Thread: The Art of Ethics *highbrow alert*

There are three fundamental questions that each of us ask ourselves (or others) in the course of our lives. Most often, we ask these questions with regard to very specific things that are happening to us at the time, and more often than not we are successful in answering them, at least provisionally. Philosophy is the enterprise of attempting to answer these questions in the most general way possible.

What are these three questions? The first one, the one we typically ask most often and are most befuddled by, is, "What the hell is going on here?" The philosophical discipline devoted to studying and answering this question is Metaphysics. Metaphysicians attempt to tell us what are the most basic kinds of things in the world, and how they are related and work together to create the world that we experience. Needless to say, through most of human history, our answers to this question have been much more wrong than right, to the extent that most serious philosophers, since the turn of the last century, have more or less given up attempting to answer this question in any systematic way, and have instead given this project over to the physicists and scientists, only dabbling from time to time to comment on what scientific discoveries mean for various historical metaphysical theories. And yes, the New-Agey, neo-pagan stuff you'll find in an ordinary bookstore counts as metaphysical theory, as does theology. It's just not particularly good metaphysical theory.

The second question is one we ask nearly as often as the first, and which befuddles us nearly as much. It is, "Now what the hell do I do?" The philosophical discipline devoted to studying and answering this question is Ethics. Since this is the topic of this contribution, I'll say more about this in a bit.

The third question is one we don't ask nearly as much, and then, only when we are truly befuddled by the first two. But as it is, this question is nearly as puzzling as the first two, and many different ideas have been proposed to find a solution. This question is, "How the hell can I be sure of any of this?" The philosophical discipline devoted to studying and answering this question is Epistemology. This question is so puzzling because it seems we do have ways of answering questions and becoming more and more certain of our answers, but few philosophers have succeeded in giving an entirely satisfactory description of how this happens.

Needless to say, it should be fairly easy to see that these three questions have quite a lot to do with one another. We can't answer the first question without being able to answer the third, and we can't answer the second question without having answers to the the other two. The answers we give for any one of them will change if our answers to any of the others change.

But our topic here is this second question, "What do I do?" and more specifically, how do we resolve disagreements about what we should do. There are three types of theories that purport to give us a way to answer these questions, and I will illustrate those types by summarizing the most prominent theories of those types. These types are deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.

Immanuel Kant's is the archetype of deontology (and personally, a theory I think answers the question at hand better than the other two). He tells us that we should act only on that rule that we could "will" to be a universal law. Practically speaking, this principle involves two tests. First, is what you propose to do something that everyone could do in the same situation? Second, if everybody did do that, would this result in a world with greater or lesser freedom? If your proposed act fails the first test, you shouldn't do it no matter what, for then you would be making yourself "special" implying that what is right for you to do would not be right for anybody else. Such exceptionalism is not allowed because if it were, it would undermine any notion of right and wrong at all. If your proposed act fails the second test, then you should refrain from doing it unless it's absolutely the only way to achieve your goals. Let's illustrate this with a couple of examples:

Let's say I'm broke and don't have a job. In order to get some money and feed my family, I propose to go to the bank and lie to a loan officer about my ability to repay the loan. Now clearly, this is something I think we would all agree is wrong, but let's see why Kant thinks this is wrong. Is this something that everybody could do in the same situation? Clearly not, because if everybody lied to loan officers about their ability to repay loans, loan officers wouldn't pay any attention to what you say about your ability. They'd look at other indicators. So while everybody could go in and say things that were false, this doesn't constitute a lie, because there wouldn't even be the opportunity to tell the truth. When what you say doesn't matter, there isn't any such thing as lying or truth-telling. Proposing that everyone lie to loan officers about their ability to repay a loan is self-contradictory. Since it fails the first test, we don't even have to bother with the second test. Lying to loan officers about your ability to repay a loan is never permitted. Let's look at another example:

Let's say I'm a teen aged girl who's had the misfortune of getting pregnant, and let's also say that I have no way to afford to bring up this child while still protecting my own future of getting an education and finding a decent job. So I propose to get an abortion in order to preserve my future. Is this something that every teen aged girl could do in similar circumstances? Well, clearly, yes they could. Not all children are born to teen aged mothers, so we don't have to worry about causing the extinction of the race or anything, and there doesn't seem to be anything inherently contradictory with every teen aged pregnant girl doing so. But does this pass the second test? Well, clearly no, for if every teen aged expectant-mother got an abortion, then it would substantially impact other's ability to adopt children. Moreover, since these aborted children would never grow up, they are denied the opportunity to make choices for themselves when they reach the age of maturity. If every teen aged girl who was pregnant had an abortion, we would get a world that is markedly less free. This means that I shouldn't get an abortion unless there is absolutely no other way for me to achieve my goal of preserving my future. But since there is the option of carrying to term and offering the child up for adoption, then I shouldn't do it. Clearly, social contingencies have an effect here. It is virtually impossible for a young black girl to successfully adopt out her child, even moreso if she has any kind of drug addiction, so her case for the permissibility of abortion is much stronger than that of a young white girl, but given our imperfect duty to avoid abortion, she still has an obligation to search out possible alternatives, only when she has eliminated those alternatives as live possibilities is she justified in pursuing an abortion. And keep in mind that I have said nothing about abortion in the case of rape, or when the life of the mother is at stake, for these are entirely different situations.

Next up is consequentialism, and the archetype of consequentialism is J.S. Mill's Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says that that act is right which produces the greatest happiness or eliminates the most suffering. Keep in mind that this is not the greatest happiness for the greatest number, or the least suffering for the most people, but the greatest happiness or least suffering full stop. If just one person is made greatly happy while everyone else suffers just a little bit, or some miserable fellow is relieved of his great suffering while everyone else is made slightly uncomfortable, that works too. Historically, Utilitarianism has been been the justifying philosophy behind some of our greatest social reforms, from shutting down child-labor in the factories of England and the U.S. to improving working conditions and even pushing animal welfare (after all, animals can suffer too). But philosophically, it's hard to get behind Utilitarianism. This is so for a couple of important reasons. First, it makes no distinction between immediate happiness and long-term happiness, and since the long term is hard to predict, it has a tendency to be short-sighted. Second, human beings really suck at knowing what makes them happy. We have lots of opinions about it, but we're wrong about it as often as we're right. Remember the old adage, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." Lastly, these two problems can combine in disturbing ways to justify a profoundly unjust act. Imagine you were a sheriff in an Old West town, and you've got a prisoner in your cell. Everybody in town fervently believes this guy has killed a popular and well-loved pastor, but you know for a fact that he's innocent, as you saw him well outside of town riding his horse at the time. You've tried to explain this to the townsfolk, but they're not having it. They're outside your door with torches and pitchforks demanding that you turn your prisoner over so they can hang him. Imagine also that your prisoner has no family and no loved ones, he's a drifter. Utilitarianism would say that the right thing to do would be to turn him over to the lynch mob, and this should strike all of us as profoundly wrong. Utilitarianism sucks at offering prescriptions for what to do, but it is really quite good at looking backwards, and evaluating what we've already done.

The last type of ethical theory is the oldest, first systematized by Aristotle. It holds that the proper ethical question is "What kind of beings are we, and how do we be the best kind of being that we are?" It focuses on important characteristics that help us excel, things like courage, intelligence, generosity and so forth. It even has a method for figuring out what those virtues are. It asks us what kind of attitudes and feelings are implicated in a moral situation, and compels us to act in moderation. In a risky situation, there are two extremes of attitudes. We could be cowards and run away, or we could be foolhardy and rush in where angels fear to tread. The proper, and virtuous course is to act with courage, acknowledging the risks and not ignoring the consequences, but also not running in irrational fear. There are many virtues of the virtue ethics theory, but among its problems is the issue of attaining excellence, which can only happen if there is a certain level of education and access to resources. Aristotle himself argued that only the gentlemen of the city had the potential to be truly virtuous, while their slaves, the poor, and women were excluded from attaining true virtue. While these issues are less pressing in today's world, they are still somewhat troubling, in that they still imply that only the very well off can attain the highest levels of virtue, while all the rest are limited to something less.

Since there are these three very different ideas about how to decide the right thing to do, and since every person has their own individual ideas on this issue, we shouldn't be surprised that conflict and disagreement is quite common about what the right thing to do really is. What remains of this already overlong treatise will be devoted to sketching a method of resolving these conflicts.

