Download this pdf of the article
Lifestyle Politics and Ethics
2018
Ethical questions in general
Many leftists think that ethical questions can be resolved like this.
Q: What is the best thing to do?
A: X is the best thing to do.
Therefore: I should do X.
So, doing X becomes a moral duty – how you should live your life.
This kind of logic is based on the idea that ethics is a system of law like obligations, in the nature of the ten commandments. You shall not kill. And so on. This is called a ‘deontological’ ethics. The word comes from ‘deus’ meaning a god. The idea is that this kind of ethics implies that ethical laws come from god, and should be obeyed because of that. In one of the Dialogues (the Euthyphro), Socrates really pulls this religious rationale to pieces. The great project of much of the Enlightenment was to create an ethics of this deontological type that did not presume the existence of God. Natural laws, human rights. A basic question about any such ethics is where these commandments are supposed to come from and why they are supposed to be binding. Another problem about deontological ethical imperatives is that they are absolute (no exceptions allowed) but end up contradicting each other. You are not meant to kill but what if someone is trying to kill you, and destroy your human right to life? Which takes priority – the continued existence of the small pox species or the human right to live without a preventable disease?
An alternative view of ethics is called ‘teleological’. It is based on the idea that ‘the good’ for any particular being is that which will best satisfy their central or basic desires. For example it is human nature to want to eat, so being fed is a good. This is called ‘teleological’ from the Greek word ‘telos’ meaning a goal or aim. Another term sometimes applied to this ethics is ‘consequentialist’ meaning that following an ethical law is not regarded as the central requirement of ethical behaviour – it is good outcomes (consequences) for particular living beings (people, animals, plants etc). In current environmental and feminist thinking, this kind of ethics (often called an ‘ethics of care’ in that context) goes with the view that it is not just humans that have goals and a basic nature of drives, but all living beings. It makes sense to talk about good or bad outcomes for a plant, animal, a species, even an ecosystem.
For humans a reasonable list of basic desires could be: food; sex; health and comfort; creativity; sociability; autonomy. Satisfying these desires is what is good for people.
This means that it is always a factual question whether some outcome is good or bad for a particular group of people. Not that it is always easy to determine that – given different interests from different people in the group you are talking about, or different desires in competition with each other.
So, as long as you specify the group (or individual) in question, you can take it that it is meaningful to consider whether some outcome, policy or strategy is good or bad for that group (or individual).
This ethical framework does not assume that you have any obligation to do the right thing and look after the interests of any group of people, animals or plants. There is no law or command that you are obliged to do the thing that you can do that would make another person’s life better. In fact it is inevitable that what is the good for you personally and what is the good for another being will not always be the same thing. You go to the garden and pull up a carrot, destroying the life of that plant. You turn down someone’s request for a sexual encounter, frustrating them.
This can seem very selfish but it does not have to be taken like that. New Age, Marxist and Feminist views of human nature all assume that part of people’s sociability is an innate desire to look after other people (and also other living beings). This desire can be called ‘love’, ‘affection’, ‘empathy’ and it is expressed in actions which attempt to make things better for other beings. It is taken that expressing this desire is rewarding in itself, especially where the action does genuinely improve things. It is the stock in trade of everyday understanding that parents feel this way about their children. It is also assumed that another reward of this kind of behaviour is reciprocation, status and affection, coming from the party being helped.
The leftist position is associated with the view that a ‘new system’ would be better for most people on earth and for other living beings. In other words, this is a factual claim about a very broad group of people and other living beings.
Lifestyle Politics and Ethics
The deontological view of ethics is often the basis of a particular kind of approach to lifestyle politics. We all know that capitalism and environmental degradation are bad things. We know that a new system without capitalism and without environmental damage would be better. Therefore we have an obligation to do the right thing – by living the lifestyle that does the least environmental damage and by devoting ourselves to the overthrow of capitalism. These goals are assumed to be connected. That if everyone behaved like this, we would not have environmental damage and we would not have capitalism. For example reduce consumption, especially of fossil fuels and non renewables. Avoid buying products that contribute to toxic waste – plastics, conventionally produced foods. Recycle all consumer goods. Live on the minimal income possible. Devote as much time as you can to promoting the revolutionary alternative to capitalism.
A teleological ethics does not recognize any obligation to live like this and by doing that to look after the planet. At the same time, a teleological ethics could well agree that actions of this kind will in fact be ethical – in the sense of helping specific other living beings. For example reducing your own consumption of plastics and saving a marine animal, riding a bike and reducing global warming.
1. Balance and your well being.
From the point of view of a teleological ethics, living a perfect lifestyle may help to bring about a better society and avoid some of the damaging consequences of how most people now live. That is one reason why you might have a motive to act like this – out of love for other people and species. But a teleological ethics will also note the good sense of balancing the need and desire to bring about a better world against other aspects of living well. Your autonomy, creativity, good health, comfort and the rest.
