10.3: Ethical Pluralism

In ethical theory, we can understand pluralism as the view that there is a plurality of fundamentally good things. Traditionally, ethicists have tried to analyze right and wrong action in terms of a single fundamental underlying kind of value. We can call this kind of approach ethical monism. For utilitarians that single value is happiness, for Kantian respect for persons theorists, it is the value of the person. Ethical Pluralism allows that there may be multiple kinds of fundamental and irreducible value in the world. Happiness and respect for persons might be among these, but there may be others yet. Here I’ll explain how pluralism so understood differs from Moral Relativism and how it is better suited than relativism and monist ethical theories to the goals of social justice sought by pluralism in a broader sense of valuing diversity.

Recall that according to Moral Relativism, what makes something right relative to a group is just that it is deemed to be right by that group. This is a pretty loose characterization of the view. We could get a bit more specific by asking just what the relevant groups are. We would also want to ask who gets to decide for that group, because according to Moral Relativism and other conventionalist views of morality (like Divine Command Theory) right and wrong, good and bad, are ultimately questions of authority.

Views that take morality to be matter of authority, whether it’s God’s, the culture’s collectively, the king’s or the chess club’s authority, all suffer the same basic defect. They render right and wrong entirely arbitrary. If someone or some group gets to decide what’s right and wrong, then anything can be right or wrong. According to Cultural Moral Relativism, whatever a culture deems to be morally right is right relative to it. So, if our culture says that homophobia, sexism, and racism are fine, then they are what is right relative to our culture and that’s the end of it. If some people don’t like it, that’s just too bad. Moral Relativism denies them any objective standpoint from which to complain or any possibility of providing reasons for changing things. Complaints about the oppressiveness of the dominant group amount to nothing more than the whininess of losers. The group that dominates is perfectly well within its rights to do so. This hardly sounds like a plausible account of social justice. But it is straightforwardly entailed by Moral Relativism and that’s exactly why Moral Relativism is an awful ethical theory. This much is just a bit of review from the last chapter. But bear this in mind for the purpose of recognizing how Ethical Pluralism avoids this defect. For according to Ethical Pluralism the fundamental ethical values are real. The importance of happiness comes with the existence of pleasure. The value of respect for persons comes with the existence of persons. This doesn’t depend on the whim or say so of any authority.

Suppose morality doesn’t depend on the say so of cultures, God, or any other individual or group. On this view goodness is “out there” in the realm of things to be discovered. It needn’t be“way out there,” like goodness in some cosmic sense or goodness for the universe at large. We’re just interested in goodness for human beings and this might have lots to do with our nature as persons. So let us set aside the relativist’s claim that goodness is decided by us and ask what else goodness for humans might be. In doing so, we take goodness to be an appropriate object for inquiry, not merely a matter of custom, something somebody gets to decide, or a tool for tyranny. We have some evidence to guide us in this inquiry and it includes all of our varying perspectives on what is good (the more the better). But just as in the sciences, our evidence is fallible and needs to be tested, both against other evidence and the explanatory power of theory.

From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the Holy Grail in ethical theorizing was to find a single, rationally defensible criterion of right action. This quest was dominated by utilitarians like Bentham and Mill, and respect for persons theorists like Kant. Both theoretical approaches are value monist, that is, they take there to be just one thing that has value fundamentally. For the utilitarian it is happiness that matters and the goal is to formulate a single law of morally right action that aims at maximizing happiness. For Kant it is the good will, or the dignity of the person that matters, and the goal is to establish a single moral law that properly captures what it means to respect the value of the person.

The utilitarian might start with the idea that an action is right if it produces the greatest amount of happiness of any available action. But this clearly conflicts with respect for persons as we saw above in the case of Bob and his vital organs. There are various moves a utilitarian might make to try to address this case, but there are more subtle cases yet where Utilitarianism seems to conflict with respect for persons. So, it looks like we can’t coherently sign on to both a utilitarian and a Kantian criterion of right action since they will conflict in interesting ways. Utilitarian standards of right action tend to be logically incompatible with standards like Kant’s Categorical Imperative. If what we are looking for is a single criterion of right action that is based on a single kind of ultimate ethical value, it looks like we have to pick a single winner among competing monist ethical theories. But perhaps this sets the wrong kind of goal for ethical theory.

