Consider the related emotions of pleasure and satisfaction to begin a way to summarily dismiss the Utilitarian and the Kantian theories of morality. In short, the idea of comfort replaces the idea of pleasure and the idea of irony replaces the idea of obligation. Moral philosophy, after all, is a partial and recondite way of dealing with what can be described as the way emotions work. A description observes what just is, and is thereby shorn of moral values about what should be done, and so can be dealt with by what is either called the sociology of everyday life or the sociology of emotions. Reducing morality into descriptions rather than proscriptions was the point of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, nothing left of ethics except descriptions.
Begin with pleasure, which conveys sensations that are of the sort experienced by a good meal or feeling warm in the cold and cool in the heat, people being just right in their homeostasis or else feeling pleasurable sensations such as in sex that are also physiolgically grounded. Famously, Jeremy Bentham had reduced all emotions to quanta of pleasure and insisted that there was nothing else to study in moral life because achieving pleasure was the only motive there was or could be, though some pleasures were more intense or long lasting or otherwise to be measured. Bentham’s moral philosophy, utilitarianism as it was called, was liberating because it forced analysts to look at what social practices actually accomplished for making life more pleasant by ridding the bugaboo of obligation. People were not encrusted by beliefs that led them to forget what actually made life pleasant even though people inevitably followed that route of pleasure, though Bentham was a bit confused in how there could be other motives that contradicted that pleasure was everything. In fact, Bentham listed satisfaction as among the pleasures, when it is a very different kind of thing, and by including it in the list makes his theory vacuous in its own terms. But we understand well enough what Bentham is getting at even if does not state his point clearly. What he means is that all activities are to be judged on how they add or decrease a person’s well being as that is not a matter of words but of the physical and psychological state of the individual person, needing an additional basic principle, that a good society gives the most pleasure to the most people, as rounding out a moral philosophy, that principle to be fought out on its own merits. Kant, on the other hand, the much more considered philosopher, thought of satisfaction as more important than pleasure. Satisfaction is the emotion that comes from having accomplished some end of some moment and so is cerebral in that one has noticed, for example, paying rent or a mortgage payment, or successfully passed a test or been true to a friend and is accompanied with a distinctive feel of self-pride. Most important, to Kant, of all satisfactions would be meeting one's obligations, which takes up a lot of the social world, including work, bureaucracies, and family, all of those having to do with instructions said by superiors, though also recognizing that there are many choices or preferences that people make that don’t have to do with obligation, but dealt with separately in his “Critique of Judgment”. In fact, Kant was so aware of the trap of satisfaction as self gratifying hauteur, that he condemned the association of satisfaction with obligation because obligation should be an end in itself rather than something done so as to feel proud or otherwise self-approving, though there doesn’t seem anyway around having it as a motive for obligation. To Kant, you shouldn’t take doing the right thing as a pleasure even of that specialized sort of thing known as a satisfaction. That means not gloating that you gave charity or having a warm spot in your heart for being a good person. Kant is a tough taskmaster.
Let us reconceptualize these basic terms pleasure and obligation because each of them are proscriptive because either one of them can be discovered as the greatest good, pleasure for Bentham as the only good and so the best good when people might see obligation or loyalty or communality as superior virtues, and the same to be said about obligation in that Kant recognized other goods such as aesthetics or preferred choices but clearly indicates that obligation is the most important virtue because in their choice to fulfill an obligation people are engaged in free will, which is what makes us human and distinctive and worthy, Kant being a German Protestant, a follower of Luther, people ever in the quest to find their freedom in spite of their perversities. Provide instead to cover much of the ground, consider terms that are descriptive (which means objective, which is the same thing) and that are aspects of consciousness, because to avoid consciousness is to rid life of its texture.
Consider a situation all people can experience. Sometimes people more or less feel themselves to be inside themselves. That means that they have more or less come to terms between what they appear to be in the social world and how they sense themselves to be . That is different from being in accord with one's identity in that an identity is already abstracted as an objective entity to one's feelings for oneself, some of which are not well defined, as when a person finds himself charming to others while finding that a very unsure appellation. Rather, a person is inside oneself when the limits ascribed as part of one’s social identity are conjoined to an emerging and emergent personal sense of self. We can feel that way, for example, while sitting at home in one’s study, working at a computer or making a telephone call or just luxuriating at allowing oneself to hear oneself breath. It can be ambulatory where the blocks you walk during a daily constitutional are so familiar, so aware of which cracks in the sidewalk will come up next, that being on that walk seems so familiar that being in that place seems a natural place where a person can be even if it is a mile away from the study you often sit in. The same thing can also happen when walking in the woods never before having walked there because places like it are so familiar in that the walk is amidst trees and across stones and between ferns or grass that you know you are a walk in the woods even if the shadows and particular inclines are freshly experienced. You can feel, as the metaphor says, at home with yourself when you arrive at your office and are drinking a cup of coffee waiting for office life to proceed, knowing what the day portends, including doing thinks of the sort that has been successfully managed previously even if there is a bit of excitement about doing these things again successfully. Those situations can all be considered being comfortable, using the common idiom of being “comfortable in your skin”. You know it when it happens and there is comfort in doing so even if comfort is not regarded usually as a particularly virtuous thing, reserved as important only when comfort is intermittent as when experiencing an illness or the privations of being in a foxhole.
There are ways of explaining the phenomena of being comfortable. Familiarity, as indicated, is often associated with it, as is becoming for a moment accustomed to a more luxurious setting that one can manage even if it is transitory as going to a fancy restaurant for dinner or having a night out at the opera. My own best explanation is that people are comfortable when they are engaged in their regular roles, such as a mother cooking or cleaning up, or a father chastising a son or else praising a son. Place and behavior echo and reinforce what you are as a person, feeling internally the feelings you recognize to be your own. It is to be remembered, however, that a person who is comfortable is not self-conscious unless they are engaged in examining the nature of being comfortable. Instead, they are just doing things naturally. They are straight rather than sardonic unless being sardonic is a usual form of expression. But comfort is what it is, very satisfying and certainly as compelling as that much more general issue of pleasure. You can feel comfortable even if you need not sense an additional charge of getting pleasure, comfort alone an end in itself however pleasant it may also be, in that you have comfort in listening to a spouse snore while the two of you lie in bed, though not sensing that as a pleasure in addition to being comfortable.
Now look at the opposite of being comfortable. I doubt very many people find being a bride or groom comfortable even if they are happy or elated or expectant of a joyous future. Rather, they think of themselves as outside of their skins. They are being stared at; they are asked to make private emotions public; they are to remain cordial and dignified and follow out the ceremonies with some degree of elegance. It is a burden to be a newly wed to be however much they are appreciative of the significance of the event. Yet the person can be said to be beside themselves or what would more accurately be said as acting out a role rather than being a plumber or a housewife or a friend. Other examples of being non comfortable are being in a submarine the enemy is raining down with depth charges. You work hard to play your role of being brave and efficient and calm, only some people grooving on that role and even then being uncomfortable because it is the discomfort, the anxiety, that makes a person “at home” with distress, as if they are fated to do that kind of work. Very ordinary ways of life can also engender discomfort. Those can include a nagging spouse which makes you wonder whether to separate from the person, or a failed examination that makes a person reconsider what is to be their future, or a successful examination that also defines life differently, like a friend of mine who told me that when she woke up after she had passed her oral examination for a doctorate that she never had to do anything gain, though that was, of course, false. But it was a fleeting feeling of relief from a prior and persistent concern.
What all of these feelings of discomfort have in common is that people are outside themselves and looking at themselves as objects and thinking how they might be doing otherwise. Whether the clown who is acting funny while crying on the inside, or Marty wondering what he is to do with himself because he is ugly, he is delving into the possibilities of choice, indeed is inventing the idea of choice as an alternative or many alternatives. Choice is not an inevitability of the human condition but is rather the creation from the human condition of an achieved outcome that is the result of being ironic, of bending what is in front of you so as to alter it whether in thought or in action. You are ironic when you speculate that you will run away from the table where your girlfriend is sitting never to see her again, or you are ironic when you sarcastically say that the play was lousy as if to indicate that you have an independent mind about such things and that i could be elsewhere rather than engaged in what is putatively a pleasure. Choice is very general and not at all very special or filled with ethical imperatives. It just means seeing things akilter without even proposing an alternative only the possibility that things in some one respect are not as they might be.You can cherish your own insights as ironic and therefore independent but people can also take irony as a limiting attribute while solid tpes take their comfort at doing what they think how life is supposed to work, such people thought of as dutiful or resigned when what they are is comfortable in what they are doing even if the work or even a lifetime is not very pleasant.
Life, then, has its choices, because there are any number of occasions when a person becomes ironic, and also because some people have more propensity than do others to engage in that mental stance. Yes, every moment can be posited as a choice in the sense that you can move to the left rather than to the right, but that is a metaphysical point about time rather than what we might call the active choice that goes with deciding or at least speculating about changing from a habitual to a less habitual behavior. You cannot choose but to go left or right or straightforward. That is because something has to happen when time moves. And most of your choices are trivial, such as whether to eat chocolate ice cream rather than strawberry ice cream, though most choices are simple preferences of this nature, while there are some choices that are consequential and self definitive, like picking spouse or an occupation, even if some of those choices re habitual or customary rather than self-guided, though take heed that what might seem events that are not chosen really are, as when the young woman huddles with the matchmaker to find a suitable fit, now that it is a good time to marry. People look aout of the corner of their eye to notice something different from what might be.