The system creates a situation in which the personal cost of looking after the planet is severe. In other words, these personal costs (in autonomy, creativity and the like) are much more severe for attempting to live this way in the current context than they would be if we had a different better system/society. For example if we lived in a de-growth village we could walk to work or ride on a safe bike track without danger of being hit by a car. Commutes to work would be much shorter. A long commute would be by sustainable public transport and would be one or two days a week at most. There would be no expectation and no material necessity to work long hours to gain security in your house, food and creative expression. So a longer commute on foot would not be cutting into time spent in leisure and creative outlets. Work itself would be an opportunity for social connection and a creative outlet. Public transport would not be connected to any risk of attack by a disgruntled stranger.
The effect of the system now is to tip the balance in favour of behaving badly (from an environmental and social justice perspective) in order to achieve other aspects of well being. It is not your fault if you take the easy way out at least in some ways and some of the time. There is no obligation to do otherwise. It is just a fact that you are blocked from expressing your love of other people and the planet by making a particular change in your lifestyle. Living a perfect lifestyle is not the only way to work to promote a changed system. Often it may be the more difficult of a range of effective options. For example, easier options could be promoting leftist ideas in the media, joining a campaign, talking to your friends.
2. A perfect lifestyle may block other effective actions
From the point of view of a teleological ethics, a leftist is someone who has a desire to see other people and the planet do well. They are someone who believes that this is most likely to be achieved through system change. This desire is a part of how they express their innate human sociability. They will not believe that following a set of ethical rules is the best way to express this sociable impulse. Instead they will be interested in what actions are likely to produce the best outcomes.
In relation to this, it can be argued that following a set of ethical rules and by doing this living ‘the perfect lifestyle’ can actually interfere with acting in a way that may most likely get results. The system makes it really difficult to live a life that causes no environmental damage. It is equally difficult to live in a way that does not exploit other people. The implication is that the attempt to live this perfect lifestyle in current conditions can take a lot of time and exacerbate feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. These effects make it difficult to engage in effective political struggle to promote system change. For example, if you avoid using a car and go everywhere on a bike or walking, you will end up spending a lot of time going from one place to another that could be spent in organizing a demonstration, developing a community gardening group or whatever. Some things become effectively impossible. For example a gardening group spread across several suburbs with members bringing tools in the back of their car. Trying to do it all, live the perfect lifestyle and also organize politically, can lead to burnout. A common experience of the left is that key young people who have been heavily involved in leftist politics leave and cease to be active. Most young leftists believe this is because these people have ‘become conservative’ as they aged, but often a more adequate explanation is that they have found it harder and harder to maintain a level of hard work and commitment – especially with the added burdens of a full time job or children. They are aware that they will be judged for their failings and pull out.
These trade-offs can be very class specific in their effects. For example it is hard to afford one hundred per cent Green energy if you do not have a job. It is impossible to have solar installed if you are renting. People who have taxing, humiliating and low paid work are particularly likely to prize their leisure time and to want to avoid unnecessary time spent doing anything that seems like a duty or takes time – for example getting around by public transport, buying organics from a health food shop. The most common response to alienated labour is to want to spend leisure time in doing something hedonistic and frivolous, to spend the money that has been earned at such cost. For example taking a trip overseas for a holiday. The effect is that a leftist emphasis on the ‘perfect lifestyle’ can seem to be a judgemental attack on strategies that make life liveable. Compounding this for working class people is the fact that such attacks are mostly mounted by people who come from a middle class background and have middle class options.
The emphasis on the ‘perfect lifestyle’ makes it hard for people to just do a few easy things to join the leftist struggle (for example voting for a radical party, recycling, buying green power). The emphasis on the perfect lifestyle makes it seem that these gestures are just a tokenistic cop-out. What is set up through this is that the entry into a leftist identity seems like a huge leap out of normal life for most ordinary people. This is not actually helpful for leftist struggle. It cuts off potential allies. People who are on a journey. It exacerbates the ageing effect mentioned above. What is the point of continuing to pretend to be a leftist when you can no longer manage to cope with trying to live the perfect lifestyle? Another way in which the left closes itself off from potential allies.
Living the perfect lifestyle is just one kind of leftist strategy. Often, given the system realities, it is more difficult than equally effective but different strategies. The most classic example must be things like buying a solar array or voting for the Greens. These are maximally easy things for middle class people to do, but have considerable political effects. In terms of efficacy, they just as likely to contribute to a real change as things that these people may find a lot more difficult – not taking a trip overseas, eating only from independent organic grocers, travelling without using fossil fuels, using cloth nappies, eating vegan, wearing only op shop.