The idea that there might be a single universal and absolute criterion of morally right action strikes many who value cultural diversity as highly problematic. But lest we abandon monist approaches to ethical theory too quickly, we should note that the standards of right action offered by both the utilitarian and the Kantian are highly abstract and for this reason they are quite compatible with a rich range of diversity in more specific derivative guidelines for action. In fact, lots of cultural diversity can be explained in terms of more broadly shared underlying moral values. Eating the dead may be seen as a way of honoring them in one culture, but be considered a sacrilege in another culture. Both of these diverse practices can be seen as diverse ways of expressing respect for persons. The difference between cultures in this case is not really a difference of fundamental moral values, but a difference in how these are to be expressed. Similarly we consider infanticide morally wrong while other cultures facing more difficult environmental pressures may practice it routinely. What may seem like conflicting moral standards at this more specific derivative level might instead be understood as differing ways of maximizing happiness that are appropriate for the starkly different circumstances that the respective cultures must deal with. So absolutist, universalizing, monist ethical theories turn out to be considerably more accommodating of cultural diversity than we might have thought at first. Still, they may not be flexible enough.

It might be that some cultures value respect for persons over happiness while others value happiness at the expense of respect for persons and others yet value community or kinship relations more than happiness or respect for individual persons. That is, we might find conflicts in the most basic or fundamental moral values upheld by diverse cultures. How can ethical theory account for this without begging questions against one set of cultural values or another?

Recall that the ethical monist is out to discover a single rationally defensible moral truth that is grounded in a single kind of moral value. In discussing monist ethical theories I insisted that you can’t be both a utilitarian and a Kantian respect-for-persons theorist. This is because these theories offer logically incompatible principles of morally right action. There will be actions (like harvesting the healthy patient’s organs in the simple versions) that one theory will deem to be right and the other will deem to be wrong. So, you can’t coherently hold both a utilitarian principle of right action and a Kantain principle of right action to be true. If the principles disagree on even a few cases, they can’t both be true. But let’s set principles aside for a moment. I’m not suggesting we be unprincipled, I just want us to focus on the underlying moral values without worrying about truths that might be based on them. There is nothing logically incoherent about taking happiness and respect for persons to both be good in fundamental ways. And there may be other plausible candidates for fundamental goodness. Happiness and respect were just the ones that got most of the attention in the 18th and 19th century. Since then, feminist philosophers have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in caring relationships. Environmental ethicists have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in the natural world. Hindus and Buddhists have long suggested that there is a kind of fundamental value in consciousness.

Perhaps this short list is long enough. Or perhaps it is already too long. A moral value is only fundamental if it can’t be explained and supported in terms of some other fundamental value. So if caring relationships matter just because they bring happiness to human lives, then we already have this kind of value covered when we recognize happiness as a kind of fundamental value. But it is not at all clear that happiness fully explains the value of caring relationships. There are issues to explore here and feminist philosophers are just starting to map out this terrain. In any case, kinds of fundamental value might be rare, but still plural.

So what should ethical theory say about cultures that differ in the fundamental values that shape their customs and codes? Monist approaches to ethical theory would insist that we pick winners in this kind of situation. But should we? Certainly, in some cases we should. The fundamental values of Nazi culture were racist through and through. Good ethical theory should not be accommodating this kind of cultural diversity at all. Recall that our most compelling argument against Moral Relativism was that it is committed to accepting that racism is right relative to racist societies and our condemnation of racism has no more moral force than their endorsement of it.

But what about cases like Confucian cultures that give kinship relationships a higher priority than respect for persons? The more individualistic cultures of the West would favor respect for persons. Must we pick a winner here? Monist ethical theories would insist. But pluralism about ethical value offers us a few other options. The ethical pluralist can say that both cultures are structured around worthy fundamental values and neither unjustly favors one kind of fundamental value at the expense of another. Or a pluralist might allow that some ways of prioritizing worthy fundamental ethical values really are better than others, but that there is no strict rational formula for working out which is best. Because we have a plurality of worthy fundamental ethical values and these are not reducible to each other or anything more basic, rigorous rational methods might not be up to settling the matter and the best we can hope for is good judgment. But however we settle these issues, pluralism about fundamental ethical value opens some new avenues for counting a broader range of cultural diversity as ethically sound.

