Editors Note: The following is the text of a speech that math and philosophy teacher Curtis Robison delivered at the Cum Laude Induction Ceremony on April 26. What a rare privilege this is for me to occasionally address the school at this ceremony. Seven years ago I spoke in praise of doubt, arguing that it is, in part, through doubt that we come to earn our justified beliefs. And there certainly is a moral dimension to acquiring and holding justified beliefs and expanding our knowledge, but today I m going to focus more squarely on this year s school theme of doing the right thing. I ll save a talk on the ethics of belief for some other occasion. In particular, this talk will be a reflection on the question: Why be moral? This is almost a dream audience to have for such a reflection.there may not be any demographic more likely to begin pondering such a question than ninth- and 10th-graders. Yet fundamental probing questions of meaning and purpose like this one, pondered with such earnestness and sincerity in adolescence, is never abandoned by philosophers. We should start by asking when such a question as Why should I be moral? would most naturally arise. It seems that such a question might be raised when someone is faced with a conflict of the sort found when two courses of action are incompatible (i.e., cannot both be carried out) and where one course of action is taken to be an obligation based on moral grounds, whereas the reasons for carrying out the other course of action are non-moral (e.g., desires of self-interest.) The questioner, then, seems to be calling for a justification, or perhaps an incentive, for acting on moral grounds when it appears that acting on moral grounds would run counter to his self-interest. The question then becomes: Why ought I to do what is moral when it appears not to be in my own interest? Notice that in such a formulation, the questioner implicitly seems to assume that self-interest provides a rational justification for performing a certain act; the concern is whether or how moral reasons for action might be justified. So it s worth noting that such a question could or would arise only if it is taken that doing what is moral actually is in conflict (or at least could, in principal, be in conflict) with some other course of action that is justified on non-moral grounds. (For the philosophers in the room, this question makes sense only on the presumption that ethical egoism is false). The question presumes that morality is such that it may sometimes require a person to act in a manner that would not maximize his own self-interest. Before we turn to some of the philosophical issues bound up in this question of Why be moral, we should, perhaps, look at some of the answers popular culture provides to the question. One type of answer is perhaps best embodied in that holiday classic that neatly blends loosely veiled threats to toddlers with good Christmas cheer: Santa Claus is coming to Town. Many of you probably know it: You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout. I m telling you why. Santa Claus is coming to town. Now, I briefly proposed getting these fine young scholars behind me to burst into song at this moment, complete with finger wagging on key lines like I m telling you why. But I m afraid that, with only three minutes of attempted persuasion, I was unable to generate a sufficiently
large coalition of the willing. So you ll just have to imagine that scene with me, and we ll file it away in some sort of Catalog of Potential Speeches. Anyway, that song offers one early answer that many of us got to the question of Why be moral? : You d better be moral because if you re not, you won t get a lot of presents. It s a close cousin to lots of answers from popular culture such as You don t want to get grounded, You don t want to get caught by the deans, You don t want to be in Saturday night study hall, or, escalating, You don t want to serve time in jail, or, escalating still further, You don t want to rot in hell, and so on. These answers and others like them, however, all suffer from the same inadequacy. They don t really address the actual question people are asking (which is, Why be moral when it s not in your self interest so to be? ) These sorts of non-philosophical answers simply claim you got the calculations wrong. They are, in fact, simply appealing to your self-interest. Now, it could be that the world (or at least your part of it) may be organized in such a way that there is a surprisingly high correlation between those actions that are moral and those actions that are in your enlightened self-interest. Indeed, strong families, good schools, and just societies will often set up elaborate sets of rules and systems of rewards and punishments, incentives and disincentives to encourage people to do the right thing. But unless enlightened self-interest is all that there is to morality, then our question hasn t really been answered. At the very best, these sorts of responses just suggest that if you do your calculations correctly, you ll find that being moral and acting in your own interest may not conflict as much as you might have thought. But these answers decidedly do not answer the question of Why be moral? when it is not in your self-interest. So let s see what philosophers might have to say on it. First, it seems difficult to determine just how the word should is being used in such an ultimate question as Why should I be moral? If we take should to be used in a moral sense, then the question hardly seems worth asking. It is trivial and tautological that on moral grounds we should do what is moral because it is moral. So if the question is not to be regarded as utterly trivial, then it must be considered to be asking for some non-moral reason for being moral. It must be taken to mean this: By what non-moral grounds should I hold that moral considerations ought to override any and all non-moral considerations? The modern philosopher Kurt Baier in his book The Moral Point of View attempts an answer. Though it is a noble effort, I believe his answer fails. So let me sketch his answer, give a couple of reasons why it doesn t work, and then argue why no such answer could work. Roughly, Baier claims that everyone s acting out of moral considerations best serves people s collective interests. (But recall that serving people s collective interests must be viewed in this argument as a non-moral reason because it would be entirely circular if he were to give a moral reason for doing so.) So here s what he claims: If everyone acted out of self-interest, the result would be the rather grim dog-eat-dog world of the sort envisioned by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes a world that serves no one well, a brutish world where reason suggests preemptive
strikes to eliminate risks to self-interest. In the absence of societally agreed upon moral rules, it would be suicidal for just a few individuals to act morally. But he says: The situation can change, and reason can support morality, only when the presumption about other people s behavior is reversed. When people live in a society, that is, if they have common ways of life, which are taught to all members and somehow enforced by the group, then the members of that society have reason to expect their fellows generally to obey its rules, that is, its morality, customs and law, even when doing so is not, on certain occasions, in their interest. Hence they too have reason to follow these rules. Now that argument of Baier s actually sounds great, and he made quite a name for himself in the last half of the 20th century with that argument. But ultimately, and I m certainly not alone on this, I believe Baier s answer is unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, notice how he seems to have switched the question from Why should I be moral? to Why should people, collectively, be moral? By answering the second question one cannot assume that he has thereby answered the first. He has argued simply that if, in general, everyone acts on moral principles, then, in general, the world will be a happier place. But I understand perfectly well why I want everyone else to be moral. I mean, who wouldn t want that? When everyone else is moral, I have it great. My stuff doesn t get stolen, no one cheats me out of things or gains unfair advantage, I can count on people to follow through with what they say they re going to do. I won t get mugged. I ll receive appropriate help when I need it. Of course I want everyone else to be moral. Duh! But what I was seeking in asking the question is why should I be moral when it s not in my interest. (If you argue that my immorality will upset the whole perfect Garden-of-Eden thing and so it will lead to my being worse off, then again the question hasn t been answered. Rather, you just said my calculations were off.) Of course, my acting immorally in a world where everyone else is doing their part to be moral is completely parasitically unfair, but that s a moral objection of course there are moral reasons for why I should be moral. If the question is to make sense, I m looking for non-moral reasons. The second inadequacy with Baier s answer is a more general problem that I believe would be shared by any proposed answer to our question as it was finally formulated ( By what non-moral grounds should I hold that moral considerations ought to override any and all non-moral considerations? ) In justifying morality by reference to the non-moral consideration of best serving people s collective interests, he seems to be giving a non-moral consideration supremacy over moral considerations. If we accept Baier, then our justification of morality is contingent upon moral considerations being those that best serve people s collective interests. If, for example, self-interested considerations were those that best served people s collective interests, then self-interested considerations should override moral ones. But the final blow seems to come from the following question: Why should I do what is moral when it conflicts with that which best serves people s collective interests? For Baier there could be no answer because by the way he has set things up, best serving people s collective interests overrides any moral consideration. And remember from the earlier analysis, best serving people s collective interest cannot be regarded as a moral consideration or else this response would be a trivial answer to our question. (You should do what is moral because it is moral.)
