Time to abandon grand ethical theories?
JULIAN BAGGINI
Ethics today is in a curious state. There is no shortage of people telling us that Western civilization is facing a moral crisis, that the old foundation of Christianity has been removed but nothing has been put in its place. Christian writers such as Alister McGrath and Nick Spencer have warned that we’re running on the moral capital of a religion we’ve long abandoned. It’s only a matter of time before, like Wile E. Coyote, we realize we’ve run off a moral cliff, impossibly suspended in mid-air only as long as we fail to realize there’s nothing under our feet.
One supposed sign of this malaise is that scepticism about morality has never been higher. University philosophy lecturers consistently report that their new undergraduates tend to arrive assuming that all thinking people are moral relativists who believe that what’s right for some is wrong for others and that’s all there is to be said for it. Psychology has fuelled this scepticism, with researchers like Joshua Greene arguing that most moral judgements come straight from the “hot” amygdala, not the “cool” prefrontal cortex. On this account, moral principles are post-facto rationalizations of emotional reactions.
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Yet for such a sickly beast, ethics is energetically at work everywhere. You may doubt the sincerity of corporate social responsibility but the very fact that every reasonably sized company feels the need to demonstrate it says something about public expectations. “Ethical consumers” used to be a small band of idealistic hippies but now mainstream supermarkets boast of their fairly traded coffee and chocolate. You can’t actually buy a banana at Sainsbury’s that doesn’t carry the Fairtrade label. In 1997 Robin Cook was laughed at for making the modest suggestion that “our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension”. Now governments are routinely lambasted when they are seen not to have one. Sexual harassment has gone from being “just one of those things” to a moral failing for which you can lose your job and your reputation. For a nation that has lost its moral compass, we seem remarkably keen to march to an ethical beat.
Social psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists would not be baffled by this apparent contradiction. Many have long believed that morality is essentially a system of social regulation. As such it is in no more need of a divine foundation or a philosophical justification than folk dancing or tribal loyalty. Indeed, if ethics is just the management of the social sphere, it should not be surprising that as we live in a more globalized world, ethics becomes enlarged to encompass not only how we treat kith and kin but our distant neighbours too.
Philosophers have more to worry about. They are not generally satisfied to see morality as a purely pragmatic means of keeping the peace. To see the world muddling through morality is deeply troubling. Where’s the consistency? Where’s the theoretical framework? Where’s the argument?
Sometimes, they have a point. Take ethical consumerism. Desirable though it is that more people are thinking about the moral consequences of their purchasing and investment decisions, too many of these rest upon unexamined assumptions about what really is ethical and what isn’t. Ethical Consumer magazine, for example, scores down companies that invest in GMOs or the arms trade and gives points to those who use vegan or organic ingredients. But many believe GMOs can be positively beneficial to society, organic products aren’t always the most ethical and eschewing animal products doesn’t make a company good. Nor can anyone who is not a pacifist object to selling arms per se.
Although popular ethics is often somewhat loose, it can also be inappropriately precise. Ethical Consumer’s score table for tablet computers, for example, gives the Sony Xperia Z tablet a 2.5 per cent higher ethical ranking than the Google Nexus 7 tablet. In moral philosophy, Jeremy Bentham’s hedonic calculus stands alone and ridiculed for its attempt to measure and quantify goodness. In corporate and consumer ethics, metrics are mainstream tools.
For instance, many organizations spend a lot of money on consultants who offer ethical audits. In principle, this is a very good thing, since you wouldn’t want to take a large multinational or a government agency’s word for its virtue. In practice, however, such audits easily turn into box-ticking exercises. Rather than measuring how good the organization is, they merely measure its ability to satisfy whatever criteria are set down. This introduces an unhelpful legalism into the process: just as many organizations feel justified doing anything as long as they avoid breaking the law, so they can end up believing they are good just because they haven’t breached their own or their sector’s codes of ethical conduct.
