I woke up late this morning and, seeing that we were having a dry spell on the blog, decided I’d better write something. Appropriately enough, the thing that was most on my mind today was the vice of sloth.

Sloth is one of the “traditional” seven deadly sins, but it makes no explicit appearance in the Ten Commandments. My missal’s Examination of Conscience says nothing about it, but it nonetheless comes up periodically in my confessions, and when I confess to general sloth, this generally means something like: “I can’t think of anything very bad that I’ve done, Father, but I sure don’t feel like I’ve been especially good.” I find it hard, in the confessional, to find words to express my general mediocrity. But talking about sloth is sometimes a good way to start.

This is a tough one for Catholics to talk about because, for many purposes, Catholics are very comfortable with a moral theory that divides tasks neatly into the obligatory and the supererogatory. To put that in non-philosopher terms: there are certain actions that the Church definitely demands of us, and neglecting these is sinful. Beyond those duties, there are lots of other good things that we could do, but these are optional. We could go pick up litter around the neighborhood, or volunteer at the soup kitchen, or bring a meal to an ailing aunt… but if we’d prefer to play video games, that’s all right too. It isn’t sinful, because these activities are beyond the call of duty. I’ll call this the “baseline view.” When we think about life through the lens of the baseline view, we tend to feel that our time “belongs to” us, and that we’re entitled to do what we like with it so long as 1) we fulfill our obligations, and 2) we don’t do anything positively immoral with our spare time. On this view, laziness doesn’t look so much like a sin per se (though it may occasion sins of neglect.) Perhaps this is why sloth makes no appearance in my Examination of Conscience.

The baseline view pleases legalistic thinkers, and actually, I think there may be some use in it. But the truth is that such schemes tend to break down in real life. There are too many ambiguities. For example, we have certain duties to care for family (especially our children and our parents.) But nobody can give us an exhaustive list of what this does and doesn’t require. You definitely have to feed the children, but how much homework help do you need to give them? How often do you need to play with them? You should definitely call mom and dad sometimes, but is once a month often enough, or should it be once a week? No Catholic moral theologian can definitely answer these questions, and while you’d hope that caring for family would generally be a pleasure, everyone is bound to have those days when they’d rather be doing something else. Theories of supererogation can’t tell you when you should feel guilty for refusing to play another game of Candyland. They can’t tell you how many days you’re allowed to go before returning grandma’s call.

But this way of thinking about Catholic morality has serious limitations in any case. There’s a famous Catholic saying that those who aim for Purgatory will wind up in Hell. At some point, you have to stop trying to determine your minimal obligations, and start thinking more positively: what is the best life for me to be living right now? How can I be a better parent, child, spouse, priest or religious? How can I be a better Catholic? When you start thinking this way, you come face to face with the vice of sloth. At what point is general laziness preventing you from bettering your life? It may not be wrong per se to sleep late, but was there something else I should have been doing? Personal hobbies aren’t themselves sinful, but are they holding me back from more virtuous activity? And so forth.

This is the point where some theologians (most of them Protestants) have been inclined to swing to the other extreme and declare that we are obliged, at every time of every day, to be doing the single best thing we could be doing. Would protesting abortion at the local abortuary be morally better than watching the ball game at home? Well, then turn off the TV and get yourself outside. Would reading the Lives of the Saints be more virtuous than chatting on the phone to a friend? Then it’s time to hang up the phone.

But doesn’t this scheme seem flawed also? If we must subject all our activities to the “best possible action” test, a lot of worthwhile things are likely to be thrown out the window. So, for example, it seems ridiculous to deny that praying for the end of the abortion is morally better than watching football… and yet, I’ve recently argued on this blog that sports fanhood does have moral value, and for some people might form an important and good part of their character. Studying the saints seems more important than continuing an idle conversation, but on the other hand, idle chitchat may be one of the primary engines for keeping a friendship alive, and friendship is certainly a powerful good. This is somewhat analogous to the worries political philosophers have concerning our obligations to the poor. As Peter Singer famously argues, buying oneself a designer sweater, when the same money could have vaccinated five third-world children against deadly diseases, seems to be valuing fashion above five human lives. Looked at that way, it seems appallingly callous to purchase such frivolities, and yet, if we subject all expenditures to this same test, very few of them seem justified, and it looks as though a great many good and beautiful things (ranging from the arts to advanced education to beautiful churches) will have to be given up.

I think the key to both these puzzles lies in what Bernard Williams calls his “argument from integrity.” Human beings, as Williams realized, are the sort of beings that thrive through the forming of particular commitments, attachments and interests. An excessive commitment to utilitarian reasoning (or, in other words, the kind of reasoning that seeks mainly to maximize something, whether that be happiness or goodness or something else) is inimical to their overall good. So it isn’t necessary, before buying your child some new school clothes, to stop and ask, “is there another child, somewhere else in the world, who is more seriously in need of this money?” You rightly have a special dedication to your own child, and it’s appropriate to put his needs above those of strangers, at least to a certain degree. Likewise, I don’t have to pause before writing this post for the Cornell Society for a Good Time to ask myself, “Is this the single best thing I could be doing right now?” Blogging is one of my interests and commitments, and if that general attachment is a valuable part of my life, that can itself justify writing the post.

Note that this way of looking at obligation is also somewhat incompatible with the baseline view. If a commitment to blogging is part of my life and my character, I won’t be inclined to ask, “What is the minimum I must do to stay in good standing with my fellow bloggers?” Rather, I will want to make the blog as good as it can be, and this may end up demanding more of me than my formal contract requires. (Actually, there are no formal contracts here, but you get the point.) This is particularly likely to happen with deeper and more serious commitments, i.e. parenthood. If you have an unusually fussy infant who keeps you up most of the night, you can’t ignore him on the argument, “My parenting book says that babies are only supposed to wake up about every four hours. That’s how my first child was.” If your child has medical problems and needs expensive treatments, you can’t beg off with the complaint, “I was told to budget $250,000 for raising a child to adulthood, and that’s all he’s getting.” Parenthood is the sort of commitment that might impose any number of different demands and obligations on you.

So, after all this discussion, what’s happened to the sin of sloth? Well, we certainly might condemn those activities that don’t seem to serve much of any good purpose. That might be a worry for, say, people who sit in front of the television for hours, not because they’re enjoying a particular program but because they can’t think of anything better to do. I won’t say much about that sort of sloth, because I don’t really understand it; I’m virtually never lacking for “something to do.”

Surely, though, a person needn’t be bored in order to be lazy. What other forms might this sin take? If my general outline is right, it won’t make sense to evaluate our slothfulness in terms of the precise number of hours we spend sleeping, watching television, daydreaming or chatting on the phone. Neither will it be reasonable to examine every action and ask of each, “Could that time have been better spent?” We might, however, be able to examine our lives as a whole and ask, “How do I tend to spend my time? Are my larger commitments virtuous in kind? To the extent that they are, am I fulfilling them well, or am I looking for a bare minimum in each case?”

Sometimes, we may recognize that our commitments are badly ordered and need to be readjusted. I should specify that this will not always reflect the sin of sloth; sometimes it may reflect disordered attachments to lesser goods, or just a lack of prudence in determining what most needs to be done. A husband who works hundred-hour weeks in order to achieve professional success probably is not slothful, but if he is neglecting his family for the sake of personal ambition, he may be sinning nonetheless.

I’m inclined to say that sloth covers a particular subset of disordered commitments, namely, those that I’ve formed largely for the sake of distracting myself from other commitments that I know to be more important. And actually, many commitments may have the potential to function that way, even if they are good in moderation. When I use blogging as a way of avoiding my academic work, that might count as slothfulness. When football becomes an excuse for not spending time with family, that might be slothful. Most of us have a subset of things that we don’t enjoy but that we know we probably ought to do, as a part of fulfilling important commitments that we’ve made. When enjoyable activities function as excuses for neglecting more important commitments, this might be at the heart of sloth.

I still don’t think I’ve gotten to the heart of this problem, because the really interesting question is: what kind of spiritual sickness is it that leads us to neglect or shun things that we know to be for our good? Since this post is long already, I will desist for now. But as I hope I’ve shown, the question, “what is laziness?” is surprisingly challenging once we delve into it. It’s a fitting worry for a dissertating graduate student, because we do set our own schedules to a large degree. Whereas some people’s daily schedules are more or less fixed by their job requirements, we tend to think in the longer term. Two years ago, when I was doing my coursework, I spent my life racing around “putting out fires” (which for me meant, studying for this test, finishing this assignment, or getting that stack of papers graded in time for the professor’s deadline.) I sometimes felt guilt about the things I failed to get done, but I frankly didn’t have much time for worrying about sloth. These days, I almost never have a project that needs to be done in the next 24 hours… but there are lots of very large tasks that ought to be done sometime in the next three months, or the next year, or even the next three years. (For example: “write 200 pages of good philosophy” or “become proficient in reading Latin.”) Sometimes it’s very nice to have the freedom to direct one’s own work. But I’ve also found, somewhat strangely, that having so much freedom can sometimes make the question, “How should I spend this particular day?” almost oppressive. And I think that really has to do with the sorts of questions I’ve asked in this post. When one’s work is self-directed, one feels a heavier weight of personal responsibility for the way time is used, and questions like this become more pressing.

Anyway, I’d be glad to hear thoughts from any of our readers about this. What do you think it means to be lazy?