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They say that we’re capable of almost anything (morally speaking) given the right set of circumstances.

Given the right circumstances, you could have been the moral lecher cheering on Hitler, satisfied that those rotten Jews had it coming to them.  Thank the Lord you are not in that place.

Have everything and everyone you love destroyed, and have your basic nutritional needs denied for a week, and then test out your moral convictions. You’ll be reduced to a savage beast, capable of moral horrors. Thank the Lord you are not in that place. Pray that you never find yourself there.

Just as moral monstrosity can be a matter of bad luck, so also moral heroism can be a matter of good luck. Some of our great moral heros just happened to be the right people, at the right time and in the right place, didn’t they?

Someday you might be confronted with an opportunity to do a great act of moral heroism. Will you be ready?

Maybe you’ll put yourself on the line, saving a life and making the 6 o’clock news. Maybe you’ll do a great deed in secret. Maybe it will be a tiny decision with great–though unknown–ramifications. Will you choose rightly in your ‘moment of truth’?

Pray to the Lord that you’ll be ready.

So much lies beyond your control. You didn’t decide where you were born. You didn’t decide the historical circumstances that would unfold before you. So much is left to divine providence.

But right now you are faced with the onslaught of a thousand tiny decisions.  In and through these decisions you will shape yourself into the kind of person you are becoming. When engaging in moral self-examination, the key questions are “who am I becoming?” and “what kind of person should I become?”

In and through these daily decisions, in cooperation with divine grace, you have a small role to play in fashioning yourself into the right kind of person.

So pray, both for moral luck and for the courage and wisdom to fashion yourself into a good person who is ready to rise up to meet the history that unfolds before you.

This is the key ethical task which has been set before us. The key ethical questions are “who’s a good person?” and “how can I be a good person?”  

These questions are basically ignored by our philosophers. Instead, they are obsessed with abstract and artificial moral puzzles and debates over what kind of language moral language is. But you can’t answer those questions without first, at least implicitly, answering “who’s a good person?” and “how can I be a good person?”

Debates over the various modern ethical systems/theories (utilitarianism, et al.) are, in this sense, massively wrongheaded.  

If you want guidance on how to live a good life, look elsewhere.  The closest thing to guidance you’ll find here is some sort of Walt Disney silliness about “following your heart” or “being true to yourself”. The problem is that there is no fully formed “self” for us to be “true to”.   And “following your heart” is hopelessly vague advice.  (What can this really mean? Following my appetites?  Really?  You can’t be serious.)  

The moral life can’t possibly be a matter of  ”being true to ourselves”.  Like it or not, we are burdened with the responsibility of fashioning ourselves.  The ethical question is “who shall I become?”  We are not ready made.  We are constantly becoming the people we incrementally decide to become.