Three Ways of Doing Good
2004
Of
course people do all sorts of good in the course of just living as they please:
the person who likes to dress up wears clothes that give others pleasure, and
may even intend that effect. Some people do all the good they do this way, by
doing what they please. But it is odd (perhaps culpably odd) to think that a
person always does as much good as he or she can do by just setting out to do
as he or she pleases. That may happen occasionally, but it is not the horse to
bet on.
Think
about the choices facing the person who sets out, in some limited part of his
life, with the primary purpose of doing good. (Of course, such a person may
expect that this activity will be gratifying or pleasing; what is special about
the project I am imagining is that the person does not set out initially to
please him or herself but to do some good in the world.)
I
want to say that a person with the purpose of doing good has three
options: making good consequences
happen, providing active members for communities/ active participants for
practices that deserve support, and meddling benevolently in institutions,
practices, and communities that deserve to endure and that appear to need
meddling.
People
who undertake to do good often think of their project solely as “making good
consequences happen” and understand the other two ways of doing good as
contained within the first way, or else ignore them entirely. But participating
and meddling are not well understood as “making good consequences happen” and
should not be thought about like that. However, participating and meddling are
ultimately so important to having good consequences happen that no one who is
committed to good consequences can afford to ignore these options. If the
paradox offends, think of it this way: participating and meddling are indirect
ways of making good consequences happen, and they are indirect in a way that
precludes those who participate and meddle from adopting the frame of mind
natural to those who seek straightforwardly to produce good consequences.
A
social worker I interviewed once told me that a lot of the interventions her
neighborhood center did were just the sorts of things that would be taken care
of naturally by families, in circumstances in which intact extended families
existed. In a similar way, it is just obvious that an intact religious
community naturally provides security, mental health services, occasional
personal and financial assistance, networks, practical information, basic
socialization, and a whole range of other support to people in a flexible and
efficient way. Some established institutions and communities, especially those
capable of reproducing themselves, are tremendous producers of utility, and,
when they decay, the costs of replacing piecemeal the services that they
provide are huge. That is all I mean when I say that a consequentialist has to
take institutions and communities seriously, and so has to take seriously the
value of participation and meddling.
Let’s
take participation first. A participant in a community has to fit into some
role provided by the loose rules defining that community. He or she can
certainly be an odd new kid on the block, reforming everything, but not if his
or her primary purpose is to be new blood for an old community. What is needed
for that is whatever behavior will allow the community to continue as the sort
of thing it is. Surely, not every community deserves to continue that way. But
a lot of communities are so useful that anyone who comes into them with a
desire to do good has lots of reason to try find a role and settle into that.
Imagine
as one example a bright American couple coming to stay in a quaint English
village. They may have all sorts of good ideas for making the place better,
and, as population declines, they may be able to make their voices heard. But
they had better realize that the quaintness of the village is the product of
generations of people coming to rely on each other in complex ways, and that,
once that network of mutual dependence, and the customs that sustain it, are
allowed to lapse or fall into disuse, it will take enormous investments of
energy to replace the work that this network did naturally. And, if the system
is already under stress, would-be reformers, however well intentioned, are part
of the problem. What is needed is people willing to fit in, and to pursue their
goals within whatever structures and customs are in place, within the context
of the particular history of this community.
And
then there’s meddling. I use deliberately a provocative word; the only other
one that comes to mind is “auditing” in a special sense: companies sometimes
send out executives to look over the operation of a facility, come to
understand how the various activities in that facility fit together, and then
recommend changes. ( Financial oversight is one small part of this sort of
auditing process.) Meddling is the sort of good that an intelligent, sensitive,
good willed outsider can do for an institution, practice, or community. It
requires that one come to understand how the parts fit together, how activities
interact, how various things are variously understood, and then to intervene in
subtle ways to make things better, or to shore things up against catastrophe,
or to limit damage, or to slow down decay. It is community/institutional dental
work, public health work in the broadest sense.
One
might wonder why it makes sense to distinguish meddling from participation.
Surely, participants can see problems in their own community and work to
correct them. That surely happens, but in many powerful institutions,
established communities, rules of action have been adopted that leave central
actors so caught up with the work of their own function that they have little
leisure to consider the whole system. And, even if they did, their
responsibilities as participants set limits to what they can do to redirect or
even lubricate the system as a whole.
Good hearted folks are drawn to efforts to make social
changes. Such folks need to distinguish between the frame of mind needed for a
participant and that needed for a change-agent, and they need to appreciate the
importance of participation. It is easy for young idealists to downplay
participation. It is also easy to
overlook that sort of “benevolent
outsider” work that takes as its primary object not some good to be produced,
nor some evil to be eliminated, but the continued efficient functioning of
those communities and institutions out of which practical solutions to social
problems have most often come.
There’s
a curriculum floating in front of me, a practical philosophy curriculum:
1. Students would look first at
reform movements of many sorts, studying the organizing strategies and
political pressure tactics that lead to meaningful change.
2. Students would look at what
it takes to maintain meaningful
change, taking account of revenge effects and of the difficulties of marshalling external resources great enough to
address major community problems, over the long term.
3. Students would begin to
think about the functions of communities and institutions – and study them in
ways that equip the students to be either accepted participants or successful
meddlers.
The
key to the right sort of education in doing good is just giving people a
plausibly complete list of their distinct options. None of the three I have
sketched is always in place. None is really exclusive of the others; any life
that made a substantial commitment to doing good would likely incorporate all
three strategies. But it seems clear to me that each requires some kind of
local autonomy; each way of thinking will temporarily drive out the others. And
so, at any given time, one faces a choice about how to do good.
No comments:
Post a Comment