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What is Ethics?
Developed by Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer
Some years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, "What does ethics mean to you?" Among their replies were the following:
"Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong." "Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs." "Being ethical is doing what the law requires." "Ethics consists of the standards of behaviour our society accepts." "I don't know what the word means."
These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the views many people have about ethics are shaky.
Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical.
Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the saint. Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion.
Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical.
Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in society can deviate from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good example of a morally corrupt society.
Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then conform my beliefs to whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an ethical issue by doing a survey. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist.
What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from
injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons.
Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.
This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics IIE V1 N1 (Fall 1987)
Revised 2010
http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics.html
Approaches to ethics Philosophers nowadays tend to divide ethical theories into three areas: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.
Meta-ethics deals with the nature of moral judgement. It looks at the origins and meaning of
ethical principles.
Normative ethics is concerned with the content of moral judgements and the criteria for what is
right or wrong.
Applied ethics looks at controversial topics like war, animal rights and capital punishment
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What use is ethics?
If ethical theories are to be useful in practice, they need to affect the way human beings behave.
Some philosophers think that ethics does do this. They argue that if a person realises that it would be morally good to do something then it would be irrational for that person not to do it.
But human beings often behave irrationally - they follow their 'gut instinct' even when their head suggests a different course of action.
However, ethics does provide good tools for thinking about moral issues.
Ethics can provide a moral map Most moral issues get us pretty worked up - think of abortion and euthanasia for starters. Because these are such emotional issues we often let our hearts do the arguing while our brains just go with the flow.
But there's another way of tackling these issues, and that's where philosophers can come in - they offer us ethical rules and principles that enable us to take a cooler view of moral problems.
So ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework that we can use to find our way through difficult issues.
Ethics can pinpoint a disagreement Using the framework of ethics, two people who are arguing a moral issue can often find that what they disagree about is just one particular part of the issue, and that they broadly agree on everything else.
That can take a lot of heat out of the argument, and sometimes even hint at a way for them to resolve their problem.
But sometimes ethics doesn't provide people with the sort of help that they really want.
Ethics doesn't give right answers
Ethics doesn't always show the right answer to moral problems.
Indeed more and more people think that for many ethical issues there isn't a single right answer -
just a set of principles that can be applied to particular cases to give those involved some clear
choices.
Some philosophers go further and say that all ethics can do is eliminate confusion and clarify the
issues. After that it's up to each individual to come to their own conclusions.
Ethics can give several answers
Many people want there to be a single right answer to ethical questions. They find moral ambiguity
hard to live with because they genuinely want to do the 'right' thing, and even if they can't work out
what that right thing is, they like the idea that 'somewhere' there is one right answer.
But often there isn't one right answer - there may be several right answers, or just some least worst
answers - and the individual must choose between them.
For others moral ambiguity is difficult because it forces them to take responsibility for their own
choices and actions, rather than falling back on convenient rules and customs.
Ethics and people
Ethics is about the 'other'
At the heart of ethics is a concern about something or someone other than ourselves and our own
desires and self-interest.
Ethics is concerned with other people's interests, with the interests of society, with God's interests,
with "ultimate goods", and so on.
So when a person 'thinks ethically' they are giving at least some thought to something beyond
themselves.
Ethics as source of group strength
One problem with ethics is the way it's often used as a weapon.
If a group believes that a particular activity is "wrong" it can then use morality as the justification for
attacking those who practice that activity.
When people do this, they often see those who they regard as immoral as in some way less human
or deserving of respect than themselves; sometimes with tragic consequences.
On the face of it, it [ethical realism] means the view that moral qualities such as wrongness, and likewise moral facts such as the fact that an act was wrong, exist in rerum natura, so that, if one says that a certain act was wrong, one is saying that there existed, somehow, somewhere, this quality of wrongness, and that it had to exist there if that act were to be wrong.
R. M Hare, Essays in Ethical Theory, 1989
Four ethical 'isms'
When a person says "murder is bad" what are they doing?
That's the sort of question that only a philosopher would ask, but it's actually a very useful way of getting a clear idea of what's going on when people talk about moral issues.
The different 'isms' regard the person uttering the statement as doing different things.
We can show some of the different things I might be doing when I say 'murder is bad' by rewriting that statement to show what I really mean:
I might be making a statement about an ethical fact
"It is wrong to murder"
This is moral realism
I might be making a statement about my own feelings
"I disapprove of murder"
This is subjectivism
I might be expressing my feelings
"Down with murder"
This is emotivism
I might be giving an instruction or a prohibition
"Don't murder people"
This is prescriptivism
Moral realism Moral realism is based on the idea that there are real objective moral facts or truths in the universe. Moral statements provide factual information about those truths.
