4.1: Ethics
The next two chapters will look at the part of philosophy we call axiology. Axiology is the study of value judgements. We say things are good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, sublime or mundane. The central question of axiology is “on what basis can we justify such claims?” There are two branches of axiology corresponding to two different sorts of judgements we make. Judgements about the moral rightness or wrongness of a freely chosen human action is ethics and that will be the topic of this chapter. The study of the basis for judgements concerning beauty and the quality of art is what we call aesthetics and will be the topic of the next chapter.
Before we launch into in depth discussions of the rational grounds upon which to make ethical judgments, we first need to answer two objections: (1) there can be no rational grounds for judgments in ethics because it is just whatever a person/society thinks, and (2) there are grounds for making ethical judgments, context-dependent and subjective to each person’s experience, but they are not rational, human reason is not enough to justify them. How we respond to these questions depends on our ethical system .
An ethical system is a working definition of the concepts of morally right and morally wrong. We all have vague ethical intuitions that suffice for most day-to-day situations. We just know that it is good to help the needy and bad to torture newborn infants with a fork just for the fun of it. But if we want to be able to approach the sticky, hard to answer issues, then we need explicit definitions for our basic moral concepts. When we say that an act is morally wrong, we need to be able to clearly and unambiguously explain why. In other words, we need to articulate reasons to defend these intuitions.
That is why we need an ethical system. Think of an ethical system as a box with a slot on one side, a button on the top, and three lights on the front. The top light is green and has the word “MUST” written in large bold letters. The middle light is yellow and has “ok” etched into it. The bottom light is red and imprinted with the words “Stop! No! Verboten! Cut it out, you degenerate! What kind of sicko are you, anyway?” You stick the description of an action into the slot, push the button, and one of the lights comes on. If green lights up, the action is ethically necessary; you are morally obliged to do it. If the yellow light comes on, then the action is morally permissible, that is, you don’t have to 88 do it, but there’s no problem if you do. If the red light comes on, then the action is morally impermissible, it is an ethically wrong behavior.
The two central claims that we need to establish are – playing along with the metaphor – 1) that such a box exists and 2) that we can pop the hood and see how the gears are put together, that is, that we can understand exactly why an action is determined by the machine to categorize why the morally necessary, permissible, or wrong buttons light up. The idea that we can and should understand the intellectual mechanism behind moral judgments is called ethical rationalism . It contends that “ethically right” and “ethically wrong” are meaningful notions and that people with minds like ours can fully understand them; in other words, that there is a box, and we can understand its programming.
In the next section, we will examine several ethical systems that have been proposed by important, and for the most part dead, philosophers through the last twenty-four centuries. We will be quality control, testing the calibration of each proposed box by sticking in uncontroversial actions that we can all agree are right or wrong and making sure that we get the desired output. If you put into the box the action “Rescue drowning child at the edge of the pool right in front of me” and the green light doesn’t come on, we know that the box is faulty. If you stick in “Enslave the next-door neighbors so I never again have to mow the lawn” and the red, morally impermissible light doesn’t come on, again, we know the internal workings of the box are to be rejected as a way of determining moral rightness and wrongness.
The goal of determining how a box works is equivalent to being able to fill in the blank in the sentence, “Act x is morally right if and only if _________.” We want to be able to explain clearly and completely what makes an action morally right or morally wrong because if we can’t explain our judgments, we can’t defend them. And then moral discourse completely collapses into the sort of closed-minded shouting matches that plague us now. To make progress on the hard issues before us, we need to clear up a few questions at the foundational, theoretical level before we try to apply them to the world around us.
Before we can do that, however, we need to answer the two challenges to ethical rationalism that have emerged from contemporary, politically infected, pseudo-ethics speak. On the one hand we have what’s called moral relativism and comes in two 89 flavors. The first, ethical subjectivism , contends that moral rightness is just whatever any given person thinks it is. There’s my morality, your morality, Soupy Sales’ morality, but no objective, universal morality apart from what any given person holds. Moral rightness and wrongness only have meaning relative to some person or other. In other words, what makes an action moral is whether or not I feel that it is moral. The second flavor of this view is cultural relativism , the position that moral right and wrong are a function of the social acceptability of an act. There is no real sense of right and wrong, according to this view, only how a given culture defines it. “Because I was brought up that way,” simply ends the discussion. In other words, what makes an action moral is whether or not a society has decided that it is moral.
Neither of these are unusual views today, and if you listen carefully you can frequently find people sliding back and forth between subjectivism and cultural relativism as if they were the same thing. The similarity that interests us is that either view, if true, would eliminate the possibility of there being a box of the sort we are seeking. No one could possibly be wrong about any ethical statement they make, and thus, moral judgment is trivial to the point of disappearing. Everyone has his or her own box and no box is any better than any other. Because morality would just be a matter of how you feel or what society thinks, there would be no such thing as an objective moral truth – in other words, there would be no “right answer” to any moral question. Say that I feel that killing kittens is wrong, and my society agrees with me. But you feel that it’s right, and your society agrees with you. Without some sort of objective moral standard, or truth, to determine which of us is right, we have no way of determining who is right. Morality becomes meaningless if we have no way to determine whose moral feeling or moral society is right.
On the other hand, there are those who do not deny the existence of a box whatsoever. Indeed, quite to the contrary, people who argue for a brand of moral imperialism assert that a box must exist, that there are absolute answers to every moral question. Some even claim to have in their very possession The One and Only True Box and are willing to do very nasty things to the bodies and relatives of others who have what they deem to be fake versions of The One and Only True Box. The problem is, while they contend that a box exists, they hold that it is impossible to see how the box works and why exactly it works that way. They claim that there is absolute 90 right and absolute wrong, but, in their view, there is no rational reason that human beings could understand as to why any given act is morally right or morally wrong. It is a matter of faith and not reason. Ethics ceases to be a matter open to rational consideration.
The first view undermines ethical rationalism because they claim that a box does not exist, and the second view undermines ethics because they say it exists, but you can’t know how it works. So, before we can start comparison-shopping for ethical systems, it is imperative that we first understand the flaws in these positions. The fact that they are unworkable does not mean that there is not something in both sides that is attractive on some level. There is, and will always be, an aspect from each that needs to be incorporated into a successful, complete ethical system. What we want to do in the next section is figure out what is wrong with each of these views, what is right about each of these views, and what can be saved.
Ethical Subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism is the view that moral judgments are purely a matter of personal decision. Everyone has his or her own ethical system, and the fact that you consider an act morally right for whatever reason (or, indeed, for no reason at all) means that, for you, the act is morally right. We can set it out like this:
Ethical subjectivism – An act x is morally right for me if and only if I think it is.
There are two things we need to focus upon in this definition. First, it is a relativistic definition; that is to say, the truth of any moral claim is relative to the person judging it. It is not universalized to all people. The second aspect is the infallibility of moral judgments. According to this view, it is impossible for anyone to be wrong when they make a moral claim. If I say so, then I must be right simply because I said so. It is logically impossible for me to be wrong about any moral claim.
Reasoning about ethics now becomes akin to reasoning about your favorite flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. If your favorite flavor is Cherry Garcia, then no matter how good of an orator I am, no matter how strong of a rational argument I formulate, I could never get you to change your mind and assert that, “While I thought that Cherry Garcia 91 tasted better than New York Superfudge Chunk, I have now come to understand that I was wrong and, in spite of what I tasted, I now assert for rational reasons that New York Superfudge Chunk actually tastes better than Cherry Garcia.” The simple fact is there is no accounting for taste. If Cherry Garcia tastes better to you, then it tastes better to you. The matter is not open to rational conversation. If you came across two people in a screaming match, one yelling passionately, “I prefer Cherry Garcia,” and the other responding with equal volume and zeal, “I prefer New York Superfudge Chunk,” you’d do well to think that these two will never convince the other they are right.
He screams, she screams, but we need not all scream for ice cream. The real problem is not that one’s favorite ice cream flavor seems insufficiently important to warrant fisticuffs (although, yes, some anger management therapy might not be the worst of things in this case). No, the real problem is that the two people have nothing that they disagree about. They are both simultaneously correct. There is no point of contention; his favorite flavor is Cherry Garcia and her favorite flavor is New York Superfudge Chunk. So long as they are truthfully reporting their preferences, they are both right.
The ethical subjectivist reduces morality to this same level. From time to time, you will even find a sense of taste explicitly substituted for moral reasoning. The usual form is “Act x is morally wrong for me because I think it is yucky.” For example, “Eating meat is wrong, I can’t imagine killing a little pig, it’s gross.” It may be, but that does not necessarily make it morally problematic.
The real crime of ethical subjectivism is that it makes moral disagreement impossible. If ethical subjectivism were true, then if Hitler really thought exterminating Jews, homosexuals, and political opponents were morally acceptable actions, then for him it was. And we can’t really object to this anymore than we can object to his favorite flavor of ice cream. When a radical pro-lifer and a radical pro-choicer sit down at a table, they have nothing to discuss; they don’t really disagree because there is no debatable, underlying principle to disagree about – it’s simply a matter of subjective taste. It may be that I can’t understand why you don’t find certain things to be yucky like I do, but, hey, some people are turned on by grown people dressed in diapers, some people like Brussels sprouts, and somebody really bought all those Nickelback albums. Again, there is no accounting for taste.
