It's not enough to do the right thing unless you have an unusually good concept of what's right.
The folk conception of morality doesn't constrain behavior enough. People can see themselves as doing the right thing even while they behave ineffectually. Morality, as popularly conceived, is not a principle which leads people to prioritize efforts with a high return on investment. Morality, as we're used to thinking about it, offers no criticism of the unambitious man who is in all other ways virtuous.
Morality, as it should be conceived, tells us to not sit idly when we don't need to rest. Morality, when taken seriously, tells us to more fully employ ourselves in the pursuit of the good. Morality, when distilled to the conceptual potency of self-consistency, is manic to the degree that mania gets shit done.
....
That last paragraph is what I feel like saying to myself when I'm not getting enough done. And maybe it has some truth. But also, maybe the pressing issue of moral progress is not that we need to squeeze our hearts harder to wring out ever last drop of motivation. Rather, the issue we should consider presently is that we now have opportunities before us which are historically great, and yet our shared, historically-adapted sense of obligation doesn't seem to grok that the cognitive investment of evaluating policies can eclipse the muscular investment of working the earth and wiping the tears from each human eye in a K-mile radius.
The historical man of good character didn't have the economic advantages that we do. As Industry has raised our sense of what is possible, so too it should raise our sense of what achieved outcomes are morally sufficient.
It's still not enough to do the right thing unless you have an unusually good concept of what's right. But maybe good outcomes come more from financial consequentialism than from the emotional disposition characterized by mania and desperation and passion and tireless sacrifice. Or maybe that's my stupid immoral heart asking not to be wrung any tighter.
Priorities
I once spent an evening with a demented elderly woman who thought that she was still a hospital administrator. She was very adamant that something needed to be done or someone needed to be called to deal with the clear and present crisis of all the suffering patients. There weren't any patients around her. But she wasn't wrong.
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