The Axe-Murderer Discussion and The Ethical Theory

Task 1: read the P38-P58 of textbook and do a writing assignment (about 1 page)
Task 2: Discussion Initial Post 150 words + 3 replies (each 50-75 words)
Task 3: 10 multiple choices

What makes an action right or wrong? What do we mean when
we say that someone ought or ought not to do something? How
should we live? How should we treat other people? These are
fundamental questions which philosophers have argued about for
thousands of years. If we cannot say why such things as torture,
murder, cruelty, slavery, rape, and theft are wrong, what justification can we have for trying to prevent them? Is morality simply a
matter of prejudice or can we give good reasons for our moral
beliefs? The area of philosophy which deals with such questions is
usually known either as ethics or as moral philosophy – I shall use
the terms interchangeably here.
I am sceptical of philosophy’s ability to change people’s fundamental prejudices about what is right or wrong. As Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844–1900) pointed out in Beyond Good and Evil, most
moral philosophers end up justifying ‘a desire of the heart that has
been filtered and made abstract’. In other words, these philosophers
give complicated analyses which appear to involve impersonal
logical reasoning but which always end up by demonstrating that
their pre-existing prejudices were correct. Nevertheless moral philosophy can provide insights when dealing with real moral issues: it
can clarify the implications of certain very general beliefs about
morality, and show how these beliefs can consistently be put into
practice. Here I will examine three types of moral theory: dutybased, consequentialist, and virtue-based. These are very general
competing frameworks for understanding moral issues. First I will
outline the main features of these three sorts of theory and show
how they might be applied to a real-life case. I will then go on to
the more abstract philosophical questions about the meaning of
moral language, known as meta-ethics.
DUTY-BASED THEORIES
Duty-based ethical theories stress that each of us has certain duties –
actions that we ought or ought not to perform – and that acting
morally amounts to doing our duty, whatever consequences might
follow from this. It is this idea, that some actions are absolutely right or
wrong regardless of the results which follow from them, which
distinguishes duty-based (also known as deontological) ethical theories
from consequentialist ethical theories. Here we will examine two
duty-based theories: Christian ethics and Kantian ethics.
CHRISTIAN ETHICS
Judaeo-Christian moral teaching has dominated Western understanding
of morality: our whole conception of what morality is has been shaped
by religious doctrine, and even atheistic ethical theories are heavily
indebted to it. The Ten Commandments list various duties and
forbidden activities. These duties apply regardless of the consequences
of carrying them out: they are absolute duties. Someone who believes
that the Bible is the word of God will have no doubt about the
meaning of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’: ‘right’ means what God wills, and
‘wrong’ means anything which is against God’s will. For such a
believer morality is a matter of following absolute commands given by
the external authority, God. So, for instance, killing is always morally
wrong because it is explicitly listed as a sin in the Ten Commandments.
This is so even when killing a particular individual – Hitler for
instance – might save other people’s lives. This is a simplification: in
fact theologians do argue about exceptional circumstances when
killing might be morally permissible, as for instance in a just war.
In practice, Christian morality is far more complicated than just
obeying the Ten Commandments: it involves the application of
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Christ’s teaching, and in particular of the New Testament
Commandment ‘Love thy neighbour’. The essence of this morality,
however, is a system of dos and don’ts. The same is true of most
other moralities based on a religion.
Many people have thought that if God doesn’t exist there can be
no such thing as morality: as the Russian novelist Dostoevsky put it,
‘If God doesn’t exist, then anything is permitted’. Nevertheless,
there are at least three major objections to any ethical theory based
solely upon God’s will.
CRITICISMS OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS
WHAT IS GOD’S WILL?
One immediate difficulty with Christian ethics is finding out what
God’s will actually is. How can we know for sure what God wants
us to do? Christians usually answer this question by saying, ‘Look at
the Bible’. But the Bible is open to numerous, and often conflicting,
interpretations: think only of the differences between those who
take the Book of Genesis literally, believing that the world was
created in seven days, and those who think that this is a metaphor;
or of the differences between those who think that killing in war is
sometimes acceptable and those who believe that the Commandment
‘Thou shalt not kill’ is absolute and unconditional.
THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA
A dilemma arises when there are only two possible alternatives and
neither is desirable. In this case the dilemma is one that was originally
presented in Plato’s Euthyphro. The dilemma for someone who
believes that morality is derived from God’s commands is as follows.
Does God command or love what he or she commands or loves
because it is morally good? Or does God’s commanding or loving it
make it morally good?
Consider the first option. If God commands or loves what he or
she commands or loves because it is morally good then this makes
morality in some sense independent of God. He or she is responding
to pre-existing moral values that occur in the universe: discovering
rather than creating them. On this view it would be possible to
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describe morality completely without any mention of God, though
it might be thought that God provides us with more reliable
information about morality than we would otherwise be able to
glean from the world with our limited intellects. Nevertheless, on
this view, God is not the source of morality.
