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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The newly updated Right and Wrong 2nd Edition is an accessible introduction to the major traditions in western philosophical ethics, written in a lively and engaging style. It is designed for entry-level ethics courses and includes real-life ethical scenarios chosen to appeal directly to students.
- Greatly expanded and improved, this successful text introduces students to the major ethical traditions, and provides a simple methodology for resolving ethical dilemmas
- Treats teleological and deontological approaches to ethics as the two most important traditions, but now includes chapters on virtue ethics and the ethics of care
- The very accessible writing style speaks directly to students’ own experience
- Draws examples from three types of real-life ethical scenarios submitted by students: academic dishonesty, partying, and personal relationships
- Provides a concise treatment of this notoriously complex subject, perfect for entry-level ethics and applied ethics courses
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Seitenzahl: 378
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface
Introduction
1 Ethics
Philosophical Ethics
Ethics: What Is It?
What Ethics Isn’t
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
2 An “Ethical Yardstick”?
What Makes Something Wrong?
The Basis of a Standard—Human Well‐Being, a Satisfying Life, and Flourishing
What Makes Something an “Ethical” Issue? Our Three Cases
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
3 Measuring Consequences
A Teleological (Results‐Oriented) Approach to Ethics
Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism, and Pleasure
John Stuart Mill and Quality of Pleasure
Analyzing Pleasures over the Long Run
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
4 Evaluating Actions
A Deontological (Act‐Oriented) Approach to Ethics
Measuring the Immeasurable—“Human” Behavior
Choice and Freedom
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
5 Virtue Ethics and the Ethics of Care
Ethics and Character
Aristotle and Virtue Ethics
Discussion Questions
6 Doing Right
Socrates—The Health of the Soul and “Vice Harms the Doer”
St Augustine and the “Wages of Sin”
Another Tale of Corruption—The Dark Side of “The Force”
Ethics, Maslow, and Self‐Actualization
Conclusion
7 Case Studies
Cheating: Hassan and his Disappointing Professor
Friends, Parties, Players, Deception and Drama
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Thomas White’s book introduces the most important ethical theories with relatable examples drawn from student life. This makes it the most engaging introduction to applied ethics there is.
Jussi Suikkanen,University of Birmingham
One of the best introductory books to practical ethics I’ve encountered. White’s Right and Wrong not only distils the subtlest and most complex issues into clear, accessible, but still sophisticated prose. It’s also current, not only in terms of philosophical theory but also in the examples he deploys, carefully drawn as they are from real university students struggling with real life.
Peter Fosl,Transylvania University, Kentucky
This greatly improved and expanded second edition of Right and Wrong introduces students to the major traditions in Western philosophical ethics and provides them with a basic methodology for identifying ethical issues and resolving ethical dilemmas. The cases analyzed throughout have been carefully chosen to reflect the lives of undergraduate students—they are all contributed by students, and are taken from major challenges in university life, such as academic dishonesty, partying, and relationships.
As a result of an increased interest in virtue ethics and the ethics of care, these areas now have their own treatment, in addition to the teleological and deontological approaches explored in the original volume. The new edition also features a significant strengthening of the discussion of Kant, and an expanded and revised discussion of utilitarianism. The final chapter applies the methodology developed in the book in an extended analysis of two cases. This not only illustrates how each of the approaches studied can illuminate a unique aspect of a situation, but also demonstrates the way in which students might apply ethical theory to practice in their everyday lives.
