A Brief Introduction To Morality PDF

APPENDIX A A BR I E F I N T R O D U C T I O N TO MORALITY By Clancy Martin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri—Kansas C...

APPENDIX A A BR I E F I N T R O D U C T I O N TO MORALITY By Clancy Martin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri—Kansas City INTRODUCTION This appendix offers a quick survey of various attempts by Western civilization to make sense of the ethical question “What is the good?” As you will recall from Chapter 1, ethics is the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation. How should we live our lives? How should we act? Which goals are worth pursuing and which are not? What do we owe to ourselves and to others? These are all ethical questions. The answers to these questions are provided in what we call moralities or moral codes. The Judeo-Christian morality, for example, attempts to tell us how we should live our lives, the difference between right and wrong, how we ought to act toward others, and so on. If you ask a question like “Is it wrong to lie?,” the Judeo-Christian morality has a ready answer: “Yes, it is wrong to lie; it is right to tell the truth.” Speaking loosely, we could also say that, according to Judeo-Christian morality, it is immoral to lie and moral to tell the truth. Moralities, or moral codes, differ by time and place. According to some people—eighth-century BC Greeks, for example—it is not always wrong to lie, and it is not always right to tell the truth. So we are confronted with the ethical problem of choosing between different moralities. Some moralities may be better than others. It may even be true—as many thinkers have argued—that only one system of morality is ultimately acceptable. Thinking about ethics means thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of moralities, understanding why we might endorse one morality and reject another, and searching for better systems of morality or even “the best” morality. Especially in our own day, when globalization and accelerating advances in communica- tion have created a cultural blending (and cultural conflicts) like never before, our ability to understand different moralities is crucial. This appendix introduces you to the way various Western philosophers have answered the ethical question “What is the good?” Because the Western tradition is complicated enough, we have not addressed Eastern moralities and the ethical thinking Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  of many fascinating Eastern philosophers. One of the interesting things about studying 398 ethics is the enormous variety of moralities that humans have created and the many similarities between competing moralities. Unlike the rest of this textbook, this appendix is not specifically focused on the ethical problems created by technology. But as you read through the various moralities in the appendix, ask yourself how you would deal with the moral dilemmas you have studied and confronted in your own life. THE KNOTTY QUESTION OF GOODNESS Achilles kills Hector outside the gates of Troy. He binds Hector’s corpse by the ankles, ties the ankles to the back of his chariot, and drags the body around the city walls. The treat- ment of the fallen Trojan hero by his victorious Greek enemy is so outrageous that not only Trojans, but most of Achilles’ Greek allies and even the Gods, are shocked. But what is wrong with Achilles’ action? To an ancient Greek of the time, the answer would not have been obvious. When the poet Homer (eighth century BC) tells this story in his epic The Iliad, his purpose is to illustrate a failure in the morality of his own day. Among Greeks of Homer’s day, the pre- vailing moral code was: “Help to friends and harm to enemies.” That code may sound naïve or ridiculously simplistic today. But for the collection of small and largely indepen- dent city-states that was ancient Greece, it was a moral code that had worked reasonably well for centuries. Yet Homer saw that different times were on the way. When the Greeks banded together, as they did to combat the Trojans, the old morality looked barbaric. There was nothing heroic about the lone Achilles dragging his vanquished enemy behind him. On the contrary, he seemed like a savage. When a society is passing from an old moral code to a new one, or when two different cultures clash in their moral codes, the extraordinarily difficult question of which moral code is correct inevitably appears. Ethics, the systematic study of moral codes, is the attempt to answer that question. Almost every philosopher and most thinking people will agree that some moral codes are better than others; many philosophers and others will argue that a particular moral code is the best. Perhaps the most famous philosopher of all time, Socrates (470–399 BC), argued that there was only one true moral code, and it was simple: “No person should ever willingly do evil.” Socrates thought that no harm could come to a person who always sought the good, because what truly counted in life was the caretaking of one’s self or soul. But Socrates also acknowledged that identifying the good was rarely easy, and his method of constantly interrogating his friends and fellow citizens—what came to be called Socratic questioning, or the Socratic dialectic—tried to improve everyone’s thinking about what one ought and ought not do. Socrates never wrote down any of his philosophy. But his student Plato (427–347 BC) made Socrates the hero of almost all of his many philosophical dialogues. Plato was the first “professional” philosopher in the West: he established a school of philosophy called the Academy (where we get the word academic), published a great number of books both for general readers and his own students, and formed arguments on virtually every subject in philosophy (not only morality). In fact, Plato possessed such breadth that the twentieth-century philosopher Lord Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “all subsequent philosophy is only a footnote to Plato.” Appendix A Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  In many of his dialogues Plato raises the question: “What is the good?” Like Homer 399 (who was one of Plato’s favorite writers), Plato lived in a time when great political, social, and cultural changes were occurring. Athens had lost the first major war in its history, trade was accelerating across the Mediterranean, and people were traveling deeper into Asia and Africa and discovering new cultures, religions, and values. Many candidates for “the good” were being offered by different thinkers: some thought that “pleasure” was the highest good, others