You can be morally perfect whenever you want
No one is stopping you
By “morally perfect” I mean never acting immorally. What actions we perform are up to us; if it’s not up to me whether my arm moves, then I am paralyzed, or otherwise constrained, but in any case my arm not moving is not an action of mine. Thus, every time I am presented with a choice, it is within my power to not do the immoral thing (if there is one). Thus, it is within my power to never act immorally. Thus, it is within my power to be morally perfect. QED, thanks for reading.
Just kidding! It would be against the law to make an inference without writing at least one paragraph explaining why it’s okay.
So, it’s very popular to think people can’t just decide to be morally perfect. Such is a core doctrine of Christianity as usually understood—that we cannot achieve holiness by our own power, rather we need the grace of God through faith in Christ’s sacrifice to be saved. Claiming otherwise is associated with the heretic Pelagius (who, I must admit, was my favorite heretic during my Christian days).1 Plus, it just seems like common sense. It seems plausible that no mere man has ever achieved moral perfection—certainly not myself, nor anyone I have met—and it seems like it would be unavoidable that even if you sincerely willed to only do right, your resolve would slip at some point. Nevertheless, I claim, my conclusion is necessitated by the mere concept of choice.
What is moral perfection? We might say a person is morally perfect if they do everything they morally ought to do. I think that’s a bit too strong. Tracing every consequence of the Moral Law as it pertains to my choices is as unattainable to me as as determining whether Golbach’s conjecture follows from the axioms of arithmetic.2 I believe, rather, that moral perfection would consist in doing nothing immoral in a way one is culpable for. If someone always does what they sincerely and with due consideration take to be right, and their only flaw is that they thought the arguments for intuitionistic pluralism were stronger than those for Kantianism, their faculty of reasoning is no doubt defected, but I would say they have a perfect moral character.
In addition, ought implies can. The things you’re morally obligation to do have to be things that are within your power to do. I gave the proof here in §2, so I won’t rehearse.
People often argue against ought implies can by bringing up moral dilemmas. Now, by “moral dilemmas” we do not mean cases where moral considerations conflict with each other. I might have strong moral reason to buy my friend a birthday present, but if I’m broke and the only way to do that is by robbing someone, clearly the obligatory thing to do is not rob anyone. “Moral dilemma” doesn’t even refer to cases where it’s really hard to figure out which moral reasons outweigh the others. Rather, a moral dilemma is a case where you are obligated to choose A and obligated to choose B, even though it’s impossible to choose both A and B.
Look, I have to level with you all. I really don’t get it. I mean, I understand the position and everything people say in favor of it, but I cannot comprehend how anyone, including people I know to be sincere and respectable, really believe in moral dilemmas. There are cases where I differ from others in intuition, but I totally get where they’re coming from. Upon reading Dennett’s Consciousness Explained or “Quining Qualia,” it doesn’t seem to me there’s a Hard Problem of Consciousness. But I totally get why people have a strong feeling that spectrum inversion has to be possible, that if all you have is physical information then there’s something you still don’t know about qualia. Such were my attitudes, until I read Consciousness Explained. I even understand people with intuitions I’ve never had. Some people really, truly feel it’s wrong to commit one murder to save a billion people. That seems very unlikely to me, and if I am ever convinced of that, it will be with struggle. But I get where they’re coming from.
But when people say they believe in moral dilemmas, it’s like hearing someone say “there seem to be cases where something is both a dog and a cat.” The most common example people give is a scenario in which a mother can save one of her children but not both (and if she does nothing, both will die). To me, as awful as the case is, the verdict is obvious: either choice is equally permissible, and she should pick arbitrarily. Maybe some people would have the extreme judgment that you shouldn’t participate in such a sick choice, so you should refuse and let both die. But to say that she failed to fulfill her obligation because she didn’t save the other child in particular? The verdict is, in my opinion, beyond belief. If you said “Yeah, unfortunate, but your obligations were to save Child A and to save Child B,” that would not only be wrong because saying that would be insensitive, but additionally because the felicitous and correct response is “Did you hear me? I already explained that saving both was impossible.”
People also have more clever examples, like where someone makes two promises that they can’t keep both of. We’re generally obligated to keep our promises when we can, and the person can keep either promise individually, so it might seem the individual has two incompatible obligations. But if I make a promise I can’t keep, do I commit two sins? One when I carelessly make the promise, and another when I don’t do the impossible? No, when I make an impossible promise (or a combination of promises jointly impossible to fulfill), the sin lies in my careless promise-making. And this seems to be the commonsense verdict; if the dirty double-promiser says “Of course I had to bail, I was obligated to, do you really expect me to break the promise I made to that other guy?” the natural response is not “Yes,” but rather, “No, I expect you not to make promises you can’t keep.”
But luckily we don’t have to worry about intuitions. I gave a proof. A proof based on a stipulative definition, admittedly, but if you mean something else by “obligation,” then no one has any intrinsic reason to care about whether to do what you call “obligatory.”
Sorry, that was years of repressed disbelief. Anyway, in my opening paragraph, I inferred from “In every choice, you are capable of avoiding wrongdoing” to “You are capable of not doing any wrongdoing, ever.” To those not trained in Analytic Love of Wisdom, this might seem like a natural inference, but it’s actually a bit more complicated. It does not generally follow from “You can do A” and “You can do B” that you can do A and B (as we saw above). I can drive to Montreal tomorrow, I can drive to Florida tomorrow, but I can’t do both.
