Doing What's Right

The Limits of Our Worth, Power, Freedom and Destiny

David W. Gooding, John C. Lennox

• Publisher: Myrtlefield House
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781912721214
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Book 4 – Doing What's Right, Gooding and Lennox present particular ethical theories that claim to hold the basic principles everyone should follow. They compare the insights and potential weaknesses of each system by asking: what is its authority, its supreme goal, its specific rules, and its guidance for daily life? They then evaluate why even the best theories have proven to be impossible to follow consistently.

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Chapter 1Questions for Ethical Theories

In times past, ethics was naturally faced with the age-old problems of sexual morality, war, racism, poverty and capital punishment. But nowadays, new technological advances are raising additional huge and difficult fundamental issues . . . just at the time when multitudes of people have lost (if they ever had) even the remnants of a religious belief to underpin and guide their ethical values and decisions.

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Introduction

There is no doubt that for many people the world has become an ethically uncertain and bewildering place. Strong communitarian ideologies, with belief-systems and practices enforced from the centre, have faded, leaving millions of people around the world with no settled source from which to derive their ethical beliefs, their long-term values and guidance for their moral behaviour in private, social, commercial and political life.

At the other extreme, western liberalism is not without its severe critics. Since the days of its famous philosophical advocate, John Stuart Mill (1806–73), it has certainly led to great individual freedom and to prosperous economies (though it is differently interpreted in different countries). But starting with the ‘negative rights’ of individuals to be left free, as much as possible, from interference by others (and in particular by legal authorities) in matters of conscience, lifestyle, tastes, inclinations, commerce, property, etc., it has developed a demand for ‘positive rights’ to a variety of sophisticated goods, without a balancing recognition of the duties that are entailed by rights, and with a consequent reluctance to affirm any substantive moral values. Professor Brenda Almond, herself a liberal, writes:

Contemporary criticism of liberalism, whether from the left or right, arises from a fundamental malaise occasioned by a general decline in the conditions of life in modern liberal ­societies—the rootlessness of the privatized individual in a mass society, crime, pornography and the decline of the ­family—in sum the moral and cultural vacuum to which some versions of pluralistic liberalism appear to lead . . . Many of the ills of liberal societies stem from the decline of the family and the breakdown of the contractual elements in human relationships . . . it has in effect become in a modern state, impossible to marry—if by that one means to make a long-term (or even fixed term!) commitment binding |46|on both parties. And states have removed ultimate responsibility for offspring, too, by well-intentioned but ill-advised measures of support for unsupported families.1

Modern difficulties for ethical theory

In times past, ethics was naturally faced with the age-old problems of sexual morality, war, racism, poverty and capital punishment. But nowadays, new technological advances are raising additional huge and difficult fundamental issues related to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, embryonic implants, the cloning of human beings, customized babies, etc. just at the time when multitudes of people have lost (if they ever had) even the remnants of a religious belief to underpin and guide their ethical values and decisions.

In addition, many are succumbing to philosophical and scientific theories which teach that in each person there is no unified, continuing self that can maintain a consistent, principled stance towards life but only a kaleidoscopic succession of immediate impressions and reactions. And on this assumption the difficulty of developing stable, character-forming beliefs is aggravated by two further difficulties.

The first is one of the by-products of the astonishing development of information technology. Its benefits need not be rehearsed; but they have a downside. Through the Internet, people’s minds are flooded with information from all over the world on every conceivable topic. The result is that many find it difficult to analyse the comparative worth of all the information, facts, views, theories, philosophies and religions with which they are presented. More­over, undigested information is not true knowledge, and unanalysed knowledge is not necessarily understanding. As a result, forming a well and rationally thought out morality and worldview becomes not easier but harder.

The second difficulty in developing stable ethical belief is postmodernism’s pluralism, which teaches people to think that in all this massive information there is no objective truth anywhere. |47|One interpretation is no more right or wrong than any other. All our understanding is culturally determined. We therefore cannot hope truly to interpret past cultures, or even present cultures other than our own; and since our own culture may well think differently in the future from what it thinks now, what is the point of trying to develop any permanent ethical principles?

What is forgiveness? Are we morally obliged to forgive everybody unconditionally? Has ethics anything to say to genetic engineering, eugenics and the production of designer babies?

Nevertheless, we still have to live, and that means facing unavoidable ethical decisions that are forced on us from every angle. Are we or are we not, as students, to cheat in examinations? Is it right for a husband to be unfaithful to his wife, or a wife to her husband? Is abortion murder? Is suicide sin? Is assisted euthanasia a crime? Is tax evasion wrong? Is bribery always wrong? Is the profit motive unethical? What is the purpose of punishment? Is it retribution, deterrence, reform or all three? What is forgiveness? Are we morally obliged to forgive everybody unconditionally? Has ethics anything to say to genetic engineering, eugenics and the production of designer babies? If the cloning of human beings becomes technically possible, does that automatically make it ethical? Or has society the right to control what scientists may, or may not, do? Is it morally acceptable for public television to broadcast pornography, obscene language and unnecessary violence for children to watch? Or is censorship too great a danger to the freedom of the press, and of the arts, to be acceptable? And what ought law to be? Should it simply reflect and guard current society’s values, which can, and do, change from generation to generation? Or should it enshrine and enforce certain absolute, unchanging values and principles?

These questions, then, and thousands like them, will call for answers; and unless ostrich-like we put our head in the sand and retreat from society into isolated private lives, we shall have to think through these ethical problems. On what basic principles and values shall we base our thinking? Merely responding with off-the-cuff, ­unthought-through solutions, based on the mood of the moment or on unrecognised prejudice, is hardly likely to come up with responsible, satisfactory answers.

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A fourfold analysis of ethics

There are four major questions that we should ask about any ethical theory:

1. What status, basis and authority does it claim?
2. What is its supreme goal?
3. What specific rules does it lay down for daily life?
4. What guidance does it give for application to daily life?

Question 1. What status, basis and authority does it claim?

Under this heading we ask such questions as: What does this theory offer us? Is it shrewd, practical advice on how to behave, advice that we should be wise to follow? Or does it claim more than that? Does it claim authority to prescribe how we ought to behave and lay down commands that it is our duty to obey? This in turn raises the question: on what, according to this theory, is ethics based? Is it based on the individual’s personal choice of moral standards? Or on the consensus of society? Or on Nature and evolution? Or on the laws of the State? Or on God’...

Table of contents

• The Quest for Reality and Significance
• Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Analytical Outline
• Doing What’s Right
• Series Introduction
• The Status, Basis and Authority of Ethics
• 1. How We Perceive the World
• 2. What Should We do, and Why?
• 3. The Source of Objective Moral Values
• Major Contemporary Ethical Systems
• 4. Christian Ethics
• 5. Act Utilitarianism
• 6. Intuitionism
• 7. Kantian Ethics
• 8. Virtue Ethics
• 9. Egoism
• What Use Is Ethics?
• 10. Determining the Value of a Human Being
• 11. The Ethics of the Transmission of Life
• 12. Ethical Issues Raised by Science and Technology
• 13. Exercises in Ethics
• 14. Beyond Ethics
• Appendix: The Scientific Endeavour
• Series Bibliography
• Study Questions for Teachers and Students
• Scripture Index
• General Index
• About the Authors