Moral Saints

The moral saint described

A moral saint is someone who does everything morality requires, all the time. Every surplus hour is donated to those who need it more. Every surplus dollar goes to effective causes. No personal project is pursued when it could instead serve others' needs. Every joke that might hurt someone is suppressed.

Wolf imagined two varieties. The loving saint genuinely wants to help everyone and has no competing desires. The rational saint disciplines their desires into alignment with moral demands. Both versions, she argued, would be strangely flat people: no developed aesthetic sense, no humor that risks causing offense, no particular passions, no projects that are simply theirs.

You would not want to have dinner with them. More importantly, you would not want to be them.

The impoverishment argument

Wolf's claim is not that moral saints are bad people. It is that saintliness and human flourishing come apart. The traits and pursuits that make a person interesting, funny, accomplished, or vivid are precisely the traits that moral demands would crowd out.

A person who devotes every available hour to famine relief cannot also become an excellent musician, a devoted reader, or a loyal friend in the ordinary sense. Moral demands, taken seriously, consume everything. What's left is not a richer life but a narrower one.

Wolf argued this reveals something important: we have legitimate reasons, not just selfish preferences, to care about things other than morality. A life has to be something specific, and that specificity requires pursuing projects that are not morally required and sometimes not morally neutral.

The objections and Wolf's reply

Consequentialists and Kantians have a ready response: if morality demands this, that is what it demands. The discomfort of the conclusion is not evidence against the theory.

Wolf's reply: we evaluate lives by more than one standard. The moral standard is one among several legitimate ideals, including personal excellence, aesthetic achievement, and relational depth. A life that maximizes moral virtue at the expense of everything else fails by these other standards, and those failures are real losses.

She is not arguing that morality is unimportant. She is arguing that it is not the only thing that matters, and that a theory of the good life that leaves no room for anything beyond moral demands has made a mistake.