The world we live in bombards us with messages that tell us our goals should be limited to and regulated by morality. We are taught that for a truly good person the ends never justify the means. We are given models such as Mother Teresa and the Pope to hold ourselves up against. Although this world understands that to achieve a state of complete moral purity is beyond a man, it continues to insist that we should strive towards becoming a moral saint. As a result we become so fixated on attempting to reach this goal that most people never step back and ask themselves why. Why do we want to be this perfectly moral person? For the vast majority of us the answer is simply that we are told to be, that we want to conform to society’s wishes. In truth, the supposed goal of becoming the moral saint is possibly one of the worst goals we could create for ourselves. An objective saint has three major faults. First of all, to become a moral saint is to give up pleasure, a detriment to oneself. Secondly, one would become a hindrance or annoyance to others, a detriment to them. Lastly, the goal defeats itself as a man whose vision is tinted by morality will find it next to impossible to truly help those who seek his help.

Before proving my claims it is necessary to understand what a moral saint is. To one who truly is a servant of morality, the belief of what is right directs every action. A moral saint is a person who at all times strives to accomplish all things in life in the most moral way possible. Susan Wolf says that both kinds of moral saints, those who are moral out of genuine desires and those who are moral out of duty, are virtually indistinguishable because their outwards actions are the same. Therefore we can use Wolf’s umbrella definition of moral saint to describe any person “whose life is dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole.” However, many find this one-dimensional view too simplistic and argue that it is not practical because such a person does not exist. Exactly. As such a person cannot exist it is useless to argue the merits or flaws of such people. The purpose of this paper is to present the flaws in the mere pursuit of such a state. For the purposes of this argument I will assume morality to be the subjective Judeo-Christian concepts of morality generally recognized throughout the world.

The pursuit of moral saintliness itself is a detriment to a person’s welfare and happiness, regardless of whether or not the goal is realized. In order to see moral purity one must essentially look past themselves and in doing so become blind to their own wants and desires. This will result in one of two things. One possibility is that the person will ignore their desires in their goal to be selfless. This results in them coming closer and closer to their goal while simultaneously becoming miserable and depressed. A person cannot live without concern for himself. One could argue that the person is acting on their desires, and that those desires dictate them to be moral. Obviously, it is possible for a person to have such desires, but it is not possible for a person to have only selfless desires. Humans are, quite simply, far too complex to have such a one-dimensional mind-set. My second point should be obvious. In order for a person to have only selfless desires, they would have to have only desires stemming from their mind. Humans, however, have bodies and those bodies have desires of their own. Hunger is a desire that is certainly selfish; one which a moral saint would be likely to ignore in many situations. This would be a repression of his or her desire. The other possibility is that the prospective saint will become so obsessed with his or her devotion to morality that their personal desires will cease to exist. This outcome would mean the death of the self. Personality is reflected by a person’s individual desires, so a person without desires ceases to be a person. Therefore a true moral saint without any selfish desires would become nothing but a force of nature, a tool the world could use to better itself. Either of these outcomes would lead to the eventual destruction of the person, either through a loss of the self or through an inevitable stress-induced breakdown. Therefore the pursuit of moral saintliness is, in fact, the pursuit of self-destruction.

A moral saint is not only a detriment to himself, but is often avoided by others who find them at best an annoyance and at worst a danger. Someone who is so devoted to the principles of morality often does not understand ideas that are even slightly counter to those morals. As such, moral saints never fit in with other people. They are also seen as dangers because morality often does not mean that they intend to help people so much as it means they will do the right thing. The right thing, in their opinion, can be a hindrance to those around them. A daily example would be the speed limit. In reality, there are very few people who stay below the speed limit, but as the limit represents the law a moral saint would insist that a driver adhere to that law. Moreover, if the driver refused to comply with the speed limit or simply was inattentive to their speed then a moral saint might feel that they were moral obligated to report the driver to the authorities. This kind of blind devotion to morality would much more often be a hindrance to those around the saint, despite the saint’s good intentions.

The third flaw with striving to become a moral saint is that even if the pursuit is successful, the goal itself will be a failure. A moral saint is not a person who wishes to be moral for the sake of morality, but instead one who wishes to be moral in order to help others. But the achievement of becoming a moral saint makes a person nearly useless at helping others. This is because people exist in a world that conflicts with morality and therefore the problems people deal with involve immoral situations. Therefore a moral saint may hear a situation and be able to give a person advice on how to resolve the situation morally, but they will be hard pressed to actually help or give advice that will allow the person to resolve the situation happily. This is because happiness is based on the fulfillment of desire, not the presence of morality in one’s life. As most people are more concerned with a happy outcome to a difficult situation, a moral saint’s help and advice would be foreign to them. This leads to the conclusion that a moral saint, providing only moral solutions, is helpful only to other saints who seek the same goals in life. On a wider scale a person who is dominated by morality is unable to offer solutions to larger problems because a saint will find it hard or even impossible to grasp a situation from the selfish points of view of other, less moral people. Again, this inability to identify with others makes their advice and help next to useless. So we can see that the moral saint is a paradox, since achieving such a state ensures that the person will fail in his or her goals.

This is based on the base idea that moral saints can never exist. Some would argue that moral sainthood is not idealism and that saints already exist today. In truth, these people are deluding themselves. Aspiring saints who believe that they have reached their goal have done so because the idea of success brings them pleasure. Those who see moral saints around them are deceived by believing that because most of a person’s actions appear moral, they all are. Admittedly, I cannot monitor every second of a person’s life to prove that they are not moral anymore than a critique could do so to prove that they are. I don’t have to. The simple fact is that humans are incapable of living lives devoid of pleasurable desires. The Hedonist philosophy has its faults as it tries to prove that every desire is based on the pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain. While this subject is hotly debated, it is folly to believe the opposite, that a man can form every desire regardless of his want of pleasure or fear of pain.

As stated before, this is based on a moral saint who interprets morality from a generic Christian point of view. The same principles, for the most part, apply to the pursuit of sainthood according to essentially any other moral system. This is because it is not the actions sanctioned by the morality that are detrimental, but the changes to the aspiring saint and the sacrifices he must make. In order to rigidly adhere to any moral system the saint must override or give up desires and lose the self. They also will have the same narrow perspective that makes others wary of them and hinders their attempts to help others.

Once a person sacrifices their own desires in their pursuit of moral sainthood they leave what makes them a truly unique person behind and become little more than a tool for the world that others fear or avoid. Worse, they are a tool that generally cannot accomplish the tasks it molds itself to accomplish. The end result is that a person has destroyed himself or herself in order to become something miserable and useless. This is not to say that the pursuit of morality itself is a bad thing. Morality on most scales is like any other goal. It is healthy to strive for and helps a person grow into the person they want to be. We must see that morality does not demand saint-hood of us. Self-destruction only results from reaching too far, in trying to become what no one can. To be subjective is to be human. No human has the potential to abandon subjectivity for reason or morality. To push against that boundary of who we are is to drive ourselves mad pushing by straining against the fabric of our nature.