Right and Wrong
A Practical Introduction to Ethics
Thomas I. White
Second Edition
This second edition first published 2017© 2017 Thomas I. White
Edition history: Pearson (1e, 1988)
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: White, Thomas I., author.Title: Right and wrong : a practical introduction to ethics / Thomas I. White.Description: Second edition. | Chichester, UK ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016033866| ISBN 9781119099338 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119099291 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781119099307 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119099321 (ePUB)Subjects: LCSH: Ethics.Classification: LCC BJ1012 .W5 2017 | DDC 170–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033866
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: M.C. Escher’s “Day and Night” © 2016 The M.C. Escher Company-The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com
To Jeff Herman
With admiration and gratitude
Preface
One of the major challenges of writing an applied ethics book is selecting cases. Humans have such a proclivity for behaving badly that there is never a shortage of examples from which to choose. However, because new scandals crop up on virtually a daily basis, cases quickly become dated and obsolete. In this book, I aim to get around that problem by using ethical dilemmas that represent constants in university life. Matters of academic dishonesty, partying, and relationships (more prosaically, “sex, drugs, crib, and cheat”) are as central to the student experience now as they were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Virtually all of these cases are genuine ethical issues that some student or other faced. They were submitted through a website I created (ethicsoncampus.com) in a way that guaranteed students’ anonymity. In order to further respect students’ privacy, any names cited and certain details of the cases have been changed. More cases were submitted than I could use in the book, so I have posted them on the site in case anyone would like to use them in their classes. Ideally, the site can be a useful, ongoing source of cases that reflect ethical issues students currently face. Faculty teaching with this book should feel free to encourage their students to post cases; students are more than welcome to do so on their own.
Because one of the individuals involved in the case decided which facts to report and how to describe the circumstances, it is obviously possible that cases are tilted in favor of the students submitting them. In working with these cases, however, I’d encourage taking them at face value so as not to be sidetracked from the ethical issues they contain.
I am grateful to a number of people whose assistance was critical to the success of this project. Jeff Dean (formerly of Wiley‐Blackwell, currently at Harvard University Press), with whom I had worked on my In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier, was the initial champion of this book. Liam Cooper and then Marissa Koors subsequently shepherded the project to completion. The anonymous reviewers whom my editors selected provided me with sage guidance. I am especially grateful to two groups of students. First, the students from the variety of colleges and universities who submitted cases. Pride of place, however, goes to the students in my Honors ethics course at Loyola Marymount University who let me “test drive” an earlier version of this book with them. As always, I depended greatly on the patience and support of my wife, Lisa Cavallaro. Finally, as is recognized in this book’s dedication, I wish to thank my agent, Jeff Herman, for a partnership of more than thirty years.
Introduction
Kirk has an upper‐level physics class in which the homework is extremely difficult. His professor has made it clear that in doing the problems “you may use only your brain and your book.” Kirk can solve the most difficult problems, however, only if he gets help from his friend Jasmine. Kirk doesn’t ask for the answer. He asks for just enough help so he can understand the problem and solve it on his own. His friend’s assistance throughout the semester allowed Kirk to understand the material. As a result, he did well in the course. If he had followed the letter of his teachers’ rules, he wouldn’t have learned as much. He may even have failed the course.
Sasha and Crystal are good friends. One day, Crystal said, “I need to tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.” Nodding, Sasha listened as her friend explained that she just discovered that a boy she hooked up with had a girlfriend. Crystal had no idea he was dating anyone, but at the end of the night, he looked at her and said, “You know I have a girlfriend, right?” Crystal was not only mortified, but disgusted and furious. If she had known he was involved with someone, she would never have hooked up with him. Unfortunately, as Crystal describes how the hook up happened in the first place, Sasha realizes that she knows the guy (Ron)—
and
the girlfriend he cheated on, Melissa, who is another one of her friends.
Because Sasha is friends with both girls, she has a major dilemma. She promised Crystal not to tell what happened. But because she is Melissa’s friend, she feels an obligation to protect her from someone who is hurting her. From this perspective, she thinks that Melissa is entitled to know that Ron cheats on her.
After agonizing over the dilemma, Sasha decided to keep her word and to say nothing. She didn’t know what kind of understanding Melissa and Ron had, and she didn’t know that Melissa would actually want to know. She also felt she should not meddle with a personal relationship. Within a few weeks, Melissa and Ron broke up. Subsequently, Melissa discovered that Ron cheated on her many times during their relationship. Sasha then felt she had to confess to Melissa that she knew about one of the times. Melissa felt that Sasha had let her down as a friend, and it took a while before their relationship was repaired.
Marco came back to his dorm room one night to find one of his suitemates, Kevin, so drunk that he was incoherent. A mutual friend had just brought him back early from a party because Kevin was clearly unable to take care of himself. Marco said he’d look after him. It quickly became clear, however, that Kevin was so incoherent that Marco wondered whether alcohol was the only cause. He needed to decide if he should call for professional medical help, or just handle things as though his friend was just
very
drunk.
