Moral life is simple

Commencement Speech Morality presents morality as something simple and easy to grasp. The simplicity and transparency of morality take many forms. Sometimes, the idea is that the world is Manichaean, a battleground between the forces of goodness and justice, on the one hand, and evil and injustice, on the other. There is a clearly recognizable Good Side that supports the Good Things and a similarly recognizable Bad Side that supports the Bad Things. Actor Tom Hanks clearly drew the battle lines in his 2023 speech at Harvard University: “We are all in a cage match, mixed martial arts battle royale with agents of intolerance and braying incompetence, the malevolent equals to Imperial stormtroopers, Lex Luthor, and Loki. And we could use a superhero right now.”Footnote ¹¹ Perhaps not unsurprisingly, commencement speakers often suggest that in this Manichaean battle, the graduates uniformly belong to the Good Side and only want the Good Things and will soon need to fight the sinister forces that await them outside the ivy walls. President Joe Biden told Howard University graduates in 2023:

The simplicity of moral life can also take the form of a claim that the important moral and political issues of our time are not complicated. All that is needed are young bright people of good will to finally do what is right. Whatever the specific form of the claim, Commencement Speech Morality betrays a very high confidence in its moral judgments: about who is morally good and bad, about what is right or wrong in the world, about our ability to solve big moral problems, and about what ought to be done about them.

To get a better feel for this feature of Commencement Speech Morality, here are some messages discordant with it, ones unlikely to appear in commencement speeches:

• • “Many of our most pressing moral and political problems are incredibly complex and difficult to understand.”

• • “Some problems in the world may not have any solutions at all. We may just have to live with them.”

• • “The world is full of trade-offs, so be prepared to sacrifice some things you care about to get other things you care about.”

• • “Morally speaking, humans are a mixed bag—few of us are very good or very bad and most of us are just mediocre.”

• • “The odds that you are right about all or even most of your moral and political beliefs are low. So proceed accordingly.”

The world is your business

In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to donate money to the poor. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business and not to interfere with other people’s,” Scrooge snaps. “Mine occupies me constantly.” Later in the story, Scrooge is visited by his former business partner Jacob Marley, who, though he once shared Scrooge’s outlook in life, has in death returned to tell a tale of regret. “Mankind was my business,” bemoans Marley. “The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”Footnote ¹³

Commencement Speech Morality takes Marley’s side in this dispute, communicating to young people that the world—all of it—is their business. Graduates are encouraged to view the world as a place of injustice and suffering and they are told that it is their responsibility to set things right. The world’s ills are presented as a buffet of options. Upon graduation, the young person stands before this buffet and decides how he will make his life meaningful. Actor Matt Damon addressed graduates at Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

It is not just national or global problems that are on the buffet, either. In a democracy, every political event is your business. Michelle Obama told Oberlin College graduates: “Every city ordinance, every ballot measure, every law on the books in this country—that is your concern. What happens at every school-board meeting, every legislative session—that is your concern. Every elected official who represents you, from dog catcher all the way to President of the United States—they are your concern.”Footnote ¹⁵ Doing a little bit is not enough, either. You must be all in, she explained:

According to the commencement speech moralist, Pericles had it right: “[W]e do not say that a man who has no interest in politics minds his own business, we say he has no business here at all.”Footnote ¹⁷ For the commencement speech moralist, the world’s problems are your problems.

