From the time I first became aware of myself as a social being interacting with others, I have felt the pull of ethical values. I suspect it was my mother who imbued me with this somewhat precocious sensibility. As a child I felt she was a pre-eminently ethical person and wanted me to behave that way.
My mom lived ethical values and made them a component of her child rearing. In her mothering she was not overly strict, but did convey the notion that it was the place of children to always treat their parents with respect. She also somehow let me know that following the herd was not a virtue. She wanted me to do the right thing even if acceptance among my peers would take a hit. Being unconventional has since held its allure for me. She included among her moral adages what was a parental cliché of the 1950s: “Joseph (she was the only person to call me “Joseph”) just because everyone else jumps off the Empire Statement Building doesn't mean that you have to also.” Again, not original, but the point stuck.
Her ethics did lend itself to weightier applications. I clearly remember her telling me in 1959 that the state of California was about to do a grave wrong in executing Caryl Chessman. Chessman had become a death row author, sentenced to death when kidnapping was still a capital crime. His case made national news, and after multiple appeals Chessman was executed in California's gas chamber. My mother had an absolute position against capital punishment that clearly emerged out of purely ethical sensibilities. As a result, abolishing capital punishment became the first social justice issue to which I became committed and evolved into a life long cause that found me active as a participant and leader in a list of organizations.
My mother died suddenly and tragically when I was twelve. But her ethics stuck with me like a ghost that lingers after the body is gone. I credited her and the values she endowed me with as the foundation on which I have build my character over a life-time. From the time of my childhood, I was a precocious Kantian. The notion and impulse to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing had powerful appeal for me. It became a type of enchantment.
It was not, however, a vehicle toward smooth social relations. In fact, in my difficult adolescence it made we feel like a bit of an outlier and alienated me from my peers. The desire to do the right thing may have been a basis for building meaning into life, but it wasn't and isn't a road to happiness. It did become, however, the source of a deeply imbued sense of justice. Enforced with an empathetic disposition, I have always been sensitive to the suffering of others, including those who labor under the ubiquitous hardships that fate and fortune have so liberally, and mercilessly, foisted on the human condition. Leo Tolstoy had once written something to the effect that a person must choose between conscience and life. Ethical commitment can bring us meaning but it can also impede our happiness. As the 17th century poet Alexander Pope noted, we humans are forever caught in a middle state torn between contrasting and contrary proclivities that pull us in opposite directions.
My ethical sensitivities led me to discover the Ethical Culture Movement during my last year in college in 1968 when I was nineteen. Here was a movement that proclaimed the primacy of ethics; that neither riches, fame nor self-interest should serve as the governor of life. To its credit Ethical Culture places its ethical ideals within communities of active people, which serves to blunt and humanize the austerity of the ideals which would otherwise remain abstract and cold.
Soon after joining the New York Society for Ethical Culture, I was invited into its training program. I picked up the invitation and serving as a professional leader has been my vocation ever since, for the past 53 years.
The famed paleontologist, Stephen J. Gould once wrote something to the effect that fortunate indeed is the person who can take the love of his childhood and turn it into the career of a life-time. Gould who was raised in Queens as I was and became enchanted with dinosaurs when his father took him on a trip to the Museum of Natural History when he was five. Studying dinosaurs and fossils led to Gould's a career as one of the pre-eminent evolutionary biologists of our time. I don't conclude that a love of ethics brings the same kind of the sensate rewards derived from playing with dinosaurs, but I can say that I have been able to make a career of ethical pursuit that unfolded from my very early years and has been a source of life-long fulfillment.
Living according to ethical ideals has always seemed right to me. As an atheist, we need to turn our attention outward to other people and work to ensure their flourishing. We are enjoined to live our lives to create a better world, both now and for generations that will come after us. For the person of such humanistic persuasion there is certainly enough to do.
The Ethical Movement which has enabled me to live out my values sincerely and without self-denial and with my conscience intact, originated in the thought of its founder, Felix Adler. Adler's philosophy bore the stamp of German idealism. It is high-minded, rationalistic, austere,and carries an aura of transcendentalism that veers on a mystical sensibility. What impels us to ethical striving, to want to do the right thing, is the tension that Felix Adler drew between the actual world we inhabit and the ideal realm which we strive for and incrementally approach, but can never attain. Quite aptly, Adler concluded that frustration is our lot.