There are fatal flaws in Utilitarianism and in Kantianism. The usual criticism in Utilitarianism is that there is the prospect but never the accomplishment of reducing one or another emotion to a number of quanta of pleasure, only the presumption that people must do that operation when making decisions. Moreover, and more crucial, is that emotions are qualitatively different from one another and so there is no prospect of translating various emotions into the common coin of pleasure. How do jealousy and beneficence and fellow feelings turn into a single formula? That is difficult but not an impossible task in that Spinoza did it a number of times, showing how one emotion, over a set of stages, becomes a different emotion, particularly with emotions that Spinoza thought were key, such as joy and love and hate. For example, Spinoza cites what might be called an aphorism about human psychology. His Postulate 46 says: “If someone has been affected with joy or sadness by someone of a class, or nation, different from his own, and this joy or sadness is accompanied by the idea of that person as its cause, under the universal name of its class or nation, he will love or hate, not only that person, but everyone in the same class or nation.” That is a very precise way of thinking what in the Twentieth Century was recognized as a general theory of prejudice, which was that people generalized from one or another person who was blameworthy to all people in a race to be blameworthy, so that some black criminals were judged to be sufficiently deficient for all Black people. The issue was not that there might or might not be a higher rate of Black criminality but an award of a categorical award to favor and disfavor a race.
A more recondite postulate by Spinoza also has a temporary ring because it explains superstitions. Postulate 50 of the “Ethics'' states “Anything whatever can be the accidental cause of hope and fear.” Because we can love or hate anything, then the anticipation of having one or the other, hope or fear, can arise at any time. That means that people can make up any excuses for their hope and fear and so things in America are going from bad to worse because of the fear of that happening, and can believe in crackpot theories simply because they stoke what are usually their fears. Facts are irrelevant to Qanon; they just imagine it because they anticipate the worst they can imagine, which in their case, is that there is a pedophile group in Washington, D. C.
Kant’s moral philosophy faces a very different problem than does Utilitarianism. Morality is for Kant inevitably hierarchical in that morality is commanded by a superior to an inferior, as when an officer tells an enlisted man what to do, or a bureaucrat tells a clerk what to do, even though good orders are ones that can be described as meeting very vague descriptions such as people being treated as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. That is impossible in that all of us use other people in practical ways just to get through the day. You get a wife to make up the beds or maybe she just assumes that she will do that or maybe the two fight over it, neither of the two as essentially subservient, just practical. More impossible is sorting out whether highly moral matters are to be treated as means to an end. It is my own means to an end that I want to be a servant or remain a slave rather than get killed. Does that mean a slave is no longer a means to an end because you are using yourself as your means? Otherwise slaves would have to kill themselves so that they no longer merely serve as a means to an end and while some slaves do so or pine away, as may have happened with the Taino when Columbus enslaved Puerto Rico, most don’t. People are demeaned but not immoral for having stayed alive.
So get back to the issue of taking orders. Why should an order be compelling? It is a command rather than an explanation. The Ten Commandments were just orders and yet they are enjoined to be considered wise or reliable or necessary ways to make rules in a society work. Somehow, the declaration is enough because the person has the authority to proclaim that dictate. So there is a disjunction between the dictates and the substance of what has been dictated and the two are incommensurable unless the dictator is to be regarded as wise or simply powerful enough to be intimidated into being wise. It is no wonder that Max Weber, ever a Kantian, thought that charismatic authority preceded all other forms of authority, such as bureaucracy or custom, because all other authority, even in rulebooks, had to rest on the ultimate authority of a personage, such as God or Hitler. That is a bad business and so should dispense with Kantianism however much it seems to be humane rather than nasty.
For their part, comfort, as a substitute for pleasure, and irony, as a replacement for orders, is much more humane (where I may indeed be treating humaneness as my own best good.) Comfort is a state of consciousness and so is not as trivial as mere pleasure, it including the reasons for why one is at comfort, not just without pain, itself no minor issue, but also at dealing with one’s everyday useful activities, like taking out the garbage, or doing something serious, like keeping a plant going whether as an employee or as a boss. Irony can also be serious, which is to distinguish it from that lesser form of sarcasm, which is simply to indulge the cynical by offering no reason, no dispassionate assessment, about how all politicians are crooks, cynicism alone its justification. Rather, irony allows a person to lever itself into a maybe only slightly differently imagined world, and so makes people free rather than the bearer or implementers of orders from others. Lucretius said that people were free because the atoms swerved and so fate was not predetermined. But it is more accurate to say that people make irony and that swerves, makes the order of things change and so creates free will.