The second option is probably even less attractive to defenders of
Christian ethics. If God creates right and wrong simply by his or
her commands or approval then this seems to make morality
somewhat arbitrary. In principle God could have declared murder
to be morally praiseworthy and it would have been. A defender of
morality as a system of God’s commands might answer that God
would never make murder morally praiseworthy because God is
good and would not wish that upon us. But if by ‘good’ is meant
‘morally good’, this has the consequence that all that ‘God is good’
can mean is ‘God approves of him- or herself’. This is hardly what
believers mean when they say ‘God is good’.
IT ASSUMES GOD’S EXISTENCE
However, a far more serious objection to such a view of ethics is
that it presupposes that God actually exists and is benevolent.
If God weren’t benevolent, why would acts in accordance with
his or her will be considered morally good? As we have seen in
Chapter 1, neither God’s existence nor benevolence can be taken
for granted.
Not all duty-based moral theories rely on God’s existence. The
most important duty-based moral theory, that of Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804), although strongly influenced by the Protestant
Christian tradition, and despite the fact that Kant himself was a
devout Christian, describes morality in a way which, in its broadest
outlines, many atheists have found appealing.
KANTIAN ETHICS
MOTIVES
Immanuel Kant was interested in the question ‘What is a moral
action?’ The answer he gave has been of tremendous importance in
philosophy. Here I will outline its main features.
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For Kant it was clear that a moral action was one performed out
of a sense of duty, rather than simply out of inclination or feeling or
the possibility of some kind of gain for the person performing it.
So, for example, if I give money to charity because I have deep
feelings of compassion for the needy, I am, in Kant’s view, not
necessarily acting morally: if I act purely from my feelings of compassion rather than from a sense of duty, then my action is not a moral
one. Or if I give money to charity because I think it will increase
my popularity with my friends, then, again, I am not acting morally,
but for gain in social status.
So for Kant the motive of an action was far more important than
the action itself and its consequences. He thought that in order
to know whether or not someone was acting morally you had to
know what their intention was. It was not enough just to know
whether or not the Good Samaritan helped the man in need. The
Samaritan might have been acting out of self-interest, expecting a
reward for his troubles. Or else he might have done it only because
he felt a twinge of compassion: this would have been acting from
an emotional motive rather than from a sense of duty.
Most other moral philosophers would agree with Kant that selfinterest is not an appropriate motive for a moral action. But many
would disagree with his claim that whether or not someone feels
such an emotion as compassion is irrelevant to our moral assessment
of their actions. For Kant, however, the only acceptable motive for
moral action was a sense of duty.
One reason why Kant concentrated so much on the motives for
actions rather than on their consequences was that he believed that
all people could be moral. Since we can only reasonably be held
morally responsible for things over which we have some control – or
as he put it, since ‘ought implies can’ – and because the consequences
of actions are often outside our control, these consequences cannot
be crucial to morality. For instance, if, acting from my sense of
duty, I attempt to save a drowning child, but accidentally drown
the child, my action can still be considered a moral one since my
motives were of the right kind: the consequences of my action
would have been, in this case, tragic, but irrelevant to the moral worth
of what I did.
Similarly, as we don’t necessarily have complete control over our
emotional reactions, these cannot be essential to morality either. If
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morality was to be available to all conscious human beings, then,
Kant thought, it had to rely entirely upon the will, and in particular
on our sense of duty.
MAXIMS
Kant described the intentions behind any act as the maxim. The
maxim is the general principle underlying the action. For instance,
the Good Samaritan could have been acting on the maxim ‘Always
help those in need if you expect you will be rewarded for your
troubles’. Or he could have been acting on the maxim ‘Always help
those in need when you experience a feeling of compassion’.
However, if the Good Samaritan’s behaviour were moral, then he
would probably have been acting on the maxim ‘Always help those
in need because it is your duty to do so’.
THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE
Kant believed that as rational human beings we have certain duties.
These duties are categorical: in other words they are absolute and
unconditional – duties such as ‘You ought always to tell the truth’
or ‘You ought never to kill anyone’. They apply whatever consequences might follow from obeying them. Kant thought morality
was a system of Categorical Imperatives: commands to act in certain
ways. This is one of the most distinctive aspects of his ethics. He
contrasted categorical duties with hypothetical ones. A hypothetical
duty is one such as ‘If you want to be respected, then you ought to
tell the truth’ or ‘If you want to avoid going to prison, then you
ought not to murder anyone’. Hypothetical duties tell you what
you ought or ought not to do if you want to achieve or avoid a
certain goal. He thought there was only one basic Categorical
Imperative: ‘Act only on maxims which you can at the same time
will to be universal laws’. ‘Will’ here means ‘rationally want’. In
other words, the message of the Categorical Imperative is only act
on a maxim you would rationally want to apply to everybody. This
principle is known as the principle of universalizability.
Although he gave a number of different versions of the Categorical
Imperative, this is the most important of them and it has been
immensely influential. We will examine it in more detail.
