What are we getting at when we say
I want to do the right thing.
What is it that we mean?
Doing the “right” thing implies there is an objective right thing to be done. A singular thing.
This, of course, doesn’t actually help us identify what that right thing is. That’s all hypothetical. It’s the abstract notion that there is, conceptually, a right thing.
Evaluating “right”
To determine what counts as right, we consider a variety of factors. So there is no singular concept we call “right”. A right thing is also the most moral, proper, consistent, and logical thing.
This leaves us with a new problem, however. How do we work with all of these different factors?
Usually, the right thing doesn’t have to rank highest in all of those areas. It just needs the highest total score. We’ll take an unethical thing that makes sense for most of us or an illegal act that is of the highest moral character.
In other words, we’re willing to fudge the process of evaluating what counts as right. It’s a kind of know-it-when-we-see-it deal.
At this point, we can probably see a dozen more problems arising. Which is also why it seems like we can’t even agree on what counts as “right” much of the time.
But there is one piece of this I want to highlight.
While most of us might focus on the subjectivity of all of this in the way we determine what counts as “the right thing”, I’m going the other way.
Why do we assume objectivity?
Why do we assume there is a singular right thing most of the time? A singular right thing that can be assigned to a situation? Or crazier: a singular right thing we can assign to any situation?
I think we get here for two reasons:
- A sincere expectation of certainty
- A fear of being judged
Adults who think they can figure out what “the right thing to do” in any situation are like students who are trying to get the highest score on a test.
And this reveals a third reason we assume objectivity:
3. We make life into a competition.
This obsession about “right” isn’t pure objectivity. It is also based in relativity to others. We want a perfect score. And a better score than them.
Being the best is always a relative term. But so is good. And right.
Why do we do this?
We obviously want order in the midst of disorder. So we look to a project that can order our world.
When we’re confused, we want something to rely on. Do the right thing.
Even as we struggle during normal times to identify right things, we expect that they ought to be easily identified when things are in flux. Just like when I’m looking for my sunglasses, I want them to be where I will look for them.
And yet, what it is closer to is an expectation that when we feel like we’re drowning there must be something to grab hold of. Even if we’re in open water.
We’re afraid.
And so often we’ll quite literally make up solutions to our problems. We create the certainty we long for. This is how we have maxims like “everything happens for a reason.” Even when this is clearly not based on any evidence. It is a myth constructed to ease our anxiety in the absence of certainty.
Where then is the hope?
Right things aren’t actually that hard to find. What I’m trying to highlight is the flaw in our methodology, desire, and expectation.
This becomes pretty obvious when we see people use the right thing to do the wrong thing or when we see people do wrong things for the right reasons. We simply “get it” because it all makes a kind of sense. Or perhaps we have a feeling that this isn’t supposed to be how it works.
We know that the classic morality dilemma of a person stealing medicine to save their spouse’s life explores one sense of right against another sense of wrong. And we also know that, most people see it as obvious. Even when a minority of people will choose the opposite.
We also know, for instance, that being generous builds up community. Kindness, positivity, grace. These values and actions help in virtually any situation. These are always “the right thing.”
Just as we know that stealing, lying, or assaulting someone is wrong. That these are going to be both a personal sin and a public crime.
These are truths of which we are certain.
Adjusting Certainty
The problem is that we have such a narrow view of certainty.
It is actually a literalistic approach to certainty. That we sometimes shift into a metaphor (when we feel like it).
This stems from both the need to make certainty into a concrete, and therefore physical truth—realized in time and space—while avoiding the rest of what constitutes truth. (For more about this, read this piece from yesterday.)
To put this plainly, we can think of the certainty of things being only what we see or touch. And then we can go to church and say “I believe in the certainty of the resurrection”. We will do this and understand them both as real. But in our lives, turn certainty into only what is spelled out in print or observed with our eyes.
This is why we are certain of the seasons, because we have experienced them every year and also never not experienced them any year.
But the certainty we want when we strive to know what is right can’t be summed up so simply. It must be allowed room to breathe.
Life
As I came back to finish this piece, I read about a young man who was murdered on a New York City subway. He was choked to death by a former marine in the middle of the day.
This is a scenario that no doubt has countless people jumping to preformed conclusions about what is right. You know them all. We’ve all heard them.
All of this certainty from people about what is right…and yet what remains is a public discourse that is actually more confused than it would be without all of that certainty.
Avoiding the politics of such a moment, refusing to speak to the evil of murder, is making our sense of what is right more confused.
A man was murdered by a stranger. That is not the right thing.
In fact, all of the excuses we offer in all of these cases are precisely about that. Not about what is right, but seeking to do two things:
- Evaluate between more wrong and less wrong and
- Then transforming “less wrong” into right.
This is the only way “murdering a man on the subway” can be cast as “the right thing”. It quite literally never is.
But making it into “the right thing” is an intentional project that most of us do. We usually do this by labeling it “self-defense” or (ironically) “Good Samaritan”.
We are creating most of the confusion.
Not because we like it or because we do so with intention. But because the moral confusion pains us. And we’d rather make things make sense.
When we learn that Grandpa made his fortune through embezzlement, we say “but he was a good man.” That, of course, was not the question. He did wrong and you are covering it up.
Moral confusion offers certainty we can’t otherwise have. Certainty that we are doing the right thing when, deep down, we know we aren’t.
This kind of moral confusion doesn’t come from philosophy but from our refusal to be wrong, and therefore experience the pain of being wrong.
The stress, then, of doing the right thing is not weighed against our ignorance, but against our pain.
Which is why we lionize prophets and martyrs. They are brave enough to not only know what is right, but to do it. While the rest of us are cowards, deluding ourselves into a confusion from which we can actively remove ourselves.