Last week I talked about doing your best, but here’s where it all pulls together. First, let’s go over the three key elements so far.
1. A hero is someone who chooses the right thing to do over the practical thing to do.
2. The right thing to do is the thing that respects the interests of all of the relevant stakeholders.
3. It’s also the thing that the agent would readily endorse as a best practice, and they do their best to pursue it.
From there, let’s see where we go.
One of the really common threads in all this is failure. Taking into account all the stakeholders is hard. Choosing what’s right over what’s practical is hard. Nobody, not even a hero, gets it right all the time. And that’s okay, as long as you did your best. That’s what sets heroes apart, really. They don’t just choose the right over the simple, they do their best at it. When they fail, they get to say they did their best to do the right thing.
We can see this in heroes in fiction and real life. The thing that makes Superman a hero isn’t his powers, it’s his will to use those powers for the benefit of others, and his acknowledgement that by virtue of having those powers, people have a stake in what he can do. Spiderman frames this idea much better, saying that
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
It’s clichéd, but it’s a good point. What it doesn’t mention is that with any power comes some responsibility. We all have the power to affect and take into account stakeholders, and we all have, by definition, the ability to do our best. The question is never “Can I?” or “Should I?” but “Will I?” I know, it isn’t fair to compare real people to fictional people. They have fictional problems. I have never once been chased around town by a robot with a kryptonite heart. Also, some days you’re just worn out. I know I get that way. I sit there, and I think, “I should really do something useful. I can totally think of it. But this bed isn’t going to sleep in itself.
Let me hop off my soapbox though, and do some actual thinking. Choosing the right thing to do, given that the right thing is doing your best to take into account the interests of stakeholders, is consistently going to be a best practice. It means that you’re doing your best to look out for others, and that you endorse the idea that they should do the same for you. There’s a lot of ways to cash this out. You can talk about improving well-being, following the actions of paragons of virtues, or developing a universalizable set of practices. They’re all different ways of imagining how things could be better.
This is an objection he can get behind.
There are some objections worth raising, though. The first questions why this is a best practice. Why shouldn’t we pick the practical over the right thing to do, when it’s to our advantage? If we all endorsed that, then we’d know what we were getting into, and so everyone’s stake doesn’t get taken into account all the time, that’s life. The problem with this is that it isn’t really a life worth living. Cooperation is the backbone of our social structure, and that means being able to trust people. If our best practice is to take advantage of people when they trust us, we can’t have the necessary trust for cooperation. We’d have to spend a lot of effort guarding ourselves, and we’d be worse off. It’s strictly better to cooperate, but cooperating means taking into account other people’s stakes.
A stronger objection has to do with the way we design best practices. Surely, if I get to set them according to my values, I can design them to my advantage. I can have a set of best practices for me, and a set for other people. This guards me from being exploited, but affords me a certain kind of moral latitude. The mental gymnastics involved are considerable, but human beings are pretty good at that sort of thing. But is doing that really a best practice? Imagine getting a job at an office, and coming in to use the copier. On the wall are posted the copier policies, and there’s one for each person in the office. Mary, Steve, Jeff, they all have a different set or copier practices. In order to sort things out, you can’t just be familiar with your own practice, but each of theirs. Is that the best practice, or is it better to have a solid practice for everybody? Developing exclusions for myself advocates that as a best practice, which goes right back to the part where everyone’s free to exploit everyone else.
With those objections aside, we can see that heroes do this all the time. We admire them not just for placing the interests of others above their own, but knowing when and how to do it. We acknowledge that even when their efforts fall short, they’ve tried their best at the best of things, rather than simply acting with the best intentions. We can’t really ask for more, nor expect less of ourselves, I think.
