Ethics. Everyone, at some point in their lives, has wondered about or been told what is good or bad. We spend our lives caught up in what is right and what is wrong, what we should have done, what would be the good thing to do, and how to live a life that will let us sleep at night. And while we have spoken about ethics and ethical systems several times in our past posts, this week, we are the meme. It’s time to talk about how the study of ethics goes beyond naughty and nice.

Naughty, Naughty Nietzsche

We’ve spoken about our bestached boy Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) several times in the past. Today, though, Nietzsche rather ominously celebrates Christmas in a way that is “beyond naughty and nice.” For those of you not entirely in the know, the cozy shirt references one of Nietzsche’s own texts on morality, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). In this book, the 19th century philosopher questions why people have considered certain things ethical or moral in the Western, mostly Christian world. 

This is a theme that runs throughout his work, this idea that perhaps we should question the actual goodness of what people have told us is good. And while not everyone who studies ethics comes to the same (kind of angry, after a certain point) conclusions as Friedrich, his work illustrates that questioning the status quo is useful and can be helpful to others.

And while Nietzsche’s own professed morality seems to be subjective in nature, as illustrated in everything from the Genealogy of Morals (1887) to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 - 1892), the fact that Nietzsche doesn’t take for granted the religious morality of his era speaks to an important task of the study of ethics. Ethics involves not only the study of good and evil, but also the study of how we determine this. 

What Puts Us on the Naughty List?

Up at the North Pole, presumably, Santa is finishing checking his naughty and nice list for the second time. He’s either a stickler for perfection or as anxious as the rest of us. And can you blame him? It’s been a long and weird year, and perhaps looking into the actions of children over the year is just a little too tiring.

Traditionally (and by traditionally, I mean the songs and cartoons I listened to and saw as a kid), Santa makes a list at some point, of every kid in the whole world, then checks off whether they were naughty or nice over the course of the year. The nice kids get rewarded with lots of gifts. The naughty kids get the pleasure of a small bag of black, lumpy coal for their misdeeds.

This system implies that Santa has a way of knowing what every kid did over the course of the year, and a certain omniscience, given “he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” Does Santa have some kind of Big Brother-level surveillance system going on? And with several billion children populating this sphere, that’s a lot of kids with a lot of ethical issues.

We should probably set aside the uncomfortable nature of creating a person from a kindly historical saint, who is somehow always watching kids to make sure they are doing the thing that their parents want them to do, that their parents were taught to do when they were a kid, etc., etc. It’s a lot to process, now that I think about it. 

However, the invention of Santa by parents can help explain the basis of morality: are we born with a moral compass? Is there a way in which we know right or wrong innately?

Everyone from St. Augustine to modern psychologists suggest that children do not understand morality until they are shown what a good action is or what a bad action is. It is similar to that classic example we are given about the kid who touches the stove when it is hot, then learns that you do not do this because you will get burned. The kid didn’t know it before, but understands through experience. In a sense, developing morality is somewhat like that, in that it is learned.

Theories About Ethics: More Than Being Mean

Unfortunately, ethics and what is ethical are not as simple as “don’t put your hand on the hot stove.” If there were one true way of doing ethics, we would have had that one, optimal way of doing things all the time that would never, ever be undermined. Ever.

But since Plato, people have wondered what the good life is, how it affects us, what we should do, and how we should be. For many, taking an approach from religion was and is a good way to understand the good life and what to do in difficult situations. Because part of the study and action in ethics deals with the thing that we do when things are hard. When situations involve potential violence, mistreatment of other human beings, or things that are simply just not that clear, it can be difficult to understand or know which choice would be the right one. 

And we’ve all been there. From something as simple as whether to tell your eccentric aunt the truth when she asks what you think about the sweater she knit with cat hairs she collected, to if you should go through with terminating your pregnancy because you found out that it may end up badly for you or your future human.

It really isn’t easy.

Imagine, you are a green and grody person who wants to take the holiday decor and presents away from a local village celebrating the season. You are grouchy because you feel some kind of way about Christmas, and you want to harness your dog to a sleigh to tote off the gifts and ruin the holiday for the whole village.

Throughout the centuries, many philosophers have posed solutions to ethical problems. Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804, one of my personal faves), creates a whole categorical imperative that we should follow so that we are acting ethically in every situation that calls for that. According to Kant, his system is universal. And it hinges on treating people as ends in themselves, and not simply as means.

According to Kant, for your green self, you must not destroy the holiday of your neighbors because you would be treating the villagers as means, because you would be using them and their decor to feed your issues that clearly require the help of a therapist. You would not be respecting their own Whomanity.

On the other hand, Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) have both proposed another system (utilitarianism) that relies on another sort of formula. Instead of creating a maxim, as you would do with Kant’s categorical imperative, you calculate how many people will benefit or be harmed by the action you are going to take. 

You’re still green and deciding to take over the local village, removing its holiday decor, etc., etc. taking it with your too, too small dog harnessed to the sleigh. You would have to calculate who is benefiting versus who would be hurt. You are benefiting, because you get to destroy everyone’s presents and make them as miserable as you are. (You are a mean one.) But the villagers will be sad and distressed from losing the gifts they were going to give each other. And your dog might sprain a leg in trying to tote that way. Therefore, totally not moral. 

In other ethical systems, you might consider the situation itself, determining the ethics subjectively, that is, according to you and your own personal code of ethics that can and should be different from others’. Or you might extrapolate from this and use ethical relativism, where you might say that, while the villagers might think you destroying their lives and holiday is not ethical, your family and their family have been doing this for centuries and consider it the moral thing to do.

There are many, many ways to look at ethical situations.

Luckily, most of them end up with similar conclusions, even if they get there by way of other means.

Sugar and Spice and Naughty and Nice

But why is the study of ethics so important? And why should we care? Shouldn’t we just do what is legal most of the time, stay away from illegal things, and be nice to most people we like?

The study of ethics shows us that, for instance, what is ethical, in the sense of what is good or bad, is not the same thing as what is legal or illegal. Sure, it’s frankly relieving that it is illegal to kill people in a premeditated way in most places in the world. It is nice when you see that it’s illegal to steal things from other people. 

But, on the other hand, legality doesn’t always line up with what is ethical. Like the early 20th century, when food manufacturers did really gross stuff like allowing wood shavings, rat parts, and human limbs to fly into their meat grinders. Until Theodore Roosevelt read and responded to Upton Sinclair’s investigative journalism (and novel, The Jungle, depicting the lives of people who worked in these plants), there were no laws at all in the United States about preserving a baseline of purity of food. What was immoral was not illegal at the time.

We can find another literary instance of when legality and immorality don’t quite hold hands. In Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Jean Valjean takes a loaf of bread and is subsequently (and disturbingly) punished for it for years, even though he was taking it to feed himself and his family. The law that keeps people from assaulting and robbing old ladies also keeps starving people from taking food out of a grocery store.

And this is why you should care. Some day, you might be tasked with something that is difficult, that is hard to find a good solution for, that will make you feel bad about what you did (or didn’t do) years later. That may or may not come with external consequences. Sartre says that hell is other people, but sometimes it can be our internal, nagging monologue.

But sometimes, sometimes what you do (or do not do) may impact others. And so, even if you aren’t the one acting, it’s good to be able to think critically and question whether something that everyone else is doing is the right thing, is the ethical thing.

And this is where we go beyond naughty and nice, moving past the simplicity of the omniscient Santa and into choosing for ourselves what is good and right. Being able to question the world around you is the most powerful skill you can have.