Solving problems is primary

There are presumably many ways to live a good life and do good in the world. Commencement Speech Morality promotes a certain approach to doing good, however, one devoted to what we might crudely call “solving problems.” Specifically, Commencement Speech Morality encourages young people to right the wrongs they have identified in the world: reduce inequality, eliminate poverty, campaign for the “right” politicians, make sure they pass the “right” laws. Tech billionaire Hayes Barnard captured the problem-solving ethos of Commencement Speech Morality when he told graduates at the University of Texas, Austin, “You’re better equipped than any class in history to solve humanity’s biggest problems and we need you to show us the way.”Footnote ¹⁸

One common way of expressing to young people the imperative to solve problems is in terms of helping people. “The good news is, you are graduating at a time of immense opportunity to help people,” Bill Gates told Harvard graduates. “New industries and companies are emerging every day that will allow you to make a living by making a difference. And advances in science and technology have made it easier than ever to make a big impact.”Footnote ¹⁹ (You may notice a continuing emphasis on doing “big” things. More on that below.) Patricia McGuire, President of Trinity Washington University, told Wells College graduates, “You must never be silent when evidence of injustice cries out for an advocate, a voice, a champion.”Footnote ²⁰ The notion that a good college graduate might check out of political involvement and devote themselves to other productive endeavors is foreign to Commencement Speech Morality.Footnote ²¹

According to some speakers, the measure of a life is how successful you have been at solving global problems. Bill Gates (a very popular choice of speaker) told 2007 Harvard grads, “I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities.”Footnote ²²

These imperatives to help others are not isolated events. According to a 2011 analysis of ninety commencement speeches, the most common moral message was some form of “help others.”Footnote ²³ According to Commencement Speech Morality, a morally good life is mainly about being useful to others and solving problems.

Here are some kinds of lives ruled out by Commencement Speech Morality or, if not ruled out, implied as being somehow suboptimal:

• • A scholarly life devoted to learning and the preservation and production of knowledge

• • An artistic life devoted to creating beautiful things

• • An ascetic life devoted to self-discipline, growth in virtue, or spiritual enlightenment

• • An entrepreneurial life devoted to creating products or services

• • A domestic life devoted to creating a good home, raising children, and enjoying friends and family in hospitality

• • A workaday life devoted to productive manual labor

Bigger is better

Commencement Speech Morality tells young people to prefer the big to the small. Sometimes, this is just a generic exhortation, as when television anchor Savannah Sellers told University of Colorado, Boulder graduates to “go out and do big things. I can’t wait to watch.”Footnote ²⁴

Other times, this advice takes the more specific form of recommending that graduates enter public life and garner attention for themselves. Journalist Katie Couric told graduates at the University of Wisconsin, Madison that “you got to get out there and get yourself noticed.”Footnote ²⁵

Novelist Salman Rushdie admonished 2015 Emory grads not just to be larger than life and change the world, but to reinvent it: “Try not to be small. Try to be larger than life… . Make no mistake. You can change things. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that you can’t… . Reinvent the world.”Footnote ²⁶

Sometimes, young people are told their lives will have more purpose if they tackle big problems. Bill Gates told 2007 Harvard graduates, “Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on big inequities. I feel sure it will be one of the great experiences of your lives.”Footnote ²⁷ Gates reiterated this advice when he addressed Harvard graduates again in 2023, saying that “when you spend your days doing something that solves a big problem, it energizes you to do your best work. It forces you to be more creative, and it gives your life a stronger sense of purpose.”Footnote ²⁸

Commencement Speech Morality says be big and bold and, if you err, do so on the side of audacity rather than caution. “Go make your big beautiful dent, and as you do so come down on the side of boldness,” explained novelist Sue Monk Kidd to Scripps College graduates. “If you err, may it be for too much audacity, and not too little. For you really are enough. You have untold strengths and resources inside. You have your glorious self.”Footnote ²⁹

Good intentions make all the difference

Commencement speakers tell young people that they need to get out there and solve big problems. Do they also tell graduates to remember that lots of smart and well-meaning people are already out there trying their best to solve those problems? That they should take their time and truly understand the complex problems of the world? That it’s very easy to destroy good but imperfect things in the world even if our hearts are in the right place?

