Aristotle thought that there was a particular way of living which allowed us, so to speak, to be at our best for the kind of creatures we are. This was the life conducted according to the virtues. The Judaeo-Christian tradition considers that it is the life of charity or love. What this means, roughly speaking, is that we become the occasion for each other’s self-realization. It is only through being the means of your self-fulfilment that I can attain my own, and vice versa. There is little about such reciprocity in Aristotle himself. The political form of this ethic is known as socialism, for which, as Marx comments, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. It is, as it were, politicized love, or reciprocity all round.
Socialism is an answer to the question of what happens when, unlike Aristotle, we universalize the idea of self-realization, crossing it with the Judaeo-Christian or democratic-Enlightenment creed that everyone must be in on the action. If this is so, and if human beings naturally live in political society, we can either try to arrange political life so that they all realize their unique capacities without getting in each other’s way, a doctrine known as liberalism; or we can try to organize political institutions so that their self-realization is as far as possible reciprocal, a theory known as socialism. One reason for judging socialism to be superior to liberalism is the belief that human beings are political animals not only in the sense that they have to take account of each other’s need for fulfilment, but that in fact they achieve their deepest fulfilment only in terms of each other.
Not everyone, however, agrees on what love or self-fulfilment is, or on which virtues are important, or indeed on this model of the good life at all. The virtues which Aristotle favours are not necessarily the ones which we moderns would be keen to affirm. They are too bound up with his own social history, whereas, conversely, his view of human nature in general is too little historical. Yet Karl Marx, a closet Aristotelian of sorts, conjured a powerfully historical critique from this ethic, as did his great mentor Hegel. It looks as though we simply have to argue with each other about what self-realization means; and it may be that the whole business is too complicated for us to arrive at a satisfactory solution. Modern existence, being fragmentary, specialized and diverse, has come up with too many solutions to the question to make a decision between them at all simple.
Yet there is another reason why the modern period in particular has made moral questions hard to handle. It is not only because in a complex society there are too many answers rather than too few; it is also because modern history makes it especially hard for us to think in non-instrumental terms. Modern capitalist societies are so preoccupied with thinking in terms of means and ends, of which methods will efficiently achieve which goals, that their moral thinking becomes infected by this model as well. What it is to live well thus becomes a matter of acting so as to attain a certain goal. The only problem is that moralists continue to bicker about what the goal should be. For utilitarians, we should act so as to bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number. For hedonists, we should act so as to maximize pleasure, preferably our own. There have been those who held that the aim of human action was to glorify the political state. Still others believe that we should act so as to achieve social justice or some other praiseworthy end. In a moral climate where what matters seems to be results, some people might well think twice about trying to help an injured man if they knew that the roof was about to fall in on him and finish him off. Yet a lot of people would help him all the same, and it is interesting to ask ourselves why.
Not all modern moral thinking is of this instrumental kind. In fact, one of the most influential schools of modern moral thought – the one deriving from the philosopher Immanuel Kant – is of just the opposite persuasion. For Kantians, what matters is not goals, but the purity of will with which we act in a certain way regardless of its consequences, and regardless of its contribution to our happiness. Morality is a question of duty, not of pleasure, fulfilment, utility or social justice. We might see this austere, unworldly moral doctrine as being, among other things, an overreaction to goal-oriented thinking. It is as though such goals as happiness, pleasure and the like have become so brittle and banal in modern society that authentic moral value must now be rigorously severed from them. Kant is right that to act morally should be an end in itself. It is not just a matter of trying to get somewhere. But he can only formulate this in a way which divorces end-in-itselfness from happiness and fulfilment. And it is precisely this combination that a more classical kind of moral thought is trying to get at.
For classical moralists like Aristotle, happiness or well-being consists not just in bovine contentment or a state of perpetual orgasmic pleasure, but in a life which one might describe as thriving or flourishing. The word ‘flourishing’ may carry rather virile, strenuous, red-faced connotations for us, but it need not do so. It includes, say, showing mercy or sympathetic listening. We need to take the idea of flourishing out of the gym. We live well when we fulfil our nature as an enjoyable end in itself. And since our nature is something we share with other creatures of our kind, morality is an inherently political matter. As Philippa Foot remarks, ‘to know whether an individual is or is not as it should be, one must know the life form of the species’.4
The good life, then, is all about an enjoyable well-being, but that is not its immediate aim. Making enjoyment the end of your life, as, say, Mick Jagger seems remarkably successful at doing, may mean that you have to devote a lot of time to planning for it, which in turn may have the result of making your life less enjoyable. This does not seem to be the most tragic deficiency in Mick Jagger’s life, but it makes the point that if you really want self-fulfilment, the best way is not to think about yourself. This is not to commend the altruism of the downtrodden, who forget about their own needs so as to keep someone else in clover. It is just to say that well-being is not something you aim at directly, since it is not one good among others. Rather, it is the result of many different kinds of goods. In this sense, Aristotle is a pluralist when it comes to what counts as the good life.