What stopped him from immediately calling for help is that Marco has other friends who were taken away in an ambulance after getting too drunk and then received a bill for over a thousand dollars. Afterwards, they were very angry that someone called an ambulance when they just could’ve slept it off. That’s what made this such a dilemma for Marco. Should he put his suitemate in that deep a financial burden to be absolutely sure he’d be OK, or should he treat him like a typical drunk friend and just send him to bed with water and a trashcan and lay him down on his side?
Marco decided not to call an ambulance. He put Kevin to bed and kept an eye on him all night. The next day Kevin was extremely hungover and had forgotten almost everything about the party. The one thing he did remember was that he did not have enough to drink to get that drunk. Marco and Kevin also learned that two other people at that same party had gotten just as incoherently drunk as Kevin, which led them to think someone put something into open drinks. The other two students got ambulances called for them and subsequently received huge bills. They were especially upset because they were the victim of somebody drugging their drinks.
Kevin thanked Marco profusely for protecting him from a big bill. Nonetheless, looking back on the night, Marco thinks he should have called the ambulance. He feels that he should have put a friend’s health above everything else, because the risk for not doing so could have been catastrophic.
Here we have some dilemmas common to university life. What’s your reaction to how they were handled?
Kirk broke the teacher’s rule by getting help from Jasmine. But is it really cheating when all he’s trying to do is to learn the material? If he needed help, couldn’t he have gone to the professor and received the same sort of assistance?
Sasha is caught in the middle. She feels she has clear—and conflicting—obligations to both of her friends. Did she do the right thing?
Marco wants to protect Kevin’s health, but he worries that if he overreacts, he’ll be responsible for his friend getting a huge, unnecessary bill. In retrospect, Marco thinks he made the wrong choice, even though Kevin ended up OK. Do you agree?
As different as they are, what these cases have in common is that they’re all ethical dilemmas. Kirk, Sasha, and Marco were faced with trying to decide what the right thing to do was. Technically, Kirk broke his professor’s rule. But was that wrong in his situation? Would it have been wrong for Sasha to break her promise to Crystal in order to protect Melissa? Did Marco have a greater duty to protect his friend’s health than Kevin’s bank account?
Such discussions about right and wrong put us squarely in the part of philosophy that evaluates how people act. We call it ethics or moral philosophy. This book will introduce you to this branch of philosophy for the purpose of helping you learn how to analyze the morality of actions and to make judgments about moral dilemmas in a sophisticated, rigorous, and clear‐headed way.
Chapter 1 will begin with a general discussion about ethics—what it is and how it’s done. We’ll move on to discuss the foundations of ethics and develop what we might call an ethical yardstick—a basic standard we can use in evaluating actions (Chapter 2). We’ll take a careful look at the two primary philosophical approaches to using this yardstick in practice (Chapter 3, “Measuring Consequences” and Chapter 4, “Evaluating Actions”). Then we’ll consider two approaches to ethics different from the dominant philosophical traditions (Chapter 5, “Virtue Ethics and the Ethics of Care”). We’ll next talk about why we should worry about the ethical character of what we do (Chapter 6, “Doing Right: Why Bother?”). Finally, we’ll apply what we’ve learned to a few cases (Chapter 7, “Ethical Dilemmas”).1
With patience, you’ll learn a new way to evaluate what you and other people do and a new method of making decisions about ethical dilemmas. In fact, this book’s goal is to introduce you to a world that’s invisible and intangible and to show you that you can weigh, measure, juggle, and manipulate intangibles as easily as if they were chairs and tables.
Note
1
As I explained in the Preface, all the cases in this book are drawn from three parts of life on college and university campuses that regularly present students with ethical challenges: academic dishonesty, partying, and relationships. They are actual cases submitted anonymously by students from various schools.
1Ethics: What It Is, Does, and Isn’t
Philosophical Ethics
Let me begin with two claims you will probably reject: ethics is something totally new to you; and your current ideas about right and wrong aren’t nearly as clear or logical as you think they are.