No. Commencement Speech Morality does not tell young people these things. Rather, they are told that the world is full of injustice and that what is missing is them. Professor and activist Angela Davis concluded her speech to the Bryn Mawr Class of 2018 by encouraging graduates to say of themselves, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”Footnote ³⁰ Graduates bring to the table their values, their character, their desire to do good and change the world for the better. In short, Commencement Speech Morality says that your good intentions will make all the difference in securing a world where our big pressing problems can be solved.

Sometimes, speakers couple this idea with a similar one: that the people who now occupy positions of power and have all the resources they need to solve problems have not succeeded because their hearts are just not in the right place. We failed. But you are different. On the topic of climate change, for example, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Tulane University graduates, “In some important ways, my generation has failed you in this regard. We spent too much time debating. We’ve been too focused on the fight and not focused enough on progress.”Footnote ³¹ In a virtual address to several historically black colleges and universities, President Barack Obama told graduates, “All those adults that you used to think were in charge and knew what they were doing? Turns out that they don’t have all the answers. A lot of them aren’t even asking the right questions. So, if the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you.”Footnote ³²

Sometimes, what has been missing is framed in terms of “political will”: the currently powerful lack it, but you graduates have it. In 2019, Hillary Clinton told Hunter College graduates, “Most of them [today’s leaders] know what needs to be done, they just lack the political will to do it.”Footnote ³³ In 2005, before he became President, Barack Obama said at Knox College, “We have the talent and the resources and brainpower. But now we need the political will.”Footnote ³⁴ Eight years later at Ohio State University, he told graduates, “But more than anything, what we will need is political will—to harness the ingenuity of your generation, and encourage and inspire the hard work of dedicated citizens.”Footnote ³⁵

The important point here is that, according to Commencement Speech Morality, past failures are largely attributable to a lack of good intentions and, furthermore, that graduates do have the right stuff and are therefore the key to unlocking solutions to a whole host of big complex problems. The key is in their hearts. Business executive and philanthropist Frank McCourt told Georgetown University graduates, “More than your intellect or your acquired skills, I have faith in the size of your heart. In your capacity to meet our moment not only with your proficiency but with your magnanimity. You have the chance to navigate a new path that is not determined by the power of technology but rather is guided by the aspirations of your soul.”Footnote ³⁶

If we were to develop further the details of Commencement Speech Morality, we would want to be more specific about how the lack of good intentions explains past failures and how they are supposed to make a difference in the future. The speeches themselves, of course, give us nothing like a theory of the efficacy of good intentions.

One view says that, assuming the right people are given the requisite resources, good intentions are sufficient to fix the world. Those currently in a position to bring about good outcomes just do not mean well enough or there just are not enough well-intentioned people in power. If we could just supply the pure of heart with the right resources, things would get better. With enough of them, some problems will be solved entirely. People who mean well are the difference-maker.

Another approach says that resources, skill, and good intentions do not guarantee we solve our problems, but you surely will not do so without them. Meaning well is therefore a necessary condition. Our hearts must be in the right place. Good things will not happen accidently. If we do not aim directly at solving problems, we are doomed to failure. Here, the Commencement Speech Moralist echoes John Rawls, who wrote that “it seems safe to assume that if a regime does not try to realize certain political values [like fair equality of opportunity], it will not in fact do so.”Footnote ³⁷

A more modest approach to good intentions says that meaning well increases the likelihood of accomplishing your goals. The old guard did not mean well or well enough, and so the cards were stacked against them. But you young people, armed with your good intentions, have much better prospects at saving the world and it is those good intentions themselves that raise your chances at success.

These, then, are the five key ideas of Commencement Speech Morality: moral life is simple, the world is your business, solving problems is primary, bigger is better, and good intentions make all the difference. Naturally, we might add others, such as having an unbridled optimism about the future or that moral and social progress is inevitable. While I do think these five ideas constitute the core of Commencement Speech Morality, I am perfectly happy to revise the list.

Not all commencement speeches will express all five of these ideas. Yet there is a set of commencement speeches that share what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance,” which is “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.”Footnote ³⁸ The more that a particular commencement speech preaches these five ideas, the more it is an expression of Commencement Speech Morality.

Notice that this set of claims that I have collectively called Commencement Speech Morality is not in principle tied to any specific political or ideological group. Republicans and Democrats, for example, can in their own way adopt a version of Commencement Speech Morality. Similarly, conservatives, liberals, socialists, and progressives can each take up this moral outlook in service to their moral, social, and political goals.Footnote ³⁹ It may turn out that for one reason or another Commencement Speech Morality is more prevalent among some political or ideological camps at any given point in time. But that is an empirical question we need not pursue here. I emphasize this point because it is important to see that a criticism of Commencement Speech Morality is not thereby an attack on any political group.

So far, I have tried to articulate the convictions of a moral outlook I have called Commencement Speech Morality. Let’s now evaluate it.

Moralizing

To moralize is to exceed the proper limits of your authority to enforce morality.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moralizers overstep important boundaries as they try to get other people to live the right way (or at least the right way as they see it). To better understand moralizing and how it connects to Commencement Speech Morality, though, we need to step back.

Most people agree that morality is important. It is generally good to tell the truth, keep your promises, be kind to others, make amends when we wrong them, deal fairly, improve ourselves, and be grateful to those who help us. Many will also agree that it is valuable for those of us who participate in the moral community to enforce morality, that is, we try to get people to do what is morally right and to eschew what is morally wrong. We enforce morality in all kinds of ways, most of which involve some kind of intervention into what other people are doing. Sometimes we intervene to encourage someone to do the right thing, give advice about how to handle a situation, or to alert others to moral causes that need attention. Other times, our interventions take a more negative stance. We might criticize someone or his behavior, shame him, or demand that he do better.

Moral enforcement itself is costly; it takes time and energy to intervene in others’ affairs, it interrupts what people are doing, it often causes further conflict, and the mere act of coercing others to try to get them to behave differently is a kind of cost. But when all goes well, moral enforcement, costly as it is, is worth it. Moral enforcement must be kept within appropriate limits, however; otherwise, social life would be unbearable. Imagine constantly policing everyone’s behavior, thoughts, and character—and having yours policed in turn. We would fill our days with hectoring, pestering, and interpersonal conflict.Footnote ⁴¹ This would be so even if everyone had true moral beliefs and enforced only the correct morality, which of course is not the case.

I do not have a simple and straightforward theory of the limits of moral enforcement. I am skeptical of any philosopher who proposes one, so I will briefly consider three kinds of limits.

The general point is that our right to enforce morality is limited. To exceed those limits is, as I have suggested, to moralize. The moralizer makes a mistake in acting as the moral police when he ought instead to keep to himself.

Moralizing has significant social costs, two of which are relevant for our purposes. First, moralizing often interferes with practical discussions. Rather than investigate complicated issues about how the world works or what institutional barriers there might be to realizing their moral vision, many moralizers cut right to the chase and tell us what justice demands. Their inquiry into the way the world works is thus limited to what Robert Nozick cheekily calls “normative sociology,” “the study of what the causes of problems ought to be.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Moralizers overstep their role as promoters of morality by treating their simple moral claims or slogans as if they settle the matter when things are more complicated. They promote morality too aggressively without paying attention to the facts on the ground. Consequently, moralizers often use morality as a premature conversation-stopper. One U.S. politician illustrates this way of thinking when she expresses her dismay that “there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Another social cost of moralizing is that it undermines the efficacy of appropriate moral enforcement. We do not automatically make the world better by being a more relentless or aggressive enforcer of morality, even if you only ever enforce the one true morality. If moral enforcement is to retain its power, it must be used sparingly and appropriately. The more we moralize, the more we undermine the utility of moral enforcement. Targets of our moral criticism will ignore us, become cynical about morality altogether, or simply respond to our criticism with some of their own.

