Summary - \"Moral Saints\" by Susan Wolf PDF

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Summary

Summary of:
"Moral Saints", in The Journal of Philosophy
Vol. 79, No. 8 (Aug., 1982), pp. 419-439...

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Summary “Moral Saints”, Susan Wolf What is a moral saint? 

“A person whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be.” [419]

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A “necessary condition” of moral sainthood is for “one's life to be dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole.” [420]

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There are two variants of the moral saint: 1) The Loving Saint: this is a person who acts from love, and their happiness lies in the happiness of others [420]. They also feel no sense of loss by having to devote their lives wholeheartedly for the interests of others. 2) The Rational Saint: this is a person who acts from duty. Their happiness comes from much of the same as the rest of us: it shares the same "basic ingredients", but they choose to disregard their own to encourage that of others.

The argument 

Moral perfection, in the sense of moral saintliness, “does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive”. [419]

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In order to be a moral saint, one would necessarily be unable (constrained by practical and logistical limitations) to pursue their "non-moral interests", or to cultivate the characteristics that we generally admire in people (e.g. artistic creativity, excellence in some field). While a moral saint might, through their process of being a saint, acquire these non-moral characteristics, this would only come about through a "happy accident" [425]. These characteristics cannot, for a moral saint, be encouraged for their own sakes.

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This in turn, is negative because “among the immensely valuable traits and activities that a human life might positively embrace (there) are some of which we hope that, if a person does embrace them, he does so not for moral reasons.” [434]

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While the aforementioned characteristics cannot be claimed to be necessary elements in a life well lived, a life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life

“strangely barren” [421]. 

Wolf also argues that we appreciate more people whose moral achievements occur in conjunction with or coloured by some interests or traits that have low moral tone, and that there “seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand [423].”

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Wolf does not suggest that moral value should not be an important (or even the most important) kind of value we attend to in evaluating and improving ourselves. Rather, she is suggesting that moral value is simply one value out of many, and “our values cannot be fully comprehended on the model of a hierarchical system with morality at the top”. [438]

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In other words, morality should not (necessarily) supercede other values. For example, in the consideration of whether or not to buy a painting, moral values do not unquestionably trump aesthetic values in this consideration. We may always account for morality in making deliberations, but it does not necessarily automatically veto non-moral considerations.

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“The way in which morality, unlike other possible goals, is apt to dominate is particularly disturbing, for it seems to require either the lack or the denial of the existence of an identifiable, personal self. [424]” [comment: this is quite a big jump to make...]

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The utilitarian would not support moral sainthood as a universal ideal [427], and neither would the Kantian.

Wolf’s conclusions: 

It is morally good to be a moral saint, and can be good for the person to be a moral saint: that is, it can be in a person’s selfinterest to be a moral saint, but a moral saint is not a good kind of person to be or a good life to lead.

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Here we take “good” to mean something broader than simply “morally good” and less subjective than “good for” a person. As Wolf variously puts the point: “it is not always better to be morally better.”...