"We are discussing no small
matter, but how we ought to live." - Socrates
 |
| The Death of Socrates. Jacques-Louis David |
The reason I was reading such books,
besides the fact that they were appropriate to my knowledge level, is that there are hardly
any basic books about ethics out there. Apparently they just don't
sell like Dan Brown or Deepak Chopra. Unless you want to start
reading textbooks, the Dummies and Idiots books are some of the only
options.
There's just no demand for books on ethics. And it shows.
One of the reasons I've gotten so interested in the topic is that
I've realized very few people have a sophisticated way of
thinking about ethics. Most of us are just muddling along, and we
don't know much about what some of the great minds of
history have said on the matter. And that's a shame, because they've had some great ideas, and pointed out a lot of logical pitfalls that people should be more
aware of.
That being said, I'm not sure most of history's ethical philosophers really understood the way the average person
thinks about morality. Most people base their morality not on careful
thought, but on their upbringing, their psychological
predispositions, and their gut reactions. Even if they do put careful
thought on into a question, they're more likely to rationalize what they want
to believe than truly reason their way to conclusions they didn't have in the first place. It's incredibly hard not to rationalize like that, and
I'm probably guilty too. But it's worth trying. If there's no chance you'll change your beliefs, there's no point in sitting down and thinking anyway.
Anyway, the average person in the
street has an ethical sense that has bears little resemblance to most
formal philosophical systems. For religious conservatives in the US,
that's likely to be a hodgepodge of ideas based on Christianity (often heavy on the Old Testament and Revelation),
classical liberal ideas about economic and personal freedom
(emphasizing property rights and self-determination), nationalism,
and so on. For liberals, there may be a mix of ideas from liberal
interpretations of Christianity (more New Testament than Old),
classical liberal ideas of personal freedom (emphasizing freedom of
personal conduct and expression more than economic freedom), and
(often vague) ideas about the harmony of nature. Probably the
majority of people are somewhere in between, with a mix of ideas from
both sides.
This vague, hodgepodge approach to
ethics would be fine if it didn't include a lot of questionable and
downright harmful attitudes; attitudes people act on, with real
consequences for real people, now and in the future.
Consider some attitudes you commonly
encounter in this country:
- Truth, and right and wrong, are socially constructed and relative to each culture.
- American lives are more valuable than foreign lives.
- Homosexuality is unnatural, therefore it's wrong.
- Might makes right. That's the way nature works--survival of the fittest.
- Greed and self-interest are good. Altruism is bad because it's inefficient, makes people dependent, and doesn't create anything.
- Animals, and the earth as a whole, were created by God for people's use.
Each of these is extremely problematic,
if you know something about the insights that ethicists (and scientists)
have had over the years. I'm not going to address any of them here,
except to note that they are common, and if they are both common and
wrong, they can do a lot of harm.
One of the problems is that there's
really no clear, simple guide to what's right and wrong that everyone
can agree on. Probably the most common guide to morality for
Americans is the Bible. But people draw very different conclusions
from the Bible. It's just too huge and contradictory to work
as a good guide for morality unless there is a standard way
of deciding which parts to follow and which to reject. There doesn't seem to be such a standard. Some people
will be reading this and thinking you shouldn't reject any part of
the Bible. But they don't really really believe that. Everyone who follows the
Bible rejects parts of its. Nobody, I hope, believes in the passages
that tell us to stone people to death for adultery or marry our
daughter to her rapist. That is terrible ethical advice. But there are also parts of the Bible that are
great, like “Thou shalt not kill” (though people are amazingly
good at ignoring that one). The question is, how do
you decide which parts are good and which parts are bad? What
criteria do you use to judge? Seriously. If you're a Christian
reading this, I'd like to know what your criteria are. If you let me
know in the comments, I'd be appreciative.
Of course, intelligent people can and do argue
that the Bible is just one religious/moral system out of hundreds the
world has known, and it may not be the best one. Plus, nothing in the Bible is
much younger than a couple of thousand years.We've learned all kinds of things about the natural world in that time--surely we've learned some useful things about ethics as well?
I've always thought the Bible is
just too big, complex, and contradictory to be a reliable guide to
ethics. Besides, it might just be plain wrong (if it contradicts
itself, clearly some of it is wrong, because two contradictory things can't both be
right). So, what is a reliable guide to ethics? Is it possible to
come up with a guide to living ethically that is factually and
logically defensible, yet simple enough not to be interpreted in
wildly different ways by different people? Could you ever make an ethical code that someone, somewhere, couldn't twist to justify killing people? Could you construct such a
code short enough to fit on a single page? Or in a document the size of,
say, the US Constitution? That's what I've been asking myself the
last several months. And the answer, I'm pretty sure, is no. But I do think
it's possible to learn more about the many different ways people have
thought about ethics, and make a good faith attempt to take the best
insights from each of them.
