Philosophical Ethics

An Historical And Contemporary Introduction

Stephen Darwall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429977985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book shows how Hobbes, Mill, Kant, Aristotle, and Nietzsche all did ethical philosophy? It introduces students to ethics from a distinctively philosophical perspective, one that weaves together central ethical questions.

Part One

INTRODUCTION

1

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS?

Ethical Opinion and Human Life

Ethical thought and feeling are woven throughout our lives in ways we rarely appreciate. We all have some implicit ethics, whether we know it or not—even if we deny that we do. We may occasionally fail or refuse to acknowledge our values, of course. Or avoid developing them into a coherent ethical outlook or philosophy. But we cannot live without values. Those who think we can should consider that without values we would lack such feelings as pride, admiration, respect, contempt, resentment, indignation, guilt, shame, and a whole host of others. Would a life be recognizably human without any of these?

Take pride, for example. To be proud of something is to see it as something to be proud of. This is an ethical thought—namely, that something is worthy of pride, that it has merit or worth.¹ When we take pride in a thing, therefore, we commit ourselves to its value. If we come to think of it as worthless, we can no longer see it as an appropriate source of pride.

It may seem surprising that pride should have this ethical dimension. The point, however, is not that pride has value but that it reveals the values of the person who feels it. If the composer of a nihilistic rock lyric denying all value takes pride in his composition, we may conclude that he doesn’t really believe what his song proclaims. Or that, if he does, there is a conflict between his nihilism and the thoughts we must attribute to him to make sense of his feeling as one of pride.

Analogous points can be made for the other emotions I mentioned, guilt and shame being the most obvious examples. The very nature of these feelings involves standardly accompanying thoughts or beliefs: respectively, that we have done wrong or that something about ourselves warrants shame. Similarly, resentment is the feeling of having suffered an undeserved injury. Admiration is a response to something as having value or merit, as worthy of emulation. And so on. Those who claim to lack ethical beliefs, therefore, are likely to be proven wrong by their own feelings.

And refuted, as well, by their conversation. Talk with others, no less than internal “self talk,” is laced with ethical categories and convictions. Gossip provides particularly good examples. Terms such as ‘jerk’ or ‘creep’ would lose interest for us if they weren’t tied to the idea of warranting disapproval, disdain, contempt, or censure. The same is true of ‘cool’ and other terms of positive evaluation. Imagine someone muttering angrily to himself. What do you imagine him saying? I’ll bet it’s something evaluative—something like “I can’t believe what they want me to do,” something implying an evaluation, such as that an expectation is unfair or otherwise inappropriate.

Nor is it just in emotional response and conversation that we reveal our values. Anyone reading this book is an agent: a person who chooses to act for reasons, and whose choices commit her to views about what choices are worth making. To see this point more clearly, consider the contrast drawn by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) between actions and other occurrences that do not involve self-directed thought and agency. Kant said that although all events happen for reasons, only actions are done for reasons. Only actions can be explained by reference to the agent’s reasons—that is, considerations the person herself took to be normative reasons weighing in favor of her choice.²

Suppose, for instance, that you drop a ball to illustrate to a child how gravity works. Consider the difference between two events: your letting go of the ball and the ball’s dropping. There are reasons for both events, but only your letting the ball go was done for a reason. Only you had a reason for so acting. The ball had none. Nothing was its reason, and dropping was nothing it did for a reason.

To act is to take some consideration as a normative reason to act and to act for that reason. And this, again, involves an ethical thought—namely, that there are respects in which the choice is desirable, or worth choosing. In letting go of the ball for the reason you did, you must have thought that the fact that it might help the child to learn about gravity was a reason to drop it, that this was a respect in which that option was choiceworthy. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have dropped it in order to illustrate gravity to the child.

We can see this point even more clearly from the agent’s perspective in deliberating about what to do. Imagine that you are considering how to spend your evening. What do you do? You look for reasons, the pros and cons of what you might do, in the hope of finding something worth doing and, ideally, finding the best choice. In deliberation we try to make up our minds, but not arbitrarily (as by flipping a coin). Rather, we seek reasons or grounds to determine our choices. And when we act, we commit ourselves to views about normative reasons. Any being entirely lacking in ethical opinions, therefore, could not be an agent. Hence anyone who claims to lack ethical views or attitudes will be proven wrong by his own choices, whatever he chooses to do.

