Your Ethics Might Be Making You a Terrible Person

Why You Shouldn’t Sleep on WWJD

Audio voiceover and a printable pdf of this article available here for paid subs!

The Jungle Explorer

Imagine you’re an explorer doing cartography (cartographing?) in an unfamiliar country. You walk out of a jungle into a clearing and stumble upon a group of natives — 20 of whom are about to get executed by a military captain. But rather than make you the 21^st, the captain decides to honor the new guest by allowing you to execute one of the 20. And if you do so, he’ll spare the remaining 19’s lives.

What would you do?

If you’ve ever taken a philosophy class, you’re probably familiar with this dilemma.¹ It’s often used to contrast utilitarian ethics with deontological ethics.

Which probably sounds like I’m ramping up to something nerdy with no universal appeal that will leave non-nerds feeling alienated and/or isolated, but I promise it won’t be that bad.

Philosophers have debated ethics ever since they started philosophizing. One big ethical school is

1. Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is essentially “doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.”² It’s like taking the pleasure principle (i.e., “Maximize Pleasure, Minimize Pain”) and trying to live in such a way that applies it for everyone around us. So in the jungle dilemma, the utilitarian would obviously execute the one, since this would cause more net good for the many.

Next, there’s

2. Deontology

My undergrad philosophy professor commented, “Don’t worry; no one does,” anytime a student admitted they were struggling to understand Immanuel Kant. So keep that in mind as I offer this incredibly abbreviated explanation of Kant’s ethics.

Deontology is all about duty — having a responsibility to act according to choices that we could happily apply universally.³ So if we don’t think killing someone is an ethical choice that we could apply to any and every situation, the deontologist would have a duty to not kill the one person to save the 19.

But both of these views come with

problems.

Philosopher Bernard Williams criticized utilitarianism because it turns the jungle explorer into a cog in a machine. The act of killing another human isn’t ineffectual; the explorer would still have to deal with the mental collateral of executing a person — even if it does spare 19 lives.

When Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, was in college, he heard a group of freshmen arguing about the death penalty outside his dorm room. After they ruled in its favor, Serling swung the door and said, “You’re missing a key. It’s not just the prisoner who dies. A small part of the executioner dies everytime they pull the switch.”⁴

Now, “a small part of person dying with every execution” isn’t something we could scientifically (or theologically) measure (probably), but it’s a fair illustration of the way actions do have unforeseen consequences – even if we really do move toward the greater good.⁵

Further, it’s also impossible to know the results of our actions. No one knows the future, and we’re generally awful at predicting it. Everyday, stockbrokers make decisions based on future predictions and only a handful of a handful pan out. If we kill the one to save the 19, it could set off a butterfly effect full of unforeseen consequences.

On the other hand, deontology requires a bit of cold, unfeelingness. It doesn’t think about outcomes; it can only act in the moment. So regardless of how enormously beneficial an outcome could be (i.e., refusing to tell a Nazi that you have Jews hidden in your crawl space), it has to ignore that so it can maintain ethical duty.

Deontology also usually ends up contradicting itself, since real life rarely plays out smoothly enough for us to make consistent ethical choices 100% of the time. A friend tells you a secret that you promise to keep, but what if keeping that promise then requires you to tell a lie to someone else?

a painting I painted and not Rembrandt don’t fact check

I could spend the whole word count talking about this, but I’ll segue into the thesis:

Any ethic that doesn’t imbibe the teachings, Spirit, and lifestyle of Jesus inevitably fails — and even has the potential to make you a horrible person.

The Sermon on the Mount Describes the Best Way to Live

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) is the most philosophically, ethically, and spiritually profound collection of teachings in human history.

After running through the Beatitudes and the talk about salt & light, Jesus says that He came to fulfill the law and the prophets.

Now, the crowds He preached to held “the law and the prophets” as their sacred text, straight from the mouth of God. The Pharisees in particular believed that meticulously obeying this law would hasten the arrival of the new heaven and new earth.

And yet Jesus says He’s the fulfillment of these sacred teachings.

i.e., it’s not surprising that they killed Him.

Yet, Jesus isn’t undoing the law. He doesn’t remove a single dot from an “i” or a cross from a “t.” Instead, He’s showing them the purpose that was always embedded in the law but got lost in translation.

The purpose of the law isn’t to just keep the law, but to become the kind of person for whom obeying the law comes naturally (i.e., becoming holy, righteous, and more like God).

The law is intended to produce the kind of person who adheres to the law joyfully — it sets the “course of righteousness.”⁶ But sadly, Israel witnessed 42 generations’ worth of evidence that even though the law set up good guardrails, it rarely produced genuine righteousness.