We can now see why Commencement Speech Morality promotes moralizing. Consider the perspective of someone who sees the world as a receptacle of injustices to set right. Suppose she also thinks that moral life is simple and transparent, that the world’s problems are her responsibility to solve, and that her good intentions are the missing ingredient to making the world a better place. What should we expect?

I propose that such a person will tend to become an overconfident enforcer of morality: a moralizer. She will find it easy to discover faults in others and she will find it difficult to mind her own business. Because she is rewarded for unearthing injustices and has been told the world is waiting for her to show up at the buffet to identify and solve its biggest problems, she will often be mistaken when she condemns people and their behavior. She does not worry that it is not her place to intervene, because she thinks the world is an ocean of her business. And because she thinks her good intentions are a reliable indicator that she is doing good, it will rarely occur to her that her attempts at moral enforcement might instead make the world a worse place.

This is not to say, of course, that anyone who imbibes Commencement Speech Morality will become a moralizer. Rather, the point is that if you want to create a generation of moralizers and reap the social costs, then teaching Commencement Speech Morality would be a good bet.

Meddling

Another cost of Commencement Speech Morality is that it motivates people to meddle in others’ affairs. Whereas moralizing is an inappropriate exercise of moral enforcement, meddling is an inappropriate exercise of helping behavior.Footnote ⁴⁶ Those who meddle—call such people “busybodies”—stick their noses in others’ business and try to help. We can all agree that, generally speaking, helping people is good. But busybodies wrongly insert themselves into others’ lives to solve their problems for them. Their intervention might be inappropriate because, like the moralizer, they do not know enough to help or because they lack the right kind of social standing to intervene. You might go around the gym and help correct everyone’s weightlifting form, interrupt a conversation at a coffeeshop to explain why these people do not understand the economics of minimum wage law, or tell this guy that he is not using the right shampoo for his hair type. A group of high-minded college students might travel to a poor, remote, traditional village to explain how they should set up their society to conform to the ideals of gender egalitarianism. There is an endless supply of ways to help people.

Many cases of meddling are merely annoying or cause only minor interpersonal conflicts. But other forms of meddling cause great damage to people’s lives. On the small scale, a busybody might overhear a retired couple and try to convince them to invest their savings in his favorite new cryptocurrency. At a larger scale, meddling can result in disastrous military action or failed public policy.

Aside from the predictable annoyances and interpersonal conflicts put upon us by busybodies, this, then, is the most obvious cost of meddling: it often makes things worse. Not all meddling will do more harm than good. But much of it does, and this is a good reason to be cautious about intervening in others’ affairs to help them and solve their problems, even when our hearts are in the right place and even if we are confident our efforts will have a positive impact. Intervening in others’ affairs is risky business, and it is often an unfair risk to impose on others. It is one thing to try to solve your own problems and end up doing damage. It is another thing entirely to make others pay for your overconfidence as you try to solve theirs.

While some costs of meddling accrue to the objects of the busybody’s intended aid, others are borne by the busybody herself. When meddling becomes a way of life, it takes the form of what psychologists call “pathological altruism.” Whereas normal altruism involves a sustained ability to help others while still attending to your own needs and obligations, pathological altruism involves an unhealthy need to sacrifice oneself for others at the detriment of one’s own welfare.Footnote ⁴⁷ For the pathological altruist there is always something he can and should do to help others—one more dollar to give, one more meal to forgo, one more creature comfort to forswear—if it means helping only one person somewhere.Footnote ⁴⁸ In doing so, pathological altruists sacrifice their own mental and physical well-being.

Let’s return to Commencement Speech Morality. Consider again a moral outlook that tells young people that moral life is simple, other peoples’ problems are also their problems, the world needs their well-intentioned interventions, and that they have an obligation to do big and world-changing things. What should we expect to happen?

