Ethics Course Pack. Table of Contents

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1 Ethics Course Pack The hard copy of the course pack (purchased through Dollar Bill Copying) contains almost all materials for this course. This web version does not contain the copyrighted articles, which are of course a central part of the course. I post it here so you can use the links for quick reference or just rely on it if you misplace your course pack or are waiting to receive it from Dollar Bill. You can also click on entries in the Table of Contents to go to that section. Table of Contents Introduction to Ethics Material in this first section deals with basic ethical concepts and principles. It is written by the instructor and provides an essential foundation for the entire course. CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS?...4 Introduction...4 Ethical and Scientific Inquiry: Similarities...6 Ethical point of view as impartial and rational...6 The rejection of custom as a basis for ethics...7 The rejection of authority as a basis for ethics...8 The rejection of feelings as a basis for ethics...8 Ethical and Scientific Inquiry: Different Meanings of Evidence...9 A Lesson in Logic...10 CHAPTER 2: THEORIES OF OBLIGATION...13 Three levels of judgment: particular cases, principles, and theories...13 Two Approaches to Ethical Theory...15 Consequentialism...15 What Consequences Are Good?...16 Consequentialism in practice...19 Cost-Benefit Analysis as Applied Utilitarianism...20 The method of cost-benefit analysis...21 Problems of Cost-Benefit Analysis: Quandaries of Quantifying Goodness...21 Non-Consequentialist Criticisms of Consequentialism...24 Utilitarianism does not take into account rights and rules Utilitarianism does not take into account justice...26 Consequentialism does not take into account the morally relevant difference between acts and omissions...28

2 Consequentialism does not take into account special obligations to special people..29 Non-Consequentialism versus Consequentialism...30 Kant s Rule-Based Ethics...32 The Good Will...32 The Categorical Imperative...33 The rationality of the categorical imperative...34 The impartiality of the categorical imperative...36 Difficulties of Kantian Ethics...38 Kant s ethics is too abstract to yield concrete moral rules...38 Kant s ethics yields conflicting moral rules...39 Kant s rules are too rigid...39 Which Ethical Theory Is the Right One?...40 CHAPTER 3: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHICAL RELATIVISM...41 Arguments for Ethical Relativism...41 Arguments Against Ethical Relativism...43 Is Reasoning Effective?...44 CHAPTER 4: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHICAL EGOISM...46 The Challenge of Ethical Egoism...46 Arguments for Ethical Egoism...47 Ethical egoism promotes the interests of everyone...47 Ethical egoism is the only standard people are capable of following...48 Ethical egoism is an ultimate principle of ethics...50 The Arguments Against Ethical Egoism...50 Group Egoism...51 CHAPTER FIVE: TO WHOM (OR WHAT) ARE WE MORALLY OBLIGATED?...52 The Concept of Moral Considerability...52 Developing Rational Criteria of Moral Considerability...53 Fetuses...53 Help With Readings... 1 Ethical Relativism...1 Outline of Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality...3 Arthur's Case Against Singer...4 Noonan and the Issue of Abortion...6 Warren on Abortion...7 Outline of Thomson on Abortion...9 Thomson and Singer on Obligation...10 THE MAJOR ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY...12 Instructions...12 Topics

3 HOW TO SUCCEED IN THIS COURSE...14 How to Read a Philosophical Essay...14 How to Write a Philosophical Essay...16 Guidelines that Apply to All Writing Assignments...16 Guidelines for the Major Argumentative Essay...17 Summary of An Essay s Key Elements...18 Mistakes to Avoid

4 Introduction Chapter 1: What Is Philosophical Ethics? The bombers alone provide the means of victory. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England, referring to the war against Nazi Germany, Churchill confronted one of modern history s most anguishing moral dilemmas. He faced what he regarded as the prospect of an immeasurable evil, the victory of Nazi Germany over Britain and other Allied powers in World War II. He judged that the only way to stop Hitler and the Nazis was to use Britain s Bomber Command with the purpose of killing a large number of ordinary citizens in German cities. The bombings, he concluded, would demoralize the Nazis and greatly increase the chance of defeating them in the war. Some British officials opposed Churchill s decision and argued that British air attacks should aim only at military targets, not civilians. They insisted that they were fighting against Hitler s Nazi morality, and they did not want to imitate him by killing innocent people. They argued that attacking civilian targets is always wrong, even in a war against a supremely evil enemy. Suppose that Churchill were correct in thinking that the chance of defeating Hitler was small unless German cities were bombed. Suppose he were correct in predicting that the intentional killing of German civilians stood a good chance of turning the war in Britain s favor. Under these circumstances, would bombing German cities be morally permissible? 1 Churchill experienced a classic moral dilemma. He could not avoid making an ethical or moral decision, 2 a decision about values. Even doing nothing would be a decision with profound implications. So how does one in Churchill s position figure out what is the morally correct thing to do? We need a method for making moral decisions. Developing such a method is a central goal of philosophical ethics. Churchill s moral predicament was historic and monumental, but we all make ethical judgments every day. Even wondering, what should I do now? raises an ethical issue. Ethical questions arise because human beings have the distinctive ability to ask about not only how things are but also how they should be. And we address this question whenever we wonder whether we ought to do something or ask if one state of affairs is better than another. 1 This summary of Churchill's dilemma closely follows Michael Walzer's description of it in Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, Basic Books, New York, 1977, pp There is no generally agreed-upon distinction between the terms "ethical" and "moral." In this course, the two words will be used interchangeably. 4

