Ethics and the Heart
When I was in graduate school pursuing my PhD research in moral philosophy, there was a lot of emphasis on the idea of human agency. Exertions of the will — what we actively do — were paramount. Other aspects of moral life that stem from the emotional side of our nature — feeling, sensing, opening, receiving — were not given as much attention. (To be fair, this is not true of moral philosophy everywhere. I studied in a department that had a very Kantian approach, and Kant was all about the will.)
In theory, there’s a good reason for this. If I decide of my own free will to lie, or cheat, or harm someone for personal gain, that tells you something about my character, and it opens me up to blame. Emotions and inclinations are much messier. I might feel hatred towards someone, and that might arouse in me a strong inclination to do something mean to him — but if I refuse to act on that inclination, that seems like a good thing. I can’t help feeling hatred, but I can choose not to act on it — and that choice is an act of will. So it seems as if the will ought to be the primary locus of moral concern.
Kant also thought that the will had a kind of logic to it. The will operates according to certain rules, and those rules form the basis of morality. Roughly speaking, and simplifying greatly, his idea was that you can’t coherently do something that you wouldn’t want others to do to you. The maxims of your actions must be “universalizable.” If I think it’s okay to deceive you for my own benefit, then I must think it’s okay for anyone to do that — and the fact that I would resent you for deceiving me shows that I don’t really believe this. So moral wrongdoing turns out to be a kind of logical incoherence.
Kantian ethics has a seductive theoretical elegance, but this approach has never felt true to my own experience. By far the most important developments in my moral life have had to do with the messier, more emotive side of things. To the extent that I have learned to take an interest in the good, and to improve on my own moral failings, this shift has come about not through rigorous intellectual argument or through heroic exertions of will, but from a gradual opening of the heart. This process is organic, intuitive, and somewhat mysterious. It doesn’t feel like grinding through a logical argument that will then form the basis for some sort of decision. It feels more like you’re sensing your way into a domain where values can touch the heart; you feel your way into that territory, you notice a certain resonance — “This feels right, this feels steady, this feels true” — and you let that carry you. And then the heart feels uplifted, and a kind of moral integrity arises out of that.
None of this is to say that the will is unimportant, or that it has no role to play in our lives as moral beings. We do have some choice, some control over how things unfold. Though I would say that much of this control lies not with the specific actions we choose in a given moment, but in how we choose to manage our attention, direct our thoughts, and respond to our emotions — in short, how we choose to care for and cultivate what we might call “the inner garden.” Do we let the weeds grow? Do we notice the flowers and take time to nurture them, or do we look past them with a casual nod? Do we know where to find good fertilizer? Do we know how to use it?
There is room for the will in all of this, but it’s subtle. Often it’s a matter of shifting or redirecting — “Don’t get involved with that,” “More of this,” “Linger here,” “Not that— try this instead.” This inner work yields outer results. The health of the inner garden leads to healthy motivational tendencies — when we feel good, we want to do good. When the garden is rotten and overgrown with weeds, our motivational system gets out of whack. If we don’t do the work of inner tending, we leave our garden wide open to the blind and often destructive forces of external influence and internal habit.
The trick is to keep an eye on all of this without becoming too obsessed or tight around the idea of being a good person or getting it right. That can lead to its own pitfalls: self-righteousness, guilt, fault-finding, rigidity. Can we keep the right balance here? Can we sustain a lively interest in the good that is rooted in an organic and intuitive sense of conscience and concern, rather than coming from a pathological need to impose law and order? What helps us walk that line?
I find the Buddhist teachings around sila (ethical virtue) to be of great value here. The five precepts in Buddhism are offered not as commandments with punishments attached, and not as propositions to be intellectually debated, but as training rules that promote one’s own welfare and the welfare of others. They are stated simply but they have a profound depth to them. They invite a kind of lived exploration and inquiry that lead to the development of moral wisdom.
I undertake the training precept to refrain from killing living beings.
I undertake the training precept to refrain from taking that which is not given.
I undertake the training precept to refrain from sexual misconduct.
I undertake the training precept to refrain from lying.
I undertake the training precept to refrain from intoxicants that cloud the mind and cause heedlessness.
By working with these precepts, we gradually train the heart to become sensitive to ethical matters, and to take a genuine interest in the good — not through logical argument or fear of punishment, but through an internal process whereby the heart learns to open to that which is good and finds in that opening a nourishment and a security that is encouraging and uplifting. This is something you do by living the precepts, and by discussing them earnestly in the company of others who are exploring them in their own lives. That’s very different from having an academic discussion about morals.
One of Kant’s great hopes was to show that morality is the sort of thing you can reason about, that it’s not all a matter of preference and opinion. Often, though, when we talk about reasoning, we have machine-like or computer-like metaphors in mind. And we can sometimes picture moral reflection in that way: you’ve got to work out some arguments about values, and then you’ve got to exert your will to make sure you do what the arguments command. The more I reflect on this territory, though, the more I come to feel that we are better served by organic metaphors of natural growth. The cultivation of ethics is less like an algorithmic sequence of reasoning and more like a blossoming of the heart.
The heart responds to values. When you are in the presence of cruelty, you feel it — or at least you do if your heart is sensitive and open, and you’re paying attention. (And if you’re not open, sensitive, and paying attention, then it seems to be you’re not fully present to the cruelty.) Likewise when you are in the presence of genuine kindness. A little boy on the playground shares his ice cream cone with the little girl who’s crying because she’s just moved to a new school and she’s scared. That moves you. Your heart sings in resonance. You feel the significance of it. This is not mere sentimentality. It is the very basis of human life. Values like this are the heart’s food. Feed it good food, and it will grow strong. A strong heart then forms the solid basis for an ethical life — and for the deep happiness that arises out of that.
The ancient Greek philosophers — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics — were united by a commitment to the idea that virtue is deeply connected with human happiness. Modern moral philosophy has largely lost sight of that important truth. Philosophers tend to look at figures who seem both obviously immoral and obviously happy, and to take them as counterexamples. “Why couldn’t someone like Hitler be happy? What about all those crooks who rip people off and get away with it— aren’t they living it up?” It’s hard to meet such arguments on the terms laid down by contemporary academic philosophy, because those terms leave little room for the invocation of wisdom. Academic debates demand arguments cast at a certain level of abstraction — sets of propositions laid out with a sheen of rigor and precision — and those propositions are always ripe for critique by some unwise but clever intellect.
The deep connections between virtue and happiness are ultimately the sort of thing one must learn to see for oneself. And the kind of seeing that matters here is the seeing of the heart, not of the intellect. I hope the above reflections can serve as an invitation to study these matters in the laboratory of one’s own heart. The lighting in there is less harsh, and it is better suited for this particular subject matter.