[5.] Ethics

 

[5.1.] Introduction to Ethics.

 

Ethics is one of the four traditional branches or areas of philosophy (along with logic, metaphysics and epistemology).

 

Ethics itself is frequently thought of as having three areas, although the boundaries between them are not completely distinct:

·         normative ethics

·         applied ethics

·         meta-ethics

 

 

[5.1.1.] Normative Ethics.

 

Before we define normative ethics itself, let’s define “normative”:

 

normative (df): a normative statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things should be, how they ought to be, rather than how they actually are. [The opposite of “normative” is: descriptive: a descriptive statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things actually are, not how they ought to be.]

 

So normative ethics is...

 

normative ethics (df.): the branch of ethics that attempts to discover general rules or principles of moral behavior; it tries to answer general questions about how we should behave, how we ought to act.

 

In this area of ethics, you’ll find claims like the following:

·         If doing x will benefit someone without harming anyone else, then it is morally right for you to do x.

·         If doing x violates someone’s moral rights, then it is immoral for you to do x.

There are claims about what sort of behavior is morally right in general. They are also rules you can use to help you decide what is the right thing to do in any given situation.

 

 

[5.1.2.] Applied Ethics.

 

applied ethics (df.): the branch of ethics that asks relatively concrete questions about the morality of specific actions and policies; branches of applied ethics include:

·         medical ethics (abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, genetic engineering, fair distribution of prescription drugs and medical treatment…)

·         business ethics (corporate responsibility, moral rights and obligations of employees, diversity and discrimination)

·         sexual ethics (homosexuality, adultery, prostitution)

 

 

[5.1.3.] Meta-Ethics.

 

meta-ethics: (df.) the branch of ethics that tries to answer questions about the nature of morality itself.  It doesn’t ask or make judgments about what types of action are moral and immoral; rather, it asks questions like:

·         Does morality depend on what we believe about it, or is it independent of our beliefs?

·         Does morality depend on what God commands?

·         Are moral judgments (statements attributing morality or immorality to a given act, e.g. “Murder is immoral”; “Charity is morally good”) capable of being true or false? or are they simply expressions of emotion? or something else?

·         How can we justify moral claims? How should we justify them?

·         What is the meaning of words like “good,” “bad,” “moral,” “evil,”, etc.?

 

Think of meta-ethics as trying to take a position above normative and applied ethics, looking down on them and trying to explain the nature of the judgments made within those areas. (“meta” means above or about)

 

 

[5.1.4.] Ethics and the Tradition of Analytic Philosophy.

 

During the heyday of the Tradition of Analytic Philosophy (through the first half of the 20^th century), most members of that tradition engaged in meta-ethics. This is true of the next two philosophers who we will be reading: G. E. Moore and C. L. Stevenson.

 

It wasn’t until the late sixties and early seventies that analytic philosophers began once again seriously to address questions in normative ethics and applied ethics.

 

 

[5.2.] Moore: “On Defining ‘Good.”

 

[5.2.1.] “The Most Fundamental Question in All of Ethics.”

 

The reading from today comes from G. E. Moore’s most important work: Principia Ethica (1903).

 

The central question of this reading is a question of meta-ethics: “This, then, is our first question: What is good? and What is bad?” (315) He goes on to specify exactly what he means by this question...

 

He is careful to say that he is not concerned with goodness simply in the sense in which human conduct can be good. Rather, he is concerned with goodness in its widest sense: what is it that all good things, including good conduct, have in common?

 

Moore is not asking what specific actions are good; nor is he asking what general types of action are good. Today those sorts of question would belong either to normative ethics or to applied ethics; Moore describes such questions as belong to casuistry...

 

casuistry [kăzh´-oo-ĭ-strē] (df.): “In ethics, the systematic discussion of the applicability of general moral laws to particular cases of conduct, accommodating new ideas that enter and challenge social order. It is often used pejoratively to refer to over-subtle reasoning that has a tendency towards greater laxity than the dictates of the unsophisticated individual conscience would allow.”[1]

 

On Moore’s view (from his perspective in 1903), this branch of ethics has largely been a failure because more fundamental questions have not yet been settled... questions such as the one that Moore himself will be pursing here: what is goodness?

 

In contemporary language, his point is this: normative ethics (which attempts to discover what general types of conduct are good) and applied ethics (which attempts to discover what specific actions and policies are good) cannot get very far until some fundamental questions of meta-ethics are settled first... questions such as “What is good?”

 

Moore now formulates his question as being about the word “good”: “how ‘good’ is to be defined?” (316)

 

But Moore is not asking for a dictionary definition, and he is not asking for an account of how people tend to use the word. He wants to know “that object or idea, which I hold, rightly or wrongly, that the word is generally used to stand for. What I want to discover is the nature of that object or idea...” (316). He is searching for a “definition[] which describe[s] the real nature of the object or notion denoted by a word, and which do[es] not merely tell us what the word is used to mean...” (317).

