Everyday Ethics

We have already discussed the fact that striving to be ethical people is a process of training ourselves to make certain types of decisions.  It would be nice if being a more ethical and upstanding person was simply a matter of making the decision to do so.  But most of our ethical failures are rooted in automatic and unconscious responses to stimuli.  When threatened with punishment for wrongdoing, many of us will lie to protect ourselves before we stop and consider the moral implications of doing so.  Thus, the effort to actually become an ethical person requires that we train ourselves.  This seems simple enough, until we consider how one might go about doing so.

After all, as we have just stated, many of our ethical failures are the result of unconscious behaviors that we are somewhat conditioned to respond with.  My own personal experience has been that choosing to lie in order to avoid negative consequences is as much a fear-based response as it is an ethical decision.  So in training the ethical self, we have to somehow teach ourselves not to react to the fear response, among other subconscious factors that must be accounted for. 

For the sake of our discussion, we will avoid the philosophical and psychological question of whether moral decisions are predominantly rational or merely intuitive.  Much work has been done in the realm of empirical psychology to challenge the notion that moral decisions are also rational ones.  However, even if this is true, it seems clear that one can make rational decisions about what one values and cares about, and that it is possible to shape our intuitive responses, at least to some extent.  Thus, although our moral choices may be intuitive at the time they are made, it does not follow that reason has nothing to do with this process.

With this said, how are we to go about the task of training the ethical self?  Let us return to our example of lying in order to avoid punishment.  Often this decision is made after we have pondered the negative consequences of truth-telling in this case and elected not to experience those consequences.  However, it is at least possible that for some of us, the first impulse is to tell the truth.  This is the concept of “first thought, best thought” that is helpful in training our ethical selves.

“First thought, best thought” is a Buddhist notion that inside all of us there is an intuitive wisdom, both morally and otherwise, and that by listening to these initial intuitive responses, we can discover what the right thing to do really is.  This is significant in light of the empirical psychology studies mentioned earlier.  Many of these studies presented people with moral dilemmas and gave them a limited amount of time to respond.  Most respondents made the “morally right” decision, though they were found to be supporting these choices with reasons after the choice had already been made, rather than prior to the choice making event.  Although these studies challenge the notion that morality is a rational activity, it strongly supports the view that our first thought is often our best one.

From this, it seems that training the ethical self might involve simply following our own intuitive wisdom.  When we are confronted with the opportunity to lie in order to avoid negative consequences, the little voice that says “tell the truth” is the one we ought to listen to.  Perhaps being ethical people means simply not thinking too hard about what we ought to do.

We should be cautious in applying “first thought, best thought” across the board.  It is possible that in some cases, thinking carefully and rationally about what we ought to do is the right choice.  In other instances, however, we might benefit from placing greater confidence in our intuitive decision-making.  If our first thought truly is our best thought, training the ethical self requires that it is also the thought that motivates us to act. 

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.