So, what I want to do now is make a
lightning survey of some of the ethical approaches I've been reading
about, and mention what I think makes sense about them, and what
doesn't. It's an entirely inadequate guide to all these ideas, of
course, and written by a total amateur. That's why I'm thinking of it
as a progress report. Still, I think I can honestly say that after 18
months of reading about ethics I have a better understanding of the
issues than probably 98% of the public. Which is kind of the point—I
may not know much, but I know more than most people, and that's a
problem. This stuff is important. We should know more about it.
Ethical Intuitions
So where do we start? First I want to
cover some ethical ideas that aren't formal theories, but
common ethical intuitions. People do seem to have an innate moral
sense. They have an intrinsic feeling that some things are wrong, and
others right. Which is not the same as saying they know what's really right and wrong. In fact, people's moral intuitions can lead to really awful things. Having a sense of morality doesn't mean we're right about morality.
Still, we do have a moral sense, or really a constellation of moral senses. Where does this come
from? The traditional answer, of course, is that it was given to us
by God, when he created Adam and Eve. But science has shown--decisively I think--that there was no Adam and Eve. Humans evolved
from earlier animals, and there's no clear evidence that we were put here
for any particular reason, or given any particular purpose. The most
parsimonious explanation of our existence is that we just happened to
evolve because there was an ecological niche for brainy, hairless,
upright apes, and we filled it. Our ethical intuitions are likely to
come from biological factors like the need to care for offspring and
family, the need to cooperate in social groups, and so on. But you
don't have to agree with me about that. You will probably agree with
me about what most of the main ethical intuitions are, even if you don't agree
about why we have them. Some of these closely match the moral foundations identified by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and others are just tendencies that seem to me to be morally important to many people.
To keep their pros and cons straight, I put them in a table. Because that's just how geeky I am.
Probable Innate Moral Intuitions
Name/Description and Basic Ideas
|
Proponents
|
Good Points
|
Bad Points
|
| Caring for Family This is probably the oldest of behaviors leading to moral questions (e.g. how to treat others), because it evolved based on kin selection and parental care. Evolution often favors “altruism” between related organisms, because they share copies of the same genes. |
Almost all humans. Confucius emphasized family relations. |
Family relations are an fundamental part of being human. Clearly it's a good thing to help your family, especially your immediate family. Parents should take care of their children. Children, in return, should take care of their parents and siblings. | Feelings for family can lead people to favor their family to the exclusion of others, to extreme and unethical degrees, leading to cruelty to people competing with family members, or to ethically problematic things like nepotism. |
| Reciprocity
Another ancient form of cooperative
behavior is based on reciprocity—I will help you if you help me.
Reciprocal cooperation can arise between unrelated animals, but
they have to be able to recognize who is reliable and who cheats,
and not cooperate with—and even punish—cheaters. Can be seen
in positive form: “You scratch my back, I scratch yours”, and
negative form: “An eye for an eye”.
|
Almost all humans Many philosophers and scientists have thought a lot about reciprocity. Confucius may have seen the Golden Rule in terms of reciprocity as much as compassion. |
A whole lot of human progress has been made by people learning to form wider and wider circles of win-win cooperation. This is not exactly an ethical system so much as a beneficial practice. But it's clearly beneficial. | The evolution of reciprocal relationships may be where we get
our sense of fairness. However, such relationships aren't always
equitable. Sometimes one party gets the much better deal. Is that
right or wrong? Opinions vary. Negative reciprocity—punishing those who hurt or don't cooperate with you, is selected by evolution, and may be a basis for ideas about justice, in the sense of rewarding good behaviors and punishing bad behaviors. Detecting cheaters is necessary, but overly harsh ideas of punishment and vengeance can lead to cycles of violence that leave everybody worse off. |
| In-Group Loyalty
Humans seem to have a universal
tendency to give preference to their own group, tribe, or nation.
They treat insiders better than outsiders, and are predisposed to
assume that the ways of their group are better than those of
others. How this evolved is controversial.
|
Most humans seem to be predisposed toward in-group preferences. |
Cooperation within groups is necessary, and people within a
group may owe each other more than they owe people in outgroups.
