I was reading Cancer Ward, a harrowing and compassionate look at cancer patients in 1950s Russia by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I was reading a section of the book about doctors making errors, about how there were cases on the record of people dying from aspirin, how a doctor really never knows if their well-meaning treatment will end up killing the patient.

This line jumped out at me:

“It is a universal law: everyone who acts breeds both good and evil. With some it’s more good, with others more evil.”

There’s something unmistakably true about that statement. I’ve felt it when trying to act morally in the world: if we tried to account for every potential evil that our actions could lead to, we’d go crazy with the possibilities. We’d never act at all.

We can’t escape breeding some form of evil in the world. All we can do is try to create as much good as possible, right?

But this leaves us with a couple problems:

Morality is not just a calculation

Thinking about morality in terms of a calculation, like this:

(total good created) – (total bad created) = Morality

This is no way forward. It’s utilitarian thinking, and has caused people to do all kinds of evil. Using dirty tools to create good isn’t any way to live in the world.

This is different than choosing the best of two bad options: At times (I think) violent actions are required to prevent serious evil. At times doing nothing is more evil than taking action to prevent evil. At times we have to choose between losing our leg and losing our lives.

But thinking that we can use evil to create good in the world is naïve at best, world-destroying at worst.

Clearly we breed evil by our actions, but we have to consider that not as part of a calculation or a tool, but as a necessary byproduct of action. We need to minimize the evil as much as possible.

The second problem is thornier:

How much do we need to know?

I’m astounded by how ignorant I am. It terrifies me.

For example: I know little about cars. The other day, I realized that the rusty trailer hitch bolted to the back of my van was just about rusted through – I didn’t know they could do that, had never even thought about it. 

It’s possible that my lack of knowledge could have lead to someone’s death: if the hitch had decided to fly off the back of the van while someone was driving behind me, for example.

Because I’m ignorant about cars (or, more precisely, because of my inattention and poor maintenance of my car), I could have accidentally killed someone. I could have killed a child.

Sure, when these random bad events happen, we tend to not blame ourselves: after all, we didn’t know.

The question arises: How much do we need to know?

Or, more generally: What do we owe each other?

Obviously we owe each other reasonable behavior: We can’t live together if we’re all acting terribly. 

But knowledge? Do we owe it to each other to gain a certain amount of knowledge? 

You can be arrested for laws you didn’t know about – ignorance is no excuse.

Yet how much evil and harm to we generate, just because we are ignorant? How much pain do we cause because we simply don’t know enough?

We don’t know how to manage ourselves.

When we don’t know enough, we destroy people’s lives.

We break up our marriages because we don’t know how to navigate an adult relationship. Our kids suffer.

We infect other people because we don’t know when to slow down and stay home.

We threaten the lives of everyone on the road because we don’t know how to stop looking at our phones.

We leave the world bereft, because we don’t know how to produce and create without sabotaging ourselves. 

We hurt our spouses, because we don’t know how to communicate.

We hurt ourselves, because we don’t know how to take care of ourselves properly.

How much do we need to know to fulfill our moral obligation to each other?

You don’t know enough to live a moral life. I don’t either.

What are we going to do?  We can learn as much as we possibly can, we can try our hardest, and we could still come up short. We will come up short.

Do we owe each other our best? How good is our best? How do you know if you’re doing your best?

“Best”

Is your “best” just better than most people?

Or is your “best” not relative – is your “best” reducing the space between who you are, and who you could be?

You might be capable of ten times the good of someone else. Is it OK if you just do twice as much good?

Will you be able to sleep at night if you phone in your life, getting by with low effort and raw ability?

What if you really gave your best? Best in your relationship, best in understanding, best in developing your mind – what would that look like?

What if you pushed yourself, held yourself to a high standard, while forgiving yourself when you fall short?

It’s no good to let yourself off the hook all the time, nor is it good to beat yourself up.

What if you held yourself to an impossible standard, while giving yourself an impossible amount of grace?

Would that be your best?

What would the world look like if we all did that?