argued that “peace” (both personal and social) and what contributed to it was the best, others argued for “flourishing” and material wealth and power, while still others endorsed “honor and fame.” But Plato responded that, while all of these things might be examples of goodness, they were not good itself. What is it that makes them good? What is the nature of the property “goodness” that they all share? And because we recognize that most “goods” may also mislead us into badness—the good of pleasure is an obvious example—how shall we sort the good from the bad? Plato’s idea is that we cannot reliably say what is good and what is not until we know what goodness is. Once we have identified goodness itself, we can discriminate among particular goods and particular activities that are designed to seek the good. We will judge what is “good” and “better” by comparing it with what is “best”: the truly and wholly good. And the truly and wholly good ought always and everywhere to be good. Could we say that something was truly, wholly good if it was good only in some countries and not others, during some times and not others? So, if we can identify goodness as such, Plato said, we can solve every problem posed by the clash between good and bad; that is, we can solve every problem of morality. One way to think about Plato’s insight is to see the moral importance of standards. We have standards for good hamburgers, for good businesses, and for good hammers, so why not have standards for good people and good actions? A standard is one way of providing a justification for an evaluation. Suppose Rebecca insists, “It is always wrong to kill an innocent human being.” And Thomas replies, “But why?” Rebecca may justify her evaluation by appealing to a standard of rightness and wrongness. Of course, identifying that standard may prove more difficult than appealing to it, and the history of ethics, again, may be seen as the struggle to provide such a standard. The philosophers you will read about in the following sections attempted to answer Plato’s knotty questions in their own ways. RELATIVISM: WHY “COMMON SENSE” WON’T WORK What about simply using common sense to find the good? Some twentieth-century philosophers argued for what they called moral “intuitions”: a kind of “consult your conscience” approach to morality. This view is initially compelling for most people; it holds that the standard for goodness demanded by Plato is accessible to all of us if we simply think through our moral decisions carefully enough. (Socrates may have been arguing for the same view.) There is a “voice” in our heads that tells us what is morally right and wrong, and if you honestly and thoroughly interrogate yourself about what you ought to do, that “voice” will praise the right action and warn you against the wrong one. Someone who says “Do the right thing!” is invoking this commonsense notion. We all know what the right thing is, a moral intuitionist argues, if we use our common sense and A Brief Introduction to Morality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  are tough on ourselves. The difficulty is that we don’t always want to use common sense 400 or ask ourselves tough questions. Therefore, the problem of right and wrong is not so much that of moral knowledge as it is weakness of will. We know what we ought to do, but it is hard to make ourselves do it. A crippling difficulty with this view is called the problem of relativism. Cultural relativism is the simple observation that different cultures employ different norms (or standards). Implicit in this view is that it is morally legitimate for different cultures to create and embrace different norms. So, for example, among the Greeks of Homer’s day, lying was considered to be a virtue. Odysseus was praised specifically for his ability to lie well. In eighteenth-century Germany, on the other hand, lying was widely considered as morally reprehensible as theft. Some philosophers even argued that lying was just as morally foul as murder. For the relativist, lying is neither right nor wrong; rather, it can be right at a certain time and place and wrong in another. Another example is bribery. Although people in many nations condemn bribery, it is perfectly acceptable in other countries, particularly in Latin America. The relativist would say: “Bribery itself is not right or wrong. Rather, some people at some times and in some places say it is wrong, and other people say it is right, depending on the circumstances. Bribery is therefore wrong for some people, right for others.” You have probably encountered this relativism with something as simple as email. The conventions that govern email etiquette vary dramatically from user to user, group to group, and culture to culture. The emoticon-laced email you send to a friend would be wholly inappropriate if sent to a professor. The kind of language you use in an email to a college admissions officer is not what you would use to email your parents or an email pal in India. A practical platitude that embodies this idea is: “When in Rome, do as Romans.” What is appropriate and what counts as a “good” email (as opposed to a “bad” or offensive email) depends on the conventions within its cultural context. Even emails have norms. Moral relativists argue that all norms and values are relative to the cultures in which they are created and expressed. For the moral relativist, it makes no sense to say that there are any transcultural or transhistorical values, and that any attempt to construct them would still be informed by the particular cultural values of a person or group. All you can talk about are the values “on the ground”: the values that particular cultures embrace. And common sense may be one of the best tools for discovering those values. Common sense may be the psychological embodiment of the complex structure of rules, standards, and values that are the substance of every robust culture. But moral relativists run into trouble, because there are some moral claims they cannot consistently make. Moral relativists can say “slavery is wrong in my society” or “slavery is wrong in the twentieth century,” but they cannot say that slavery is always wrong. Furthermore, because they cannot appeal to transcultural standards for morality, they cannot speak of moral progress. Moral values (like all other values) change over time for the relativist, but they do not improve or degenerate. Yet, most of us would agree that the growing worldwide prohibition against slavery and torture, for example, is not merely a change, it is moral progress. And if we believe in moral progress, we cannot be