RIGHT AND WRONG 43
UNIVERSALIZABILITY
Kant thought that for an action to be moral, the underlying maxim had
to be a universalizable one. It had to be a maxim that would hold
for anyone else in similar circumstances. You should not make an
exception of yourself, but should be impartial. So, for example, if
you stole a book, acting on the maxim ‘Always steal when you are too
poor to buy what you want’, for this to have been a moral act, this
maxim would have had to apply to anyone else in your position.
Of course this doesn’t mean that any maxim whatsoever which
can be universalized is for that reason a moral one. It is obvious that
many trivial maxims, such as ‘Always poke your tongue out at
people who are taller than you’, could quite easily be universalized,
even though they have little or nothing to do with morality. Some
other universalizable maxims, such as the one about stealing, which
I used in the previous paragraph, may still be considered immoral.
This notion of universalizability is a version of the so-called Golden
Rule of Christianity, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you’. Someone acting on the maxim ‘Be a parasite, always live
at other people’s expense’ would not be acting morally since it
would be impossible to universalize the maxim. It would invite the
question, ‘What if everyone did that?’ And if everyone were parasites,
then there would be no one left for parasites to live on. The maxim
fails to pass Kant’s test, and so cannot be a moral one.
On the other hand, we can quite easily universalize the maxim
‘Never torture babies’. It is certainly possible and desirable for
everyone to obey this order, although they may not. Those who
disobey it by torturing babies are acting immorally. With maxims
such as this one, Kant’s notion of universalizability quite clearly
gives an answer which corresponds to most people’s unquestioned
intuitions about right and wrong.
MEANS AND ENDS
Another of Kant’s versions of the Categorical Imperative was ‘Treat
other people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end’. This is
another way of saying that we should not use other people, but should
always recognize their humanity: the fact that they are individuals
with wills and desires of their own. If someone is pleasant to you
simply because they know that you can give them a job, then they
44 RIGHT AND WRONG
are treating you as a means to getting that job, and not as a person, as
an end in yourself. Of course, if someone is pleasant to you because they
happen to like you, that would not have anything to do with morality.
CRITICISMS OF KANTIAN ETHICS
IT IS EMPTY
Kant’s ethical theory, and in particular his notion of the universalizability of moral judgements, is sometimes criticized for being
empty. This means that his theory only gives a framework showing
the structure of moral judgements without giving any help to those
faced with making actual moral decisions. It gives little aid to
people trying to decide what they ought to do.
This neglects the version of the Categorical Imperative which
instructs us to treat people as ends and never solely as means. In this
formulation Kant certainly does give some content to his moral
theory. But even with the combination of the universalizability
thesis and the means/ends formulation, Kant’s theory does not yield
satisfactory solutions to many moral questions.
For instance, Kant’s theory cannot easily cope with conflicts of
duty. If, for example, I have a duty always to tell the truth, and also
a duty to protect my friends, Kant’s theory would not show me
what I ought to do when these two duties conflict. If a madman
carrying an axe asked me where my friend was, my first inclination
would be to tell him a lie. To tell the truth would be to shirk the
duty I have to protect my friend. But on the other hand, according
to Kant, to tell a lie, even in such an extreme situation, would be
an immoral act: I have an absolute duty never to lie.
UNIVERSALIZABLE IMMORAL ACTS
A further related weakness that some people see in Kant’s theory is
that it seems to permit some obviously immoral acts. For instance, it
appears that a maxim such as ‘Kill anyone who gets in your way’
could quite consistently be universalized. And yet such a maxim is
clearly immoral.
But this sort of criticism fails as a criticism of Kant: it ignores the
means/ends version of the Categorical Imperative, which it obviously
RIGHT AND WRONG 45
contradicts. To kill someone who gets in your way is hardly treating
them as an end in themselves: it is a failure to take their interests
into account.
IMPLAUSIBLE ASPECTS
Though much of Kant’s ethical theory is plausible – especially the idea
of respecting other people’s interests – it does have some implausible aspects. First, it seems to justify some absurd actions, such as
telling a mad axeman where your friend is rather than putting him
off the trail by telling him a lie.
Second, the role the theory gives to emotions such as compassion,
sympathy, and pity seems inadequate. Kant dismisses such emotions
as irrelevant to morality: the only appropriate motive for moral
action is a sense of duty. Feeling compassion for someone in need,
while it may be considered praiseworthy from some viewpoints, is
not, for Kant, anything to do with morality. In contrast, many people
think that there are distinctively moral emotions, such as compassion,
sympathy, guilt, and remorse, and to separate these from morality,
as Kant attempted to do, is to ignore a central aspect of moral
behaviour.
Third, the theory takes no account of the consequences of actions.
