18,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Philosophy has provided us with a wealth of moral and ethical theories. Applied ethics is the study of practical moral issues and our best philosophical theories, and how each can inform the other.
Acclaimed philosopher and textbook author Robin Attfield invites students to reflect on the key problems of our time. Through lively case studies of topics related to health care, international development, the environment, abortion, punishment and more, he reveals how standard ethical theories can be tested on these real-life scenarios and, if necessary, revised or discarded. Students are encouraged to be their own philosophers, exploring and reaching coherent stances across a wide range of areas of everyday concern.
Covering a typical applied ethics syllabus in a comprehensive and accessible manner, Applied Ethics will motivate philosophy students to engage with the most pressing moral issues of the twenty-first century.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 427
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
1 The History and Revival of Applied Ethics
Applied Ethics has a Long History
Applied Ethics Disappears from View
The Revival of Applied Philosophy
Themes of Applied Ethics, Old and New
Further Reading
2 Sketches of Some Ethical Theories
Moral Standing and Rights
Intrinsic Value and Obligation
Consequentialism
Deontological Theories
Contract Theories
Virtue Ethics
Conclusion
Further Reading
3 Inter-Generational Ethics
Fluctuating Approaches to the Future
Clarifying the Key Concepts Arising
International Recognition of Future-Related Responsibilities
Future Rights and Identities and their Relation to Current Responsibilities
Conflicts Between Present and Future Interests
Sustainability and Sustainable Development
Population and Future Generations
Sustainable Institutions
National and International Instruments
Education in Environmental and Global Issues
Obligations to the Future and to the Past
Further Reading
4 Inter-Species Ethics
An Historical Sketch
Peter Singer’s Utilitarianism and Tom Regan’s Rights Approach
Further Responses: Fox, Frey, Nussbaum and Clough
Anthropomorphism and Language about Animals
Vegetarian Ethics
Desensitization and Compartmentalization
Implications for Agriculture and Fisheries
Genetic Engineering
Animal Ethics Versus Environmental Ethics?
Further Reading
5 Biomedical Ethics
History of Biomedical Ethics
The Re-Emergence of Philosophical Bioethics
Abortion, Infanticide and Euthanasia
Principles of Biomedical Ethics
How Covid-19 Intensifies Issues of Justice
Further Issues of Justice
Critical Themes in Professional Ethics
Further Reading
6 Development Ethics and Population Ethics
Development and Development Ethics
Development and its Critics
Hunger, Famine, Poverty and Systemic Factors
Energy Poverty
Sustainable Development
Population Ethics
The Millennium Development Goals
The Sustainable Development Goals
Historical Context and Related Conclusions
Further Reading
7 Environmental Ethics and Climate Ethics
Some Historial Antecedents
The Foundations of Environmental Ethics
Sustainability and Human Interests
Climate Change, Climate Ethics and the Precautionary Principle
Biodiversity Loss and the Case for Preservation
Debt-For-Nature Swaps
Astrobiology
Migration, Compensation and De-Growth
Further Reading
8 Punishment, Recompense and Capital Punishment
Backward-Looking Practices
Justifications of Punishment: Retribution, Deterrence, Reform
How Justice Can Become Injustice
Recompense
Reparations for Slavery
A Brief History of Capital Punishment
Can Capital Punishment Be Justified?
Further Reading
9 The Ethics of War and Peace
Does Ethics Apply to Warfare?
Can Going to War Be Justified at All?
Circumstances in which Wars are Justifiable
JUS AD BELLUM
JUS IN BELLO
Wars of Humanitarian Protection
Individual Responsibility of Those Engaged in Warfare
Discrimination and Non-Combatant Immunity
Nuclear Warfare
Nuclear Deterrence
Military Impacts on the Environment
Further Reading
10 Applied Ethics and Ethical Theory
Moral Standing Reconsidered
The Scope of Ethics in Space and Time
Components of Well-Being
When are Agents Responsible for their Actions?
Ethical Theories in the Light of Applied Ethics
Becoming Your Own Ethicist
Further Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 5
Table 1 The Hippocratic Oath (extracts)
Table 2 The Nuremberg Code, Article One
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
vi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
Applied Ethics
An Introduction
ROBIN ATTFIELD
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Robin Attfield 2023
The right of Robin Attfield to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4737-1 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4738-8 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934668
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers are grateful to Springer Nature for permission to re-use an extract from Robin Attfield, ‘Future Generations’, published in Henk ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, Cham, Switzerland 2016 (vol. 2, pp. 1326–36). The author is also grateful to Rebekah Humphreys for making available her prospective chapter ‘Moral Feelings, Compartmentalization and Desensitization in the Practice of Animal Experimentation’, published in Natalie Thomas (ed.), Animals and Business Ethics, London: Palgrave, 2022, pp. 229–50.
We are also grateful to Bloomsbury Publishing Plc for permission to re-use in Chapter 5 two tables that appeared previously in Robin Attfield, Ethics: An Overview, London and New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012, ch. 4.
