Two Approaches to Living Well
The Ethical
There are two fundamentally different approaches to investigating what living well means.
The first — let’s call it ethics — works primarily within the sphere of idea. We consider ideas about how we could live and search for rules and principles that would offer a reliable map of the good and the bad or of the ought and ought not.
Ethical approaches to living well can focus on what a proper goal should be, such as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people,1 focus on illegitimate motivations for action, like furthering one’s own ends without considering the impact on other people,2 or focus on the codes of action a person must follow for them to be morally good. Don’t steal. Don’t cause animals to suffer. Don’t be unfaithful to your partner.
All ethical approaches work through capturing any actions we want to consider within the realm of idea. We label the actions and classify them. A misleading statement becomes a ‘lie’ and people protesting politically become either ‘demonstrators’ or ‘agitators’.
Once the actions under consideration are labelled, they can be placed within a structure of ideas that distinguishes between the admirable and the reprehensible. If the idea-of-action meets the relevant conditions of goodness, the action itself becomes morally acceptable.
The Limitations of Ethics
The ethical systems we grow up with can seem to have an immutable power, as if they were written into the fabric of the universe. But there is no way to probe ethical systems scientifically by seeing how well they fit observations of what the world is like. Ethics doesn’t describe the world. It judges it.
Nor can ethics have a validity based on internal consistency, as mathematical and logical truths have. Ethical propositions must go beyond internal consistency and say something about the world.
And even if a person was to place their full faith in ethical imperatives, it would be impossible for the person to meet all the conditions of goodness that could be applied to them. In today’s world we are not only expected not to murder, not to steal, and not to be gluttonous or slothful. We are also told that it is good to be kind, happy, rich, generous and intelligent. We should be cheerful at work, follow dress codes, and perhaps become rich enough to buy a big house. Perhaps we should drive a certain calibre of car, or perhaps we should, for environmental reasons, avoid driving cars altogether.
Meeting one criteria often prevents another criteria from being met and a person could always conceivably be positioned higher up an axis of value. We could always conceivably give more to charity, spend more time with friends, or work harder, or better, or less selfishly. We could always be smarter, cooler, happier and more successful.
The Aesthetic Alternative
Let’s call the alternative approach to living well aesthetics. Instead of looking at how a course of action matches a pre-existing mental category, we can aim our imaginations directly at the specifics of reality. The focus is then on concrete details. We put reality first and use all our faculties to examine and explore it.
We start with an absolute acceptance of how things actually are, both the general givens of the human condition and specific givens of a particular person’s life. Then we investigate the objective reality of the person’s life — the picture that anyone who looked closely enough would see — and ask about the subjective reality of the person’s feelings and value judgements.
Now that they are taking the time to explore reality afresh, how do things make them feel? What do they consider important? Out of all possible futures, what would they most like to become the new reality of the universe? And what can they do to help this future come to pass?
Investigations
Ethics attempts to set out universal rules for how a person should act — rules that would apply to all people and all situations. But aesthetics just seeks to offer individuals clarity as to what living well means in the context of their particular life. What would be an elegant way for them to respond to the situation that they’re in?
To build that clarity, the person will need insights about the big picture of their life. They’ll need to examine their thoughts and feelings about what matters. And they’ll need to connect their conclusions with the possibilities ahead of them.
The person will also need to become able to actualise their ability to live well from moment to moment. They’ll need to be able to connect their big picture clarity with the concrete reality of life as it happens, steering themself through the challenges that confront them and having the real-time insights they’ll need to act in ways that they’ll be proud of.
The end point of a successful life investigation isn’t a theoretical stance. It is to become consistently able to live well.
As human beings, we all have brilliant, flexible minds and we all need confidence that we are indeed living as we should. We can try to satisfy this need with ethics and follow whatever rules and principles we believe to be valid, but such approaches will always be flawed. Or we can satisfy this need with a reality-first approach where we engage creatively with the obstacles that might prevent us from living the best lives we can imagine.
- “That Action is best which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers”. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Section III, VIII, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004, p. 125 (first published 1725).
- “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993, p.30 (first published 1785).