Ethics

I hope that this thread can be a place to discuss the philosophy of ethics and apply moral reasoning to specific ethical questions.

This is meant to cover the three main branches of ethics, which are normative ethics (roughly, systems of general action-guiding principles), applied ethics (what do normative ethical systems say about specific moral choices), and metaethics (what is the status of normative systems and claims).

Some resources that I’ve found to be useful:

  • The Elements of Moral Philosophy by Rachels and The Fundamentals of Ethics by Shafer-Landau are two good introductory surveys. The first is short and can be found in PDF form online, while the second gives a more comprehensive and critical treatment of the material.
  • Oxford undergraduate reading list
  • University of Arizona graduate reading lists in normative ethics and
    metaethics
  • The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has good articles on ethics and other areas of philosophy

I’m working on a longer post about John Mackie’s great book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Others should feel free to kick off the discussion while that is in progress.

3 Likes

what’s the difference between ethics and morals anyway

1 Like

3 Likes

In ordinary usage, I don’t think there’s an important difference between the terms.

In philosophical discussions, you can draw a distinction between conventional morality, which is whatever system of morals happens to exist in a given community at a point in time, and a normative ethical system. Depending on the philosopher, the normative ethical system can be an attempt to discover the fundamental principals that underlie one or more systems of morals that actually exist; or an attempt to discover moral systems that should be adopted instead of the ones that actually exist; or a number of other things (some of which can get pretty complicated).

2 Likes

Anyone?

1 Like

What’s love got to do, go to do with it?

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by John Mackie (1977)

I bought this book a while ago, but it took me a while to read it because I was biased against its cover. I didn’t think any Penguin book with an orange spine could be a serious work of philosophy – those are usually published by snooty university presses. I was wrong; this is a serious book by a serious thinker. John Mackie was an Australian philosopher who fought in the second World War and later taught at Oxford. He published an article in the 1940s that was the basis for the first part of this book, and that article advanced one of the most influential ethical arguments of the 20th century.

The main thesis of the first part of the book is that typical thinking about morality is dead wrong. More specifically, he argues that when ordinary speakers make moral claims (1) they are typically making propositions (that is, statements that are either true or false) and (2) they believe that these statements are about objective facts rather than a person or a group’s opinions or feelings. While the first part of his claim may seem straightforward, it goes against some ethical theories that were popular in the mid-20th century that held that ordinary ethical statements aren’t making propositions and are instead, for example, expressing emotions (emotivism) or making commands (prescriptivism), and therefore aren’t capable of being true or false.

His crucial claim is that (3) there are no objective moral values. (He also thinks that there are no other types of objective values, but moral values are the focus of his argument.) By objective moral values, he means “intrinsically prescriptive entities” that are “part of the fabric of the world.” In other words, objective moral values are facts, which, if known would give everyone a reason for acting one way or another.

The conclusion from claims (1)-(3) is (4): all ordinary positive moral statements (for example, “X is good” or “Y is bad”) are false. This line of argument, which has come to be known as the “error theory,” continues to be very influential in metaethical thinking. For more detail on the argument, and particularly the support for claim (3), I’d really encourage you to read the first chapter of his book. It’s only 30-some pages, and it can probably be found for free somewhere.

I also got a lot out of the rest of the book which shows that I can’t judge a book by its table of contents, let alone its cover. Based on the chapter titles, I expected the book to transition into a basic survey of ethics after making the case for the error theory, but that’s not what it does. Instead, chapters 2 through 4 elaborate on and expand the line of thinking begun in the first chapter, and the rest of the book (surprisingly to me) sketches out a normative ethical system that’s consistent with the metaethical error theory.

Overall, the book clarified or expanded on many issues that my other readings only touched on briefly or not at all. Perhaps most significantly, it helped me understand how normative ethical positions can be largely independent of metaethical positions. It also made some very clear and helpful distinctions between conceptual and factual analyses and between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, as well as including a careful discussion of the relationship between free will and moral responsibility.

I’d strongly recommend the entire book to anyone interested in these topics. The writing is extremely clear and largely nontechnical. It probably helps to have some basic knowledge of the theories that he’s responding to in the first part of the book (emotivism and prescriptivism) as well as the normative theories that he draws on in the latter part of the book (utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, social contract theory, and value ethics). You can get a sufficient background on those topics from Wikipedia or the sources given in my first post.