5 The following questions from a popular calendar suggest moral choices any of us might face: If you earned the same wages no matter what job you had, what would you do? When you are old, which would you rather have: considerable wealth but few fond memories, or a wealth of fond memories but little in the way of material possessions? Would you be willing to endure four months of isolation on a rocky island if you knew you would not only survive the difficult experience but would come away from it with an unwavering core of self-confidence and spiritual awareness? If you knew that upon death each of us would be reincarnated as a random baby somewhere in the world, would it make you favor increasing government aid to Third World countries? Note that you would have about a 50 percent chance of returning as either Chinese or Indian. If you could choose either to be honest and yet not have people trust you or to be dishonest and have people trust you, which would you pick? 3 If you think seriously about questions like these, you will find yourself thinking about your values, about what you regard as worthwhile in your life. If you discuss these questions with others, you will encounter disagreement because thoughtful people have different views about what is of central importance in a human life. Though your decisions about ethical questions will not affect as many people as Churchill s, you are no less involved in making moral choices. The field of ethics addresses the need that most people feel to clarify their values. And philosophical ethics, the subject of these chapters, seeks not only to clarify values but to help us resolve disagreements about them, and to do so in a systematic and reasoned way. When addressing questions like those above, philosophers seek to discover not what people would do but what they should do. Often people are inclined to prefer things even when their judgment tells them they ought to prefer something else. Whereas the field of psychology studies people s actual preferences and behavior (and their causes), philosophical ethics focuses on judgments about what things are good or worth preferring. In this way ethics aims to offer people standards for how they should act. Ethical inquiry ultimately concerns every person s search for what Socrates called the good life, the life of human excellence. In plainer terms, ethics addresses our concern about the best way to make use of the one span of time that we have on this earth. On the social and political level, ethics addresses the question of the good society, the form of social organization that will best promote human good. Looked at this way, ethics or morality is much broader (and more interesting) than it is often taken to be. It is not about some narrow code of prohibitions that someone else imposes on you. It is not especially concerned about sexuality, though sexual ethics may be part of more general moral concerns. It is not necessarily associated with any particular religion or even with religion at all. Rather, it is a central concern for all persons who wish to reflect on how to live their lives. However, philosophical ethics does differ from the way many people ordinarily think about ethics. Philosophers are committed to seeking the truth about ethics using the method of reasoning. Significantly, philosophers also question whether a purely rational approach to ethics 3 Page-a-Day 1989 Questions Calendar, Gregory Stockman, Workman Publishing Company. 5

6 is possible and whether reasoning is capable of yielding ethical truths, but they use reasoning even when they investigate these very questions. These considerations point to the main themes around which this course is organized. Most of the course focuses on the use of reasoning to answer ethical questions, questions about the best way to live our lives and questions about resolving social and political dilemmas. This is the core project of philosophical ethics. Later in the course will explore several challenges to this standard approach of philosophical ethics, including a challenge to the idea of impartial reason as the only proper approach to morality. Before we can step back and consider the limits of ethical reasoning, we need first to see what it means to base ethical claims on reason and why philosophers are committed to trying to do so. Ethical and Scientific Inquiry: Similarities Scientific beliefs differ from person to person, but what is actually true presumably remains the same. At its most ambitious, philosophical ethics also aims for the kind of truth that is objective and universal, not a truth that varies from person to person. Probing Further: Can There Ever Be Objective Truth? Philosophers debate what it means to talk about an objective or universal truth in both science and ethics. Some philosophers would say that certain beliefs are more worth holding if they have more evidence in their favor but would shy away from claiming that any belief is true in some objective sense. It is possible, for example, that even if rationality and standards for good evidence are common to all human beings, what we take to be rational is just a product of the way all our minds are constructed. We still would not know that our minds are constructed to guarantee that what seems rational to us actually corresponds to what really exists in the world. Maybe whoever (or whatever) created us made our minds so that things that seem to us to be rational and well supported with evidence actually have no independent existence outside our minds. Notice that this skepticism about truth applies to mathematical and scientific truths as well as to ethical truths. If the skeptic is right, when we think we are learning new things about the world, we are actually, at most, learning about the structure of our own minds. Ethical point of view as impartial and rational There is a special reason that universal truth is important for ethics. A major task of ethics is to resolve conflicts of interest, to offer a fair or morally correct solution when different people, or different nations, press opposing demands. If what is ethically right differed from person to person, or from group to group, there would be no impartial standpoint from which to balance competing claims. The need to solve conflicts of interest leads many philosophers to define the moral point of view as necessarily an impartial point of view. Whether it is possible to attain such a detached 6