But ethics is cannot be merely a matter of taste. When we disagree about the moral acceptability of an action, we are disagreeing about something. When the radical pro-lifer and the radical pro-choicer are arguing, they do have something to argue about. Neither may explicitly state what it is, but there really is some implied or explicit principle underpinning the disagreement. Unlike the ice cream argument, they cannot both simultaneously be right – though they can both be wrong. They do disagree. Something more than taste is at issue.
How do we know this? After all, who’s to say? Consider moments of moral doubt. From time to time, we all find ourselves at points where we are not sure about what the right thing to do would be. We need to make a choice, but it is not at all clear to us what the right choice should be. We feel torn. We feel anxious. We know that there really is something at issue. We feel guilty if later on we feel like we made the wrong choice.
If ethical subjectivism were correct and moral rightness was therefore merely a matter of taste, then such reactions could not exist. No matter what you decided, it would instantly become right because you decided it. There’s never any reason to fret over any moral issue, and certainly no reason to feel guilty. Guilt just doesn’t make sense on a subjectivist model of morality. Just making it up as we go along is fine – and if we discover later that our preferences have changed, that’s also fine. But this simply doesn’t make sense given what we actually experience. We do feel tortured by hard moral decisions. That horrible knot in the pit of your stomach wouldn’t be there if the choice of action was just another version of Coke or Pepsi, paper or plastic, medium rare or well-done. And we certainly wouldn’t feel gnawing guilt or shame about telling that guy at the ticket counter to also have a good flight when we know damn well he’s not going anywhere. Where does this sensation come from? Where does regret, embarrassment, shame, or sadness come from if everything we do truly is just “what was best for us at the time”, or what we considered a moral preference?
In cases of deep moral doubt, we don’t just feel, we think. We deliberate. We weigh both sides. Maybe in the end we throw up our hands and do what is most expedient, maybe we play “eeny, meeny, miney, moe,” maybe we let someone else make the decision for us, but sometimes we make our choice based upon a rational argument. Sometimes – sure, not all the time – but sometimes (and that is all we need to see the problem with ethical subjectivism), sometimes, we find an ethical argument convincing, 93 and we then have a good, rational reason for choosing how to act in that situation. In fact, we do this most of the time, even if we don’t realize it. But if anyone asked you why you did anything – why you made any decision, from why you took this class to why you wore that shirt to why you ran that red light – you can give them a list of reasons, even if you weren’t aware of those reasons at the time. Because of the infallibility of moral judgment that comes with it, such moral doubt and such good reasons could not possibly exist. If ethical subjectivism were true, then whichever way you decided would instantly become morally right because an act is morally right, in this view, just because you think it is. It would never matter what actions you choose, you wouldn’t feel anything but contentment with those actions in retrospect, and you wouldn’t justify those actions with reasons if asked.
Furthermore, subjective understandings of morality seems to be something that develops over time. Have you ever changed your mind about the moral rightness of an action? Think of the way we refer to our previous view: “I used to think that putting beef bouillon cubes in the shower heads of my dorm was funny, but I was wrong.” If morality is purely subjective, then such a statement would be nonsensical – you couldn’t have been wrong if you really thought you were right at the time. But the action was immoral, regardless of the fact that your thinking was skewed when you were younger.
If you’ve ever tried to convince someone that an act was morally right or wrong, if you’ve ever changed your mind about the moral acceptability of an act, or if you’ve ever been convinced by an argument from someone else, then you must allow that moral right and wrong is more than mere personal taste. Ethical subjectivism is false.
But there is a good reason why ethical subjectivism is so attractive to so many people. It is a reaction (an overreaction, but a reaction nonetheless) to something that many intuitively and correctly sense is wrong in some contemporary moral discourse. We want to avoid being moral imperialists – the sort of people who assert that there is only one right thing and only one way to do that right thing. According to these folks, there is never any reason for moral doubt. There is no moral ambiguity. Everything is absolute and clear-cut. Not only that, but they have all of the right answers, and if you disagree with them it is a clear demonstration of a serious flaw in your character. The technical philosophical term for such people is “self-righteous blowhard,” (although we often use other terms that we will refrain from printing here) and ethical subjectivism is 94 often an attempt by good, caring, rational, open-mined people not to be self-righteous blowhards. In the face of widespread intolerance towards people who hold disagreeing moral views, many who embrace ethical subjectivism do so because they wrongly think that it is the only way to make room for legitimate moral disagreement.
The move to subjectivism is based upon a crucial and mature insight into ethics: “I may be rational, and I might have what seems to be a really strong argument for my position, but, you know what, I might be wrong.” It seems to be a critical property of robust, authentic, adult deliberation that room exists for moral doubt and disagreement between smart, thoughtful, good people. There are real moral conundrums – situations in which the decision seems hard because it is hard – and sometimes we do have to agree to disagree. Life doesn’t always work in black and white – it’s wildly complicated and nuanced. Any ethical system that we come up with needs to reflect this reality. If an ethical system makes difficult questions seem too neat and easy, then it is trivializing ethics. A successful ethical system needs to show us why the tricky questions are, in fact, tricky.
But while the move to ethical subjectivism is motivated by good intentions, it actually fails in those intentions. Not only is the view problematic, as we have just seen, but it does not accomplish our other social goal of supporting good faith, open-minded ethical discussion.
As we have seen, ethical subjectivism fails in the attempt to make room for competing views about ethical issues because under ethical subjectivism there are no competing views! Everyone is right. It finds itself on the exact opposite side of the spectrum from moral imperialism; just as extreme, but in a completely different way. Ethical subjectivism most often derives from the attempt to be tolerant, but in the end it ends up entirely intolerant. If we were all ethical subjectivists, we would not be living in harmony with people who disagree with us, rather we would each be sequestered in our own little ethical bubble where it doesn’t matter how reasonable or wacko the folks in the surrounding bubbles are. We would not be safeguarding open-minded moral conversation, we would be making it impossible. It would be as if we all have our fingers in our ears screaming, “I can’t hear you! LALALALALA! Talk to the ethical hand.” If the idea was to create thoughtful ethical discourse, this ain’t it.
Further, this view does not disarm the self-righteous blowhards. They’ve figured out that beating ethical subjectivists in moral debate is easier than finding an out of date magazine in a dentist’s waiting room. In reaction to the self-righteous blowhards’ lack of tolerance, the ethical subjectivist has elevated tolerance from its rightful place as a virtue and set it upon a pedestal as the one and only morally relevant virtue. There is no doubt that, all other things being equal, we ought to be tolerant, but there are plenty of things we should absolutely not tolerate, morally, socially, or politically. If tolerance above all if the only moral value, then not only do we have no right to say that Hitler was wrong, but we also have no moral grounds to claim that the views or actions of others are unjust. If it’s all subjective, I can’t really complain if someone wants to kill my kitten, it’s their preference. I don’t want my kitten to be killed, but I can’t claim that it is unjust and should be punished or prevented, because that would require some sort of agreement on what constitutes a thing being punishable or prevented. Subjectivism does not allow for that possibility. So not only do we lose the possibility of disagreement in dialogue, we also lose any foundation for justice itself. All anyone would have to say is that by considering their horrendously morally objectionable views to be horrendously morally objectionable you are being intolerant, and, since you say that we always have to be tolerant, you must therefore tolerate the intolerance and injustice that they are advocating. The goodhearted folks who make the move to ethical subjectivism get their backsides kicked every single time because the rules of the game can be used against them. Yes, it is good to be tolerant, but in some particular cases other virtues have to come first. Sometimes justice, sometimes fairness, and sometimes even the promotion of tolerance itself require taking actions that do not place tolerance at the forefront. Tolerance is an important thing, but not the only important thing.
Real tolerance does not mean everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. Some opinions are poorly thought out, unsupported, detestable affronts to morality. Such opinions ought to be opposed, and the flaws demonstrated for all to see. Tolerance means giving people with differing opinions a genuine opportunity to thoroughly explain their position before making a determination about that position. It is approaching others with an open-minded hearing and listening in good faith, such that if they demonstrate a flaw in your position you would consider that flaw in a genuine sense, perhaps even giving up your position and changing it to theirs. It means playing 96 the moral deliberation game fairly. We want to find the right answer, not just win the argument. If the other person turns out to be right, we need to be open to changing our minds. But we can’t find out if the other is right if we don’t give them the space to speak, and if we don’t listen with a genuine willingness to understand them. In Plato’s words, we need to make sure that we “nobly submit to the argument.” The self-righteous blowhard is one who puts the conclusion first and then tries to backfill a moral justification. If they are not playing fairly, they do not deserve the same moral status. Tolerance may mean live and let live, but it does not mean think and let not think. Open-mindedness and the space for legitimate moral disagreement needs to be preserved in our eventual ethical system but worked into the system in such a way as to avoid these problems.
Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism is the more filled-out big brother of ethical subjectivism. Both offer relativistic definitions of our basic moral vocabulary; in both cases it is claimed that there is no objective sense of an act being morally right or wrong, only right or wrong relative to something. In ethical subjectivism, that something is each individual; cultural relativism, on the other hand, that something is a group, a culture, a society. The definition could be set out this way:
Cultural Relativism – An act x is morally right for culture S if and only if x is approved of in S.
