essay about doing the right thing

Doing the Right Thing Opinion Essay

Introduction, inequality, cohesiveness and civic virtue, law proposal 1, linking politics and moral engagement, law proposal 2, works cited.

Perhaps, the American society is the most divergent, the most accommodating and the most culturally diverse among all societies across the globe. Interestingly, most Americans reflect similar elements of behavior in many respects (these elements are distinct to our American society).

There are a number conscious and unconscious core values which are expected to guide every American character. Most of the American culture has to some extent embedded western civilization: A civilization that accommodates different cultures, merges multiple ideas, and values the freedom of choice.

Still, a number of challenges in the direction of promoting our general wellbeing have been arising; thus, leading to questions on the direction that our society should direct for our common wellbeing. Here, I will be discussing approaches that can be designed in addressing the issues of wealth distribution, and the relationship between politics and community beliefs so as to have an even happier society.

One among the challenges that face our society today is the widening rift between the rich and the poor (Sandel 267). Although our politics has evaded the reality of a widening society, several philosophers have given their opinions on the challenge of wealth distribution (Sandel 267).

Our politics has become so distant from the challenge of widening social gaps that president Obama’s proposal to review tax laws in the direction of burdening the wealthy with more taxes has received heavy criticism from the republican political quarter (Sandel 267). Apart from philosophical ideologies on the topic of wealth distribution, there is a more important challenge which requires the attention of our political leaders: Civic Virtue (Sachs 14).

Getting a picture of our social landscape will be useful here. As the gap between the affluent and the poor continues, the social gap between the rich and the poor is likewise widening; hence, decreasing the elements of cohesiveness and civic virtue within our society (Sachs 14).

While the poor can only afford the often low quality education in public schools, the rich will take their children to expensive private schools (Sandel 268). Moreover, the rich can afford expensive social amenities and can even rely on their own security systems instead of the community policing (Nzich 60). Such an arrangement has two important results. First, it (wealth disparity) has led to a significant decrease in the level of interactions between the poor and the rich (Sahar 50).

While a rich American will prefer to visit a private park for recreation, a poor American will rely on the often deteriorated public park. Secondly, such an arrangement (wealth disparity) has left most of the government’s services to the poor (Hansen 108). The rich are becoming less reliant on government services. For example; they (the rich) can pay for their own security services; they can take their children to private schools; and will often visit private parks (Hansen 128).

As such, the rich will become less enthusiastic in paying for public services which they rarely utilize; thus, presenting the government with a challenge in collecting enough resources required in providing primary services to citizens (Sandel 268). The quality of public services can therefore be expected to deteriorate even further as a result (Nzich 61).

Moreover, it will increasingly become difficult for interactions between the rich and the poor to flourish. Since it is not possible for democracy to exist in a divided society, such an arrangement will deal a blow to our democracy (Hansen 129). A society can only act democratically when it can make choices objectively, and with the consideration of everyone’s good.

Considering the utilitarian moral theory, an act is judged to be good or wrong depending on the measure of happiness/ sadness that the act will cause to the majority of societal members (Mill 9). An act that brings pleasure to the maximum number of societal members is therefore judged to be morally acceptable (Mill 9). Utilitarian philosophers will therefore view wealth distribution as an act that is morally acceptable.

Thus, although the act of wealth distribution is likely to cause a degree of slight sadness among the rich, it will bring numerous benefits/pleasure to a big proportion of our society (Maclntre 15). Moreover, when future generations are considered, the benefits of wealth distribution are even more obvious. In particular, future societies will want to live in a society that is cohesive, democratic and where the majorities are happy (Maclntre 15).

Considering John Rawls’ principle of justice, we are likely to consent to wealth distribution as a right moral act (Rawls 203). John Rawls proposes that we consider ourselves as persons that have self interest (meaning that we intend to always select choices that are beneficial to us), and as a people in ignorance of our common identifiers such as ethnicity, race and class (Rawls 203).

The conditions described above can then be considered as our original position. Here, we are very likely to accept wealth distribution as an approach that can better our wellbeing. Standing on the argument above, a number of philosophers consider wealth distribution as an approach that will be helpful to our society (Rawls 204).

I will therefore agree with Obama’s policy proposal which intends to overhaul our tax system in the direction of distributing wealth. Such a tax system will see the wealthy paying more taxes than the poor. Here, it will be important to come up with measures that will see the development of policies precisely designed to utilize collected taxes in improving the living conditions of the poor.

Promoting government services (like public education and recreation) to levels that can be utilized by both the rich and the poor is important here. I propose the above law in the view of promoting our wellbeing, guarding our democracy and enhancing our cohesiveness.

Having seen the evils that could be perpetuated by a state that has entrenched religion into her government, the formulators of our constitution were careful to emphasis on the separation of the religious institution from the government institution (West 68). We all know about millions of people that have died from the machinery of a government that was against their religious belief.

Today, the question is whether we can engage religion and politics in a fruitful direction for our society. Here, it is important to make it clear that such engagement should not have elements of coercion, discrimination, among such vices (Sandel 269). Rather, as I will describe here, such an engagement should be designed to diffuse tensions, educate our public, help to eliminate religious extremism, and promote unity in our society (Sandel 269).

Religious leanings which are undeniably present in our government cannot be ignored (Sandel 269). When it has come to multiple issues, our governments have at times developed policies considered to lean towards certain religious beliefs (West 70). On the other hand, many people in our society are exhibiting behaviors that have shown to tend towards various degrees of religious extremism.

Following terrorist attacks, racism, among other vices that are linkable to religious extremism, it is important that we find a useful direction in dealing with religious matters (William 53). It is therefore useful to engage politics and religion on a high moral pedestal that is acceptable, just, and fruitful to our society (Zauderer 213).

Such a direction needs to be designed with the recognition that although we have avoided talking about religious and moral beliefs, we have silently held our own perspectives (sometimes in ignorance) on religion and morality (Zauderer 214). Instead of coming out to talk about such issues, we have kept quiet and ignored, despised, and avoided the perspectives of others on religion and morality (William 53).

What should therefore be encouraged is an open discussion on religious and moral issues within our society. Such discussions should be based on a framework which (guided by mutual respect among societal members) would allow societal members to gain enlightenment on various religious and moral ideals, to credit and discredit such beliefs, and to generally give their opinions on such beliefs (Bentham 9).

One might argue that such a direction would be a precipice for religious intolerance. However, such a framework would allow people to diffuse tension, and move further from extremist religious ideologies. Here, people are likely to become more liberal and less religious (Bentham 10).

According to utilitarianism, an act can be judged to be morally acceptable or not depending on the degree of happiness that such an act will bring to societal members (Mill 14). Since an engagement between politics and religion can be helpful in diffusing moral tensions in our society, help in alleviating religious extremism and contribute in creating a more tolerable society than the one that we have, such an act will be helpful in contributing to happiness among the majority of our societal members; hence, it is morally acceptable.

I will therefore propose that we allow for the teaching of various religious beliefs to take place in our schools and other institutions. Instead of only focusing on the teaching of various religious and moral beliefs, students should be allowed to openly present their opinions on various religious matters. Such a direction must be done under an environment that respects the right of people to choose various religious and moral beliefs (which are available in our society).

As I have discussed, I agree with Sandel’s opinions on the two issues (the distribution of wealth, and an open engagement between religion and politics) that I have discussed above. Wealth distribution is especially useful in guarding our democracy, promoting cohesiveness, and improving the welfare of the poor.

On the other hand, an engagement between politics and religion will be useful in promoting unity, tolerance and knowledge within our society. With the emerging challenges (such as poverty, terrorism, and religious extremism) that are threatening to haunt our society, it is important for our society to react accordingly by adopting the measures that I have considered in this particular discussion.

Bentham, Jeremy, Principles of Moral Legislation ed. Michael Sandel. New York: McMillan, 2010. Print

Hansen, Chad. “Utilities” A Journal of Utilitarian Studies , 7.4 (1996): 128-218.

Maclntre, Alasdair. 2007 After virtue: a study in moral Theory . London: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print

Mill, Stuart. Utilitarianism ed. Michael Sandel New York: McMillan, 2010. Print

Nzich, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia ed. Michael Sandel New York: McMillan, 2010 Print

Rawls, John. Justice and fairness ed. Michael Sandel New York: McMillan, 2010. Print

Sachs, Jaffrey. The end of Poverty . New York: McMillan Publishers, 2011. Print

Sahar, Ben. How to Live Positively New York: McMillan Publishers, 2011. Print

Sandel, Michael. What’s the right thing to do? New York: McMillan, 2010. Print

West, Henry . An Introduction to Mill’s utilit arian ethics . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004 Print

William, Owen, Arthur. Utilitarianism: for and against . New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1973 Print

Zauderer, Naaman. Descartes’ deontological Turn: reason, will, and virtue in the later writings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print

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An American soldier with British war orphans adopted by his unit; London, early 1943. Photo by Robert Capa, International Centre for Photography/Magnum

The right right thing to do

The ethical life means being good to ourselves, to others, and to the world. but how do you choose if these demands compete.

by Irene McMullin   + BIO

Conventional wisdom depicts moral struggle as an internal conflict between a higher moral self and an untamed dark side. This picture pervades popular imagination: the angel and the devil on either shoulder, the ‘two wolf’ parable, the Ego and the Id, the ‘true self’ and the ‘false self’. It resonates with religious traditions that place us between angels and animals in a Great Chain of Being, leaving us torn between higher and lower, spirit and body, good and evil, the demands of conscience and the lure of sin.

This view also calls to mind a philosophical tradition from Plato to Immanuel Kant that often presents life’s major moral struggles as a kind of combat between the requirements of duty and the dangers of desire. The self is fragmented and must struggle for wholeness by casting out or silencing its evil components, refusing to give immoral intentions a foothold in thought and deed. A good deal of moral theory, therefore, tends to assume that there’s a morally right answer about what one ought to do in any given circumstance. Any difficulty in doing the right thing results from (evil, selfish) resistance, not from the fact that one cannot do all the good or valuable things that one is called upon to do.

However, this familiar view ignores the fact that, in many cases, the problem is not how best to override or silence one’s dark side, but how to cope with having too many good or morally neutral demands on your limited time, energy or resources. In other words, the key issue in many cases is not whether to be moral at all – but rather how best to distribute your moral resources in conditions of scarcity and conflict. Coping well with this latter kind of moral challenge requires very different ways of thinking about moral agency and how to lead good lives.

There are (at least) three different classes of goods that regularly give rise to incommensurable but competing legitimate moral claims, each revealed through a different practical stance that we adopt towards the world as we try to figure out what to do and who to be. On this picture, each agent is indeed fragmented, but this fragmentation is not best understood as an internal conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ selves. Instead, moral conflict should be understood in terms of competing dimensions of the good – not all of which can be accommodated in any given moment.

What are these three basic normative domains or classes of value? It can be helpful to think of these in terms of the traditional literary distinction between the first-, second- and third-person perspectives. A novel written from the first-person perspective provides access to the protagonist’s struggles from the inside; the reader says ‘I’ along with her. In the second-person perspective, the focus is on the other person: the ‘you’ takes centre stage. When written from the third-person perspective, every character’s struggles are viewed from the outside; each is referred to as ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘it’ in descriptions of their movements in the world of the novel. Though some characters might be more important than others, typically none is singled out as providing the primary lens through which the world finds its meaning.

These perspectives are not just useful literary devices. They are core practical perspectives that we adopt toward the world and our place in it. As we pursue our projects and pleasures, interact with others, and share public institutions and meanings, we are constantly shifting back and forth among these three practical perspectives, each bringing different elements of a situation to salience and highlighting different features of the world and our place in it as good or bad.