Some degree of group loyalty is good.
|
It's common for people in one nation or religion to think the
lives of those inside their group are much more valuable than
those outside it. Common, but deeply ethically questionable.
In-Group/Out-Group “morality” has led to some of the world's worst atrocities. People can lose--or never have--any sense of compassion for outsiders, and are only too happy to kill them if they are scared or feel like they're competing with them. Societies assuming they are God's chosen ones, or that God is on their side, have caused big, big problems. Also leads to ethnocentric biases. We tend to assume the way we do it is better. Maybe it is, but it isn't something that can be assumed without further support. |
| Respect for Tradition as Morality Closely related to in-group loyalty. |
Lots of conservative thinkers. | People like Edmund Burke have argued, correctly, that some traditions may have lasted for very good reasons (which we may not even fully understand) and it's not clear that what we replace them with will be better. | Clearly, many traditions, such as slavery, honor killings and
dueling, female genital mutilation, the caste system, and many others, are unjust,
and needed to be changed. What's traditional is not necessarily
what's right. Many, many people seem to believe what they believe simply because they grew up believing it. This means if they grew up in another culture, they would believe what those people believe. We have to be able to logical justify what we believe, not just accept it passively. Like in-group loyalty, leads to unfounded biases against other cultures and traditions. |
| Purity and Sanctity as Morality
People have a tendency to view
morality in terms of what is pure/impure, sacred/profane, or
clean/unclean. This may be related to the evolutionary useful
emotion of disgust, and its opposite, feelings of sacredness or
elevation. Modern westerners, especially liberals, may not realize
how important this is to many people around the world, because
they tend to think of morality in terms of fairness and not
hurting people, not purity and degradation.
|
Many religious thinkers. | Ideas about purity, sanctity, and cleanliness seem to be
connected with morality in the human brain. When cities clean up
their streets in the literal sense—picking up trash, etc—they
get cleaned up in the metaphorical sense. Crime rates go down. It's hard to argue that it's a good thing to wallow in some things considered morally “dirty”, such as having an extremely foul mouth. It can be good to have a sense of the sacred. |
Misplaced ideas of moral purity have lead to a lot of
suffering, for example, the idea that menstruating women are
unclean, or that some people are “untouchable”. People
commonly see outsiders as disgusting or degraded, and it's much
easier to hurt and kill those we see in those terms.
Intuitions about what is clean and unclean are not enough to decide what is moral or not. If something is bad, we should be able to give a clear reason it's bad. |
| Protecting One's Honor Many societies around the world have ethical codes where a strong component is protecting one's honor or reputation, violently if necessary. People who have been dishonored may kill themselves or others, as in Japanese ritual suicide, or “honor killing” of sisters or daughters accused of being unchaste. Men may cultivate a reputation for toughness and be ready to fight if they are insulted—seeing it as an ethical obligation. Ties in with nationalism, because many people who don't react violently to personal insults will advocate violence if they think their nation has been insulted. |
Many societies through history and around the world. There was a honor-based tradition of blood feuds and dueling in the United States, which lasted longest in the south. Many fights and homicides can be traced to violent responses to petty insults. | While it's good to have a personal sense of honor and
integrity, and even shame if you feel you haven't lived up to it,
I can't think of very much good to say about the extreme, violent
kind of honor. Honor-related violence may be necessary in very lawless or violent societies, where if you don't keep a reputation for toughness you won't make it, but the point is to make those societies less violent so that attitude isn't necessary. Honor-based ethical codes tend to emphasize bravery and duty to one's group or role. These can be good things, when applied to the right things. |
Mostly an example of how moral intuitions can be harmful, certainly in modern, civilized societies. |
| Honesty/Authenticity
We probably have an innate
intuition that truth, honesty, and authenticity are good things.
It's no mystery where this came from—in a species that relies on
language for cooperation, people need to trust each other to tell
the truth. Which doesn't mean that's always what they do.
|
Probably a universal intuition. | Sometimes the need to be truthful conflicts with other moral concerns. Kant thought that one should never lie, under any circumstances—even if a murderer is asking where whether your friend is in the house, so they can kill them. Surely lying can be justified in such extreme circumstances? | Respect for truth, and being genuine, are extremely important moral issues. A society where everyone lies is no society at all. |
What does this quick and dirty survey show? It shows that people naturally have a moral sense that can be very complex and multifaceted, and may not be explained well by ethical philosophies, which tend to be more cerebral, and less visceral, than what the average person really feels. It's also clear that not all of the "moral" impulses people have actually cause them to do the right thing. They may have a desire to do something, and think of it as moral imperative, and that desire may have been shaped by evolution. But none of that means it's the right thing to do. Many of our intuitions and traditions don't stand up to rational scrutiny. Confining "unclean" women to their tents, killing your sister after she was raped to preserve your family's honor, or seeing members of groups outside your own as less than fully human--those may all have roots in human biology and evolution, but that doesn't make them right. Such things are wrong--terribly wrong--because they hurt others for no good reason.
On the other hand, some ethical intuitions are good. Taking care of our family, helping our friends, maintaining a basic sense of the sacred, and even having sanctions against cheaters and liars--these are good ideas, and we intuitively think they are right for good reasons. But it's possible to take these things too far. Watching out for your family is good; nepotism is bad. Discouraging cheaters and liars is necessary; cutting their hands or tongues off (as has been common in history) is bad.
Now, what about more formal, philosophical systems of ethics? I'm going to list those below, in the same kind of table, with the pros and cons, as I see them. I'm not remotely doing justice to most of these philosophies--this is just my way of lining them all up and comparing them. I'll start with what I see as the antithesis of ethical thinking: the idea that might makes right.
Ethical Theories
Name/Description and Basic Ideas
|
Proponents
|
Good Points
|
Bad Points
|
| Might makes right Ethics is for weaklings. It's a dog eat dog world, and the strong survive. The only good is strength, power, or self-mastery (Nietzsche) |
Machiavelli Herbert Spencer (Social Darwinism) Nietzsche (sort of) Legions of thugs and heads of state. While most of us recoil at this idea, most of us are also quite capable of thinking in these terms (see under "Bad Points") |
Meekness is not necessarily a virtue. Strength, courage, and power can be virtues (if used for the right things). | Ignores any sense that we should have concern for others. Almost the antithesis of ethics. However, many people still believe in it to some extent. If you see a bully get a righteous butt-kicking, you might think justice has been done. I probably would. But it's only by chance that the one in the right was the stronger person. What if the person behaving badly was the stronger, and won? There's something very suspect about the idea that strength should be the way of deciding justice, even if the better people happen to be the stonger ones. Lots of people who don't think in might-makes-right terms in personal relations might think they are acceptable in international affairs, e.g: "My country right or wrong". |
| Virtue Ethics Ethics is about cultivating virtues, or good character traits, in order to live a good life. Socrates and Plato believed this was about perceiving and aligning oneself with "the Good" (which has a transcendent reality), through reason. Aristotle didn't believe in "the Good". He believed everything in nature has a “telos” (goal, purpose, or basic nature), and that what is good for each thing is to be good at its telos. The telos of a knife is cutting, so a good knife is one that cuts well. The human telos is our ability to reason, and so we should seek wisdom, the greatest of the virtues. Aristotle believed there were several virtues people should cultivate, and that each was a “Golden Mean” between an two extremes. Bravery, for example, is the mean between cowardice and recklessness. |
Socrates Plato Aristotle Aquinas |
Identifying and cultivating virtues does seem to be essential to being ethical. It makes sense to cultivate virtues as habits, so they become second nature. Moderation does seem to be a very useful thing. Many situations require the right amount of something—not too much or too little. His idea of eudaemonia—“living well” or “flourishing” as a more sophisticated, less hedonistic version of happiness, is useful. There's more to the good life than pleasure. It's a good point that cultivating character has a lot to do with cultivating habits, which takes practice. |
Moderation is not always right. Is pedophilia OK in moderation?
No.
Aristotle, like many philosophers, was too confident in human reason. Modern psychology has shown that we are extremely biased and often irrational. It's not clear that things do have a telos, and if they do, it's not clear that ours is reason. Doesn't provide many clear ways of deciding what to do in particular ethical situations. Ethics can't just be about cultivating character. We also need ways of deciding which acts are right or wrong, based on things like principles or consequences. |
| Natural Law Ethical laws are written into the nature of the universe. People may look to God or nature for those laws, but they believe they are “out there” in some sense. People who believe this often think morality is related to being in tune with our true nature, or fulfilling our destiny. Aristotle's virtue ethics was also a natural law theory, based on this kind of thinking. Locke and Jefferson believed in natural law in a different sense: they believed in inalienable rights that are part of the natural order of things. |
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle Aquinas Locke Jefferson |
It's clear that if we go against nature, or human nature, too
much, there will be trouble. We can't stop reproducing or eating
living things, for example. Humans do need certain things to be
happy, though we are highly variable. Locke and Jefferson recognized that each person deserves equal rights, because they were “created equal”. Today it's clear that people aren't created equal--we aren't born blank slates. But it still makes sense to say people should have equality in basic rights, and equality before the law. People shouldn't have more or less rights based on accidents of birth. |
Hard to say what is natural, especially for people, who are
constantly pushing the boundaries of nature with our inventions.
