mono-rules are the kinds of things that the Rider whispers into the Elephant’s ear. That is the essence of social intuitionism: Our intuitions are in charge and we explain our decisions with what often amounts to utter bullshit.

At p. 368, Haidt warns about all forms of moral monism, ready-made platitudes that allegedly encompass all you need to know in order to live a moral life:

If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places-particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable.

Beware that people use moral rules to justify whatever they want to do. When we “apply” our vague moral rules, we give ourselves the freedom of doing anything we want. We convince ourselves that our simplistic rule determine our behavior, even though moral rules are almost entirely post hoc ad hoc justifications. We are great at convincing ourselves that we are “good” people for our entire stay on planet Earth. I haven’t yet met any person who thinks that they are incapable of deciding what is moral. Everyone who looks in the mirror sees a basically good and decent person, maybe even a hero. OK, maybe there are some folks who see themselves as failures who have 1000 concocted excuses for failing, but failures who are basically good people.

We employ our simplistic moral mono-rules to excuse our irresponsible behavior as consumers. We use our rules as salves for the guilt-free destruction of our planet. We gobble chocolate with no thought of the people (including many children) forced to do the hard work overseas. We sip cocktails on cruise ships while children attend life-damaging under-funded shitty schools. We burn fossil fuels to go on long trips in our over-sized cars and to over-heat and over-cool our enormous houses. And while we are profligately destroying our planet, leaving it dramatically more shitty than it was when we arrived, we do this damage in good conscience because we haven’t broken any of our simple moral rules—not in our minds.

We are the good people, always the heroes in our own stories. We are nice people who do unto others and who make sure we maximize happiness in the mini-worlds to which we attend (because WYSIATI, Chapter 14). And if we ever feel a twinge of guilt, we look to heavens for forgiveness and pre-forgiveness by uttering some equivalent of: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It’s a very sophisticated ruse that allows us (and people like us) to be piggish while others starve. What happens in our gated-village stays in our gated-village. That is the degenerate power of our simpleton moral rules.

We use our simple moral rules to engage in conscience-washing. This is the same reason many people go to church. It’s also like wearing a flag pin so that you can claim that you are patriotic. Or like putting a Black Lives Matter sign on your front lawn while vigorously engaging in the soft bigotry of low expectations. Self-identified Maxist Freddie deBoer recently commented on this hypocrisy of the wokeness/social justice movement:

[T]he social justice movement has coopted basic left goals and has completely failed to meet them. The social justice movement hates racism, sexism, homophobia, and assorted social ills, and yet has achieved nothing in fighting them.

It’s like magic: Simple phrases absolve us of responsibility. Our moral rules define us as good because they invite us to cart in our own definitions of “good” whenever we utter these rules. Everyone is fair and good. Who would ever admit that they are not fair, mean or thoughtless? I have lived 65 years and almost never met any people who admit these things.

I’m sorry to keep pulling you down, making things worse. But it will rue your day when it occurs to you that dollars and hours are both fungible. This fungibility means that you ever be able fo escape your duty to be moral. Those dollars that you just spent on a luxury car could have been spent saving the lives of starving children. The hours you spent on that week-long visit to a health resort could have been spent tutoring children trapped in dysfunctional schools. There is no moral oasis.

Do our simple moral rules allow us to accrue piles of wealth and to use our economic clout to buy things like iPhones? Yes!  But doesn’t doing this make us economic Harvey Weinsteins? We commonly use our money to take advantage of people without power or money and we do it without the slightest twinge of conscience, over and over. Those who sell us new glitzy things also provide us the service of not forcing us to see how those things are made and what abuse is being done to the workers. If ever we are challenged about whether we are abusing powerless workers abroad with our piles of wealth, just wait for the sorts of things that you and I blurt out: “Those workers were old enough to give consent and they knew enough to give consent and we are actually doing them a favor.”

John Rawls realized that we needed a powerful tool to help us to create meaningful moral rules. He came up with the “Veil of Ignorance” to test our proposed ideas for fairness. Do you want to make moral rules (or political rules)? Behind Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance, no one knows who they are—to engage in Rawl’s pretend that we are all souls waiting to be born on Earth, about to be born parents all over the globe at random. These souls lack clues as to their class, their privilege, their disadvantages, or their personality or their lack thereof. At the time they write these moral rules, these souls don’t know where they’ll end up, so they will be more likely to cover all bases. You might end up on the bottom on the heap once the veil is lifted, so you’d better make sure that design a fair world that won’t have a permanent miserable underclass! Rawl’s Veil reminds me of one of my mother’s rule: The child who cuts the piece of cake in two (to divide it for two children) must take the smaller piece. He veil also reminds me of the problems that Anatole France wanted to avoid:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.

We all struggle to do “the right thing,” but it is damned difficult because we and our world are so incredibly complex, while our moral rules seem to be mere toys and distractions. Can moral rules tell us whether to visit our ailing Grandma next weekend, or are we free to take a week off? Can they tell us how much money to give to the next beggar we encounter? Can they tell us whether we can take the high-paying job or whether we should take the low pay job that will allow us to better serve the downtrodden in our community?

Our moral rules don’t tell us what to do. Not in the next minute or hour or day. Imagine going to school to be a plumber or dancer or doctor but the only thing they taught you is what NOT to do! Knowing what not to do, however, is barely scratching the surface. We need to know what to do! We love our simple moral rules because they certify our actions as “good,” no matter what we’ve chosen to do. But they don’t help us decide our future actions any more than the bits of wisdom that we chant when we are trying to make tough decisions. What is better? “Look before you leap?” Or “He who hesitates is lost.”? What is better? “Out of sight, out of mind?” Or “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”?

It’s not that our rules are completely useless. As Philosopher Andy Clark points out, they provoke (often helpful) discussion:

The attempt to condense expertise . . . into a set of rules and principles that can be economically expressed by a few sentences of public language may thus be wildly optimistic, akin to trying to reduce a dog’s olfactory skills to a small body of prose. Clark reconceptualizes rules as “guides and signposts” that enable collaborative exploration “rather than as failed attempts to capture the rich structure of our individual . . . knowledge.”

ANDY CLARK, ” Connectionism, Moral Cognition, and Collaborative Problem Solving,” in MIND AND MORALS: ESSAYS ON COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND ETHICS (1996).

But here we are, at the end of a long essay, with no solid guidance for what we are supposed to do. My point is that this guidance does not exist in the form of simple strings of words. Perhaps it is ineffable. Perhaps it is only instinct. Perhaps we can only know what it isn’t. Perhaps we can only know it in hindsight. I’ve pasted Harlan Ellison’s quote in a prior Chapter, and I’ll paste is in again here. He explains succinctly why he has done the questionable things he has done in his life:

. . . [My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about love—whenever we try to explain why we have done any particular thing, whether it’s buying T-bills or why we would live in a house in the mountains or why we took the trip to Lake Ronkonkoma, or whatever it was, the only rationale that ever rings with honesty is: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” We’re really no smarter than cactus or wolverines or plankton; and the things we do, we always like to justify them, find logical reasons for them; and then you go to court later and the judge says, “Well, didn’t you know that it was doomed from the start?” I’m waiting for someone to say to the judge, “Because, schmuck, I’m no smarter than you.

More to come on this topic . . .