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CHAPTER 1

ETHICS AND THE MORAL LIFE

Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the philosophical study of morality.

Morality refers to beliefs concerning right and wrong, good and bad—
beliefs that can include judgments, values, rules, principles, and theories.
These beliefs help guide our actions, define our values, and give us reasons
for being the persons we are. Ethics, then, addresses the powerful question
that Socrates formulated twenty-four hundred years ago:

How ought we to live?

The continued relevance of this query suggests something compelling

about ethics: you cannot escape it. You cannot run away from all of the
choices, feelings, and actions that accompany ideas about right and wrong,
good and bad—ideas that persist in your culture and in your mind. After all,
for much of your life, you have been assimilating, modifying, or rejecting
the ethical norms you inherited from your family, community, and society.
Unless you are very unusual, from time to time you deliberate about the
rightness or wrongness of actions, embrace or reject particular moral
principles or codes, judge the goodness of your character or intentions (or
someone else‟s), perhaps even question (and agonize over) the soundness
of your own moral outlook when it conflicts with that of others. In other
words, you are involved in ethics—you do ethics—throughout your life.
Even if you try to remove yourself from the ethical realm by insisting that all
ethical concepts are irrelevant or empty, you will have assumed a particular
view—a theory in the broadest sense—about morality and its place in your
life. If at some point you are intellectually brave enough to wonder whether
your moral beliefs rest on coherent supporting considerations, you will see
that you cannot even begin to sort out such considerations without—
again—doing ethics.

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In any case, in your life you must deal with the rest of the world, which
turns on moral conflict and resolution, moral decision and debate.

What is at stake when we do ethics? In an important sense, the answer

is everything we hold dear.

Ethics is concerned with values—specifically, moral values. Through the

sifting and weighing of moral values we determine what the most
important things are in our lives, what is worth living for and what is worth
dying for. We decide what is the greatest good, what goals we should
pursue in life, what virtues we should cultivate, what duties we should fulfill,
what value we should put on human life, and what pain and perils we
should be willing to endure for notions such as the common good, justice,
and rights.

 Does it matter whether the state executes criminals who have the
mental capacity of a ten-year-old?

 Does it matter whether we can easily save a starving child but casually
decide not to?

 Does it matter who actually writes the term paper you turn in and
represent as your own?

 Does it matter whether young girls in Africa have their genitals pain—
fully mutilated for reasons of custom or religion?

 Do these actions and a million others just as controversial matter at

all?

Most of us—regardless of our opinion on these issues—would say that they

matter a great deal. If they matter, then ethics matters, because these are
ethical concerns requiring careful reflection using concepts and reasoning
peculiar to ethics.

But even though ethics is inescapable and important in life, you are still free
to take the easy way out, and many people do. You are free not to think too

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deeply or too systematically about ethical concerns. You can simply

embrace the moral beliefs and norms given to you by your family and your
society. You can just accept them without question or serious examination.
In other words, you can try not to do ethics. This approach can be simple
and painless—at least for a while—but it has some drawbacks.

First, it undermines your personal freedom. If you accept and never

question the moral beliefs handed to you by your culture, then those
beliefs are not really yours—and they, not you, control your path in life.
Only if you critically examine these beliefs yourself and decide
for yourself whether they have merit will they be truly yours. Only then will
you be in charge of your own choices and actions.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill summed up the ask-no-questions

approach to life pretty well: “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it,
choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the
one of imitation.”1

Second, the morally blind attitude increases the chance that your responses
to moral dilemmas or contradictions will be incomplete, confused, or
mistaken. Sometimes in real life, moral codes or rules do not fit the
situations at hand, or moral principles conflict with one another, or entirely
new circumstances are not covered by any moral policy at all. Solving these
problems requires something that a hand— me-down morality does not
include: the intellectual tools to critically evaluate (and reevaluate) existing
moral beliefs.

Third, if there is such a thing as intellectual moral growth, you are unlikely
to find it on the safe route. To not do ethics is to stay locked in a kind of
intellectual limbo in which personal moral progress is barely possible.

The philosopher Paul Taylor suggests that there is yet another risk in taking
the easy road. If someone blindly embraces the morality bequeathed to him
by his society, he may very well be a fine embodiment of the rules of his
culture and accept them with certainty. But he also will lack the ability to
defend his beliefs by rational argument against criticism.

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What happens when he encounters others who also have very strong
beliefs that contradict his? “He will feel lost and bewildered,” Taylor says,
and his confusion might leave him disillusioned about morality. “Unable to
give an objective, reasoned justification for his own convictions, he may
turn from dogmatic certainty to total skepticism.

And from total skepticism it is but a short step to an „amoral‟ life. . . . Thus
the person who begins by accepting moral beliefs blindly can end up
denying all morality.”2

There are other easy roads—roads that also bypass critical and thoughtful
scrutiny of morality. We can describe most of them as various forms of
subjectivism, a topic that we closely examine later on. You may decide, for
example, that you can establish all your moral beliefs by simply consulting
your feelings. In situations calling for moral judgments, you let your
emotions be your guide. If it feels right, it is right.

Alternatively, you may come to believe that moral realities are relative to
each person, a view known as subjective relativism (also covered in a later
chapter). That is, you think that what a person believes or approves of
determines the rightness or wrongness of actions. If you believe that
abortion is wrong, then it is wrong. If you believe it is right, then it is right.

But these facile pathways through ethical terrain are no better than blindly
accepting existing norms. Even if you want to take the subjectivist route,
you still need to critically examine it to see if there are good reasons for
choosing it—otherwise your choice is arbitrary and therefore not really
yours. And unless you thoughtfully consider the merits of moral beliefs
(including subjectivist beliefs), your chances of being wrong about them are
substantial.

Ethics does not give us a royal road to moral truth. Instead, it shows us how
to ask critical questions about morality and systematically seek answers
supported by good reasons. This is a tall order because, as we have seen,
many of the questions in ethics are among the toughest we can ever ask—
and among the most important in life.

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THE ETHICAL LANDSCAPE

The domain of ethics is large, divided into several areas of investigation,

and cordoned off from related subjects. So let us map the territory
carefully. As the term moral philosophy suggests, ethics is a branch of
philosophy. A very rough characterization of philosophy is the systematic
use of critical reasoning to answer the most fundamental questions in life.
Moral philosophy, obviously, tries to answer the fundamental questions of
morality. The other major philosophical divisions address other basic
questions; these are logic (the study of correct reasoning), metaphysics (the
study of the fundamental nature of reality), and epistemology (the study of
knowledge).

As a division of philosophy, ethics does its work primarily through critical

reasoning. Critical reasoning is the careful, systematic evaluation of
statements, or claims—a process used in all fields of study, not just in
ethics. Mainly this process includes both the evaluation of logical
arguments and the careful analysis of concepts.

Science also studies morality, but not in the way that moral philosophy
does. Its approach is known as descriptive ethics—the scientific study of
moral beliefs and practices. Its aim is to describe and explain how people
actually behave and think when dealing with moral issues and concepts.

This kind of empirical research is usually conducted by sociologists,

anthropologists, and psychologists. In contrast, the focus of moral
philosophy is not what people actually believe and do, but what
they should believe and do.

The point of moral philosophy is to determine what actions are right (or
wrong) and what things are good (or bad).

Philosophers distinguish three major divisions in ethics, each one

representing a different way to approach the subject. The first is normative
ethics—the study of the principles, rules, or theories that guide our actions

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and judgments. (The word normative refers to norms, or standards, of

judgment—in this case, norms for judging rightness and goodness.) The
ultimate purpose of doing normative ethics is to try to establish the
soundness of moral norms, especially the norms embodied in a
comprehensive moral system, or theory. We do normative ethics when we
use critical reasoning to demonstrate that a moral principle is justified, or
that a professional code of conduct is contradictory, or that one proposed
moral theory is better than another, or that a person‟s motive is good.
Should the rightness of actions be judged by their consequences? Is
happiness the greatest good in life? Is utilitarianism a good moral theory?
Such questions are the preoccupation of normative ethics.

