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Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?

Choi Byeong-hun Contributor
· 6 replies · 292 views
Virtue & characterAnalyticChineseGreek & RomanAristotelianismVirtue ethics (modern)Alasdair MacIntyreAristotleMencius#integrity#moral-injury#professional-ethics#role-morality
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I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part of it on the DMZ. I am not talking about atrocities. I mean ordinary things the role required: enforcing a punishment I thought was disproportionate because the regulation was clear, sending a capable young sergeant on a duty I knew was pointless and risky because the order came down, keeping silent in a meeting where silence was expected of a major.

Each time I told myself that a good officer does this, and that being a good officer was part of being a good man. Now I'm less sure. People who study moral injury describe exactly this: the damage done to a person who acts against their own sense of right in the course of doing a job well.

Aristotle asks in the Politics whether the virtue of a good citizen and the virtue of a good man are the same, and as far as I can tell his answer is: not always. MacIntyre distinguishes practices, with their own internal goods, from the institutions that house them and can corrupt them. That helps a little.

My question is open. Is there a coherent idea of goodness in a role that can come apart from goodness as a person? Or does every role eventually present a bill, which you either refuse to pay or pay with part of your character? I would like to hear from people in other professions too.

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6 answers

  1. Khalid Mahmood Awan

    Fellow

    Thirty-one years on the bench. There were sentences the law required of me that I would not have chosen. I passed them. I told myself then, and still mostly believe, that a judge who substitutes his own preferences whenever he disagrees with the law does a different and larger wrong: he makes the law depend on which judge you happen to draw.

    But I'd add this. The role permitted me some things and required others, and the work of conscience was in the space between. Where there was discretion I used it toward mercy. Where there was none, I wrote my view into the record. I don't think the bill was refused or paid in full; it was negotiated, every week.

  2. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Contributor

    The men in my prison class talk about the officers this way. Some of them say a particular guard is "a decent man in a rotten job" and mean it as high praise. What they notice is not whether he enforces the rules, which he must, but how: whether he looks at you while he does it. Maybe goodness in a role lives partly in the manner, which no regulation specifies.

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  3. Sasha Kovalenko

    Fellow

    Skovoroda, whom I work on, held that happiness lies in work that suits your nature, and he turned down the posts he was offered when he judged them unsuited to him. He spent his last decades wandering. That is one answer: if a role keeps asking for what your nature refuses, leave it. The cost is that very few people can afford to walk the roads with a bag of books, and the roles still need filling by someone.

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  4. Andrés Zuluaga

    Contributor

    In the truth commission hearings in Colombia I listened to former soldiers and former guerrillas describe the same thing from both sides: the role carried them, and then one day it asked for something they could not live with afterwards. What struck me is that the ones who seemed most intact were not those who had refused everything, but those who could name the exact moment they should have refused and didn't. Being able to see the bill, as you put it, seemed to matter.

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  5. Choi Byeong-hun

    Contributor

    Thank you. Khalid's "negotiated every week" is the most honest description I've heard. Another case has been on my mind: Mencius is asked what the sage king Shun would do if his father committed murder. The answer is that Shun would not obstruct the judge, but would give up the empire, carry his father on his back and flee to the coast. He keeps both loyalties by leaving the role. I used to find it evasive. Now I think it's saying that some conflicts cannot be solved inside the role at all.

  6. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    Engineers have a version of this. We sign off on designs, and the pressure to sign off on something marginal is constant. Our codes say the public's safety comes first, which sounds clean until your manager, whom you respect, says the risk is acceptable. I've found the most useful question isn't "would a good engineer sign this?" but "would I be able to explain my signature to the person who gets hurt?" That's closer to Scanlon than to Aristotle, I suppose.

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