Thanks are also due to Professor Workineh Kelbessa for spotting several typos (now corrected) in Chapter 8. Thanks are due, above all, to Leela Dutt Attfield, without whose constant care this book could not have been begun, let alone completed.
1The History and Revival of Applied Ethics
Philosophy in Europe from earliest times always used to be applied to practical issues such as medicine, conduct in war and sexual relations. You will find here a thumb-nail sketch of applied philosophy from Plato and before to Mill and later philosophers, and then an outline of factors that diverted philosophers in the anglophone world in the early twentieth century from practical matters to being preoccupied with the study of concepts alone (so-called ‘second-order’ issues).
Next, you will discover some factors and pressures that restored applied philosophy, including issues surrounding the Vietnam War and also the disclosures of Rachel Carson about how modern technology (in the forms of herbicides and pesticides) was exercising global rather than just local impacts, and unintended ones at that, thereby threatening ecosystems worldwide (Carson, Silent Spring, 1962). The work of leading figures of the early stages in the revival of applied or practical philosophy will be reviewed, including the universal prescriptivism of Richard Hare (Freedom and Reason, 1963), and the social contract model of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1972), together with the limitations of both these approaches. There is no single pathway or methodology for conducting the study of applied ethics, as subsequent chapters will bear out.
Readers eager to move forward to ethical theories, rather than the history of applied ethics, may choose to turn to Chapter 2, while those preferring to leap into one of the particular fields of applied ethics without delay could turn to Chapter 3 (on inter-generational ethics) or to one of the subsequent chapters.
Applied Ethics has a Long History
For some five decades, many ethicists have studied the practical implications of ethics in an increasingly wide range of fields. These have ranged from the ethics of war to the ethics of sex, from medical ethics to environmental ethics, and from ethical implications of historical slavery to the ethics of plans for the lives of future people. The treatment of animals has been a prominent concern, together with related issues such as those surrounding vegetarianism and veganism. So too have the ethics of sustainable development and of the remediation of poverty.
Yet, as recently as the 1960s, these issues had little or no place in the philosophy curriculum of universities, at least in anglophone countries and countries influenced by them. Philosophy was understood to focus on the clarification of concepts and on the logical relations between them, and not on the practical issues to which they applied. It was widely agreed that philosophy was not a first-order discipline, concerned with what we, as individuals, or society, or our governments should do. Instead it was held to be a second-order subject, concerned to analyse the ideas that others could go on to use in practical contexts. One journal, founded towards the close of this period in Nigeria, was actually called Second Order (1972–1988), although there was always some tension between this title and the journal’s subtitle, An African Journal of Philosophy.
All the same, from the philosophers of ancient Greece to those of the late Victorian period (or in other words up to 1900), philosophy had continually been applied to practical issues, and also to fundamental scientific ones. For example, Plato (428–348 bce) discussed in his Republic the nature of an ideal state and society, including its class structure and relations between the sexes. Earlier still, the Sicilian Greek philosopher Empedocles (490–430 bce), originator of the four elements theory of earth, air, fire and water, also devised a rudimentary theory of evolution; much later, Charles Darwin acknowledged him as a predecessor (Burrow 1985, 53). More relevant to ethics was a book he probably wrote under the title Purifications, about the right sort of dietary and other practices to secure the favour of the gods, vegetarianism included (Kingsley and Parry 2020).
Plato’s great successor, Aristotle (384–322 bce), wrote works that reasoned from ordinary language in a way that ideally suited many of the anglophone philosophers of 1900–1970, including his three studies of ethics. These works, like those of Plato, continue to reward those who study them. However, he also invented the discipline of biology, writing books with titles such as The Parts of Animals, and at the same time a series of books on political constitutions, such as The Constitution of Athens. To come closer to (what we call) applied ethics, two of the ten books of his Nicomachean Ethics are a study of friends and friendship.
Later in the ancient world, the philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce) discussed, among many other subjects, the ethics of war, and originated the theory of the just war (see Chapter 7 below). This was taken further by the philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) and, soon after Columbus’ celebrated voyage to the Americas of 1492, by the Spanish philosopher Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), who argued that the principles of just-war theory applied equally to aboriginal Americans as to Europeans (Christian or otherwise).
This brings us to the Early Modern Period, when several philosophers attempted to devise new methods for the study both of society and of the natural world. Yet they saw no need to defend drawing people’s attention to the social implications of their methods, for that is what the philosophers of the ancient and medieval worlds had always done. Thus Francis Bacon (1561–1626) introduced and defended the scientific method of induction, but also depicts in his New Atlantis (1624) a society that applied this method to enhance agriculture and overcome disease. His aim was ‘the enlarging of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Such language has recently attracted much hostile critique (Merchant 1990 [1980]), but leaves no doubt about Bacon’s commitment to applied ethics (Attfield 2006).
