Introducing Ethics E-Book

Chris Garratt

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 132

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What is the place of individual choice and consequence in a post-Holocaust world of continuing genocidal ethnic cleansing? Is "identity" now a last-ditch cultural defence of ethnic nationalisms and competing fundamentalisms? In a climate of instant information, free markets and possible ecological disaster, how do we define "rights", self-interest and civic duties? What are the acceptable limits of scientific investigation and genetic engineering, the rights and wrongs of animal rights, euthanasia and civil disobedience?"Introducing Ethics" confronts these dilemmas, tracing the arguments of the great moral thinkers, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant, and brings us up to date with postmodern critics.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd., Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-008-7

Text copyright and illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author and artist have asserted their moral rights.

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Moral Questions

Social Beings

Communitarians or Individualists?

Setting the Stage Ten Central Questions

The Social Origins of Belief Systems

Morality and Religion

Morality and Human Nature

Genetics

Do We Have Any Choice?

Is Society to Blame?

Moral Relativism

Ethical Absolutism

Relativism versus Absolutism

Another Absolutist Reply

Are They Both Wrong?

The Problem of Moral Knowledge

A Brief History of Ethics The Greek City State

Democracy

Greeks and Philosophy

Slavery

The Socratic Method

Socratic Ethics: Know Thyself

Plato’s Republic

Plato versus the Sophists

The World of Forms

A Closed Society

Aristotle and Commonsense Ethics

The Teleological View and the “Mean”

A Dull but Good Person

Hellenistic Ethics

The Advent of Christianity

Medieval and Scholastic Ethics

The Rise of Humanism

Machiavelli

Brutes or Innocents?

The Social Contract

Is It True?

Romantic Innocence

The Noble Savage

Mutual Aiders or Sociobiology

The Social Gene

Symbolic Animals

Marx and Economic Determinism

False Consciousness

Utilitarianism

The Law and Morality

Happiness Sums

A Practical Example

Consequences not Motives

Mill’s Ideas

Rule Utilitarians

Mill’s Pluralism

What is Happiness?

Is It Really Scientific?

The Moral Law of Duty

Practical Reason

Duty versus Inclination

The Parable of the Rich Young Man

The Universability Test

Inflexible Rules

Moral Imagination

Ethical Doctrines Contrasted

Hume’s Radical Scepticism

Beliefs are Psychological

Is the “Is-Ought Gap” True?

Subjectivists and Objectivists

Moral Language is Nonsense

The Importance of the Imagination

Choosing To Be: Existentialism

The Student Who Couldn’t Decide

The Road to Postmodernism

What Is This Thing Called “Human Nature”?

Freud’s Model of the Psyche

The Unconscious and Moral Autonomy

Lacan: the Fiction of the “Self”

The Holocaust and the Betrayal of the Enlightenment

The Dangers of “Reason”

Postmodernist Scepticism

Human, All Too Human

Postmodernist Visions: Supermarket Slavery

Post-Marxist Critical Theory

Nietzschean Dandyism

The Evils of Modernism

Moral Philosophers and Legislators

Postmodernist Societies

The Postmodernist Moral Agent

A Postmodern Hope: Neo-Tribes

Social Ethics

The Future Community: a New Social Contract

Social Justice

Bring Back Aristotle

Why Has Ethics Become a Mess?

Hope in Traditions

What Are the Virtues?

And Where is Postmodernism Going?

Time for a New Feminist Ethics

Private and Public Spheres

Sensible Jake and Sensitive Amy

Different Moral Priorities

S.H.E.

Environmental Ethics

Anthropocentric Ethics

The Newbury Case

Does it Matter?

We Are Not Outsiders

ETHICS AND ANIMALS The Libellous Philosophers

Animal Rights

Can We Prove That Animals Have Rights?

The Utilitarian Argument

Animals and Pain

Animal Experiments

The Persons Argument

Are Chimpanzees Persons?

ETHICS AND EUTHANASIA The Case of Dr Cox and Mrs Boyes

The Trial

Is Euthanasia Acceptable?

Arguments Against Euthanasia

Counter Arguments

The Coma Patient

Let Nature Take Its Course

Let The Patient Decide

What Do The Philosophers Say?

The Utilitarians

Virtue Theory Again

What Do We Conclude?

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

Moral Questions

Everyone is interested in ethics. We all have our own ideas about what is right and what is wrong and how we can tell the difference. Philosophers and bishops discuss moral “mazes” on the radio. People no longer behave as they should.

THE COUNTRY IS IN A STATE OF MORAL DECLINE AND THERE IS NO RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY ANY MORE! WE MUST GET “BACK TO BASICS”! WE NEED “MORAL MISSION STATEMENTS”! POSTMODERN RELATIVISM HAS LED US INTO A NIGHTMARE OF UNCERTAINTY AND MORAL CHAOS

So we’re told. But there have always been “moral panics”. Plato thought 4th century B.C. Athens was doomed because of the wicked ethical scepticism of the Sophist philosophers and the credulity of his fellow citizens.

