Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

Tuesday 15 January 2008 at 12:03 pm Don’t eat meat, ride a bike, and be a frugal shopper – these are all ways that you can help stop global warming according to the head of the United Nation’s Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change.

You are right to say that people often think that trivial contributions represent a ‘fair share.’

6.6 billion and growing is hardly sustainable, no matter how frugal an existence we impose upon ourselves.

This may well be true. Hopefully, we will see the global population peak sometime this century and decline quite a distance subsequently.

That said, a lot of governments have a foolish notion that maintaining their population level is necessary or desirable.

It is not at all apparent that there is a duty to future generations that is above our duty to our family and to society.

Why can we legitimately discriminate in favour of our relations? How badly can we treat others for the benefit of the people we know? Does that include only exploitation of future generations, or can we legitimately exploit people in other countries today? We we exploit different social classes within our own society?

While it is fair to recognize that people will privilege other people who they know, I don’t see why we should accept that as ethically legitimate.

So, I do not think it is unethical to live in society. It might, however, be dramatically immoral to perpetuate the kind of society you live in.

This is the heart of the whole matter. How can we live in society while not perpetuating it? What defines our duty to effect change? What kind of change can we be personally expected to produce? Do the answers to these questions depend primarily on the kind of arguments in the section about utilitarianism above?

The matters concerning me in Vancouver are certainly more pressing than general ethical musings. Clearly, it is also important to spend time with friends and family when you get the chance.

That said, a life devoid of any such reflection is unlikely to do much good.

(That remark sounds facetious, but it isn’t). There are more important things in life than our obligations to people we will never meet.

Morality and ethics are minimally divided: morality refers to the rights of individuals to make decisions about what the right action in their own life is, and ethics is a system of rules which can be imposed on others. It is always possible that the ethical action is immoral, and that is why we allow individuals to make their own decisions – their personal perspective on what is right can not be understood exhaustively from without. Minimally, this is because people are free and have a right to actualize their freedom; they have an alienable right not to be forced into the ethically right action against their will.

The question “is it possible to live ethically in our society” will be to some extent decided de facto by what “live ethically” means in the sentence. Premises 3 and 4 state values and deduce from them ethical wrongs. However, ethics is not the sphere of right and wrong but the sphere of duty. That something is right or wrong is known in morality, not in ethics. Ethics can impose duties on you, and then those duties can be evaluated morally. There can be a moral or immoral ethics, but that judgement is made from outside, from the moral position, which is why an individual can choose whether or not to abide by the duties imposed upon him.

It is not at all apparent that there is a duty to future generations that is above our duty to our family and to society.

So, I do not think it is unethical to live in society. It might, however, be dramatically immoral to perpetuate the kind of society you live in. Mayhaps the Kantian principle of universalizability is an appropriate kind of moral thinking. Instead of “if I steal this bank note, and the maxim I’m acting on was universalized, we wouldn’t have banks”, remove the time condition and say things like, “If I (do some action that perpetuates unsustainable society), and that maxim was universalized, would society cease to exist after some time”.

The key is to produce a way of thinking ethics which gives you the concrete right action, not which makes you refrain from all action (i.e. living in society) as de facto wrong.

6.6 billion and growing is hardly sustainable, no matter how frugal an existence we impose upon ourselves. Malthusian catastrophes can happen in places where people live as you described, e.g. Rwanda. In the early 90′s, it had a population density approaching that of a city state and an economy consisting almost exclusively of subsistence agriculture. That lead more or less directly to most of the violence of the genocide: neighbors killing each other over tiny plots of land, even in ethnically homogeneous communities.

I think the main problem is that from a historical perspective, growth has been kept sustainable by famine, disease and violence. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could agree educating and emancipating women, and using the resources of rich nations to provide good public health services is a preferable alternative to mass slaughter?

That’s not sustainable either. Not for 6.6 billion people. There isn’t enough land.