Ethics

Is time-wasting immoral? The books I read tell me many times not to waste my life doing nothing, but if I choose to do it by the way, would it be immoral?

Comments

Like so many questions in ethics, this one seems to me to depend on which actual ethical theory we apply.

If we take a very strict kind of consequentialist theory (according to which the goodness or badness of an action is to be measured by the value of the consequences of that action, "wasting time" will be fairly neutral--not as good as actions that yield good consequences, and not as bad as those that produce bad consequences.

On some version of deontological theory, "wasting time" would also be neutral in any case in which no moral duties needed to be satisfied at that time. On the other hand, it does not look like "wasting time" could possibly satisfy Kant's notion that right actions are those we are prepared to universalize for all agents and times--plainly, if everyone "wasted time" all the time, we'd be in pretty bad shape!

From a virtue-theoretic point of view, we might ask whether the best sort of person would be one who "wasted time," and the answer would seem to be "no," in which case, wasting time would seem to indicate a lack of virtue, or even vice.

But now let me explain why I kept putting "wasting time" in scare quotes. My problem, briefly, is that I don't know what you really mean by this. If you mean playing with your children instead of filing one more legal brief before you have to go to sleep, then I am disinclined to call what you are doing "wasting time" (even if your boss at the law firm would count it as that!).

My own inclinations in ethical theory are mostly towards a kind of eudaimonistic virtue theory, where what counts as virtuous are those things that contribute to human flourishing (eudaimonia, in ancient Greek). This entails not only the agent's own personal flourishing, but also to the flourishing of those with whom the agent comes into contact (since our own interests are so deeply engaged with those around us, often to the point of being indistinguishable from their interests). From this perspective, what may seem, by some standards, as "wasting time" will actually contribute to a flourishing life--periods of play, of simple socializing, of leisurely thought and contemplation, and so on. I can well imagine many people who are deeply invested in the pursuit of other valuable things finding play and socializing and such nothing but "wasting time," but I think people are too ready to count time as wasted simply because the time is not spent on some too narrow conception of what counts as time not wasted.

Here's a perfect example: I have known maany people who regard philosophy as a "waste of time," because we don't produce wealth, don't heal the sick, don't feed the poor, and don't do a lot of other things that people regard as valuable. I also regard most of these "valuable" pursuits as genuinely valuable; I just don't agree that they exhaust the list of what is genuinely valuable.

So, my main answer to your question is that I am somewhat skeptical about what should and should not count as "wasting time" or as "wasting a life." For the most part, I think wwe should all be much more inclusive about what counts as meaningful, valuable, and not a "waste of time."

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