Social Beings

We are all products of particular societies. We do not “make ourselves”. We owe much of what we consider to be our “identity” and “personal opinions” to the community in which we live. This made perfect sense to Aristotle. For Aristotle, the primary function of the state was to enable collectivist human beings to have philosophical discussions and eventually agree on a shared code of ethics.

MAN IS BY NATURE A POLITICAL ANIMAL. IT IS IN HIS NATURE TO LIVE IN A STATE.

But as soon as we are formed, most of us start to question the society that has made us, and do so in a way that seems unique to us. Socrates stressed that it was in fact our duty.

ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT ACCEPTED MORAL OPINIONS, AND NEVER STOP DOING SO.

The State may decide what is legally right and wrong, but the law and morality are not the same thing.

Communitarians or Individualists?

Ethics is complicated because our morality is an odd mixture of received tradition and personal opinion.

SOME PHILOSOPHERS HAVE STRESSED THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COMMUNITY AND SEE INDIVIDUAL ETHICS AS DERIVATIVE. OTHERS WILL STRESS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUAL AND CLAIM THAT SOCIETY IS MERELY A CONVENIENT ARRANGEMENT WHICH MUST BE SUBSERVIENT TO THE GOALS AND AMBITIONS OF INDIVIDUALS.

Both individualist and communitarian philosophers are reluctant to explain away ethics as no more than “club rules” agreed upon and formalized by members. Both want to legitimize either communal ethics or the need for an individual morality by appealing to some kind of “neutral” set of ideals. Much of this book is about these different attempts to provide a foundation for ethics.

Setting the Stage Ten Central Questions Let’s begin, as philosophers do, by asking some odd and awkward questions. These questions are important, even if clear and positive answers to them are few. Are there any differences between moral laws and society’s laws? if there are, why is this? what are human beings really like: selfish and greedy or generous and kind? are some people “better” at morality than others, or is everyone equally capable of being good? Are there good ways of teaching children to behave morally? does anyone have the right to tell anyone else what goodness and wickedness are? Are there certain kinds of acts (like torturing children) that are always wrong? if so, what are they? what do you think is the best answer to the question, “why should i be a good person?” Is ethics a special kind of knowledge? if so, what sort of knowledge is it and how do we get hold of it? Is morality about obeying a set of rules or is it about thinking carefully about consequences? when people say “i know murder is wrong”, do they know it is wrong or just believe it very strongly? important may contain traces of peanut

The Social Origins of Belief Systems

It seems very unlikely that any society has ever existed in which individual members have thought the murder of others to be acceptable. Although the odd serial killer does occasionally surface in any society, most of us think of one as an exceptional aberration, or even as “non-human”.

There have always been rules about when men may kill other men – usually outsiders as opposed to insiders.

So Killing Missionaries May Be Perfectly Acceptable…. …But Not Fathers-In-Law From Neighbouring Tribes!

Such moral understandings are often codified and regulated by religious and legal taboos of various kinds. Human beings seem reluctant to accept that morality is something invented by themselves and so tend to legitimize moral rules by mythologizing their origins: “The Great White Parrot says stealing is wrong”. The story of ethics is to some extent a description of attempts like these to legitimize morality.

Morality and Religion

Most people living in Western Christian societies would say that they base their ethical beliefs and behaviour on the ten negative commandments, rather inconveniently carved on stone tablets handed to Moses by God. (Of the ten, only about six are actually ethical.)

Most People Think Of Ethics In This Way… …As A Series Of Rules That You Try To Keep To Most Of The Time. If You Can’t Remember All Ten Rules, IT’S Possible To Live The Moral Life By Sticking To One Golden Rule — — Always Treat Others As You Would Like Them To Treat You.

This “reciprocity rule” has a long track record and is found in many different religions worldwide. It is a bit like prudent insurance – a sensible way of getting along in the world, even if it’s not quite what Jesus Christ says. (His moral code is much more radical and not at all “reciprocal”. You have to do good deeds to those who have done you no good at all. This is why real Christianity is a hard act to follow.)

Is religion where morality comes from? Is being moral simply a matter of obeying divine commands? Independently-minded individuals, like Socrates (in Plato’s Euthyphro), said that there is more to morality than religious obedience. One reason for this is that religious commands vary from one religion to another.

You Can Have Four Wives If You Follow This Religion, And Only One If You Follow That one… The Moral Commands Of Christianity Often Seem Contradictory… …The God Of The Old Testament Seems Profoundly Anti-Gay And Hardly Pluralist… Too Right, Pal! Thou Shalt have no other gods before me.… …For I The Lord thy God Am A Jealous God…

Atheists and agnostics would refuse to obey any order from God they believed to be wrong. Religion on its own doesn’t seem to be a complete and satisfactory foundation for human ethical beliefs. What many philosophers search for is a way of justifying moral values which are independent of religious belief.

Morality and Human Nature

One alternative answer is to say that morality comes not from external supernatural sources but from ourselves. This raises one of the big questions of all time.