F rom the first-person stance, you navigate the world as an agent trying to realise your projects and satisfy your desires. From the second-person perspective, you understand yourself and the world through the lens of other people, who are a locus of projects and preferences of their own; projects and preferences that make legitimate demands on your time and attention. From the third-person stance, you understand yourself as one among many, called to fit yourself into the shared standards and rules governing a world made up of a multitude of creatures like you.

These different perspectives reveal different features of the same object or situation. Take the example of your own body. When weeding the garden or washing the dishes you are – despite the physical nature of the work – largely ‘unaware’ of your body except insofar as it is the vehicle of your will. Indeed, what’s valuable and salient about the body from this first-person perspective is precisely its ability to disappear into the task. If you’re hampered by a migraine or an arthritic shoulder, the body’s status as vehicle of your agency is compromised, and you’re forced to think of it instead as a kind of recalcitrant object that needs to be managed. If it’s a perfect manifestation of your will, it’s no longer ‘your body’; it is, rather, simply you .

From the second-person perspective, your body appears as an object of experience for the other person. Think of how differently you experience your own body when you’re alone, as opposed to when someone suddenly enters the room. From the second-person perspective, one’s own body might seem awkward, desirable, average, ineffectual and so forth, depending on who the other person is. Now imagine that same body of yours being examined by a doctor. Then your body shows up for you as something quite different from a seamless expression of agency or the manifestation of self before another individual. Your attention shifts to a third-person perspective such that your body is revealed as a physical object subjected to the rules and categories of other physical objects. Different features become important. During a medical examination, you experience your own body as an instance of a general physical type, capable of being helped or hindered by generic procedures and processes developed for managing objects of that kind.

You must answer for who you are – if not to others, then to yourself

This kind of third-person practical perspective moves to the background when another perspective is setting the terms for what counts as particularly relevant or meaningful in a given situation. The point is to see how these different perspectives give us access to different forms of meaning, value and reasons – though we never occupy one stance in total isolation from the others. While occupying one perspective, we don’t simply forget the others, but are aware of and answerable to the claims that they make in an implicit way. Each perspective is constantly providing important information about what matters and what’s best, and we’re answerable to all three at once, even when only one is setting the agenda for how best to allocate our limited time, care and attention in a given situation.

The fact that there’s a plurality of these normative perspectives means that there’s more than one way of understanding what’s best. Best for whom? For me? For you? For the many who share the world with us and the institutions that enable this sharing? No single perspective can fully encompass the others. Each shows us a different facet of the world’s irreducibly complex meaningfulness and our place in it. Each gives us access to different ways of understanding what’s important, valuable or good. Our condition of normative pluralism means that we’re supplied with different resources for answering the basic questions of agency: what should I do? What are the better or worse options in this situation? Who am I trying to be? To whom am I answerable? This moral complexity makes living a good life challenging because competing goods from these different normative categories can’t be compared on a single metric. In most cases, there is no simple answer about what to do. To negotiate life’s demands, we constantly move in and out of each perspective against a background sense that we’re answerable to the different criteria of meaning and value constitutive of each of the three perspectives.

This emphasis on ‘answerability’ is a core feature of existentialist accounts of personhood. We experience ourselves as being ‘at stake’ in our choices, aware of the fact that who we are is up to us, and that we care about getting it right. Though we regularly try to cover up and forget this fact by means of bad faith, mindless conformity and self-deception, to be human is to be haunted by the anxiety that comes with an awareness of our freedom and the existential responsibility it entails. Ultimately, you must answer for who you are – if not to others, then to yourself. Our basic status as normatively responsive beings – that is, as beings with a capacity to be oriented towards distinctions of better and worse – depends on this sense of being responsible for who you are.

The awareness of being entrusted with an existence for which you alone are answerable means that we’re always on the lookout for guidance in how to make choices well. The three different normative domains revealed via the first-, second- and third-person perspectives provide tools for answering the fundamental existential questions that underwrite every choice. Each offers a different basic value framework through which the world makes demands on us about what it’s best to do. We are indeed fragmented selves, but what divides us is not, for the most part, a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ intentions. Rather, it’s a tension between different practical frameworks for assessing better and worse options, each anchored in a different aspect of the good.

According to this existentialist picture, you can’t be entirely unmoved by whatever strikes you as better or best in any situation. Why? Because to be utterly indifferent to the considerations that count in favour of choosing one way rather than another is to forfeit one’s agency – to adopt the posture of a thing determined solely by causal forces, rather than that of an agent responsive to reasons. But even this forfeit is a manifestation of agency, albeit one that seeks to conceal this fact from itself. Though it’s not always clear how best to respond to specific normative claims as they arise across different practical perspectives in particular situations – and one might be incompetent or cowardly in facing up to them – we can’t escape the sheer fact that we’re answerable to such claims. We cannot help but care about the difference between better and worse lives, and that means we cannot help but care about responding well to the claims of each of the three practical perspectives.

I n contrast, a good deal of moral theory prioritises one of these practical perspectives and downplays the moral relevance of the others by ruling them out as providing genuine access to moral reasons. This has the effect of allowing any responsiveness to other classes of normative claims to be categorised as irrational or evil. For example, classical utilitarianism enjoins us to think of everyone – ourselves included – as an equal unit in the moral calculus that aims to maximise the satisfaction of legitimate desires and preferences. This is a third-person way of approaching the question of what it’s best to do, since each of us is to be treated as an equal moral unit, subjected to the same categories and assessments as any other. Similarly, Kantian deontology prioritises the third-person universality of a reason understood to be identically present in all agents. In each case, the good life is defined in terms of your ability to submit yourself to universally shared moral categories – to think of yourself in third-person moral terms.

