Doing the Right Thing: Cultivating Your Moral Intelligence

Aaron Hass is a professor of psychology, but it's his experience as a clinical psychologist--heading off suicide and gluing marriages back together--that informs Doing the Right Thing. Resolutely unconcerned with abstract questions, and deliberately setting aside such tough moral chestnuts as abortion and capital punishment, he offers instead a straightforward guide to two intermingled issues. First, why it is, despite the attractions of selfishness, that we are generally better off when we do what we believe to be right? And second, how, on the most practical level, can we do ourselves and everyone around us the favor of becoming better people?

This is refreshing stuff, especially from someone in a profession that has done its best to treat notions like self-restraint, self-sacrifice, and moral character as distasteful jokes. For Hass, they are nothing less than keys to a cure. The book's treatment of philosophical issues is light; occasional references to Kant or Aristotle are strictly pro forma and essential subjects such as psychological egoism--the popular view that all human action is "really" self-interested--are dismissed with almost flippant ease. But it's worth reading just for the anecdote about what happened when researchers put seminarians under tight deadlines to finish a sermon on the Good Samaritan--and then ensured that, in order to present their work, they would have to pass by a shabbily dressed man who was coughing and groaning as if in pain. Doing the Right Thing also contains other well handled discussions of such matters as whether God is a necessary foundation for workable value and the way that generosity and courage, just like dishonesty and cruelty, are subject to a powerful snowball effect. --Richard Farr