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Bacon’s erstwhile secretary, in turn applied his very different philosophy to social issues. He attempted to articulate ‘laws of nature’, which rational individuals will all have reason to adopt on the basis of enlightened self-interest, and which form the basis of the social contract that (in his view) underlies society and of the legitimacy of (an authoritarian form of) government (Attfield 2006). His contemporary, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza (1632–1677), resident in what we call ‘The Netherlands’ (then the United Provinces), argued like Hobbes from first principles, but sought to defend a much more liberal form of society and of government that would recognize the importance of religious toleration (Nadler 2020).
Slightly later, John Locke (1632–1704) applied his belief in God-given rights both to political philosophy and the rights of citizens against the state (in his Treatises of Government), and also to religious toleration (in his Letter Concerning Toleration). Both these works were composed during his exile in the United Provinces (1683–1689); a great many philosophers of the time found scope to apply their ideas to controversial issues in the relative freedom of that country. Locke also contributed to the theory of education, expressing concern that children be taught the avoidance of cruelty to animals, but was reticent (given its contemporary growth) on the subject of slavery (Attfield 2006). His theories about private property facilitated the acquisition of land as property in the British colonies, and thus contributed to the (problematic) growth of industrial capitalism in the period after his death (Northcott 2013).
Across the period between 1650 and 1800 more than a dozen British philosophers wrote about the basis of ethics, seeking to counter the egoistic philosophy of Hobbes (his belief that all agents are motivated by self-interest), and offering a variety of different foundations. One of the most notable was the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), an upholder of free will against Hobbesian determinism (the belief that there is only one future, exhaustively generated by laws of nature and earlier states of the universe). Several of these writers could be described as ‘humanitarians’ because, like Locke, they recognized the moral significance of animal as well as human suffering, and of preventing it, where it was avoidable. These included Christians such as Francis Hutcheson and sceptics such as David Hume. Hume also defended the permissibility of suicide (Raphael 1991; Attfield 2006).
Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism (1748–1832), applied his moral philosophy to the justification of punishment, a topic that remained an issue for analytic philosophers even in the mid-twentieth century when other topics in applied philosophy were considered unphilosophical. Utilitarians hold that right actions are actions or types of actions that promote the greatest available balance of happiness over unhappiness. (Many people misuse the term ‘utilitarian’, as if it meant ‘instrumental’ or ‘instrumentalist’; please try to avoid such flagrant misuse of language.) John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) applied his version of liberal utilitarianism to representative government, to minority rights and to sexual equality; and Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) applied utilitarianism to the means used in warfare, requiring them to be proportionate (Attfield 2006).
In the next generation, the social philosopher Leonard Hobhouse (1864–1929) left a Fellowship at Oxford to become a Guardian columnist. In this capacity he opposed paternalism (the tendency of figures in authority to coerce other people for their own good), and defended democratic socialism and the relevance of ethics to foreign policy, in a period when the application of philosophy to public policy was already coming under a cloud in English universities (Howarth 2012). That narrowing of the scope of ethics calls for an explanation.
Applied Ethics Disappears from View
Early in the twentieth century, the kind of practical reasoning characteristic of applied ethics went increasingly into abeyance among anglophone philosophers. This was partly due to philosophy’s linguistic turn. Many issues were held to arise because of terms being used vaguely or ambiguously, and it was hoped that focusing on meanings and the distinctions implicit in ordinary language would dissipate the problems. Another reason for applied ethics being spurned resulted from G. E. Moore’s denunciation of ‘the naturalistic fallacy’ (or of attempts to define ‘good’) in Principia Ethica (1903). This misled many into supposing that reasoning in the realm of values was impossible (even though Moore proceeded to publish, in his book Ethics, a reasoned contribution to normative ethics himself).
The gradual silencing of all branches of ethics but meta-ethics (the study of ethical concepts and of the status of moral language) was subsequently abetted by the irrationalist account of ethical language offered by emotivism, and in particular by A. J. Ayer’s claim that such language expressed pseudo-propositions, and was literally meaningless. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic was particularly influential among the post-war generation of the late 1940s.
Nor was ethical thought assisted by the influential view of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) that attempts to write ethics ran up against the boundaries of language, since values supposedly form no part of the world (Wittgenstein 1922, 1953). Across this period of around seven decades (1900–1970), philosophy (including meta-ethics) came to regard itself as a serious discipline because of its second-order status, which immunized it from the first-order commitments of value-talk and ethical engagement.
Besides applied ethics, political and social philosophy also virtually departed the philosophical scene, at least in England and Wales. It also fell into comparative obscurity in the United States of America, under the influence of the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1969) and then the behaviourism and pragmatism of Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) (Boersma post-2003: no date supplied).
The Revival of Applied Philosophy
One of the obstacles to the pursuit of applied philosophy was the supposed gap, originally drawn to attention by Hume, between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, or between facts and values. So one of the factors that facilitated the return of applied philosophy was the work of philosophers such as William Frankena, who questioned the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (the designation devised by Moore for any attempt to define ‘good’ and thus facilitate the drawing of ethical conclusions from factual premises). Effectively Frankena accused Moore of assuming the indefinability of ‘good’ in the course of his attempt to prove it, and thus of begging the question (Frankena 1939); I have argued to similar effect elsewhere (Attfield 2012). Other philosophers, such as John Searle in America and Philippa Foot in Britain, took matters further during the late fifties and sixties of the twentieth century, by challenging the fact–value distinction itself (Searle 1964; Foot 1958, 1958–9).