Subjectivism Subjectivism teaches that moral judgments are nothing more than statements of a person's feelings or attitudes, and that ethical statements do not contain factual truths about goodness or badness.
In more detail: subjectivists say that moral statements are statements about the feelings, attitudes and emotions that that particular person or group has about a particular issue.
If a person says something is good or bad they are telling us about the positive or negative feelings that they have about that something.
So if someone says 'murder is wrong' they are telling us that they disapprove of murder.
These statements are true if the person does hold the appropriate attitude or have the appropriate feelings. They are false if the person doesn't.
Emotivism Emotivism is the view that moral claims are no more than expressions of approval or disapproval.
This sounds like subjectivism, but in emotivism a moral statement doesn't provide information about the speaker's feelings about the topic but expresses those feelings.
When an emotivist says "murder is wrong" it's like saying "down with murder" or "murder, yecch!" or just saying "murder" while pulling a horrified face, or making a thumbs-down gesture at the same time as saying "murder is wrong".
So when someone makes a moral judgement they show their feelings about something. Some theorists also suggest that in expressing a feeling the person gives an instruction to others about how to act towards the subject matter.
Prescriptivism Prescriptivists think that ethical statements are instructions or recommendations.
So if I say something is good, I'm recommending you to do it, and if I say something is bad, I'm telling you not to do it.
There is almost always a prescriptive element in any real-world ethical statement: any ethical statement can be reworked (with a bit of effort) into a statement with an 'ought' in it. For example: "lying is wrong" can be rewritten as "people ought not to tell lies".
Where does ethics come from?
Philosophers have several answers to this question:
God and religion
Human conscience and intuition
a rational moral cost-benefit analysis of actions and their effects
the example of good human beings
Despite its obvious common-sense appeal, consequentialism turns out to be a complicated theory, and doesn't provide a complete solution to all ethical problems.
Two problems with consequentialism are:
it can lead to the conclusion that some quite dreadful acts are good
predicting and evaluating the consequences of actions is often very difficult
Non-consequentialism or deontological ethics Non-consequentialism is concerned with the actions themselves and not with the consequences. It's the theory that people are using when they refer to "the principle of the thing".
It teaches that some acts are right or wrong in themselves, whatever the consequences, and people should act accordingly.
Virtue ethics Virtue ethics looks at virtue or moral character, rather than at ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of actions - indeed some philosophers of this school deny that there can be such things as universal ethical rules.
Virtue ethics is particularly concerned with the way individuals live their lives, and less concerned in assessing particular actions.
It develops the idea of good actions by looking at the way virtuous people express their inner goodness in the things that they do.
To put it very simply, virtue ethics teaches that an action is right if and only if it is an action that a virtuous person would do in the same circumstances, and that a virtuous person is someone who has a particularly good character.
Situation ethics Situation ethics rejects prescriptive rules and argues that individual ethical decisions should be made according to the unique situation.
Rather than following rules the decision maker should follow a desire to seek the best for the people involved. There are no moral rules or rights - each case is unique and deserves a unique solution.
Ethics and ideology Some philosophers teach that ethics is the codification of political ideology, and that the function of ethics is to state, enforce and preserve particular political beliefs.
They usually go on to say that ethics is used by the dominant political elite as a tool to control everyone else.
More cynical writers suggest that power elites enforce an ethical code on other people that helps them control those people, but do not apply this code to their own behaviour.
Are there universal moral rules?
One of the big questions in moral philosophy is whether or not there are unchanging moral rules that apply in all cultures and at all times.
Moral absolutism Some people think there are such universal rules that apply to everyone. This sort of thinking is called moral absolutism.
Moral absolutism argues that there are some moral rules that are always true, that these rules can be discovered and that these rules apply to everyone.
Immoral acts - acts that break these moral rules - are wrong in themselves, regardless of the circumstances or the consequences of those acts.
Absolutism takes a universal view of humanity - there is one set of rules for everyone - which enables the drafting of universal rules - such as the Declaration of Human Rights.
Religious views of ethics tend to be absolutist.
Why people disagree with moral absolutism:
Many of us feel that the consequences of an act or the circumstances surrounding it are relevant
to whether that act is good or bad
Absolutism doesn't fit with respect for diversity and tradition
Moral relativism Moral relativists say that if you look at different cultures or different periods in history you'll find that they have different moral rules.
Therefore it makes sense to say that "good" refers to the things that a particular group of people approve of.
Moral relativists think that that's just fine, and dispute the idea that there are some objective and discoverable 'super-rules' that all cultures ought to obey. They believe that relativism respects the diversity of human societies and responds to the different circumstances surrounding human acts.
Why people disagree with moral relativism:
