If one is in a moral quandary it is
wise to look for ethical guidance if one has the time to do so. Ethical
theories are, among other things, intended to be one possible source of ethical
guidance. If such guidance is valuable, then in ethics there is an
embarrassment of riches: There are multiple, well-accepted, yet mutually
inconsistent theories. These include utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue ethics,
contractarianism, libertarianism, natural law theory, some forms of moral
particularism, and more. The disquieting thing is that, at present, it seems
that we are not at all close to being able to determine which of them, if any,
is right. How can you know what you should do when ethicists, those who devote
their careers to studying such theories, cannot reach a consensus on which one
we should accept? Those who look to ethical theories for ethical guidance are
apt to be disappointed. This situation is problematic, for if ethical
theorizing is to have relevance to real-world ethical behavior, and not just be
a way of examining ethical issues out of a love of arguments or puzzles, it
must be possible for us to use ethical theories to inform ourselves of what we
should do.
It seems that philosophers have
usually tried to address the issue of how one should act by advancing arguments
for or against these theories (or certain parts of them). I want to approach
this issue from a different angle. The question I will address is this: Can you
get ethical guidance about what you should do in certain situations without
knowing, or even having good reasons to believe, that any particular
ethical theory is right?
I know of at least one philosopher
who thinks you can. In the following passage from his article “Hunger, Duty,
and Ecology”, which was the inspiration for the ideas I express in this article,
Mylan Engel Jr. rebuts an objection to the obligatoriness of donating to famine
relief:
One of the most common reasons that I have heard
philosophers give for rejecting the arguments of Singer and company [for
contributing to famine relief] runs roughly as follows:
Singer’s preference utilitarianism is irremediably
flawed, as are Kant’s ethics, Aieken’s theory of human rights, and Rawlsean
contractarianism. The literature is peppered with devastating objections to
these views. Because all of the aforementioned arguments are predicated on
flawed ethical theories, all these arguments are also flawed. Until someone can
provide me with clear moral reasons grounded in a true moral theory for sending
large portions of my income to famine-relief organizations, I will continue to
spend my money on what I please.
Such a self-serving reply is both disingenuous and
sophistical. It is disingenuous because, as noted earlier, utilitarianism,
Kantian ethics, human rights-based ethics, and contractarianism are among the
most widely accepted theories in normative ethics. In other contexts,
philosophers typically embrace one of these four theoretical approaches to
ethics. It is sophistical because a similar reply can be used to “justify” or
rationalize virtually any behavior. Because no moral theory to date is immune
to objection, one could, for example, “justify” rape on the grounds that all of
the arguments against rape are based on flawed ethical theories.
The speciousness
of such a “justification” of rape is obvious. No one who seriously considers
the brutality of rape can think that it is somehow justified / permissible simply because all current ethical
theories are flawed. But such specious reasoning is often used to “justify”
allowing millions of innocent children to starve to death each year. [footnote
omitted] (Environmental Ethics, p. 462).
Engel
goes on to justify his conclusions about donating to famine relief by appealing
to what he takes to be almost universally shared commonsense beliefs about
morality.
My approach will be different. My
idea is that if you compare all the viable ethical theories that you know of,
and find that all, or at any rate a great majority of them agree about whether an
action you're considering is right, wrong, or permissible, then you know
that it is at least highly probable that that action really is right, wrong, or
permissible. For if all ethical theories agree about the moral status of an
action, it can only fail to have that status if they are all false. And if a
great majority of ethical theories agree about the moral status of an action,
it can only fail to have that status if all of the theories that agree about its
status are false, which becomes more and more improbable as the number of the
theories that agree increases. Note that I’m not arguing that if a great majority of ethical theories agree
about the moral status of an action then it automatically follows that it very
probably has that status. The argument is rather that if some ethical theory or other is true, then majority agreement implies that the action very probably has
the moral status that the majority of theories agree that it has. The upshot is
that my approach should be a good guide as to what you should do as long as
some ethical theory or other is true. So
by using my approach you can be guided by ethical theories without having to
attempt the difficult task of determining which of them is right.
To clarify, my idea is not to put
different ethical theories together to get a composite theory, but to help
someone figure out what they should do in a fairly specific situation. By
comparing different ethical theories you might find that they agree about what
you should do in a situation, but they might not agree about why
you should do it. If you try to “combine” the guidance you get across diverse
situations the result would probably not be cohesive enough to yield an
ethical theory. And if you find that a sufficient number of ethical theories
don't agree even about what you should do in a given situation, I think
the most you can conclude is that you don't know what you should do, and
in such a case you would not have any
determinate guidance. So I think that in some cases my approach will give you
guidance and in other cases it won't.
Nevertheless, on my view, you would
have a reason to explore as many different candidate ethical theories as
you can, even though there is no need to determine which of them is right. This
is because the more of them you consider, the more certain you can be that you
have a representative sample of all the possible viable ethical theories, and
the more representative the sample is, the more certain you can be that an
action really has the moral status you think it does given that the majority of
ethical theories agree that it has it.