7 standpoint is a subject of much debate 4, but if we define the ethical point of view as one of pure impartiality, then we need at least to strive to detach ourselves from the interests and concerns of any particular individual, culture, or nation. Philosophers have invented numerous devices for describing this impartial attitude; for example, it has been conveyed through the image of an impartial benevolent spectator or of a God s-eye view of the world. As one philosopher puts it, the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view...of the Universe, than the good of any other. 5 Using this approach, anyone confronting a moral dilemma will, ideally, come to the same solution. If it is morally right for Churchill to bomb German cities, then, theoretically, even German citizens would agree with this judgment if they adopt the impartial point of view. In the standard approach to philosophical ethics, being impartial is closely tied to being rational. Impartiality requires using a method that is common to all persons, rather than with what is particular to our histories, such as our being Americans, Germans, Muslims, or Jews. Rationality is held to be what all persons have in common, and reliance on reasoning is considered our best hope for reaching universal ethical truths. Specifically, standard philosophical ethics rejects three non-rational sources for ethical beliefs: customs, authority, and feelings. It is important to see why. The rejection of custom as a basis for ethics If one investigates the customs of different cultures, one discovers a wide range of moral beliefs and practices, each of which may have a deep significance for the people who hold them. If we believe tolerance to be a good moral value, we may be inclined to say that each culture is entitled to practice its customs. But these customs reflect moral values that may conflict with one another. They may offer radically different ideas on the role of women, on the extent to which people may gain private wealth, and on whether people should be allowed to oppose the government s policies. Philosophical ethics seeks to learn which beliefs are the ones most worth holding. At its boldest, it asks which beliefs are most likely to be true, and the mere appeal to custom cannot answer this question. In this respect philosophical ethics is a lot like science. Different cultures have different ideas on scientific issues, too. There may still be cultures that believe the earth is flat. While we may not wish to force others to change their beliefs, we still want to know which beliefs are worth holding and which are not. And we determine this not by which beliefs are customary but rather by asking which beliefs can be supported with evidence and which lack sufficient evidence. The faith of the philosopher, like that of the scientist, is that a belief that can be supported with evidence is a belief that is more worth holding. Like scientists, moral philosophers seek to determine which beliefs can be backed up, supported, defended, and justified all different ways of saying the same thing. Reasoning, as we will see, is the method that philosophers use to support or justify their beliefs. 4 Later in the course we will discuss in much more detail whether it is possible and even desirable to attain pure impartiality in ethics. 5 Henry Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics (7th Ed.), p. 382, quoted by Peter Singer, "All Animals Are Equal," in Understanding Moral Philosophy, ed. James Rachels, p

8 Since philosophical ethics is committed to accepting only ethical beliefs that are supported with good reasoning, a moral claim, like a scientific claim, cannot earn favor merely by being customary in a given society, including our own. We must recognize that equally thoughtful people in other cultures or in other periods of history have held ethical beliefs vastly different from those held by our culture today. What is more unsettling, we have to acknowledge that had we been reared in a different culture, we probably would have very different ethical attitudes from those we now hold. A philosophical approach does not demand that we reject everything we have been taught, but it does insist that we scrutinize everything and not hold any belief simply because the culture in which we happen to be living taught it to us. The rejection of authority as a basis for ethics Philosophers also reject appeals to authority as a foundation for ethical claims. An authority can take many forms, including parents, laws, religious leaders, and books that are claimed to be sacred, such as the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, or the Book of Mormon. One problem with appealing to authority is that authorities disagree, and one needs some basis, independent of any one of the authorities, to decide which authority is most worthy of obedience. If one were to try to decide to choose the authority with the best values, one would first need some way of learning which values are best before accepting any particular authority. In that case the authority would not actually function as the source of values, and one might as well simply try to learn which values are best directly, without relying on any appeal to authority. If one tries to make legal authority the basis for ethics, then one is in the absurd position of saying that any change in the current laws must, by definition, be immoral. If the very standard of what is moral were current law, then any change in the law would be a deviation from morality. It seems more reasonable to judge whether a proposed change in the law is desirable by asking whether it, or the current law, better accords with morality, rather than trying to base all moral judgments on what the law happens to be in a particular country at a particular time. A practical difficulty with appealing to authority is that if each person loyally follows the ethical dictates of her chosen authority, there will be little chance of reaching a universally accepted standard. We tend to think that truth in, for example, medical science, is universal, so the laws of medicine are the same for an Islamic doctor and a Christian doctor. Likewise, from a philosophical point of view, we aim for an ethical truth that will apply to all persons and all times. If persons were to ground their moral beliefs on different ethical authorities, there would be little chance of resolving ethical disagreements. This last point, that reliance on authority might make agreement impossible, has practical importance, especially given the diversity of American society, but it does not speak to the truth of an ethical belief. Even if everyone agrees about an ethical believe (maybe because they rely on the same authority), that belief could still be false. Just because a group of people all agree that slavery is acceptable (or that the earth is flat) does not make that belief true. Defending or justifying a belief means offering good reasons for it, not just pointing to or achieving a consensus. The rejection of feelings as a basis for ethics Ethical philosophers also reject subjective feelings as a basis for ethics. How we feel is molded in large part by the particular circumstances of our lives our parents, our friends, and our culture in general. These feelings have the power to cause us to believe certain things, but 8