This means that well-intentioned idiots who unintentionally cause a
number of deaths through incompetence might be morally blameless
on Kant’s theory. They would be judged primarily on their intentions. But in some cases consequences of actions do seem relevant
to an assessment of their moral worth: think how you would feel
about the well-intentioned babysitter who tried to dry your cat in a
microwave oven. However, to be fair to Kant on this point, he
does consider some kinds of incompetence culpable.
Those who find this last sort of criticism of deontological theories
convincing will very likely see the appeal of the type of ethical
theory known as consequentialism.
CONSEQUENTIALISM
The term ‘consequentialist’ is used to describe ethical theories which
judge whether an action is right or wrong not on the intentions of
the person performing the action, but rather on the consequences
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of that action. Whereas Kant would say that telling a lie was always
morally wrong, whatever the possible benefits which might result, a
consequentialist would judge the lie-telling on the results it had, or
could be expected to have.
UTILITARIANISM
Utilitarianism is the best-known type of consequentialist ethical
theory. Its most famous advocates were Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
and John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Utilitarianism is based on the
assumption that the ultimate aim of all human activity is (in some
sense) happiness. Such a view is known as hedonism.
A utilitarian defines ‘good’ as ‘whatever brings about the greatest
total happiness’. This is sometimes known as the Greatest Happiness
Principle or the Principle of Utility. For a utilitarian the right action
in any circumstances can be calculated by examining the probable
consequences of the various possible courses of action. Whichever is
most likely to bring about the most happiness (or at least the
greatest balance of happiness over unhappiness) is the right action in
those circumstances.
Utilitarianism has to deal in probable consequences because it is
usually extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict the precise
results of any particular action: for example, insulting people usually
makes them feel unhappy, but the person you are insulting may turn
out to be a masochist who takes great pleasure from being insulted.
One of the advantages of utilitarianism over some other approaches
to ethics is that it can give a clear method for including animals
within the realm of moral concern. Provided that it is accepted that
animals are capable of pain and pleasure, then it is possible to
include their welfare in the utilitarian calculation. And even if animals are not directly included in the calculation, the fact that their
apparent suffering has an effect on the happiness of animal-lovers
allows their welfare to be included in the assessment indirectly. For
example, if I and others like me are deeply distressed by the
knowledge that calves suffer in the production of veal, our unhappiness needs to be set against the possible pleasures experienced by
consumers of veal when deciding the morality of veal production.
Chapter 3 deals more thoroughly with questions about the moral
status of non-human animals.
RIGHT AND WRONG 47
CRITICISMS OF UTILITARIANISM
DIFFICULTIES OF CALCULATION
Whilst utilitarianism may sound an attractive theory in principle,
there are many difficulties which arise when you try to put it into
practice.
It is extremely difficult to measure happiness and to compare the
happiness of different people. Who is to decide whether or not the great
pleasure experienced by a sadist outweighs the victim’s suffering?
Or how does the pleasure a football fan experiences watching his or
her team score a brilliant goal compare with the tingles of delight
experienced by an opera buff listening to a favourite aria? And how
do these compare with the more physical sensations of pleasure
such as those that come from sex and eating?
Bentham thought that in principle such comparisons could be
made. For him, the source of happiness was irrelevant. Happiness
was simply a blissful mental state: pleasure and the absence of pain.
Although it occurred in different intensities, it was all of the same
kind and so, however produced, should be given weight in utilitarian calculations. In what he called his ‘felicific calculus’ he set out
guidelines for making comparisons between pleasures, taking into
account such features as their intensity, duration, tendency to give rise
to further pleasures, and so on. He was even prepared to include
animals in the sums. To do so, however, raises very serious difficulties
of the weighting of the pleasures and pains of different species and
different individual animals, assuming, of course, that we could
come up with an accurate measure of these. How are we to assess the
pleasure of a python slowly devouring a small antelope alive against
the pain felt by the antelope? Or what about the mosquito’s pleasure
felt at the expense of its victim’s minor irritation?
Mill found Bentham’s approach crude: in place of it he suggested
a distinction between so-called higher and lower pleasures. He argued
that anyone who had truly experienced the higher pleasures, which
were, in his view, mainly intellectual, would automatically prefer
them to the so-called lower ones, which were primarily physical. In
Mill’s scheme, higher pleasures counted for more in the calculation
of happiness than did lower ones: in other words he assessed pleasures according to their quality as well as their quantity. He argued
48 RIGHT AND WRONG
that it would certainly be preferable to be a sad but wise Socrates than
to be a happy but ignorant fool, on the grounds that Socrates’
pleasures would be of a higher kind than the fool’s.
But this sounds elitist. It is an intellectual’s justification for his own
particular preferences and the interests and values of his social class.
The fact remains that relative amounts of happiness are extremely
difficult to calculate. And indeed this problem would still not be
completely resolved even if we were to accept Mill’s division
between higher and lower pleasures.
A more basic difficulty of calculation occurs in deciding what are
to count as the effects of any particular action. If someone hit a child
because the child had misbehaved, the question of whether or not
this was a moral action would depend entirely upon the consequences
of the action. But are we to count only the immediate effects of
hitting the child, or must we take into account the long-term effects?
If the latter, then we may end up trying to balance such things
as the child’s emotional development, and possibly even the effects
on the child’s own children, against the child’s happiness derived
from avoidance of potentially dangerous situations as a result of the
punishment training. With any action the effects can stretch far into
the future, and there is rarely an obvious cut-off point.
PROBLEM CASES
A further objection to utilitarianism is that it can justify many
actions which are usually thought immoral. For instance, if it could
be shown that publicly hanging someone who is innocent would
have the direct beneficial effect of reducing violent crime by acting
as a deterrent, and so, overall, cause more pleasure than pain, then a
utilitarian would be obliged to say that hanging the innocent person
was the morally right thing to do. But such a conclusion is repugnant
to our sense of justice. Of course a feeling of repugnance towards
some of its conclusions doesn’t prove that there is something wrong
with the theory of utilitarianism. A hard-line utilitarian would
presumably quite happily stomach the conclusion. However, such
unpalatable consequences should make us wary about accepting
utilitarianism as a completely satisfactory moral theory.
Utilitarians like Bentham, who believe that happiness is simply a
blissful state of mind, leave themselves open to a further objection.
RIGHT AND WRONG 49
Their theory suggests that the world would be a morally better place if
a mood-altering drug such as ecstasy were secretly added to the
water supply, provided that it increased the total pleasure. Yet most
of us would feel that a life with fewer blissful moments but the
choice of how we achieve them would be preferable to this, and
that the person who added the drug to the water supply would
have done something immoral.
A related point has sometimes been made using the thought
experiment of the Experience Machine, an example thought up by
Robert Nozick (1938–2002). Imagine that you have the option of
being plugged into a sophisticated virtual reality machine that will
give you the illusion of having whatever experiences you most
desire. You only have the choice of being plugged in for life;
however, once you have been plugged in, you won’t realize that
you are plugged in. This machine could give you a huge range of
blissful mental states, yet most people considering this imaginary
situation say they wouldn’t opt for it. They wouldn’t seek their
own happiness irrespective of how it is produced: this suggests that
happiness is not just a matter of mental states, but includes a notion
of how those states are produced. And it is not at all plausible to
suggest that a world in which everyone was plugged into Experience
Machines giving them pleasant experiences would be morally superior
to the present one. Yet on Bentham’s view it would have to be, since
for him the methods of producing the blissful mental states did not
matter.
Consider another difficult case for the utilitarian. Whereas Kant says
that we ought to keep our promises whatever the consequences of
doing so, utilitarians would calculate the probable happiness that
would arise from keeping or breaking promises in each case, and act
accordingly. Utilitarians might well conclude that, in cases where
they knew that their creditors had forgotten about a debt and
wouldn’t be likely ever to remember it, it would be morally right
not to pay back money which they had borrowed. The borrowers’
increased happiness due to increased wealth might well outweigh
any unhappiness they felt about deceiving others. And the creditors
would, presumably, experience little or no unhappiness as they
would have forgotten about the debt.
But in such cases personal integrity seems to be an important
aspect of human interaction. Indeed, many would see telling the
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truth, repaying debts, being honest in our dealings with other people,
and so on, as central examples of moral behaviour. For such people,
utilitarianism, with its rejection of the concept of absolute duties, is
inadequate as a moral theory.
NEGATIVE UTILITARIANISM
Utilitarianism is based on the assumption that the right action in
any circumstances is the one which produces the greatest overall
happiness. But perhaps this puts too much stress on happiness. The
avoidance of pain and suffering is a far more important goal than
the achievement of a balance of happiness over unhappiness. Surely
a world in which no one was particularly happy, but no one
suffered extreme pain, would be more appealing than one in which
some people suffered extremes of unhappiness, but these were
balanced out by many people experiencing great contentment and
happiness?
One way of meeting this objection is to modify utilitarianism
into what is usually known as negative utilitarianism. The basic
principle of negative utilitarianism is that the best action in any
circumstances is not the one which produces the greatest balance of
happiness over unhappiness for the greatest number of people, but
the one which produces the least overall amount of unhappiness.
For instance, a rich negative utilitarian might wonder whether to leave
all his or her money to one poor and severely ill person who was in
great pain and whose suffering would be relieved considerably by
this gift, or else to divide it between a thousand moderately happy
people, who would each increase their happiness a little because of
this gift. An ordinary utilitarian would calculate which action would
produce the greater balance of pleasure over pain for the greatest
number of people; a negative utilitarian would only be concerned
to minimize suffering. So, whilst an ordinary utilitarian would probably divide the money between the thousand moderately happy
people, because that would maximize happiness, the negative utilitarian would leave the money to the severely ill person, thereby
minimizing suffering.
Such negative utilitarianism is, however, still open to many of the
difficulties of calculation that arise for ordinary utilitarianism. It is
also open to a criticism of its own.
