Choices and Life Plans
Choices and Life Plans
As I have pointed out, each of us is a substantial self that persists self-identical across or through time. Because we are this kind of being, we not only have a short- and a long-term good and the possibility for a conflict between them, but also we make choices and, thereby, plans about how we will pursue what is good over time. We are agents who regularly choose and, thereby, form intentions in advance about more or less complex plans concerning our futures, where these plans guide our later actions. It is instructive to think of the more expansive or conduct-controlling plans as life plans. According to the philosopher Robert Nozick,
To intend that my life be a certain way, I must have an intention…that focuses upon my life as a whole.…The strongest sort of intention about one's life is a life plan, an individual's set of coherent, systematic purposes and intentions for his life.…A life plan specifies the intentional focus of a person's life, his major goals (perhaps partially ordering them), his conception of himself, his purposes, what if anything he dedicates or devotes himself to, and so forth.…[A] life plan focuses on a person's whole life or a significant chunk of it as a life.12
If we combine the idea of a life plan with a libertarian conception of freedom, we end up with the idea that agents settle on life plans by making choices. Consider two choices of life plans. The first is a choice of an alcoholic who has chosen never again to touch the demon of drink. Such a choice entails much about his future behavior, which might include no longer having alcohol in his house, no longer frequenting his old haunts, no longer associating with old friends, regularly attending AA meetings, and so forth. The person who makes this choice is planning to avoid as best as he can future situations in which he might be tempted to drink. Through no fault of his own, he might find himself in the kind of situation that he sought to avoid and be forced to make a choice he hoped never again to have to make, but a choice to foreswear drink is a choice of a life plan to guarantee as best as he can that he will not be tempted in this way.
The second is a choice of a line of work, profession, or vocation. The fact that I awoke this morning to walk to my office, teach classes, and write this essay indicates that some time ago I made a choice about a plan for a career that we can think of as a career choice. This choice imposed constraints on the kinds of actions I would perform on a day-to-day basis in the future. My career choice entailed that I would rise at a certain hour each morning, routinely carry out certain kinds of work-related activities, return home at a certain time each afternoon, etc. Had I instead made a different career choice, it would likely have imposed different constraints on the kinds of actions I would have had to carry out on a day-to-day basis. Whatever career choice I might have made, the fact that I made such a choice would have introduced a large amount of regular activities into my daily life, which were intended without being repeatedly chosen.
Though a career choice is broad in terms of its scope of influence over the activities that are carried out daily, it is not the most wide-ranging choice of a life plan an individual makes. A career choice is nested within even wider-ranging choices of life plans. For example, in light of the points made about the meaning of life as happiness, an agent's most broadly influential choice about a life plan is about when he will maximize his happiness and the kind of action he will adopt in pursuit of that happiness. Because happiness is a person's ultimate good, I will term this most wide-ranging choice an ultimate good-seeking choice. The following quote from the philosopher Owen Flanagan about a choice of Augustine's nicely illustrates the kind of choice I have in mind:
St. Augustine was the ultimate party animal until his early thirties, at which point he changed his ways and became an exemplary moral person, a great philosopher, a bishop, and eventually a saint. We might say that Augustine was ruled by his passions until he saw the light in his early thirties. But according to the [libertarian] picture, we would not mean that he couldn't control himself. We would mean that he chose not to control himself or chose to control himself badly.13
What Flanagan is suggesting about Augustine's life is something like the following. At a certain point early in his life, Augustine made an ultimate good-seeking choice that entailed he would not restrain himself from pursuing certain means to maximizing his short-term happiness. Then some years later he made a different ultimate good-seeking choice that implied he would restrain his pursuit of goods that promoted his short-term happiness, where exercising this restraint involved his avoiding the performance of certain kinds of actions. Augustine's own account of this latter ultimate good-seeking choice supports Flanagan's description of it. While Augustine says that he was converted to God, in whom he believed he would find long-term, perfect happiness, it is clear from his summary of the events leading up to that conversion that he understood that this ultimate good-seeking choice entailed that he would no longer seek to satisfy certain desires for goods that would promote his short-term happiness:
But now…as I heard how [two men] had made the choice that was to save them by giving themselves up entirely to your care, the more bitterly I hated myself in comparison with them.…[N]o more was required than an act of will. But it must be a resolute and whole-hearted act of the will.…I was held back by mere trifles, the most paltry inanities, all my old attachments. They plucked at my garment of flesh and whispered, “Are you going to dismiss us? From this moment we shall never be with you again, for ever and ever. From this moment you will never again be allowed to do this thing or that, for evermore.”14
It is plausible, then, to understand Augustine's conversion as an ultimate good-seeking choice in which he chose a life plan that he believed would maximize his later experience of happiness (this belief is implicit in Augustine's comment that the choice of the two men would save them), where that choice entailed a commitment on his part to restrain himself from pursuing his short-term happiness in certain ways. As Lewis pointed out, there is nothing amiss with a person who is concerned about his ultimate, long-term happiness. Indeed, there is something amiss if a person is not concerned about it:
If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion…is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.15
Though Augustine's ultimate good-seeking choice involved a conversion to Christianity, there is nothing essentially Christian about the idea of an ultimate good-seeking choice that requires restrained pursuit of short-term happiness for the sake of that which lies in the future. This is because any individual, qua human being, has a desire for his short-term happiness. Given his desire for happiness in the short term, he has a reason to act for the sake of (to promote) his own immediate well-being. If, however, such an individual also believes that other persons exist who have a similar desire for their own short-term happiness, then he will believe that were he to act in certain ways he would undermine their opportunity to satisfy their desire for their own short-term well-being, an opportunity to which they have as much right as he has to his own. As a result of what he believes about the potential impact of his actions on the immediate well-being of others, he comes to have moral beliefs about certain kinds of actions that he should not perform. The upshot of this line of reasoning is that a person, as a human being, comes to possess beliefs about permissible and impermissible ways of pursuing what he believes is good and will promote his short-term happiness, where he views the former ways of pursuing what is good as just and the latter ways as unjust. Given these ideas about just and unjust ways of pursuing what is good, a person forms ideas about two corresponding life plans, one which consists of restraint in pursuit of what conduces to his short-term happiness and the other which does not.
An ultimate good-seeking choice of the former kind of life plan, which is the kind Augustine made in his early thirties, is what I will call an ultimate just-good-seeking choice, while an ultimate good-seeking choice of the latter way of life is what I will term an ultimate unjust-good-seeking choice. In simplest terms an ultimate just-good-seeking choice is a choice to live a life of restraint in pursuit of what is good, while an ultimate unjust-good-seeking choice is a choice not to exercise this restraint.
Might not, however, a person's moral beliefs be erroneous? And if they might, can a person really be morally responsible for having made an ultimate just- or unjust-good-seeking choice on the basis of those moral beliefs? After all, if an individual's moral beliefs are seriously misguided, then what he subjectively regards as just and unjust might not be objectively so. Hence, it is possible for a person to make an ultimate choice of a life plan that he believes (subjectively) is just when in reality (objectively) it is (in whole or in part) unjust and for a person to choose a life plan that he thinks (subjectively) is unjust when in reality (objectively) it is (in whole or in part) just.
While the distinction referred to in this objection is a real one, it is not relevant to the issue at hand. What is important is the fact that a person makes an ultimate just- or unjust-good-seeking choice in light of his beliefs about what is just and unjust, regardless of whether those beliefs are true or false, and he understands that he is obligated to make an ultimate just-good-seeking choice in light of those beliefs by virtue of what is appropriately called his conscience, where his conscience is an inner voice or judge that pronounces a verdict of innocence or guilt upon him depending on whether he makes an ultimate just- or unjust-good-seeking choice. St. Paul frequently appealed to this notion of conscience, as in the following comments in his letter to the Romans: “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them” (Rom 2:14–15 RSV). The philosopher Immanuel Kant also recognized the importance of conscience:
[T]he accusation of conscience cannot be…readily dismissed, neither should it be; it is not a matter of the will.…Conscience is an instinct to judge with legal authority according to moral laws; it pronounces a judicial verdict, and, like a judge who can only punish or acquit but cannot reward, so also our conscience either acquits or declares us guilty and deserving of punishment.16