In Science, the task at hand is to resolve apparent conflicts between facts in such a way that all those facts can be true at the same time. Consider the discovery of Oxygen. For most of human history, we have found that when we burn something, what remains is weighs less than what we started with. Two ideas were prevalent about what happens when something burns. Either the flame releases something within what is burned, or something combines with what we burn to release heat and light, and this something must have negative weight, for the ash and soot that is left over weighs less than what we started with. Before the discovery of oxygen, this latter idea held sway, and the odd substance with negative weight was called phlogiston. This theory held sway until a man named Lavoisier burned magnesium filings in a covered crucible. He weighed the ash and found that it weighed more than the magnesium he started with. Suddenly, there was a new fact that conflicted with all the other facts that came before, and that was incompatible with what we previously thought happened when stuff burned. The resolution was the hypothesis of a substance with positive weight, Oxygen, combined with observing that many times when things burn, a gas is formed that escapes. Further experiment showed that when you capture the gas and combine its weight with the weight of the ash left over, what remains always weighs more than what you started with. In this way, a scientific theory resolves the apparent conflict between facts. Moreover, this resolution always points to new facts that we can discover that we didn't know about before, facts that might replace and reform older facts. In this case, it is the fact that what remains always weighs more than what you start with when you burn something, so long as you are careful to capture everything that remains.

Similarly, we can engage in parallel project in ethical resolution. In this case, the conflict is not often between facts, but between values. And rather than formulating an idea that resolves this conflict, we must formulate an action that pays attains all the values at stake. Just as the resolution between a conflict of facts points to new facts and reforms old ones, so too the resolution of conflicts between values will point to new values, and reform old ones. What are values, you might ask? Ultimately, values are those possible things or arrangements of things (not ideas or beliefs) that you and others wish to preserve or to bring about. Since the presence of some things means the absence of others, there can be real conflicts between values, but since we don't exist in a static universe, and time marches ever on, we have the ability to put off to the future some things we can't have now in order to attain the things we can. This, then, provides the key to ethical conflict resolution. The resolution attains all those things and arrangements of things we desire, not all at once, but in order. And since this order is its own new arrangement of things, the resolution of conflict literally creates a new value and projects that value out to those whose conflict it resolves and provides a template for the resolution of similar conflicts in the future.

So what do you think about the nature of right and wrong, good and evil? What is its source and how do we come to know it? I intend this piece to spark some discussion on this most important of topics. I am motivated to do this because of a largely fruitless, if enjoyable, discussion of politics and the candidacy of a particular individual in the current Presidential race that took place in another thread. I consider it fruitless, not because I think nobody learned anything from it, nor because we didn't gain and reinforce the respect we have for one another, we did do those things, but because we reached an impasse that could not be surmounted. I often find that when such conflicts are reached, it is often best to go back to first principles, and find agreement there. Since the art of politics is a sub-branch of the art of ethics, I thought we could begin again here.

Kant,

Don't your fingers ever get tired?

As a scholar, I type more often than I speak, and can type as fast as I think, sometimes faster. Sometimes I get cramps in my wrists, but I just shake it out and keep going, usually being slightly frustrated that I had to stop. That said, it did take me a couple of hours to type this all up.

Oh man!

Good luck with solving these problems!
Now back to razor stuff for me.

Actually, mebbe I can't help myself. You painted a picture of a part of ethics according to which it involves identifying those actions which attain 'all those things and arrangements of things we desire, not all at once, but in order'. But then where's the role for assessing the ethical status of desires themselves? The sort of conflict resolution that you mention seems more to be a matter of calculating how best to serve our desires, rather than being ethical in any serious sense. Or so someone (Kant?) might argue!

Originally Posted by SheffieldShaver

Oh man!

Good luck with solving these problems!
Now back to razor stuff for me.

Actually, mebbe I can't help myself. You painted a picture of a part of ethics according to which it involves identifying those actions which attain 'all those things and arrangements of things we desire, not all at once, but in order'. But then where's the role for assessing the ethical status of desires themselves? The sort of conflict resolution that you mention seems more to be a matter of calculating how best to serve our desires, rather than being ethical in any serious sense. Or so someone (Kant?) might argue!

Well, you see, this is why I summarized the three main ethical theories above. They give general methods to help decide what you can or ought to desire. For example, in Kant's system, you can't want to rule the world, because that's not something everybody could do, and because it would result in a profoundly less free world. Shadenfraud, or wishing for another's pain and suffering for your own enjoyment (rather like some of those video clip TV shows) is right out for both Kant and Utilitarianism, and it's difficult to see how a virtue ethicist could accommodate it.

But typically, we don't want to say that it's not right for you to desire something, cause who the hell are we to say that? The only desires we rule right out are those which simply cannot be accommodated with similar desires or necessary desires of everybody else (things like food and shelter and whatnot would be necessary desires).