There is then a curious combination of incoherence and vagueness about just what it is to be ethical, and a bogus precision in the ways in which organizations prove themselves to be good. All this confusion helps fuel philosophical ethics, which has become a vibrant, thriving discipline, providing academic presses with a steady stream of books. Looking over a sample of their recent output, it is evident that moral philosophers are keen to show that they are not just playing intellectual games and that they have something to offer the world. Malcolm Murray’s Morals and Consent, for example, directly addresses the supposed crisis about morality’s foundations in a post-religious world. His opening sentence, “A morality rooted in the indefensible is worse than one rooted in the defensible”, is as clear and succinct a justification for his attempt to put ethics on a sound footing as you could demand. Like most moral philosophers working today, Murray offers a purely naturalistic account of morality, offering a version of contractarianism – the theory that morality is an implicit acceptance of mutual obligations and prohibitions – that emerged for evolutionary reasons.
Despite its wider resonance and relevance, Morals and Consent remains a resolutely academic work. Other writers are trying even harder to make moral philosophy part of the wider cultural conversation. Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley have been doing a good job of getting academics to speak to the general public, editing The Stone, a widely read philosophy blog hosted by the New York Times. Contributions to this on ethical themes have now been collected in a book, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments. Similarly, Ethics at 3:AM collects twenty-five interviews with moral philosophers by Richard Marshall, all previously published by the online magazine 3:AM. Several of Marshall’s interviewees testify to the value of such popular works, telling him how they came to philosophy because they had read Bertrand Russell’s “potboilers”, as he called them, not his “serious” work.
Aside from Philip Kitcher’s claim in his interview that “most of current Anglophone philosophy is quite reasonably seen as an ingrown conversation pursued by very intelligent people with very strange interests”, Marshall’s book shows there are plenty of moral philosophers grappling with the tangled problems created by the new moral disorder. The most abstract of these belong in the lofty realm of metaethics, the study of the nature of morality itself. Here, the most fundamental debates concern the validity of realism – the claim that moral values have a real, mind-independent existence – and cognitivism, the claim that statements such as “murder is wrong” are either true or false. (The debates are more complicated than this because all definitions of realism, non-realism, non-cognitivism or cognitivism are disputed, so even my summary is not beyond contention.)
It might surprise the relativist freshmen and women to learn that a survey of thousands of academic philosophers in 2009 showed that around two-thirds were cognitivists and nearly 58 per cent realists, more than twice the number of non-realists. (The rest were “other” or did not know.) It seems that after churches, philosophy departments are one of the last bastions of the belief that morality involves actual facts that can be known. It should not be surprising therefore to find a secular philosopher, Michael Hand, arguing in A Theory of Moral Education that his subject, which aims at “bringing it about that children subscribe to moral standards and believe them to be justified”, is “defensible and realisable”.
Debates surrounding realism and cognitivism matter a great deal to philosophers, but a quick look at people’s behaviour would suggest resolving them won’t help to create a more moral society. Ordained members of the church are as realist as it comes in moral matters but that hasn’t stopped a significant minority of them abusing children. The most godless countries in the world are also often the most moral in many respects, and most people in them haven’t a clue what the philosophical debate is even about.
Although truth is not a democracy, philosophers might take some heart in the fact that realism and cognitivism at least enjoy majority support among their colleagues. However, when it comes to normative ethics – actual theories about what makes things right or wrong – the field is hopelessly divided. Just over a quarter of academic philosophers “accept or lean towards” deontology, the view that morality concerns duties to follow rules or fulfil obligations. A few percentage points behind are the consequentialists, who believe that actions are right or wrong to the extent that they result in good or bad consequences. In a not-too distant third place are the proponents of virtue ethics, who reject both rules and utilitarian calculations of the greatest good of the greatest number, preferring to see goodness as inherent in character and habit. Katja Maria Vogt’s Desiring the Good is the latest book to defend a version of this still growing camp. More popular than all three of these leading theories is the refusenik option of “other”, backed by nearly a third.