There are many issues to address yet in exploring Ethical Pluralism and I won’t get to them all here. But a few loom too large to ignore. In particular, you might be worried that over the past few paragraphs I merely assumed that the fundamental values of Confucian cultures are worthy ethical values but the fundamental values of Nazi culture aren’t. How do we figure out which fundamental values are worthy and merit a place in our ethical theorizing and which don’t? Monist ethical thinkers like Kant and Mill faced the same issue, they were just limiting themselves to identifying one kind of value. If I’m given a fundamental value, say respect for persons, then I can argue for more derivative values, being honest for instance, on the grounds that these are required for respecting persons. But when it comes to fundamental values, this strategy for justifying value is no longer open. I’ve come to the end of the explanatory and justificatory line. So what now? What’s my evidence for taking some fundamental values to be worthy ethical values but not others? The evidence in ethics is not like the evidence in physics. But then the evidence in physics is not really like the evidence in anthropology. Still, I think we do have evidence in ethics. The evidence in ethics consists of our ethical intuitions. We do have a moral sense about things.

Our ethical intuitions do differ around lots of issues, but that’s not an argument for skepticism or relativism. People disagree about how to understand scientific evidence, too. The evidence of our senses can be misleading and even systematically distorted. We certainly don’t just sense that the earth spins and travels around the sun. What we sense seems quite contrary to the truth of this matter. So the evidence provided by our ethical intuitions is fallible and even has the potential for misleading us systematically. Things are no different here than they are in any branch of inquiry. Our job as inquirers in ethics is to account for the evidence of our various ethical intuitions as best we can by formulating theories that help make sense out of them. As we try to systematize our ethical intuitions we will encounter problem areas where some intuitions conflict with our best theories and explanations. Since our intuitions are fallible, such conflicts don’t automatically mean our theories are just wrong. There might be creative ways to reconcile such evidence with our best theories, or we might find that the evidence is defective or distorted in some way, or we might find grounds to alter or refine our theories in light of the evidence. There are at least these different paths our inquiry might take. Likewise, each of these paths is open when the evidence of the senses seems to conflict with our scientific theories. Inquiry in ethics is pretty much like other kinds of inquiry. Our reasoning engages us in a continual negotiation between our experience and how to best understand it. Our experience shapes our theoretical understanding and our theoretical understanding shapes our experience in turn in a more or less organic process of intellectual growth. Reason doesn’t dictate any outcomes, it merely provides the system of currency in which this negotiation towards deeper understanding takes place.

So let’s illustrate how this negotiation works with the case of the Nazis. Why reject their fundamentally racist values? There are probably lots of good reasons, but here’s one: The value of respect for persons accounts for a very broad range of ethical intuitions about how we should treat people and there is no way to reconcile general respect for persons with Nazi racism. So much the worse for Nazi racist values, they don’t merit any place in our ethical theory. The ethical intuitions of Nazis should be rejected as systematically distorted.

The last issue I’ll take up here has to do with oneness. Just why is oneness so special? Why would philosophers like Kant and Mill think it so important to have just one kind of fundamental ethical value? One powerful appeal of oneness is that is allows for a high degree of precision and rigor. Bentham even hoped that we would one day have a calculus of utility that would allow us to rigorously prove which actions will maximize utility and therefore be right. The powerful appeal of oneness here is that it allows us to completely replace human judgment with rational calculation. We have yet to outgrow this intellectual lust for reduction. Many of us still want to see the sciences as in some way reducible to just one, physics. But philosophers of science have been raising a steady stream of questions about our reductionistic inclinations over the past few decades. And even physics itself appears to be stuck with a kind of force pluralism. The fundamental forces, according to our best theory, include nuclear, gravitational, and electrical forces. We have specific theories that explain the behavior of things if we abstract away from other forces and focus only on gravity. And we have specific theories that explain the electrical behavior of things, but only when we ignore other forces that might be at play. Similarly, some version of Utilitarianism might give us the ethical truth about the value of happiness at least when no other important ethical values are relevant. And some interpretation of Kant might give us ethical principles that get at the truth so long as we abstract away from ethical values other than the moral dignity of persons. Plurality in both ethics and physics denies us the satisfaction of a single specific formula that accounts for absolutely everything. But that shouldn’t bother us too much. I rather doubt that this kind of intellectual satisfaction is really worthy of human beings.