The history of ethics is a history of speculations. Whatever great ethical theory we examine, weāll see that this is so. The highest good in life is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue. The foundation of morality is that one ought to act only on that maxim that one can at the same time will as a universal law. In a given situation, that action is morally right which produces the greatest pleasure among the agentās options. These are the central claims of Aristotle, Kant, and the classical utilitarians, respectively. Each one in its origination is properly described as a piece of speculation, as a conjecture, as a guess. Perhaps one or more of them is a genuine insight into normative reality, or some aspect thereof. All of these ethical hypotheses remain quite controversial within ethics when we consider if they are true, when we consider if we can, or do, know them.
Theories are criticized on many grounds in ethics today. One kind of criticism of an ethics claim is that it is āspeculativeā. This term has a special meaning within the contemporary field of ethics and often means something other than what it ordinarily means. To the layperson all theoretical claims in ethics are speculative. Most people outside ethics donāt believe that ethics is an objective, cognitive discipline in which matters of dispute might be settled or in which we can make progress in any objective sense. What often invites the label āspeculativeā today is that a theoretical claim is not feasible under the current collective understanding of ethics, or that a claim cannot be justified by some evidential, explanatory, or justificatory route that is currently in favor, or that a claim posits entities that have been thought to be justifiably discarded by previous researchers in ethics.
Explorations in Ethics features chapters that originated in a call for talks for the Speculative Ethics Forum I held in New York City. To one extent or another, they may be considered speculative in the strict sense of the term. Problems in ethics are addressed by providing hypotheses to deal with them. Neglected matters are brought into light by speculation. Connections that might hold between different domains in ethics are brought together by speculation. Hitherto unthought of implications of ethical concepts and propositions are brought out by speculation. And speculations are provided to explain why this or that theory has gone wrong. Throughout this volume are numerous familiar matters in ethics. The overall bent of the chapters is to tackle such matters by speculation. If the volume may be said to have an overall import, it is to expand our thinking in ethics beyond what we think today.
1 The Aim of Ethics
Part of what prompted me to seek ethicists to engage in speculative work is a set of concerns about the field of ethics, considering it from a big picture perspective. This introduction could have been titled āThe Case for Speculative Ethicsā. I say the case for speculative ethics, rather than a case, because I havenāt seen expression of similar concerns elsewhere. Thatās why I think it might be useful here to share some of them. The field of ethics today is rich, varied, and covering a lot of normative territory. While some potentially significant normative areas remain unaddressed, certain other current tendencies promise to expand ethics to more comprehensively cover normative space.
There is no ānormal ethicsā today as there is a normal science. That is, there is no single dominant research program or paradigm that ethicists are applying to new areas, refining and improving it in the process. Nonetheless, we have a sense that there have been definite improvements in several different ethical theories. Although different theories are moving in different directions, we have a sense of on what points each is strong and on what points each is weak. At this point in time, I think that, for several reasons, it is important to step back, take stock of what we are doing in ethics, in order to move ethics forward constructively. Being that ethicists are currently engaged in numerous lines of inquiry, it would be helpful to pause to reflect, to what end? What do we wish to find by ethical inquiry? What is that to which all our efforts are ultimately directed? In short, I am asking what is the aim of ethics.
The ultimate aim of ethics is to provide a comprehensive and correct ethical theory. Such a theory would feature a normative system to inform individual agents of what they ought to do that covers large areas of life. To understand what a comprehensive and correct ethical theory would be like, we must engage in some idealization. If one new to ethics were to take the time to look into a random sample of contemporary ethics articles and books, and attempt to determine from that what the point of it all is, one would be at a loss. Ethics is a discipline that is notorious for the multiple ways in which disagreement persists. Not only is there no consensus on which view is correct, there is little agreement on what the correct methods of ethics are, what the purpose of ethics is, or what the definition of ethics is. It would be a source of great embarrassment for ethics if the only conclusion we could draw from these data is that ethics has no point and that it is, at best, a collection of personal intellectual activities.
Idealization is necessary in speaking of the aim of ethics because of the great variety of ethics aims that currently prevail. What I think are necessary requirements of a comprehensive correct ethical theory include four. An ethical theory should feature (1) propositions with very high epistemic credibility, if not the highest, for the normative domain, (2) an explanatory apparatus for the entire normative domain, (3) action-guiding information for a wide range of situations we agents face, and (4) systematic relations between the items meeting these different requirements.
The power of modern ethics is that it promised to meet all four of these requirements in a simple way: through a single supreme principle of morality. Call this āthe modern modelā of ethics. One first embarking on a quest of moral inquiry would find certain moral propositions convincing enough to be the initial candidates for requirement (1). We think of such items as āone ought not to lieā, āone ought not to stealā, and so on. These are often referred to as rules of common-sense morality. The modern era in ethics is distinctive in that at its center it placed a single supreme principle that is supposed to have the highest epistemic credibility of all normative propositions, and that it could be used to prove the rules of common-sense morality. If any such principle could do that, it would meet requirements (1) and (2). The principle of utility, it was held, is better known than any common-sense moral rule, and it would explain why and when we should follow such moral rules. It was also believed by modern ethicists that supreme principles have the central practical function of providing action-guidance to agents in real-life moral situations, thus satisfying requirement (3). Lastly, requirement (4) would clearly be met by the supreme principle. No ethical system could be more simply and strikingly systematic than one which has a single principle from which all moral truths can be derived.
The modern model of ethics has experienced several setbacks. There are doubts that any supreme principle has very high epistemic credibility in the normative domain, doubts that any supreme principle implies all and only moral truths, doubts about the action-guiding capabilities of supreme principles, and doubts about systematicity in ethics in general. Nevertheless, I think that the four requirements for a complete and correct ethical theory retain their value. As various classical normative theories have undergone adjustment, there have been sensible proposals for retaining, in one way or another, connection to the four requirements. For example, as various action-guiding problems were raised for utilitarianism, utilitarians responded by claiming that while the principle of utility provides a criterion of rightness, it should not be understood as a decision procedure instrument.1 In this way, utilitarianism could satisfy requirement (2) as providing an explanation for what makes acts right and might satisfy requirement (3) by allowing some other normative system to do the work of providing action-guidance for agents. In this way, it is possible that requirement (4) might be satisfied, albeit not in the simple way that classical utilitarians envisioned.
2 The Current State of Ethics
Although there is not a single, dominant school of thought in contemporary ethics, there is a distinctive way we do ethics. The dominant approach to ethics is analytic and historically informed. By analytic I mean that it draws from the various major schools of thought introduced and developed in the English-speaking world during the twentieth century, with important contributions from various German-speaking thinkers.2 Most academic ethics today follows lines developed in the analytic approach. Graduate students are educated along the lines of this school. And ways of thinking, writing, criticizing, and publishing in journals have emerged out of all this. Some of the essential features of analytic philosophy are clarity of expression, thoroughness, and carefulness. The process of reviewing articles for publication is quite rigorous. This puts a certain stamp on the results, and impacts how people write, and what they think is important. One obvious way that philosophy has gained from this approach is that different positions and theories are extremely well understood. Even if one doesnāt agree with a theory, assessing the strengths and weakness of it is considered quite important. This goes for contemporary as well as historical theories. That is why analytic philosophy has produced an impressive mass of first-rate scholarship on the work of historic philosophical figures.
What sets the parameters of contemporary ethics can be traced to previous work in analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy has been extremely successful in eliminating claims and approaches that were highly speculative and difficult to justify. What is central to analytic philosophy is its focus on logical and linguistic analyses of claims. With the tools of analytic philosophy, we can subject claims to severe tests. A theory that offers a supreme principle of morality provides material that we can examine to see if it produces any counterexamples. We have the tools to see if a purported supreme principle of morality is really equipped to, by itself, imply all and only rules of morality. An important st...