Is that tendency part of our nature? At the largest scales, isn't everything part of nature, and thus "natural" in some sense? Who says what is natural is necessarily good? It isn't clear how to get “ought” from “is”. Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it should be that way. Arsenic and infanticide are naturally-ocurring things. It's not clear that natural laws of what is right really exist, outside of human preference and interaction. It's not at all clear that we have a pre-ordained destiny or purpose. If we do, how do we know what it is? |
| Divine Command (related to natural law) What is right is whatever God commands. Related is the “Be good if you want to go to heaven and not hell” argument. That argument has little to do with ethics, because if the only reason you do good or don't do bad is the promise of heaven and hell, you're not really very ethical. |
Lots of people. A few theologians and philosophers, such as Ockham, Martin Luther, and Kierkegaard. | ? | Euthyphro Dilemma: Is God commanding things arbitrarily,
or is he making commands based on a standard of ethics outside
himself? Only the second makes sense, unless you are willing to
say that if God said doing something awful was right—e.g.
torturing babies—then it is right. If you can't accept
that, then you believe there is a standard of what is right
external to God. Whether there is a God or not, we still have to
figure out what that standard is, and what its logic is. It may still be logical to think that God is commanding certain things because they are good, by an independent standard. But how can anybody be sure what God commands? There are many different ideas, many contradictory. The Bible itself is contradictory. For example, in some places it celebrates killing, and in others it forbids it. |
| Golden Rule Positive form: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Negative form: Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you. General form: Treat others they way you would want to be treated. Closely related to Jesus’ “love they neighbor as thyself” (originally from Leviticus) |
Jesus Hillel Confucius Many others |
Most versions of the Golden Rule recognize the importance of
empathy and compassion, which are an absolutely vital part of
ethics. Very simple to remember and follow compared to most other ethical rules. The Golden Rule recognizes perhaps the most basic reason to be ethical: others have pleasures, pains, and preferences, and they are just as powerful to them as ours are to us. We have no rational reason to think our well being is of more importance than anyone else's. |
Others may not want the same things you want. It makes more
sense to treat others the way they want to be treated. (If what
they want is reasonable and ethical) How does the golden rule apply to people who have done terrible things? Should we treat them as we would want to be treated? |
| Buddhist Ethics Suffering is caused by desire, attachment, and ignorance; the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate these things, by following the eightfold path: right understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration.
Buddhist ethics is centered around
the Five Precepts--abstain from: harming living beings, stealing,
sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication.
|
Buddha
Many, many Buddhists |
Buddha, like Aristotle, emphasized moderation: the “middle
way” between extreme ascetism and extreme indulgence. The Buddhist insight that desire is the root of suffering is very valuable. You can't obtain happiness by the endless pursuit of desires. Once you have one thing you wanted, you'll want something else. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill. Buddhism puts great emphasis on compassion, and teaches that a good way to cultivate compassion is to let go of selfish desires and cravings. Once we can keep our self-consciousness from taking up too much of our consciousness, we have more room for compassion and clear perception (mindfulness). Like Aristotle and other traditions, Buddhism emphasizes the need for practice. Thinking alone won't do much good. I love the Buddhist ideal of the Bodhisattva, who attains enlightenment for himself, but holds off on nirvana to help other sentient beings achieve it. Buddhism recognizes that people aren't the only sentient beings deserving of ethical consideration. The Buddha taught that getting obsessed with unanswerable theological/philosophical questions gets in the way of what's important. Sometimes we need to stop thinking and DO something. |
Buddhism can lead people to accept their life as it is and not
stand up for their rights. Many westerners get confused about Buddhism and other meditative spiritual practices, such as Yoga, thinking that they can somehow achieve enlightenment through self-indulgence. This totally misses the point. The point is self-transcendence. It does involve the individual practice of mindfulness, but if that doesn't lead to compassion and selflessness (as well as greater personal satisfaction), it's not working. I can't help thinking a truly enlightened person wouldn't be found meditating in Sedona, but helping people in Bangladesh or somewhere similar. Note on Mysticism: Buddhism, and many other mystic traditions in other world religions (mystic not in the sense of “magic”, but of being focused on experience instead of words and ideas) have had some great insights. One is that truth can't always be captured in words and mental images. It's too big and subtle. We also have to learn to open our minds to it: to experience it, not describe it. To taste the food instead of reading the menu. This takes practice. What's interesting is that this kind of practice leads to more than just wonder and other good feelings at the individual level. It also seems to result in increased compassion for others, maybe because we stop thinking about ourselves so much. |
| Taoism Not exactly an ethical tradition, but useful. Emphasizes the need to realize we can't capture the whole truth with words and ideas. Sometimes we have to let go of words and ideas to get a better sense of the world and how it flows and hangs together. Taoism is about opening your mind to see the harmony of nature, and getting into harmony with it. Often you can accomplish more by flowing with nature than by working against it. |
Lao Tzu Chuang Tzu |
We can certainly learn a lot by expanding our perception, which
lets us see the world in wholes. Explicit thought can cause us to
have tunnel vision, and to trip over ourselves. If you think too
hard about shooting a basketball, for example, you'll miss.
Sometimes you have to relax and trust that your body knows what to
do better than your conscious mind does. People who can master this kind of thing are likely to be happier and more relaxed, and enjoy life more. Enjoying life is ethically important. |
Taoism can be too passive. It doesn't really promote working to
make the world a better place, in the sense of finding cures for
disease, etc, which are very good things. Sometimes you shouldn't
go with the flow, but against it. Taoism also doesn't promote a lot of respect for rights, because it tends to encourage people to be satisfied with what they have—which is good, in moderation. Taoism as a religion is very different from its original, simple form, and is full of silly magic and superstition. |
| Contractarian (Social Contract) Ethics The basis for ethics and justice can be found by imagining a contract between people to create a system of rules for society (contractarian ethics focus on what kind of government is just) |
Hobbes Locke Jefferson Rousseau John Rawls |
Some versions, like Locke, recognize that the only real reason
to have government is to make life decent, if not better, for the
people who create the government. That's the only valid reason for
government to exist, and if it doesn't do the job, it is a bad
government, and the people have the right to change it. Some versions, like Rawls', offer useful ways of thinking about fairness, which is an important concept, though people disagree on what it should be. Rawls said we could decide what is the most just society by having people imagine that they were going to decide on what the best society would be, without knowing what position they would have in that society--they don't know if they will be rich or poor, talented or not, etc. It's a brilliant idea. |
Most people don't ever enter willingly into any contract. A good contract is a fair one, where both parties are equally powerful, and receive equal benefits. Most societies don't seem to be based on any such contract. If a contract is unfair to you, why honor its terms? Contractarian ethics doesn't say much about how to act in personal relationships |
| Liberty as a moral issue
People may have an innate tendency
to resist oppression by those in power, at least if they see that
power as illegitimate. Of course, what is considered legitimate
authority varies from person to person, and society to society.
Classical liberals like Locke and
Jefferson believed that people had inalienable rights to liberty
and property. They saw government as existing to serve protect
life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, etc. The
purpose of government is to provide basic security and law, to
ensure those rights. They saw the only legitimate government as
being based on the consent of the governed. They were more
interested in liberty, to let people pursue their welfare as they
saw fit, than in social safety nets.
Modern day libertarians and
economic conservatives may see taxation for social welfare
programs, or other government programs they see as illegitimate,
as robbery.
|
Locke Jefferson Mill Robert Nozick |
Resisting authority is vital, because those in power often act
in their own interest, not the interest of those they have power
over. Even if they try to act in the best interest of others, they
may not be as effective at it as the people who decide for
themselves what they want.
The idea that government should be based, at some level, on the consent of the governed, is a vital one too. Unless you believe rulers have some kind of “natural” or divine right to be in charge, it's hard to think of any reason government and law is legitimate, except that the people are agreeing to it, because they think society is better with it than without it. The idea that property rights should be protected is a good one, at least up to a point. If people work for what they have, then they have rights to it. Governments should have a very good reason if they are going to take some of it away. But taxation is only robbery if it is illegitimate. The question is what is illegitimate? |
Liberty and property rights are important things, but they
aren't the only important things.
