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There is no life without responsibility. The modern age with its all glamour has found itself with an entitlement culture. With instant internet access, video-streaming content, next-day, orders, food choices, and more, many of us could hardly imagine living with less. The vacation of spirituality and religion in a secular materialist world has dragged many into passive consumerism and ditching life’s greater responsibilities. The Western world today finds itself battling its own ideological, spiritual and political fractures. Divided and polarised, what society needs is a return of responsibility and virtue. The duty to oneself and others mixed with a standard for moral excellence has left a compromising chase of individual desires. This article seeks to argue there is greater self-belief and mental peace in embracing responsibility. By striving for a deeper shared understanding of duty and change through moral virtue, we can all tame our expectations of the world. In turn, we may discover there is more contentment and joy to reap from our developing world.

1) Good and Evil – the reality of human existence

a. Moral evil

Our hopes and efforts of a healthier, peaceful world stretch beyond the first principle of living, concerning human moral consciousness. It doesn’t take a religious person to acknowledge the world in all its action contains both good and evil. While we may argue about who or how we define ‘good’ and ‘evil’, our common intuitions prove to us a divide between what we can do and what we ought to do. Pure evil is axiomatic. Since the beginning of humankind, bouts of evil have loomed. From one side of life, there is compassion, justice, charity, peace, community, family, friends, honesty, forgiveness and mercy. Now comparing the opposite, we discover true evil. The capacity to destroy social order and mercy. To prey on enemies, murder, rape, oppress, massacre, war, steal, cheat, decimate and hate. In other words, for love and prosperity, there exists the ineradicable evil the world is endowed with restraining and fighting off.

By recognising the moral condition of this world, we come to a fundamental question of our societal and political freedoms in the modern secular world. If we know humanity is capable of such evils, should we really be advancing a liberal order led by individual sovereignty?  The prevailing Western world has certainly grown out of this fundamental principle. Whether it’s been conservative, liberal or even Marxist thought, philosophers of the Western Enlightenment age have promulgated the rationality of man. Society is to be understood by a particular ‘reasoned’ framework at times being right, at times being wrong but in any case, to be fought and implemented by the will of individuals. This can be deemed the battleground of Western ideology today. One may sternly defend individual sovereignty by highlighting the prosperity of the enlightened West. It was not evil but the faith of man to grant the body politic authority over rights, respect, tolerance and freedom so it may be enshrined into a liberal world.

b. Individual sovereignty

However, the secular ideal to uphold individual sovereignty has gone beyond measure. What we are witnessing is individual empowerment gone wrong, turning in on itself. Liberty now succumbs to a creed of “my body, my choice”. It may be considered progress to many, the natural next step to greater freedom and happiness. But in practice, modernity has fallen into a rhetorical trap. In the name of progress and freedom, it has turned acceptable to strip away functional traditions, modesty and virtue for raw pleasure. This is ethical egoism – individual sovereignty taken to its fullest where one is entitled to do what brings the most pleasure. In this scenario, we can see today’s secular state mirroring Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. His story describes the state as taking an enforcing role in advancing pleasure and eliminating the pains and sacrifices needed to understand reality. We witness today across the West, a not-too-dissimilar agenda across politics i.e., promoting gender dysphoria and sexual identities, ostracizing religious faith and discipline, and reshaping children’s curriculum into self-denial and confusion. Henry Ford’s ‘History is Bunk’ is presented as the defining slogan of Brave New World (Huxley, 2007:29):

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition, we don’t want tradition, we want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today

Hence, in the postmodernist and capitalist age, immediate gratification is more than just progressive words. Without leaving our beds, our screen offers a ticket of a lifetime to an out-of-body experience. It doesn’t take long before many find themselves lost in endless short videos, trivial debates and opinions, all before being flooded by access to pornography and shopping. Beyond screens, our consumer environment feeds our senses with ever more clothes, trainers, accessories, music, video-game realities and much more to repeat the consumption cycle. The real problem emerges when this individualism proves so numbing, we continue eating, drinking and partying like there is no tomorrow.  This ethical egoism, taking individual sovereignty to its fullest, has clouded the basic moral foundation needed to uphold individual duty, responsibility and virtues.

c. Loss of virtue

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (2007) by Alasdair MacIntyre offers an intriguing perspective to understanding today’s vacuous post-enlightenment age where we see the displacement of discipline, temperance, responsibility and virtue. He argues today’s moral discourse (our language of what is fair, right and wrong) is largely devoid of meaning. Since the Enlightenment, rational thinkers such as Marx, Kant and Hume have interpreted human life abstractly. Their close focus on finding the greatest possible reasons for organising a society in the greatest possible way has overlooked individual life as an end in itself – carrying with it deep tradition, duties, thought-out moral goods and evils shared across communities.