If we think that capitalism as a system is causing environmental collapse, we need to think about why it does this. The market monetary economy means that owners of the means of production have to compete to maximize sales. They do this by improving their technologies of production and producing more with less. The effect is to increase the amount being produced and the environmental impact. This is exacerbated because they will cut corners (externalize the costs) to get the maximum profits and thereby stay ahead of their competitors. At the same time, workers in the system are alienated at work because their bosses are intent on maximizing production (and sales) rather than on improving the experience of work. In any case, labour is alienated because decisions about what to produce and how to distribute it are made by the market rather than producers. Environmentally, this means that consumers want to spend big to compensate for a life of forced labour.
If all this is true, then the antidote is a society in which people choose the work they want to do and allocate their produce according to their own ideas of what is important. A society in which a network of productive units coordinate production by agreements. A society in which each group of workers is organized democratically to do the work they think is important and necessary. A society in which people do not have to earn money and obey a boss in order to have their needs met.
One implication is that we need to be promoting organizations that work together democratically, doing the things that give their members productive satisfaction. Distributing what they produce without expecting a monetary reward. We need these initiatives now to give people the confidence to move towards a new system of production, one that is organized without the market, one that expresses egalitarian solidarity. Some initiatives like this bear the stamp of a fully worked out leftist politics and commitment to environmental goals – such as the community gardens networks. But many are much more dependent on the kind of unsustainable economy we now have. They might ultimately vanish in a society geared up to be sustainable. For example, a group that comes together to fix up and race high powered cars. The emphasis on the necessity to lead the perfect lifestyle can prevent the left from seeing the ways in which such everyday leisure networks are helping to foster a new way of working together.
It may seem that the judgements of lifestyle choices made within the leftist scene are an inevitable corollary of our understanding of the problems of the current situation. As well, it may seem as though what we say about and to each other has no relevance to our political efficacy in the broader community. But in fact this is not the case. Ordinary people are very conscious of the moral judgements of the left and often resent them. Clearly, some of this resentment comes out of their own guilt and denial. But it is also the effect of what we do and say to each other. A classic statement in one of my interviews was from a woman who expressed some concern about environmental issues and was asked if she would ever consider going along to a demonstration. No, she said, not if I have to eat brown rice and lentils.
3. A mismatch of means and ends
A mismatch of means and ends is not necessarily a problem in relation to a consequentialist teleological ethics. For example, from a personal point of view you may have to do something unpleasant to get a good outcome overall. On the other hand the question, is this sacrifice tolerable, is always a good question. The injunction to lead a perfect lifestyle can lead to a mismatch of means and ends.
The aim of leftist politics must be to change the system. The ideal replacement is a society where people get to express themselves creatively and have autonomy in seeking out the things that they enjoy. A society without alienated labour would be the best context in which to pursue environmental goals. There would be no need to choose work that ended up by having bad environmental impacts. Creative and meaningful work, without coercion by bosses, would be universal. Social reward could come from activities that looked after the environment.
Yet the injunction to lead a perfect lifestyle makes leading a perfect lifestyle the prime goal. It ends up being more important than personal needs for creative autonomy, social pleasures and the rest ¬– the motivations and pleasures that will operate to make a new system work. The danger is that this habit of self sacrifice can become institutionalized and form a cultural milieu in which it is actually impossible to move towards a better society. In relation to the politics within the left, the danger is that leadership becomes premised on the willingness to make the most sacrifices to lead a perfect lifestyle or work towards the revolution. Such a politics ends up endorsing authoritarian leaders who cannot be questioned by those who are presumed to be making fewer sacrifices. This is exactly the kind of thinking that compromised the anarchist revolution in Spain. It made it difficult for the rank and file of the movement to go forward when the leadership started to make mistakes. They had spent so many years of their lives seeing these leaders as self sacrificing heroes, it was hard to believe they could be wrong.
For a permeable left
At the end of the day, a teleological ethics helps us to avoid absolutist moral judgements of the choices being made by other people. It helps us to avoid beating ourselves up for failures to lead a perfect lifestyle. It allows us to be more honest about why that may be difficult and even undesirable. By contrast, a deontological ethics elevates ‘doing the right thing’ into an unbreakable moral commandment. The ‘perfect lifestyle’ becomes a fetish of political activism. Taking that goal seriously gives one the credentials to identify as a leftist or environmentalist. The great problem with that approach is that it amplifies the tendency of the left to become a ‘bubble’ and to have little impact on society more broadly. It becomes impossible for people to get credit for being ‘on a journey’ and taking some easy steps towards political activism. There is no acknowledgement of the ways in which ordinary people, those who are not leading the perfect lifestyle, are nevertheless troubled by the present state of affairs and are making efforts to move in a better direction. From their point of view, the left seems spiky and judgemental, not the kind of people you would want to have as your friends. There is a barrier set up here between different social groups. What we need, to move forward, is a more permeable left, that draws people in. We need to see various efforts to live differently as being carried out by people who are emotionally and financially capable of making some efforts to be ‘early adopters’ – in a scenario that does not make these choices easy. We need to work on the strategies that are effective but low cost (emotionally as well as financially) and to promote those without implying that they are merely token efforts.