But I want to focus on an element in such an ethic that causes me to balk and I have come to reject. The ideal realm that inspires us to action is the realm of perfection. Adler's writing and voluminous public addresses continually reference perfection as the model and the lodestar that should guide our actions as we make our way through life. The perfect person and the perfection society should serve as our inspirations.
I see several pitfalls in ethical striving so conceived. The adage “the perfect is the enemy of the good” pertains. Since perfection is not possible for us, aiming to achieve it, not only brings inevitable frustration, it may also occasion premature surrender of our efforts. As a vegetarian, I not infrequently find myself in conversation with friends who share with me their desire on ethical grounds to take the vegetarian route but are feeling challenged. My approach is to suggest that in our circle what we choose to eat is not derived from divine command and it is better to eat less meat than more. Absolutizing our aspirations places upon us a goal so demanding that the entire effort may seem to not be worth it.
Such a conclusion leads me to a position of incrementalism or meliorism. It a view more in accordance with the naturalistic ethics of John Dewey's pragmatism than Adler's idealism, though their political aspirations for humankind were similar. Rather than inspired by ethereal ideals, Dewey's ethics is motivated by a commitment to grapple with and practically overcome problems that we encounter in our daily lives.
But it is a second problem I want to focus on. I confirm that ethics requires judgment. Without judgment and discernment there can be no ethics. “This is right, that is wrong.” “This is good, that is bad.” I was socialized in the counter-culture of the 1960s. The spirit of the times was voluntaristic, and unimpeded fulfillment (the mantra of “self-actualization) of one's aspirations and potentials was highly valued. Hence we conveyed the message among ourselves that we shouldn't think in terms of “shoulds.” “Should” became a dirty word implying such undesirable and priggish concepts as obligation and duty, all obstacles to the unimpeded and ostensibly happy life.
Dispositionally, I could never go there. Such utopian aspirations seemed self-contradictory, as well as unrealistic and more than a trifle adolescent. Again, if we value ethics and strive to live ethically, then we can't avoid at some point making judgments. “Should” inevitably takes its place in our moral vocabulary.
And herein lies the peril of ethical striving that too often lies latent and needs to be unearthed:
The more we elevate the importance of ethics and ethical values and incorporate them into our lives, the greater the danger. The danger I am pointing to is that of self-righteousness, even sanctimoniousness. It is the danger of hidden self-congratulation. It is the gratification, perhaps sublimated, of moral superiority, that places oneself falsely above the one who is judged and putatively outside the fray of human fallibility.
The position I take is that ethics needs to be thickly contextualized. I am not referring here to the debate over “cultural relativism” which so vexes the world of human rights. I do hold that there are ethical values that are absolutely wrong – and absolutely right - independent of cultural contexts.
I refer rather, to the need to see the actions of others, and especially those we disapprove of or find morally wanting, within the framework of a broader understanding of the vulnerabilities that are inherent in what it means to be a human being. In other words, our commitment to ethical ideals and values must always be chastened by a sense of humility, what Buddhists would refer to as compassion. It is a felt understanding that universally we are all fallible. Our common existential humanity, which at its foundations binds us all together, needs to recognize that we all without exception stumble and fall. In our times, which often confront us as so harsh, and in which people retreat so adamantly behind their own truths to point excoriating fingers at others, these fundamental realities remain too hidden.
When we turn our ethics outward to others, which, as noted, inevitably partakes of judgment, we, at the same time, are holding a mirror to ourselves. Humility suggests that in the realm of ethics the door to self-awareness must always be open and forgiveness close at hand.
I did not know that “Ethical” was intended to be an adjective expressing aspiration, a very useful fact. Indeed, “woe to those who identify as an achievement.” To the wisdom of humility! Thanks.
I’ve witnessed the perils to which you refer, including a good amount of dishonesty, disapproval of other members, and public self-righteousness. It’s been off-putting, divisive, and incompatible with my principles and the stated principles of Ethical. Might that be part of why “the movement” hasn’t grown in decades? While a member of Ethical, I am happy to have found more thoughtful conversations and diverse opinions through the Stoicism and philosophy groups often led by Massimo Pigliucci, sometimes in partnership with others. That's a rapidly growing movement locally, nationally, and internationally. There might be something to be learned from it. Just saying, looking in the mirror’s good, but so is looking at what’s happening in the larger competitive universe.