“Reason is calculative; it can assess truths of fact and mathematical relations but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of means. About ends, it must be silent. Reason cannot even, as Descanes believed, refute scepticism; and hence a central achievement of reason according to Pascal, is to recognize that our beliefs are ultimately founded on nature, custom and habit.” (MacIntyre, 2007, p.54)

MacIntyre points out this Enlightenment era has given way to a morality shaped by individual agency.  As he explains, through Max Weber’s thoughts on rationality, one’s reasoned argument on a topic remains no more ‘rational’ than another reasonably constructed argument. Each viewpoint is rooted in a deeper subjective realm of biases or other words “sentiment and feeling” (2007, p.26). This is seen in today’s campaign of radical wokeness, a fierce arena of moral emotivism/emotional attitudes, seeking self-defined principles, with ever-expanding claims to ‘rights’ and ‘fairness’. In all, today’s advanced stage of individual sovereignty has come to reflect the sinister praise many times given by Alistair Crowley’s (1966) Age of Horus, a regressive mantra to “do what thought wilt”.

2) The need for responsibility and virtue

a. Life and discipline

The discussion about the current moral discourse helps us to understand today’s rising apathy across the Western world. A secular age ostensibly believing in the progress of individual freedom but descending deeper into a spiritual discontent. The truth remains there is no end to individual wants and desires. As we see in the continued chasing of sexual fantasies, drugs, money and virtual entertainment, there is no stopping point or contentment. Fulfilling the aims of sovereign individuals appears as impossible a goal as the very political ideologies that show themselves irrationally competing perspectives embody competing desires. As seen in the perplexing landscape of race, religion, sexuality and wealth being weaponised to support radical left and right views on their larger ideal of a better world.

In seeing this spiritual free-for-all, one can now address the question of responsibility and virtue. The crude hedonistic individual may still assert life is short. It must be enjoyed freely before it disappears. It may be said self-righteous morals are just another trap into tyranny. However, this is not about living an ascetic life but recognising that life comes with inherent compromises/sacrifices and duties that are essential to a functioning society. A life primarily dedicated to pleasure gives way to spiritual anarchy where the undefined nature of human gratification has no end. The point of return is morality and virtue; about what to keep hold up, what principles to defend and what to outlaw. Similar to Hobbes’s description of a society growing out of the state of nature, the individual must carry a level of duty to themselves and others to keep society functioning. If we take an individual, we can presume he/she will act in their self-interest. As such, a self-interested individual can only ever function, in trade and sharing, by committing ourselves to a contract. This may not be a formal, written contract but a spoken promise that in the grand scheme of a working society obliges us all to deliver- this is the deep responsibility we have to ourselves and others.

b. Importance of Responsibility and Virtue

In defence of human principles, it becomes apparent the condition of the human being can only be protected by a virtue –moral excellence to uphold responsibility and duties to ourselves and others. This is about upholding life’s virtues, not complaining about what seems to others as now chores amidst more pleasure-seeking, eating well, exercising, caring for parents and siblings, being reasonable over reactionary, striving for self-learning and self-improvement, accepting fate, and upholding justice. These are just some basic responsibilities to ourselves and to our environment that force us to reflect inwards. In other words, as Williams (2008:20) stresses “responsibility is necessarily connected with mutual accountability”; even modern atomistic society still depends on the practical necessity of others fulfilling their roles to meet each other’s demands. Therefore, against entitlement and pure pleasure seekers, society does not allow for us to escape responsibility. We must maintain an orderly function in our own lives before changing bits of society.

An interesting discussion emerges when we explore the link between responsibility and virtue through the views of Aristotle and Nietzsche. According to Aristotle and traditional morality, what is good is also what is true. “For Aristotle, if we develop a characteristic or power that works to hide the true, it would not be a virtue but a vice” (Kain, 2009:14). Conversely, Nietzsche embraces the idea of individual virtue but rejects the wider notion of good and evil. For Nietzsche, morality is nothing but an invention attempting to restrain us from a truly deplorable world. The Virtuous Good in this instance must therefore be willing to accept the ‘untruth’, a self-defined system of moral good and evil.

“Nietzsche thinks that “each one of us should devise his virtue…” (cited in Kain, 2009:12)

“To overthrow the tyranny of the actual, to overcome the gods and tradition, one must develop new powers, a new self-confidence, new capacities, new virtues (cited in Kain, 2009:13)

Nietzsche’s perception of the ‘horrors of existence’, however, remains deeply subjective like the very religious arguments he condemns. If the world was truly so bleak, yes, we would not maintain the courage to go outside. But how or why should we believe his viewpoint the world is really so dark? This line of discussion leads us into relativism, and eventually, a nihilistic paradigm in which meaning itself including Nietzsche’s views becomes ostensible.

Putting aside the moral debate, it appears ironic Nietzsche despite all his pessimism, and condemnation of a world doomed to despair, attempts to change his perception. He realizes the necessity of finding, applying, and ‘inventing’ meaning to act virtuously than dwindle into empty existence. The question therefore arises, what are we to achieve in this life? Acceptance of suffering or strive for moral good – the latter proves more productive.

