It is likely that the words “morals” or “morality” mean more to you than the words “ethics” or “ethical theory.” However, for our purposes here, they more or less refer to the same topic of human reflection. The subject of morals is one that deals with the right or the good human actions. While much of what we'll be discussing here will have to do with the specific area of ethics that involves making choices in particular ethical instances, we should recognize that ethics also encompasses the more general discussion of the human good and how we should live our lives.
You have probably spent some time at some point or another in your life reflecting upon an ethical dilemma. You may have even considered your overarching value. However, you may not have had the occasion. This does not mean you are not an ethical being. Instead, it may be because your ethical beliefs are so deeply part of you that you act on them without a great deal of reflection. When faced with questions about what would be good to do in a particular situation, we most often navigate based on our core beliefs about what is good without too much trouble. As we've seen, philosophy is very much about self-reflection, so it shouldn't surprise you too much to learn that we'll be digging into our system of beliefs to learn more about what we believe and why.
If we were going to try to understand more about the nature of our ethical beliefs, where would be a good place to start? The best place to begin would be at the point at which we find ourselves at a loss for what to do in a given situation. Under the ideal circumstances, we don't really even notice we're making decisions about what we think is good in life; we make it to work on time, we help a person carrying a heavy load of books, and we don't steal the soda we're buying even though the line is long and we could do it without being noticed.
Sometimes, though, our beliefs about what constitutes “good action” do not give us clear guidance about what to do in an especially difficult or problematic situation. Perhaps we find ourselves faced with competing goods and we must decide between them. The key to this sort of situation is that the moral compass or moral intuitions that we normally rely on to help us make decisions is not working. Our movement through life comes to a halt; we are paralyzed by the necessity of making a choice that cannot be done intuitively as we normally do. We need a cure for our paralysis so that we can continue with our lives.
These moments of ethical paralysis are crucial for our discussion of ethics, because it is in this sort of moment that we are most likely to be thinking about the nature of ethical reflection in itself, and we're most likely to benefit from a study of various ethical systems. In essence, the ethical theories we will be discussing are guides; they are guides that can be used to help us make ethical decisions and return to action. For many people, the most familiar ethical theory is embodied in religion. A religious believer may turn to their religious leaders or texts to help them resolve an ethical dilemma or indecision.
The ethical theories we will be discussing are not exclusive of religion; indeed, some of the world's great religions embody strains and aspects of various ethical theories. Ethical theories differ from a straight appeal to religion in a key way. Even though they may reference a divine presence, they explain human good in rational, rather than supernatural terms. Therefore, even though an ethical theory may have a place for the divine, its particular view of the human good is based on an argument or arguable reasons.
You probably know more about ethical theories than you might think. In the next section, we'll focus closely on utilitarianism and deontology ethical theories, but most theories of this type can be grouped in a few categories that you probably are familiar with now. Several very popular ethical theories are: - Cultural relativism is a theory that cultures essentially each have their own goods, and you should choose your actions based on what your culture holds valuable.
- Utilitarianism, which will be the first theory we'll focus on more closely, suggests that what is good is that which increases the happiness of the greatest number of people.
- Deontological theory, the other theory we'll explore in depth, says that we have certain duties as human beings and doing those duties is how we ought to direct our actions.
- Virtue ethics, popular among the early Greeks and some feminist theorists, holds that ethics should be focused less on what we do and more on the kind of character we should develop.
While we could spend an entire class in the study of ethics, in an introductory course, the best we can do is walk through an overview of major ethical theories and see how some of them might apply to our lives. In the future, you can do more in-depth readings if these studies are of interest to you | Utilitarianism & Deontological Theory: Two Approaches to Ethical Theory | While John Stuart Mill wasn't solely responsible for it, his name is most often associated with utilitarianism. Like many philosophic ideas, utilitarianism is a theory that will probably seem like a familiar type of thought. Simply put, the theory of utilitarianism holds that the right action ethically is the one that will go the farthest toward increasing happiness for the community as a whole. If this sounds somewhat vague, it is supposed to. Mill ended up spending many pages of text explaining what the key terms of the theory mean and how they were supposed to work together. Because this is an introduction to ethical theory, we will focus on the idea of happiness and what it might mean to increase it.
Mill's idea was that human beings desire happiness first and foremost. We orient our lives to try to increase our own general happiness as much a possible. Because happiness is our goal, he reasoned, it makes sense to evaluate the goodness of an action based on its general effect on happiness. Further, as social beings, we shouldn't be concerned with our own happiness solely. Therefore, when we are evaluating the impact of an action on happiness, we should be concerned with the happiness of people in general. Thus, if we are faced with a choice between action A and action B, we should ask ourselves “how would each of these actions impact human happiness?” Then, we choose the action that increases human happiness the most. Conversely, we should avoid actions or choices that affect human happiness adversely.
Perhaps a concrete example would help with clarification. You may be faced with the (somewhat trivial) ethical dilemma of whether you should have another bowl of ice cream after you’ve already had a large bowl just before. Applying utilitarianism, you would ask yourself what sort of impact the action would have on human happiness. You would probably find that the immediate effect on your happiness would be positive: You like ice cream, and eating some more would probably make you happy.
On the other hand, you might reason that the gluttony of eating more than your fair share of ice cream amounts to taking up more than your share of things in the world. Further, perhaps you also know that eating too much ice cream has health implications that may end up being a public problem if you rely on public health care to treat diabetes or heart disease.
After thinking it over, you might conclude that even though your personal happiness might get a little bump from that extra bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough, the overall impact on human happiness is negative. Thus, to choose the ice cream would be unethical. Of course, many of the ethical choices we actually agonize over are more complex than this, but the general process of reflection is the same.
Astute philosophy students will often quickly notice that it seems as if utilitarianism would have us all simply seeking the simplest pleasures, because they are the most direct method of increasing happiness. You can probably see, though, that psychoactive drugs might be the shortest cut to happiness. Overall, human happiness would quickly suffer if we all sat around high and happy. For example, who would take care of us when we were sick or work to pay for our drugs?
Mill has a very complicated assessment of how we might balance various human goals in relation to human happiness, and he was famous for having noted that we'd be better as Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
We can see that one of the chief attributes of utilitarianism is its orientation toward consequences of human action. The consequences of an action are what are important to the utilitarian in terms of the impact of human happiness. Deontological ethical theory, most often associated with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, has a completely different focus; it holds that the consequences of the action are not important in making an ethical decision.
Instead, deontological theory focuses on duty. Specifically, deontological theory holds that human beings have a certain duty of action, and doing the right ethical thing means doing our human duty in a given situation. The million-dollar question is “what is our duty?” Kant thought that the way we discover our duty was using the “categorical imperative.” He had a number of ways of stating this categorical imperative, but the gist is that we should act in such a way that the action could become a maxim or directive of human action in general. A maxim is simply a universal moral law, and the categorical imperative is the method we use to figure out this moral law. This might sound like the Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and there are certainly some situations in which the outcome of the two approaches would be the same.
However, it is important to note that the categorical imperative is not the same concept as the Golden Rule. For starters, the Golden Rule doesn’t include the duties we have to ourselves, and as Kant makes quite clear, our duty to treat all rational beings as ends in and of themselves rather than as a means to an end extends to ourselves. Furthermore, because the Golden Rule is based on how a person desires to be treated, it only works if what that person wants for himself or herself coincides with the universal good. For example, if a person were suicidal, the Golden Rule would tell other people to kill people, because that’s what the suicidal person would like them to do to him or her. However, the categorical imperative tells us that the maxim of such an action is logically untenable, because everyone would end up dead, and there would be no moral beings left at all!
