Everyday Ethics

We all have priorities that indicate what sorts of things matter to us. Priorities are essentially the trump cards of our decision-making processes. When we must choose between helping a friend and doing something that supports our own personal goals, what we choose is largely an indicator of what our priorities are. Sometimes choosing among priorities is challenging, and there are not many clear-cut rules for choosing among significant priorities. The difficulty of making choices between multiple priorities that carry moral weight is thus a rich ground for ethics and a problem that we all inevitably face.

Priorities tend to fall within a hierarchical system, and we implicitly rely on this system in choosing among priorities. Doing things for our children hopefully takes priority over most anything else that we might do. Others make helping people or being a good friend first-order priorities, and other interests are often overruled by these fundamentally important goals. But what about when our priorities are not so selfless?

Whether or not we have an ethical obligation to adopt a particular system for choosing among priorities is doubtful. For one thing, it’s not at all clear what such a universal ranking system would look like. Most of our priorities are based on our interests and values, and while values may or may not have some universal feature, interests are as diverse as the landscape of humanity.

Second, a universal ranking system will not make much sense to people who simply do not share the sense of priority that we might advocate. For example, if we make meeting the needs of your children the most important priority, what about people who either have no children or don’t share this sense of parental duty? How would we ever convince them that their interests and values are not the “right” ones? How can a single 20-year-old male, for example, ever make sense of a system that is so divorced from his own interests?

Although it is not likely that we can ever develop a universal system of priorities, many of us share some common intuitions about what the “right” set of priorities might look like. Someone who owns a sports car but does not pay their child support, for example, might be described as having a flawed sense of priorities. It seems difficult to defend a system of priority that places hedonistic interests of self ahead of parental responsibility. We struggle to articulate a universal system of positive priorities, but it seems that we have at least some notion of what a system of flawed priorities might look like.

The key point for the purpose of “everyday ethics” is to recognize that your priorities are essentially statements about what you value, and ethical consistency requires that you adjust your priorities to reflect what you truly care about. The other option is to recognize that your values are not what you say they are, and that your priorities reflect what really matters to you. Priorities and value are crucially connected, and it is easy to be self-deceived in this area. By recognizing this connection, we can move closer to an awareness of what really matters to us, and whether we feel comfortable with our value system.

About the Author

Elijah Weber is a graduate student at Bowling Green State University. He holds a Master's degree in philosophy from Colorado State University, and Bachelor’s degrees in sociology and philosophy from Chapman Univerity. He currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife Laura, his son Brandon, age two and a half, and two cats, both of whom are mentally deranged.