Another major division is metaethics—the study of the meaning and

logical structure of moral beliefs. It asks not whether an action is right or
whether a person‟s character is good. It takes a step back from these
concerns and asks more fundamental questions about them:

 What does it mean for an action to be right?

 Is good the same thing as desirable?

 How can a moral principle be justified?

 Is there such a thing as moral truth?

To do normative ethics, we must assume certain things about the meaning

of moral terms and the logical relations among them. But the job of
metaethics is to question all of these assumptions, to see if they really make
sense.

Finally, there is applied ethics—the application of moral norms to specific

moral issues or cases, particularly those in a profession such as medicine or
law. Applied ethics in these fields goes under such names as medical ethics,
journalistic ethics, and business ethics. In applied ethics we study the results
derived from applying a moral principle or theory to specific circumstances.

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The purpose of the exercise is to learn something important about either

the moral characteristics of the situation or the adequacy of the moral
norms.

 Did the doctor do right in performing that abortion?

 Is it morally permissible for scientists to perform experiments on

people without their consent?

 Was it right for the journalist to distort her reporting to aid a

particular side in the war?

Questions like these drive the search for answers in applied ethics.

In every division of ethics, we must be careful to distinguish between

values and obligations. Sometimes we may be interested in concepts or
judgments of value—that is, about what is morally good, bad, blameworthy,
or praiseworthy. We properly use these kinds of terms to refer mostly to
persons, character traits, motives, and intentions. We may say “She is a
good person” or “He is to blame for that tragedy.”

Other times, we may be interested in concepts or judgments

of obligation— that is, about what is obligatory or a duty, or what we
should or ought to do. We use these terms to refer to actions. We may say
“She has a duty to tell the truth” or “What he did was wrong.”

When we talk about value in the sense just described, we mean

moral value. If she is a good person, she is good in the moral sense.

But we can also talk about nonmoral value. We can say that things such as
televisions, rockets, experiences, and artwork (things other than persons
and intentions) are good, but we mean “good” only in a nonmoral way. It
makes no sense to assert that in themselves televisions or rockets are
morally good or bad. Perhaps a rocket could be used to perform an action
that is morally wrong. In that case, the action would be immoral, while the
rocket itself would still have nonmoral value only.

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Many things in life have value for us, but they are not necessarily valuable
in the same way. Some things are valuable because they are a means to
something else. We might say that gasoline is good because it is a means
to make a gas-powered vehicle work, or that a pen is good because it can
be used to write a letter. Such things are said to be extrinsically
valuable—they are valuable as a means to something else. Some things,
however, are valuable in themselves or for their own sakes. They are
valuable simply because they are what they are, without being a means to
something else. Things that have been regarded as valuable in themselves
include happiness, pleasure, virtue, and beauty. These are said to
be intrinsically valuable—they are valuable in themselves.

THE ELEMENTS OF ETHICS

We all do ethics, and we all have a general sense of what is involved. But we
can still ask, What are the elements of ethics that make it the peculiar
enterprise that it is? We can include at least the four factors described in
this section.

The Preeminence of Reason

Doing ethics typically involves grappling with our feelings, taking into
account the facts of the situation (including our own observations and
relevant knowledge), and trying to understand the ideas that bear on the
case. But above all, it involves, even requires, critical reasoning— the
consideration of reasons for whatever statements (moral or otherwise) are
in question. Whatever our view on moral issues and whatever moral
outlook we subscribe to, our commonsense moral experience suggests that
if a moral judgment is to be worthy of acceptance, it must be supported by

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good reasons, and our deliberations on the issue must include a

consideration of those reasons.

The backbone of critical reasoning generally and moral reasoning in

particular is logical argument. This kind of argument—not the angry—
exchange type—consists of a statement to be supported (the assertion to
be proved; the conclusion) and the statements that do the supporting (the
reasons for believing the statement; the premises).

With such arguments, we try to show that a moral judgment is or is not

justified, that a moral principle is or is not sound, that an action is or is not
morally permissible, or that a moral theory is or is not plausible.

