One statement of ethics I used to hear all the time is “If it feels good, do it!” I haven’t heard it recently, but I think that’s because our culture has internalized it so thoroughly that it goes without saying. I mention it because it highlights a basic principle of the human will: in any action a person takes, he is pursuing an end that seems good to him. And, ultimately, there must be some real good there. We do evil by pursuing some good in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong state, or out of due proportion. It’s not wrong to have enough money to live comfortably; but it’s wrong to steal it. It’s not wrong to have sex; but it’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage. It’s not wrong to eat ice cream; but it’s wrong to binge on it. It’s not wrong to talk; but it’s wrong to gossip. It’s not wrong to play poker on-line; but it’s wrong to do it on company time, or with the rent check. It’s wrong…but it seems good to us, it feels good, and we do it. And there’s just enough genuine goodness there that we can fool ourselves into thinking that it’s OK, despite the protests of our conscience.
Sin makes you stupid, as Mark Shea would say, and I often think that our sense of due proportion is the first thing to go. And the more the conscience is ignored, the more it is deadened, and the more it is deadened, the less a sense of due proportion we have.
So the men who flew the planes into the Twin Towers were pursuing an end that seemed good to them. Ultimately, there is some real good they were after, though I won’t presume to say what it was. But they had persuaded themselves that that tiny spark of true worth outweighed the enormous villainy of their means.
It felt good to them, and they did it.
How deeply wrong they were.
The View from the Foothills 
This was also Hemingway’s idea. I think his formula was “it is good if it feels good”. There was no time element.
He was not a good thinker, and yet he is among the greatest of writers.
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The sense in which suicide bombers can be said to act on the principle “if it feels good, do it” can only be that they do what they think they ought to do. Usually, the phrase is used to ridicule hedonism, but nobody would be stupid enough to suggest that suicide bombers are hedonists. The really troubling thing about the fact that even suicide bombers (perhaps especially suicide bombers?) take themselves to be acting rightly and even nobly is the possibility that our own judgments could be just as mistaken. You suggest that the problem is a deadened conscience. I won’t dispute the possibility of such a thing, but I don’t think it’s what goes on in these cases. Rather, it seems to be that conscience is highly operative but extraordinarily warped. Sin makes you stupid alright, but that very stupidity leads you to believe that you’re right. If we can’t rest assured on our sense that we’re right after all and that what is right is just obvious, we all need to be fairly humble about our judgments and a little less confident in ourselves than we sometimes tend to be.
No?
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