The study of first-order ethical issues was also demanded by a generation of American students, morally exercised about fighting in Vietnam, about civil rights, and about the environmental problems revealed by works like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Carson’s disclosure that chemicals such as DDT, used as insecticides in the northern hemisphere, were detectable in the flesh of Antarctic penguins not far from the South Pole, prompted a new awareness of human obligations to prevent environmental destruction, and led in the following decade to the study of environmental ethics. At the same stage, the American defoliation of forests in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia enhanced the same concern, while the ruthless conduct of that war led to a renewed concern to reflect all over again on the application of ethics to warfare.
Others again were stirred into ethical reflection in the 1970s by the works of several young philosophers (including Peter Singer and Tom Regan) on the ethics of the treatment of animals, which inspired the animal liberation movement. Singer’s disclosures in his book Animal Liberation (1975) about the treatment of animals in factory farms prompted a revival of the application of utilitarianism (first mooted by Bentham) to animal ethics and, later, on the part of Regan, to consideration of the possibility of animal rights (Regan 1983).
However the single greatest stimulus that revived applied ethics and political philosophy alike was the publication in 1971 of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971, 1972), which for many gave new life to rational debate about justice and social institutions in general, and for some a framework through which issues of international fairness could be approached. Rawls’s framework was that of a social contract, which was applied by some to inter-human relations within a society, and by others to international relations (see Chapter 6 below on development ethics). The Rawlsian framework had its limits; even its adherents struggled to include future generations within the contract, and it manifestly excluded non-human animals, granted their apparent inability to make informed rational choices. Yet its very shortcomings themselves fostered ongoing ethical debate, not least in applied ethics, as also did the many attempts to follow through its implications, and those of comparable continental ethical theories such as those of Jürgen Habermas (1984).
Another continental writer, Hans Jonas, has independently explored the nature of ethics, granted that, as Rachel Carson had already discovered, the framework of ethics had been transformed by modern technology. The threat of nuclear war, ecological degradation, genetic engineering and comparable developments oblige us to reflect on the long-term and worldwide impacts of current policies, as Jonas argued in The Imperative of Responsibility (1979, translated 1984). Jonas was a pioneer in including non-humans (and not only sentient ones) within the scope of ethics.
The contributions of the British philosopher Richard Hare should also be mentioned, despite his being a prominent adherent of the fact–value distinction. Nevertheless, in his second book Freedom and Reason (1963) and in subsequent works, Hare contrived to contribute to applied ethics himself by claiming that his meta-ethical universal prescriptivism supports utilitarianism and, subsequently, through applying this normative theory to topics that included population issues (Hare 1993) and slavery (Hare 1979). The supposed derivation of utilitarianism was all along controversial, as was Hare’s implicit principle that the well-being of a person (or sentient animal) consists in the satisfaction of their preferences. Yet, notwithstanding these problems, Hare’s preference–utilitarianism proved applicable to many problems (such as issues of planning) and, where slavery was concerned, he was able to point out that he had himself, when captured during the Second World War by Japanese forces, effectively been a slave. Thus Hare and his followers were able to make contributions to applied ethics, and thus to contribute to its wider recognition and respectability.
Themes of Applied Ethics, Old and New
One of the longstanding traditions of ethical thinking, now resuscitated, concerned the ethics of war. As we have seen, both Augustine and Aquinas contributed to this subject in the Middle Ages, as did Sidgwick in the nineteenth century, with his discussion of the importance of proportionality. The advent of nuclear weapons added both to the scope and the urgency of this subject. Early contributions from the recent period included Anthony Kenny’s book, The Logic of Deterrence, written from a deontological (duty-based) perspective (Kenny 1985) and, earlier, Jeff McMahan’s British Nuclear Weapons: For and Against, which adopted a consequentialist stance, similar to that of Sidgwick (McMahan 1981). Both these writers concluded that nuclear deterrence was unacceptable, at least on the part of Britain. We return to these themes in Chapter 9 below.
Another longstanding theme now to be revived was that of medical ethics. As we have seen, this subject was initiated in the ancient world, with the Hippocratic Oath, and its implicit code of conduct for medical practitioners. Events during the Second World War, such as medical experiments conducted in concentration camps, and the subsequent Nuremberg trials, led indirectly to the founding in Britain of the Society for Medical Ethics and the Institute for Medical Ethics, both in 1963, while modern requirements such as that for informed consent to medical treatment and the numerous issues surrounding it led to the foundation of the Journal of Medical Ethics in 1975. In the United States, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress propounded a four-principles approach (the principles being respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice), expressed in their Principles of Biomedical Ethics (first edition, 1979), which has run to eight editions. A more consequentialist approach was defended in Britain by Jonathan Glover in Causing Death and Saving Lives (1977), which covered other life-and-death issues as well as medical ones. These matters are discussed further in Chapter 5 (below). It should be added that the importance of professional codes of conduct, recognized originally in the medical sphere, has rightly spread to other professions and related codes.
While these fields of applied ethics can be understood as revivals of ancient traditions, other fields have been relatively new. What we call ‘environmental problems’ went largely unrecognized in the ancient and medieval world, despite some worries about deforestation (expressed by Plato), and the awareness of Theophrastus (fourth century bce) that some local impacts on the environment were due to human action. Later John Evelyn (seventeenth century) drew attention both to deforestation and pollution. Then, in the twentieth century, the American forester Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) wrote of how unsatisfactory land-management was, leading to loss of wilderness, and offered a related ethic (Leopold 1949). But what triggered both environmentalism in its modern form and later environmental ethics was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which disclosed the impacts of pesticides and herbicides, and not least (as has been mentioned earlier in this chapter) how the human use of pesticides in the northern hemisphere was impacting the flesh of penguins as far away as Antarctica. As we shall see in Chapter 7, environmental ethics emerged with Richard Routley’s article ‘Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?’ (1973), and with John Passmore’s book Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974), to an early draft of which Routley was replying.
Meanwhile animal ethics was also revived at the same time, after earlier writings of Henry Salt (1851–1939), a campaigner for social reform, had protested against some of the human treatment of animals in transport, farms, zoos and circuses. Early books included Animal Liberation, by the Australian consequentialist philosopher Peter Singer, who drew attention to the horrors of modern factory-farming and, from a rights perspective, The Case for Animal Rights, by the American philosopher Tom Regan. We return to this subject in Chapter 4. While some have held that environmental ethics and animal ethics are conflicting endeavours (Callicott 1980), there was much common ground among the related campaigners of earlier decades (for example, against whaling), and from some perspectives they can be regarded as complementary, and as potential allies.
A final example of a new field of applied ethics is that of development ethics. Ethical issues related to issues of malnutrition and poverty, and implicitly of social and economic development, were raised in another essay of Peter Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ (1972). However, the systemic aspect of the problems was also expressed in the United Nations’ Declaration of the Right to Development (1986). The International Development Ethics Association was founded in Costa Rica in 1984 by the American philosopher David Crocker and others (IDEA 2020), while a significantly new approach was supplied by the World Commission for Environment and Development (the ‘Brundtland Report’ 1987), which advocated sustainable development on a worldwide basis. To these issues we return in Chapter 6.
However, before we plunge into this and other fields of applied ethics, it may be helpful to survey the key concepts and theories of normative ethics. I have discussed these concepts and theories in greater detail elsewhere (Attfield 2012); but a brief sketch of these theories, and some of the difficulties that they face, is offered in Chapter 2. It is preceded there by a brief explanation of key concepts such as moral standing, intrinsic value and moral obligation. Some readers may prefer to think of moral obligation as moral responsibility; if you are so minded, please translate obligation-talk into responsibility-talk. For both of these terms simply refer to what it would be wrong not to do.
Questions
Explain the contributions to applied ethics of the British philosophers who responded to Thomas Hobbes, including John Locke.What accounts for the virtual disappearance of applied ethics from the philosophical scene in anglophone cultures around 1900?What accounts for the reappearance of applied ethics on the philosophical scene in anglophone cultures in the 1960s and 1970s?What, in your view, was the ethical significance of Rachel Carson’s disclosure that the pesticide DDT, released in the northern hemisphere, was affecting the penguins of the southern hemisphere?Further Reading
Attfield, Robin (2012).
Ethics: An Overview
, London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Beauchamp, Tom L. and James F. Childress (1994).
Principles of Biomedical Ethics
, 4th edn, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carson, Rachel (2000) [1962].
Silent Spring
. London: Penguin Classics.
Frankena, William K. (1939). ‘The Naturalistic Fallacy’,
Mind
, 48, 464–77.
Jonas, Hans (1984) [1979].
The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age
, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Moore, G. E. (1968) [1903].
Principia Ethica
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, John (1972).
A Theory of Justice
, London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Regan, Tom (1983).
The Case for Animal Rights
. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Singer, Peter (1975).
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals
. New York: Avon.
2Sketches of Some Ethical Theories
Moral Standing and Rights
Before we plunge into applied ethics in detail, readers may be assisted by an introductory sketch of the main theories of normative ethics, and of some key related concepts. The major ethical theories are consequentialism, deontology, contract theories and virtue ethics. Examples of key related concepts include moral standing, intrinsic value, rightness and obligation. Such a sketch is what this chapter seeks to supply. (Readers can refer to my earlier book Ethics: An Overview, for a more detailed account.)
Normative ethics is the branch of ethics concerned with theories of what is either right or obligatory, and therefore what should be done. To study rightness, we need an understanding of moral standing and of intrinsic value, and of the other key concepts at issue. This is the scope of the current section and the next. We begin by reflecting on how a theory of moral standing can help with questions of right conduct, and how moral standing relates to moral rights.