3) Finding contentment – learning, leading and appreciating through responsibility

Responsibility for a start helps us to combat the sensibilities of a world filled with tragedy and rejection. A glance at the news or social media reminds us of a world filled with struggle. Plentiful opinions, images and videos showcase a world needing more than just mere change, for some an entire destruction before transformation. Headlines steal the show when we see deplorable crimes that constantly remind us of the heinous capacities of human beings. It becomes easy to declare the world is underserving of greater love, especially when the nemesis of evil that is religion has taken a toll in the West.

Little do people realise swatting away a life of virtuous devotion has left open compromises to societal vices – as seen in the political realm, in actions over words, lying, deceiving, tormenting, greed and promiscuity in this secure material life.

“…the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos.” MacIntyre (p.54)

By returning to faith-based virtue as Stoics once emphasised, it becomes possible to embrace the necessary and added responsibilities to ourselves and others. This is about leaving the path of hedonism enabled by secular society. Instead of forever chasing our desires, our responsibilities and duties in life offer us a pathway of fulfilment. Many of us take on added responsibilities that we forget are instilled with virtue. As parents there is a duty to protect our children, as children there is a duty to return the care and love we grew up on; in marriage, there is a duty to remain faithful as we form one vessel with our partners; as business owners, workers we maintain a duty to fulfil our agreed promises; as citizens, we hold a duty to respect, contribute and preserve our sanity to keep society functioning for the greatest number. In this way, responsibilities hold stronger significance when recognising virtue. As moral creatures, our interaction with others and our thoughts hold the power to create and serve meaning to greater society. Rather than being overwhelmed or frustrated with life’s offerings, the virtuous individual will identify with their meaningful presence in this universe. As a person whose thoughts, movement, and speech hold weight against the events that call upon them to act. Their actions can turn our inner complaints and rants into opportunities to transform events into the line of a virtuous existence.

As the morally faithful would reflect, the more powerful sentiment over the polemicist, is to both accept one’s suffering as God-given and pursue the greater good for ourselves and others in the life he continues granting us. With the value of virtue in one’s life, one will find there is no room for self-denial. Society’s ills and the periodic low points are no excuse for destroying one’s soul. The individual who acknowledges virtue will remember that their continued existence alone, on miracle Planet Earth, warrants an unconditional duty towards maintaining a healthy body, mind, and spirit. As long as we are living, a future exists in front of us, carrying hope and unspoken possibility. This virtue of responding to life’s faults with action forms life’s vital principle in taking small steps. It doesn’t take long to feel warmth in the heart when doing even the smallest actions such as watering a plant or helping their neighbour with their groceries. The duty to the world carries on and as an indication, every life carries significance and purpose to the world around you.

Individuals can soon realise there is no living without discipline and compromise. The shameful alternate remains entitlement, where one removes themselves from their significance to the world. It becomes no surprise this group remains scornful of the world and bellicose to fulfilling their desires. For this group, their wish is to stay in childhood, supposedly ‘liberated’ from the demands of their radicalised consciousness. However, it is a fantasy to believe life does not demand responsibility and virtue. Our bodies require nutrition in the same way it seeks to rid bodies of excess and toxicity; friends, and families depend on our care and trust to relish experiences; our environment and societal order need our harmonious coexistence. The principles that lead us to fulfil our responsibilities in life make virtue a necessary character. Without recognising the existence of moral standards and excellence, paves the way for a life of mere chores and denial towards self-improvement. They are eventually pulled by the many utopias of the world and the quick highs of following their desires. On the contrary, their after-morning hangover reveals an individual afraid to accept life, its responsibilities and reality beyond self-interest.

Conclusion:

In summary, there is no change or empowerment without first attending to the responsibilities endowed upon us by our very existence. The secular world makes it easy to get lost in a spiral shrouded by consumerism and lust. The compulsion to want, however, never meets an end as modern society reveals a populace grafting for never-ending pleasure. The decline of religion offers no respite either. Rather than freeing ourselves from self-tyranny, the lack of faith has exacerbated a state of apathy and refusal with the world. The necessary transcendental belief to continue duties oneself and others has been lost to a compromising chase of individual desires. Our mental, physical, and spiritual health demands we do not merely complain but act conscientiously. In private, with discipline every day, to uphold more than responsibilities – moral virtues that bring the best out of society. Returning to religion or a basic conception of greater moral virtue can help us find peace against society’s many shortfalls.

References:

Gong, Qun, and Lin Zhang (2010) Virtue Ethics and Modern Society–A Response to the Thesis of the Modern Predicament of Virtue Ethics, Frontiers of Philosophy in China, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 255–65, Available at:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/27823328. Accessed 13 Aug. 2023.

Huxley, Aldous (2007) Brave New World (London: Vintage Books)

Kain, Philip J. (2009). Nietzsche, virtue and the horror of existence, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17

Kao, Ya-Yun (2019) What’s in It for Me? On Egoism and Social Contract Theory, Rebus Community, Available at: https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-ethics/chapter/whats-in-it-for-me-on-egoism-and-social-contract-theory/ (Accessed 16 August 2023)

MacIntyre, Alistair (2007). After Virtue, Third Edition, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press

Williams, Garath (2008) Responsibility as a virtue, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 455-470 Available at: https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/765/1/Responsibility_ETMP_publication_text.pdf