Ethical Inquiry: Normative Ethics

By this point, I hope you are prepared to accept that you have ethical convictions, or at least to grant this as a working hypothesis. However, I haven’t said what makes a belief or an attitude an ethical one (i.e., as opposed to a nonethical belief or attitude, not as opposed to an unethical one). I have given examples: taking something to be worthy of pride, believing an action to be wrong or an injury to be undeserved or something about oneself to be shameful, or thinking that there are reasons for doing one thing rather than another. A central, perhaps the central, ethical notion running through these examples is what philosophers call the idea of the normative, or normativity. Each example concerns what a person should or ought to desire, feel, be, or do. Let us, then, provisionally define ethics as the inquiry into what we ought to desire, feel, be, or do.

Ethical Versus Nonethical Disagreement. Suppose two people disagree about whether the law should permit doctor-assisted suicide. This seems to be a clear case of ethical disagreement. However, it could be based on a further disagreement, and we may wish to consider (especially in trying to understand and perhaps resolve the issue) whether that further controversy concerns ethics or not. Suppose that the only relevant matter on which the two people disagree is whether vulnerable individuals would likelier be taken advantage of if there were such a law. They agree that if the law would have this consequence, it should not be passed and that this would be the only reason against such a law. Moreover, they agree about what “taking advantage” amounts to. In fact, the only thing they disagree about is whether vulnerable individuals would likelier be taken advantage of if there were such a law. Their ethical disagreement concerning the law is thus rooted in a further controversy that is not about ethics at all. They simply have a difference of opinion about what would happen if the law were passed. Here, then, are two people with identical ethical premises who are drawing different ethical conclusions because they disagree about the nonethical facts of the case.

Now imagine a third person who is also opposed to the law, but for a different reason. She thinks that it is morally wrong to assist in suicide and that the law should not permit such immorality. Although she agrees with one of the first two in opposing the law, she disagrees with both in her reasons, since neither of the other two believes that assisting in suicide is immoral in itself. This third person has a deeper ethical disagreement with both of the first two, although she agrees with one of them in opposing the law.

Consider, finally, a fourth person who agrees with the third in opposing the law and in doing so because she thinks assisted suicide is intolerably immoral. Imagine, however, that these two disagree about why assisted suicide is immoral. The third person believes that we are God’s creatures and that He has a proprietary interest in our lives such that it is wrong for anyone else to determine their end point. The fourth person holds no such view. She believes that human life is intrinsically valuable and that killing is always wrong. Is this disagreement ethical or nonethical?

The answer may not be immediately obvious. If we suppose that the fourth person agrees with the third that were there a God we would be His property, and that this fact would make assisted suicide wrong, but simply disagrees about whether God exists, then the two have no fundamental ethical disagreement. The real issue between them would be theological, not ethical. If, however, the fourth disagrees also about whether God’s creating and sustaining His creatures would make them His property, then this would be an ethical disagreement, since it would concern what rights and obligations follow from such a creative act. Or if the fourth person holds that life has intrinsic value whether it is created or not, and the third holds that its value derives entirely from its creator, then, again, we have a disagreement in ethical belief.

Reasons and Normative Ethical Theory. I have gone into these matters in some detail for two reasons. First, it is only by considering the difference between ethical and nonethical considerations at the margins that we can gain an intuitive grasp of the distinction. Second, thinking about the interrelations between our ethical convictions helps us see how they must fit together into a coherent structure, whether in an individual’s mind or in the moral culture of a community. Our ethical convictions are not simply an aggregated set of unrelated items. Some are deeper than others, providing reasons for and supporting the others in much the same way that the third person’s conviction that our lives are ultimately owned by God supports her belief that the law should not permit assisted suicide.

What accounts for this phenomenon? The seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) once remarked that no “moral rule” can “be proposed, whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.”³ Why should this be? Why, when someone says that some action is wrong, or that something has value, do we naturally feel entitled to ask why (if only silently, to ourselves)?⁴ The beginnings of an answer are contained in the insight that ethical propositions concern justification, and that whether some thing is justified depends on whether it is supported by reasons. If, for example, I admire the way a colleague interacts with her students and think it estimable, then I must regard features of the interaction as worthy of esteem, as reasons for its merit or value. Perhaps these reasons include the respect she shows and elicits, the humor and light touch she adds while expressing and encouraging a serious interest in her subject, the way she draws out her students’ best efforts, and so on. I take the value of the interaction to be grounded in these features. These reasons warrant or support my admiration or esteem, not just in the sense that they are signs or evidence of value but also in the sense that these features make the interaction valuable. They are what its value depends upon. Similarly, when a person morally disapproves of something, and expresses this disapproval by saying it is wrong, she commits herself to there being reasons that make it wrong. Someone who disapproves of permitting assisted suicide is thus committed to there being reasons to proscribe it.