RIGHT AND WRONG 51
CRITICISM OF NEGATIVE UTILITARIANISM
DESTRUCTION OF ALL LIFE
The best way to eliminate all suffering in the world would be to
eliminate all sentient life. If there were no living things capable of
feeling pain, then there would be no pain. If it were possible to do
this in a painless way, perhaps by means of a huge atomic explosion,
then, by the principle of negative utilitarianism, this would be the
morally right action. Even if a certain amount of pain were involved
in the process, the long-term benefits in pain elimination would
probably outweigh it. Yet this conclusion is hardly acceptable.
At the very least negative utilitarianism needs to be reformulated so
as to avoid it.
RULE UTILITARIANISM
As a way of getting round the objection that ordinary utilitarianism (also
known as act utilitarianism) has many unpalatable consequences,
some philosophers have suggested another modified version of the
theory, known as rule utilitarianism. This is supposed to combine
the best aspects of act utilitarianism with the best of deontological
ethics.
Rule utilitarians, rather than assessing the consequences of each
action separately, adopt general rules about the kinds of action which
tend to produce greater happiness for the greatest number of people.
For instance, because in general punishing innocent people produces
more unhappiness than happiness, rule utilitarians would adopt the
rule ‘never punish the innocent’, even though there may be particular instances in which punishing the innocent would produce more
happiness than unhappiness – such as when it acts as an effective
deterrent against violent crime. Similarly, a rule utilitarian would
advocate keeping promises because in general this produces a balance
of happiness over unhappiness.
Rule utilitarianism has the great practical benefit that it makes it
unnecessary to perform a complicated calculation every time you
are faced with having to make a moral decision. However, in a
situation in which you know that greater happiness will result from
breaking a promise than from keeping it, and, given that your basic
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moral sympathies lie with a utilitarian outlook, it seems perverse to
stick to the rule rather than to treat the individual case on its merits.
VIRTUE THEORY
Virtue theory is largely based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and
as a result is sometimes known as neo-Aristotelianism (‘neo’ meaning
‘new’). Unlike Kantians and utilitarians, who typically concentrate
on the rightness or wrongness of particular actions, virtue theorists
focus on character and are interested in the individual’s life as a whole.
The central question for virtue theorists is ‘How should I live?’ The
answer they give to this question is: cultivate the virtues. It is only
by cultivating the virtues that you will flourish as a human being.
FLOURISHING
According to Aristotle, everyone wants to flourish. The Greek word
he used for flourishing was eudaimonia. This is sometimes translated
as ‘happiness’, but this translation can be confusing since Aristotle
believed that you could experience, for instance, great physical
pleasure without achieving eudaimonia. Eudaimonia applies to a whole
life, not just to particular states you might find yourself in from
hour to hour. Perhaps ‘true happiness’ would be a better translation; but this makes it sound as if eudaimonia were a blissful mental
state at which you arrive, rather than a way of living your life successfully. Aristotle believed that certain ways of living promote human
flourishing, just as certain ways of caring for a cherry tree will lead it
to grow, blossom, and fruit.
THE VIRTUES
Aristotle claimed that cultivating the virtues is the way to flourish
as a human being. But what is a virtue? It is a pattern of behaviour and
feeling: a tendency to act, desire, and feel in particular ways in appropriate situations. Unlike Kant, Aristotle thought that experiencing
appropriate emotions was central to the art of leading a good life.
A virtue isn’t an unthinking habit, but rather involves an intelligent
judgement about the appropriate response to the situation you are in.
Someone who has the virtue of being generous would, in
appropriate situations, feel and act in a generous way. This would
RIGHT AND WRONG 53
involve the judgement that the situation and response were of an
appropriate kind. If put in the situation of the Good Samaritan, a
virtuous person would both feel compassion for the man left by the
roadside, and act in a charitable way towards him. A Samaritan who
only helped the victim because he had calculated some future
benefit for himself would not be acting virtuously, since generosity
involves giving without thought of benefit to yourself.
If the Samaritan had arrived at the time the robbers were
attacking their unfortunate victim, and the Samaritan had had the
virtue of courage, then he would have overcome any fear and
confronted the robbers. Part of what being courageous means is
having the ability to overcome fear.
Virtues such as generosity and courage are, virtue theorists
believe, traits which any human being will need in order to live
well. This might sound as if a virtuous individual could pick and
choose from a portfolio of virtues those which he or she wanted to
develop, or as if someone who possessed a single virtue to a great
degree could be a virtuous person. However, this would be a misunderstanding. For Aristotle, the virtuous person is someone who
has harmonized all the virtues: they must be woven into the fabric
of the virtuous person’s life.
CRITICISMS OF VIRTUE THEORY
WHICH VIRTUES SHOULD WE ADOPT?
A major difficulty with virtue theory is establishing which patterns
of behaviour, desire, and feeling are to count as virtues. The virtue
theorist’s answer is: those which a human needs in order to flourish.
