How Should We Live? / Moral Character and a Life Worth Living

Doing the right thing can be hard.

As Modern people, we’re deeply in tune with the human ability to mess things up. Our ability to lie, to cheat, to steal, to harm one another—intentionally, unintentionally.

If we want to lead our lives well, we may need to ask hard questions: How should we live? Who should we care for?

As with every one of life’s big questions, there are varying answers: Perhaps we should act in order to produce the best outcomes, or maybe we should live according to God’s commands, or maybe we should aim to cultivate good character. Maybe we should care equally for everyone. Maybe we should care more for those closest to us.

Lecturer at Yale College and Life Worth Living Director, Matt Croasmun asks what it means to lead good lives in this this chapter-by-chapter video curriculum series based on his bestselling book (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Miroslav Volf), Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

Transcript

‍Doing the right thing can be hard.

As Modern people, we’re deeply in tune with the human ability to mess things up. Our ability to lie, to cheat, to steal, to harm one another—intentionally, unintentionally.

And so we’ve built some systems that allow morally suspect people to live together without harming one another too much. Systems that produce something like moral goods without anyone needing to be good in the first place.

So, for example, by participating in the Market we can agree on the price of something without anyone needing to know what something is really worth*. After all, it’s really hard to discern the true *value of something. That’s a fundamentally moral question.

But the Market doesn’t require a moral person to answer that moral question. In fact, it does something *magical*.

It leverages our collective selfishness to generate a moral good. It’s moral alchemy: vice goes in; virtue comes out.

We do the same thing with Truth in our antagonistic legal system and Justice in our interest group politics. We don’t need moral people who love the Truth or value Justice. We just let one biased argument encounter another, one self-interested group take on another, and hope that, given the right checks and balances, vice will produce virtue.

If you believe in the moral alchemy, you may not need to worry all that much about what the right thing to do is.

But there are reasons to doubt that our systems of moral alchemy have ever worked—plenty of Modern evils have been winners with both voters and the Market—and to whatever extent these systems have worked in the past, there are good reasons for doubting they’ll continue to do so in the future.

If we want to lead our lives well, we may need to ask the hard questions that Moral Alchemy tries to spare us: How should we live? Who should we care for?

As with every one of life’s big questions, there are varying answers: Perhaps we should act in order to produce the best outcomes, or maybe we should live according to God’s commands, or maybe we should aim to cultivate good character. Maybe we should care equally for everyone. Maybe we should care more for those closest to us.

These are important questions and they’re worth taking up head-on. So what do you think: How should we live?