There is something right about this approach. It has the compelling result of putting pressure on us to do more for strangers in distress than we tend to do because we’re so often caught up in our own troubles, or those of loved ones. But it also gives rise to objections that ultimately derive from a recognition of the equal value and importance of the first- and second-person perspectives in our moral lives. For example, critics of Kantian deontology point out that respect for a universal reason that manifests in every other human is hardly the same thing as loving concern for this particular person. Critics of utilitarianism, meanwhile, have pointed out that maximising ‘total expected utility’ – ie, getting as large a ‘quantity’ of good results as possible – might require us to, say, harvest someone’s organs when she arrives for a routine check-up at the doctor’s office, since five of her healthy organs could save the lives of five critically ill people. Allowing her to keep her organs will save only a measly one. Though utilitarians and deontologists have come up with many ingenious responses to such objections, these worries follow naturally from a third-person practical perspective, in which each person is viewed as an interchangeable and largely anonymous unit of general rationality or calculable outcomes for the world at large.

An adequate account of the good life requires that all three classes of good are accommodated

But if we think of what matters from the first-person perspective – namely, the individual’s power to govern her own life and express her own unique will – then this kind of approach strikes us as monstrous. Indeed, the approach to moral agency dear to economists and libertarians – rational egoism – swings far in the other direction, insisting that the individual’s power to govern her own life and express her own will is the only thing that is truly valuable, the only thing that can show up as a genuine reason to do anything. According to accounts of this kind – which prioritise the first-person perspective to the exclusion of the others – institutions or persons are immoral insofar as they thwart any individual’s efforts to satisfy her own preferences. All ostensible practical reasons must be understood in terms of the individual’s free pursuit of her preferences if they’re to count as reasons at all.

Again, something about this seems right. Each agent is indeed legitimately claimed by a desire for autonomy and individual success, a basic yearning to satisfy one’s preferences and realise one’s projects. But suggesting that this is the only or the primary source of value – the only legitimate way to answer the question ‘What is best?’ – leads to highly counterintuitive conclusions about the nature of the good life. The main objection is that it completely elides the deeply social nature of good human lives, reducing others to a mere means of satisfying one’s preferences.

In contrast, the truth revealed to us from the second-person perspective is that we treasure others and regularly seek to enable them in their projects and preferences, even at great personal cost. From the second-person perspective, the agent experiences herself as claimed by the value of another person, not as a mere representative of a universal moral category, nor as a useful tool for her own pursuits. The other person is instead experienced as intrinsically valuable. Hence the second-person perspective reveals that even actions that don’t promote one’s own interests can count as reasons.

But the legitimacy of the other two normative domains – the goods of shared world-building and self-expressive autonomy – means that they cannot simply be subordinated to the altruism of the second-person perspective. An adequate account of the good life requires that all three classes of good are accommodated. Though the subordination of the self or the shared political domain to acts of extreme self-sacrifice or charity is a compelling moral ideal advocated by many of the world’s religions, it too distorts the moral picture of what counts as a good human life.

D espite the best efforts of moral theorists to simplify the moral terrain by constraining us to a single perspective on the good – a single source of normative claims to which we’re answerable – doing so invariably results in a picture of human life that neglects some of the sources of value that make a good life good. Each of these normative perspectives offers us a set of distinct reasons that cannot be reduced to or translated into the others without erasing some essential feature of our moral lives.

This means that life confronts us with a fundamental and irresolvable tension. We are tasked with negotiating competing legitimate normative claims – a plurality of goods – with no recourse to an ultimate metric or higher perspective through which to eliminate conflict in answering the basic existential questions to which we’re condemned: who should I be? What should I do? To whom am I beholden?

This shouldn’t prompt us to embrace nihilism , but to recognise the only form that a good life can take for normatively fragmented creatures like ourselves. Leading a good human life – what is sometimes called flourishing – requires that we continuously negotiate these three competing ways of encountering goodness. Flourishing demands achieving a fragile and shifting balance between the different normative terrains. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these domains (self-fulfilment, good relationships, and responsiveness to the demands of a shared world) but achieved in such a way that success in one domain doesn’t unduly compromise success in another.

Well okay, you might be thinking, but how do we know what to do in any particular circumstance? The approach outlined here – which emphasises the irresolvable messiness and conflict at the foundation of our moral lives – seems to have the drawback of not offering sufficient guidance for actually figuring out what one ought to do, at least compared with the resources provided by other moral theories.

But those other approaches succeed in offering guidance by ignoring the moral complexity of being in the grip of an irreducible plurality of goods. This is not to oversimplify these positions, of course. Kantian deontology prioritises the third-person universality of reason, but we can see that it attempts to accommodate the other normative perspectives through the notions of respect for others (the second-person dimension) and respect for self (the first-person dimension). It essentially enjoins us to respect ourselves, respect others, and build a world in which all can be respected. As such, it maps well on to the tripartite moral terrain that I’ve specified above, but it tends to ignore the complexity that results, assuming that all three normative perspectives will subject you to the exact same moral demands.

Everyday moral deliberation involves shifting constantly from one perspective to the other

Similarly, utilitarianism prioritises the third-person norm of universal utility, but it attempts to accommodate the other perspectives through the fact that one’s own preferences don’t automatically trump the other person’s (the second-person dimension) and the fact that the nature of its guiding norm – satisfaction – includes a fundamental reference to the first-personal domain.

But in both cases the intention – an intention that’s understood as realisable – is to provide a decision procedure that stipulates adopting a neutral third-person stance that purportedly captures the normative force of the other two normative domains without remainder. It’s this view that must be questioned.

What engagement with these other theories helps us to recognise is how everyday moral deliberation involves shifting constantly from one perspective to the other in an effort to weigh them against each other, despite their fundamental incommensurability. Imagine that you’re trying to decide whether to quit your job to pursue a less stressful career. The lower pay will make things harder on your family, and you won’t be able to help others as much in the new job. Is it self-indulgent to pursue the easier option when you have the skills to help others, and doing so supports your family? But don’t you deserve a break, too? And the stress is taking a toll on your health and mood, which also affects your family. With the extra time and energy the change affords, you could help out in the community more. What should you do?

These perspective shifts demonstrate that it will almost always be impossible to assess the moral quality of specific acts except against the background of the general tenor of one’s life. In other words, when assessing moral success or failure, the primary target should be lives, not acts. In most cases, a specific act is meaningful only in terms of its place in one’s life as a whole; in terms of the role it plays in the general landscape of competing demands from self, other and world. Are you the kind of person who regularly helps and respects others on both an individual and an institutional level? If yes, then you’re entitled to make some room for your own comfort or pleasure. But if you’re always submitting to the siren call of self-indulgence, then you should think about reallocating your limited resources so that your life better reflects the value of the other two classes of good. Responding well to the criteria of excellence constitutive of each normative domain – being good to ourselves, to others, and to the world – demands negotiation work such that these three classes of competing goods can be accommodated in a coherent way. Hence flourishing requires us to organise our priorities – not simply in the moment, but over the course of our projects, relationships and identities.

Of course, there will be certain lowest common denominators in each normative domain. No amount of good behaviour will ever entitle you to torture others – at least, not if you’re to be counted a good person and your life a good life. But these absolute constraints are few, and few of us find them particularly tempting, at least in their obvious forms. They are therefore incapable of offering sufficient practical guidance when it comes to the choices that most people make in their everyday lives.

T he emphasis on lives, not acts, is a distinctive feature of the virtue-ethical approach in moral theory, according to which our focus should be on a person’s character and life context, not primarily on isolated choices or events. My view, which combines existentialism with virtue ethics, endorses this approach, along with another core feature of virtue ethics: the central place of role models in our moral reasoning. When we feel torn between competing legitimate moral demands both within a normative domain (eg, when we’re claimed by the competing needs of two loved ones) or across domains (eg, when the needs of a loved one compete with the demands of institutional justice), we must think about how to allocate priorities in our lives as a whole, and we regularly take inspiration from the models of excellent lives provided by our moral exemplars. What you choose to do should be guided by your understanding of how those actions shape a life. But understanding how specific actions create a certain kind of life or character is information that we learn mainly by looking to the lives and characters of others. How to find good role models and how to break free of bad ones are of course important questions to address, but those challenges shouldn’t interfere with recognising moral exemplars as a key source of guidance as we navigate this complex moral terrain.

One of the ways in which we learn from others how to succeed at the accommodation and negotiation work made necessary by normative pluralism is in terms of the virtues. The virtues are problem-solving stances through which we address obstacles to human flourishing that are built into the human condition. These obstacles to flourishing include mortality and temporal finitude, material scarcity, and temptations posed by desire for bodily pleasure and aversion to pain. The virtues are character traits – tendencies of seeing, feeling and doing – that enable a good person to respond well to all three normative domains even in the face of these obstacles. For example, patience helps us continue to respond well to self, other, and shared world, despite the temporal limitations that make doing so difficult. By habituating ourselves into these exemplary forms of normative responsiveness, we can better accommodate the different ways that the good reveals itself in our lives. Together with certain absolute prohibitions on a limited set of extreme violations of the good, and moral exemplars who orient us in our striving, the virtues can help us cope with deep structural challenges to flourishing.

The popular ‘combat’ view of morality, wherein agents are constantly torn between immoral desires and the demands of duty, gets much of its plausibility from our normatively plural predicament, which requires us to negotiate conflicts and tensions arising from competing normative resources provided by self, other, and shared world. We are indeed conflicted – torn between comparably legitimate, substantively moral demands – but this is often simply a feature of the messy moral landscape to which we’re condemned, not a sign of intrinsic moral corruption. What might count as a ‘bad intention’ on the combat model is often better understood as the manifestation of another legitimate claim to goodness, one that’s at odds with a value that we ultimately take to have a greater claim to recognition in this context or at this point in our lives. Hence doing what’s right isn’t simply or primarily a matter of silencing an evil desire – though it might be strategically useful to think of goods we can’t realise in this way – but rather a matter of figuring out what’s best now in the context of a well-lived life considered as a whole. And there’s no simple algorithm for knowing how to exercise this moral discernment as we struggle to do justice to all of the sources of value to which we find ourselves answerable.

Am I happy? Am I generous? Am I contributing to the world? The moral struggle we face is finding a way to honestly and accurately answer ‘Yes’ to all three of these questions at once, over the course of a life that presents us with many obstacles to doing so.

To read more on ethical living, visit Psyche , a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychological knowhow, philosophical understanding and artistic insight.

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Doing the Right Thing: When Moral Obligation Is Enough

November 19, 2015 • 8 min read.

Wharton's Robert Hughes contends that it doesn't take long to find examples of ethical behavior being practiced even in the absence of serious legal consequences. He finds that laws, even weak ones without specific sanctions, serve a definite purpose in modern society.

• Public Policy

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” James Madison, the fourth president of the United States and an architect of the U.S. Constitution, is credited with writing these words in “The Federalist Papers” as he constructed his framework for a nation guided by laws that are both enshrined and enforceable. But do laws have any less power if they cannot be enforced properly?

Robert Hughes, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, challenges Madison’s notion in his latest research , which focuses on the moral obligations of citizens and businesses. Hughes contends that it doesn’t take long to find examples of moral and ethical behavior being practiced even in the absence of serious legal consequences. He finds that laws, even weak ones without specific sanctions, serve a definite purpose in modern society.

An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

James Madison Was Wrong

James Madison once said that if people were angels, we would have no use for law. My work in legal philosophy and moral philosophy shows that James Madison wasn’t right about this. Of course we need law in government to address a variety of human moral failings, but even morally very good people would need law and government to get along well together.

“If you believe, as James Madison did, that the only point to law is addressing human misbehavior, then you’ll probably think that law has no point unless there are sanctions attached to legal prohibitions.”