But this doesn’t really give much help. Virtue theorists often produce
lists of virtues such as benevolence, honesty, courage, generosity,
and loyalty, and so on. They also analyse these in some detail. But,
as there is not complete overlap between their lists, there is room
for debate about what should be included. And it is not always clear
on what grounds something gets designated a virtue.
The danger is that virtue theorists simply redefine their prejudices
and preferred ways of life as virtues, and the activities they dislike as
vices. Someone who likes fine food and wine might declare that
subtle stimulation of the taste buds is an essential part of living well
54 RIGHT AND WRONG
as a human being, and thus that being a lover of fine food and wine is
a virtue. A monogamist might declare fidelity to one sexual partner a
virtue; a sexually promiscuous virtue theorist might make a case for
the virtue of sexual independence. Thus virtue theory can be used
as an intellectual smokescreen behind which prejudices are smuggled in. What is more, if the virtue theorist opts for accepting only
those ways of behaving, desiring, and feeling which are typically
considered virtuous in a particular society, then the theory emerges
as an essentially conservative one, with little scope for changing that
society on moral grounds.
HUMAN NATURE
A further criticism of virtue theory is that it presupposes that there
is such a thing as human nature and so that there are some general
patterns of behaviour and feeling appropriate for all human beings.
However, such a view has been challenged by many philosophers,
who believe that it is a serious mistake to assume that human nature
exists. I will return to this topic in the section on naturalism below.
A further assumption that virtue theorists make is that individuals’
characteristics are relatively stable, that, for example, someone who
is generous is reliably generous across a range of circumstances. Yet
recent psychological research suggests that we are far more affected
by circumstances than we believe we are – aspects of our environment significantly affect our behaviour without our realizing that
this is going on. For example, people tend to be far more generous
when outside a bakery smelling fresh bread than they are when
standing outside a hardware store. If our behaviour is so easily affected
by such circumstances, this casts some doubt on whether the virtuous
person whom virtue theorists praise so highly is a realistic possibility.
We may all of us be far more creatures of our circumstances than
is generally realized, and this makes the notion of fixed virtues less
secure as the foundation of morality than most virtue theorists
believe it to be.
APPLIED ETHICS
So far in this chapter I have outlined three basic types of ethical
theory. Obviously these are not the only types of ethical theory,
RIGHT AND WRONG 55
but they are the most important ones. Now let’s look at how philosophers actually apply their theories to real rather than imagined
moral decisions. This is known as practical or applied ethics. In
order to illustrate the sorts of considerations which are relevant in
applied ethics, we will focus on one ethical issue, namely that of
euthanasia or mercy killing.
EUTHANASIA
Euthanasia is usually defined as mercy killing. The issue of whether
or not euthanasia is justified typically arises with the very old and
the chronically sick, particularly those in great pain. If, for instance,
someone is in pain, and has no prospect of living a worthwhile
life, is it morally acceptable to switch off their life-support machine
or, perhaps, even administer a lethal drug? This is a practical ethical
question, one which doctors are frequently obliged to address.
As with most applied ethics, the philosophical questions which
arise in relation to euthanasia are not all ethical ones. To begin with,
there are a number of important distinctions which we can make
between types of euthanasia. First, there is voluntary euthanasia –
when the patient wishes to die, and expresses this wish. This is
usually a form of assisted suicide. Second, there is involuntary
euthanasia – when the patient does not wish to die, but this wish is
ignored. This is equivalent to murder in many, though not all,
cases. Third, there is non-voluntary euthanasia – when the patient
is unconscious, or in no position to express a wish. Here we will
concentrate on the issue of the morality of voluntary euthanasia.
The general ethical theory that an individual adopts obviously
determines their response to particular questions. So a Christian who
accepts the duty-based ethical theory outlined at the beginning of this
chapter is likely to answer questions about euthanasia in a different
way from someone who accepts John Stuart Mill’s consequentialist
theory, utilitarianism. A Christian would probably have doubts
about the moral justification of voluntary euthanasia because it
would seem to contradict the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’.
However, it might not be as simple as this. There could be a conflict
between this Commandment and the New Testament Commandment
to love one’s neighbour. If someone is in great pain, and wants to
die, it can be an act of love to help them end their life. A Christian
56 RIGHT AND WRONG
would have to decide which of these two Commandments had
more force, and act accordingly.
Similarly, someone who adopted Kant’s ethical theory might feel
duty-bound never to kill. To kill someone would seem to go against
Kant’s view that we should treat other people as ends in themselves
and never as means to an end, and respect their humanity. But this
same version of the Categorical Imperative could, in the case of
voluntary euthanasia, provide a moral justification for ending someone’s life, if that is what the patient wants and yet is unable to do it
unaided.