The academic debate suggests that this is not so much a battle to the death as a sometimes fractious effort to build a peace. To defend one theory against others you have to admit that its opponents have a point and show how you can accommodate it. For example, the oldest objection in the book against deontological ethics is that it leads to a mindless rigidity in which common sense is trumped by abstract duty. Immanuel Kant, the greatest deontologist in history, scored an own goal in this respect when he said (or at least strongly suggested) that it would be wrong to lie even to a malicious murderer wanting to know where his intended victim was. Consequentialists, on the other hand, are constantly trying to show why their theory doesn’t justify stringing up the innocent if it prevents a greater loss of life. To put it more starkly, deontologists try to disown the compliant citizen of the Third Reich while many consequentialists seek to distance themselves from the instrumental horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is perhaps then unsurprising that the most high-profile work of moral philosophy in recent years, Derek Parfit’s monumental On What Matters, attempted to combine deontology, consequentialism and contractarianism.
The uninformed outsider might conclude from this that each theory has a point but that none has all of them. Most philosophers would find this hopelessly woolly. Since the theories say radically different things, they can’t all be right. Either we have to give up some strongly held moral intuitions – learn to love the bomb or admire the steadfastness of the honest informer – or we have to work harder to show that our favoured theory does not have the rebarbative implication it seems to have.
But I suspect the naive outsider is onto something. If we’re not realists or cognitivists, we have to believe that morality cannot be neatly described in a complete and consistent system. That does not mean we have to conclude morality is just an illusion or a matter of preference. There is space in between for a kind of moral seriousness that sees importance in doing the right thing without believing we can ever have a formula for specifying what the right thing is.
Many moral philosophers are at work in this space, trying to show that even if we can’t tidy up every inch, there are more or less rigorous ways of muddling through. One central issue that has preoccupied them for several decades is the possibility that there may be more than one set of legitimate moral values but that these sets might be inconsistent with each other. For example, there is a moral value in individual liberty and also in being bound to a community. Both might be equally reasonable forms of life but to choose one is to reject the other.
The word that is bandied around most often here is “incommensurability”. In Marshall’s collection, Ruth Chang complains that people routinely mix this up with incomparability. To give an example: you can compare apples and oranges. Oranges have thicker, less edible skins, are more juicy, have a different colour and so on. What you can’t do is measure the quality of an apple and the orange using the same scale. What makes a good orange is not what makes a good apple, and vice versa. This is incommensurability.
Incommensurability creates all sorts of ethical problems, many of which have public policy implications. For example, is it more important to build another hospital or keep a museum open? It’s difficult to say, not because hospitals and museums are incomparable but because we value them in different ways which can’t be measured against each other. Similarly, justice and beauty are incommensurable values. Whole ways of living can also be incommensurable. For instance, there is no way to determine whether individualism or a community-based ethic is a better form of life, because there is no single scale for assessing such things.
This is bad news for deontologists who believe we could in principle arrange all our duties into some kind of hierarchy in which some trump others, so that we could always read off the right thing to do in any given circumstance. It’s also bad news for consequentialists who look to determine the rightness or wrongness of an action by a kind of objective cost-benefit analysis.
One job for moral philosophers is therefore either to show that, contrary to appearances, there are no genuinely incommensurable values, or to show how incommensurability is not such a problem after all. Some of the most interesting work today, however, sees both options as too neat. Moral particularism, for example, argues that there are no general rules which determine whether actions are right or wrong. The reason there appear to be such principles is that many cases are sufficiently similar for us to assume that they instantiate examples of the same general rule at work. But according to particularists, this is an illusion. It confuses the fact that many things have a similar description with the idea that just one thing covers them all. What we call general principles are no more than rules of thumb, which is why philosophers can have endless fun attacking any moral principle ever proposed just as long as they have enough imagination to come up with one case in which it appears to breakdown.
Lisa Tessman reaches an even more challenging conclusion which she gives away in the title of her lucid and thoughtful new book, When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible. An old and august principle, attributed to Kant, is that “ought” implies “can”. There is no sense in saying you ought to do what you cannot do. Tessman disagrees, arguing that there are times when we have more than one option, we can only take one, and not doing the other is wrong. For example, in order to protect your own child you might have to fail to protect other children. The choice is morally impossible: it would be wrong to abandon your special duty of care to your own child but also wrong in effect to sacrifice other children for your own.