Moral rightness, in this view, is completely determined for a society by the practices and norms of that society, and the ability to judge anyone’s behavior by those criteria is strictly limited to that society.
Versions of the problems we saw with ethical subjectivism will pop up for this view, but a new problem arises for the cultural relativist that wasn’t an issue for the subjectivist – What counts as a culture? With subjectivism, at least we could identify the individuals – except, of course, when it came to moral disagreement between conjoined twins. But what about cultures? Is it the national borders of countries that decide it? Is there one morality for the whole United States or are there different definitions of right 97 and wrong in New England and in the South? Is it heritage? Are there distinct Caucasian, African-American, Asian-American, and Latinx ethics in Los Angeles? How big does a group have to be to count as a culture? Do Lithuanians in Chicago get to decide what’s moral and immoral for Chicago Lithuanians, but Lithuanians in Albuquerque don’t – unless they manage to relocate enough retirees from Chicago to have a “Little Vilnius”? The social relativist needs to be able to unambiguously define what a culture is to answer all of these questions. It is a tall order, but not their only problem.
There is no doubt that groups of all sorts have norms for behavior, that what is acceptable conduct in one group may or may not be acceptable in another, and that they enforce these expectations through social mechanisms ranging from Amish shunning to Jewish guilt to a good old Bronx dope smack on the back of your head, “What’s the matter with you?” But this enforcement of social norms is unfortunately all too easy to mistake for morality. Just because each society has its own rules for acceptable and desirable behavior, and reward and punishment procedures that keep people accountable for that behavior, does not mean that these socially enforced values are moral values. Even though many morally wrong behaviors are also socially unacceptable, the social and the moral are different, distinct notions. It might be morally neutral to wear a color other than pink on Fridays, but it would merely be a social slight against a group of “mean girls”.
The problem is that the words “right” and “wrong” have several distinct meanings and that it is far too common for people to shift between these different meanings unknowingly. The two easiest senses to distinguish between are “morally right” and “factually right.” A sentence is factually right if what it says about reality is true and factually wrong if what it says about reality is not true. The sentence, “Bill Barr wears women’s clothes,” is true just in case Bill Barr frequently adorns himself in women’s attire and false if he doesn’t. But moral statements are not factual statements. They do not describe how people do act, they describe how people ought to act, and very often people don’t act the way they ought to. Ethics does not describe, it prescribes. “Bill Barr should not shoplift panties from the women’s section of Macy’s”. Thus, morally right and factually right are completely different animals.
But there are other distinct notions of “right” besides morally right which are also prescriptive, which tell people how to behave and how not to behave. One can be “legally right” but morally wrong. Take drug laws, for example. In some states, marijuana is legal, and therefore legal right, or at least not legally wrong, to use. Other states, though, marijuana is not legal, and it is legally wrong to use. Morality doesn’t work that way. If something is morally wrong in Wisconsin, then it is morally wrong in Illinois, and morally wrong in Colorado, and Washington, and everywhere else. Laws don’t work that way – something is legally right or wrong depending on the borders that law governs. Laws are made by legislatures. Legislative powers in some cases are given to representatively elected bodies; sometimes this power resides with the population itself, sometimes with dictators or small groups in star chambers. But whatever the mechanism, legal right and wrong are determined by the whims of those legislators.
Laws may require citizens to do things which are morally necessary (don’t murder random people on the street) or they may require people to do things which are morally problematic (return humans who have escaped their masters back to those who own them). Most of the time, however, what the law tells you to do is morally irrelevant. Our laws demand that we drive on the right side of the road, British laws demand that they drive on the left. Which one is immoral? Laws structure society, sometimes in accord with morality and sometimes in violation of morality, but most often laws are merely conventional decisions made to keep some sort of order that have nothing to do with morality.
Now, we hope that laws do not require you to act immorally or make morally required actions illegal. But this may or may not be the case. “Legally right” is the result of a legislative process that may be bought and paid for by moneyed interests, or it may be controlled by people who are acting to benefit only themselves, or it may be the outcome of a compromise that pleases nobody. But the notion of “legal” is the accidental result of a legislative process, which is not the same as moral deliberation. There may even be a moral obligation to oppose immoral laws, but that in no way means that the legal and the moral are the same.
Similarly, groups have their own social mores. You may ask, “What are mores?” When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a more. But, there can be no doubt that etiquette is a strongly socially enforced system. When you’ve committed a 99 faux pas, a social/cultural oopsie, it is made clear to you, and you know not to do it again. But simply because society demands that certain kinds of behaviors be curtailed does not mean that such behaviors are immoral. Picking one’s nose in public is rude and disgusting. It is a behavior that will generate unfavorable comments, lead to disapproving looks, and keep you from receiving further invitations to dinner parties. But as long as you wash your hands immediately afterwards, so as not to communicate any germs beyond your own body, mere rudeness – gross as it may be – does not constitute unethical behavior. Socially wrong and morally wrong are not the same thing.
To see this clearly, consider the case of someone disapproving of a socially acceptable act on moral grounds. Suppose we discover the writings of an antebellum Southern abolitionist, someone who opposed slavery in the South before the Civil War because, she contended, the social institutions that allow someone to own another human being are immoral. This person would be seen as ethically admirable today, but the cultural relativist would have to see this person as morally wrong and irrational in relation to her cultural context.
The reason is that for the cultural relativist, it makes no sense to talk about moral rightness and wrongness outside of social acceptance. Consider the person who says, “It is raining outside, but I don’t believe it is.” This person is an idiot or a liar. He has asserted the truth of a statement and then asserted that he will not accept the truth he has already asserted. Only an idiot refuses to believe what he knows to be true. But if we accept the cultural relativists’ definition of moral rightness, then our abolitionist is in the same position. Because slavery was socially acceptable at the time, according to the cultural relativist, it would be morally right in the society to which she belonged when she condemned it morally. Thus, the statement “Slavery is socially acceptable, but I think it is immoral” would be the same as “Slavery is moral, but I think it is immoral.” The abolitionist becomes an idiot. People who object to common practices on moral grounds might be right or wrong about their claims, but they are not irrational for questioning the morality of everyday social practices, and the only way we can save their rationality is by denying cultural relativism.
While the view is irreparably defective, like ethical subjectivism it comes from a good place: the desire to be tolerant. We want to understand that there are other morally acceptable ways to live life and structure society than what we are accustomed 100 to, and grant that we have something to learn from other cultures. It also stands as a reaction (albeit again an overreaction) to cultural imperialism. Like moral imperialism, this view claims that my culture has it right and every other culture damn well better live like us or they are immoral human beings and ought to be thankful for the waterboarding. There is a long history in humanity generally to subject members of other cultures to horrendous, egregious, despicable treatment simply for being different. Longstanding customs that are well-adapted to the environment in which people live have been forcibly changed, even if the fashions of Western Europe and the United States make no sense in the contexts of the lives of these people. This sort of tampering in other cultures is often morally unacceptable.
But there are two problems. First, cultural relativism undermines its own ends because the cultural relativist cannot morally condemn the cultural imperialism he opposes. The cultural relativist wants to say (1) that it is immoral for one culture to force its ways on another culture, and (2) that there is no sense of morality outside of what any given culture says it is. Notice that the claim in (1) is exactly the sort of universal moral declaration that (2) does not allow. (1) and (2) contradict each other. They can’t both be true at the same time. To end cultural imperialism, there must be a universal, objective moral truth about the wrongness of interfering in the ways of another culture. But the notion of “morally wrong” by the cultural relativist’s own definition is culturally relative. It is impossible to have a universal, objective moral truth about anything!
The second problem is that sometimes cultural practices are so horrible, so evil, such an affront to morality itself, that stepping in to stop them is morally necessary. “Never again” is the slogan that arose from the horrors of the death camps in Europe after the Second World War. This proclamation is ethical, it demands that all people be seen as people, and if that means stepping in to stop the slaughter of innocent lives, so be it. Of course, exactly what justifies intervention, especially military intervention which is sometimes the only way to protect the innocent, is a tricky business. When do we cross the line? Yeah, it’s a hard question, but it’s a real question. Welcome to ethics – it ain’t always easy.
So what we want to keep from cultural relativism is similar to what we found desirable at the heart of the ethical subjectivist’s motivation: the notion that there may be more than one way that is allowable even if we are forced to pick only one. In these 101 cases, tradition or sentiment may be the deciding factors, and we must accept that we will not be able to criticize the character of someone who chooses differently.
Contrary to the relativized definitions of ethically right and wrong, this doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no universal, objective moral notions, it just means that they do not always neatly and completely decide every hard choice for us. There is a difference between every choice being morally acceptable and there being a range of mutually exclusive, morally acceptable options. Sometimes, moral theory can narrow down the field, but not pick a winner. Sometimes there is a moral tie.
The French existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre, gave a moving example of this in his work “Existentialism is a Humanism.” He describes a student who came to him during the Second World War when the Nazis occupied France. His father had become a Nazi collaborator and was thrown out of the family. His only sibling, his older brother, joined the resistance and was killed. He is the only person his aging and beloved mother has left. If he were to go off to fight the Nazis, his mother would not only be broken-hearted, but would likely die. At the same time, if he stayed with his mother, he would not be doing what he saw as his moral duty to try to free his homeland from the evil occupiers. If he joined the underground, he might or might not make any real difference. If he stayed with his mother, he knows he would make a real difference. What should he do? Which comes first: the duty to your country or the duty to your mother? There may not be a single right choice here, but that does not mean that all morality is relative. While either option might be the right one, and we it may not be able to condemn one choice over another, we can still say with certainty that taking an axe and hacking his mother to pieces while swearing allegiance to Adolf Hitler would clearly be a morally blameworthy decision.