relativists. Appendix A Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Egoism versus Altruism 401 Throughout this book we have seen that ethics deals with the question of how we should treat one another. But some thinkers would say we have already misconstrued the ques- tion when we ask “How should we treat others?” For an egoist, the salient moral question is “How do I best benefit myself?,” and the answer to Plato’s question “What is the good?” is simply “The good is whatever is pleasing to me.” Egoism is usually divided into two types. Psychological egoism is the thesis that people always act from selfish motives, whether they should or not. Ethical egoism is the more controversial thesis that, whether people always act from selfish motives, they should if they want to be moral. There is a superficial plausibility to psychological egoism, because it might appear that most of us make many of our choices for self-interested reasons. You probably decided that you wanted to go to college rather than immediately finding a job. You might respond: “No, I went to college because my parents wanted me to!” But the psychological egoist would reply: “That simply means that, for you, pleasing your parents is more important than other things that would have kept you out of college.” However, some of the problems with psychological egoism already are glaringly apparent. First, though we may make many decisions based on our own interests, it is far from obvious that all of our decisions are motivated by self-interest. We make many deci- sions, including decidedly uncomfortable ones, because we are thinking of the interests of others. It is silly to suppose that our own interests must always and implicitly conflict with those of others, as a psychological egoist believes. Why did you go to college? Because you wanted to, and your parents, teachers, and friends wanted you to. Everyone’s interests happily coincided, and it is oversimplifying your complex choice to say, as a psychological egoist would, “I did it because I wanted to.” While considering ethical egoism, we should also look at its opposite: altruism. The altruist argues that the morally correct action always best serves the interest of others. Wouldn’t the world be a better place, the altruist asks, if we worried about ourselves less and tried to help other people? No one will deny that everyone benefits from altruism, but problems arise if we try to adopt altruism as a moral code. Practically speaking, it is sometimes difficult to know what best serves the interest of another, beyond helping people with the basic necessities of life. For example, a devout Southern Baptist might sincerely believe that his neighbors are condemned to hell unless they accept his religious views, and might feel an altruistic urge to convert them, despite their hesitation. Another more famous example involves a boat full of altruists lost at sea. They can only survive if one of them volunteers to be eaten, but if the only moral action is to serve the interests of others, how can any of the adrift altruists be truly moral when one of them has to die to save the rest? Problems like these help to motivate advocates of ethical egoism. We do not reliably know the interests of others, the ethical egoist says, but we certainly know our own. And, unlike altruists, whose satisfaction is in helping others, ethical egoists try to create a happy and moral world by seeking good for themselves. The hacker who thinks she can morally break the rules because she has the smarts to do so is both a psychological egoist (“you would break the rules too, if you could”) and an ethical egoist (“everyone who can break the rules to help themselves should do so”). Given the choice between self-interest and altruism, the ethical egoist takes the former. A Brief Introduction to Morality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Of course, the only choice is not between ethical egoism and altruism. Most moral 402 codes and most people recognize the importance of both self-interest and the interest of others. The more telling objection to ethical egoism is that it does not respect our deepest intuitions about moral goodness. If an ethical egoist can serve his own interest by per- forming some horrific act against another human being, and be guaranteed that the act will not interfere with his self-interest, he is morally permitted to perform that act. In fact, if he finds that he can only serve his interest by performing the horrific act and getting away with it, he is morally required to do so. An employer who could benefit from spying on her employee’s email would be morally required to do it if it served her long-term interest. But for most of us, such examples are sufficient to defeat ethical egoism. Moral codes are plausible only if they accommodate basic intuitions about our sense of right and wrong, and ethical egoism fails on that ground. DEONTOLOGY, OR THE ETHICS OF LOGICAL CONSISTENCY AND DUTY Most people find they cannot accept relativism as a moral code because of their moral intuitions that some things are always wrong (like slavery or the torture of innocents). For this reason, they must also abandon a “common sense” approach to morality, which relies on embedded knowledge of cultural norms. The problems with egoism and altruism are even more glaring. But don’t despair—there are lots more moral theories to consider. The rest of this appendix reviews several modern attempts to articulate a consistent morality. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is generally considered the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Kant’s moral theory is an attempt to refine and provide a sound philoso- phical foundation for the strict Judeo-Christian morality of his own day. Most people, when they begin thinking about ethics in a philosophical way, find that they are some brand of Kantian. Kant’s theory is called deontology, from the Greek word deon, meaning duty. For Kant, to do what is morally right is to do one’s duty. Understanding what one’s duty requires is the difficult part, of course. Kant begins with the idea that the only thing in the world that is wholly good, without any qualifica- tion, is good will. Most good things may be turned to evil or undesirable ends, or are mixed with bad qualities. Human beings do not seem wholly good: they are a mix of good and bad. Money is a good that most of us seek, while “love of money is the root of all evil.” But the will to do good—the desire or intention—must be wholly good. If we think through what we mean by “moral goodness,” Kant argues, we realize that the notion of moral goodness