One side of my research program is concerned with specific legal institutions that facilitate or hinder citizens having good moral relationships with each other. This includes some work on democratic theory as well as health care justice. The other side of my program concerns the relationship between law and law enforcement. If you believe, as Madison did, that the only point to law is addressing human misbehavior, then you’ll probably think that law has no point unless there are sanctions attached to legal prohibitions. On this view, there’s no point to telling people to do something — or the government telling people to do something — unless the order is backed up with the threat to lawbreakers to put them in prison, to fine them, to compel payment of damages or something of that nature.

I argue that law can serve morally important purposes, even when it’s unenforced or under enforced. Law can be morally binding on us quite apart from the effect that any sanctions have. Consider an income tax law that’s either entirely unenforced or under enforced. Of course, under enforcement is the situation we’re in because there are some forms of income that aren’t subject to third-party withholding or reporting. In 2006, the IRS estimated that 54% of people who owe tax on amounts that are not subject to third-party reporting or withholding misrepresent the amount that they owe. That’s a lot of people cheating on their taxes. But it’s also a lot of people who are paying their taxes honestly, even though there isn’t a reliable enforcement mechanism to sanction them if they don’t.

I focus on the ethical question here. If you’re in this situation, if you have income that you could conceal from the IRS or another tax authority, and if you know that roughly half of your fellow citizens are shirking the tax and roughly half are paying it honestly, what’s your moral obligation? Tax laws serve a morally important purpose. They attempt to organize support for morally important public goods, such as public safety, and to do it in a fair way. Of course, some people aren’t paying their assigned share, and that’s unfair. But you would be compounding the unfairness or the injustice if you chose to join their number. The right thing to do is to report your income honestly and pay the tax. This is an illustration of a general principle that there is a moral obligation to obey laws that are unenforced or under enforced, and this is important partly because there are sometimes good reasons not to enforce the law. For example, there might be resource limitations on the part of law enforcement or there may be privacy considerations. It might be impossible to enforce a law effectively without an undue intrusion.

The Intersection of Morality and Law

For citizens and residents, there can be a moral obligation to follow laws that are unenforced or under enforced. Just because you could get away with breaking the law doesn’t mean you’re entitled to morally. This is going to apply when there’s no enforcement on the books at all or when there are sanctions on the books that are rarely applied. It will also apply when there are sanctions on the book that are applied, but they are too slight to affect behavior. The other major takeaway is for legislators. Legislators sometimes have reason to believe that a law being proposed couldn’t be enforced both efficiently and fairly. That alone shouldn’t take a proposal off the table. Sometimes the right thing for a legislature to do is to enact a new law, demand that citizens take that law seriously, but not back up that demand with a threat of sanctions.

“Legislators sometimes have reason to believe that a law that’s being proposed couldn’t be enforced both efficiently and fairly. That alone shouldn’t take a proposal off the table. Sometimes the right thing for a legislature to do is to enact a new law, demand that citizens take that law seriously, but not back up that demand with a threat of sanctions.”

This argument is going to be relevant to business people who are facing difficult questions about whether to follow an under-enforced law when following that law may not be narrowly in the firm’s interest. Suppose there is a labor law requiring overtime pay for certain categories of workers, and suppose that this law is under enforced because the only liability is back pay plus interest. An employer that is narrowly self-interested may choose simply not to pay the overtime because the sanctions on the books aren’t enough to effectively deter nonpayment. Nonetheless, there may be a moral obligation to provide overtime time pay given the importance of this law in a fair scheme of economic cooperation.

My arguments are going to have particular application in the international context. Sometimes a multinational business is doing business in a lower-middle-income country where law enforcement has resource limitations that prevent it from enforcing all of the socially important laws effectively. I argue that the moral obligation to follow socially important laws isn’t limited to the laws of one’s own country. One can also have a moral obligation to follow socially important laws when one is doing business as a visitor.

A Business Perspective on Morality

I have three directions that I’d like to explore in my research. First, I’d like to look more closely at the effects, if any, of competition on what obligations businesses have to obey unenforced or under-enforced laws. Are there situations in which a very tightly competitive market makes it genuinely infeasible to obey an under-enforced law? If so, could the moral obligation to support important legal institutions be fulfilled by participating in some kind of institution building instead?

Another future direction is to look at what forms of enforcement are appropriate in a business context. In particular, I plan to look at general moral principles that apply to the use of force and when imprisonment is an appropriate penalty for white collar or nonviolent property crimes.

Last, I’d like to look more closely at the international context and the question of what should a multinational business do if it has reason to believe that some of its business partners in resource-poor settings are breaking the law, perhaps because the law isn’t effectively enforced or because law enforcement has resource limitations?

Here’s a relevant example. In 2013, an eight-story building collapsed in Bangladesh, killing over 1,000 people and injuring over 2,500. The building collapsed because it wasn’t up to code. If they had followed the local building codes, which were under enforced, the people wouldn’t have died. Part of that building was being used as a garment factory that manufactured garments for export. What obligations does a multinational fashion corporation have when it has reason to believe that its business partners in low- and middle-income countries may not be following some important laws, including safety codes?

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The Importance of Doing the Right Thing

Table of contents, building character and personal growth, fostering healthy relationships, promoting societal harmony and progress, leaving a lasting legacy, references:.

• Aristotle. (2000). Nicomachean Ethics (T. Irwin, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.
• Kant, I. (2017). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (M. Gregor, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
• Kohlberg, L. (1971). From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Naturalistic Fallacy and Get Away with It in the Study of Moral Development. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1971(5), 51-57.
• MacIntyre, A. C. (2013). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
• Solomon, R. C. (1993). The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Hackett Publishing.

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Do the Right Thing Analysis

by Walker Valdez April 2016

Introduction

The film Do the Right Thing, written, directed and produced by Spike Lee, focuses on a single day of the lives of racially diverse people who live and work in a lower class neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. However, this ordinary day takes place on one of the hottest days of the summer. The film centers on how social class, race and the moral decisions that the characters make have a direct effect on the way people interact with each other. It starts with the film’s characters waking up to start their day and climaxes with a neighborhood riot after police officers excessively restrain and kill a young black man named Radio Raheem for fighting an older Italian American restaurant owner named Sal in his pizzeria, and then outside on the street. The film, although released in 1989, with its social commentary on the effect that race has on police brutality is just as relevant today as when it was released 26 years ago.