3 Likes

I find entry level error theory to be persuasive enough that it’s what I default to these days, but I haven’t read enough to be able to go into the weeds argument for argument in favor of it. Perhaps I’m slightly more agonistic than Mackie about the existence of objective moral values.

Non-cognitivist ethics always seemed weird to me. As theories of what people mean when they say things like “murder is wrong” they just seem instantly false. Ask anybody who says “murder is wrong” if they think “it’s true that murder is wrong”, guessing everyone says lol yes. Nobody is going to say, “now that I think about it, I really meant ‘boo murder’”. But it’s also true that it’s unlikely that ordinary speakers appreciate the technicalities at stake in metaethics debates, so it’s not that they are conversant philosophical cognitivists either, but I do think they’d overwhelmingly say that statements like “x is wrong” are either true or false.

1 Like

Noncognitivism always struck me as strange as well, and I doubt if its best known proponents really believed it. It seems to have fallen out of favor based on the latest PhilPapers survey: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all

image

A metaethical position that seems even more bizarre is so-called “hermeneutic moral fictionalism,” which is the view that most people do not believe in objective moral values, but they just speak as if they believed the opposite. I’m sure some people act like this, but it doesn’t seem to ring true with how most people act.

I lean towards moral realism myself, but I don’t yet have an entirely coherent explanation of how it all works, so there’s still more work for me to do on that front.

This sort of seems to give the game away to me though, it’s the “I believe in a higher power” of metaethical philosophy. What I mean is, that’s what people say when they recognise that all the concrete religious beliefs they have ever encountered are bullshit, but they find the conclusion to be drawn from this too dispiriting.

I can see why you would say that, so let me expand on what I wrote.

I didn’t mean that I can’t articulate an argument for moral realism. I just meant that I’m not sure if the argument is correct.

I believe that there is a normative dimension to cognitive experience, that certain types of cognitive experiences are good and others are bad, and that this can be known simply by experiencing it. In other words, I don’t make a judgement that the experience of a pleasant odor is good or that the experience of an unpleasant odor is bad; these are just bare facts about how I experience things.

I have strong grounds to believe that other people have normative cognitive experiences, although the same stimulus could result in different types of normative cognitive experiences for different people. What matters for objective normativity isn’t the stimulus but the resulting cognitive experience.

Finally, I think it’s plausible that cognitive experiences supervene on physical (e.g., neurological) processes and that the physical processes that determine normative cognitive experiences are causally reason-giving. That is, the physical processes that result in good normative experiences causally motivate or reinforce behavior, and the physical processes that result in bad normative experiences have the opposite effect. So these physical processes are instrumentally good or bad and inherently reason-giving.

To me, this sounds similar to arguments used to support classical utilitarianism, although the terms are more modern. I’ve been kicking around this idea since reading Chalmer’s book on the conscious mind, and I found an NYU PhD dissertation that seems to make the same types of arguments, although I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

There are several reasons to doubt these arguments:

  • The existence of qualia is controversial in philosophy
  • Even if you grant the existence of qualia, it still seems odd to me for them to play a central role in ethics since – at least according to my conception of things – the causal interaction between the physical world and qualia is a one-way street that doesn’t allow qualia to have any impact on the physical world
  • Presumably these types of arguments were considered and rejected by Moore and other careful thinkers (although I think Moore’s open question argument has been refuted so he might have reconsidered if he were still alive)
1 Like

I’m not very knowledgeable about ethics, but I really enjoyed reading this book:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Perfect-Correct-Question/dp/1982159316

From the description:

Most people think of themselves as “good,” but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good” or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people.

It’s written by Mike Schur, who I absolutely love. And I’m probably biased, because I got a signed version.

1 Like

My daughter and I watched all of The Good Place on Netflix. Seems improbable that a show about ethics could be so funny and have such great character arcs.

1 Like

I have no idea what any of this means, lol. I’m also not sure if this is a you or me problem :slight_smile:

One problem is that I have no clue what you mean with your use of the word “normative” here. The second problem is that I reach the end of your argument and have no idea how it relates to meta-ethics. Like the argument seems to be that there are certain physical processes or stimuli which provide bad experiences for me and thus those are to be avoided, for me. OK? I don’t understand where in this moral principles make an appearance, though.