is just another name for this will to goodness. Kant recognizes that, as the old saying goes, “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”; he is not saying that good will must always have good consequences. (In general, Kant is suspicious of the moral worth of consequences.) But the intention to do good, before it gets tangled up in the difficulties of the world, must itself be purely good. Morality, therefore, comes from our ability to intend that certain things happen: that is, from our ability to choose. The good choice will come from a good will. But how do we sort the good choice from the bad? Kant, following the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, believed that the property that makes human beings unique, and that propels us into the moral sphere, is the faculty of reason. Kant saw human beings as constantly torn Appendix A Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  between their passions, drives, and desires (what he called “inclinations”) and the rational 403 ability to make good choices on the basis of good and defensible reasons. For Kant, with his dim view of human nature, what we want to do is very rarely what we ought to do. But we can recognize what we ought to do by the application of reason. Kant’s derivation of the categorical imperative, which he argued is the fundamental principle of all morality, is notoriously complex. But the key idea is simple: reason demands consistency and rejects contradiction. Accordingly, Kant argued that the moral principle we should follow must preserve consistency in all cases and prevent any possibility of contradiction. This moral principle might be expressed as: “Act only on that maxim such that the maxim of your action can be willed to be a universal law.” (Although Kant offered several different formulations of the categorical imperative, this is the most famous and most basic formulation.) Kant’s prose is dense and confusing, and the categorical imperative is no exception. What does Kant mean? Kant observed that we make choices according to rules. We tell the truth even when it is inconvenient or embarrassing because we have a rule in our heads that tells us to do so. This is an example of what Kant calls a “subjective principle of action” or a maxim. Other examples of maxims are “don’t steal” and “keep your promises.” Our heads are full of rules that we use to guide our choices. When we worry about moral choices, Kant tells us in the categorical imperative that we should act only on choices that “can be willed to be a universal law.” That is, before acting on a maxim that informs a moral choice, one must ask: “Could this rule (this maxim) be applied to everyone, everywhere, for all time?” Kant argues that, by universalizing a maxim, one can see whether it generates a contradiction. If it generates a contradiction, it cannot be rational, and so it is not a legitimate expression of a good will. If it does not generate a contradiction, it looks morally permissible. When we follow the categorical imperative, Kant thinks, we are doing our (moral) duty. Take a couple of examples. Suppose you decide to borrow money without intending to pay it back. Your maxim might be: “If I need to borrow money I should do so, even though I know I will never pay it back.” Now universalize this maxim according to the categorical imperative. Suppose everyone, everywhere, always borrowed money without the intention of paying it back? Obviously no one would lend money and the very possibility of borrowing would be eliminated. It is rationally contradictory to choose borrowing money without intending to pay it back. Or, suppose you are caught cheating and try to lie your way out of it. Your maxim is: “When caught cheating, I should lie to get out of trouble.” But suppose everyone, every- where, always lied to get out of trouble when caught cheating? To lie you must hide the truth, and in this situation, were it universalized, it would be impossible to hide the truth. Lies depend on being exceptions to the rule of truthful communication; if lies are no longer the exception but the rule, there is no more truthful communication, and a lie becomes impossible. Again, this is a rational contradiction, and we see that the lie is immoral. Suppose, however, that you try a maxim like “Thou shalt not kill.” What if everyone, everywhere, always avoided killing others? No contradiction is generated. There may be many impractical consequences of universal not-killing, but there are no logical problems with it. If you try a maxim of “Thou shalt kill,” on the other hand, you see how quickly it falls apart. A Brief Introduction to Morality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  It is not difficult to generate objections to this theory. If one makes maxims specific 404 enough, it is easy to justify apparently immoral actions while following the rule of univer- sal maxims. For example, one can easily universalize a maxim like “a woman with no money whose children are dying of pneumonia should steal penicillin if necessary to save her children’s lives,” yet Kant would maintain that theft is always wrong and irrational. Kant also maintains that it is always irrational and wrong to lie, even in the attempt to save an innocent life. But to most of us that sounds absurd. Should a mother never lie, even if it means saving the life of her child? Should the Danes who lied to the Nazis about whether they were protecting Jews have told the truth? Surely not. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Kant’s moral theory is his distinction between moral duty and happiness. Kant argues that choosing freely on the basis of what we rationally see is right—following the categorical imperative, acting from duty—is the only way we can choose morally. But suppose we are acting a certain way solely because it makes us happy, even though those actions happen to agree with what would otherwise be our duty. For Kant, actions motivated by inclination (with the result of happiness) are not motivated by duty, and so we should not consider them moral actions. For example, a suicidal person who does not shoot herself because she recognizes that it would be irrational (and thus contrary to her duty) is acting morally. However, another person who fleetingly considers shooting himself but then declines because he loves his life is not acting morally; he is merely inclining toward his happiness. But if moral duty and happiness are opposed, it seems that only miserable people can be moral. Wouldn’t it be nicer if we could have both moral worth in our actions and happy lives? This leads us to utilitarianism, the