So there seems to be an irremovable place for personal decision making, and for sentiment and emotion in moral deliberation, even if we are able to build the sort of box we want. A successful ethical system will show us why the hard cases are hard and why the competing rational choices both seem rational, even if we must ultimately choose one over the other. The resolution of these questions will often require human consideration, not mere calculation.
Sentiment will also be part of the process when we move from deliberation to action, in moving from knowing what you should be doing to actually doing it. 102 Remember that acting in a morally good fashion requires not only figuring out what is right, but having the strength of character to do it. It is often emotion that forces us into action. When we heap blame upon someone who has done something wrong, we often appeal to their emotional failures, not their intellectual ones. Sarah McLachlan is going to keep showing us those pictures of abused animals until we are guilty enough to pick up the darned phone because we all know we can afford to help and therefore we should. When we complete our picture of honest, vigorous, real life moral deliberation, we need to make room for personal choice, sentiment, and emotion in these places.
Divine command theory
A frequent claim that you will hear if you speak about ethics with people is, “My morals come from my religion.” Many people draw tremendous strength from their spiritual faith. Beside empathy, religious conviction surely stands as the other preeminent source of moral courage, the ability to actually go through with what one knows one must do. In the aftermath of the South Asian Tsunami, hurricane Katrina, and any number of other disasters, not to mention feeding the hungry and housing the homeless on any given day, religious organizations are often the ones doing the morally admirable work for the neediest among us. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Dorothy Day, and countless other champions of moral justice and in-the-trenches good works explicitly place their spiritual views atop the reasons they did what they did. Religion can be a tremendous power for good and right.
Of course, every now and then you get a Reverend Fred Phelps, who pickets the funerals of soldiers saying God killed them because the US allowed gay marriage. Torquemada burned and tortured countless people to death for being insufficiently Christian. Yigal Amir, an orthodox Jew, murdered the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in cold blood for negotiating with the Palestinians. Who could question the religious fervor of the Hindus who murdered of innocent Muslims in Gujarat or the 9/11 hijackers? How do we understand religious moral conviction when, in these cases, the practice of it can be so wildly immoral?
There is no doubt that when beginning to deliberate upon a daunting moral question that requires action, it is a fine starting point for your thinking to ask “what would Jesus do”? Or the Buddha? Or Shiva? Or the Great Spirit. Or… But the point of 103 this section is to demonstrate that while religious conviction can be a fine starting point to this discussion, it cannot be the entire discussion. The key difference between a religious belief and a philosophical one is what counts as prove for the truth of the claim. Religion and philosophy have different criteria for what counts as good evidence – and this criterion rarely overlaps. Subjective emotional evidence is powerful religious evidence, but it’s not going to convince a logician. In fact, some religious arguments begin with the logically sound premise that God’s knowledge is inaccessible to human beings and therefore must be taken solely on faith. For our purposes as philosophers, religious criteria alone isn’t sufficient – we need logical argumentation to support claims, even those that have theological origins. Plenty of philosophers throughout time have shown us how to have both religious conviction and philosophical rigor, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Alasdair MacIntyre.
Even though religion and philosophy have different criteria, their subject matters are often overlapping. Religious organizations are social institutions and, as we saw with cultural relativism, there is no doubt that most religions have behavioral codes, usually in the form of rules or commandments. Further, organized religions have reward and punishment mechanisms to make sure that those in the structure obey the rules – indeed with the threat of fire and brimstone, eternal damnation, sitting at the right hand of God, and the promise of 70 adoring virgins, religions take reward and punishment enforcement mechanisms to an entirely new level. Like social etiquette, some of these theological rules overlap explicitly with moral concerns and are perfectly in line with the demands of morality. This is often the point of religious stories and allegories that have unambiguous moral overtones. “Thou shalt not murder” and “thou shalt not steal” are both theologically and morally good rules of thumb.
But just as the ethical is different from the social and the legal, so the moral and the theological are also different. If someone enjoys a hamburger, he may be a bad Hindu; if on Good Friday, a bad Catholic; if during the day during Ramadan, a bad Muslim; if with cheese and/or bacon, a bad Jew; but violating any of these theological rules does not by itself entail that his action is unethical. Just like which side of the road to drive on, some theological rules are moral in nature and some are just part of how you must act to be a part of that religious organization. Some theological rules are moral 104 rules, but just because it is a theological rule does not automatically by itself transform it into a moral one.
This is not to say that the moral teachings of any given religion are not morally good teachings, rather it is to say that subscribing to any given faith does not get you off the hook for thinking hard and deeply about the difficult ethical issues one comes across in real life. To fall back on religion to justify blind allegiance and not consider competing arguments when faced with a real ethical quandary is simply a cop out. Many of the lessons taught by the world’s religions are good ones, and the world would be a better place if people actually behaved according to them instead of merely affixing fish to their car bumpers, but belonging to a religious organization does not allow one to avoid moral deliberation.
The claim that morality is the result of God’s will with respect to how we behave is called Divine command theory, and the notion of moral rightness may be set out in this way:
Divine command theory – An act x is morally right if and only if God prefers that you do x.
While some religions have philosophical reasons for why God prefers x, and there exist moral theories that explore these (such as the Natural Law Theory) Divine Command Theorists are not concerned with discovering or speculating on those reasons. Moral judgments in this view are determined by how well one’s conduct conforms to the desires of the Almighty. The only thing consulted in determining whether an act is right or wrong is what God wanted that person to do in that situation.
A couple of the worries with this position should be obvious. Putting aside all of the metaphysical issues about the existence of God, the problem of evil and the suffering of innocent children, and the ability of God to create a rock so big that even God can’t lift it, there are specifically ethical concerns. The first problem is that defining moral rightness solely in terms of the Divine Will means that making any moral judgment at all requires the ability to know the mind of God.
The historical claim for the Divine Command Theorist is that this Divine will is exposed to people not through reason, but through revelation. Certain people at certain 105 times have had God appear to them in one of a variety of forms, and He has revealed His desires to them. Some of these experiences have been recorded as Scripture. Moral rightness therefore requires strict adherence to rules written in ancient languages and translated into modern language. Holy books, aside from their other functions, are moral code books in this view.
There are three main problems here: 1) the problem of interpretation, 2) the problem of completeness, and 3) the problem of soundness. We’ll look at these in order.
The Scriptures are written words, and written words may be understood in many different ways. This is especially true with the Bible and its many allegories. There are not easy, straightforward, unambiguous meanings to many passages. The question, then, is that if moral rightness derives from the Word, but we only have access to it through a human understanding of the words – and there are several possible coherent understandings – how could we ever know which one interpretation is the right one? This becomes even more complicated when we consider that what we read in our native tongue is a translation from the original written language – there are some words that exist in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek that do not exist at all in English. So who translates the Word, and what words they use to bring out what meanings, can further effect the final product. How could we ever actually make objective moral judgments if the subjective opinion of the translator is present in the very translation of the texts? On every side of every moral issue, you will find authentically religious people who derive the strength of their convictions from their faith. Just as one should worry about anyone who claims to have God’s cellphone number, anyone who claims to have the one true interpretation of all of Scripture ought to be viewed with great suspicion.
But even if we did somehow have uninterpreted access to some underlying Divine sense, there are still two other problems. One is the problem of completeness. If your only source of moral guidance is a book written by prophets millennia ago, what could one do when faced with dilemmas that involve issues not seen in that time? The word “internet” does not appear anywhere in the King James version of the Bible. In vitro fertilization, cloning, surrogate mothers, spousal abuse, “aggressive accounting” and repackaged mortgage-backed derivatives, feeding tubes and life support,…the list of new moral questions that result from technological and social progress goes on and on. Reality is a complex and constantly changing place. Any finite set of rules, no matter 106 how large, general, and insightful, will ultimately be insufficient to handle new cases. We would have to focus on general principles and apply them to specific new cases – which creates another opportunity for us to get our interpretations and applications wrong.
One way to deal with this is to take the Amish route and simply eschew new technologies. That certainly avoids some problems; but it doesn’t answer the question, it merely sidesteps it. There are novel, complex moral issues that must be sorted out, and Scripture, while perhaps helpful as a starting point for discussion, is simply not sufficient to end the discussion for every case.
But apart from the new problems and whether the old commandments are sufficient to handle any moral conundrum that comes down the pike, there are passages that tend to be overlooked in modern times because there are practices that are allowable according to Scripture, but which are nonetheless immoral.
Warning: uncontroversial claim ahead. Slavery is immoral.
Yet, if you go back and look at the debate over slavery in the United States, those who were arguing for keeping the institution legal did so primarily by drawing support for it from Scripture. Nowhere in the standard canon do you find an unambiguous statement that it is wrong to buy and sell human beings and use them as inhuman tools. Indeed, one can point to passages that assert just the opposite, which set out the rules under which slavery is permitted (for example, see Exodus 21: 7-11, Exodus 22:1-3, Deuteronomy 15:12-15, Leviticus 25: 44-46, Ephesians 6:9, and Colossians 4:1). Again, uncontroversial claim, slavery is wrong. But to accept this requires moral reasoning beyond religious belief. It requires moral reasons.
Beyond these deep problems associated with Divine Command Theory, there remains one last significant worry when we take moral rightness completely away from human reason and place it in the realm of faith. By making faith rather than reason the central condition, a problem pointed out by Plato emerges. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates comes across a young man named Euthyphro and discusses the nature of morality. When Euthyphro defends the Divine Command Theory, Socrates asks, “Is an act morally right because God prefers it or does God prefer it because it is morally right?” It’s the moral equivalent of the chicken and the egg, but it has some very serious ramifications for Divine Command Theory no matter which side of the bet you take.
If one says that God prefers acts because they are morally right, then you must accept that the act was morally right before God took a look at it. This requires that moral rightness exists independently of God’s desires and that God then only prefers it because it was already morally right. This takes God out of the moral picture. We need only understand the nature of moral rightness, and do not need any understanding of God at all. He’s just standing there on the side giving a wink and a big thumbs up, but the thumb is not the reason for the goodness. In other words, all God is doing is pointing to the good thing, and the thing that would be good whether God pointed to it or not.
That leaves the other horn of the dilemma, that the reason an act is good is simply that God prefers it. What is good is whatever God decides is good – and that has nothing to do with the goodness of the act itself. That means that if God enjoyed seeing people set infants on fire and roasting marshmallows over them, such horrendous acts would be morally good. The immediate impulse is to say, “But God would never prefer such a thing.” “Well why not?” we ask. “Because it is morally wrong to set an infant on fire in order to make s’mores.”
D’oh, look what just happened. That move takes us back to the first horn of the dilemma, where acts are morally good independent of God. You can’t refer to the morality of an act when that morality is – as you, yourself just claimed – completely determined by what God likes and doesn’t like. You can’t say that God wouldn’t like it because it is immoral, because to be moral just means that God likes it. If there is a reason why God would or wouldn’t like it, then it is the reason that is important, not God’s preferences.
By taking this second option God is kept in the picture, but it would mean that moral rightness and wrongness would just amount to a particular individual’s preference. There could be no good reason why an act would be right or wrong any more than there would be a good reason why God prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla. Therefore, there would never be any reason to think about or discuss moral problems – you buy the chocolate because it’s what God wants, and that’s that. There would never be good reason to think hard about or change our minds about moral issues. We are back to irrationalism.
The other remaining problem about this – especially for the biblical literalists – is that one of the early stories in Genesis is about Abraham willingly bringing the knife 108 down on his son Isaac because God told him to kill the boy. God tested the patriarch by seeing not only if he was willing to commit murder for Him, but if he was willing to murder someone with whom Abraham had a special moral relationship, his own child. We see versions of that sort of behavior today. Consider cults like the Branch Davidians following David Koresh or Jim Jones and the people who were willing to give what they thought was poisoned Kool-aid to their families. We look at these people as crazy, sick, or brainwashed, but certainly not morally exemplary, especially the cult leaders, who, we say, are acting like they think they are God. Demanding or following through on these requests may be a clear showing of religious fervor or commitment, but that commitment is not morality.
The 19th century philosopher of religion Søren Kierkegaard pointed this out when he discussed the story of Abraham and Isaac. What Kierkegaard concludes is that ethical and religious duties are different: ethics comes from reason and religious duties come from faith. Ultimately, he thinks we need to make a leap of faith to overcome ethics and become truly devout. This is what Abraham did when he willingly attempted to murder his innocent and beloved only son; Abraham chose faith over morality. Personally, while there are many people who are both extremely pious and very moral, if someone who put theology before morality were to baby-sit my kids, I would make sure to hide the knives and show them clearly where we keep the sacrificial rams out back next to the altar, just in case the voices show up while we are out at dinner.
So divine command theory is up to its commandments in problems, just like the relativistic views. But there are some aspects to divine command theory that are crucial for our complete ethical system and need to be kept. What motivates divine command folks is the claim that ethical disputes are about something real and that the solutions should not be relative, but universal. Morality is more than just a matter of personal taste. The idea of moral universality, that there is one box for all of us, is a good one that we want to keep.
Further, the idea that there is some aspect of morality that has the form of commandments, what we call imperatives, is absolutely correct. In some cases, we absolutely can look at an action and declare it immoral because it violated a rule that starts “Thou shalt not…” Some actions are, in and of themselves, wrong.
But then the nagging question, “What makes them wrong?” pops up. Being able to simply fall back on “because God said so” would be easy, but it doesn’t work. There is a difference between theologically right and wrong and morally right and wrong. We can – and sometimes do – have ecumenical discussions about morality and these can be enriching and enlightening. But these discussions may be just as enlightening if they include atheists.
We are looking for an ethical system, a box that will tell us when an action is morally necessary, morally permissible, or morally impermissible. We want to be able to use this box and to examine it. We need to know what it is that makes ethical actions ethical and what makes unethical actions unethical. To do this, philosophers since the times of ancient Greece have proposed different systems. Each of these systems focuses on one of five different aspects of the moral situation and tries to elevate that aspect so that it alone becomes the defining characteristic of moral rightness and wrongness. These aspects are:
- the way the behavior affects the character of the person acting;
- whether the action itself is intrinsically good or bad;
- the consequences of the behavior for everyone involved;
- whether it violated the rights of the person to whom the act was done; and
- personal commitments that the person acting has to people he or she cares about.
Consider again Sartre’s student. How would we judge his choice? We would ask a number of very different questions, all of which seem relevant to judging his eventual action. We would ask questions like: Are you really the kind of person who would leave his mother when she really needs you? But doesn’t he have a duty to defend his country when it has been invaded? And what would the results be if he did go? What real difference can one person make in a war effort? Isn’t the choice between making a real difference to somebody or possibly no real impact in something larger? But does he have the right to ignore the needs of his countrymen? On the other hand, isn’t there a special responsibility that someone has to one’s mother? She gave life to you, raised you, took care of you when you were sick, doesn’t that mean something morally?
Each of these is a question that is relevant to determining how one ought to act in this unfortunate situation. Each is based upon a different aspect of the moral situation and each is representative of a different ethical system. What we need to do, then, is test drive each of these boxes and see if any of them are the right answer.
Virtue Ethics
In virtue ethics, the rightness or wrongness of an action results from the effect on the character of the person who did it. The consequences that we consider here are not the material consequences in the world, for example whether the person made a lot of money for doing it, received a medal, or has nasty memes made about them. Rather, we look at what kind of person the person who acted has become as a result of the action. We are what we do. We are only honorable if we do something honorable. We are only brave if we don’t wet our pants at the sight of danger. We are only generous if we give money to good causes, or at least pick up a check every now and then. It is what we do that makes us who we are, not what we feel about it. I don’t care that you really are very, very sorry for what you did with that cigar. Sorry don’t mean nothing. You are a louse if you act like a louse. You are a cad if you act like a cad.
The insight beneath virtue ethics is that human beings are creatures of habit. We are much more likely to do something if it is something we have done before. If it is something we have done many times before, we do it almost automatically, sometimes cavalierly. This is the psychological reason behind marketing and brand loyalty. If they can get you to try their product once, you are, in verifiable fact, significantly more likely to pick it up again in the future. It is the reason that many criminals get caught. At first, they are very careful to cover their tracks, knowing how bad their action is. You’d think that the more they get away with it, the more skilled they would become at leaving no trace of their identity behind. But what often happens is that they become sloppy because the action no longer seems that far out of the usual course of things. There seems to be less reason to be concerned with covering their tracks.
Whenever we act, we shape our underlying moral structure and make it more likely that we will act in certain ways thereafter. This is not to say that we are irreversibly programmed, but that we are certainly psychologically affected in such a 111 way that it ultimately takes concentration and effort, sometimes great effort, to change our ways once they are set.
What we now know from detailed sociological and psychological research was pointed out in the 4th century B.C. by Aristotle, the father of virtue ethics. He held that the human mind is shaped by human actions and this is what we call our character. We are perfectly free to choose our character through our actions when we are naïve, young, and stupid, but over time that character becomes more and more set until we are crotchety, old, and stupid.
There are certain properties that ideal people have and less than ideal people lack. Those properties are called virtues. The properties that less than ideal people possess, but ideal people do not, are called vices. To behave in a fashion that is morally correct is to act in such a way as to become virtuous. To act unethically is to act viciously. Virtues are something that everyone has the potential to actualize through actions, and so are vices, but no one is just born virtuous or vicious. That is a matter of what you choose to do, and what you choose to do as a matter of habit.
The obvious related questions are, “Who is the ideal person?” and “How do we determine what are the virtues and vice?” The answer to the first is either Mr. Rogers or Mother Teresa, or maybe the love child of Mr. Rogers and Mother Teresa, who would probably look a whole lot like a wrinkly Ron Howard.
Aristotle, however, addresses the second question concerning how we figure out what are the virtues. He says that the key is to understand that each human, by being a natural member of the human species, has an inborn goal. A taller, stronger oak is a better oak, and all oaks come from acorns, so for each acorn there is a natural, innate goal: to be a strong, tall oak. Those things that lead the acorn to actually become the oak it potentially could be is good for the acorn. In the same way, there is embedded in human nature potential that we may or may not actualize through our actions, and to actualize that potential is what “good” is for humans.