Maybe not the best choice of words. I’m just saying that there is a domain or dimension of our conscious experience that has to do with value.

I’m claiming something stronger than that certain of my experiences are good for me or bad for me. Instead, I’m saying certain of my experiences are good or bad full stop. If I accept that about myself, then I also need to accept it for others. Rather than paraphrase for myself, I’ll quote Mackie summarizing Sidgwick

The ethics of business can be summarized in the uh

1 Like

I came across an interesting passage in an article on the philosophy of mind that is related to my own leanings toward moral realism.

There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other’s experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view – to understand the ascription in the first person as well as the third, so to speak.

This from from Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”

Side note: I plan to use this thread as a type of blog for my reading and thoughts on ethics. A post on Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is coming soon.

If the Utilitarian has to answer the question, ‘Why should I sacrifice my own happiness for the greater happiness of another?’, it must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist, 'Why should I sacrifice a present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other persons?

This passage is from Henry Sidgwick as quoted in chapter 7 of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which develops this line of argument further

I recently read Answering Moral Skepticism by Shelly Kagan. This is an excellent book on metaethics with the goal of convincing the reader that believing in moral realism (roughly the view that there are objective moral facts) is not “intellectually disreputable” or “philosophically naive.” He does this by considering various arguments for the opposite thesis of moral skepticism (the view that there are no positive objective moral truths) and explaining why each of them are not decisive objections to morality. Because he is primarily focused on defending moral realism, he doesn’t present an extended affirmative argument for this view or advance a particular theory of normative ethics. He does, however, present a basic argument for why the skeptic rather than the realist should bear the burden of proof.

Even with this narrow goal, Kagan’s book covers a lot of ground. He responds to Mackie’s concerns (see my post on Mackie above) as well as several other concerns raised by more recent philosophers. As a result, this is a long book, and probably won’t make for great beach reading on your next vacation. Even so, you could consult specific chapters if there are skeptical arguments that you find particularly compelling.

One counterargument that Kagan applies to several skeptical claims is the “companions in guilt” strategy. This approach shows that certain skeptical arguments, if not carefully stated or qualified, prove too much in the sense that they would undermine all normativity and not just morality. One of the implications here is that these types of arguments mean that we don’t have reasons to do anything (like take our hand out of a fire) or believe anything (like that 3 is a prime number). Since even moral skeptics believe in some kind or normativity (or act as if they do as long as they are trying to convince you of something), I find these types of arguments particularly effective. Kagan also uses several other types of arguments, and often applies multiple arguments to a single issue.

While this book could serve as a decent introduction to metaethics, Kagan’s aim isn’t to provide a survey but to win you over to a certain point of view. And indeed I did change my mind, or at least start to change my mind, on a number of areas. One of these areas is moral intuitionism, which is roughly the idea that intuition can be a source of evidence about ethics. I had been highly skeptical of appeals to intuition ever since I started studying ethics, but after Kagan’s presentation, I no longer think I can dismiss this view out of hand.

I find Kagan’s writing particularly effective. His style is straightforward – almost to the extent of being plainspoken – and he avoids technical terms as far as is possible while still being in touch with the broader literature. The text is mercifully free of footnotes. There are a few endnotes, but they are un-numbered and simply provide some additional context at the chapter level. A wonderfully concise bibliography (under two pages) provides a very focused set of materials for further exploration. With all of these user-friendly features, you might think this book runs the risk of oversimplifying the subject matter. Not so! Each chapter carefully considers its topic, although of course there are limits to how much can be said in a single volume.

Altogether I think this is an excellent and highly accessible book of moral philosophy. While I wouldn’t recommend it as someone’s first book on ethics, it would be a great choice for a third or fourth book.

To give an idea of what else I’ve been up to in this area, over the past year I’ve read Kant’s Groundwork, Mill’s Utilitarianism, Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, Rawl’s Theory of Justice (about halfway through), Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other (nearly done), Williams’s Morality (also nearly done), and several articles from an anthology. I’m not planning detailed writeups of these, but I’d be happy to try to answer any questions about them.