To explain why, let’s talk

Perversity.

In one of the most famous stories in Christian history, the young Saint Augustine and friends stole pears from a neighbor’s tree. They didn’t steal them because they were hungry; they only wanted to throw them at pigs. As he later reflected in Confessions, he didn’t really want the pears – he just wanted to do something he wasn’t supposed to.⁷

The great Saint Augustine, sitting by a tree, P-R-A-Y-I-N-G

In social science terms, this temptation is called “perversity.”⁸ It’s the idea that things become more tempting simply because they’re off limits – because we’re told “no.”

It isn’t like a James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause, kind of anarchy. Perversity is more so the desire to cross lines for the sake of crossing lines. The philosopher David Sussman defines it as the things we do when our normal desires for the good are reversed.⁹ Basically, the more fixated we become on what we shouldn’t do, the more we’ll want to do what we shouldn’t do.

We do it in all sorts of odd ways, too. We lie about our age. We cheat on our diets even though we’re the main person holding us accountable. We walk on the grass because there’s a sign that says not to. In studies from the psychologist Paul Bloom, he found that 19% of high schoolers who told researchers they were adopted weren’t; in another case, 99% of students who said they used an artificial limb didn’t.¹⁰

We’re easily infatuated by taboo. Sometimes things become tempting simply because we see them as temptations. Or as that one saying goes, “I wasn’t aware of my sin until I became religious.”¹¹

This is why too much emphasis on keeping laws, rules, and guidelines doesn’t make us moral – in fact, it often does the opposite: it turns up the dial on our fantasies about breaking the rules until we become more susceptible to breaking them.

This applies especially to sin. As the medieval theological writer Thomas Traherne suggested, too much attention on sin and fallenness doesn’t lead us into sinlessness, but usually its the opposite. Or in William Blake’s words, those overly preoccupied with sin are prone to “become what they behold.”¹²

We shouldn’t fight sin by trying really hard to not sin; we fight sin with virtue.¹³ We “overcome evil by doing good” (Rom. 12:21). When I’ve talked younger guys through porn addictions, I’ve found that suggesting that they invest their attention toward the good—God, others, using their Spirit-driven potential to create beauty in places that lack it—goes a whole lot farther than just telling them that what they did was bad.

As theologian Lanta Davis put it, “The Gospels do not tell us how Jesus went about his day avoiding sinning; they tell us what his love and virtue led him to do. We learn to say ‘no’ to the vices by saying ‘yes’ to what is good for us.”¹⁴

me n the bros talkin perversity

Which brings us back to the Sermon. In it, Jesus is describing a “greater righteousness” — a practical lifestyle of ethics that leads us straight into the flourishing life with God.¹⁵

It’s not just a set of rules and commands — though there are both rules and commands. Human perversity makes rules too tempting to not break. As Dallas Willard writes, Jesus “knew that we cannot keep the law by trying to keep the law. To succeed in keeping the law one must aim at something other and something more. One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow out of.”¹⁶

So rather than turn our attention to laws, He turns our attention toward a way of life.

How to Do Righteousness

Jesus offers six ways to actualize a life of “greater righteousness” called the “Antitheses”:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement, whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says ‘Raca!’¹⁷ will be liable to the hell of fire.

The law and the prophets outlawed murder — a great law, in my subjective opinion. But Jesus puts an asterisk on this law by assigning anger the same severity.

Obviously, cold-blooded murder isn’t literally as bad as a grudge. It’s more so saying that if we control our anger, we’ll get the source of the murder impulse under control, and we’ll thus naturally become the kind of people who don’t murder. Jesus is basically telling us how to get the pot off the stove before it boils.

Now, Jesus isn’t saying that Christians can’t be angry — just check out Paul’s “be angry and do not sin” (Eph. 4:26). It’s not a lofty, high-ideal that we’ll never reach; it’s “a diagnosis of a sinful pattern that we often get stuck in: being angry, and then insulting one another, with escalating hatefulness.”¹⁸

Jesus then provides some “transforming initiatives” to channel our anger: if we know someone has something against us, it’s better to make peace than take the Eucharist with a guilty conscious; if we’re on our way to a trial, we may as well solve our disputes before getting a court involved. These suggestions provide a way of escape; we don’t have to just sit around and focus really hard on not being angry. We can take our anger and extinguish it by actively confronting the source; and once confronted, we’ll often realize the source was inside us all along.

The problem is rarely our circumstance or environment. Rather than instructing women to stop dressing provocatively, Jesus tells men to stop using their image for the purpose of lust (5:27-30). Rather than introduce complex contracts and bylaws, He tells people to just be so truthful that they won’t feel the need to manipulate others to get them to do what they want (5:33-37).