theory of morality that responds specifically to deontology by insisting that morality and happiness are not opposites, but the very same thing. HAPPY CONSEQUENCES, OR UTILITARIANISM Hedonism is the notion, first advocated by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (342–270 BC), that pleasure is the greatest good for human beings. (Epicurus is the source of the word epicurean.) To be moral is to live the life that produces the most pleasure and avoids pain. But we should not suppose that Epicurus was arguing for a life of debauchery. Drinking too much wine, for example, though fun while it lasts, produces more pain than pleasure in the end, so Epicurus sorted pleasures into categories: Natural and necessary, like sleeping and moderate eating Natural but unnecessary, like drinking wine or playing chess Unnatural and unnecessary, which hurt one’s body (e.g., smoking cigarettes) Unnatural but necessary (but there are no such pleasures) Epicurus said that we should cultivate natural and necessary pleasures, enjoy natural but unnecessary pleasures in moderation, and avoid all other sorts. The true hedonist does not seek what is immediately pleasurable, but looks for pleasures that will guarantee a long, healthy life full of them. For this reason, friendship is Epicurus’ favorite example of a pleasure that everyone should cultivate; friendship was consistently considered one of the highest human goods among ancient Greeks. Appendix A Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) adopted Epicurus’ basic principles when he developed 405 the theory that later became known as utilitarianism. In response to Plato’s question “What is the good?,” Bentham argued that it is easy to see what humans consider good because they are always seeking it: pleasure. But Bentham was not an egoist, and he argued that the highest good would result from a maximum of pleasure for all people concerned in any moral decision. Decisions that promote utility are those that create the most pleasure (the words utility and pleasure were virtually interchangeable to Bentham, though later utilitarians would ascribe many different meanings to utility). Whenever making a decision, the person who desires a moral result should weigh all possible outcomes, and choose the action that produces the most pleasure for everyone concerned. Bentham called this weighing of outcomes a “utilitarian calculus.” Bentham’s new moral theory enjoyed enormous popularity, but brought inevitable objections. Some philosophers argued that such a theory made people look no better than swine (because they were just pursuing pleasure). Others objected that people would surely frame their moral decisions to enable them to do whatever they pleased. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) responded to these objections and gave us the form of utilitar- ianism that, in its fundamentals, is the same moral theory that so many philosophers and economists still endorse today. Mill argued that the good that human beings seek is not so much pleasure as happiness, and that the basic principle of utilitarianism was what he called the “Greatest Happiness Principle”: that action is good which creates the greatest happiness, and the least unhap- piness, for the greatest number. He also insisted that people who used this principle must adopt a disinterested view when deciding what would create the greatest happiness. He called this the perspective of “the perfectly disinterested benevolent spectator.” When making a moral decision, then, people will consider the various outcomes and make the choice that produces the most happiness for themselves and everyone else. This is not the same as asking which choice will produce the most pleasure. Accepting a job selling computer software for $55,000 a year might produce more short-term pleasure than going to graduate school, but it might not produce the most happiness. You might be broke and hungry in graduate school, but still very happy because you are progressing toward a goal and finding intellectual stimulation along the way. The utilitarian must also ask: does this decision produce the most happiness for everyone else, and am I evaluating their happiness fairly and reasonably? Suppose that the recent graduate is again deliberating whether to go to graduate school. Her mother and her father, both attorneys, very much want her to go into the law. But she is fed up with school and will be miserable sitting in a classroom all day. She is sick of eating Ramen noodles and having roommates, and would like to drink a nice bottle of wine once in a while and buy a new car. It is true that her parents’ happiness is relevant to the decision, but she must try to weigh the happiness of everyone involved. How unhappy will her parents be if she takes a few years off? How unhappy will she be back in a lecture hall? Utilitarians admit that finding the good is not always easy, but they insist that they offer a practical method for finding the good that anyone can use to solve a moral dilemma. Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism, because we evaluate the morality of actions on the basis of their probable outcomes or consequences. For this reason utilitar- ianism is also what we call a teleological theory. Coming from the Greek word telos, A Brief Introduction to Morality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  meaning purpose or end, teleology refers to the notion that some things and processes are 406 best understood by considering their goals. For utilitarians the goal of life is happiness, and thus they argue that the good (moral) life for humans is the happy life. Utilitarianism is probably the most popular moral theory of the last hundred years. It is widely used by economists, because one easy way of measuring utility is by assigning dollar signs to outcomes. Today’s most famous advocate of animal rights, Peter Singer, is also a well-known utilitarian. Many different versions of utilitarianism have been advanced. In rule-utilitarianism, we first rationally determine the general rules that will produce good outcomes, and then follow those rules. In preference-utilitarianism, we solve the difficult problem of what will create the most happiness for others by simply asking every person involved for their preference. But there are many strong objections to utilitarianism. One was raised by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in his masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra. At the end of the book, Zarathustra asks himself if his efforts to find the good for human beings and for himself have increased his personal