9 our being caused to believe something by powerful feelings no more guarantees the worthiness or truth of a belief than our being caused to believe something through the action of a powerful chemical. A scientist might have a very strong feeling that an experiment will produce a certain result, but that feeling alone cannot count as evidence for a particular conclusion. Similarly, many who carried out the Inquisition, the atrocities of Hitler, or the recent ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia were no doubt prompted by strong and even sincere feelings. In both science and in ethics, emotion can lead us astray; we need to evaluate with reasoning whether the belief we have been led to by our feelings is actually well grounded; that is, whether it is supported with evidence. There is another problem with using our feelings as a basis for ethics: we may have feelings that conflict with one another. We then need a method for judging which of our feelings is most worthy of being acted upon, and our feelings alone cannot determine this. Ethical and Scientific Inquiry: Different Meanings of Evidence The standard philosophical approach, then, is to base ethical judgments not on customs, authority, or feelings but on reasoned argument. What a repeatable experiment is to a scientific claim, reasoned argument is to an ethical claim. And just as a scientist must learn not only to do experiments but to construct the right experiments and draw the right conclusions from them, so one engaged in ethical inquiry must not only offer arguments but learn to construct good, wellreasoned, appropriate arguments. When scientists oppose each other, each has some evidence to support his position, and it is even more usual for thoughtful philosophers to disagree with one another. Each philosopher will offer arguments as evidence, and then our task is critically to analyze which arguments are the strongest. The parallel between ethical and scientific inquiry must not be carried too far, however. Though both insist that claims be backed up with evidence, the form of evidence appropriate to ethics is different from scientific evidence because ethical questions are different in their very nature from scientific questions. A scientific problem is generally a dispute about what the facts are in a given situation, so the evidence for a scientific claim usually takes the form of providing new data that are gained through the empirical method; that is, through observation and experience (e.g., an experiment). An ethical problem, in contrast, may exist even after all the facts are known, so the evidence that is needed to resolve the problem will not take the form of new data. An ethical problem focuses not on factual judgments but on judgments about values. Think, for example, of two doctors who disagree on whether abortion is morally appropriate in a particular case. Most likely they already agree on the relevant facts: for example, the structure of the fetus at six weeks, the degree of risk of pregnancy to the mother, and the likelihood that the fetus will develop normally. There may be no new medical or psychological fact to be discovered that would alter either physician s opinion about the moral permissibility of an abortion. Yet they still disagree about something. The kind of evidence that they need to decide on the ethics of abortion is a reasoned argument about values, which is something quite different from simply amassing new data. This is not to say that the facts are irrelevant to making ethical decisions. In some cases the facts will be crucial. However, in many cases, and the ones on which we will most often focus, even after all the facts are known, the moral issue may still not be resolved. 9

10 The relation between factual (or empirical) judgments and ethical (or normative) judgments is also clear with respect to Churchill s dilemma about whether to bomb German cities. Clearly factual data, including predictions about what is likely to happen in the war both with and without using the Bomber Command, are relevant to Churchill s decision. Should he learn that the war is likely to be won without bombing civilian targets, Churchill s whole moral predicament would be totally different (and easier). But factual data alone are not sufficient for making a final moral decision because even if we assume that the facts are exactly what Churchill claimed them to be, we still may find it difficult to know what course of action is the morally right one. Philosophical ethics thus uses a method of inquiry that is both different from most other areas of study, especially the sciences, and also different from the way most people ordinarily think about moral judgments. Its project is an ambitious one: to recognize that factual judgments alone cannot provide a foundation for value judgments, yet not to base value judgments merely on customs, appeals to authority, or personal feelings. Many people think that if a question cannot be settled by an appeal to facts, then one must either depend on some authority or else rely on subjective feelings. Philosophical ethics offers an alternative method; namely, to justify ethical claims, to show that some ethical claims are more worthy of belief than others, because they are more rationally defensible. How can reasoned argument show that one claim is more worth believing than another? The best way to answer this question is by actually reading arguments for particular ethical positions, such as those you will read in this course. Though these essays may contain more complex argumentation than what you have been exposed to previously, you are already familiar with ethical argumentation from many popular sources. Virtually every newspaper editorial or opinion column argues for an ethical position. No writer expects you to believe the way she does on a controversial issue without offering you good reasons. And this is true not only in ethics but in government or business as well. Anyone who advocates a position, whether it be for an ethical claim or for a corporate plan of action that is designed only to advance that company s interests, must be prepared to defend it with reasoned arguments. Thus the reasoning skills that you learn in ethics have practical value in many other fields as well. You need to be able to defend your positions with good arguments for two reasons: first, and most important, unless you consider and weigh the arguments for different positions, you cannot know which position is most worthy of your belief; second, even if you feel sure that your position is the best one, you will not be effective in persuading other thoughtful people to believe it unless you can offer them good arguments in its favor. You will be better able to evaluate the arguments in the readings if you consider more closely how reasoned argumentation works. A Lesson in Logic A reasoned argument is trying to reach a conclusion. It does this by setting out some statements, called premises (or assumptions), from which the conclusion follows (logically). For example, say I was trying to get you to believe the conclusion that "U.S. actions in Iraq are wrong." I might try this: 10

11 (P1) It is always wrong to try to overthrow a legitimate government. (P2) The U.S. is trying to overthrow the government of Iraq. (C) Therefore, U.S. actions in Iraq are wrong. This argument states two premises, so there are two stated premises in the argument, (P1) and (P2). For the conclusion, (C), to be true, both of the stated premises must be true and the conclusion must follow from the stated premises. To say that a conclusion follows from the stated premises is the same as saying that there are no hidden premises. A hidden premise is a premise that is needed to make the conclusion follow, though it was not stated. If you are opposing an argument, you will want to see if you can find any hidden premises in it. But remember, the hidden premise is not your argument; it is the claim needed by the argument that you are opposing. It is the missing link in that argument. It is what must be shown to be true before that argument can work. The best way to test the strength of an argument is by seeing whether it can withstand criticism. 6 To criticize an argument, you look to see (1) whether its premises are true and (2) whether its conclusion follows from its premises. Imagine that you wanted to oppose the argument about U.S. action in Iraq. One thing you could do is show that one of the stated premises is wrong. Either one would be controversial to many foreign policy experts, and if one were really going to argue for the conclusion (C), he would have to say a lot more about why you should believe (P1) and (P2). We ll deal with that a bit later. But let s say we can agree that (P1) and (P2) are true. Does the conclusion, (C), logically follow from (P1) and (P2)? Put another way, and this is what logically follow means, if (P1) and (P2) are true, must (C) also be true? If not, then there must be a hidden premise, and you should try to figure out what it is. Stop right now and decide whether you think (C) follows from (P1) and (P2). If you don t think so, try right now to write out exactly what you think the hidden premise is. The conclusion does not follow. (If you got that wrong, you have another chance to look back at the argument and try to figure out the hidden premise before you read the answer.) The hidden premise (P3) is The government of Iraq is a legitimate one. Let s make it a stated premise and see what the argument looks like. (P1) It is always wrong to try to overthrow a legitimate government. (P2) The U.S. is trying to overthrow the government of Iraq. (P3) The government of Iraq is a legitimate one. (C) Therefore, U.S. actions in Iraq are wrong. Of course for the conclusion to be true, it is not enough that it follow from the premises. To say the conclusion follows from the premises only means that if all the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. So we now need to ask whether the premises are true. 6 For an excellent discussion of this point and the methods associated with it, see Jack Meiland, College Thinking: How to Get the Best Out of College, Mentor, 1981, chapters

12 Someone arguing for the conclusion above would need to argue for each of the premises. In defending (P1), for example, one might argue that every country has a right to determine its own political system and values, free of outside interference. In arguing for (P1), one would be advancing new premises, and in this side argument, (P1) would function as a conclusion. Then, after the truth of (P1) was thought to have been reasonably established, it would again be used as a premise in the larger argument. How long can we keep going back further and further like this, continually examining more and more basic premises? Well, as long as we want, but philosophers don t feel a need to prove absolutely everything, only to give good reasons that would show a reasonable person that a given claim is worthy of belief. For instance, if someone were to argue that Policy X causes needless suffering; therefore Policy X is wrong, he probably only needs to demonstrate that the stated premise, Policy X causes needless suffering, is true. Of course, someone could still say, Okay, you ve shown that Policy X causes needless suffering, but there is a hidden premise; namely, whatever causes needless suffering is wrong. One could say this, but it might be fair to ignore such an objection because the hidden premise is just not very controversial or worth arguing about. If someone doesn t see the avoidance of needless suffering as a good reason to reject Policy X, then maybe there is nothing more to be said. What is the point of this whole procedure if it is not to reach the kind of absolute proof that geometry aims for? (Actually geometry starts with given, unproved assumptions, too.) The point is to show that some claims can be supported with good reasons and others cannot be. Philosophers assume that a claim that can be backed up with good reasons is a better claim, one more worthy of belief, one (many would add) more likely to be true, than a claim that cannot be so defended. (See Probing Further, Can There Ever Be Objective Truth? on page 6.) When we discuss controversial issues, you will see that philosophers offer arguments that lead to conflicting conclusions, such as abortion is never permissible and abortion is permissible whenever a woman chooses it. Neither philosopher s argument may seem unsound in an obvious way, yet both conclusions cannot be true. How can we tell which argument is stronger? To ask this question is to go from the necessary first stage of understanding what an author says to the more advanced task of engaging in philosophical ethics yourself. To do this, you must evaluate each author s argument by looking at both its stated and hidden premises, thinking of how their truth might be challenged and seeing whether those challenges can be answered. The response to a challenge may reveal still other premises that are needed to establish the truth of one of the premises in the original argument. The process of going to deeper levels of an argument and weighing challenges and responses is the essence of philosophical inquiry. Teaching you how to do this is a major goal of this course. A good philosophical essay will (1) offer arguments to support its thesis and also (2) anticipate and respond to objections. When you read the essays in this course, look for specific arguments and responses to objections. After you feel you understand a philosophical essay, try to think of criticisms that the author did not anticipate. Imagine how the author might respond, and consider whether the author s original argument can withstand your criticisms. Engaging in this process will not only help you in this course; more important, it will help you develop your own values based on critical reasoning. 12

13 Chapter 2: Theories of Obligation It should now be clear that philosophical ethics involves more than compiling a list of our preferences. Philosophers attempt to use reasoning to answer questions about values and, ultimately, about the best way to live. Since a life consists largely of actions, much of moral inquiry focuses on which actions are the right ones. 1 Therefore, one important goal of philosophical ethics is to formulate a theory of right action. Three levels of judgment: particular cases, principles, and theories We can think of ethical judgments about actions on three levels, from the least to the most general: particular cases, principles, and theories. Let s use the issue of abortion as an example. We can judge in a particular case that abortion for a particular person in a particular situation would (or would not) be morally permissible. But it is hard to imagine even the least philosophically oriented person remaining completely on this level. To do so would be to take each instance of abortion and to make an ethical judgment only on it, making no attempt to relate the different cases to one another. A person who did this could judge one case of abortion morally permissible and then another case morally wrong, even though it is similar in all relevant respects to the first case. Most people demand a degree of consistency in the different judgments they make about particular cases of abortion (or anything else). Another way to make this point is to say that we expect people to be able to answer the question, why? when they assert, for example, that a case of abortion would be morally wrong. And we expect an answer in the form of a moral principle, such as It is morally wrong to kill people. Principles, then, function to explain our judgments in particular cases and to provide consistency among them. Principles are more general than judgments in particular cases, and different principles can also be more or less general. The principle Abortion is always wrong covers all instances of abortion, but is not as general as Killing is always wrong, which covers all instances of killing. A person who appeals to a general principle is expected to employ it consistently in all cases where it applies. Someone who wishes to defend a position against abortion on the grounds that killing a person is always wrong would, if consistent, need to oppose the death penalty as well as abortion. This is not to say that it is inconsistent to oppose abortion and yet to favor the death penalty; it is only to say that opposing abortion on the grounds that killing is always wrong is inconsistent with favoring the death penalty. A person who opposed abortion and yet favored capital punishment might consistently do so by appealing to a slightly narrower principle, such as killing an innocent person is always wrong. Formulating a principle that one can hold consistently does not guarantee that one s principle is sound, however. One might consistently maintain the principle you should exert power over others whenever you are capable of doing so, or any of hundreds of other possible principles. The real challenge is to know which of all the possible ethical principles are the ones most 1 This sentence may seem uncontroversial, but we will examine a challenge to it later in the course. See Mayo, Virtue or Duty in Sommers, pp