I say that ethics is new to you because, although ideas of right and wrong have been part of your life since infancy, you are probably unfamiliar with a philosophical approach to ethics. Parents, teachers, preachers, friends, and associates try to shape our conduct and beliefs, but most of them don’t use a philosophical approach. They cajole, coddle, argue, encourage, bribe, and sometimes even threaten us to agree with their ideas or, at a minimum, to get us to do what they want. They may try to reason with us, but most likely not especially well. Intense and disciplined thinking about right and wrong is something totally new to you because, at least in public discourse about ethical issues in our culture, it’s usually rejected for more emotional, rhetorical, partisan, and ideological approaches.
You may feel comfortable with the way you approach ethics and see no need for a new way to look at things. You probably have deeply held beliefs about right and wrong, and you assume that everyone’s entitled to his or her own ideas. And you probably think that’s all ethics is about.
However, because your current approach to ethical dilemmas is based on a hodge‐podge of beliefs, feelings, traditions, and convictions you’ve picked up throughout life, your ideas about ethics are much less clearly formulated, systematic, and consistent than you think they are. Some of your approach to ethics is emotional—you probably believe something is wrong if you feel guilty when you do it. Some ideas are based on something practical—you know you’ll get in trouble with the law or some other authority if you get caught. Your decisions about how to act may also be affected by your wanting to please other people—you might want the approval or acceptance of your parents or friends. But precisely because this hodge‐podge of ideas about ethics comes from so many different sources, there’s a good chance your thinking may be inconsistent and contradictory.
You agree with the law says stealing is wrong. But when you’re told to buy a very expensive textbook for a required class that you didn’t want to take in the first place, you might decide your friends are right when they say that stealing textbooks isn’t wrong because, as a “captive market,” students are being taken advantage of.
Perhaps the conflict is as simple as having one set of rules for ourselves and another set for others: “It’s OK for me to cheat on the person I’m dating, but it’d be wrong if they did it to me.”
Maybe you believe what your religion says about right and wrong, and that you should feel guilty after doing something wrong. But you also know that you can feel really good after engaging in some pretty serious “sinning.”
It’s also possible that at this point in your life, you’ve decided to engage in your own version of Socrates’ “examined life.” Maybe you’re questioning what you were taught when you were younger as you meet people who think very differently. But if you’re just starting that process, you don’t have an overarching understanding of how you separate right from wrong.
Or maybe you’re at the other extreme and you’ve decided to reject any specific standards and leave your sense of morality to “gut feel”—even though you can’t explain to other people very convincingly what you mean by right and wrong.
The goal of this book is to help you learn how to approach ethical dilemmas in a systematic, sophisticated, and consistent fashion so that you will understand ethical issues more fully and make better‐informed decisions. In short, this book aims to make a philosopher out of you—someone who can slog through the confusion, put it in order, think about it clearly, understand why you believe what you do, explain your beliefs to others, and resolve ethical dilemmas in an intellectually sophisticated way. All it takes is patience and practice.
Ethics: What Is It?
The simplest way to describe what ethics does is to say that it evaluates human actions. It’s a particular way of making positive and negative judgments about what we ourselves and other people do.
Obviously, philosophical ethics isn’t alone in evaluating behavior. Law divides actions into “legal” and “illegal,” and tells us that if we disobey, we’ll go to jail, pay a fine, or lose some privilege. Most religions advise us what to believe and how to act if we want to please God, achieve everlasting happiness, or avoid eternal punishment. Psychiatry explains the difference between behavior that’s “normal,” “neurotic,” and “psychotic.” Medicine gives us a yardstick for deciding how “healthy” our behavior is. Business tells us how “profitable” something is.
But with so many different ways of measuring human behavior, how is ethics different? What is ethics? Does it have anything special to contribute apart from law and religion?
Ethics
Ethics (or moral philosophy) is a branch of philosophy that dates back two thousand years to Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), the ancient Greek philosopher who spent his days in the Athenian marketplace encouraging people to think about how they lived. Two of Socrates’ most important ideas were: the unexamined life is not worth living, and vice harms the doer.1 Socrates believed that his mission in life was to challenge his fellow citizens to live in a more self‐reflective way and to act ethically. He would ask them, “Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom and truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” (Apology 29 d–e). Socrates lived and died following the idea that “the most important thing is not life, but the good life” (Crito 48 b).
Socrates did nothing more than ask people to reflect on and study their behavior, and that’s essentially what ethics does. But, as we can learn from the original meanings of “ethical” and “moral,” this includes both what people do and how they do it.
The English words “ethics” and “morals” come to us from two words in ancient Greek and Latin, ethos and mores; both mean “character.”2 When we ask if an action is ethical, we can think, “Is it the sort of thing somebody with a ‘good character’ would do?”
For example, when we say that Alex has a good character, we mean that we trust her to do the right thing—to keep her promises or be kind. But we’re also saying something about the way she does things. Alex keeps her word because it’s the right thing to do, not because she wants to impress people. She gives to charity out of generosity, not because it’s a tax deduction. We’re unimpressed if George keeps his promise only with people bigger than he is or if Dorothy is helpful only when there’s an audience around. Acting “ethically” is connected with both what a person does and how he or she does it.
In reflecting on what we and others do, however, precisely what do we mean when we say that an action is positive or negative from an ethical viewpoint? What standard does an ethically acceptable action meet? What does it mean to say that an ethically unacceptable one falls short? These are the basic questions in ethics. And because they are so important, the next chapter is devoted to them. Right now we’ll look at what ethics is—its connection with philosophy—and then move on to what it isn’t. In Chapter 2 we’ll see what goes on when we evaluate the ethical character of an action, that is, when we make some judgment about how right or wrong an action is.
Ethics and Philosophy
Ethics is a part of philosophy. And like any branch of philosophy, it uses reason, logic, concepts, and arguments to analyze problems and find answers. Philosophical questions are abstract or conceptual, so the most important tool to use is your mind.
Of course, real‐life ethical dilemmas do involve facts. And sometimes uncovering more facts will help clarify an issue. For example, to go back to one of the examples in the Introduction, if Sasha learns that Melissa and Ron don’t have an exclusive relationship, she doesn’t have a conflict about whether she should keep her promise to Crystal. On the other hand, if Melissa confides to her that she suspects Ron is cheating, and she would definitely want anyone who knew the truth to tell her, Sasha has a clearer path to say something like, “I can’t tell you how I know this, but I can confirm your suspicions.”
Even if digging up additional facts helps, it is only a preliminary step. What Sasha should do depends more on how those facts fit into the concepts of promise keeping and one’s duties to protect a friend.
Similarly, the pronouncements of laws, sacred writings, or religious authorities may give us some relevant data on which to reflect, but they aren’t the final word in a philosophical approach to an ethical issue. Some strictly illegal actions can be quite ethical (breaking the speed limit while rushing a sick friend to the hospital) and many immoral actions are perfectly legal (misleading someone about how you feel just to seduce them). A religious pronouncement about abortion may settle the issue for members of one particular church, but it doesn’t make it wrong for members of other religions, agnostics, or atheists.
More important than facts, laws, or precepts, then, is what you do with them. Whenever you use a philosophical approach to ethics, you analyze actions and their consequences. You examine the relevant ethical concepts and see how they apply to the facts in the case. And when you come to some conclusion, you use your mind to craft an explanation or argument that lays out your analysis and explains your point of view. In ethics, what counts most is what you think.
There are two ways to understand the last sentence: “What counts most is what you think” and “What counts most is what you think.” Each emphasis tells us something about what ethics isn’t.
What Ethics Isn’t
Ethics and Emotion—“What Counts Most Is What You Think”
The first way to look at this sentence is, “What counts most is what you think”—not what you feel, but what you think. Many people have gotten into the habit of using “I feel” to refer to both emotions and thoughts, as in “I feel happy” and “I feel that stealing is wrong.” But there’s a big difference between thinking and feeling, and it’s especially important to keep this straight when talking about ethics.
Simply put, feeling statements describe our own internal, private, emotional, or physical states: “I feel happy”; “I feel angry”; “I feel depressed”; “I feel like I’m in love”; “I feel hot”; “I feel cold.” If you tell me you feel unhappy, I must accept that as your description of what it feels like from the inside. I can’t debate it. It is ridiculous for me to argue back, “No, you don’t feel unhappy.” And it’s insulting to say, “You shouldn’t feel unhappy.” For whatever reason, you do feel unhappy, and that’s all there is to it. If I care about you I might ask, “Why do you feel unhappy?” Maybe there’s something I can do to cheer you up, or perhaps talking about your unhappiness will make you feel better. But I’m not asking you to defend why you’re entitled to feel that way. Your feelings legitimately exist in and of themselves, and that’s all that matters.
We really shouldn’t use feeling statements to express our ethical convictions, then. Strictly speaking, if I say, “I feel that capital punishment is morally wrong,” I’m saying that something about capital punishment makes me uneasy, unhappy, or distressed. What I should say instead is “Capital punishment makes me feel upset.” But, of course, that kind of statement doesn’t explain my moral evaluation of capital punishment very well. So if we want to say something’s “wrong,” we must change our language. We’ve got to use thinking statements.
Thinking statements are very different from feeling statements. They communicate a position we hold for specific reasons—reasons we should be willing to make public. If someone says to you, “I think it’s OK for this company to give preference to a man for this particular job rather than a woman,” you’re entitled to ask “Why?,” get an explanation, and decide whether it’s an acceptable reason.
If it’s “men are just better at business than women,” you have good reason to reject it as prejudice. However, if it’s “this job involves trying to sell men a supplement that promotes prostate health, and men will be more comfortable discussing that with another man than with a woman,” more is going on than irrational bias.
Since the main tools of philosophical ethics are reason, logic, and arguments, this approach depends more on thinking than feeling. When you analyze an ethical problem this way, use your mind—not your heart. Be prepared to give reasons for your position, listen to someone who disagrees with you, consider the merits of what they say, and have an intelligent response.
Keep in mind that philosophical ethics is a public enterprise. We’re all expected to state fully and clearly the reasons behind our convictions so that others can scrutinize our arguments and either be convinced by us or show us our mistakes. It’s like a scientist who runs an experiment. She publicly reports her findings so that her colleagues can either confirm the work or refute her. Inquiries after truth are public so that people can see what’s going on and decide whether the facts are accurate and the arguments make sense.
For example, if I want to convince you that cheating on a test is morally wrong, I can’t say just that it makes me upset when students cheat and leave it at that. If you hold the opposite view, there’s no reason why my belief should make you change your mind. I must give you reasons that you find relevant and convincing. If both of us make our reasons public, we can scrutinize each other’s evidence, and perhaps come to an agreement. But even if we continue to disagree, we’ll at least understand each other better and not think that our respective positions are arbitrary, self‐serving, or baseless—unless that’s what our explanations reveal!
There are, after all, better and worse reasons for holding certain positions, and this is precisely what ethical analysis reveals. If I argue against cheating by pointing out that you would be gaining an unfair advantage over other students, I would be giving you an explanation worth considering. But if I say cheating is wrong because it lets too many students get high grades, I haven’t given a reason for why it’s wrong. My position, then, wouldn’t be worthy of your respect. But going public with our explanations is the only way we’ll find out.
The biggest problem with feeling statements is that we can’t argue with them. Feelings simply have to be accepted. And if we can’t argue about them, they won’t get us very far in ethics. That’s why “What counts most is what you think.”
Also, people’s emotions can change dramatically. On Monday we’re in love with someone, on Tuesday we can’t stand them, and on Wednesday we’re back together. The first time we lie, we feel terribly guilty; the fifth time the guilt isn’t so bad; and by the twentieth time we congratulate ourselves on how well we do it. How people feel about an action, particularly whether they feel guilty or not, typically doesn’t contribute much to an ethical investigation.
We should also not be misled by how sincerely people hold their beliefs. In the past, some people thought it was a good thing to burn heretics and “witches.” Terrorists who kill innocent people may sincerely believe they’re doing the right thing. Sincerity is a wonderful human virtue, but is has absolutely nothing to do with proving that what you’re doing is right.