Though the movie ultimately shows how dangerous it is to react to others based on race, ironically, Lee portrays characters stereotypically in the movie through their language and aesthetics. Spike Lee indulges in stereotypes by using iconography to represent the different racial groups in the film (Etherington-Wright 236). He does this in numerous ways such as having Italian American characters wear crosses and tank top shirts. He also does this in his portrayal of Radio Raheem wearing an African medallion necklace while carrying a large boom box playing loud rap music. Even tertiary characters such as a group of Puerto Rican friends are shown listening to salsa while speaking Spanish and drinking beer on the stoop of their apartment building. Lee also points out that his characters recognize that their different ethnicities can lead to a power struggle by having them openly insult each other through ethnic slurs in both a comic and serious fashion. Lee also shows this when his black activist character Buggin’ Out tells Mookie, who is a black man employed by a white man, to “Stay Black” insinuating that Mookie should never strive to be a Tom or a sell-out (Etherington-Wright 238).

Throughout the film, the characters not only point out the differences in their race, but also display the ideas found in Marxism through their social interactions. According to Understanding Film Theory , “Marxism was conceived as a revolutionary theory that attempted to explain and expose the relations of power in capitalist societies” (Etherington-Wright 83). It also says that Marxism’s founder, Karl Marx, was “concerned with the apparent division between the ruling and the working class” (83). In the film, Buggin’ Out verbally attacks a property owning white man for running over his new Air Jordans and then asks him “What are you doing in my neighborhood?” In this brief scene Lee is able to show how a character in a poor neighborhood feels the psychological need to compete with others economically. This is an example of the Culture Industry and Buggin’ Out displays this because he buys the latest shoes and does not want to feel that he was literally and symbolically being run over by a man who was much wealthier than he was (86).

The film is set in a predominantly black neighborhood and the only two families seen that own businesses are either Italian American or Korean American. Therefore, some of the black characters like them because they are business owners and others dislike them for the same reason. However, at the end of the film the only business owner whose business is vandalized and burned to the ground is a white man’s. Lee shows that, although there is conflict between Korean Americans and African Americans, the history between whites and blacks is much more conflicted. Furthermore, even though many of the black characters love Sal’s pizzeria, they do become aware of what Sal really thinks of them when he feels threatened out by Buggin’ Out and denies him the chance to put a picture of a black man on the pizzeria wall. The movie also clearly shows how by denying the picture, Sal keeps control over the black patrons in his restaurant. The two films clips that will be discussed will be analyzed by using both a racial and Marxist perspective. The first clip shows black and Hispanic characters in conflict over material possessions, but ultimately respecting each other, and the second clip shows Mookie coming to the realization that as much as he tries to moderate peaceful relations between white and black characters at some point he feels he has to fight for what he thinks is unfair, even if it means losing his job over it.

Do the Right Thing Analysis of Scenes

The first selected scene begins with a record being played that brings in the sound of conga drums while the camera fades to the next scene where we find a group of Puerto Rican men who fit a perceived ethnic Puerto Rican image while the salsa music of Ruben Blades is heard loud. Spike Lee opening the scene with heavy use of iconography enforces stereotypes by choice of the men’s clothes, language, and facial appearance. The man in the center speaks in Spanish, referring to his beautiful land Puerto Rico, while his friend disagrees with its beauty by calling it a nightmare. The scene is successful in portraying that this corner of the majority black neighborhood is very different from the rest. While the two friends begin to argue the camera pans away to reveal that the loud salsa music actually comes from an old boom box which begins to blend with loud rap music cluing the viewer that Radio Raheem must be near. The camera pans to the right and starts from the ground, moving up stopping at the large newer stereo being held by two large African American hands wearing gold knuckle jewelry, showing Lee’s use of fetishization by focusing on half of the body and not the face. As the camera pauses, the viewer can read the words Super and PRO stereo and Raheem’s music is heard much more clearly, showing signs of economic excess. The jewelry and the stereo’s excessive noise and size represent economic power and status. The camera pans up to Raheem’s serious face and the African medallion hanging on his neck once again shows iconography. While the camera focus on Raheem, the sound of the Puerto Ricans yelling that their salsa music is being drowned out is heard. The camera rotates to the right again and passes green bushes that represent a tropical climate as the salsa music starts to be heard again.

The man in the center recognizes that Radio Raheem is issuing a challenge of power by standing next to them blaring loud rap music that many black youth identify with. This challenge of power has both racial and economic symbolism because it is essentially seeing not only whose stereo plays louder music, but also whose culture is the more dominating one. When the Puerto Rican man walks over to his boom box, which has a Puerto Rican flag sticker on it, it is clear that his stereo is not as new and when he turns up the volume louder the viewer realizes it’s not as loud either. Raheem then turns up multiple knobs and drowns out the salsa yet again, letting the Puerto Rican man know that in this power struggle he has just lost. He responds by turning down his music again and saying “You Got it Bro” to which Raheem responds by smiling and pumping his fist in the air. This two minute scene, although entertaining, in reality represents the whole movie in the way the different races want to feel acknowledged, powerful and respected by the other races in the film. In this scene Raheem proves he is more powerful and it is a precursor for the many confrontations that he faces throughout the film.

The second selected scene begins minutes after Radio Raheem has been killed by the police because of their response to a street fight between Radio Raheem and Sal. This scene represents how disbelief turns to outrage, as the characters shout the names of other victims of police violence. At this point the viewer begins to realize that this may not have been a freak accident and in fact that has been happening repeatedly in this neighborhood. The residents of this lower class neighborhood are now all aware that it is the norm for them to be victimized by police. The older man saying “They didn’t have to kill the boy,” points out that Radio, though large and intimidating, was still a fairly young man.