Now there are plenty of philosophers of a utilitarian slant that argue that something like best serving people s collective interests is the ultimate moral principle the standard by which we judge whether an action or a rule or a practice is moral. But offering a utilitarian standard for morality is not the same thing as trying to justify why one should be moral. Utilitarianism is rather one answer to the question What is moral? The question we ve been wrestling with is Why should I do what s moral?. They aren t the same thing. So given that our question was seeking to justify with non-moral reasons why moral considerations ought to override any and all non-moral considerations, Baier has failed to meet the question. This second inadequacy of Baier s answer is, I believe, a problem that all potential answers to our question would share. If we try to provide some other non-moral justification of morality (e.g., prudence), we would be faced with the same problem. In that case, moral considerations could not be said to be overriding considerations of prudence. The issue is such that in attempting to justify (outside of morality) the supremacy of moral considerations, we always would introduce non-moral considerations that would be supreme. We would thereby sketch a system of practical judgments that has non-moral considerations at the top. Yet, we got into this whole discussion trying to figure out if we could justify why moral arguments should be supreme. This suggests that the task of providing a non-moral justification for the total supremacy of moral considerations is impossible; and, of course, to provide a moral justification of the supremacy of moral considerations is trivial. So acting out of moral considerations must be considered basic, just like acting out of self-interest is considered basic. It always just seems a priori reasonable to everyone that acting out of self-interest is justified. You don t hear people spending much time agonizing over the question Why should I act in my self-interest? It is taken for granted that self-interest offers a primary motivation for reasonable action. But what I m trying to suggest is that morality must, likewise, be seen as a primary motivation. Personally, I see nothing unusual or wrong in believing that a sufficient motivation for performing a given action is the mere recognition that performing that action is one s moral duty (what one ought to do). Indeed, if we are to hold that there is always some type of motivation for acting morally ( Why we should be moral? ), then acting out of moral considerations must be considered basic. It must be considered a primary motivation for action in much the same way that self-interest is, naturally, considered a primary motivation for action. So a moral answer to our original question is trivial, and a non-moral answer is not forthcoming. So where does that leave us? It seems that all we can do is examine a person s system of practical judgments including our own describe it, and thereby determine which considerations are regarded by that person as supreme, or overriding. For some it might be moral considerations; for others it might not. Each of us must choose what kind of person we want to be. A central feature of our personhood involves what reasons we consider overriding when determining a course of action. A person must decide for herself what she is going to care about in her life. It is the ultimate decision to be a certain sort of person. As one philosopher put it: To
make an ultimate commitment of this sort is nothing less than to define oneself. There is no way to escape this choice of self-definition. We always make decisions and choices in daily life that are not themselves ultimate, but we do so only in terms of the conceptual system embodied in the ultimate principles of our way of life those principles that determine what we accept as basic reasons for acting and reasons for choosing. Our way of life is our way of defining ourselves. It is not imposed on us from the outside at least not fully so we have some say in the matter. And our way of life is not merely a reflection of the kind of person we already are, for our being a certain kind of person (after we ve attained the age of reason) is due to our having chosen to live in a certain way, not the other way around. At every moment, whether we realize it or not, we are choosing our way of life. The fact that we do not change our mode of living from one moment to the next does not show that no choice is being made. For if we do not change, we are, in effect, choosing to continue to be what we have been, and so we are still creating ourselves, defining our own nature by living as we do. So whether our way of life is one in which morality outweighs self-interest in cases of conflict between the two, or is one in which self-interest overrides morality, it is our way of life because we have made it so. We determine for ourselves which will be supreme, ethics or ego. It is our ultimate choice. It is a matter of how we decide to live and to define ourselves. We cannot escape the responsibility to define our selfhood at every moment. Most of us have, fortunately, met people for whom moral considerations seem to take precedence in their system of practical judgments. We also, unfortunately, have met people for whom morality seems to play very little role in their practical judgments. There are exemplars of each way of living. And each of us must confront that most ultimate question of what type of person we want to be. A choice to be moral is basic and fundamental to how you might wish to define yourself. It cannot be justified in all cases by appeal to non-moral interests. So maybe, just maybe, that classic holiday song had it right after all. You ve just got to be good for goodness sake.