William Mattison notes that in the Sermon, “attention to moral obligations is important, but not primary. Jesus’ central question is how to live a good and flourishing life. This of course entails living according to moral rules, rules which at times are experienced as obligations. Yet the rules are ideally understood not simply as obligations to be obeyed, but as prescribing activity that leads to real happiness.”¹⁹

In other words, Jesus is showing us that “doing the right thing” doesn’t cure our souls; allowing Him to cure our souls is what cures our souls.

Kingdom Ethics

Jesus isn’t much of a utilitarian or a deontologist. He’s a kingdom ethicist.²⁰

It’s a way of being in the world that focuses on who you are, not what you do. Rather than basing our decisions around rules, laws, or duties (deontology), or choosing ethics based around consequences or outcomes (utilitarianism), kingdom ethics are more about cultivating justice, temperance, courage, wisdom, and compassion on the inside, and then letting that naturally flow outside into the world around us.

To see why this is superior, consider a police officer who obeys the law and follows procedures to a tee because he knows he has to. Now, many ethical systems would stop there and conclude that this officer a good person. But let’s say, deep down, if the officer were honest with himself, he knows that if no one were around to punish him, he would happily accept bribes, extort criminals, and abuse the people that he arrests.

Would we call that person “good”? No, of course not – he’s not doing good things because he’s a good person; he’s just following rules because he’s afraid of getting caught.²¹

Many systems of ethics leave us terrible people because they only polish up the exterior while leaving the interior unrenovated. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words,

Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but He loved the real man. He was not, like a philosopher, interested in the “universally valid,” but rather in that which is of help to the real and concrete human being. What worried Him was not, like Kant, whether “the maxim of an action can become a principle of general legislation,” but whether my action is at this moment helping my neighbor to become a man before God.²²

me writing

Yet sadly, Christians are pros at minimizing Jesus’ moral vision to just doing various right things at right moments: tithing for a yearly fundraiser, showing up to x number of church events each month, refusing to watch the new Netflix show with nudity, and so on. For how passionately “anti-works” many sects of American Protestantism are, we sure do spend a lot of time and energy trying to maintain a list of arbitrary rules that signal that we’re among the “righteous” Christians.

Those kinds of moral guidelines can help us get our bearings, but they can’t make us righteous.

Take Rahab, the Canaanite woman in Jesus’ lineage, for example. If Rahab was more concerned with moral guidelines than honoring God, she would’ve never ended up in Hebrews’ hall of faith with the other greats: “By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies” (Heb. 11:11).

What’s so odd about this is that Rahab is honored because she lied. Now, if she had worked with an understanding of righteousness that thought that not lying was more important than the salvation history that God was orchestrating, she would’ve missed the point.²³ What’s sin in one context apparently makes someone a saint in another.

So maybe honoring God’s will is less a matter of keeping rules than it is adapting to wherever His will directs us in life’s complicated circumstances.²⁴ As theologian Olivier O’Donovan argues, “Christian freedom, given by the Holy Spirit, allows man to make moral responses creatively.”²⁵ Kingdom ethics are about growing in discernment through the Holy Spirit to creatively, lovingly, and righteously respond to any and every situation.

And thankfully, Christians have the leg up in pursuing genuine righteousness because we have a roadmap that’s paved with more than human effort alone. Kingdom ethics will always supersede other ethics because through it we step into a moral vision that was demonstrated by Jesus, illustrated by God, and is now perpetually woven together through the Holy Spirit.

Back to the Jungle

So how would Jesus respond to the jungle explorer dilemma?

I have absolutely no idea. But I doubt He’d happily settle for either the utilitarian or deontological approach.

Anytime someone tried to trap Jesus in an ethical conundrum, He always turned the situation on its head by offering a creative alternative.²⁶

• When asked if they should stone the woman caught in adultery, He said sure — but only if the one who casts the first stone is without sin (John 7:53-8:11).

• When the scribes try to catch Him in a superfluous, abstract, metaphorical question about marriage, He simply says there won’t be marriage in the resurrection (Matt. 22:23-33).

• The Pharisees call Him out for allowing his disciples to pluck grain on the Sabbath and healing a man’s withered hand, and He basically scolds them for valuing superfluous rules over the needs of the body (Matt. 12:1-8; Luke 6:6-11).

• Asked about paying taxes, He said “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Matt. 22:15-22).

• Rather than responding with violence toward Judas and the soldiers, He tells his disciples to stand down and reattaches a soldier’s severed ear (John 18:10-11).

It seems like the response Jesus chooses for any and every situation where there’s a moral dilemma is a creative alternative-ism laced with a side of “kenosis” (i.e., self-emptying, self-sacrifice, complete service).

In a real-life jungle dilemma, we don’t have just two options — there are literally hundreds of creative ways to reassess the situation. Kingdom ethics help us brainstorm alternatives: bartering with the military captain, working out some kind of deal, finding a loophole, and so on.

But all that said, if Jesus was ever locked in a situation where He was forced to either take a life or give His own, I imagine He’d give His own everytime.²⁷

1. This example first appeared in Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 97–135. J. A. Siemer had a great note awhile back that made me want to think more about the sheer ridiculousness of the deontology vs utilitarianism debate.

2. John Stuart Mill built upon the work of Jeremy Bentham to give a more refined description of utilitarianism in John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1863).

3. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

4. Mark Dawidziak, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone: A Fifth-Dimension Guide to Life (New York: Thomas Dunne Book, 2017), Introduction.

5. For example, see this study on the adverse effects of killing among police officers: I. Komarovskaya, et al., “The Impact of Killing and Injuring Others on Mental Health Symptoms Among Police Officers,” Journal of Psychiatric Research, 45 no. 10 (2011): 1332–1336.

6. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Your Hidden Life with God (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 1998), 43.

7. Augustine, Confessions (Penguin Classics) (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), II.4–II.9.

8. Psychologists Leon Seltzer and Paul Bloom have each written and given lectures on the topic of perversity, but neither have written a definitive academic book or article about it yet. You can find their basic preliminary research in Psychology Today and TedX.

9. David Sussman, “For Badness’ Sake,” The Journal of Philosophy 106 no. 11 (2009): 613-628; R.H. Etchegoyen, “The Concept of Perversion in Psychoanalysis,” British Journal of Psychiatry 154, no. S4 (1989): 81–83.

10. Paul Bloom, “The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions,” The New Yorker, July 19, 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/perverse-incentives.

11. Tim Keller said this in a sermon somewhere. I’m aware of how vague and terrible this footnote is, but I cannot possibly remember where he said it. And plus, what are you going to do? Reject my paper like you’re some peer-reviewer? Get real, pal.

12. Thomas Traherne, Centuries (New York: Angelico Press, 2020), x; William Blake, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. Morton D. Paley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), plate 36 [32], 186.

13. This point is supplied by Basil of Caesarea, quoted in Kevin Clarke, Seven Deadly Sins: The Sayings of the Church Fathers (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Press of America, 2019),190.

14. Lanta Davis, Becoming by Beholding (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 117. In context, Lanta is commenting on John Cassian, Institutes of the Cenobia 11.17.

15. Jonathan Pennington, The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 87-91.

16. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy,142-143.

17. “Raca” is the most derogatory term that an 1^st century person could’ve dreamed up. We don’t necessarily have a good modern equivalent, but it basically just meant that someone was worthless.

18. David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016), 130.

19. William C. Mattison, The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Ch. 2.

20. Honestly, the closest thing to Jesus’ actual ethics that has some kind of systematic quality are the Aristotelian virtue ethics. However, I dislike using that language for myriad reasons, namely, because virtue ethics is necessarily dependent upon one’s own mind and will, and it is intrinsically impossible to move closer to kingdom ethics through sheer power of the human self. The best place that this is argued is William C. Mattison’s The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective. I’d prefer not taking virtue ethics’ relationship to Christian ethics quite as far as Mattison does. See also Daniel Harrington and James F. Keenan, Jesus and Virtue Ethics: Building Bridges between New Testament Studies and Moral Theology (London: Sheed & Ward, 2005), 207.

21. This example is used in Steven B. Sherman et al., An Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Guide to the Things That Really Matter (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2025), 267.

22. Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes a similar point in Ethics (New York: Touchstone, 2009 Reissue), 85.

23. Obviously, Rahab wasn’t literally aware of God’s salvation history at the time that she lied. But she clearly sensed it was more important to keep the spies, God’s people, alive than to worry about lying.

24. This is one of Bonhoeffer’s main contributions to Christian ethics. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 186-187.

25. Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2^nd edn., 2004), 24.

26. Bonhoeffer makes a similar point in Ethics, 30-34.

27. John 15:13; 1 John 3:16; Phil. 2:3-4. Some caveats are so obvious that I don’t think them worth mentioning. But yes, if Jesus were faced with giving His life before the cross, there’s reasonable doubt that He wouldn’t sacrifice Himself in that scenario for the sake of maintaining the salvation history. But obviously, the ethic He established for His followers was one hay prized self-sacrifice.