Do Your Thing

I offer for your consideration the following ethical motto:

Do your thing.

I admit: This motto doesn't sound very ethical. What if "your thing" is murdering babies for fun? Even ignoring extreme cases, what if your thing is just watching reruns of I Love Lucy? That also doesn't seem ethically good (though I've argued elsewhere that privately appreciating good TV can slightly improve the world).

For this (Daoist inspired) motto to work, we need some constraints on "your thing". I suggest two.

First, harmony. Do your thing in harmony with others, or in harmony with the world. The baby-killer, it seems safe to say, is out of harmony with the world. His putative "thing" clashes mightily against the projects, interests, and things of others around him.

Second, specificity. Do your thing. Every person has their individual predilections, talents, preferences, and style. Let those shine through, instead of aiming for bland conformity.

We might hear "do your thing" as analogous with (not synonymous with) "do your part". In the complex intertwined processes that make Earth a magnificently rich locus of value in the cosmos, you can play a part. Bring your unique, best self. Make the world even more magnificently rich.

Maybe your thing is playing D&D with your nerdy friends; no one plays a fruity bard quite the way you do. Maybe your thing is decorating your room with anime posters and cute stuffed animals. Maybe your thing is making great one-pot vegetarian meals for your family, or being the most enthusiastic local pickleball player, or writing dark poetry, or cruising around town in a tricked-out car with your windows down, or diving deep into Leibniz interpretation and sharing your findings with students and colleagues. Each of these enriches the world.

I envision a flourishing planet as one where diverse humans and other entities encounter and construct for each other diverse environments where they thrive in diverse ways, harmonizing both internally and externally: harmonizing internally by finding "things" that feel right to them and express their desires, skills, and individuality; and harmonizing externally by contributing distinctively to a flourishing whole (including through harmonious conflict, as in sports, games, and competition -- and even the cat and mouse).

People will act differently: There are many ways to harmonize. How dull it would be if we all struck the same note! The world is improvisational jazz, to which we thankfully bring distinct instruments and styles. Diversity is intrinsically valuable.

Doing your thing is ethically good because it makes the world better -- maybe through its consequences, but also just intrinsically. The world is a more awesome place, just because you're doing it.

[your fruity bard; image source]

Kantian ethics urges us to respect persons. Fine! But that hardly exhausts the matter. Kant also privileges human rationality as the source of all value -- an equally limited view. Why not respect also (in different, maybe smaller, but equally direct and intrinsic ways) the bug in the grass, the grass itself, and the cliff it grows on; the ruins of an ancient city; the clouds; the sound of the little league game down the block? Kant askes us to "act on that maxim you can will to be a universal law". Here's a candidate maxim: Do your thing. Kant might disagree, but maybe we could universalize it, with the constraints above.

Virtue ethics urges us to cultivate and enact virtue. Again that's only a piece of the puzzle, unless "virtue" is understood much more widely than virtue ethicists generally intend. It's not virtuous, exactly, to be play a fruity bard in a D&D campaign or to decorate your room with anime posters. And Aristotle's phronimos -- a wise, virtuous person who hits the mean of every virtue and is full of good sense and learning -- is only one type of interesting person. Let's celebrate the spendthrifts, the hotheads, the intemperate, and the cognitively disabled too, as long as they're authentically doing their thing, contributing some weird wonderfulness to the world, and not hurting themselves or others too badly.

Consequentialist ethics of the utilitarian stripe urges us to maximize the balance of pleasure over pain in the world. Sure, pleasure is good and pain is bad! But again this is only a fraction of what matters; I wouldn't want to reduce all value to it.

A different type of consequentialist might suggest that if diversity and richness matter so much, maybe we should maximize those. No, I see no reason to maximize. Where does this demand for maximization come from? And trying to maximize will normally require doing something other than your thing. I'd rather you just do your thing.

Does doing your thing mean fiddling while Rome burns (supposing Roman fiddles are your thing)? If people are suffering -- even far away, as the consequentialist emphasizes -- shouldn't you make some effort to help, even at the cost of your thing?

Yes, that seems right. I could try to force it into the motto: Maybe part of every human's "thing" is an imperfect duty to help others in need. But I don't know; that seems procrustean. Maybe it diverges from the original spirit of the idea. So instead I'll just admit: Do your thing also is not a complete ethical picture.

Four Aspects of Harmony

I've found myself increasingly drawn to an axiology of harmony, inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism. (Axiology is the study of what makes things valuable in general, including ethically, aesthetically, prudentially, and epistemically.) On this view, the, or a, central value is harmonious participation in the flourishing patterns that make our planet awesomely valuable.

But what is harmony?

Presumably, harmony involves a kind of fit, alignment, or cooperation with something else, without duplicating that something else. The melody proceeds; the harmony complements it with something different, generating a richer whole that encompasses both. The relationship is asymmetric: Melody leads, harmony follows -- though of course the follower can affect and elevate the leader.

Hasko von Kriegstein, in "Well-Being as Harmony" (HT Keilee Bessho for the pointer) identifies three broad ways in which a person can harmonize with the world: mental correspondence, positive orientation, and fitting response. I find his taxonomy useful, though I won't follow his exact formulations, and my aim is broader. I'm interested generally in the value of harmony, while von Kriegstein focuses on harmony as personal well-being. I'll also add a fourth category. Part of what I admire about von Kriegstein's taxonomy is its breadth and ambition -- the amount that he can sweep in.

Mental Correspondence

Von Kriegstein suggests that knowledge is a type of harmony between mind and world -- a non-accidental correspondence of one to the other. The world leads; the mind follows. (He doesn't express it that way.) If the sun is setting and you know that it is setting, you are in tune with the world. If the sun is setting and you think it's high noon, you are out of tune.

