Two Kinds of Moral Thinking

This post from several years back by Michael J. Sigrist at the blog of the American Philosophical Association gives what I think is the correct answer–or part of the correct answer–to a question that motivated a lot of my own thinking lately. Namely, study data seem to indicate that moral philosophers aren’t, by and large, any more ethical than the rest of us.

He subtly teases out what might be going on, but here’s the core of it:

I like this. It nicely gives clarity to a distinction I’ve been wrestling with regarding contemporary moral thinking often getting something wrong about morality. What I’d add on to Sigrist’s distinction, though, and so tie it into my parallel approach, is that ethics needs to be a practice. Even if we think about ethics in the right way (e.g., the “kind of thinking we do when we are trying to do something or become a certain kind of person”), “becoming” is active and requires more than thought. We need ethical training, in the same way a baseball pitcher can think about how to throw a slider, but also needs to get out and throw a ton of bad sliders before he can inch his way toward a good one.

This is one of the elements I like in Buddhist philosophy: meditative practice gives us tools for cultivating an ethical mindset and habits, and give us a way to practice them, so that we will be more naturally inclined towards ethics in the world–just as the pitcher who practices throwing will more naturally throw well when next called upon to do it when it matters.

I’m going to keep thinking about Sigrist’s essay, hopefully in the right way. And I encourage you to read the whole thing.