Things that have moral standing are entities that matter, morally speaking, and should be taken into account when decisions are being made. Geoffrey Warnock called such parties ‘moral patients’, since they are on the receiving end of human action, and he held that they include all the people that our actions can affect (Warnock 1971). Kenneth Goodpaster called such parties ‘morally considerable’, meaning (by ‘considerable’) not ‘large’ or ‘important’, but ‘to be taken into consideration’. And he included in this category everything with a good of its own, in other words, all living creatures. He did so because everything with a good of its own is a potential beneficiary, and beneficence and benefiting are pivotal to morality (Goodpaster 1978). This stance is called ‘biocentrism’ (because it makes living creatures central to ethics), and those who endorse it are called ‘biocentrists’. Yet because ‘moral considerability’ is a confusing phrase, I will use the phrase ‘moral standing’ instead.
Before we turn to intrinsic value, we should reflect on the relation of moral standing to moral rights, and also to moral obligation. It might seem that moral rights belong exactly to the same range of entities as moral standing. For if something has moral rights, there is such a strong case against harming it that refraining from harming it appears obligatory; and if this is correct, then we might be able to move straight from moral standing to moral obligation. However, this move depends on the bearers of moral standing and moral rights being identical. Should we accept this identification?
The answer is that we cannot. Carriers of rights are identifiable individuals (or sometimes organized collectives such as countries) equipped with entitlements, and capable of being treated better or worse. But many bearers of moral standing are future creatures, unidentifiable in the present, and so far from being equipped with entitlements that their coming into existence at all depends on beings of the present. As such, we often cannot tell whether an action of the present affects them well or badly, as the future to which they belong may fail to come about at all (as Derek Parfit has explained in Part IV of Reasons and Persons). They have moral standing because we, and/or other current creatures, can either generate the particular future in which they would enter the stage of history, or else a different future in which they would not, and can affect them in that way. But they cannot be held to have a right to exist, or so too could all the other beings that could exist instead of them, which would land us with contradictory obligations or duties to bring them all into being! Hence not all the bearers of moral standing can have moral rights.
To express matters differently, the scope of morality is broader than the sphere of rights, and not all obligations correspond to rights on a one-to-one basis. Here is a related example. We can have obligations or duties to enhance the quality of life of people or other creatures of the future, whichever people and whichever other creatures come into existence then. Such obligations or duties are not owed to future individuals as such, but they are still actions that it would be wrong not to perform. They are obligations or duties with regard to future beings, but that are not owed to such beings. In a similar way, we may have obligations or duties to relieve the poverty of current people, even when the individuals who could benefit have no rights against ourselves, and when the identities of these individuals are unknown to us. John Stuart Mill called these obligations ‘duties of imperfect obligation’.
Rights are still important. For rights can be claimed, usually by their bearers. Indeed the ability to make such claims makes awareness of rights crucial. So rights will be returned to later in this chapter. However, the present point is that moral standing extends far beyond the sphere of rights. Thus many entities matter and should be taken into consideration despite their lack of clear-cut rights, and if these entities and their groupings are ignored, our obligations will be misunderstood and to some degree neglected. Some other route to an understanding of obligation is needed.
Intrinsic Value and Obligation
Arguably there is value in the flourishing of every entity that has moral standing; and this value depends on and derives from nothing beyond itself, or, in other words, it is intrinsic value. Could there be a link between obligation and intrinsic value? If so, this could be important for our understanding of obligation, and accordingly of moral rightness as well, and thus of what we (morally) ought to do.
There are many other theories of the location of intrinsic value. Some locate it in pleasure alone (hedonism). Yet, as Aristotle replied to this theory, if pleasure alone were desirable, then it could not be enhanced through the addition of something else, such as understanding or accomplishment. Yet lives are widely held to go better when pleasure is supplemented in either of these ways. Therefore something other than pleasure must be desirable (Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, chapter 2).
Besides, a formidable contemporary reply has been offered by Robert Nozick. You are offered the opportunity to be wired up for the next few years to an Experience Machine, which will give you whatever blend of pleasurable experiences you select beforehand. The experiences will be indistinguishable from genuine ones, but you will not really be having them, because you will be wired up to electrodes, while floating in a tank. As Nozick says, most people would refuse to go on the Experience Machine, for they value the authentic use of their faculties, and would be foregoing it. But if hedonism were true (see the previous paragraph for this term), then there would be no reason not to accept the offer of a few years on this Machine (Nozick 1974, 42–5). What we might miss could be the exercise of our faculties, or genuine accomplishments (as opposed to illusory ones). Both of these seem to have value independent of the value of pleasure.
Others locate intrinsic value in happiness. But to this view there are comparable objections. While happiness in general may be a blessing, drug-induced happiness is arguably less than desirable, being based on an illusion. Further, if autonomy, achievement and good health are absent, then happiness is less valuable than when they are added.
