What It Means to View Ethics as a Practice

I’ve written before about how we ought to view ethics not as a field of knowledge you know, but as a practice you learn to do. But I haven’t set out clearly, in one spot, what I mean by that. So let me correct that omission here.

First, it’s important that I’m using the term “ethics,” and not “morality.” I do this because ethics is bigger than morality. Morality deals with what we owe to others and the rules governing the actions we take that impact them. These are important questions and they’re part of ethics, but ethics is concerns with other issues, as well. Namely, ethics is about living well . And “well” speaks to both a sense of personal happiness and satisfaction with one’s life and also to how others view you. If your life is “good,” it’s both good for you and seen as admirable by others.

Morality is part of ethics, then, because if you behave immorally, you are not living well, even if you, in the moment, believe yourself to be thriving. But ethics is bigger than morality because there’s more to living well than behaving morally towards others.

With that distinction in mind, we can think of ethics as a skill: the skill of living well. Any skill has two parts: the knowing and the doing. If you want to be good at throwing baseball pitches, you need knowledge, but knowledge alone isn’t sufficient. You also need to train your body to be able to throw the kind of pitch your knowledge tells you is the right one. Reading every book ever written about pitching won’t make you a good pitcher. But trying to figure out how to be a pitcher entirely on your own without anyone teaching you the knowledge necessary is unlikely to result in success, either.

How can we succeed not just in knowing how to live well, but actually applying the skill in a way that achieves our desired ends? Practice. To be ethical is know what what ethics entails, to perceive what action is appropriate when, and to be inclined towards behaving that way. This means ethics requires knowledge, perception, and values. And is made easier by turning an ethical perspective and ethical behavior into a habit.

Thus we go from ethics as “something that needs” practice to being a practice. Living well is an ongoing project (you’re not done until you die), one where you need to learn, but then constantly adapt, and one you need to consciously and mindfully pursue–because, unlike pitching in baseball, is a skill you’re always applying. Every bit of your life is part of it being good or not. So you should think of yourself as someone who undertakes ethics, and views ethics as an ongoing project.

This is why it’s wrong to reduce ethics to “something you know.” By not view it as a practice, you don’t take seriously the need to constantly put effort into it, to watch for ways you’re drifting from it, to put yourself in situations where being ethical is easier, to seek out ethical techniques and tools for enhancing your skill, to cultivate habits of mind and noticing conducive to, and supportive of, ethical behavior, beliefs, and values, and so on.

If we take ethical philosophy to be just book learning and the application of reason to principles, we’re like the pitcher who thinks he can pitch after watching some YouTube videos. We need practice. And we need to view ethics as a practice.