Sometimes liberty clashes with social welfare or justice, and there are points where those things outweigh liberty. Saying people should have the liberty to develop more virulent strains of anthrax in their homes would sacrifice public safety for liberty. Everyone thinks there is a balance point, but people disagree about where it is. It's not clear that it's always right that some people earn vastly larger amounts of money than others. Does Maury Povitch deserve to make far more money than the average nurse or school teacher? Even if people get rich by being intelligent, talented, and hardworking, instead of lucky or unscrupulous, to what extent do they deserve credit for their intelligence or energy? What if they are born with those traits? Does someone born with a low IQ, in a poor family, deserve to stay poor all his life? He didn't choose his birth. What about social inequalities that make the playing field far from level? If one kid is born to a wealthy, educated, loving family, and another is born to a drug-addicted, impoverished single-parent in a housing project, and the wealthy kid goes on to be successful, and the other kid doesn't, can we really say each kid deserved what they got later in life? There are very good arguments for fairness—for leveling the playing field—especially for children, who certainly can't be said to deserve their advantages or disadvantages. |
| Deontological (Duty-based) Ethics What is right is not determined by consequences, but by intentions. If you do a good thing with bad intentions, you aren't being ethical. If you don't do bad things because you're afraid of getting caught or being punished, you're not being ethical. We should act according to duty. If one person helps another because they like to help people, and another does because they think it's the right thing to do, only the second person is acting in an ethical manner. The first person isn't being unethical, and they are doing a good thing, they just aren't acting according to an ethical rule. When considering any act, we should ask if it would be good if everyone did it. If not, it is not ethical. Treat people as ends in themselves, not means. Part of respecting people as reasoning, autonomous beings is to punish them when they have done wrong, |
Kant | Individual rights are important. Consequentialist theories that
disregard individual rights, in favor of the common good, are
problematic. Should we kill a person and use his organs to save
five lives? No. His rights are important. It's an important point that intentions, not just consequences, matter. It's also true that sometimes we have to do things simply out of a sense of duty—because it's the right thing to do--whether we enjoy them or not. |
Doesn't recognize the value of enjoying doing the right thing.
If we can do the right thing, both out of a sense that it's the
right thing, and because we enjoy it, that is better than just
doing it out of a sense of duty. Doesn't recognize the problem of ethical dilemmas, where you have to choose between two wrongs. Sometimes it's best to choose the lesser of two evils. Lying to a murderer about the whereabouts of his victim is a lesser evil than letting him murder them. I don't care what Kant said. May take the idea of universal imperatives too far. Sometimes the right thing to do depends on context, and sometimes it's best for different people to act in different ways. Kant's philosophy is so subtle and counterintuitive, it may be unworkable. It may simply be too hard for people to grasp and apply. An ethical system needs to be realistic. |
| Consequentialism (Utilitarianism is the most common consequentialist philosophy) What is right is whatever gives the best results. Bentham's utilitarianism suggested that we should aim for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, that happiness is basically pleasure, and that all pleasures are equal. John Stuart Mill agreed that happiness is basically pleasure, but he thought some pleasures were higher than others. He also advocated “rule utilitarianism” which says that the greater good often results from following certain established rules, like respecting the rights of individuals. |
Bentham Mill Peter Singer |
Gives a clear basis for why we should be ethical: because it
makes the world better for people and other sentient creatures.