But those are two incompatible ways of settling a single decision. What about different decisions? Is it the case that if I can choose A in circumstance X, and B in circumstance Y, where X and Y are different, then I can do both? Still no, because sometimes making one choice at one time causes another option to not be available at a later time. It’s within my power to set my car on fire today, and it’s within my power to drive to Montreal tomorrow, but I cannot do both.
But if we limit ourselves to cases where the actions in question are not incompatible actions at a single time, and where doing one action (or perhaps several of them) doesn’t prevent me from being capable of a later one, then if I can do each of X1, X2, …, Xn individually, I can do all of them. This can be shown by mathematical induction. The case where n = 1 is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader. Suppose, now, that the claim holds for some n, and I now deliberate about my (n + 1)st choice. By hypothesis, I was initially capable of doing Xn + 1. Moreover, by the inductive hypothesis, I am capable of doing all of X1, …, Xn, and these choices collectively do not preclude my doing Xn + 1. Therefore, given I have done the first n actions and can still do the (n + 1)st action, I can do all of them. Thus, the conclusion follows for all n. QED.
Sorry, okay, think of it this way. For simplicity, let’s say you’ll live for 1,000 days, and on each day you’ll have one choice, each of them having one morally obligatory option, all the other options being immoral. Say you claim it’s impossible to be morally perfect—to do the right thing on each day. Well, you must be able to do the right thing on the first day, otherwise it wouldn’t be your fault for acting otherwise, and there would be no flaw in your moral character. Okay, say you do as you’re able, and you do the right thing on Day 1. Now it’s Day 2. Again, you must be capable of doing the right thing, or you wouldn’t be culpable for not doing it. But could your choice on Day 1 have prevented you from acting rightly on Day 2? It seems not; if I’m incapable of doing something because I did something else yesterday, and I did the right thing yesterday (so I had no obligation to prevent today’s predicament), then I am not committing any sin by not acting as I cannot today. Same with Day 3, etc. If order for something—even a whole collection of actions—to be your duty, it has to be within your power to do it. But moral perfection consists merely in doing your duty, always.
“But you’ve only shown it’s possible to act rightly every day. But someone who happens to make the right choice throughout all their lives isn’t necessarily perfect; consider a would-be thief who happens to never encounter an opportunity to steal.” This is true. But at the very least, if a person is morally imperfect, they must have determined their will in such a way that they would act immorally under some hypothetical circumstances. Let’s assume, then, that the hypothetical circumstances are actual, and the above reasoning will work just as well.3
“But no matter how hard we try, our desire to sin is greater than our desire to do what’s right.” I don’t need any premise about the nature of desire for the argument to go through. Simply choose to do what is right in every case you find yourself in; if you couldn’t, that would mean what you do isn’t a sin in the first place. Once you do this, your desire to do right will ipso facto be stronger than any other desire you have.
“But sometimes I’m overpowered by temptation.” No, I’m afraid, that has literally never happened to anyone. If whatever impulse moves you made you incapable of doing what’s right, then the result wouldn’t be an immoral action any more than a spasm would be. More likely, the temptation caused doing the right thing to be painful, and you chose to avoid pain instead of doing what’s right.
Look, I don’t think I’m saying anything crazy. There are various ways you’re capable of acting; some of them are permissible, and some are impermissible; your job is to only do the permissible ones. If you’ve acted immorally in the past, then you can’t change that, and now your job is to do permissible things from now on. From among the permissible, just choose your favorite. No one (with perhaps a handful of plausible counterexamples) has ever done this at any point in there life, but literally nothing is preventing you from being the first.
Someone knowledgeable in theological matters should correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the Pelagian teachings that were actually declared heretical are not implied by what I argue here. It seems compatible with these canons any human can freely choose to be morally perfect at any time, and that God’s grace consists in his causing this state of affairs to come about (this is what I believed when I was a Christian). Just because I’m capable of doing something or not does not mean that the whole state of affairs of my freely doing one thing or the other has no antecedent cause (pace Kant). If you have an “unpredictably choosing which course the chain of events will take”-type view of free will, this won’t make sense. If, however, you are correct about free will (and about the nature of God), then every last detail of the unfolding of history is a consequence of God’s will, and so if you simply decide to be perfect then God has ipso facto given you the grace to do so.
It would be dumb of me to argue “This is a bad definition of moral perfection, because it’s unattainable. Therefore, moral perfection is attainable.” I am, rather, claiming that this definition of moral perfection is too obviously unattainable and for such cheap reasons that it is not a good definition. A concept of moral perfection that requires having the same flawless deductive reasoning that would make one capable of figuring Goldbach’s conjecture out is a counterintuitive one.
Okay, more argument is required to say why making one choice doesn’t preclude me from determining myself to act a certain way conditional on some non-actual circumstances. If anyone is worried about this point, say so in a comment.
I like to combine this view with necessitarianism, yielding the flattering conclusion that I have always been morally perfect all along.
I actually still think moral perfection is impossible, not because I disagree with anything in this article, but because I define moral perfection to consist not just in always making permissible choices, but in always choosing the best possible option, even among permissible ones. And there are possible scenarios where there is no best possible option, but instead an infinite succession of better and better possible options. You don't sin by choosing a sub-optimal option in such a scenario, since it's not possible to choose an optimal option, but you do fail to be morally perfect.