This is not to say that emotions are less important than reason or that they have no place in our lives. Emotions evolved to play specific, crucial roles in our lives. Feelings give color to our lives. And in some parts of life, like friendships and intimate relationships, we should probably pay more attention to our emotions than to our rational ideas.
It’s also important to note, however, that even though emotions aren’t a foolproof touchstone to knowing what the right thing to do is, they can be relevant to an ethical analysis.3 If you feel that lying is wrong, examining your feelings may reveal some of your reasons. For example, your negative, emotional reaction to lying may be based on something specific and germane—like your concern that the person lied to is being manipulated.
Or someone’s emotions may show us something relevant to an ethical analysis in another way. Imagine that Sasha’s decision to respect Crystal’s wishes is really the result of the fact that she used to date Ron, and she’s angry at Melissa, who, in dating a friend’s ex, violated the “Girl Code.” Sasha decides to pay her back by letting her continue dating a cheater, knowing she’ll ultimately be crushed when she finds out the truth about Ron. Under those circumstances, the fact that Sasha honors her promise to Crystal is hardly an ethically positive action.
Nonetheless, we need to be careful how much weight we put on how we feel emotionally when deciding how morally acceptable an action is. Our feelings may only cloud the issue, and we’ll never get to the heart of the matter. A classic case of this is the way the abortion issue is handled in the United States. Abortion’s foes use sensationalistic films and photos of fetuses; they denounce it as “murder”; proponents of a woman’s choice make stirring appeals to individual liberty, and raise the scary specter of religions convincing governments to regulate the most private parts of our lives. But so much emotion is stirred up that no one bothers to talk seriously about the central questions: What does it take for something to be a person? And does a fetus meet those criteria? Since this is a case of an actual person (the woman) versus a potential person (the fetus), do the supposed rights of the latter trump those of the former, or vice versa?
So remember: In ethics, what counts most is what you think.
Ethics and Authority— “What Counts Most Is What You Think”
Now let’s talk about the other way that sentence can be read: “What counts most is what you think.”
One of the most important characteristics of philosophy is that it grants total authority to us as rational individuals. In a philosophical discussion—one based on reason and logic—a position is recognized as legitimate only if we agree to it because the argument supporting it is reasonable and logical.
Imagine that I tell a friend I think it’s OK to pay undocumented immigrants poor wages and work them long hours under bad conditions simply because they have no leverage against me, and I can get away with it. It doesn’t matter if Socrates himself miraculously appears and tells me that I’m wrong. I shouldn’t grant his point until he convinces me with a decent argument. He would give me his reasons, solicit my objections, consider them, and respond. And this process would go on until he showed me the mistakes in my thinking, and I freely admitted I was wrong. A philosophical approach to ethics works on discussion, dialogue, disagreement, debate, and the free assent of individuals.
Obviously, not all debates about ethics are conducted with this kind of openness to dialogue. More often, people try to settle ethical questions simply by appealing to some sort of authority. Perhaps it’s tradition (“For thousands of years, marriage has been only between a man and a woman, so that’s the way it’s supposed to be”). Maybe it’s a personal authority (“I’m your father and as long as you live under my roof, my word is law”). Sometimes it’s religious teachings (“The Bible teaches that blasphemy is a serious sin”). But in all of these cases, someone is simply telling you to accept some authority as the final word on the matter. That is, they aren’t trying to convince you and elicit your free consent that their position is correct. As far as they’re concerned, they have an authority to back them up, and that’s all there is to it.
There are two major problems with appeals to authority. First, such appeals are regularly accompanied by threats of punishment if you disobey (ranging from being thrown out of the house to spending eternity being flame broiled) or promises of rewards if you go along (your friends’ approval, your parents’ continued love). Not only are these punishments and rewards completely irrelevant to the ethical issue at hand, but trying to manipulate one another by threatening retaliation or holding out rewards hardly counts as treating one another with respect.