In the end, this sort of pragmatism is the only thing that ethics could be about, how to resolve differences and attain the goals we do have. Because if you were off in the wilderness all by yourself with no chance of running into or affecting anybody else, it's hard to see how anything you might want to do would be wrong or immoral. The consequences of what you do would only matter to yourself.

Give me a little time to digest your post and I'll reply!

Might I suggest a little brevity?

Believe me, I tried. In my defense, I refer you to the second quote in my sig line, (though not without irony, as this is mentioned in the introduction of a book that's over 840 pages long, and that I've only managed to read cover-to-cover twice, as it's so damn hard to grasp). But by all means, take your time. If this stuff were easy to understand and address, I'd already be out of a job.

In the end, this sort of pragmatism is the only thing that ethics could be about, how to resolve differences and attain the goals we do have. Because if you were off in the wilderness all by yourself with no chance of running into or affecting anybody else, it's hard to see how anything you might want to do would be wrong or immoral. The consequences of what you do would only matter to yourself.

Well that might be right, but it might not be. So consider the Kantian line. Kant, on a standard reading, thought that actions were basically incidental to ethics; intention (the agent's 'maxim') was all that really mattered. And the ethical status of intentions is, on that Kantian view, intrinsic, being derived entirely from their content - their rightness or wrongness thus doesn't have to do with whether anyone else happens to be about, nor from the probable consequences of acting upon them. And why shouldn't ethics be about, simply, trying to ascertain facts, just like science is - but just facts of a different sort? (I'm playing Devil's Advocate here! )

Originally Posted by SheffieldShaver

Well that might be right, but it might not be. So consider the Kantian line. Kant, on a standard reading, thought that actions were basically incidental to ethics; intention (the agent's 'maxim') was all that really mattered. And the ethical status of intentions is, on that Kantian view, intrinsic, being derived entirely from their content - their rightness or wrongness thus doesn't have to do with whether anyone else happens to be about, nor from the probable consequences of acting upon them. Why shouldn't ethics be about, simply, trying to ascertain facts, just like science is - but just facts of a different sort? (I'm playing Devil's Advocate here! )

Yay! A fellow scholar! You are quite right that Kant believed that the actual act, and the real consequences that follow from that act, are incidental to the morality of that act, and that what rules is the intention that motivates that act. He didn't want to require us to be omniscient in order to be moral, as Utilitarianism does. But the content of an intention simply is an act, that is, it is the outcome you wish to achieve and the means you would employ to attain it. As I teach my students, the "rule," or in Kant's terms "maxim" that is our intention consist of three things: the general, relevant circumstances under which we act, what we propose to do, and what we want to get out of it. And while you can certainly ascertain the morality of a proposed act in isolation from others, the method of that assessment involves reference to a great many, if not infinitely many other rational agents. If what you intend is something that no one else could intend, due to the uniqueness of your circumstances or for any other similar reason, then it cannot be moral for you to do that act, but in this case, morality is simply not a live question for you in those circumstances.

And any ethical theory must take facts into account. If you think the way to make money is to cast a spell, you're going to be profoundly wrong, but not, perhaps, morally wrong. We wouldn't want to morally condemn people merely for being ignorant. But ethics is not simply about ascertaining facts, because the fact that I have a certain value doesn't help us figure out why I have that value or whether that value can be transmuted into something more amenable to the values of others. Facts can help, but they're not the whole story. Indeed, the reasons I value something are not facts, but mere beliefs and opinions. That something is valuable can be a fact, but why it is valued is not.

But ethics is not simply about ascertaining facts, because the fact that I have a certain value doesn't help us figure out why I have that value or whether that value can be transmuted into something more amenable to the values of others. Facts can help, but they're not the whole story. Indeed, the reasons I value something are not facts, but mere beliefs and opinions. That something is valuable can be a fact, but why it is valued is not.

One thing is that ethics might somehow involve facts about the reasons for which values are held; those are still facts. And perhaps ethics is, like science, bound up with knowledge - it's not just about cataloguing facts, but also in various ways about providing us with knowledge. So the assessment of reasons and arguments is then crucial.

On the Kantian stuff -

And while you can certainly ascertain the morality of a proposed act in isolation from others, the method of that assessment involves reference to a great many, if not infinitely many other rational agents.

Kant gives examples that use methods that take that sort of stuff into account, but it's surely not completely clear how that's justified; he seems to import rather questionable contingent assumptions in doing so.

I must turn in!