I can restate the point underlying Locke’s demand in what philosophers call metaphysical terms: No particular thing can be barely good or bad, right or wrong. If a particular thing has some ethical property, it must be by virtue of other properties it has—either “intrinsically” (in terms of its being the kind of thing it is) or “extrinsically” (in terms of its relations to other things, including its consequences). For example, if you say to me, “You shouldn’t have done that,” that commits you to thinking there was something about what I did that makes it something I shouldn’t have done—that there was a reason why I shouldn’t have.

Discovering what grounds our ethical emotions and choices is simultaneously a process of self-discovery and of developing a deeper understanding of what, as we believe, really is good or bad, right or wrong. For example, I may find myself admiring my colleague’s way of teaching but not be initially clear about what I admire in it, about what I am seeing as its value-making properties. By reflecting on its various qualities and analyzing my responses, I may come to a clearer understanding of just what I find admirable about it. And, in so doing, I may come to a more articulated comprehension of the values of good teaching. I learn something about myself and about certain values (at least, as they seem to me). Similarly, someone may be, as we say, “uncomfortable” with the idea of legalizing assisted suicide, but not be sure why he feels this way. Only by thinking through and analyzing his feelings, ideas, and opinions—especially in conversation with others—can he come to see what really concerns him.

These are cases where one has an ethical conviction but wants to understand what reasons support it. Alternatively, one may lack a conviction on some matter, or have a conviction but doubt or wonder about its validity. Here again, we look for reasons. But now, if we are open and genuinely desire to come to a supportable conviction, we do not restrict ourselves to ethical convictions we already hold. The object, after all, is to find out not what we already think but what we should think. So we have to take seriously the possibility that there are reasons that we have not thought of or that we are aware of but have insufficiently appreciated.

The branch of ethics that inquires into specific ethical issues and the general ideals and principles underlying them is known as normative ethics. As we shall see, there are disagreements about how general and systematic normative ethical theory can be. At one extreme, we find philosophers who believe that ethical truth can be summarized in a few, highly general propositions. According to act-utilitarianism, for example, there is only one principle of right conduct: An action is right if, and only if, it will produce no less happiness overall than any available alternative. At the other extreme, we find thinkers who hold that there is such an irreducible multiplicity of goods and evils, virtues and vices, obligations and prohibitions, that it makes little sense to try to articulate general ideals or principles. Still, virtually everyone who has thought seriously about normative ethics respects Locke’s demand for reasons in some form or other. By its very nature, normative ethics aims at comprehensive and systematic answers to ethical questions, even if the most defensible answers are very complex.

The search for reasons gives normative ethics its direction. Since no particular thing can be barely valuable or right, normative ethics seeks to uncover the grounds of value and obligation—the features that are value- or right-making. And it attempts to do this in a systematic way, with as much generality as the subject admits of.

Philosophical Inquiry About Ethics: Metaethics

I hope it is now evident that both ethical conviction and normative ethics are firmly rooted in ordinary human life and, therefore, in your life. We all have some drive to uncover more general ethical reasons, whether in seeking to understand our own convictions or in trying to answer the ethical questions that confront us. So not only do we all have some implicit ethics, we are all also to some extent normative ethicists. As a formal subject, normative ethical theory simply extends and develops an impulse that is already firmly planted in human experience. It attempts to articulate the grounds of value and obligation in a way that is maximally systematic and maximally sensitive to genuine complexity.

Normally, when we ask questions of normative ethics—“What has value?” “What are our moral obligations?”—we more or less take for granted the categories in which these questions arise. We implicitly assume that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• PART 1 INTRODUCTION
• PART 2 METAETHICS
• PART 3 PHILOSOPHICAL MORALISTS
• PART 4 PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS WITHOUT MORALITY?
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• INDEX