Moral Clarity I - Reason and Ideals

I recently read Susan Neiman’s book Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, 2008) and found a lot there of value to government ethics, even though government ethics doesn’t generally involve the big questions of moral philosophy (see my blog post on this). I am going to write a few blog posts on some valuable ideas raised by this excellent book. This is the first.

Neiman is a devotee of Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher who tried to bring order to moral philosophy by means of a few principles based on the “categorical imperative” (please don’t be put off by the fancy lingo). Kant is the leading philosopher to take a deontological, or rules-based approach to ethics (the other major school is the consequentialist or utilitarian, ends-based approach). Government ethics takes a primarily rules-based approach in an arena where values are primarily ends-based (as in "the end justifies the means").

Government ethics professionals tend to be grown-up idealists, to use the term in Neiman’s title. And this, like "government ethics," is not an oxymoron.

Ideals aren't just for kids. “The ideals of your youth,” Neiman writes, “are no more naïve than they ever were; what you must abandon is the naïve belief that they can be completely fulfilled.” I don’t think any of us has such a naïve belief.

In fact, it is realists whose growth effectively stops, not at childhood, but at adolescence, the period when the recognition of reality leads to serious disappointment with the world.  By writing a better future off as wishful thinking, realists are less disappointed, but they also prevent themselves from acting to improve the world, simply because they feel their effort will be wasted.

"Growing up means taking our lives out of others' hands and into our own,” Neiman writes. This is accomplished by using our reason, the power we have to think beyond the reality we're faced with every day. Reason allows us to look at what is, and think of what ought to be. Happily, Neiman’s example of how reason works involves a government official:

Suppose you observe an official who has failed at all the tasks he was appointed to fulfill and is nevertheless rewarded with goods and glory.  Reason tells you not only that things could be otherwise, but that they ought to be otherwise.  It thus moves you to ask: What accounts for this discrepancy between is and ought?  You seek an explanation: The man has powerful connections who care more about loyalty than competence.  Now you might stop there, having explained the original data, but reason is still discontent.  A system in which competence is disregarded in favor of loyalty is dysfunctional; institutions need to be differently constructed.  What accounts for the existence of this one? ... Why do we have a political system that gives contingency and corruption free reign?  At some point you will likely throw up your hands in rage or dismay; you have a sick child, a double shift, an urge to dance, a need to sleep.  Reason does not.  Left to its own devices it will keep asking why the gap between the way things are and the way things should be exists at all, until it reaches a point where no gap exists.

Ideals involve the ought, which is why ethics works by means of ideals (or, in the case of government ethics, by means of rules that seek to achieve ideals). How the world happens to be is not enough for those who think about how much better it could be. In other words, ideals involve not only reason, but also hope. Hope, not expectation.

“Ideals,” Neiman says, “are not measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals.”

Other blog posts in this series:
Intentions
Ethics Environments

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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