Achievement, von Kriegstein also suggests, is another type of harmony -- one in which you shape the world to correspond (non-accidentally) to your mind, your goals, your intentions. He treats this as the complement of knowledge, with a different direction of fit: The world comes to match your mind, rather than the other way around.

However, in treating knowledge and achievement as having the same general shape, von Kriegstein misses a subtlety. Harmony, recall, asymmetrically follows melody. Shaping the world to match your goals seems to make you the melody, with which you force the world to harmonize. Imagine bulldozing a hill flat, so it corresponds to a blueprint in your mind. The details of the hill don't matter: The bulldozer ignores them all; it flattens every hill the same. This seems unharmonious. It's an achievement of a sort, and a correspondence arises between your mind (your plans) and the world, but not because you are harmonizing with the world.

Harmonious achievement requires a gentler touch. Imagine instead that you create a footpath through the hill, tracing its curves, skirting a stream, following a shady line of oaks. This responsiveness to the features of the hill, the integration of your goals with the hill as it exists, in a way that does not damage and arguably enriches the hill -- that is the harmonious achievement.

In harmony, you seek mental correspondence to the world, not the other way around, whether that is through knowledge or achievement. Harmonious achievements do not dominate and oppress the world but fit into and enhance what is already there.

Other types of mental correspondence could involve fearing (only) the fearsome, admiring (only) the admirable, wanting (only) the desirable, regretting (only) the regrettable, perceiving (only) what's really there, anticipating (only) the likely.

Positive Orientation

Von Kriegstein suggests that you also harmonize with the world when you have a "pro-attitude" toward events in it -- that is, when you value, enjoy, like, or approve of events.

The sun sets over the hill. Not only do you know it does (harmonizing via mental correspondence) but also you enjoy the view (harmonizing via positive orientation). Not only do you successfully follow the footpath as planned (several types of mental correspondence at once, each harmonizing further with each other) but the walk brings you pleasure. Not only do you accurately notice the swooping of the birds, but you delight in the sight.

Von Kriegstein expends several pages on pro-attitudes gone wrong: inauthentic or toward unworthy things or under a misapprehension. In every case, it's plausible that to have the positive orientation toward the target harmonizes with the target, even if overall it would be more harmonious not to have that orientation. If something in you thrills with joy at suffering kittens, you are in harmony with the suffering of kittens, though you are simultaneously out of harmony with the kittens' well-being.

How is a pro-attitude harmonious, exactly? The melody is the event; the harmony is the part of you that aligns with it, that affirms it, that says this is good, lovely, wondrous, right.

Fitting Response

Von Kriegstein suggests, finally, that you harmonize with the world when you have a fitting response to it, for example when you are revolted by evil, pleased by good, admire the beautiful, and laugh at the humorous. His examples are fine, but relying on only these examples risks collapsing fitting response into mental correspondence.

I would have liked to see, in addition -- and maybe as the center of emphasis -- bodily examples. You respond fittingly to the world also when you skillfully catch the object a friend tosses you, when you merge harmoniously into the freeway traffic, when your video game character dodges the hazards, when your stride carries you smoothly over the uneven creek stones, when you and your dance partner swing perfectly together.

Long-term projects can also be fitting responses: Marriage can be a fitting response to a love relationship; going to graduate school can be a fitting response to your values, skills, and opportunities; buying and reading a novel can be a fitting response to a new publication by your favorite author.

New Resonances

Is it not also wondrous to daydream? Daydreams don't straightforwardly correspond to the world, nor are they always joyful or a fitting response to the events of the day. Maybe we could shoehorn them into one or more of those three categories, but instead let me offer a fourth: the creation of new resonances. We owe ourselves some daydreams.

We harmonize with the world when we enrich it in new ways that resonate with the ways in which it is already rich. Dreams and daydreams enrich the world -- and not in an entirely random, independent way. The long-dead friend reappears for you. You imagine or relive a vacation or a triumph. The worries of your day are reshuffled. (If the dream leaves you anxious or uncomfortable, the harmonies mix with unharmonious notes -- not every aspect of every event is harmonious.)

Likewise, games, sports, art, long chats into the night, splashing in the surf, telling a joke at dinner, pretending to be a magic unicorn, sparkly earrings, surprising a friend with a thoughtful gift... all such acts can resonate harmoniously with what was and is, in a manner beyond reflecting, valuing, or responding to what is already there. Von Kriegstein's first three categories are all a little passive or reactive. This fourth category encompasses the creative and new, which builds upon the old without clashing.

[Kandinsky, Quiet Harmony: image source]

Letting Pass

For two months we kept the dog run, as if she might come back. But we had killed her ourselves, or rather the vet had, with that bright needle, in Pauline's arms. Pauline had thought she was ready; she was not.

Our children's favorite toys, from when they were two, are stacked and shelved in the garage -- and their bicycles from when they were ten, and their high school trophies. And our high school trophies, and Pauline's diaries from middle school in the 1970s, and appointment calendars of my father's from the 1980s with haircuts and meetings with his students and plumbers' phone numbers in lopsided handwriting -- calendars I'd grabbed after he died ten years ago, desperate to save a piece of him, though I still can't bear to look at them. I need to hold shreds of what he'd left, but now those shreds only remind me of their inadequacy.

Daoism teaches that the world is processes that rise and fade, turn a few circles and depart, that growing is always also losing, living is the reanimation of mounds of substance many times dead before -- but I can't see it that way. I dwell in a world of things and people, who I paradoxically want to change without changing, to move along without moving, never to age. Memory is insufficient, a tease, horribly semisweet -- itself fading, dying, the resonances of a bell that will not be struck again.