For utilitarians, that involves maximizing pleasure and minimizing
pain. Other consequentialists still see ethics as being about
making life better, but they may think other things are more
important than pleasure, such preferences, or a more sophisticated
version of happiness. Doesn’t rely on abstract concepts like social contracts, natural laws, and so on, whose objective existence is hard to establish. |
Pure consequentialism wouldn't consider the past, only the
future, so it would ignore how people have behaved in the past in
deciding how to treat them. There may be some wisdom to that
(forgiveness can end cycles of retaliation) but it's still
questionable as an absolute rule. But few ethicists would see it
as an absolute rule anyway. Can you sensibly compare different kinds of pleasure? How do you compare going to the opera with going fishing? Is one better than the other? Is pleasure really what’s most important in life, anyway? Crude versions of consequentialism suggest that the ends justify the means, and don't give enough respect to individual rights. These ideas would suggest that it would be ok to kill one person, if it would make one hundred people very happy. Few if any real philosophers see consequentialism in such crude terms. |
| Ethical Relativism What is right depends on the culture. There is no “real” standard of right and wrong, and no culture should judge another based on its own norms. |
Lots of people think they think this, but many haven't though it through. Some philosophers, mostly postmodern types. | It's true that unthinking ethnocentricity should be avoided. We shouldn't confuse “how we do it” with “what is right” because we may be doing things wrong. | Logically incoherent: if we say all views are equally valid,
what about the views that say they are the only right ones? Doesn't ever give a way of saying some things are just wrong. Should we say slavery in the old south was right, because it was integral to the culture of the time? |
| Ethical Egoism What is right is whatever is in the best interests of the individual. |
Ayn Rand, lots of others, though many of them don't admit it. | It is a good point that individuals matter, and that
individuals, not groups, are who feel pleasure and pain. A society
or group as a whole doesn't feel anything. The individuals who make it
up do. Thinkers like Ayn Rand do make the useful point that altruism can have harmful consequences, when applied unthinkingly. People really can grow dependent on the generosity of others, for example. Benevolence should be thoughtfully applied. Some degree of self-interest is not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly generates a lot of productivity and creativity. Enlightened self-interest, where people enter into win-win relationships of cooperation and trade, can be more efficient and workable than relying on people's altruism, which is pretty unreliable. |
Ignores the obvious fact that other individuals have feelings,
rights, and preferences, just like we do. How can we logically
defend the idea that our interests are more important than anyone
elses, from an impartial point of view? Justifies itself by saying it is beneficial to society. But this isn't clear, and besides, wasn't the point that the individual, not society, is the unit of ethical concern? |
| Feminist Ethics/Ethics of Care Says that traditional ethics has a male bias, and has focused too much on seeking universal rules, and not enough on the importance of empathy and caring, or on the importance of personal relationships, Emphasizes the need to base ethical decisions on context, not universal rules. |
Carol Gilligan | Caring and empathy are certainly important. It’s a good point that personal relationships have to be treated differently than relationships with people we are less close to, and shouldn't be viewed in terms of a social contract. For example, we owe more to people who have helped us in the past than we owe to strangers. Does a baby agree to a contract with its parents? |
Few clear guidelines for how to behave. “Be caring” is not
sufficient advice for some situations. Sometimes compassion for those close to us can cause us to be unethical to those who aren't. The idea that women are naturally more caring or nurturing (on average) is surely true to some extent, but emphasizing it too much could lead to perpetuation of stereotypes and traditional female roles. Taoism, Buddhism, Virtue Ethics, and Care Ethics all emphasize that you can't have explicit rules that cover every aspect of wisdom and behavior. That means it's good to cultivate habits, such as compassion and honesty, which will let us have good intuitions about the right thing to do in different situations. It's a good insight, but thinking things through can also be vital. |
So far in this enormous blog post, I've talked about 21 different ways of looking at ethics. Some of them are closely related, but others are very different, and even contradictory. As I said earlier, I've always wondered whether it would be possible to come up with a good, simple, and unambiguous guide to living a good life and doing the right thing. As I look through all these ideas, I see that it's a pretty far-fetched idea. None of these theories stands out as being sufficient all by itself. The Golden Rule is probably the best simple rule of thumb we have, but even it has its limitations. Human life is complicated, and that means deciding what's right and wrong is complicated. It doesn't help that ethics is a metaphysically shaky topic: while we can't do without ethics, it's hard to say in exactly what sense ethics exist. It's not like we can look through a telescope, spot an wild ethic in its natural habitat, and measure it. What all this adds up to is that ethics has a certain amount of irreducible complexity. Most of the theories I've mentioned above make useful points, and a good theory of ethics should take those points into account.
Still, there is hope. It might be possible to go through the ideas above, with their pros and cons, and come up with something simple enough to be useful. I might even try it myself, just as an intellectual exercise, and a way of getting a little closer to understanding what living well and ethically entails. But that's a task for another time, probably a time when I understand these theories a little better than I do now. I'm still an absolute amateur. But so are most other people, and that's really my main point here. This stuff is almost completely unknown to the person in the street, and it's hard to even find good, unbiased books about ethics. It's rarely taught in school until college, and then it's an elective few kids take. These are big problems. There are some giant ethical issues facing this world right now, so we better learn a little more about how to think about them.
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Besides Ethics for Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ethics, which really are very useful (if painfully corny), I also highly recommend Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do, by Michael Sandel. It focuses more on what is right at the political level than the individual level, but the explanations are great. Peter Singer's book How Are We To Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest, is also good, but dated and more opinionated. Simon Blackburn's Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics, is OK, but rambling. Jonathan Haidt's books The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis, talk about the evolutionary and psychological bases of ethics. Both great.
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