14 worthy of belief. This requires moving to the level of theories, a level even more general than that of principles. Just as we expect people to be consistent in their judgments on particular cases, we also expect people to be consistent in their principles. A person may hold one principle that covers all acts of killing, another principle addressing obligations to endangered species, and still another dealing with racial discrimination. But there must be a reason for holding each of these principles rather than others, and there must be some connection between the different principles we hold. We cannot, for example, claim that we must save endangered species based on the more general principle that all life is sacred and then fail to apply that principle when dealing with treatment of persons from a certain ethnic group. Just as we can ask people why? when they assert that a particular action is right or wrong, we can also demand a reason for believing one principle rather than another. Typically the answer will take the form of a more general principle; for example, one might defend the principle that abortion is wrong except to save the mother s life by appealing to the more general principle that killing a person is always wrong except in self-defense. But we can press the demand for rational justification still further and ask for a reason to accept even that more general principle. We can demand a first principle from which more particular principles are derived. When we demand this most general kind of standard of ethical action, we are at the level of ethical theory. An ethical theory attempts to answer the question, what makes a right act right? If sound, a theory tells us what it is that all morally right actions have in common that make them right actions. A theory provides a definition of right action. Probing Further: The Relation of Theory to Particular Cases The relationship between theory and more particular judgments is complex. Ideally one would decide on a correct theory, and then whenever one comes across a particular moral problem, whether it be about killing or taxation or breaking promises or anything else, one would simply apply the theory. But the reality is that we do not have the kind of perfect intellects that allow us to know which theory is correct, and as we try to formulate an ethical theory we can stand behind, we often find ourselves testing the theory to see what answer it yields in particular cases. This appears paradoxical: theories are supposed to be guidelines for particular cases, yet we check our theory in light of its application to actual cases. But this procedure has analogies to the method of science. In science we develop general explanations or theories to explain phenomena, and the more phenomena a theory explains, the more confidence we have in the theory. If a theory in which we have confidence seems to conflict with what we observe in a particular case, we may decide that our observation in the particular case is mistaken, but we might also decide that it is our that theory needs to be further refined. Developing a sound ethical theory may require continual revisions and refinements also, and one of the ways of testing a theory is to see whether it accords with those of our judgments on particular cases in which we have the greatest confidence. For example, we are probably more confident that it is wrong to torture a child for pleasure than we are of any theoretical standard we might formulate. Therefore, we might safely conclude that any theory that implied that we are morally required to torture a child for pleasure is a theory in need of revision. 14

15 Theories of right action are theories about moral obligation, and it is important to be clear about what philosophers do and do not mean by this phrase. A basic assumption in ethics is that certain actions are morally required, and it is the job of an ethical theory to tell us what kind of actions these are. To say that an action is morally required is also to say that performing the act is a moral obligation, a moral duty, something that one should do, and something one ought to do. Each of these is a different way of saying the same thing. To say that a person is morally obligated to do something generally means that if that person chooses freely, then she is morally praiseworthy if she does the action and morally blameworthy if she fails to do it. Failure to do an action that one is morally obligated to do is morally blameworthy (when one chooses freely) because one chose not to do what she ought to have done. But it is important to realize that saying someone is morally obligated to do something is not to say that the person should be forced to do it or that any particular punishment should be administered if the person does not do it. Those are separate matters, questions of political and legal philosophy. What an ethical theory attempts to do is to define a standard for moral obligation, something that can instruct people who wish to be moral what choices they should freely choose to make. Two Approaches to Ethical Theory Consider again Churchill s moral dilemma about whether to bomb German cities. Let s assume that Churchill is right in his moral judgment that (a) it would be extremely bad if the Nazis won the war and that Churchill is also right in his factual determinations that (b) a Nazi victory is a real threat and that (c) bombing German cities is the only way significantly to reduce that threat. Even granting all this, and even assuming that ethics must be impartial considering equally Germans, Britons, and everyone else people will still disagree about the morality of bombing with the intent to kill innocent civilians. This example can illustrate the two major theoretical approaches to defining right action. One approach, broadly known as consequentialism, judges the rightness or wrongness of an action purely on the basis of the action s likely consequences. The second approach, nonconsequentialism, considers the consequences of an act either morally irrelevant or only one of several factors that must be considered in evaluating whether an action is moral. Thus, the most fundamental controversy in standard ethical theory is whether an action s consequences are the sole basis for determining its morality. Consequentialism The first approach, known either as consequentialism or utilitarianism, 2 claims that the only basis for judging the morality of an act is by its consequences for all those who are affected. If an action is likely to produce, for all affected, a better balance of good over bad results than any other action, then, according to utilitarianism, it is the morally right thing to do. One way the utilitarian defends this approach is to claim that there can be no point to moral theory other than to advance general human welfare. The utilitarian must be impartial, not favoring himself or the people closest to him. But if an act promotes general human welfare more than any other act, it must be the morally required action. 2 Some philosophers define utilitarianism so that it is one kind of consequentialism while others make no distinction between the two terms. In this book the two terms are used interchangeably. 15