Enjoyment comes from the deep sense of well-being which for Aristotle springs in its turn from living a life of virtue. ‘Virtue’ here means something like the technique or know-how of being human. Being human is something you have to get good at, like playing snooker or avoiding the rent collector. The virtuous are those who are successful at being human, as a butcher or jazz pianist are successful at their jobs. Some human beings are even virtuosi of virtue. Virtue in this sense is a worldly affair; but it is unworldly in the sense that success is its own reward. Not many company directors would relinquish their salaries on the grounds that their work was a pleasure in itself. The good life is a taxing, technical business; it does not flow from attending to the promptings of the heart. Like a good stage play, it requires a good deal of rehearsal. How to fulfil one’s nature doesn’t come naturally. But whereas the puritan might well agree with that, he would not agree so easily that the good life is a matter of joyful self-fulfilment. In his view, if it isn’t unpleasant, it can’t be moral.
This is not to suggest that instrumental ideas of morality should simply be ditched. If we are historical animals, we are bound to be instrumental ones, too, concerned with fitting means to ends. If the good life is one of fulfilling our natures, and if this is true for everybody, then it would take a deep-seated change of material conditions to make such fulfilment possible all round. And this would require the kind of instrumental action known as radical politics. A lot of functional activity would be needed to achieve a situation in which we did not have to live so functionally. In the modern age, this project has been known as socialism.
There is a potentially tragic conflict here between the means and the end. If we have to act instrumentally in order to create a less means-ends-obsessed form of life, then we have to live in a way which by our own admission is less than desirable. At the worst, it may mean that some people, tragically, may feel the need t
o sacrifice their own happiness for others. To call this tragic means that such sacrifice is not the most desirable way to live. Morality is about fulfilling the self, not abnegating it. It is just that for some people, abnegating it may be historically necessary for bringing that desirable form of life about. There are, tragically, situations in which the self can be fulfilled only by being relinquished. If history were not as dire as it has been, this would not be necessary. In a just world, our condition would not need to be broken in order to be re-made.
What does all this have to do with objectivity? It is that flourishing cannot really be a subjective affair. This does not mean that it is objective in the sense that it has nothing to do with us, rather as the Giant’s Causeway is there independently of whether we are there to look at it. Ethics is all about human beings – but it is about what they are like, not what they like. Some kinds of happiness may be subjective, in the sense that people are often contented if they think they are. Sometimes you just have to take their word for it. You may be wrong about thinking you are happy in some deeper sense of the word, but it is hard to see how you can be wrong about feeling gratified and at ease, any more than you can have a pain and not know about it.
The kind of happiness that matters, however, is the kind which is much less easy to determine. You cannot tell whether your life is flourishing simply by introspection, because it is a matter of how you are doing, not just of how you are feeling. Happiness is about living and acting well, not just about feeling good. For Aristotle, it is a practice or activity rather than a state of mind. It is about realizing your capacities, not having a particular outlook on life.
Rather than simply checking out how you are feeling, you have to look at your life in a much wider context. It is this wider context which Aristotle knows as politics. You also have to look at yourself in a temporal context – to have some sense of your life as a narrative, in order to judge whether it is going well or not. This does not mean that everything from cutting your first teeth to losing the lot of them has to form a logically coherent whole. Not many narratives of any degree of subtlety have that kind of unity. Narratives can be multiple, ruptured, recursive and diffuse and still be narratives. Finally, you have to have some idea of what counts as a specifically human kind of prospering. It is not just an individual affair. It is not up to you to decide what counts as this, any more than it is up to you to decide what counts as mental stability in a moose. You cannot say ‘Torturing Tyroleans feels like thriving for me’ – not just because it is not true, but because it is not up to you to lay down the law. Moral values are not just what you happen to plump for, as the decisionist or existentialist maintains. Some moral thinkers believe that they are what all of us happen to plump for – that they are intersubjective rather than subjective. But this way of looking at morality does not. Even if we were all to agree that torturing Tyroleans was an excellent idea, it would still not count as an instance of human flourishing. Some people would consider this an impossibly objectivist position, though probably not Tyroleans.
Another reason why you cannot know whether you are flourishing just by looking inside yourself is because the idea of flourishing is a complex one, involving a whole range of factors. You may be prospering in some ways and not in others. You have to ask yourself whether you are healthy, happy, at ease with yourself and others, enjoying life, working creatively, emotionally caring and sensitive, resilient, capable of fulfilling friendships, responsible, self-reliant and the like. A lot of these things are not wholly within your control. You cannot be happy or at ease with yourself just by an act of will. It requires among other things certain social and material conditions.
