How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest

"Even though I’m not a utilitarian, and so I tend to disagree with Singer in terms of the general framework, this book literally changed my life. I read it many years ago, in the 1990s, when I was in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was part of a book club that I helped organize and I don’t remember who suggested it but we read this book. One of the things that struck me as really reasonable and useful in it is that Singer says, ‘Don’t try to be perfect, don’t try to change everything you do all at once because most likely you will fail and give up. Try to do the little that you can, and as much as you can in the right direction.’ So, for instance, Singer is famously an advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism. He says that if you agree that the vegetarian or even the vegan position is, in fact, morally preferable, that doesn’t mean you have to give up everything on the spot, or indeed ever. It means that you want to move in that direction. What are you doing now, eating steak three times a week? Go down to one a week, or once every couple of weeks. Start moving in that direction. Any movement you make in the right direction is progress. It’s progress for you as an individual and it’s progress for whatever cause—in this case, animal rights and the environment—you’re concerned with. I remember my wife and I discussing this book after the book club, and we immediately made the decision to sell one of our two cars, because we really didn’t need two, and to move downtown from the really nice suburban area where we were living to a smaller house. Those were relatively small steps, but they were significant for us. There were costs: it costs to sell your house and buy another one. You’re putting yourself into smaller quarters, you’re inconveniencing yourself by going down to one car instead of two. You have to start coordinating going to work and all that stuff. But it immediately felt like the right thing to do as a result of reading Singer’s book. It’s an example of a book in practical philosophy where even if you disagree with the general framework that informs the book—as I said, I’m not a utilitarian—you can still take a lot of what Singer says about individual strategies of how to go after certain issues and make changes in your life instantly. We implemented those changes in a matter of days. It’s an example of how even a book with which you disagree can have a direct impact on your life and, hopefully, move you toward a better situation. You’re right. That is where I disagree with Singer. He seems to think that he has the right priorities at a global, universal level. From the point of view of virtue ethics, I think each one of us has to make their own decisions based on their own circumstances and in their own judgement of those circumstances. It just so happened that on those two issues, my personal judgment agreed with that of Singer and so I wanted to act. And the reason the book was important to me is because I was spurred, by reading the book, to act on those particular issues. But what is important and what is not important is a personal decision, I don’t think there is a universal answer. That’s a major disagreement that I have both with the Kantian and the utilitarian approach. They’re a little too ‘one size fits all.’ “I wish more contemporary philosophers were clear about what they’re saying” That said, I am not a moral relativist either, nor were the Greco-Romans. They thought that there are certain parameters, a certain framework that you can use, that is more or less universal in the sense that it takes into account what’s common among human beings. We are a particular type of social being with certain needs and wants. So, anything that directly or indirectly helps us move toward those needs and wants is a good thing and anything that impairs our moving in that direction is a bad thing. But those are general enough that then you can have a lot of reasonable discussions and even reasonable disagreements about the details. For instance, going back to the ancient sources, although I just said that Cato the Younger, as presented in Lucan, was a role model for the Stoics, Cato arguably made a number of bad political decisions. He was presumably making those decisions in good faith. But his friend Cicero, who was not a Stoic, but a skeptic philosopher and also a senator, apparently at some point, lost his patience and said, ‘You know, Cato, you keep trying to do these things because they seem right to you. In fact, you’re undermining your own long-term goals by doing what you’re doing.’ At some point, Cicero writes a letter to his friend Atticus where he says, ‘Our friend Cato, I love him to death. But he doesn’t seem to realize that we don’t live in Plato’s Republic , we live in the mud of Romulus.’ It’s a great way of putting things. There is definitely more than one way to be virtuous and more than one way to look at the same problem in terms of what the right thing to do is. Exactly. I often use one or another of Peter’s books in my courses at City College. The students often disagree with his take, but things get interesting when I say, ‘Okay, but what exactly do you disagree with? Where does he go wrong in the reasoning?’ That’s far more challenging than just saying, ‘Oh, I disagree. I’m going to reject the whole thing.’ It’s a great exercise and I think you’re right that it’s possible because Peter is very clear when he writes. I wish more contemporary philosophers were clear about what they’re saying and why they’re saying it because that would make possible a lot more interesting and fruitful discussions. How to Be a Stoic is my personal take on Stoicism as an ancient philosophy that I think has much value for the 21st century. It’s supposed to be a practical approach. This is not just a general philosophical or historical discussion of Stoicism, as interesting as that may be. I want to know how you can put into practice Stoic principles in your own life. The book is written from a very personal perspective. Several of the anecdotes are real life things that happened to me or that I had to deal with, from health issues to being robbed. It concludes with a set of practical exercises that people can do on a regular basis, if they want to give the general approach of Stoic philosophy a try. This was co-edited with my friends and colleagues Skye Cleary and Daniel Kaufman. It came out of a podcast hosted by Dan. We were having a conversation and, at some point, we said, ‘Maybe it would be interesting to ask people who are not only knowledgeable about a particular philosophy or religion, but actually live that philosophy and religion, to write a personal essay about how do they put together the theory and the practice?’ And so you’ll find essays in the book on Aristotelianism and Epicureanism, the ancient Greco-Roman philosophies, you will find the Eastern traditions, Buddhism, Confucianism, and also some religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, as well as modern philosophies, existentialism, effective altruism, which I’m not sure qualifies as a philosophy but it’s close enough, and secular humanism and ethical culture. It was really interesting to put together, to ask people who are actually living these approaches, ‘How do you do it? How do you put into practice the principles of, let’s say, Christianity in the 21st century? How do you navigate modern life in a way that is sensible and good and doesn’t betray the fundamentals of whatever philosophy or religion you’ve actually chosen to follow? It was a really interesting exercise, putting together that book. This one is about the quest for character, what the story of Socrates and Alcibiades teaches us about our search for good leaders. Most of the book is about leadership and how you get leaders with a good character. Of course the implication is that there is such a thing as a good character, and that we can achieve it. So, near the end of the book, there is a discussion of ‘Okay, forget the leaders for a moment. Let’s ask the same question about ourselves. How do we become better people?’ As the subtitle says, the starting point of the book is the famous dialogue between Socrates and his friend, student and possibly lover, Alcibiades. The reason I start there is, first of all, because it’s a great example of how you do practical philosophy that has to do with statesmanship and leadership. But it’s also because the Alcibiades figure is fascinating. I’m stunned that nobody—as far as I know—has done a movie on the life of Alcibiades, because this guy was incredible. He was a handsome, rich, brave, unbelievable character. And yet he was also affected by what the ancient Greeks called hubris. Socrates tells him so, very clearly, in the Alcibiades Major from Plato, where the two interact. A very young Alcibiades goes to Socrates and says, ‘Look, I want to be in charge of things in Athens, but I want to do it right, I need to know how to be virtuous.’ Socrates talks to him a bit and at the end says, ‘You know, Alcibiades, you really should give up, you’re just not the kind of person to do that sort of thing, if you insist you will bring all sorts of bad consequences.’ And, sure enough, that’s what happens. Alcibiades was singlehandedly responsible for a large chunk of the disasters that befell the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War. Socrates was right. So that’s the start of the book. After that, I examine a number of other interesting figures, statesmen and/or philosophers who interacted with statesmen in ancient Greece and Rome. So Marcus Aurelius, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Alexander the Great and Aristotle and the relatively less known story of Dionysus the Second of Syracuse and Plato. Many people don’t realize that Plato at the age of 60 and then 70 did a couple of trips to Syracuse, to put into practice his philosophical ideas. In his fairly old age, he crossed the Mediterranean because he wanted to see if he could actually make a difference. He almost lost his life twice as a result. The book also updates this whole discussion beyond the Greco-Romans to the Renaissance, and then modern times. Of course, you cannot talk about Renaissance ethics and statesmanship without mentioning Machiavelli and his Prince and the kind of advice that he was giving. That’s right. That is the origin of what we today call realpolitik, or political realism, which has been adopted by a number of characters in the 20th and 21st centuries, Kissinger, for instance, who I wouldn’t necessarily recommend as the ideal statesman. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter By the end of the book, we have a discussion about not only what we have learned from this whole issue of character and leadership and what individuals like us, who are not emperors, prime ministers or presidents, can do in terms of improving ourselves, but also how we should think about the relationship between ethics and politics. To simplify greatly, I come down in between Socrates and Machiavelli. Socrates basically thought that unless you’re virtuous, forget it. Just don’t get into politics. He’s right in theory, but in practice, it’s just not going to happen. The opposite extreme, as you mentioned, is Machiavelli, who says, ‘If you want to be a statesman, here’s how you take advantage of people, here’s how you betray people, etc. etc. in order to actually get what you want.’ It seems to me that somewhere in between is the right position and I do think that of all the people that I present as case studies in the book, Cicero is the one that comes closest. He was a philosopher, he certainly did believe that there is such a thing as virtuous character, and that we have an imperative to become better people. But, at the same time—as I mentioned before with the quote about Cato not realizing that he lives in the mud of Romulus—he was also a pragmatic politician. He had been a consul in Rome, which was the highest political office during the Republic; he had actually had to deal with a conspiracy against the state, orchestrated by Catiline . He knew that in order to be an effective statesman and politician you have to compromise. Cicero is often nowadays accused of being a flip-flopper, changing his allegiances right and left depending on the situation. It’s true and that’s exactly what you would expect from a good politician. What he did not change was his aim. His goal was to try to do his best to save the Roman Republic. If that meant sometimes allying yourself with a not exactly great character like Pompey, then you have to do that as long as you keep in mind where you want to go."