Moral Perfection
by Joseph Rowlands
One interesting question in the field of morality is whether you can be morally perfect or not. Is it even possible? Is it so hard that you shouldn't expect to achieve it? Is it a worthwhile goal? Is someone's moral imperfections a reason to damn them, or something that should be expected and tolerated?
The typical criticism of moral perfection is that it is too difficult to achieve. This is particularly true when you adopt a sacrificial morality where you are expected to consistently sacrifice your own interests for the sake of others. Clearly moral perfection in that context would lead to suffering and death. Sacrificial moralities tend to accept a certain amount of hypocrisy or moral cheating. In that view, morality is a way of measuring how good you are, how willing you are to sacrifice, but there is no expectation that you will completely follow the moral guides. Everyone will fail to live up to the standard, but it's okay because you are judged by how far you got. It's a relative standard, not an absolute one.
Moral perfection can be difficult to achieve for other reasons. Sometimes a moral system may have conflicting moral rules, where you have to violate one or the other. You may believe that lying is bad, but so is hurting the feelings of others. When you are forced to choose, you end up violating one or the other.
Objectivists tend to view moral perfection as something that can be achieved. The typical problems with moral perfection are due to problems with the moral system itself. It requires sacrifice, or has conflicting rules. A morality of rational self-interest has no such problems. It is made to be practiced, and people are fully capable of it. It does not demand actions that are destructive or impossible to satisfy.
The other component of moral perfection is whether people have the integrity to consistently do what they think is right. In irrational moral systems, this is harder because the integrity must overcome rational self-interest. It requires you to blind yourself to the consequences of the moral demands and act on them anyway. A philosophy of rational self-interest doesn't have the same problem. It claims the action that best serves you is the moral action. Increased clarity will not lead to temptation, but will lead you to better, more informed choices.
Despite the advantages of a self-interested morality, it doesn't make every choice easy. Some choices will still be influenced by societal pressure or strong emotions and desires. In some situations you will have more clarity of the consequences, while other times you will have less clarity. Sometimes your emotions will be supporting your rationally determined choice, and sometimes they will contradict it. So in practice, moral perfection is still not easy to achieve.
I want to criticize the concept of moral perfection from a different angle. The usual angle is that moral perfection is too hard to achieve. But from my perspective, it is too easy to achieve. It is not a worthwhile goal.
The first thing to note with moral perfection is that it is most compatible with a view of morality that is limited in scope. If you have a rule like never tell a lie, you can achieve moral perfection by never telling a lie. The moral rules specify certain minimum behaviors, and moral perfection is just achieving that minimum. It works best when you have a bunch of rules like "don't lie", "don't steal", "don't evade the truth".
This kind of moral minimum is not a worthwhile goal. Morality is a means of making choices to further your life. If moral perfection becomes the goal, the focus shifts from living your life well to achieving some kind of moral status. It perverts the point of morality, twisting it into a means of claiming superiority or ranking yourself with others. It stops being concerned with whether you live life well. And once that connection is severed and status becomes the goal, the choices that highlight status become important. Choices that require you to make sacrifices in order to be moral become the morally significant choices. And you're left with a sacrificial morality.
In contrast to the simple "thou shalt not" rules that provide easy tests of morality, look at a virtue like productiveness. There is no minimum level you can seek out. It's not like "never tell a lie", where you can easily tell if you've satisfied it. Productiveness is never satisfied. There's always more potential.
If we set aside the word morality for a minute, and instead discuss whether you are living life to the fullest, what would it mean to talk about "living perfectly"? Every choice you make is perfect? Every plan you make is flawless? You have correctly identified the optimal path in life? There is no wasted time or effort, ever? You slept exactly the right amount and ate exactly the right amount? That kind of perfection would be insane?
So if "living perfectly" is a crazy idea, how come "moral perfection" isn't as well? It is the same thing. Every choice you made, every action you took, was perfect? It's impossible.
So what it ends up being is achieving a moral minimum. If you don't lie, steal, murder, evade, allow your emotions to override your best judgment, etc., etc., then you are morally perfect. If you don't do any of the bad things, you are perfect even if you aren't doing many good things. You may not be living your life optimally, but as long as you don't commit any sins, you are considered morally perfect.
That's why I view moral perfection as too easy. Even accepting the fact that it may not be that easy to avoid the "sinful" choices, it is still aiming for a minimum. In measures perfection in terms of avoiding bad behavior, instead of measuring it by the good choices you make, and the values you achieve. Moral perfection is compatible with achieving little value in your life, as long as you don't violate any of the rules.
A better goal would be to maximize your values. Moral worth, if it is to be measured at all, should be in terms of what values you achieve and how well you improve your life. It should be judged by how well you avoid certain choices, since that shifts focus from your life to a set of rules.
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