Tom Koch treads similar ground in Ethics in Everyday Places. Koch argues that we can’t always avoid “the queasy, inchoate feeling that arises when you’ve done everything right but know you’ve done something wrong”. For Koch, this is the consequence of the conflict between individual moral agency and the demands placed on us by employers, insurers, professions or the state.
Here, as elsewhere, philosophy cannot spoon-feed us the answers we seek. Take Iddo Landau’s Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, one of several recent books in which an academic philosopher has dared to tackle the meaning of life. This would have been professional suicide just a few years ago, perhaps because as Landau finds out, the conclusions he reaches are “so obvious that pointing them out seems almost silly”. Avoid perfectionism, remember life is not a dress rehearsal, be kind to yourself, work and you’ll probably find life worth living. Like many philosophers, Landau doesn’t so much turn on the lights for us as turn up the dimmer switch a little more.
This is a noble enough achievement in my book. We are right to seek more moral clarity, thinning the fog, but we can never completely clear the mist. We will always be in some sense muddling through because ethics is not a clear-cut system, either God-given or embedded in some transcendent, eternal realm. It is the attempt to do the best thing by each other, motivated not by cool logic but by what what the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (including Adam Smith and David Hume) called moral sympathy. We recognize that others have interests, lives worth living and so accept that we ought to treat them as such. But it is and can never be entirely clear what that demands of us.
The existentialists were therefore right to emphasize the impossibility of escaping our responsibility to choose for ourselves without the validation of an external objective authority. If some find it unsatisfactory, I much prefer it to the historical examples we have of societies and movements that were crystal clear about the righteousness of their principles and the solidity of their foundations: Islamic State, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Europe at the time of the Inquisition, France at the height of the revolutionary Terror.
One reason ethics defies final codification is that what we ought to do changes according to circumstances. In small societies, it is reasonable to think, as Jesus did, that no one should walk by a neighbour in need. In modern cities, not even the holiest could follow that injunction or else they could never traverse a block, let alone get home. In emergencies, one leaves one’s own child unattended and leaps into the pond to save another. In normal circumstances, a parent is entitled to take care of their own children and leave the welfare of others to someone else.
The idea that good moral decision-making requires attention to contingencies of time and place is taken up enthusiastically by Koch. Koch’s central claim is that data, especially in the form of maps, often appears to be purely neutral and objective but is often deeply value-laden. Attending more carefully to this enables us to see the mismatch between the universality of the values we uphold and the unevenness of their instantiation in the world. Moral philosophers may not be persuaded to abandon their methods for the “bottom-up” approach favoured by Koch, but his book is a useful reminder that they should spend more time at ground level than they often do.
Western philosophers, with their historical universalist aspirations, have tended to overlook the importance of time and place. That is one reason why in the anglophone world the discipline of moral philosophy has remained so parochial. The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy (694pp. Cambridge. £130), a brand new book that already looks old-fashioned in its narrowness, demonstrates this all too well. Based on the weightings of its entries, we would conclude that ethics has its foundations in Ancient Greece, stumbled through Europe during decades of Christian dominance until the Reformation, after which it fully developed in Europe and latterly North America. The Middle East gets a bit part in this story, with two out of fifty-four chapters dealing with medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy. On this account, moral philosophy has never existed in Asia, India, Africa or South America.
Moral philosophers have taken on global issues in the twenty-first century but their thinking typically remains resolutely local. Owen Flanagan’s recent The Geography of Morals is the exception that proves the rule, a major work by a serious thinker that challenges Western philosophers to broaden their conceptual palette. Moral philosophy must rise to this challenge if it is to fulfil its role as a counter-force to ethical entropy in an increasingly fluid world. If, as Kitcher says, philosophical ethics is no more than “a collection of resources people can use to act better” it is perverse not to take advantage of resources other traditions have to offer. Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Muddle again. Muddle better.
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