ETHICS
ANIL
MITRA, COPYRIGHT © 2001
CONTENTS
What is ethics? It has to do with
choices. Not all choices are thought of as ethical. Common areas of ethical
choice are proper actions and ends – what are right actions and what are good
ends? Proper actions and ends may be determined by prescription, or according
to principles. In practice, since the process of determination involves
reflection – including emotion – and trial and selection, the
determination is by a combination of prescription and principle. A moral code
or a code of ethics is a prescription. Examples of principles are hedonism –
happiness is the main good – and utilitarianism – right action is determined by
the outcome. There are various ways in which a prescription can be seen as a
principle. There is a tendency to reduce ethics to a single principle. This
would, if valid, have the effect of making ethics rational – at least in
principle.
The concern of ethics, as just
described, with the determination of right actions and good ends is normative
ethics. Whereas ethics is about proper human actions and states of affairs,
metaethics is about the nature or meaning of right and wrong and good
and evil, about the objectivity of values – metaethics is about ethics. The
distinction between normative and meta-ethics is valid and, yet, the boundary
is not sharp. This point requires further analysis for validity and, then,
further clarification. However, the following question is both normative and
metaethical, “Should life be ethical?”
What is action, what is an “end”?
As far as ethics is concerned these questions are important but auxiliary. The
nature of actions and ends belong to ontology or metaphysics
which are concerned with the study of being in its most general and fundamental
sense.
What comes first, ethics or
ontology – what is more fundamental? The question has no definite answer unless
ethics and ontology are clearly distinguished and defined. This, however, is
counter to the nature and conception of ontology. As the nature of being,
regardless of whether there is a distinction between values and states of
being, the concern of ontology must be with both. On the other hand ethics is
concerned, say, with action. What is an action? This topic was assigned, above,
to ontology. However that may be, the idea that the study of action is not part
of ethics must be based on the separability of fact and value. It is not at all
clear that there is such a distinction.
Axiology – the
study of value, metaphysics, and epistemology – the study of
knowledge, are, traditionally the three main divisions of philosophy. In a
sense indicated in the final paragraph of this introduction axiology is ethics.
The distinction between metaphysics and epistemology is blurred – just as is
the distinction between ethics and metaphysics. Since knowledge is part of the
world metaphysics must include the study of knowledge; additionally, claims
about the nature of being cannot be evaluated or completely understood without
understanding the real nature of knowledge. Thus, any distinction of
fundamental study into ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology
is for convenience, according to the special concerns of an age, and limited.
Return to the question of the
nature of ethics as that of the right and the good. Consider an individual who
asks, “How should I live?” His or her concerns include the response to a
variety of situations that are part of life – a friend is deceiving his wife
about his unfaithfulness to her, what should one do? Some expositions present
the ethical aspect of life as a parade of such situations of varying
importance. The resulting view of ethics is rather passive – what is the
correct reaction to a situation? However life is not merely a sequence of
unrelated situations. An individual may ask, how may I construct my whole life
– and according to what criteria? What kind of a person should I be – what is a
good person – virtue is related to actions and ends. It is not implied that the
individual has a choice about everything or that every aspect of living must be
considered. However, there are some main choices that the individual can make –
from common themes or from among the individual’s own creations. There are
choices from among themes that are commonly considered to be ethical – the
division of one’s energies to work, love, voluntary effort and so on. There are
also choices of aesthetics – adding to or recognizing beauty in the world.
Adding beauty to the world is clearly ethical. Leisure is good – it is
enjoyable, allows for the enjoyment of life, of beauty and makes for
creativity. Waste, dilution of the good with the mundane displace the good and
have, therefore, an ethical dimension. There is little that does not impact
ethics. That does not mean that we should be constantly serious or worrying –
that is not what ethics is about; play and laughter are values. It is not clear
that ends, actions, kinds of persons and lives are fundamentally distinct.
There is the question of the individual’s being – what may the individual
become? This latter question is metaphysical – what is the possibility of
being… but it is also ethical – the choice has impact on the world in which we
live and on the lives of others as example and as light. This attitude reveals
an ideal of ethics that is an active one, that is concerned with value
generally and not just with concerns that are moral in nature, that is
concerned with life and living as a whole and not just with unrelated
situations, and that, finally, is interwoven with the nature and possibility of
being, i.e., with metaphysics.
Origins: [if] values have local origin can they be
universalized? What happens to “folk” morals when subject to rational scrutiny.
Note of course the concept of bounded rationality; and of the necessary
relation between rationality and action. Consider honesty as an example. To
begin, honesty is saying what one believes to be true. What, then, if one state
what one believes is true but allows another person to believe what one
believes is not true? Beyond telling the truth, what is ones responsibility to showing
the other person what is true? The concept of telling the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth goes part way toward showing but not far enough
and, in some ways, too far. One cannot say everything that one believes to be
true – one restricts what one tells to the context. Showing, telling and
specifying the context are ongoing, interactive. However, at some point
judgment is necessary; investigation and telling come to an end, we move on. So
much for honesty, but what is the point to honesty? Is honesty an end in
itself? Or is the point to honesty that it improves peoples lives and
communication? This is not an ends-means issue. The question is whether honesty
is a fundamental value or is there something, such as trust, that is more
basic… and what do we do when honesty and trust are in conflict? If we cannot
behave in trust to all persons and in all situations, how do we choose?
How are the distinctions between ends and action justified
from a metaphysical point of view. I.e., if there are philosophical problems in
taking ends and actions as clear in their nature and metaphysically distinct
why should an ethicist, just because ethics is named as a separate discipline,
merrily carry on his theorizing without regard to the distinction? Although
there is some practical value to a metaphysically blind ethics, it needs to be
noted that the metaphysical questions have immediate and practical
significance.
Are value systems complete with regard to all situations?
With regard to the entire life of an individual or civilization? With regard to
the entire range of choices of an individual or group life?
Are value systems consistent? I.e. how do we know that a
given value system requires a unique, single action in any given situation?
Note that these questions apply equally to normative ethics
and moral systems as to ethical principles such as the Kantian ethics.
The ethics of ends or states of affairs. The good.
The ethics of actions. The right. The problem of action in
an imperfect world.
Part way between deontological
and teleological ethics is concern with the direction of action.
There is a view of ethics as
concerned with relatively isolated situations and issues. This view is
frequently in evidence in modern discussions of “applied ethics.” Although the
term is recent and reflects the professionalization of philosophy, the kind of
concern is not new. Above are some topics in applied ethics taken from the
Encyclopedia Britannica. These commonly recognized issues have been recognized
as significant over the period 1950 – 2000. The actual importance assigned to
individual issues may vary over quite short periods of time and the list could
be expanded.
In keeping with the discussion at
the end of the introduction of ethics as an active endeavor with concern for
life and living as a whole, the following topics also fall under applied
ethics:
The remaining topic may be considered to be speculative
ethics: