Ethics

My highlights

An ethical environment is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live. It determines what we find acceptable, or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible. […] It gives us our standards—our standards of behaviour.

For Plato there could be no just political order except one populated by just citizens, although this also allows that inner harmony or ‘justice’ in citizens requires a just political order—there is nothing viciously circular about this interplay. Chickens and eggs have evolved together.

We are much more nervous talking about our good: it seems moralistic, or undemocratic or elitist. Similarly, we are nervous talking about duty. […] We have a right, we think, to be as we are. We assert that we have a right to our own opinions, however stupid or careless we apparently were in forming them.

Human beings are ethical animals. I do not mean that we naturally behave particularly well, nor that we are endlessly telling each other what to do. But we grade and evaluate, and compare and admire, and claim and justify. We do not just ‘prefer’ this or that, in isolation. We prefer that our preferences are shared; when they are important to us we turn them into demands on each other.

The satirist and cartoonist, as well as the artist and the novelist, comment upon and criticize the prevailing climate just as effectively as those who get known as philosophers.

We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience. People who disturb that equilibrium are uncomfortable, so moralists and critics are often uninvited guests at the feast, and we have a multitude of defences against them.

Just as weeds flourish at the expense of other plants, so do some people.

The prisons containing convicted terrorists are filled with deluded young men convinced that their holy book has told them that almost everyone else must be killed. Religion on this account is not the source of standards of behaviour, but a projection of them, made precisely in order to dress them up with an absolute authority.

[T]he death of God is far from being a threat to ethics. It is a necessary clearing of the ground, on the way to revealing ethics for what it really is.

If everybody needs the rule that there should be some rule, that itself represents a universal standard. It can then be suggested that the core of ethics is universal in just this way.

Every society that is recognizably human will need some institution of property (some distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’), some standards governing truth-telling, some conception of promise-giving, some restraints on violence and killing. It will need some devices for regulating sexual expression, some sense of what is appropriate by way of treating strangers, or women, or children, or the aged, or the handicapped. It will need some sense of how to distribute resources, and how to treat those who have none. In other words, across the whole spectrum of life, it will need some sense of what is expected and what is out of line.

On the one hand there is the relativist thought that ‘If they do it that way, it’s OK for them and in any event none of my business.’ On the other there is the strong feeling most of us have that these things just should not happen, and we should not stand idly by while they do.

[I]t is typically only the oppressors who are spokespersons for their culture or their ways of doing it. It is not the slaves who value slavery, or the women who value the fact that they may not take employment, or the young girls who value disfigurement. It is the brahmins, mullahs, priests, and elders who hold themselves to be spokesmen for their culture.

Anyone sincere is of course voicing their own opinion—that’s a tautology (what else could they be doing?). But the opinion is put forward into the public arena. […] The speaker is saying: ‘This is my opinion, and here are the reasons for it, and if you have reasons against it we had better look at them…’ If the opinion is to be rejected, the next move should be ‘No, you shouldn’t think that because…’

It is one thing to explain how we come to be as we are. It is a different thing to say that we are different from what we think we are.

It may provide the reason why we ourselves have inherited altruistic tendencies. The confusion strikes again, however, when it is inferred that altruism doesn’t really exist, or that we don’t really care disinterestedly for one another—we only care to maximize our chance of getting a return on our investments of helping behaviour.

To guard against this confusion, contemplate sexual desire. It has an adaptive function, presumably, which is the propagation of the species. But it is completely off-the-wall to suppose that those in the grip of sexual desire ‘really’ want to propagate the species.

But I do think something has gone wrong if extreme demands are placed squarely in the centre of ethics. The centre of ethics must be occupied by things we can reasonably demand of each other. The absoluteness of the fanatic, or the hair shirt of the saint, lie on the outer shores. Not wanting to follow them there, or even not able to do so, we still have plenty of standards left to uphold.

We may not be able to solve all the world’s problems, but we should do our best with the ones we can solve. So the right reaction is to look for moral principles that are not impractical, and not limitless in their demands. Adhering to anything more stringent might be saintly, and admirable, but it is not demanded of us.

There is something a little off colour as well about some of the ways morality sometimes intrudes into people’s lives. The judge, the priest, or the elders, a panel of the great and the good, may tell people what they must do—but themselves they do not usually have to live with the consequences.

Nietzsche indeed tried to ‘deconstruct’ the benevolent emotions, railing against them as weak or slavish or life-denying, but the attempt is unconvincing and unpleasant, a kind of Hemingway machismo that regards decent human sympathy as unmanly.

Before the 18th century, many moral philosophers thought that […] fundamental principles of ethics could be seen to be true by the ‘natural light of reason’. They were ‘a priori’, having the same kind of certainty as logic, arithmetic, or geometry; you could see from your armchair that they had to be true.

By the end of the 17th century, this theory had lost a lot of ground, especially among philosophers more ready to trust empirical sense experience as a source of knowledge, rather than allegedly divine revelations.

The passions, preferences, desires, and attitudes that we have are supremely important, for it is only in order to direct them towards effective action that we need to know anything about the world in the first place.

You have your tastes, I have mine, and often enough we do not care about the difference. Ethics only rears its head when we feel the need for a common point of view, on matters where anyone else’s different sentiments disturb or offend us or stand in the way of what we regard as the thing to do, the way to go.

Adam Smith is both socializing and operationalizing the ideal self. That is, rather than some abstract, vague, and hazy idea of perfection he locates the element of idealization socially, in the idea of the gaze of others. And by doing so he puts flesh and blood on the idea, in the concrete form of impartial scrutiny. It gives him a secularized version of the religious idea of us being open to the scrutiny of the all-seeing eye of God.

[T]here may be circumstances, one would think, in which virtue requires us to sacrifice something of our own health or happiness. In the limit, virtue and duty may require us to lay down life itself. So there is no automatic alignment between behaving well and looking after ourselves.

The tradition that follows Aristotle is sometimes called the tradition of ‘virtue ethics’. It heroically tries to squeeze together what is natural for people, a life lived according to reason, a happy life, and a virtuous life, seeing all these apparently different things as essentially one and the same.

[I]t takes education to instil into the subject the sense of respect and self-respect which will turn a profit made by losing his soul into a loss. […] It takes a secure and stable political or social system to generate bad effects on the villain, such as loss due to discovery, or loss of reputation. […] It takes a culture or politics to properly identify a lapse from virtue in any case.

[A] life lived amidst lies, or in a fool’s paradise, is not a flourishing life. So the ingredients are there to suggest that real flourishing or true human health implies justice. It implies removing the oppression, and living so that we can look other people, even outsiders, in the eye.

When we try to stop people acting in some sneaky way, a good question is often: ‘What if everybody did that?’ The test is sometimes called a ‘universalization’ test. If the answer is that something would go especially wrong if everybody did that, then we are supposed to feel badly about doing it.

[T]he golden rule can be misapplied. A criminal can throw it at a judge, asking him how he would like it if he were being sentenced.—Yet the sentence may be just for all that. A person in good circumstances may complacently agree that others should not benefit him, if he could be excused from benefiting them. He apparently abides by the Golden Rule. So something with more structure is needed.

A salient example is a shopkeeper who does not overcharge an inexperienced customer, but only because his self-interest is served by not doing so. Perhaps he calculates that the customer is more likely to return, or that his shop will profit from a good reputation. The shopkeeper behaves honestly enough, but not because he has the right feeling that he ought to do so. There is no jewel shining by itself here. This is not the good will in operation.

The core of morality […] lies not in what we do, but in our motives in doing it: ‘When moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of action that one does not see.’ [Kant]

We often want people to act out of love or gratitude, not out of duty. Good parents take their child to an entertainment because they enjoy the child’s pleasure; a parent who takes the child out of a sense of duty is not quite the thing. A lover who kisses out of a sense of duty is due for the boot.

Moral excellence is found only in the strength of the sense of duty. [Kant]

I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law. [Kant]

Kant considers somebody whose principle of action is ‘Let me, when hard pressed, make a promise with the intention not to keep it.’ Then, says Kant, I could will the lie, but I could not will the universal law to lie, for in accordance with such a law there would be no promises at all. It would be willing a kind of contradiction. So we have a Reason against the lying promise.

[M]en are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions. [Locke, on centralized power]

A landscape of trust and cooperation is always ready to be invaded by free-loaders who can exploit it for their own benefit, and these are the ones who will win out in the end. Or are they? Fortunately, no.

If success is measured by number of descendants, and we use the prisoners’ dilemma arithmetic in reverse (so that more is better) then the cooperative people are set to outbreed the others.

Norms give us the ‘musts’ that infuse social life. […] Such ‘musts’ are there for our convenience, for without them activities such as hide-and-seek or chess become impossible. But the same construction underlies more serious activities and serious institutions: not games like hide-and-seek but the serious scaffoldings of life, like language, money, law, and trust.

Being governed by rules and norms may seem a hindrance to self-interest. But that is far from the truth.

There is a whiff here of might being right, whereby issues of justice do not arise when one party has all the power over another. The weaker can only rely on the benevolence of the stronger party, which is likely to be a fairly unreliable matter.

The suggestion is that any pride in our ability to care about justice requires forgetting its egoistic basis in interactions in which we exchange benefits with reciprocal partners, although it has spread from there to embrace much wider circles of our interactions.

We cannot have the pleasures that tennis gives without the rules of tennis, the shelter of the laws without the rule of law, and we cannot have the pleasures society opens to us without the conventions that make society possible.

Utilitarianism is consequentialist, or in other words forward-looking. It looks to the effects or consequences of actions in order to assess them. In this it contrasts with deontological ethics. An action that might be thought wrong, or undutiful, or unjust, or a trespass against someone’s rights, might apparently be whitewashed or justified by its consequences, if it can be shown to be necessary or even conducive to the general good.

Suppose just a little bit more happiness is obtained by trampling on someone’s rights. Do we have to approve of that? Is justice itself subordinate to the general good? Suppose it creates more happiness to give a benefit to Amy who does not deserve it, than to Bertha, who does?

For Hume, as we have seen, the whole edifice of justice, rights, duties, and law is a social creation essential to the well-being of society. This solution has become known as ‘indirect’ utilitarianism.

Rules are often designed for ordinary cases, and can stand in the way of acceptable outcomes when applied in cases that are not ordinary. But emergencies are rare, and it requires judgement to know when one is upon us. Emergencies permit exceptions, but the old stabilities and certainties can be reborn as soon as the emergency is over.

Hegel found true freedom only in fairly rigorously structured political association, leading to the liberal Russell’s gibe that for Hegel freedom means freedom to obey the police.

[T]he word ‘freedom’ is flexible enough to cover these goals as well: freedom of economic activity is compromised in order to bring about freedom from economic disadvantage; freedom of association is compromised in order to bring about freedom from tension and hatred. Almost any positive good can be described in terms of freedom from something.

Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one.

The most celebrated account of the elitist image is due to Plato’s Republic. In the argument of that book, government should be in the hands of disinterested and selfless rulers or guardians who have been rigorously educated into wisdom. The mob has no right of self-determination. It is there to be governed; it is not to be allowed to find its own way of life or make its own mistakes.

The modern emphasis on freedom is problematically associated with a particular self-image. This is the ‘autonomous’ or self-governing and self-driven individual. This individual has the right to make his or her own decisions. Interference or restraint is lack of respect, and everyone has a right to respect.

Any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies suggests that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self-understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions. Our capacity for self-government is spasmodic, and even while we preen ourselves on our critical and independent, free and rational, decisions we are the slaves of fashion and opinion and social and cultural forces of which we are ignorant. It would often be good, and no signal of disrespect to ourselves, if those who know better could rescue us from our worst follies.

The grim histories of anti-democratic politics stand as awful reminders of the dangers in Plato’s aristocratic myth. Plato himself was glum about this in the real world. The guardians of his imagined world can only merit their role by an impracticable process of the most rigorous education. Plato does not provide any consoling myth at all for the jumped-up dictator who claims to know what is best for the people.

Safety legislation makes the worker wear a helmet or a safety harness, whether he wants to or not. In times of plague people may be required to wear face masks, again, whether they want to do so or not. Social security systems make people pay towards their support in old age, whether they want to or not. Most people accept seat-belt and motorcycle-helmet laws. These all represent restrictions on an agent’s freedom made in the name of the agent’s own good.

Free speech is sacred. Yet the law does not protect fraudulent speech, libellous speech, speech describing national secrets, speech inciting racial and other hatreds, speech inciting panic in crowded places, and so on. In return, though, we gain freedom from fraud, from misrepresentation of our characters and our doings, from enemy incursions, from civil unrest, from arbitrary risks of panic in crowds.

[W]e can hear people demand without blushing a right to freedom from any disadvantage, unhappiness, offence, want, need, disappointment…It sounds desirable, until we reflect that the other side of a right in these contexts is a duty: a duty on the legal or political or economic order to protect them from disadvantage and the rest. And then we need to wonder whether it is just too costly, or not even possible, for us to labour under those duties.

When pre-nuptial contracts specify a right to have half the washing up done, or the housework, or a right to shared child-caring duties, and sex no more than four and no less than three times a week, we should not be optimistic about the ensuing marriage. It is not that any of these things are bad—they may be desirable—but demanding them as a right implies that me has not been taken over by we.

Even in a democracy, a minority can need protection against the tyranny of the majority. Even if insisting on rights can be egoistic, and shrill, and sometimes insensitive, still, we need the notion.

If ‘interfering with nature’ is, as some people suggest, ‘playing God’ and therefore wrong, then we have always played God. […] The charge of playing God has no independent force. That is, people only raise it when the interference in question upsets them.

A good first philosophical question to ask might be whether this black and white may be an illusion. It may be the result of a moral lens that imposes its black and white on a landscape of different shades of grey.

[N]ot all wrongdoings are criminal, and it is a political, and eventually an ethical, issue how far the law is allowed to intrude upon them. Indeed, one of the moral signatures of a society will be the extent to which the law allows liberty to do, feel, or think the wrong things.

A bad argument to watch out for now has the form ‘If there is no principled place to draw a line, then we must draw it here—at the very moment of conception’; or, if you stand on the woman’s right to control her body, we should draw it only there—at the moment of birth. The idea is that anywhere else involves a ‘slippery slope’.

Consider the imposition of a speed limit. We choose a definite limit, say 30 miles per hour, and make it the law. We do not really believe that 29 miles per hour is always safe, and 31 is always not. But we would not listen to someone saying ‘there is no principled place to draw a line, so we can’t have a speed limit’.

Epicurus had an argument that death should not be feared. Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

If it is not an evil, then there seems to be a corollary, which is that there is nothing especially bad about killing; or, if there is, it is because it is bad for the relatives or friends. Yet the prohibition against killing has a central place in almost any morality.

Ethical thought seems to need some distinction between what we permit to happen and what we actually cause.

It is often more important to us to be part of the group, to play along with others, to be popular or admired, than it is to be orientated towards the truth.

The first defence against fake news is the existence of trustworthy sources of information. This is why governments of all kinds have an uneasy relationship with the institutions that have earned trust over many years, and one of the first things any dictatorship does is to suppress the free press.

Spreading misinformation is like spreading litter. It pollutes the social world just as effectively. Indeed insofar as it contributes to a general slovenliness of thought it is far more dangerous and more disastrous.

[E]thics colours the whole of human life, from birth to death. It colours the whole of any society at any time, even although over time the particular shades it takes can change.