When the camera pans to Mookie’s shocked face, it reveals that Mookie has decided that there is something wrong with standing next to these three white men while the rest of his neighbors and friends watch. The way they stand is very important because Sal is standing in the center and his two sons are standing behind him. Mookie is also next to him, but his body is slightly away from them showing that he is reconsidering his position towards them. He looks to Sal, then back at the neighborhood and begins to walk away from Sal and his sons. The act is very significant because Mookie felt a loyalty to Sal through employment, but now a line in the sand is drawn. After Mookie leaves, Sal’s facial expression becomes tenser because he realizes that at least he had someone in the neighborhood literally on his side who ethnically looked like the rest of the residents who at the moment are not happy with him or his sons.

Seeing that tensions may escalate, the character Mayor tries to pacify the crowd, but they do not take him seriously due to his alcoholism and the fact that he is dressed poorly. At this point the crowd is upset, but have not decided to commit any acts of violence yet. The camera panning from a largely black crowd to three white men staring at them shows that Sal and his sons may have more economic status, but they do not have the numbers. Pino’s face shows that he may have been expecting this to happen all along. This scene is very fascinating because at this point Sal and his sons are not just a symbol of wealth, but are now a symbol of any injustice committed against the people of the neighborhood by someone who is white or economically more powerful than they are. It is ironic because Raheem was actually choking Sal before the police came, but the residents do not acknowledge that. As Mookie runs with a trashcan towards the pizzeria, he is not only smashing Sal’s store, but is showing his outrage and anger for being made to feel powerless by the police. Sal’s voice in slow motion can be heard yelling “No!” but by then it is too late. As the residents loot the store it shows that they are tired of being made to feel powerless by the police and by all those who are economically better off. While some destroy the store, others go for the money showing that they are desperate to regain the power that they felt that they never had. While the neighborhood residents destroys the pizzeria, Sal is taken to the other side of the street where he is forced to watch in disbelief as not only his store is being destroyed, but also his economic superiority over them becomes destroyed as well, thus proving to be a remarkable scene.

Director Spike Lee chose to create a film that is able to both entertain and emotionally resonate with an audience by pointing out that when racial and social disparities are not properly addressed by those in power, they can ultimately lead to acts of extreme violence by those who feel powerless. The film is realistic in its approach that a melting pot of different cultures and races doesn’t mean that everyone will live happily ever after. Lee knew that in order to make a film about social issues he needed to embrace the stereotypes in order to criticize them. At one point in the film the police officers are driving through the neighborhood and say “What a waste” while they are driving by. The residents outside at the moment were not committing any acts of violence, but in a brief instant it shows that the officers whose job it is to protect the community do not respect the residents they serve, and also hints at what is to come later in the movie.

The film expertly lets the conflict build slowly instead focusing on the ridiculousness of stereotypes such as the Asian store owner with a thick accent, or the overly agitated and hyper active young man who can be seen as very pro black. The film shows the viewer that these issues concerning race exist, but the characters do not directly confront them until the very end of the film. It is important to emphasize that these issues are not solely with race, but also who is in control. It is the combination of the two that takes things to a boiling point. Comic scenes like a boom box show down ultimately prove to be more about power and less about who’s got better music, and a riot does not usually form without years of feeling that the system created for a group’s protection does not benefit their best interests. Do The Right Thing is more than just a film on police brutality or racial identity, it is about the beauty and ugliness that exist, not only in a low income community, but in our selves.

Works Cited

Do The Right Thing . Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Spike Lee, Danny Aiello. Universal, 1989. DVD.

Etherington-Wright, Christine, and Ruth Doughty. Understanding Film Theory . Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

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Do the Right Thing Essay Examples

"do the right thing": exploring themes of race and social injustice.

Spike Lee's iconic film, "Do the Right Thing," released in 1989, remains a powerful and thought-provoking examination of racial tension and social injustice in America. Set in the sweltering heat of a Brooklyn neighborhood, the film unfolds over a single day, portraying the interactions among...

Depiction of Al-life Racial Contradictions in "Do the Right Thing" Film

“Do the right thing” was a film directed by Spike Less in 1989, it is a film that full of political and racial colors, combined with the situation and contradictions of African Americans and nonblack Americans at that era. Main actors and actress that participate...

Question of Diversity in Do the Right Thing Movie

The movie Do the Right Thing, a group of people in the district of Brooklyn, have had enough and tensions are growing in this black ghetto area. The only local businesses are a Korean grocery and Sal's Pizzeria. Mookie, Sal's delivery boy, manages to always...

Understanding of Do the Right Thing Movie

The weather is sizzling hot and tensions are slowly coming to a boil in this Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn hood. Slowly but surely we see the heat melt away the barriers that were keeping anger from rising to the surface. The pizzeria is owned by Italians, the...

Gentrification and Class System in the Film "Do the Right Thing"

This paper will discuss the film Do The Right Thing (1989), directed by Spike Lee, as a source of historical knowledge emphasising housing and class systems that have been structured and set into the American consciousness. I aim to contextualize this movie in the discourse...

Main Idea in Do the Right Thing Movie

With its 90’s flare of boom boxes and box tops, Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” draws in audiences who love the era. The film depicts an urban neighborhood during an extra hot summer’s day. However, in this movie throwback clothing and summer heat influenced...

The Documentary 13th: Preason for No Reason

The documentary 13th where we can see scholars, activist, politicians analyzing the criminalization of African Americans and the massive increase of the prisoners. After the 13th amendment the law was passed to free the slaves and slavery was ended. Since slavery was the economy system...

The New Asylum Analysis

The documentary video “The New Asylum” (Frontline, 2005) focuses on the fact that prisons have been getting filled up with more and more mentally ill inmates ever since America’s psychiatric hospitals shut down. They have nowhere else to put them, so they put them in...

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