18 May

Proust says we only become moral when we’re unhappy. What he meant by that was that (and I agree) in most of our lives we rarely stop to act or think ‘morally’. We certainly evaluate most situations we’re in, but we don’t think, hmm, time for some moral reflection here, better dust off my moral principles and apply them. Proust says we only set up a distinction between how things are and how we think they SHOULD be - moral thinking - when we’re unhappy with how things are. So that thing we call explicit moral thinking is really just us trying to rationalise things not being the way we want them to be. He’s not a cynic, we all value things, it’s the core of who we are. But those values are not the explicit ‘morals’ people mean when they talk about morality. We don’t really express our values either, we live them - we are what we do, not what we say.