The Art of Doing the Right Thing
Doing the right thing is more of an art than an analysis.
I’ll explain.
For a long time, I wanted to find reasons to be moral. I wanted to know why people should do the right thing. But try as I might, I could not convince myself of any “self-evident” or “deductive” reasoning that led philosophers like Kant to conclude that ethics and morals can arise out of pure reason or reasons.
I’ve since come to believe we, the apes, place too much causal power on our so-called, “reasons.” (But that’s another topic.)
This does not mean that I believe morality is relative. To the contrary. I agree there is a “core morality,” coined by Alex Rosenberg, generated in humans by natural selection. (From here, I diverge from Rosenberg’s conception.)
Human beings evolved prosocial feelings and behavior as group-hunting mammals so that we could live, work, and hunt in groups. This gave us an advantage in nearly every environment on earth and made us the apex predators. Doing what is right is an adaptive trait for working in groups.
Core morality, which is a “sense,” or sensibility, contained in the mind-body, is objective in the same way that human sight is contained in the eyes and nervous system, and is objective.
There are some outliers who cannot see light or who may perceive light in fundamentally different ways, but the human sense of sight has a universal, objective nature to it. The human eyeball can see a specific spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, which allows human beings to gather information and navigate the world.
Morality is like this, but it is in the heart-mind rather than the eyeball and nervous system. Sight emerges from the interaction between light and eyeballs, the nervous system, and the other complex functions. Analogously, prosocial feelings emerge from the interaction between groups of human organisms and hormones, neurochemicals, and other complex functions.
Noam Chomsky makes essentially this argument. He claims humans have innate moral sensibilities analogous to his theory about how humans have innate syntactic structures for language.
In other words, my claim is evolution has endowed each human being with the ability to feel what is right. Natural selection gave us the best adaptive feelings.
It goes further. Prosocial feelings and behavior have a dual function. Our core morality is at the basis of our ability to cooperate, which is highly adaptive. These feelings are “right” because they promote our survival. In addition, prosocial feelings and behavior generate a sense of well-being in the person who feels and acts in prosocial ways.
In short, doing the right thing is “right” because it is necessary for survival, and we should also act from prosocial feelings because it makes us feel good and is part and parcel of human flourishing. Again, I acknowledge there exist outliers, but this is generally true.
Therefore, the way to know what is the “right thing” is not an idea that can be thought. Ideas have given us very limited conceptions of morality and ethics. The “right thing” must be felt within the dynamic, unfolding moment. It seems that ideas inform our actions in these moments, but they are very limited.
I take this claim a step further: Anyone can cultivate and develop the capability to feel what is right. And it is a positive feedback loop. The more we feel and do what is right, the better we feel and do, the more we feel and do what is right.
And the training for this capability is simple and ancient. But it is increasingly difficult in our distracted world. The answer is this — mindfulness-awareness meditation practice.
The more quiet and open the heart and mind become, the easier it becomes to feel and do what is right.
This is not a complex argument. It does not arise from logic or reason. It is a basic observation handed down through the ages. But it requires careful, constant practice.