So our understanding of what is truly valuable should be more inclusive, and incorporate the development of the broad generality of our faculties, autonomy included. The relevant faculties should not be restricted to distinctive ones, as Aristotle seems to have thought, but include ones that we share with other creatures, such as capacities for self-motion, for perception, for forming friendships, and for reproduction. With the development of most of these faculties (distinctive and non-distinctive ones alike), together with happiness (including as it does some amount of pleasure), we get a picture of the good life for humans, or human flourishing, of which good health and some measure of achievement will also be components. While this cannot claim to be a complete account, the conclusion that human flourishing is intrinsically valuable becomes hard to resist.
Perhaps the flourishing of other living creatures should also be recognized as intrinsically valuable, alongside the well-being or the flourishing of human beings. For if all living creatures have moral standing, then intrinsic value can hardly be absent from their well-being or flourishing. To this conclusion, it might be objected that far from everyone values the flourishing of all living creatures. While this is true, it is not a decisive consideration. For having value does not mean being valued; if it did, then whatever anyone valued would be valuable, and no valuing could be misplaced or illusory. (Also, nothing that is unvalued could have value at all, a conclusion that is often found to be mistaken.) Having value instead means being valuable, or there being reasons for the entity in question to be valued. Sometimes the reasons lie beyond what has value, in what it is a means to, or in what it symbolizes. At other times, the reasons consist in the bearer of value itself. And this could be the flourishing of each and every creature or organism.
Besides, the reasons for things having value could not always lie beyond what has value; it is not possible for all value to be derivative. There must be something that confers value on whatever has derivative value, and that itself has value that is not derivative. Such non-derivative value is what is called ‘intrinsic value’. The above debate has concerned where such value is to be found; after considering as candidates pleasure and happiness, I have argued that well-being or flourishing comprises a better answer.
There is admittedly disagreement about whether the well-being or flourishing of all creatures or organisms has intrinsic value, or just that of (say) sentient ones. Some philosophers draw the line at sentient creatures, and at the same time, hold that only such creatures have moral standing. (This is the stance of sentientism.) There are others who draw the line more narrowly at human beings, and hold that it is only human flourishing that has intrinsic value, and that only human beings have moral standing. (This is the stance of anthropocentrism.) Those of us, however, who take a broader (biocentric) view of moral standing than either anthropocentrists or sentientists also take a broader view of the location of intrinsic value, and hold that it attaches to the flourishing of non-sentient creatures too. Doing so does not commit us to respecting (or treating) all creatures equally, for, as Goodpaster argues, moral standing is not the same as moral significance, and creatures with ampler faculties and ampler interests should receive priority over those with more limited faculties and interests.
The debate between anthropocentrism, sentientism and biocentrism does not need to be resolved here, although it will be clear where my own sympathies lie. What is important for the present is that all these theories are theories both of the location of moral standing and of the location of intrinsic value, and also that intrinsic value is what confers value on other kinds of value (for example instrumental value and symbolic value).
But this allows us to reconsider whether there could be a link between intrinsic value and obligation. If intrinsic value supplies reasons for action, possibly obligatory actions (and omissions) could be what there is most reason to do, or overwhelming reason to do. Obligations could be linked to intrinsic value through it being obligatory either to maximize intrinsic value, or to uphold practices that do this overall, or to uphold traits of character that do this, or to generate or sustain some satisfactory amount or level of intrinsic value.
There are other possible relations between obligation and intrinsic value as well; for example, it could be obligatory to respect some or all of the creatures whose flourishing has such value. Different normative theories understand the relation between obligation and value in different ways, and supply matching understandings of what it is right to do. Yet it is worth asking, about each of them, how they understand this relation, and whether the relation they present is a cogent one. It is now time to turn to particular normative theories. We begin with consequentialism.
Consequentialism
Many people assume that consequentialism is nothing but utilitarianism. But this is a mistaken assumption. Utilitarians form just one subset of consequentialists, the kind who hold that intrinsic value is restricted to pleasure (with pain having negative value), or to happiness (with a negative value attaching to unhappiness). Stances of this kind have allowed utilitarians to make great strides in applied ethics. Examples include John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century (with his campaigning against the oppression of women), and Peter Singer in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Singer, in particular, has been explicit about recognizing the moral standing of sentient creatures, and not only of human beings, and has strongly advocated improved treatment of non-human animals (Singer 1975).
Yet consequentialists are not obliged to have such a restricted understanding of the scope of intrinsic value as utilitarians have. They can recognize intrinsic value in human flourishing as a whole, including the development of central human capacities; and they are free to recognize intrinsic value in the flourishing of non-human creatures as well, whether sentient or non-sentient. These stances are so far removed from utilitarianism that representing them as ‘utilitarian’ is a complete misnomer for them and thus for consequentialism in general.
The distinctive feature of consequentialism is that it makes the generation of intrinsic value central, whether for our actions, our practices or our traits of character. This is what makes actions and/or practices right, and obligatory, where a large difference in outcome is in prospect.