happiness. He responds to himself: “Happiness? Why should I strive for happiness? I strive for my work!” Nietzsche’s point is that many profound and praiseworthy human goals are unquestionably moral, and yet they cannot be said to contribute to the happiness of the person who has those goals, and perhaps not even to the happiness of the greater number. It is true that Van Gogh’s paintings, though they destroyed him, created a greater happiness for the rest of us. But that did not count for him as a reason to paint them—he had no idea of his own legacy. For a utilitarian, such self-sacrifice is not only confused but immoral. And yet if our moral theory has difficulty accounting for the value of Van Gogh sacrificing his happiness and everything he loved to his art, we might be in trouble. Perhaps the most telling objection to utilitarianism is that it could be used to morally sanction a “tyranny of the majority.” Suppose you could solve all of the suffering of the world and create universal happiness by flipping a switch on a black box. But, in order to power the box, you had to place one person inside it, who would suffer unspeakably pain- ful torture. None of us would be willing to flip that switch, and yet for a utilitarian such an action would not only be permissible, it would be morally demanded. A related objection comes from the British philosopher Bernard Williams. Suppose you are an explorer in the Amazon basin and you stumble on a tribe that is about to slaughter 20 captured warriors from another tribe. You interrupt the gruesome execution, and the tribal chief offers to release 19 prisoners in your honor, on the condition that you accept the ceremonial role of choosing one victim and killing him yourself. A utilitarian would be morally required to accept, but most of us would be morally appalled at the idea of killing a complete stranger who presented no threat to us. Utilitarians have responded to such objections by introducing the notion of certain irreducible human rights into utilitarianism. The discussion now turns to these rights and their origins in social contract theory. Promises and Contracts Although there are good reasons for being suspicious of egoism of any stamp, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was a psychological egoist, which was essential to his moral and political theory. Hobbes argued that there are two fundamental facts about human beings: (1) we are all selfish and (2) we can only survive by banding together. You may have Appendix A Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  heard Hobbes’ famous dictum that human life outside of a society—that is, in his ima- 407 gined “state of nature”—is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” We form groups for self-interested reasons because we need one another to survive and prosper. But the fact that we band together as selfish beings inevitably results in tension between people. Because resources are always scarce, there is competition, and competition creates con- flict. Accordingly, if we are to survive as a group, we need rules that everyone promises to follow. These rules, which may be simple at first but become enormously complex, are an exchange of protections for freedoms. “I promise not to punch you in the nose as long as you promise not to punch me in the nose” is precisely such an exchange. You trade the freedom to throw your fists wherever you please for the protection of not being punched yourself. These rules of mutual agreement are, of course, called laws, and they guarantee our protections or rights. The system of laws and rights that make up the society is called the social contract. Social contract theory builds on the Greek notion that good people are most likely encouraged by a good society. Few social contract theorists would argue that morality can be reduced to societal laws. But most would insist that it is extremely difficult to be a good person unless you are in a good society with good laws. Hobbes argued that the habit of exchanging liberties for protections would extend itself into all dimensions of a good citizen’s behavior. The law is an expression of the reciprocity expressed in the Golden Rule—"do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—and so through repeated obedience to the law we would develop the habit, Hobbes thought, of treating others as we would like to be treated. The most famous American social contract theorist was John Rawls (1921–2002). Rawls argued that “justice is fairness,” and for him the morally praiseworthy society distributes its goods in a way that helps the least advantaged of its members. Rawls asked us to imagine what rules we would propose for a society if, when we thought about the rules, we imagined that we had no idea what our own role in that society would be. What rules would we want for our society if we did not know whether we would be poor or rich, African American or Native Indian, man or woman, or a teacher, plumber, or famous actor? Rawls imagined that this thought experiment—which he called standing behind “the veil of ignorance”—would guarantee fairness in the formulation of the social con- tract. Existing social rules and laws that did not pass this test—that no rational person would endorse if standing behind the veil of ignorance—were obviously unfair and should be changed or discarded. Strictly speaking, social contract theory is not a moral code. But because so many of our moral decisions are made in the context of laws and rights, we should understand that the foundation of those laws and rights is a system of promises that have been made, either implicitly or explicitly, by every citizen who freely chooses to live in and benefit from a commonwealth. A RETURN TO THE GREEKS: THE GOOD LIFE OF VIRTUE In the twentieth century, many philosophers grew increasingly suspicious of the possibility of founding a workable moral system upon rules or principles. The problem with moral rules or principles is that they self-consciously ignore the particulars of the A Brief Introduction to Morality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  situations in which people actually make moral decisions. For the dominant moralities of 408 the twentieth century, deontology and utilitarianism, what is moral for one person is moral for another, regardless of the many differences that undoubtedly exist between their lives, personalities, and stations. This serious weakness in prevailing moral systems caused philosophers to turn once more to the ancient Greeks for help. Aristotle (384–307 BC) argued that it does not make sense to speak of good actions unless one recognizes