On the pointlessness of ethics

Damn that worthless idiot Rawls. At least I derive some comfort from the knowledge that when the social democratic consensus of the mid-to-late 20th century no longer seems self-evident, eternal truth to so many academics, he will fall right out of favor. Still, though he is especially bad, the fundamental mistake is attempting a theory of right behavior--ethics.

The only book of ethics that has helped me in practical ways is the Nicomachean Ethics, and even that is chockablock with nonsense, like the pretty but evanescent golden mean. I could pick any other part of ethics to beat on, but the golden mean is common to many ethical theories and particularly annoying. The trick is evident when used in a short form. For instance, a spendthrift is bad, a miser is bad, therefore take a little of both and be willing to spend but willing to save. The badness of the spendthrift and the miser are separate arguments, but one of the things I value in Aristotle is his willingness to work with the moral intuitions that, as Pinker would say, are part of the structure of our minds, and those intuitions are certainly inclined to condemn both kinds of men.

More damning is that there is no reason to suppose those behaviors have a linear, quantifiable, and exclusive relationship. It is perfectly possible to be a miser and a spendthrift; surely that is immediately recognizable in the character of the selfish profligate. Should there be a Cartesian chart of possibilities, in as many dimensions as there are human behaviors that the ethicist feels relevant to the question? I doubt very much anyone is competent to work the vector math of ethics, but if only two points are chosen, the choice will define the answer.

What most shows the golden mean to be brass is that it tells you what to do only when you already know what to do, and nothing at all when you do not. What behavior counts as miserly and what as spendthrift (to return to using only two possibilities) varies a great deal from country to country and also by time and circumstances--compare a man of 40 who gives all his wealth to a charity, though he has a family to provide for, a man of 95 who gives all his wealth to a charity, knowing his family to be well established, and a man of 25 who exhausts all his resources on a party, confident because he has so many years left to work for more. Now imagine them in different countries, even ones as closely related as America, Ireland, and Scotland; the judgments about these men would not coincide. If in your peculiar circumstances you know what would be miserly and what would be spendthrift, then by simple negation you already know near enough how to act, at least if you would prefer not to be seen to be a miser or a spendthrift. There is no need to go pretending that there is some happy place "between" wrong behaviors: just do not do them. If, as is more likely since you are thinking about it at all, you do not know what would be miserly or spendthrift in this case, then you have no points to set, no place to start, and less time to figure things out properly because you have wasted a lot of it trying to make human behavior into geometry.

Do not even get me started about Kant and Plato, those cautionary examples. Their worth, as far as ethics goes, is in pointing out others' errors and, by their own complete failures, in demonstrating the impossibility of a rational system of ethics. Aristotle will tell you a lot about how to become a good man, though he fails to show what a good man is. Only Socrates will teach you what all the virtues are: indescribable.