Ramblings on the Moral Sense
What is the moral sense? According to Kant, the idea of morality itself supposes a highest duty. The good should be strived for in every instance, all the time. It is always the best thing to do. There are people, though, who seem to be better than we expect people to be, saintly or heroic. If morality is a highest duty, then these people just do a better job of reaching that good than everyone else, and we praise them for it. But everyone falls short of their duty. Therefore we create another category of morality -- the sufficiently moral. This may still be a stricter duty than most people follow, but it does not seem unreachable, whereas the moral lives of saints and heroes does seem unreasonable to expect from everyone. In this way, we can still consider that morality is the highest duty, and that nobody can ever be extra-moral, beyond moral, better than the highest good -- but still, we can allow that some people go beyond what is traditionally expected. Beyond a second-tier level of duty, but not quite reaching the top.
Is this second-tier moral duty a practical necessity? How does such an idea arise? If morality is to be universally compelling, then why do we create a category that allows for us to fall short of "universally compelling," and still fulfill another category? Why not hold everyone to the impossibly high standard of the good will?
Those saints and heroes -- they are inspiring to those people who are not saints and heroes. Why? Couldn't we hear about their lives and be pleased, but not feel inspired to be better? The compulsion of the good as something unreachable, always to be striven for, seems plausible. In fact, it would have to be defined as that which we cannot go beyond. That, if we are making moral judgments, it is always fair to say "I should do this better, if I can." The moment I say anything like "well, I don't have to do this better," then I'm no longer just taking the good into consideration. I may be taking other things into consideration, or I'm not using the idea of morality to define what's better or not. For example: I'm giving money to charity. Up to a certain point, I keep saying "I should give more." Someone might say that I should do that up until the point that I run out of money. At that point, I'm materially incapable of continuing the action. Someone else might say that I should stop at a point at which I have enough money to live comfortably. Now, the first person might say that the second person is wrong, that the "ought" continues, and that I'm stopping short of a highest good. But what if the good includes other things than giving money to the poor? What if it includes the ability to take care of one's self, and not obligate others to help? What if it includes the happiness that comes of a comfortable life? Then I was not stopping short, in the second case -- I am optimizing the balance of factors that are all included in my morality.
Is this how we come up with first- and second-tier obligations? Maybe we don't really think that those saints and heroes are somehow more moral! St. Augustine, for example, was able to give all of his belongings to the poor -- but we don't use that as a sole measure of our own morality (in the second case described above), so why should we use that in his? He was more extreme, perhaps -- his balance was more heavily weighted on one side. And yet he seemed happy, too. We would not consider someone a saint who strived for extremes of morality and was not happy, I think. Or even if we did, we might still say that she was not obligated to go beyond that point that she could be happy. She chose to, but then those further decisions are not in the realm of morality. Or are they? Does morality include happiness? So then those saints and heroes might be the people whose inclinations lead them to enjoy things that we consider constitutive of morality, under general principles or intuitions -- equality or generosity, for example. If part of our moral obligation is to make ourselves happy, then we might recognize that morality impels us to a certain point, at which we can stop with the action of generosity, but continue to be moral because we've hit the balance point. The saints and heroes can balance further up the extremes of equality and generosity. We are sufficiently moral, and yet we recognize that their happiness, their point of sufficient morality, is more otherwise moral than our own.
What is the place of reason in our moral sense? If pure reason, living entirely in the world of ideas, cannot connect enough to our feelings of morality to dictate in particular circumstances what is wrong or right, then what use does it have? It can abstract, combine, inductively and deductively analyze patterns. It helps us reine our moral sense. It can even cause us to go against our moral intuitions -- but if we continue and continue to go against what our moral intuition says, in favor of a rational moral principle, will we feel like we're being moral? Or should we trust those intuitions enough that we begin to question the rational moral principle, because it doesn't coincide with our moral feeling? But can't habit change the moral feeling? Or are there certain moral feelings that are born into us? And for those who can't use moral feeling as a guide -- what is their guide to morality? What reason would they have for listening to what other people think about morality, if I'm beginning to define moral feelings as a way for people to judge moral principles. There needs to be an independent check on the principles, this is the moral feeling. There needs to be an independent check on the moral feeling -- this is reason. Are there any other independent checks? Tradition? Law?