Culture | Philosophy in practice

The lives of moral saints

Sacrificing everything to strangers in need

Hands across the sea

Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices and the Overpowering Urge to Help. By Larissa MacFarquhar. Penguin Press; 320 pages; $27.95; Allen Lane; £20.

“THE do-gooder”, writes Larissa MacFarquhar in “Strangers Drowning”, “sets out to live as ethical a life as possible.” This is the kind of person who has himself injected with the leprosy bacillus to be a subject for medical testing, or who drives hundreds of miles after a hurricane to save factory-farm chickens. Do-gooders have flocked to Greece to help refugees.

In a series of character studies—coupled in this eccentric and intriguing book with historical and philosophical essays—Ms MacFarquhar profiles a range of do-gooders including an Indian aristocrat, a Bostonian social worker and a Japanese monk. These disparate altruists are united by the priority they place on the duty to help strangers. They are moral above all else, suppressing desires, sacrificing pleasures and often enduring years of loneliness. The saviour of chickens believes that advocating for chickens’ rights is the best way for him to reduce worldwide suffering. “He wasn’t interested in happiness,” the author writes. “He was interested in pain.”

Ms MacFarquhar is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She is a careful expositor of ideas. “Strangers Drowning”, a defence of the authenticity of do-gooders, presents an exemplary subject for a writer who is at once cerebral and anecdotal, critical and sympathetic.

Ms MacFarquhar does not argue that saintly behaviour is simply a question of doing one’s duty. Instead, she sets out to prove that altruists are not necessarily deluded or dispirited. And she uses her distinctive profiler’s tone to show, as she puts it, “the beauty and cost of a certain kind of moral existence”. For Ms MacFarquhar’s subjects themselves, everyone is morally obliged to be maximally good all the time, and anything less is unjustifiably selfish. Many critics, on the other hand, find such moralising fanatical and perverse. Do-gooders are often not especially likeable. One tells his girlfriend he will not clean up after himself because “time spent washing dishes could be time spent working for animal rights”. They are distrusted by those who suspect that hidden motives underlie their goodness. Ms MacFarquhar refers to doctors who have called kidney donors “screwballs”, “abnormal” and “not to be trusted”.

Susan Wolf, a philosopher whose landmark essay, “Moral Saints”, is a foil for Ms MacFarquhar’s thinking, has argued that moral perfectionism and personal well-being are incompatible. Because “morality itself doesn’t seem to be a suitable object of passion”, moral saints must either lack or repress the amoral desires that give people their humanity, Ms Wolf writes.

That view might seem intuitively correct to anyone who aspires to virtues that are not moral in nature—who would, for example, act immorally for a friend in need. If morality forbids all partiality and self-cultivation, any special attachment to friends and family, even to yourself—then people may well question whether it is good to be moral. Ms MacFarquhar is not endorsing the strict moral requirements upheld by her subjects. She does, however, refute Ms Wolf’s claim that do-gooders must be robots or hypocrites. Many are motivated by uncommon moral sentiments. “Strangers Drowning” begins with a vignette in which a young philosophy student is reduced to tears merely by reflecting on the existence of suffering.

Even the most self-sacrificial do-gooders can achieve a remarkable clarity and contentment. One couple adopts 20 children, many of whom end up in prison, have unwanted pregnancies or die young. But the whole family remains close in spite of it all. “Their days were crowded and unpredictable,” writes the author, “and charged with fervour and purpose.” These do-gooders could be described as moral overachievers, an unlikely group whose well-being can consist in extreme moral goodness, whose partiality itself seems impartial. Concluding that their behaviour is not morally required does not dismiss the challenges they present. Readers of this book will question whether they can admire do-gooders while wishing to be nothing like them.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The lives of moral saints"

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