that good actions are performed by good people. But good people deliberate over their actions in particular situations, each of which may differ importantly from other situations in which a person has to make a moral choice. But what is a good person? Aristotle would have responded to this question with his famous “function argument,” which posits that the goodness of anything is expressed in its proper function. A good hammer is good because it pounds nails well. A good ship is good if it sails securely across the sea. A bad ship, on the other hand, will take on water and drift aimlessly across the waves. Moreover, we can recognize the function of a thing by identifying what makes it different from other things. The difference between a door and a curtain lies fundamen- tally in the way they do their jobs. Human function, the particular ability that makes mankind different from all other species, is the ability to reason. The good life is the life of the mind: to be a good person is to actively think. But to pursue the life of the mind, we need many things. We need health; we need the protection and services of a good society; we need friends for conversation. We need leisure time and enough money to satisfy our physical needs (but not so much as to distract or worry us); we need education, books, art, music, culture, and pleasant distractions to relax the mind. This does sound like the good life. But how does the thinking person act? Presumably, Aristotle’s happy citizen will encounter moral conflicts and dilemmas like the rest of us. How do we resolve these dilemmas? What guides our choices? Aristotle did not believe that human beings confront each choice as though it were the first they ever made. Rather, he thought, we develop habits that guide our choices. There are good habits and bad habits. Good habits contribute to our flourishing and are called virtues (Aristotle’s word, arête, may also be translated as excellence). Bad habits diminish our happiness and are called vices. And happily, for Aristotle, the thinking person will see that there is a practical method for sorting between virtues and vices built into the nature of human beings. Aristotle insisted that human beings are animals, like any other warm-blooded creature on the earth; just as a tiger can act in ways that cause it to flourish or fail, so human beings have a natural guide to their betterment. This has come to be called Aristotle’s “golden mean”: the notion that our good lies between the extremes of the deficiency of an activity and its excess. Healthy virtue lies in moderation. An example will help. Suppose you are sitting in the classroom with your professor and fellow students when a wild buffalo storms into the room. The buffalo is enraged and ready to gore all comers. What do you do? An excessive action would be to attack the buffalo with your bare hands: this would, for Aristotle, show the vice of rashness. A defi- cient action would be to cower behind your desk and shriek for help: this would show the vice of cowardice. But a moderate action would be to make a loud noise to frighten the buffalo, or perhaps to distract it so that others could make for the door, or to do whatever might reasonably reduce the danger to others and yourself. This moderate course of Appendix A Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  action exemplifies the virtue of courage. Notice, however, that the courageous course of 409 action would change if an enraged tomcat came spitting into the room. Then the moderate and virtuous choice might be to trap the feline with a handy trash basket. Aristotle’s list of virtues includes courage, temperance, justice, liberality or generosity, magnificence (living well), pride, high-mindedness, aspiration, gentleness, truthfulness, friendliness, modesty, righteous indignation, and wittiness. But one could write many such lists, depending on one’s own society and way of life. Aristotle would doubtless argue that at least some of these virtues are virtuous for any human being in any place or time, but a strength of his theory is that others’ virtues depend on the when, where, and how of differing human practices and communities. One appeal of virtue ethics is that it insists on the context of our moral deliberations. But is human goodness fully expressed by moderation? Or by being a good citizen? And what about people who lack Aristotle’s material requirements of health, friends, and a little property? Aristotle is committed to the idea that such people cannot live fully moral lives, but can that be right? As powerful as it is, one weakness of Aristotle’s virtue ethics is that it seems to overemphasize the importance of “fitting” into one’s society. The rebel, the outcast, or the romantic chasing an iconoclastic ideal has no place. And Aristotle’s theory may sanction some gross moral injustices—such as slavery—if they contribute to the flourishing of society as a whole. Aristotle himself would have had no problem with this: his theory was explicitly designed for the aristocratic way of life. But today we would insist that the good life, if it is to be truly good for any of us, must at least in principle be available to every member of our society. Feminism and the Ethics of Care Psychologist and philosopher Carol Gilligan discovered that moral concepts develop differently in young children. Boys tend to emphasize reasons, rules, and justifications; girls tend to emphasize relationships, the good of the group, and mutual nurturing. From these empirical studies Gilligan developed what came to be called the “ethics of care”: the idea that morality might be better grounded on the kind of mutual nurturing and love that takes place in close friendships and family groups. The ethical ideal, according to Gilligan, is a good mother. Gilligan’s ethics of care is compelling because it seems to reflect how many of us make our daily moral decisions. Consider the moral decisions you face in a typical day: telling the truth or lying to a parent or sibling, skipping a party to take care of a heartsick friend or going to see that cute guy, keeping a promise to another student to copy your notes or saying “oops, I forgot.” We often confront the moral difficulties of being a good son, sister, friend, or colleague. Generally speaking, we do not settle these moral issues on the basis of impersonal moral principles—we wonder whether it would even be appropri- ate to do so, given that we are personally involved in these decisions. Should you treat your best friend in precisely the same way you treat a stranger on the street? Some moralists would say, “Of course!” Yet, many of us