I propose that someone who adopts such a life orientation will find it very difficult to avoid becoming a busybody. Her moral self-confidence buffers against concerns about mistakenly diagnosing problems or identifying solutions. Her conviction that a meaningful life involves tirelessly working to help others protects her from having second thoughts about devising solutions to other peoples’ problems. And her commitment to doing big things on a big stage incentivizes her not to do what is helpful, but to do what will impress people and get attention. And often those are not the same thing.

I pause here to emphasize how harmful these messages can be for young people who try to live out Commencement Speech Morality. “From a very young age,” writes one American teenager, “I have felt that I have the immense responsibility to change the world by advancing gender equality, eradicating racism, and resolving homelessness, among a countless number of other world-wide issues.”Footnote ⁴⁹ (We might substitute more traditionally right-wing causes here. The political valence does not matter for my present purpose.) These are, we must be frank, unreachable goals for any teenager. If these are your goals, you are going to fail. If we teach young people these should be their goals, we are setting them up for failure. And because failing at unreachable goals seems to be one cause of severe depression,Footnote ⁵⁰ by conscripting young people into moral and political activism, we show selfish disregard for their mental health. Indeed, the weight of these responsibilities often leads young people to feelings of depression and burnout.Footnote ⁵¹ Consider, for example, the testimony of British teenager Chrissie Okorie:

In incentivizing people to scour the planet looking for people to help, Commencement Speech Morality produces not just meddlers, but masochists.

Maintainer derogation

Edward Shils observes: “It is not often that gratitude is expressed to those who have maintained institutions in the state in which they received them. Their founders are praised; innovators are praised, but not those who have maintained what the innovators created.”Footnote ⁵³ Shils’s point—or one way of thinking about his point—is that there are powerful social incentives for being a founder or an innovator, but many fewer rewards for those who pursue less visible lives devoted to maintaining the things that make social life tolerable at all.

Maintainers protect their institutions from erosion and destruction. Examples of institutions include libraries, elementary schools, the legal system, houses of worship, hospitals, mutual aid societies, businesses, the postal service, journalistic outlets, gyms, running clubs, police departments, markets, professional sports leagues, and universities. For most of us, the first institution we experience is the family. As the “building blocks of the social order,” institutions form the backdrop of our lives.Footnote ⁵⁴ We go through life relying on them, assuming they will be there when needed.

As “humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction,” the importance of institutions cannot be overstated.Footnote ⁵⁵ By constraining and guiding our behavior, institutions create the possibility of a peaceful and predictable social order. They help us coordinate with others to solve problems and provide environments in which humans can find meaning and meet basic needs. Try imagining what your life would be like without them.

Commencement Speech Morality encourages young people to be Founders and Innovators. Start a charity. Invent a drug to cure cancer. There is nothing wrong with being a Founder or Innovator, but not everyone can be one. Nor should we want everyone to be one. An entire generation of CEOs and heads of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? Society also needs Maintainers, that is, people who invest their time and energies in local institutions and try to preserve the good things that already exist.

Insofar as Commencement Speech Morality encourages only the life of a Founder and Innovator, it derogates the life of a Maintainer. This is the third and final social cost of Commencement Speech Morality. Maintainer derogation has two aspects. First, it discourages people from being maintainers. Second, it encourages people to look down on maintainers. Commencement Speech Morality derogates maintainers by telling young people to do big things, make their mark, start revolutions, and make a name for themselves. The implicit message is that the well-educated, “good people” are too good to live a pedestrian life of putting down roots, creating a good home, coaching tee-ball, and volunteering at the Kiwanis club. But Shils is right that being a Maintainer will not make you famous. So, Commencement Speech Morality has a serious problem. Ordinary people leading ordinary lives committed to maintaining the good things around them are vital to the preservation of social institutions. But Commencement Speech Morality encourages a different kind of life, one devoted to upsetting the status quo, making a splash, and solving global problems. The resulting social cost is that the maintenance of social institutions comes to be undervalued.