Our use of critical reasoning and argument helps us keep our feelings
about moral issues in perspective. Feelings are an important part of our
moral experience. They make empathy possible, which gives us a deeper
understanding of the human impact of moral norms. They also can serve as
internal alarm bells, warning us of the possibility of injustice, suffering, and
wrongdoing. But they are unreliable guides to moral truth. They may simply
reflect our own emotional needs, prejudices, upbringing, culture, and self-
interests. Careful reasoning, however, can inform our feelings and help us
decide moral questions on their merits.

The Universal Perspective

Logic requires that moral norms and judgments follow the principle of
universalizability—the idea that a moral statement (a principle, rule, or
judgment) that applies in one situation must apply in all other situations
that are relevantly similar. If you say, for example, that lying is wrong in a
particular situation, then you implicitly agree that lying is wrong for anyone
in relevantly similar situations. If you say that killing in self-defense is
morally permissible, then you say in effect that killing in self-defense is
permissible for everyone in relevantly similar situations.

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It cannot be the case that an action performed by A is wrong while the

same action performed by B in relevantly similar circumstances is right.

It cannot be the case that the moral judgments formed in these two
situations must differ just because two different people are involved.

This point about universalizability also applies to reasons used to support

moral judgments. If reasons apply in a specific case, then those reasons also
apply in all relevantly similar cases. It cannot be true that reasons that apply
in a specific case do not apply to other cases that are similar in all relevant
respects.

The Principle of Impartiality

From the moral point of view, all persons are considered equal and should
be treated accordingly. This sense of impartiality is implied in all moral
statements. It means that the welfare and interests of each individual
should be given the same weight as all others. Unless there is a morally
relevant difference between people, we should treat them the same: we
must treat equals equally. We would think it outrageous for a moral rule to
say something like “Everyone must refrain from stealing food in grocery
stores—except for Mr. X, who may steal all he wants.”

Imagine that there is no morally relevant reason for making this exception
to food stealing; Mr. X is exempted merely because, say, he is a celebrity
known for outrageous behavior. We not only would object to this rule, we
might even begin to wonder if it was a genuine moral rule at all because it
lacks impartiality. Similarly, we would reject a moral rule that says
something like “Everyone is entitled to basic human rights—except Native
Americans.” Such a rule would be a prime example of unfair discrimination
based on race. We can see this blatant partiality best if we ask what morally
relevant difference there is between Native Americans and everyone else.

Differences in income, social status, skin color, ancestry, and the like are not
morally relevant.

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Because there are no morally relevant differences, we must conclude that

the rule sanctions unfair discrimination. We must keep in mind, however,
that sometimes there are good reasons for treating someone differently.
Imagine a hospital that generally gives equal care to all patients, treating
equals equally. Then suppose a patient comes to the hospital in an
ambulance because she has had a heart attack and will die without
immediate care. The hospital staff responds quickly, giving her faster and
more sophisticated care than some other patients receive. Because the
situation is a matter of life and death, it is a good reason for not treating
everyone the same and for providing the heart attack patient with special
consideration.

This instance of discrimination is justified.

The Dominance of Moral Norms

Not all norms are moral norms. There are legal norms (laws, statutes),
aesthetic norms (for judging artistic creations), prudential norms (practical
considerations of self-interest), and others. Moral norms seem to stand out

Whenever moral principles or values conflict in some way with nonmoral

principles or values, the moral considerations usually override the others.
Moral considerations seem more important, more critical, or more weighty.

A principle of prudence such as “Never help a stranger” may be well

justified, but it must yield to any moral principle that contradicts it, such as
“Help a stranger in an emergency if you can do so without endangering
yourself.” An aesthetic norm that somehow involved violating a moral
principle would have to take a backseat to the moral considerations. A law
that conflicted with a moral principle would be suspect, and the latter
would have to prevail over the former.

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Ultimately the justification for civil disobedience is that specific laws conflict
with moral norms and are therefore invalid. If we judge a law to be bad, we
usually do so on moral grounds.

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