A utilitarian would see the issue in a very different light. For a
utilitarian, the difficulty would not be a conflict of duties, but rather
how to calculate the effects of the various possible courses of action
available. Whichever course of action would cause the greatest amount
of happiness for the most people, or at least the greatest balance of
happiness over unhappiness, would be the morally right one. The
utilitarian would consider the consequences for the patient. If the
patient were to carry on living, he or she would experience great
pain, and probably die very soon anyway. If the patient were to die
through an act of euthanasia, then pain would cease, as would all
capacity for happiness. However, these are not the only effects to
take into consideration. There are a number of side-effects. For
instance, the death of the patient by euthanasia might cause distress
to the patient’s relatives. Also, the act of euthanasia might involve
breaking the law, and so the person who helped the patient to
die might run the risk of prosecution. This also raises questions of
the morality of law-breaking in general.
Another side-effect of performing a single act of euthanasia is that
it might make it easier for unscrupulous doctors to kill patients
under the guise of it being the wishes of the patient. Opponents of
all euthanasia often point out that Hitler’s extermination techniques
were first tried out on victims of an involuntary euthanasia programme. Perhaps every individual act of voluntary euthanasia makes
it easier for someone to bring in a policy of involuntary euthanasia.
A utilitarian would weigh up such possible consequences of action
in order to decide whether the particular act of euthanasia were
morally justified.
A virtue theorist would approach the issue of euthanasia somewhat
differently, emphasizing the character of the person performing the
RIGHT AND WRONG 57
act of euthanasia. Although killing another person is usually contrary
both to the virtue of justice and to that of charity, in the special
case of voluntary euthanasia, when death would clearly benefit the
other person, the virtue of charity would permit it. However, even
in this case the virtue of justice might still oppose it. A virtue theorist would not lay down rigid rules of behaviour, but would be
sensitive to the details of the particular case.
As this brief discussion of a practical ethical problem illustrates,
there are rarely easy answers about what we should do. And yet
frequently we are forced to make moral judgements. Contemporary
developments in technology and genetics are constantly giving rise
to new ethical questions about life and death. In medical science,
the development of the possibility of in vitro fertilization, and of
genetic engineering, poses difficult ethical questions, as do technological breakthroughs, such as those in the field of computer science
which permit surveillance and access to personal information on an
undreamed-of scale. The AIDS epidemic has brought with it a
wide range of ethical questions about when it is acceptable to force
someone to be tested for the HIV virus. Clarification of the possible
approaches to such problems can only be useful. Often the most helpful philosophical contribution to genuine moral discussion does not
take the form of the application of a moral theory. Philosophers can be
good at spotting reasoning errors in such discussion, errors that turn
on logical rather than moral points. But the fact remains that ethical
decisions are the most difficult and the most important that we make.
The responsibility for our choices ultimately rests with each of us.
ETHICS AND META-ETHICS
The three types of ethical theory we have examined so far – dutybased, consequentialist, and virtue theory – are examples of first-order
theories. That is, they are theories about how we should behave.
Moral philosophers are also interested in second-order questions:
these are questions not about what we ought to do but about the status
of ethical theories. This theorizing about ethical theories is usually
known as meta-ethics. A typical meta-ethical question is ‘What is
the meaning of “right” in the moral context?’ I will consider three
examples of meta-ethical theories here: ethical naturalism, moral
relativism, and emotivism.
58 RIGHT AND WRONG
NATURALISM
One of the most widely discussed meta-ethical questions in the
twentieth century was that of whether or not so-called naturalistic
ethical theories are acceptable. A naturalistic ethical theory is one
which is based on the assumption that ethical judgements follow
directly from scientifically discoverable facts – often facts about
human nature.
Utilitarian ethics moves from a description of human nature to a
view of how we ought to behave. Ideally, utilitarianism would use
a scientific measurement of the quality and quantity of each person’s
happiness in order to demonstrate what is right and wrong. In contrast, Kantian ethics are not so closely linked to human psychology: our
categorical duties supposedly follow from logical, not psychological,
considerations.
CRITICISMS OF NATURALISM
FACT/VALUE DISTINCTION
Many philosophers believe that all naturalistic ethical theories are
based on a mistake: the failure to recognize that facts and values
are fundamentally different sorts of things. Those opposed to naturalism – anti-naturalists – argue that no factual description ever
leads automatically to any value judgement: further argument is
always needed. This is sometimes known as Hume’s Law, after
David Hume, who was one of the first to point out that moral
philosophers often move from discussions of ‘what is’ to discussions
of ‘what ought to be’ without further argument.
Anti-naturalists claim that the further argument needed to move
smoothly from facts to value, or, as it is sometimes put, from ‘is’ to
‘ought’, is impossible to give. Fact and value are different realms and
there is no logical connection between, say, human happiness and
moral worth. Following G. E. Moore (1873–1958), anti-naturalists
sometimes use the term the Naturalistic Fallacy to describe the
alleged mistake of arguing from facts to value, a fallacy being a type
of bad argument.
One argument anti-naturalists use to support their position is
known as the Open Question Argument.