What Odysseus and the Sirens teach us about the good life
On the rise and fall of rules-based ethics
A culture of self-improvement
I see lots of articles on Medium offering to boost your productivity, maximize your happiness, sustain a fulfilling life, and so on. Almost always, these articles enumerate certain rules or habits: “get up early”, “spend time for yourself”, “track your calories” … By following a list of these digital commandments, you’re promised the key to your unlocked potential.
It’s reassuring to see a market catered to self-improvement, along with a base of dedicated readers who are striving to live their best lives. It’s also refreshing to see social media directed to the purpose of insight and growth, as opposed to more vain or counterproductive uses.
But my question is this one: how is it that, enjoying as we are the freedoms of modern society, we should circle all the way back to willingly consuming a series of rules, which are inherently limitations on our way of life? In other words:
In our era of permissiveness and free choice, why do we find a notable rise in self-help programs that impose rules and regulations on our lives?
We might subscribe to Navy Seal and motivational author Jocko Willink’s thesis that “discipline is freedom”: what appears to be a self-limitation is actually the ultimate form of liberation, since it allows you to use your remaining time without the pressure of anxiety or anticipation.
But I think that the rise of rule-based self-help regimens should be understood precisely as a voluntary movement away from freedom. So much of our experience is framed by an injunction to enjoy—to maximize our pleasure and free choice—and I sense that there’s an increasing amount of dissatisfaction with this implicit notion of the good life.
Utilitarian vs rules-based ethics
When it comes to defining the good, we can either be utilitarians or deontologists. Utilitarians associate good with the consequence of actions, typically measured as well-being or happiness. The morally right choice is whichever one maximizes this metric.
On the other hand, deontologists define the good in terms of adherence to certain principles. The most famous example of this is Kant’s categorical imperative, itself a kind of reformulation of the golden rule: what is morally right is to ‘do onto others what you’d like done onto you’. For this reason, we can think of deontology as a rules-based ethics.
There are persuasive arguments for and against both systems. You can ask the deontologist: okay, but what if sticking to those rules gets us all killed? You can ask the utilitarian: who gets to decide what the proper metric is?
But it seems like with the decline of religion and social traditions, our ‘popular ethics’ has shifted more to the utilitarian side. That is to say:
In modern society, we are biased towards the consequence of an action when assessing its moral status
This is clear in politics, for example. The right gun legislation is whichever one reduces gun deaths—we understand this implicitly. The right healthcare system is commonly understood as some combination of “universality, quality, and affordability”. As our capacity for science and technology grows, we tend to measure the success of our policies based on increasingly refined metrics.
This utilitarian bias extends beyond politics and into our daily lives. In the absence of any deeper purpose or higher values, we’re often inclined to believe that the ‘good life’ constitutes the attainment of certain titles or possessions. This can lead to a perpetual state of deferral: pushing off the bad parts of the present, telling ourselves that all we really need is this much more money, that particular title, and so on. As a result, our energies are diverted to the task of seeking those products as opposed to looking inward.
The scientific version of this popular utilitarianism comes from Sam Harris, a neuroscientist who aims in his book The Moral Landscape to ground morality in objectivity. For Harris, moral questions can essentially be reduced to empirical inquiries into the world: objective measures of social contentment, life outcomes, or even neurotransmitter levels. What is this if not the ultimate form of utilitarianism, positing that the good life can be strictly defined as the maximization of whichever one of these metrics Harris sees most fit?
This utilitarian mindset — and its many forms — are simply incapable of providing us with the proper orientation towards life. This is an especially relevant point today considering the so-called ‘crisis of meaning’ that we hear about increasingly. To understand why, we’ll have to take a detour to Greek mythology and rational choice theory.
Odysseus and rational choice
The Greek hero Odysseus faced many trials during the 10-year journey back to his home city of Ithaca. On one occasion, he and his crew sail past the Sirens, deadly creatures whose beautiful song is notorious for seducing sailors into a suicidal frenzy.
Ever the curious explorer —he was, after all, the favorite of Athena, goddess of wisdom — Odysseus wants to hear the Sirens’ song but spare his life. To do so, he makes the following plan. He orders his crew to plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast of his ship. Under no circumstances should his crew untie him, lest he heaves himself off the boat in an ill-fated attempt to meet with the Sirens.
As expected, Odysseus hears the song and immediately pleads to be released. His crew is prepared to deny his request, and they all make it past the Sirens unharmed. Through his ingenious plan, Odysseus was able to gain knowledge of the Sirens’ song without getting himself killed.
Odysseus’s wisdom in this story consists of his expectation of a change in preference ranking. Even though he knew that the Sirens were deadly, he also knew that the Sirens would become appealing when he entered their waters. By anticipating his change in desire, Odysseus was capable of achieving the best possible outcome: hearing the Sirens, but staying alive.
Odysseus’s strategy reflects a certain agent called the resolute chooser. There is a distinction in rational choice theory between the myopic and the resolute chooser. A myopic (or short-sighted) chooser cannot take into account the fact that his preferences might change; he always follows the preference-rankings of the present. On the other hand, the resolute chooser will take adherence to a pre-set plan as an important part of his decision making.
A simple example will explicate the difference between these two agents. Let’s say I’m on a diet and have two options: to open the fridge, which contains some broccoli and a chocolate cake, and to walk past the kitchen and go to sleep. In my sober-minded state, I know the best option would be to eat some broccoli, the middle option is to sleep, and the worst option is to give in to gluttony and eat the cake.
It’s clear that the best option — eating the broccoli — can only be accomplished if I decide to open the fridge. But once I do so, the intoxicating sight of the cake will transform my preference ranking and make it the best option in that moment.
So, should we pursue opening the fridge or simply go straight to bed? The myopic chooser will decide to open the fridge — since it promises the best option, eating the broccoli — but end up choosing the cake every time. This is because the myopic chooser does not consider anything besides the preference rankings of the present moment.
By contrast, the resolute chooser escapes this conundrum by making adherence to a plan his standard for decision making. He rejects the so-called primacy of present preferences (an axiom of rational choice) and commits himself to eating the broccoli even though the cake is a better option for him in that moment.
The difference between the myopic and resolute chooser can be understood in terms of utilitarian and rule-based ethics. The myopic chooser is acting as a utilitarian insofar as he does not regard the ‘following of a plan’ as a valid good: his system only leads him to maximize a metric that he always measures in the present moment.
Utilitarian ethics leads us to be myopic choosers — incapable of dealing with the inevitable flux of passions that stand in the way of our higher goals.
This is the lesson to be learned from the story of Odysseus and the Sirens: a self-imposed prohibition is sometimes necessary for an agent to live out his best conception of good. But this dimension of prohibition is not accounted for by utilitarianism, which necessarily makes us myopic choosers. Instead, it only works under a deontological framework whereby sticking to a set of rules is elevated to the highest good.
Towards a meta-modern ethics
The neurotransmitter dopamine is a crucial part of our everyday lives. It’s responsible for broad aspects of our motivation and attention, underlying reward-motivated behavior such as eating, having sex, and parental care.
A rise in dopamine gives these activities their salience, or “motivational desirability”. On a neurological level, then, we seek to increase the level of dopamine in our brain. And yet, it’s obvious that very few of us would ever take the ultimate dopamine rush: a hit of heroin.
What this tells us is that — obviously — the moral good cannot be defined by levels of dopamine, although dopamine itself underlies many activities which are positive in our lives.
Perhaps, then, we can read the current opioid crisis as a kind of ‘utilitiarian bias gone crazy’, one fueled by the implicit notion that dopamine-inducing activities are the highest good. After all, many of us already act this way in real life, chasing experiences that maximize our dopamine: high-sugar food, sex and/or pornography, and so on. Perhaps strong opioids have become the next ‘obvious choice’ for those who have equated high-dopamine inducing states with the good.
The opioid crisis is often mentioned alongside the decline of social connections, tradition, and meaning in the modern age. These are societal changes which most people believe we must counteract or supplement in some way. The ‘meta-modern’ condition is the name we give to our reaction and response to modernism, both its good and bad aspects.
It’s clear that a utilitarian bias is one such aspect of our modern age. Its meta-modern counterpart is something along the lines of a voluntary self-limitation. This subjective position resists explanation by modernism, which can’t help but see it as a step backwards or willing venture into delusion.
I think that, in our modern era, we have to “force ourselves” back into a rules-based system
Whereas in previous eras, subscription to a strict rules-based ethics was provided by religion, social custom, and so on, today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation where we have to be the agents of our own self-limitation. Our task in the meta-modern age is to explore this idea and established a rule-based system fit for the 21st century.
Subscribe to my newsletter for updates on future articles: https://pages.convertkit.com/e8233d5800/cb92edd54d