Are Human Beings Essentially Good or Essentially Wicked? What Is Human Nature? Is It Even Possible For Us To Define It Or Generalize About A Species Which Includes London Bus Inspectors, Kalahari Bushmen, Italian Tenors, Mahatma Gandhi And Adolf Hitler?

Thinking on ethics often begins with assumptions about human nature, either negative or positive. For instance, the Christian notion of “original sin” takes the view that our nature is “fallen” and essentially bad. If this is the case, then it is our social environment and its legal sanctions that force us all to be moral. But the reason most of us don’t torture children is because we think it is wrong, not because we fear a visit from the police.

This negative Christian verdict is an example of the “programmed” view of human nature. There is an opposite “Romantic” view of human nature which assumes it to be positively programmed for good.

Most People Like To Flatter Themselves That They Choose To Do Good Acts Rather Than Being “Programmed” To Do Them. So, Perhaps Society Has Very Little To Do With The Fundamental Moral Foundations Of Our Characters? It May In Fact Be Responsible For Many Human Evils.

Men may kill other men in different uniforms because society encourages them to do so, but their genetic instincts might be to do things like play football and drink beer with each other.

Genetics

Nowadays, arguments about human nature centre more and more on genetics. Words like “selfish gene” and “altruistic gene” turn up in popular science articles, but no-one is sure yet what these terms mean or what the full implications of them are. Geneticists use the word “selfish” in an odd sort of way, so that many people now assume erroneously that it is possible to identify “criminality” from DNA. Genetics is an empirical science, but the subsequent arguments and discussions about “human nature” that new genetic “facts” stimulate are full of political myths, ideological assertions and dangerous tosh.

There Are Several Philosophers Who Sincerely Believe That It Will Never Be Possible To Be Truly “Scientific” About Human Nature. You can’t Be Serious!

The whole debate is highly speculative and unscientific. Worse, it may be what philosophers call a form of “language bewitchment”. We assume that because there are convenient human terms like “good” and “bad” and “human nature” that there are real physical concrete entities to which these words refer. They very probably don’t exist as “genes” at all. Geneticists prefer words like “potential”, “propensity” and “encourage” rather than “cause” or “determine”.

One Gene May Give Someone A Propensity For Vertigo Which Might Encourage Them To Live In Flat Areas. But It Didn’t Stop Me From Becoming A Mountain Climber. The Social And Cultural Influences In My Childhood Were Strong Enough And I Had Will Power.

Talk about genes means that the old and eternally unsolveable debate about “nature versus nurture” crops up and drags all the usual political baggage along with it. Those who wish to preserve political power structures are often very keen on genetic determinism.

Do We Have Any Choice?

Some philosophers maintain that DNA and social environment have little or no influence on the sorts of people we become and the moral choices that we make. We are almost wholly autonomous individuals who make our own moral decisions in life and therefore we alone are responsible for all the good and bad things that we do. After all, without free will, we are little more than robots and cannot be moral beings at all. it is a commonplace in ethics that “ought implies can”. You can’t even begin to talk about morality, unless you assume that human beings have freedom to choose.

It Just Isn’t Sensible To Call Cats “Wicked” When They Kill Mice. But We Do Think That Hitler And Charles ManSon Were Rightly Punished For Their Wicked Behaviour. Their Genetic Make-Up And Early Social Environment Are Not Good Enough Excuses For What They Did.

Nevertheless, “commonsense” views like these can be naive or prejudiced. A brutal society can often have a strong negative influence on the formation of someone’s moral character.

Is Society to Blame?

Even if DNA has little or no influence on our moral character, perhaps we are still products of our social and cultural environment. At birth, we are blank sheets of paper that are gradually written on by parents, teachers, peer groups, the media and all sorts of other ideological forces. The influence of society on our moral personalities is infinitely stronger than any genetic inheritance and almost totally responsible for everything that makes us both human and moral. This means that it is nonsense to talk about some absurd fiction like “human nature”, as if it has some kind of pre-societal existence. This view is held by many sociologists:

There is no such thing As Innate “Human Nature” –only Citizens Internalizing External Moral Codes. It Is Also A View Held By Many Marxists Who Believe We Are Merely Products Of The Ideologies Of The Dominant Class. If I Am Bad (Or Good), Then Society Is To Blame, Right?

Human nature might either be wholly plastic, and subsequently given “ethical shape” by social forces, or a programmed bundle of moral software. What puzzles philosophers is the variation in ethical beliefs held by different societies at different times.

Some Societies Allow Polygamy… …Some Make It Illegal And Call It Bigamy. Some Societies Think It Acceptable To Kill And eat Their GrandParents… …Others Put Them In Retirement Bungalows By The Sea. It Looks As If Beliefs And Values Are Pretty Relative!

Moral Relativism

The recognition of this wide variety of ethical beliefs and practices is usually called moral relativism. Differences in moral belief exist between different countries and tribes, but can also exist between different subcultures within a society, or between different classes. History also demonstrates how time alters moral beliefs.