The human mind or soul (they meant the same thing for Aristotle) has two parts that are particular to humans. One part deals with knowledge of facts, logical reasoning, and analytic problem solving; the other part deals with ethical matters. One part is for intelligence, and the other is for wisdom. With respect to intelligence, more is always better. No one ever said, “Oh, you won on Jeopardy. I’m sorry. Maybe next time you’ll be 112 a little more of an idiot, or at least, for your sake, we can hope so.” Knowing something is better than not knowing it. Making fewer mistakes balancing your checkbook is always better than making more.
With the moral part of the soul, however, things are different. Aristotle argues that where intellectual virtues are found in the extreme, ethical virtues, by contrast, are found in the mean, in the middle. The key is to find the happy medium. Too much is bad, too little is bad, down the middle is just right. To be standoffish or over-effusive is bad, to be even-tempered is virtuous. Cheap bastard or spend like Imelda Marcos in Payless, both bad; generous is good. Wet blanket or buffoon, bad; witty, good. The middle road is the path to virtue according to Aristotle. The virtuous action is the action that will be the right thing, at the right time, to the right degree, for the right reason, and for the right ends.
How in the world can you figure that out? You learn through practice, but building up a good character, and then it becomes second nature. If every day I leave the house and I don’t kill anyone, it won’t be hard for me not to kill someone today. But if I’ve been killing people every day for a year, it might be just part of my normal routine. I’ve gotten in the habit of killing people. The actions you do repeatedly build up habits that become second nature, part of your character. The way muscle you want to exercise to be able to determine the right thing to do (at the right time, to the right degree, etc.), is your practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is like street smarts – it’s an intuition you hone based on experience that helps you figure out how to read the situation and determine the right action. You can’t be practically wise by reading about what other people do, or by studying virtuous people; practical wisdom requires action. You can’t learn how to play the guitar by reading about guitarists, or by watching YouTube tutorials. The only way you’ll learn how to play the guitar is if you pick up a guitar and start playing. The same is true of virtue – you have to use your practical wisdom and practice, and the more your practice, the better you’ll get.
Some folks object to virtue ethics through what’s called the universalization problem. Is the ideal person ideal for everyone? Isn’t it, in some sense, determined by individual circumstances and each person’s own goals? That is the view of some contemporary virtue ethicists, like Nel Noddings. Noddings argues that we each have an ideal ethical self – a realistic picture of the person we really could be, living the life we 113 really could lead. It is from this image and what we would need to do to live up to it that we get our virtues. You may be the sort of person for whom a full life includes a significant place for contributions to the arts or maybe it is a life dedicated to furthering scientific knowledge. Creativity and freedom of mind would be important virtues for the first person, while rigor of mind and patience may be more crucial for the latter. One’s own projects will determine what qualities are to be preferred.
We can now set out the system explicitly:
Virtue Ethics : An act x is morally right if and only if doing x makes me more like the ideal person I could be.
The sort of person you should be may be universal if you follow Aristotle or a matter of personal circumstance if you follow Noddings, but either way, it gives us grounds for moral judgment. “Can you believe what that lying sack of fertilizer just said?” now has moral teeth because no matter who that person is, his or her ideal moral self would most likely rise above the level of “lying sack of fertilizer.”
But there are problems. If we just focus on the person acting and whether the actions are virtuous, sometimes we get it wrong. Immanuel Kant points out that the last thing you want is a virtuous criminal. If someone has bad intentions, the last thing you would want is someone clever, brave, and temperate. The most evil villains in literature and film are also the most virtuous. Think of Count Dracula or Hannibal Lector. They are so much scarier because they don’t make the mistakes of someone who does not display such virtue in being so vicious. This is why it’s so crucial to understanding virtue ethics that we understand the theory as a character-based ethic rather than an action based one. Vicious people can do virtuous actions, a virtuous person can have bad days. But a virtuous person will never be a serial killer, and a vicious person will never be a saint.
Let’s now shift the focus off of who did it (character) and onto what they did (action).
Deontology
The ethical system that locates rightness or wrongness in the action itself is what we call deontology or duty-based ethics. Unlike virtue ethics, this is an action-based ethic, meaning that the goal is to focus solely on performing moral actions, and not focused on developing a good moral character. Rightness, it holds, is intrinsic to the act just as blueness is part of blue jeans. The duty-based theorist sees considering some aspect of the situation other than the action itself – say, looking at the effects of the action on the agent or anyone else – to be like looking at someone’s shirt to determine what color his pants are. If you want to know what color his pants are, look at his pants. You want to know if the act was ethical, look at the action.
People may be honorable or not, trustworthy or not, obnoxious drunks who tell you how much they love you and then punch you in the mouth claiming you seduced their girlfriend or not. But it is behaviors, not people, that are ethically necessary, permissible, or impermissible, and to determine the moral status of an action the only thing we need to consider is the action itself independent of any context.
Murder: bad. It doesn’t matter whether you are Professor Plum, Colonial Mustard, or Charles Manson. It doesn’t matter if you used a candlestick, a revolver, or several brainwashed, strung out followers. Murder is intrinsically wrong, and we have a moral duty not to murder. Duty-based ethics are based on universal, absolute rules. To act in an ethical fashion is to follow the rules. If you break a rule, you violate morality. Codes of ethics that you see in various professional and social organizations have this sort of system underlying them.
People who are comforted by Divine command theory intuitively hold a duty based system to be the foundation of ethics, and the move to bring in God can be seen as an attempt to deal with one of problems of a duty-based system. If moral rightness and wrongness are intrinsic properties of actions, how do I tell which it is for some specified action? With blue jeans, I just hold them up to a light or put them in a fancy spectrometer. We can always determine with absolute certainty whether something is blue or not. But there is no ethicometer. Ethical properties are not descriptive of the way the world is – they tell us how it ought to be. So, who decides what the rules are? Who is to say how the world ought to be? God is an easy answer to that question. Easy, that is, until we really start thinking hard about it. But if not God, then who?
But the problems get worse. If morality is determined by absolute, universal rules, then those rules would have to cover a potentially infinite number of possible actions. As such, we’d need a potentially infinite number of rules. But I can’t know an infinite number of rules; hell, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast. That means that morality is beyond my limited human intellectual capabilities, and so I, and every other mere mortal, am off the moral hook. After all, no one can reasonably demand that I do what I am incapable of doing, and I am incapable of knowing all the rules.
An answer to these problems came from Immanuel Kant, a man so rule-bound that he died a virgin and would have his manservant wrap his hands before bed. Kant’s extremely clever complete answer to this question includes lots of words like a priori, prolegomena, and antinomy, and so was not understood for about half a century after his death. But the basic idea is that if you pop open the rule-based box, inside is another box that makes the rules. Whenever a situation is put into the duty-based box, the second box looks at the paper, generates the proper rule, and if the action is in accord with the rule, the green light goes on and if it violates the rule, the red light goes on. So now all we have to do is open up that second box to see how it works. This second box is what Kant called the “categorical imperative.” It works like this, take the action, remove all context – who did it, to whom it was done, why it was done, when and where it was done, what happened as a result of doing it,… – ignore it all. Get down to just the bare action and ask, “Which ought to be the universal rule, always do it or never do it?” or “What if everyone did it?” This will serve as your ethicometer and illuminate the intrinsic ethical nature of the action for you. Think of “What if everyone did it?” it as the rule that generates the rules.
The system can now be set out explicitly:
Deontology : An act x is morally right if and only if there is a universal moral rule ‘Always do x.’
When deciding whether it is ok to murder someone who delights in creating a public nuisance, forget about who it is, what the world would be like without him, what the punishment would be for killing him,..none of that matters. Just ask whether “always murder” or 116 “never murder” ought to be the universal ethical law. The fact that “never murder” is the appropriate choice makes that and every other murder morally wrong – no matter what. But while Kant seems to have answered our two concerns above, there is another problem. By placing the ethical properties of an act solely within the nature of the act itself, we lose the ability to deal with cases where the consequences of the act seem to make a big difference.
Suppose you are asked by an angry person with a gun where his intended victim is hiding. You know the intended victim is a good person, you know the murderer has a mistaken belief about the person but won’t listen to you, and you know the hiding place. Kant says that morally you need to tell the truth. Really? And get an innocent person killed? Don’t listen to Kant. Don’t tell the murderer the truth. Consequences matter. An unnecessarily dead good person is a bad thing. So, while there is definitely some sense in which ethical rules are important to a complete ethical system, sometimes you have to break the rules to act morally.
Utilitarianism
You are sitting in a park people watching. A stranger walks up to you and, for no reason at all, hands you a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. As you say, “Thank you,” and take a bite, another stranger walks up and, for no good reason at all, punches you in the nose. First act, good; second act, bad. Why? Simple. The first act generated happiness and the second act generated pain. Our actions have ramifications in the world around us – real life costs and benefits. We can choose to act in ways that either make the world a better place for everyone in it or act in ways that don’t. Morality seems to say that determining the rightness or wrongness of an act requires determining whether the act will result in a better or worse world.