According to deontological theory, our actions should be chosen such that we could imagine everyone acting in a similar way. Kant thought that if we found the result of this imagination impossible or unacceptable, the action was not morally permissible. In his quintessential example, he takes up the issue of lying. Can we imagine a world in which everyone lied at will? It doesn't really even make sense to imagine, as the whole notion of truth would dissolve in such a case. If lying were the norm, we would not easily be able to identify the truth.
To return to the bowl of ice cream: What would deontological theory say about the additional helping of dessert? We would have to decide what it would mean for you to make a general rule out of your action of eating a second bowl of ice cream. Could you will it that there would be a universal law that everyone would eat a second helping of dessert? There certainly doesn’t seem to be any internal contradiction with such law or maxim, so perhaps given the deontological method, that extra helping of dessert wouldn't be morally problematic.
However, Kant also believed that we had to distinguish between the duties we have been discussing and our inclinations. You certainly don’t have a duty to eat ice cream, but you may have an inclination to do so. If that inclination doesn’t violate your duty, it is no longer an ethical problem. However, if you eat ice cream for pleasure and it is bad for your health (because you are lactose intolerant, diabetic, etc.), then you are violating the duty you have to treat yourself as an end and preserve your health by treating your body as a means to pleasure. Thus, eating the second serving of ice cream would be to act on inclination in violation of duty and, therefore, would be unethical. If the ice cream happens to be frozen yogurt with live and active cultures that promote health, on the other hand, it might serve both your duty to preserve your health and your inclination to eat dessert, and is therefore an amoral (as opposed to immoral) action.
Using the navigation on the left, please proceed to the next page. | | Character and Ethics | Deontology and utilitarianism are both concerned with how we should act. Virtue ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with how we should be. In other words, virtue ethics is based upon the belief that if we develop good character, we will act ethically. The most famous virtue ethicist is probably Aristotle, whose work we discussed earlier. Like the utilitarian thinkers who came after him, Aristotle believed that ethics is primarily concerned with happiness. Aristotle’s idea of happiness also has less to do with short-term pleasures (e.g., the taste of ice cream or the riches that come from fame) and more to do with fulfilling your purpose in life. For human beings, this purpose is ultimately about developing virtue. He believed there were two types of virtues: intellectual virtues (like wisdom) and ethical virtues (like courage and honesty).
Intellectual virtues are developed through education, while ethical virtues are developed through practice. For example, if you make a conscious effort to tell the truth, you will develop a habit of doing so and, thus, become an honest person. In addition, there is a difference between accidentally being virtuous (because it never occurred to you to lie in the first place, for example) and consciously, deliberately, and continuously acting virtuously. The latter practice helps us to develop virtue.
But, what are the virtues? In classic Greek fashion, Aristotle doesn’t actually tell us what the virtues are. However, he did set forth a guide to help us figure it out for ourselves: the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is the idea that virtue lies somewhere in between excess and deficiency; thus, it emphasizes moderation and self-discipline without completely excluding pleasure. In short, he believed that we should strive for the Golden Mean, and in so striving, we develop the virtuous character we need to live good and happy lives.
For example, think about the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. He was seeking courage, and thought it might be something the Wizard could give him. In the end, he learned that acting courageously was all he needed to do to be courageous. He knew what it meant to be a coward and shrink away from all dangers, because that was how he had lived most of his life. He also learned what it meant to be foolhardy when he lunges at Toto the dog and is slapped by Dorothy.
Care ethicists, such as NelNoddings, take this approach one step further and argue that ethics aren’t only about personal character development. Ethics should also be concerned with developing the ability to genuinely care for others. This care isn’t an abstract concept; in fact, the way in which you care for one person may be different from how you should care for another. In other words, care is a relational term for Noddings. Therefore, care is a virtue that can only be developed through concrete relationships with other people. However, developing an ethics of care cannot only be about caring for existing relationships. In fact, it requires us to develop new and different caring relationships to other people. For example, you may care about your friends and family, but to really develop as a person, you need to form new caring relationships by coming to the aid of a stranger or volunteering at a homeless shelter. | |