16 Though consequentialism appears straightforward enough, it is hardly uncontroversial, as an application to Churchill s dilemma will demonstrate. If Churchill wants to justify bombing innocent German civilians on utilitarian grounds, he would need to claim that even taking into account the bad consequences of innocent people suffering and dying, in the long run the likely balance of good and bad results will be more favorable with the bombings than without them. If he refrains from using the Bomber Command, the German civilians will be spared, but many other innocent people will die and, most important, the Nazis will be likely to win the war, which will cause tremendous suffering for an enormous number of people. Churchill, if he were arguing as a utilitarian, might even point out that his failure to bomb civilians would, in effect, be causing the death and enslavement of millions of people who could have been saved and that the refusal to bomb civilians would actually be the more murderous act. This approach seems at odds with the way many people think about morality, but that alone does not show it to be mistaken. The utilitarian would insist, in fact, that one of the virtues of utilitarian theory is to challenge the unreflective and largely intuitive morality that many people hold and to replace it with a more rational method. At the core of the utilitarian approach is the conviction that no action is inherently good or bad just because of the kind of action that it is. Killing innocent people is a category of action that generally provokes moral revulsion, but the utilitarian claim is that we should oppose such an action when, and only when, it leads to worse consequences than another available act (or doing nothing). Usually this is the case, so generally utilitarians oppose killing innocent people. But if there should be a case and perhaps Churchill s predicament is an example of one where killing innocent people produces better results than refraining from killing, then acting with an intent to kill is the right action in that situation. In contrast, those who oppose utilitarian theory will reject the idea that the results of an action are the only things morally relevant to consider. Some will claim that certain kinds of actions (like killing an innocent person) are inherently bad actions, whatever the consequences. Utilitarians prefer to characterize actions as right or wrong rather than as good or bad. Whether an action is the right one at a particular time depends on whether the consequences that follow from it are good or bad. According to the consequentialist, the only things in the world that can be characterized as good or bad are the results of actions, not the actions themselves. Applying the utilitarian approach to Churchill s decision leads to an argument in the following form, where the first premise is the utilitarian standard itself: (P1) An action is morally required if it, of all available acts, is the one most likely to promote the best possible balance of good over bad consequences for all those affected. (P2) Bombing German cities with the intent to kill civilians is the act, of all available acts, that is most likely to promote the best possible balance of good over bad consequences for all those affected. (C) Therefore, bombing German cities with the intent to kill civilians is morally required. What Consequences Are Good? Though all consequentialists agree that actions are right or wrong depending only on whether their consequences are good or bad, they disagree about what constitutes a good consequence. 16

17 Though this disagreement among utilitarians does not go to the core of the debate between the two different approaches to ethics, we need to say something about what the utilitarian means by ultimate good and to examine some of the leading candidates for this title. There are, of course, many things that we consider good in the world, but when consequentialists refer to the ultimate good, they mean not those things that are good only because they lead to something else that is good but rather those things that are intrinsically good, good in and of themselves. For example, people often consider money a good, but only because it may lead to other things that people value. Money, therefore, has no intrinsic value; its value is derived from something else that is valued for its own sake. In some situations, it may not be good at all. When utilitarians say that an act s rightness depends on its producing good, they are referring to that which is good in itself, and therefore always good. If we can ask about something, what is it good for? and can give an answer, then it probably is not an intrinsic good. What things are intrinsically good? We might think of things like friendship, beauty, and kindness, but we need to consider whether these would be good if they did not lead to human happiness or satisfaction. If they are only good because they lead to greater happiness, then they are not intrinsically good after all. But if we ask what is happiness itself good for? we may find it impossible to answer; happiness seems to be worthwhile in and of itself. For this reason many utilitarians have proposed that happiness is in fact the only intrinsically good thing. Historically, in fact, utilitarianism has often been identified as a theory that approves of actions based on whether they produce happiness (rather than good consequences generally). The greatest happiness for the greatest number is sometimes thought to capture the essence of the utilitarian approach. Probing Further: What Is Happiness? Even utilitarians who agree that happiness is the ultimate good may disagree about what happiness is. There is an historic debate between two utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Jeremy Bentham ( ), claimed that happiness was nothing but a quantity of pleasure: the more pleasure, the more happiness. John Stuart Mill ( ) agreed that happiness is pleasure but argued that more pleasure alone does not necessarily create happiness. According to Mill, the amount of happiness an act produces depends not only on the quantity of pleasure that results from it but on the quality of the pleasure. Mill thought that some very intense pleasures might be of low quality and not produce as much happiness as smaller amounts of higher quality pleasures. Mill thought that identifying happiness, the ultimate good, with amounts of pleasure was mistaken and would lead to putting things like soap operas or video games (or the equivalent in his day) ahead of Shakespeare and Plato. True, Mill might grant, some people get more pleasure out of watching wrestling on television than seeing Shakespeare at Stratford, but they can t be said to be happier because the pleasure is of such low quality. Mill is famous for saying, better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better the somewhat frustrated pursuit of higher pleasures than the gluttonous satisfaction of lower ones. Is this just the worst form of elitism? Mill s distinction of higher and lower pleasures has been the subject of ridicule, but Mill would defend it by explaining that what he means by one pleasure s being higher than another is only that it is the one that is preferred by a majority of people who have experienced both. He would then point to the development of our intellectual or aesthetic capacities. Isn t it true that a person who has experienced more sophisticated art, drama, literature, or philosophy generally prefers it to the five-and-dime variety she might previously have been drawn to? And isn t it 17