 

And he describes it as “the most fundamental question in all of ethics.” (316) He suggests two reasons for this:

1.      Unless we know the answer to it, it is very unlikely that our “most general ethical judgments” will be true... and (as Moore eventually argues) “the gravest errors have been largely due to beliefs in a false answer.” (316)

2.      Unless we know the answer to it, it is impossible to know what the evidence is for any given ethical judgment, i.e., it is impossible to give “correct reasons” in support of a given ethical judgment.

 

As we will see, Moore’s answer to the question is a surprising one...

 

 

[5.2.2.] Moore’s Positive Account.

 

Moore’s positive assertions about the good include the following:

 

1.      “Good” is a simple concept and is therefore indefinable.

·         Anything that is definable is a complex notion that can be analyzed into smaller parts in a definition, e.g., the notion of horse is a complex notion.

·         The notion of good isn’t like this. It is a simple notion, comparable to colors, e.g., yellow.

·         Ostensive definition is the only type of definition possible with regard to goodness: we present someone with something that is good, point at it, and say, “That is good.”

 

As Moore himself says: “good is good, and that is the end of the matter.” (316)

2. Good is a non-natural property. Moore means something like this:

·         The goodness of a thing cannot vary independently of its other properties, unlike a thing’s color...

·         It is possible for two things to differ only in color; e.g., object #1 is red and object #2 is yellow, and this is the only difference between them.

·         But it is impossible for two things to be exactly alike in every way except that one is good and the other is not.

·         So, whether x is good always depends on what other properties x has.[2]

 

In making this last point, Moore is responding to late 19^th-century attempts to tie ethics very closely to evolutionary science.

 

There is one philosopher in particular who made the attempt to develop a moral theory based on considerations of human evolution: Herbert Spencer.

 

 

[5.2.3.] Spencer’s Ethics.[3]

 

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

·         Spencer was a popularizer of contemporary scientific discoveries, including evolutionary theory.

·         He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and was sometimes misunderstood to advocate “might makes right / survival of the fittest” ethics, especially as applied to justify capitalist economics.

·         He died the year that Moore’s Principia Ethica was published.

 

 

In the The Data of Ethics (1879), the first volume of his two-volume work The Principles of Ethics[4], Spencer argued that ethics is the form of universal conduct during the last, highest stage of evolution. According to Spencer:

·         To understand what makes conduct good, we must know what conduct is for.

·         All animals have evolved conduct that aims at increasing the length and comfort of their own lives, as well as conduct that aims at producing offspring.

·         Since the purpose of conduct is to increase the length and quality of life and to produce offspring, good conduct is whatever conduct serves these functions best.

·         The “highest” conduct is that which is best at achieving those goals, viz. behavior of people in permanently peaceful communities—which Spencer calls “the limit of evolution.”

·         So Spencer defined good conduct as more evolved conduct.

 

[Note that the idea of a last or highest stage of evolution is NOT a Darwinian idea. Scientists reject this idea of Spencer’s and hold that evolution is not aiming at some higher level, that it is not progressing toward some final, better state.]

 

 

[5.2.4.] The Naturalistic Fallacy.

 

According to Moore, any theory of ethics that attempts to define moral concepts, like good, in terms of natural properties, like highly evolved conduct, is flawed.

 

According to Moore, almost all theories of ethics are based on an erroneous answer to his “most fundamental question of ethics”:

“What is good?”, i.e. how should the word “good” be defined?, i.e. what is the nature of the “object or idea” that the word “good” is used to represent?

 

Says Moore, all previous views, including Spencer’s evolutionary ethics, incorrectly assumed that good can be defined.

 

Moore thinks that goodness cannot be identified with any other property; to assume that it can be is a mistake.

 

He calls this mistake the Naturalistic Fallacy.

 

It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not ‘other,’ but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and of it I shall now endeavor to dispose. (318)

 

Says Moore, any theory offering a definition of goodness can be expressed in this way:

 

“X is good” means “X has property P”

 

But this is a mistake no matter what “P” stands for, because goodness is different from any other property.

 

Spencer’s identification of good with more evolved is an example of the Naturalistic Fallacy, according to Moore. To say that something is good is to make a normative (evaluative, prescriptive) claim, while to say that something is more evolved is to make a descriptive claim, a claim about what is in fact the case.

 

So this argument:

 

Conduct X is more evolved.

Therefore, conduct X is good conduct.

 

is invalid. (Cf. David Hume’s claim that it is impossible validly to derive an “ought” from an “is.”)

 

 

Stopping point for Monday April 20. For next time, finish reading the article by Moore (pp.319-23)