How should we live?

How should we act?

How might we live?

At first glance these questions seem really similar, but even though they differ from one another by one or two words only, it turns out that these small differences in the questions lead to vastly different answers. Two drops of rain landing on top of a mountain may wind up thousands of miles from one another, depending on what side they roll down. In the case of the three questions above, the answers hinge on the difference between living and acting and between should and might. In the case of living and acting the difference may not seem worth pursuing. After all, each term seems necessary for the other. I cannot act without living, and I cannot live without acting. This mutual dependence, however, does not mean that we cannot make a distinction in principle. This becomes clear when we think about different ways in which we use these words. Take the phrase “standard of living,” for example. This phrase has all sorts of implications about annual income, housing, clothing, and entertainment built into it. It implies a baseline, a standard, by which we can gauge our lives as a whole, and it is really this notion of “wholeness” that interests us here. While the phrase “standard of acting” is not nearly as common as “standard of living,” the implications are clearly different. A standard of acting usually concerns actions in specific situations, and does not suggest “wholeness” in the same way that standard of living does. Thus, the questions How should we live? and How should we act? require very different answers, because one is seeking a kind of summary claim about the best kind of life to live, while the other is asking for a judgment about the rightness or wrongness of individual acts.