1.2: What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba)

2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality?
David Svolba²

I. A Hard Case

We begin with a hard case, one which might pull us in different directions.

Baby Theresa. Theresa is born an anencephalic infant, which means that she will never be conscious, though she may live for several months since she has a functioning brain-stem that controls respiration and other life-sustaining processes. Theresa’s parents are understandably devastated. After consulting with Theresa’s doctors, the parents make a decision: they request that Theresa’s healthy organs be removed, thereby killing her, and given to otherwise healthy children who will die if they do not receive an organ. The alternative is to donate Theresa’s organs after she dies, but as we wait for nature to take its course children will die who could have been saved, and Theresa’s organs will become less viable.³

Would it be ethically wrong to kill Baby Theresa in order to save the lives of other children?

How would we even begin to answer a question like this?

II. Some False Starts

Why not seek an answer to the question by…

Consulting the law?

But there may not be a law that covers the hard case, in which case the law will not offer us any guidance. More importantly, however:

Is the law a reliable guide to right and wrong? Let’s consider: can we think of actions (real or imagined, current or historical) that are legal but unethical? Can we think of actions that are illegal but ethical? If so – if legality and ethics can diverge – then the law probably isn’t a reliable guide to determining the right thing to do.

Conducting an opinion poll?

But others may be as torn as we are concerning what to do, in which case an opinion poll won’t offer us any guidance. More importantly, however:

Are opinion polls a reliable guide to right and wrong? Let’s consider: can we think of actions that are (or were) popularly approved of but unethical? Can we think of ethical actions that are not popularly approved of? If so – if popular opinion and ethics can diverge – then opinion polls will not be a reliable guide to determining the right thing to do.

Going with ‘gut feelings,’ or the dictates of conscience?

But especially when it comes to hard cases, we may not have clear feelings one way or the other—or, more likely still, our feelings might pull us in opposing directions, leading us to draw different conclusions about right and wrong. More importantly, however:

Are ‘gut feelings’ (or conscience) a reliable guide to right and wrong? Again, let’s apply the same divergence test we applied when considering the first two suggestions: can we think of examples in which conscience errs, or a person’s gut feelings lead her astray? We might also reasonably wonder about the source of gut feelings or dictates of conscience. Why think that these give us glimpses of ethical truth, rather than, for example, merely reflecting on assumptions and biases that we have accumulated through our upbringing and socialization?

III. Ethical Argument

There is a better approach to ethical hard cases than any of the false starts canvassed above: we can think about them. We can consider the reasons for and against certain ethical evaluations. We can construct and evaluate ethical arguments and see in which direction the weight of reasons tilt.

You might not be accustomed to thinking of ethics as a subject we can reason about. After all, many ethical disagreements seem anything but reasonable: they are often passionately emotional and intractable. But this might simply reflect the fact that we are not prone to reason about ethics well. Really, this is not so surprising, since reasoning well about any subject, and certainly a subject as complex and difficult as ethics, requires considerable experience.

it would be wrong to kill Baby Theresa—from general ethical principles. A general ethical principle is a statement that says that a certain kind of action is ethical or unethical.

Here, for example, is a general ethical principle, which we may call the Benefits-Without-Harm Principle, or

BWHP: If an action will benefit people, without harming anyone, then it is ethically right.

BWHP identifies what philosophers call a sufficient condition for ethically right action. If an action benefits people without causing any harm, then that’s enough – it’s sufficient – to make that action ethically right, regardless of other features of the action or the circumstances in which the action is performed.

Suppose we find BWHP intuitively compelling. Does it shed any light on our question about whether killing Baby Theresa would be unethical? It might seem to, for one could appeal to BWHP in making the following ethical argument:

A1

1. If an action will benefit people, without harming anyone, then it is ethically right.

2. Killing Baby Theresa will benefit people, without harming anyone.

3. Therefore, killing Baby Theresa is ethically right.

For the moment, never mind whether this argument is convincing. Rather, try to appreciate how this method of arriving at ethical judgments differs significantly from the false starts we considered above.