The system where the consequences of an action are the determining factor in the rightness or wrongness of an action is called utilitarianism . The utility or usefulness of an action is the reason an act is ethically necessary or not. To determine whether an act is moral or not, perform a cost benefit analysis taking equally into account the pain and pleasure of everyone affected.
Should I lie? The answer, according to the utilitarian, depends upon to whom and about what? To some attractive woman in a bar about what kind of car I drive? No. This 117 lie, while at best may produce passing pleasure, in the end will cause things to come out badly for everyone involved. Should I lie to my best friend in order to get her to the surprise party I know she’ll enjoy? Of course. How about to the angry person with the blunt instrument in search of his victim you see hiding in the bushes? You lie. To the three-year-old who asks you if Santa is real? Don’t be a jerk.
The utilitarian asserts that there is nothing intrinsically wrong about lying. In fact, there is nothing intrinsically right or wrong about any action. It all depends upon whether the lie will have better or worse consequences than not lying. But those consequences need to include all the consequences, even the long term ones, not just the “it makes life easier at this moment” ones. The seemingly convenient lie will often have very bad unintended consequences. But that does not mean that one ought never lie. Repeat after me, “No, I don’t think that makes your butt look big at all.”
The folks who advocated utilitarianism in the 19th century were also the people in favor of political reforms that gave more people, including women, the right to vote. The idea behind both of these systems is that everyone’s pain and pleasure is considered equally – the moral equivalent of one person, one vote. Everyone’s potential pain and pleasure are all thrown onto one big ethical tally sheet, and everyone is considered equally in the calculation, no matter who it is. If someone experiences more pain or pleasure, of course the amount is considered, but whether it is prince or pauper is completely irrelevant. Utilitarianism is meant to be democratic ethics.
These are also the folks who championed free market economics. The idea that the marketplace is rational and will stabilize prices in order to maximize overall benefit for everyone is right in line with the idea that ethics ought to do the same in the same way. It is fully intended to make moral deliberation into ethical accounting.
We can set out the system, then in this way:
Utilitarianism : An act x is morally right if and only if it is the action that brings about the best overall consequences.
We are morally responsible for the state of the world around us, and to be moral is to act in such a way that we leave the best possible world behind.
So, what could possibly be wrong with that?
Imagine that one day you come home to find that you have been robbed. Your computer, TV, ipad, speakers – gone. You go room to room noting that your most expensive leisure-time and labor-saving devices have all been stolen. Shocked, you walk into the kitchen and there, on the refrigerator, under a “Save the Children” magnet you’ve never seen before, is a note: “Got tired of waiting for you to call, so I just took all your stuff and hocked it. Using the money to feed and build schools for the children of three villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks for your ‘generosity.’ Sincerely, Bono.”
There is no doubt that the wealth tied up in your entertainment equipment is generating more overall good in the world having been liberated from your sorry, Dorito-eating, couch potato possession. Does that make it morally appropriate to send in the Bono brigade to burgle your home? Maximizing utility in cases like this does not lead to ethical action, quite the opposite. And if one were to confront Bono, and they indignantly ask why shouldn’t they do what they can to help these people in need, your response would most likely be, “You have no right to come into my home and take my stuff.” While there is certainly an aspect to a complete ethical system that hinges on leaving a better world than we found, ethical right and wrong here seems to hinge on this idea of rights which – at least in this case – seems to trump utility.
Rights-based Ethics
In the 20th century the most influential moral notion was that of rights. Women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, human rights; all have been the rallying points from which injustice was fought, and, in some cases, outright defeated. Exclusion from full humanity and citizenship is the hallmark of an unjust social structure, and the most powerful moral weapon in the dismantling of barriers put up by the haves to keep the have-nots out has been the notion of rights.
One of the reasons this tool has been so effective is because the notion of rights is also crucial to the haves. The place where the concept of rights begins is with property rights, with the erection of social protection structures for the stuff of the wealthy and the ability to enforce contracts so that they have a stable business environment in which to seek further enrichment. What property rights do is guarantee that nobody can mess with my stuff and that I’ll get paid if I sell it. The powerful are almost always also the 119 rich, and in order to keep what they have in terms of both wealth and power, they rely on the inviolability of a structure based on rights.
It was then a very small step to extend the notion of rights from keeping my things safe to keeping my body safe, and then we were off and running, declaring moral rights to protect our privacy, access to healthcare, and countless other needs. More and more got packed in until we started seeing claims like “I have a right to drive a gas-guzzling, fume-spewing SUV,” regardless of how it impacts the environment or other cars in collisions.
We now throw around the term “rights” without having any real sense of what it means. To fix this, we must first distinguish again between the notions of legal and moral because we use rights-talk in both cases. If a buddy confided in me that he got herpes from his roommate’s girlfriend and I promised to keep it secret, and then I immediately text this fact to a mutual friend, I cannot cite the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in my defense. Breaking confidence while gossiping is not a federal crime, but it does make you a slime bag. Your legal right to free speech means that you cannot be arrested for saying most things. It doesn’t mean that there are no moral responsibilities to watch what you say. Just as in the case of cultural relativism, where we had to be careful not to confuse legal with moral, here we need to keep legal rights – which again are decided by the whims of a legislative body – distinct in our minds from moral rights.
This difference is part of the reason why we see so much talk about human rights from the United Nations, a body which sits outside of individual governments and the legal rights they may or may not grant to their citizens. The UN advocates for measures that bring the legal rights of each individual nation closer to the basic moral rights shared by all people. The idea of universal human rights is a moral notion, and the hope is that by having an extra-governmental organization concerned about moral rights, we may be ableThere are two reasons why this does not devolve into cultural relativism. First, universal human rights are always present to serve as a lowest level of inalienable rights. The social contract is constrained by the demands of basic human existence and flourishing. Second, the contract is based on a moral good that the group has chosen to elevate – equality, security, freedom – and there may be deep, intellectual discussion about whether this good ought to occupy a privileged place. Rationality may still exist in the negotiating of the social contract. to affect the granting of legal rights within individual countries in such a way that legal and moral rights converge.
Where virtue looks at the actor, duty looks at the action, and utilitarianism looks at everyone in the world, rights-based ethics focuses all attention on the person to whom the act is being done. The central insight is that all human beings have the same basic needs and the same basic conditions that will allow them space to develop freely and 120 flourish. As such, since every human – and animal rights advocates argue, every member of the animal kingdom – is an autonomous being who by his/her/its very nature has a certain intrinsic value, the conditions of their thriving ought to be morally protected from transgression.
But not all of the conditions for human or animal flourishing are the same everywhere and at all times. Certainly, what is needed in some contexts is different from others. This is where we bring in the concept of a social contract that both affirms universal human rights and allows for local variation. Societies are set up differently, and in each, rights are distributed differently. In some cases, the distribution is designed to maximize individual freedom, in other cases to maximize social orderliness and security, in others to maximize equality. There are competing moral goods, and different groups in different contexts will choose to elevate different ones as primary. This can even change in a single culture over time, so the social contract is dynamic, constantly renegotiated in the face of a changing social context.
It is here that we see some of the cultural relativists’ insights beginning to appear in a more sophisticated form. In normal times, markets may be allowed to set prices, say, for plywood; but after a natural disaster, where scarcity may take the price of goods necessary for the protection of life and property through what little is left of the roof, price gauging makes you a scum bag. Rights are not entirely absolute and may vary with the social context.
But regardless of the source of the right, universal or from a social contract, we can now define our basic moral vocabulary.
Rights-based Ethics : An act x is morally permissible if and only if it does not violate any person’s rights
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” As long as you are not violating the rights of anyone else, you may do as you darn well please.
And that is the key to rights-based ethics; it entails purely negative duties. Rights never tell me what I have to do for you, they only say what you can’t do to me. For all of the historical heavy-lifting they have done over the last couple of centuries, the moral concept of a right is an extremely weak notion. You can act in a way that doesn’t violate anyone’s rights and still be a complete prick.
Suppose you are taking a walk down the street and you suddenly have what seems at the time to be a great idea. You want to write it down so you don’t forget it, but you don’t have a piece of paper. Suddenly, you realize that you are passing a yard sale, and there on the table is an old notebook for a nickel. You buy it and write down your idea. Later, when leafing back through the notebook, you come across some strange symbols and a paragraph from the former owner as to their meaning. It turns out that it is the chemical formula for a substance that would be the greatest wonder drug in history. It can cure cancer, AIDS, malaria, sleeping sickness, male-pattern baldness, menstrual cramping, and erectile dysfunction – every major threat to humanity. You now own this piece of paper because you bought the notebook and have acquired the right to use its contents as you see fit. You could turn this piece of paper over to medical science and save the lives and end the suffering of many people.
But, if you follow a rights-based ethic, you wouldn’t have to. You can do whatever you want. You could burn it. You could eat it. You could go to oncology wards and wave around the page saying, “I bet you wish you had this,” while dancing the Can-Can. That page is yours to do with as you please, and you don’t have to be a nice guy to still be moral according to a rights-based system.