would consider such behavior odd or psychologically impossible. The feminist attack on traditional ethics does not accuse one Western morality or another, but indicts its whole history. Western morality has insisted on rationality at the expense of emotions, on impartiality at the expense of relationships, on punishment at the expense of forgiveness, and on “universal principles” at the expense of real, concrete A Brief Introduction to Morality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  moral problems. In a phrase, morality has been male at the expense of the female. Thus, 410 the feminist argues, a radical rethinking of the entire history of morality is necessary. As a negative attack on traditional morality, it is hard to disagree with feminism. Our moral tradition does have a suspiciously masculine cast; it is not surprising that virtually every philosopher mentioned in this appendix was a man. But feminism has struggled to develop a positive ethics of its own. Many consider Gilligan’s ethics of care to be the best attempt so far, and it works well in family contexts. But when we try to extend the ethics of care into larger spheres, we run into trouble. Gilligan insists on the moral urgency of partiality (as a mother is partial to her children, and even among children). But you would object if you were a defendant in a lawsuit and saw the plaintiff enter, wave genially to the judge, and say, “Hi Mom!” The point, of course, is that in many situations we insist on impartiality, and for good reasons. And we all agree that people we have never met may still exercise moral demands upon us. We believe that a man rotting in prison on the other side of the world ought not be tortured, and maybe that we should do something about it if he is (if only by donating money to Amnesty International). Everyone deserves protection from torture for reasons that apply equally to all of us. PLURALISM When the German philosopher Nietzsche famously proclaimed that “God is dead,” he was not proposing that the nature of the universe had changed. Rather, he was proposing that a change had taken place in the way we view ourselves in the universe. He meant that the Judeo-Christian tradition that has informed all of our values in the West can no longer do the job for us that it used to do. Part of that tradition, Nietzsche thought, was the unfor- tunate Platonic idea that there is an answer to the question “What is the good?” There is no more one “good” than there is one “God” or one “truth”: there are, Nietzsche insisted, many goods, like there are many truths. Nietzsche argued the moral position that we now call pluralism. Pluralism is the idea that there are many goods and many sources of value. Pluralism is explicitly opposed to Plato’s insistence that all good things and actions must share some quality that makes them all good. But does this make the pluralist a relativist? No, because the pluralist argues for the moral significance of two ideas that the relativist rejects: (1) that some aspects of human nature are transcultural and transhistorical and (2) that some methods of inquiry reveal transcultural and transhistorical human values. When we look at human history, we see goods that repeatedly contribute to human flourishing and evils that interfere with it. War is almost always viewed as an evil in his- tory that has consistently interfered with human flourishing; health, on the other hand, is almost always viewed as a good (with the exception of aberrant religious practices like asceticism). “Avoid war and seek health” is not a moral code—although it might go further than we think—but it does provide an example of what a pluralist is looking for. The pluralist wants concrete goods and practices that actually enrich human life. For the pluralist, the choice between Plato’s absolutism and moral relativism is a false dichotomy. Just because there is no absolute “good” does not mean that all goods or values are rela- tive to the time, place, and culture in which we find them. Some things and practices are usually bad for humans, others are usually good, and the discovery and encouragement of the good things and practices is the game the smart ethicist plays. Appendix A Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  For this reason, pluralists emphasize the importance of investigating and questioning. 411 Is our present culture enhancing or diminishing us as human beings? Is the American attitude toward sexuality, say, improving the human condition or interfering with it? (And before we can answer that question, what is the American attitude toward sexuality? Or are there many attitudes?) The ethical contribution to the history of philosophy made by the fascinating twentieth-century movement called existentialism is its insistence on this kind of vigorous, ruthlessly honest interrogation of oneself and one’s culture. The danger of hypocrisy and self-deception, or what the leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1912–1984) called bad faith, is rampant in every culture: challenging our values is uncomfortable. It is much easier for us, like the subjects of the nude ruler in H. C. Andersen’s fable The Emperor’s New Clothes, to collectively pretend that something is good (even if we know there is really nothing there at all). Thus, the project of becoming a good person becomes not just a matter of following the rules, doing one’s duty, seeking happiness, becoming virtuous, or caring for others. It is also the lifelong project of discovering if, when, and why the apparently good things we seek are what we ought to pursue. SUMMARY After reading this appendix, a reasonable student might ask: “But which of these moral- ities is the right one?” Admittedly, philosophers are better at posing problems than solving them. But the lesson was not in demonstrating that one or another morality is the one a person ought to follow. Rather, this appendix has attempted to show you how different people have struggled with the enormously difficult questions of ethics. Many people think they simply know the difference between right and wrong, or unreflectively accept the definitions of right and wrong offered by their parents, churches, communities, or societies. This appendix tried to show that there is nothing simple about ethics. To understand ethics means to think, to challenge, to question, and to reflect. Accordingly, being a good person might mean attempting your own struggle with, and attempting to find your own answer to, what we called Plato’s knotty question of goodness. A Brief Introduction to Morality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.