Second, debates about ethics that rely on authorities can get dangerous when authorities disagree, as they invariably do. When you put together groups of people who are absolutely certain they’re right but hold opposite positions, you have a tinderbox. Because these groups accept without question what some authority has told them, they will have little patience with anyone who sees things differently. Everyone will have a low frustration threshold, and they will have little interest in listening to, understanding, or appreciating a point of view that challenges their own. This makes for an explosive, potentially violent situation. As we read time and again in the pages of human history—not to mention the daily news feed—when people get tired of using words against each other, and yet are still convinced they’re right, they don’t leave each other alone. They reach for weapons instead.
Appeals to authority, threats, and coercion have no place in philosophical ethics. There is never a time in an ethical disagreement with someone when we can throw up our hands in disgust, yell that further talk is useless, and stomp away cursing that anyone who disagrees with us is just going to have to give in—or else! One of the great virtues of philosophical ethics is that there are always good reasons to keep talking. You might think of a new argument that will finally convince your adversary. You could be persuaded by her that you’ve been wrong all along. Or you may find some new common ground.
Ethics, Authority, and Religion
Religion is probably the authority that is cited most often in debates about right and wrong. One of the main functions of religion is to advise people how to live, so it’s not surprising that religions make ethical pronouncements.
It is clear that religions are important to people who believe in them. Religions comfort and protect believers in a way that no government, school, business, or other institution can. In the face of human hatred, the threat of terrorism, war, poverty, natural disasters, a universe exploding headlong into infinity, and our own storm‐tossed days, religions provide a sense that life isn’t quite as bleak as it seems. The world becomes ordered and purposeful, and we have our own special, protected niche. The winds aren’t quite so biting, the bumps less jarring.
However, for the sake of learning the skills associated with a philosophical analysis of ethical problems, we need to exclude a religious approach to ethics for a number of reasons.
Religious ethics and philosophical ethics are two different enterprises. The one is spiritual, the other intellectual. Philosophical ethics is a decidedly secular enterprise.
When religions make moral pronouncements, they use the language of authority, which puts their claims outside the realm of philosophical ethics.
Some people believe that you can’t be ethical unless you’re religious, even though this is clearly not true.
The contributions of particular religions to discussions of right and wrong remain mainly within the flock. Religions are built on faith, and if you don’t accept certain fundamental teachings, you won’t get much out of the ethical judgments offered by religious figures. Roman Catholic tradition gives considerable moral authority to the Pope, but if you’re Lutheran, Jewish, or Buddhist, the Pope’s opinion probably doesn’t mean very much to you.
Many religions also make the disturbing claim that someone may be judged to be unethical not because of their
behavior
(lying, cheating, stealing, being disrespectful to one another), but because of what they
believe
. There are far too many examples in the history of many religions of a willingness to punish (even execute) perfectly good and decent individuals because they subscribe to the wrong theology. From a philosophical perspective, this makes no sense.
As a rule, religion and philosophical ethics don’t have much in common.4
Ethics, Authority, and the Law
Another authority that people regularly appeal to in discussions about ethics is the law. Many think that something is “wrong” only if the law prohibits it; conversely, if the law allows it, it’s all right. However, we must reject this attitude because “legal” and “moral” are two different things.
There’s good reason why people confuse “legal” and “moral.” Law gives us a yardstick against which we can measure our actions, and it punishes people whose behavior falls short. And law does punish many actions that are morally wrong: murder, rape, theft, blackmail, and the like.
Law cannot work as the ultimate standard of right and wrong, however. Laws allow many actions that are morally offensive (manipulating people or lying to your friends). At the same time, they prohibit behavior that is morally neutral (most parking infractions) or even good (civil disobedience to advance human rights).
Laws are contradictory. The same action may be legal in one state or country and forbidden in another.
They are also changeable. For nearly two centuries the laws of the United States allowed atrocities to be done to black Americans. The laws first let them be owned, used, and abused as property. Even after emancipation, the laws still allowed discrimination. Today, the denial of fundamental human freedoms to the citizens of too many countries is performed in accordance with their laws. Furthermore, when laws change, what was permitted on Monday can be punishable on Tuesday. But it’s nonsense to say that the same action done by the same people in the same way for the same reasons is “morally right” one day and “morally wrong” the next.
The coercive power of the law may be able to tell us what we can or can’t do with impunity. But it cannot serve as a reliable guide to morality.