It is widely supposed that consequentialists must include all the consequences when assessing actions (Lenman 2000). But this would include unforeseeable consequences, such as the deeds of the distant descendants of current pairs of partners. Thus it might imply that the deeds of Adolf Hitler made the marriages of his ancestors of two hundred years earlier to be wrong. Yet people cannot and should not be held responsible for outcomes that they could not possibly foresee, and consequentialists need not suppose otherwise.
Yet restricting the outcomes that are relevant to an action’s rightness to the intended consequences would be just as misguided. For a motorist who foreseeably causes a road accident by swerving to avoid a small hole in the road can rightly be held responsible not only for what he or she intended but also for what he or she foreseeably caused to happen. This suggests that we are responsible for outcomes that could reasonably be foreseen.
Some philosophers adhere, on the contrary, to the Doctrine of Double Effect, which holds agents responsible for intended consequences but not for foreseeable ones. Yet this stance is not a consequentialist one. Certainly we are more concerned about other people’s intentions than their unintended impacts, but what this shows is that we are often more concerned with people’s character than with the rightness of their actions. It does not show that unintended but foreseeable consequences lack relevance to the rightness of what they do (Attfield 2012, 76–80). (For more on the Doctrine of Double Effect, see Chapter 9.) Consequentialism, then, appraises the rightness of individual actions (ones that are not part of a social practice) by their foreseeable impacts.
However, consequentialists are also free to recognize that there are social practices compliance with which makes actions right, and sometimes obligatory. Keeping promises is an example, as when employers deliver promised pay-rises. Here we need to bring in another distinction. Rule-consequentialists hold that where the overall consequences of a practice are beneficial, that makes compliance with that practice right as such (except in exceptional circumstances where a great deal of harm could be prevented by infringing the practice). Adherents to this stance can better be called ‘practice-consequentialists’. By contrast, act-consequentialists hold that moral rules are merely generalizations about which actions tend to have the best outcomes, and that they should be broken whenever the agent foresees better outcomes (whether slightly or significantly better) from doing so; what really matters, they hold, are the outcomes of individual actions. (A related distinction can be made between rule-utilitarians and act-utilitarians.)
One problem for act-consequentialism is that it seems to require agents to be endlessly calculating which course of action has the best consequences. This process would be unending, and would include calculating how long to continue calculating about each new action. Another problem is that if everyone were to calculate the outcomes of (let’s say) relatively important decisions, no one could ever rely on anyone else to comply with expected social practices such as keeping promises, fidelity, or telling the truth, particularly as many decisions would predictably result in miscalculations.
So there is great social benefit, and thus value, in people sticking to social rules, except in genuinely exceptional cases. This means that there is a much stronger case for rule-consequentialism (or practice-consequentialism) than for act-consequentialism. The general following of beneficial rules and practices will foreseeably produce greater overall benefit than the general adoption of act-consequentialism would. However, in cases where no beneficial rule is in place or in prospect, rightness will still depend on the foreseeable outcomes of individual actions or clusters of actions.
Consequentialists who recognize intrinsic value in the well-being and flourishing of non-human living creatures are likely to adhere to practices of preservation and sustainability, as well as promise-keeping and truth-telling. They can reasonably be named ‘biocentric consequentialists’, a stance that can readily be adopted on a practice-consequentialist basis. Readers will not be surprised to discover that this is the stance that I favour. More will be said about virtue-consequentialism later in this chapter, in the section on virtue ethics. But it would first be helpful to review the main alternative to consequentialism, widely known as ‘deontology’.
Deontological Theories
‘Deontology’ derives from the Greek words for duty (deonto-) and for ‘study of’ (-logy), and means ‘related to duty’. The term was devised for stances contrasting with consequentialist ones. I will discuss three kinds of deontological theories, but supply separate sections for contract theories and for virtue ethics, because of their distinctiveness. (Incidentally, please don’t try dividing the word into ‘de-’ and ‘-ontology’; it has nothing at all to do with ‘ontology’. Besides, ‘de’ comes from Latin, not Greek, as words ending in ‘ology’ do.)
A central deontological theory is that of W. D. Ross, who held that there are certain basic moral rules like ‘Do not break promises’ and ‘Be beneficent’, and that there is nothing beyond them that could justify them. There are five such rules, jointly constitutive of morality. His acceptance of beneficence shows that he accepts some link between obligation and value, because being beneficent reflects a duty to promote values such as other people’s well-being. His stance is what many people take for granted, without any reflection on ethics at all.
To this stance, there are some pointed objections. What makes these rules moral rules? Why are there no others? Why stop at five? And what is to be done when the rules clash? To this last question, Ross can only urge us to follow our intuitions or our consciences. Consequentialists, by contrast, can appeal to the benefits of following one rule rather than another, either on this occasion, or generally. Both rule-consequentialists and Ross-type deontologists have a central place for moral rules, but only the former have any sort of justification for them (Hooker 1996, 531–2; 2000).