The folks who buy into rights-based ethics Locke, stock, and barrel are called Libertarians. Just as ethical subjectivists elevate tolerance above all other virtues to the status of the one and only virtue, so libertarians elevate individual freedom above all other moral concerns. Rights are needed to guarantee individual freedom, all else be damned. It is certainly true that, all other things being equal, liberty is an incredibly precious thing that ought to be protected with one’s life if need be. One cannot say 122 enough about how important and wonderful freedom is. But, as with tolerance, it is not the only thing. Life is a complicated place, and while liberty is tremendously valuable, it is not, as libertarians want to maintain, the only thing of moral value.
The notebook example above demonstrates the moral poverty of libertarianism. The view is generally supported by well-off, well-educated, self-centered white guys who above all else want to make sure that now that they have theirs, a) no one else will take it, and b) they don’t have to feel guilty about not wanting to share it. By focusing exclusively on rights and the resulting freedoms, libertarians free themselves from what we usually think of when we think of morality, that is, being decent, caring, empathetic human beings who actually give a darn about anyone other than themselves. This is not to say that everyone who calls him or herself a libertarian is a selfish, uncaring clod. Freedom is important and we need people dedicated to protecting it, but it is not the only important thing and those who hold it to be can work against human flourishing. When the notion of rights is allowed to seep its way into questions of morality around personal relationships, we end up with really bad relationships. If your sweetie pie gives you flowers or chocolates on Valentine’s Day because they see it as fulfilling a romantic contract, your honey bunny probably does not really understand the meaning of the word “romantic.” And if smoochums now expects that, having satisfied their end of the romantic contract you are now required to satisfy your part, a visit to a couples’ counselor (or the acquisition of a dating site membership) might be prudent. Being a good person requires more than just avoiding violating the rights of others. It involves actually feeling the pleasure and pain of others, especially those close to you. While the concept of rights needs to be kept in some capacity, morality seems to need to move beyond mere rights to empathy, concern, and care.
Care-based Ethics
One thing that all of the above systems have in common is that they were all developed by men. This is evident in the character of the systems. Notice how they bear a striking resemblance to the way that traditional men’s occupations work: they are legalistic approaches or economic-based approaches. When coming up with a system, it is not strange that men would model that system on other systems of socially enforced behavior. But that is not the only such model.
Carol Gilligan was a research assistant in the laboratory of Harvard psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg, who was studying the development of moral reasoning. He followed Jean Piaget in asserting that one could rank moral maturity with the lowest level being obedience to authority for fear of punishment and the highest level being the use of universal abstract moral concepts such as justice. He noted that boys would frequently reach this most abstract level of moral sensibility, but that girls most often would not, remaining instead in the concrete world of the situation around them. He concluded that males are frequently more morally developed than females.
Gilligan thought that something was wrong, not necessarily in the observations, but in Kohlberg’s analysis of them. Women, she argued, do, by in large, approach moral situations differently. It is, indeed, less based upon strict adherence to cold, abstract rules and more based upon relating to people as the people they are. But this does not mean that girls are less morally developed. It means that women most likely are dealing with a different sense of how one ought to relate morally to other people. This sense is based not around the contractual model of tit for tat and abstract principles, the sort of thing that boys would have to internalize if they were to be successful in traditional male social roles. Rather, it is based around the sort of relational skills that girls would have to master to be successful in the traditional roles reserved for them: wife, mother, nurse, and teacher. In all of these roles, the core principle of the relationship is care. To care about another is to take legitimate interest and concern in their development and well-being.
Notice how different this is from the contractual-based relationships that are standard parts of the work world. In the work world, the focus is not on the development of the other person, but on your own self-interest. You enter into relations with others for the sole purpose of advancing your own interests, and you remain in that relationship only as long as you both believe it is mutually advantageous. If someone else gives you a better price and you haven’t yet signed on the dotted line, see ya. Legal and business relationships are built around the notion of contracts where it is clearly set out what each must do for the other. Once both parties agree to the contract, you are tied in. You now have an obligation under the contract. Once you fulfill your end of the bargain, you are released from the relationship. You need not have anything more to do with the party of the first part. You may choose to continue to do business with this person, but 124 you are under no obligation to do so. In a contractual relationship you only do as much as you have to, and you do it so that the other person will do for you what he agreed to. You act in the interest of the other person only so that he will do what you need him to. Once he’s done it, goodbye.
Care-based relationships are a completely different animal. Where acting releases you from a contractual relationship, with a care-based relationship, acting in the interest of the other person further embeds you in the relationship. You become someone the other person knows she can count on when she needs you. Parents do not keep track of the time and money they spend on their children expecting to be repaid. They act out of love and care, out of a genuine sense of concern for the flourishing of their child. To be a good parent is to willingly sacrifice, to put your child’s interests before your own. The approach to morally good behavior that we see in the other systems fails in cases where there is a special relationship.
Suppose you are late for an important meeting and you see someone broken down on the side of the road. It is cold, raining, miserable. Your eyes meet his as you pass, and you can tell that the person does not have a cell phone. The road is not a main thoroughfare, so it might be quite a while until someone else happens by. If you drive past the person thinking, “I wish I had time to stop for you, but I have a meeting I have to get to,” the person most likely would watch your taillights and simply say, “%$&!.” You’d probably feel a small pang of guilt, and rightly so. It wasn’t the nicest thing you could have done.
But now suppose that it was your best friend whose car broke down, and when your eyes meet, you know he recognized you. Now, when your best friend – the one who lifted the toilet seat just before you revisited those tequila shots and burritos; the one who would vouch for any alibi, no matter how inane; the one who listened to you drone on and on for days about the love of your life leaving you for the person everyone else knew they were sleeping with for all those months – that friend sees your car driving away leaving them stranded in the middle of nowhere. Needless to say, they will add a few more expletives to his rant when watching the fading taillights, and some of them will include your mother. This better not be the same small pang of guilt you felt with the stranger. You just screwed over your best friend. What kind of self-absorbed uncaring piece of garbage are you? Friends, family, and lovers come with an additional level of moral 125 responsibility, an additional level that is not abstract, but which lives in the same world as your loved one. We can set out the heart of the care-based system in this way:
Care-based Ethics : An act x is morally good if and only if you do x because you believe that it will help some particular person with whom you have a relationship live a better life
Moral goodness comes from caring about someone and acting on that care to make their life a place where they are more likely to flourish.
There is no doubt that the foundational insights here are right on the money. There is a special ethical obligation that you take on when you are in a caring relationship. But this ethic of caring cannot be universalized to cover all acts. Unless you are Oprah, you cannot care about everyone. At some point, your care for others will necessitate neglecting the well-being of those you began caring about first. If you really care about someone, it means that you are willing to put her welfare above others. If you try to elevate everyone to that level, it will quickly become self-defeating. There are – and must be – people you don’t really care about. That doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t care about them if you knew them or knew of their plight. If you are a decent, empathetic person, of course you would.
Not being in a caring relationship with every other person on the planet does not mean that you do not have an obligation to those other people. You do. That’s why care-based ethics is by itself – like all the other views – insufficient. At best, it must be a part of the larger complete system.
Now what?
Ok, so there are five aspects to moral situations and a proposed ethical system that takes each of them as the single, unique factor that needs to be considered in making a decision about what is morally necessary.
| Aspect of the situation | Ethical System based on it |
| The person acting | Virtue Ethics |
| The action itself | Duty Ethics |
| The consequences of the action | Utilitarianism |
| The person the action is done to | Rights-Based Ethics |
| Special relationships of the person acting | Care-based Ethics |
For each and every one of these systems, there are cases where each hits the nail right on the head, and for each there are cases where following them is clearly wrong. None of them is sufficient on its own, but each properly paints part of the picture. The natural instinct is to say, “Can’t we put them together and get one big system? Can’t we figure out a way to hook all the boxes together into one big box?”
Well…yes and no. This is where we tun to discourse. We do employ all of these ethical systems when we think and talk about ethics. Listen closely when you hear those around you talking bout moral issues, they will use the language of virtue, duty, consequences, rights, and care. All of these are part of how we think about the hard moral questions.
What is fortunate for us is that in the overwhelming majority of cases, all five of these ethical systems point us in the same direction. This is why we have the mistaken idea that we have some natural intuitive sense that guides us. We have a complex sense of morality, but in most cases there’s nothing complex happening so it all seems so easy.
Until it doesn’t. In the hard cases, what we see are two different systems giving us two different prescriptions for ethical action. Take the case of the murderer looking for the innocent victim. Deontology says to never lie, so tell the murderer where the hiding spot is. Because the harm of telling the truth in this case outweighs any minor harm from lying, utilitarianism tells you not to tell the murderer where the victim is hiding. Which do you listen to? In this case, utilitarianism.
But always? No. If we generate tremendous pleasure by enslaving a small subpopulation, utilitarianism says you have to do it. Deontology tells you that slavery is wrong. In this case, deontology wins.
In these two cases, it was easy to pick the winner. But in our hardest cases, it is not easy at all. That is why the hard moral problems are hard. We have a multifaceted account of ethics and the persistent problems, the ones that seem like they have no 127 solution, are the cases where two or more of our moral systems disagree with one another concerning what to do and we have strong cases on both sides. It is not that these cases don’t have solutions. It isn’t that there is not a best answer. It is just that it is unclear what the best answer is. This is where we need to talk and think. This is where we need to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the outputs of the different moral systems and engage in thoughtful, open-minded ethical discourse. These moral systems will not always determine the answer for us, but they will give us the comparative grounds upon which to collectively decide.