September 13, 2004
Ethics, the principles that guide right conduct, is not a prominent ingredient in the modern understanding of happiness.
Servais Pinckaers' The Sources of Christian Ethics (English translation 1995) sets out to salvage the idea of ethics as psychologically practical. What is the real tenor of Thou shalt not, when it echoes through our contemporary Dionysian and Romantic-tinted cultures? Are ethical codes dreary outdated constraints bruising our tender vital flesh, imprisoning the compliant and gullible via heavy fruitless moral obligations, inhibiting the masses for easy exploitation by the malevolent, the venal, and the powerful, whose force is bent toward
binding with briars
my joys & desires?
Is William Blake's rhythmic accusation true? Where is he wrong, or shortsighted, or only partial in this ringing condemnation? And how can we decide? Since it is almost certainly the case that our relationship to our own ethical choices affects our happiness -- at the moment, over a lifetime, and, some religious would say, filling frames larger and longer than we could imagine by creating character which goes beyond any one human life.
How did ethics earn such a bad rap?
What are the ethics of discussing ethics?
How might we come to appreciate ethics as "the science of happiness and the ways that lead thereto"? (Pinckaers, ch. 2 sec. 2, The Question of Happiness)
They will probably arise again, these questions.
It is not of course the only, or even the most important aspect, of happiness. Nor is it a subject that is easy to discuss with freshness and simplicity. Nonetheless, ethics may have some wisdom to offer from the the back row, because it has been more or less ignored in the modern consideration of individual happiness.
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