Whether you can live a moral life, which is to say a fulfilling life of a kind proper to human beings, depends in the end on politics. This is one reason why Aristotle makes no rigorous distinction between ethics and politics. He tells us right at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics that there is a ‘science that studies the supreme good for man’, adding rather unexpectedly that it is known as politics. Ethics for him is a sort of sub-branch of politics. Nobody can thrive when they are starving, miserable or oppressed, a fact which did not prevent Aristotle himself from endorsing slavery and the subordination of women. If you want to be good, you need a good society. Of course there can be saints in atrocious social conditions, but part of what we admire about such people is their rarity. Basing an ethics on this would be like restricting everyone to three raw carrots a day simply because a few rather weird people can survive happily on such a diet.
Ethics is in Aristotle’s view the science of human desire, since desire is the motive behind all our actions. The task of an ethical education is to re-educate our desires, so that we reap pleasure from doing good acts and pain from doing bad ones. It is not just a matter of gritting our teeth and capitulating to some imperious moral law: we need to learn to enjoy being just, merciful, independent and so on. If there is not something in it for us, it is not true morality. And since all our desires are social, they have to be set in a wider context, which is politics. Radical politics is the re-education of our desires. Aristotle was not of course a radical, but he held that playing an active part in political life was itself a virtuous thing to do. Republicanism is an ethical form of politics. Being politically active helps us to create the social conditions for virtue, but it is also a form of virtue in itself. It is both a means and an end.
You can, then, be mistaken about whether you are flourishing, and someone else may be more wisely perceptive about the matter than you yourself. This is one important sense in which morality is objective. Feeling happy may be a sign that you are thriving as a human being should, whatever that means; but it is not cast-iron evidence. You might be feeling happy because the parents of your abductee have just come up with the ransom money. Or it might be a rare patch of felicity in a generally dispirited existence. The point, anyway, is that when the colonialists assure us that the natives are thriving, we would do well to be cautious.
The problems arise when the natives themselves tell us that they are thriving. What are we to say then? The liberal or postmodernist who is reluctant to say that the colonialists are right may also hesitate to say that the people they lord it over are wrong. Have we not patronized the colonized enough without informing them that they are too thick-headed to realize they are miserable? In fact, it is deeply unlikely that men and women who are treated as second-class human beings would be obtuse enough to believe that they were prospering. If they lacked that kind of intelligence, they would probably not be usefully exploitable in the first place. They might feel gratified now and then, or believe that they deserve nothing better, or be stoical about their situation, but that is different. Anyway, if I cannot tell you something without odious patronage, neither can you tell me. Even though I have been buried under a ton of rotting asbestos for the last ten years, with only three fingers free to cram the odd forkful of withered grass into my craw, I will not stand being told by condescending elitists like you that there might be a better way to live. My decisions may be abysmal, but at least they are mine.
There are, then, certain public criteria to determine whether we, or somebody else, are flourishing or not. I cannot see that I am doing well just by looking into my soul. As Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, the best image of the soul is the human body. The best image of what I am is how I am behaving. The two are as closely bound up with each other as a word and its meaning. These public criteria provide us with a case against those for whom happiness or well-being is not a practical condition but an individual state of mind. But happiness is not just a state of mind, any more than playing chess is just a state of mind. People may feel content with their situation; but if they are not, for example, allowed to play an active role in determining their own lives, then in Aristotle’s eyes they cannot be genuinely fulfilled. Virtue for Aristotle is a kind of excellence; and though slaves may feel in good shape from time to time, they are not exactly object-lessons in how to excel
at being human. If they were, we would not bother to free them. Objectivity is among other things a political affair: it is a matter of there being ways of refuting those who insist that all is well as long as we are feeling fine. It is a critique of the holiday-camp mentality. Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it rather less politely, ‘the scum who want the cockles of their hearts warmed’. To feel good about yourself when you have no material grounds for doing so is to do yourself an injustice.
There is, however, an even deeper relation between objectivity and ethics. Objectivity can mean a selfless openness to the needs of others, one which lies very close to love. It is the opposite not of personal interests and convictions, but of egoism. To try to see the other’s situation as it really is is an essential condition of caring for them. This is not to say that there is only ever one way a situation can be said to be. To say that ‘writing a book’ is an accurate description of what I am doing right now is not to say that it is the only way it can be described. The point, anyway, is that genuinely caring for someone is not what gets in the way of seeing their situation for what it is, but what makes it possible. Contrary to the adage that love is blind, it is because love involves a radical acceptance that it allows us to see others for what they are.
To be concerned for another is to be present to them in the form of an absence, a certain self-forgetful attentiveness. If one is loved or trusted in return, it is largely this which gives one the self-confidence to forget about oneself, a perilous matter otherwise. We need to think about ourselves partly because of fear, which the assurance which flows from being trusted allows us to overcome. To achieve such objectivity in any absolute way we would need to remove ourselves from the situation altogether, which would hardly be the most convenient way of intervening in it. But the fact that it is ultimately impossible should not deter us from trying to achieve it.
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