It is important to note that ethical
theories properly so called need not
be the only kind of ethical view that one might have to take into account on my
approach. Timothy Chappell has introduced the different yet related notion of
an ethical outlook, which he characterizes
as follows:
Anybody
who is going to live a genuinely worthwhile and a fully human life will have to
live out a set of views and commitments about the central questions concerning
value: what is worth living for and what is worth dying for, what is really
admirable and what is really contemptible, what we must do at all costs and
what we must not do no matter what; and so on. This set of views and
commitments need not be very explicit; but it must run deep—must be sincerely
and indeed passionately held. And it need not be very systematic; but it must
be as considered, rationally defensible, and coherent as possible. Any such set
of views about value is what I will call an ethical outlook.
The notion of an ethical outlook is,
in principle, broader than the notion of an ethical theory, for it can include
ethical theories as well as ethical views that are less systematic. In
Chappell’s opinion, mainstream ethical theories
are not credible ethical outlooks, because he thinks they are ill-suited for
any of the four roles that he regards as important ones important for ethical
outlooks to play.
I am not convinced by his arguments, but I don’t have the space to address them
here, so I will proceed on the assumption that mainstream ethical theories are
credible ethical outlooks and leave the analysis of Chappell’s arguments for another
occasion
Related to this is the important
question of whether ethical outlooks that are not ethical theories are eligible to be included among the views
that my approach takes into account. For
now I will simply say that, though I cannot see a priori any reason why not, I think their eligibility must be
determined on a case by case basis, and in order to make such determinations I
would need a more fully developed account than I now possess of the criteria of
viability that I will present next. The development of such an
account is something that I must also leave for another occasion.
Given that there may be ethical
theories that have not yet been thought of by anyone, it is not certain how
many of them there are. But it is certain that not all of them are created
equal. Thus, in order to carry out a project like mine, it will be necessary to
develop criteria of viability that one can use to eliminate theories that are
inadequate and thus narrow down the range of theories one will have to
consider. In this section I will list
some of these criteria.
One criterion is cohesiveness. Ethical theories cannot
contain contradictions, but more than that, their components must be mutually
supporting and fit together well. That is, an ethical theory can’t just be some
arbitrary set of statements about what one should do that happens to be logically
consistent. Some parts of the theory must provide a rationale as to why such-and-such
is right, wrong, or permissible. Furthermore, these parts and their rationales
must be subsumed under some common principles, or be such that relevantly
similar actions receive relevantly similar evaluations, and for relevantly
similar reasons.
Another criterion is comprehensiveness: An ethical theory
cannot merely tell one what one should do in just a few cases. It should give one
guidance that applies to a large number of cases of various kinds.
An ethical theory also has to have verifiable implications for one’s
behavior. That is, one’s obligations must be such that it is in principle
possible for one to discover what they are if one makes the effort to do so. If
an ethical theory says, for instance, that in cases having feature F one should do x and in cases having feature G
one should not do x, there must be a
way for one to recognize that one is in a case which has
feature F or a case which has feature
G. If this were not so, one could
only do x or fail to do x in the appropriate kind of case through
a lucky guess. Even if one assumes that one really would have obligations in
such a skeptical scenario, it would be pointless
for one to try to find out what they
were.
Yet another criterion derives from the
old but venerable principle that “‘ought’ implies ‘can’”. Ethical theories must
be psychologically plausible: One
cannot be obligated to do something if it is psychologically impossible for one
to do it. And if doing something is possible but difficult, an ethical theory
which prescribes doing it is less viable the more difficult it is to do it.
As with any kind of theory, ethical
theories should not contain any statements that have been shown empirically to
be false. They should, in other words, be empirically
adequate. This seems obvious enough, but if one takes one’s theorizing
seriously it requires that one should make the effort to see if the ethical theories
that one is considering are consistent with any relevant scientific theories or
bodies of knowledge.
The guidance that an ethical theory
provides must also be appropriately specific,
that is, it should not be so vague that it doesn’t really recommend anything in
particular.
Finally, however specific an ethical
theory’s guidance may be, when considering it one needs to ask oneself, “Do
those who know this theory best agree about what
it recommends and what it doesn’t?” The more difficult it is for the relevant
experts to agree on how to interpret the theory, the more it lacks interpretational stability and the less
viable it is.
I will make no claim that the above
list of criteria is complete, but one has to start somewhere. However, I will claim that these criteria are both
necessary and useful for my project.
Here is
Chappell’s characterization of these roles:
We
want our ethical outlook to be something which, in real time, can be the source
of our reasons to act (motivation), and which can structure our thinking
and deciding about how to act as it actually happens (deliberation). We
also want our ethical outlook to be something which, offline, can articulate
and deepen our understanding of what counts as good or bad and right or wrong action,
and why (explanation); and we want it to be something which can explain
what will or would be good or bad and right or wrong action, in future or hypothetical
situations that we ourselves have not actually met, but which we or others
might conceivably meet (prediction) (“Ethics Beyond Moral Theory,” pp. 12-3).