IV. Evaluating Ethical Arguments

In evaluating a simple ethical argument like A1, there are two basic questions we can ask:

Q1. Is the general principle to which the argument appeals (in this case, BWHP) a plausible one?

Q2. Is the principle correctly applied to the case under consideration?

As for the first question, one common way to assess the plausibility of a general ethical principle is by using what philosophers call the method of counterexample. This involves searching for cases (real or imagined) in which the principle gives the intuitively wrong result. Let’s illustrate this method by devising a possible counterexample to our sample principle, BWHP:

Benefactor. I am a very wealthy man in a small city with two hospitals. One hospital (Sunnyvale) serves the very rich and is decked out with all the latest and greatest medical equipment and is staffed by the most talented doctors and nurses. The other hospital (City General) serves the rest of the city (a majority of the population) and is badly under-equipped, under-staffed, and desperately in need of upgrades and repairs. Despite being aware of the dramatic inequality in the relative state of these two hospitals, I donate several million dollars to Sunnyvale and give nothing to City General. My reason is that I have been a patient at Sunnyvale several times in the past and am grateful for the treatment and care I received there.

Have I acted ethically right? Was giving several million dollars to Sunnyvale the right thing to do? BWHP suggests that it was. After all:

A2

1. If an action will benefit people, without harming anyone, then it is ethically right.

2. Donating the money to Sunnyvale benefits people without harming anyone.

3. Therefore, donating the money to Sunnyvale is ethically right.

But suppose we disagree with the claim that donating the money to Sunnyvale is the ethically right thing to do. What I should have done, we might argue, is donate the money to the hospital that needed it most—City General—where it could have done significantly more good. In our estimation then, BWHP yields the incorrect verdict in the case of Benefactor, and that’s a reason to doubt its validity.

Of course, counterexamples in ethics are never conclusive, since one always has the option to ‘bite the bullet’ and take on-board the counterintuitive ethical judgment. For example, a proponent of BWHP could give up the judgment that the money should have been donated to City General (and thereby state that giving it to Sunnyvale was the right thing) instead of giving up on BWHP. In ethics, counterexamples give us a choice: we can modify our principles to fit our ethical judgments, or we can modify our ethical judgments to fit our principles. Unfortunately, there is no algorithm for deciding when to do which. The best we can do is try to use good judgment and be on guard against various forms of bias.

In any case, let’s suppose that BWHP passes our tests. Let’s suppose we’ve considered a wide range of cases in which an action benefits people without harming anyone, and without exception we are disposed to judge these actions ethically right. When evaluating arguments like A1, there is still work to be done even if we find acceptable the general ethical principle to which the argument appeals. We need to ask whether the principle actually applies to the case under consideration. In evaluating A1, for example, we have to ask whether it is true that killing Baby Theresa would benefit people without harming anyone. We may disagree about whether an individual like Baby Theresa is harmed by being killed. In evaluating A2, we might disagree about whether there can be circumstances in which not bestowing a gift constitutes a harm, and, if so, whether these circumstances obtain in Benefactor. Complex conceptual and empirical issues like these arise all the time when thinking about right and wrong and form a large part of the workload in philosophical ethics.

V. Other Important Argument Forms

Thus far we’ve looked only at ethical arguments in which a particular action is said to conform to a general ethical principle. These arguments have the following form or pattern:

1. General Principle: Actions of type X are ethically right (or ethically wrong).
2. Particular judgment: This action, a, is an X.
3. Conclusion: Thus, a is ethically right (or ethically wrong).

As you begin to read more widely in philosophical ethics you will notice that there are many different argument-forms that philosophers commonly employ. Learning these patterns will improve your comprehension of arguments in ethics and your ability to offer compelling support for your own ethical views. Here we will cover two more forms: arguments from analogy and arguments from inference to the best explanation.