Philosophy and Ethics

Mark I. Vuletic

Last updated 20 January 2011

This is a documentized version of the fourth iteration of a slideshow (with added commentary) that I show to students in my ethics classes on the first day or two. Most of my students are nonmajors, and have little or no prior exposure to philosophy, so I need to give them a very brief orientation to philosophy and to some background issues in ethics.

Slide 1:

The picture in the background is The School of Athens, by the Renaissance artist Raphael. You may be able to dimly discern the figures of Plato and Aristotle in the center, with the former on the right and the latter on the left. If you look closely at the original, you will notice that Aristotle is holding one of his own works on ethics—everyone says it's the Nicomachean Ethics, though I'm not exactly sure how they know it isn't the Eudemian Ethics. Plato, incidentally, is holding the Timaeus, one of his dialogues about metaphysics. This is not testable information, but of course you're curious.

Slide 2:

The quote above is from an old Newsweek article written by philosophy professor Erik Wielenberg. It's what he tells people when they find out that he is a philosopher and ask him what exactly he does. It's a pretty accurate account, as far as it goes.

Slide 3:

There are as many views of the nature of philosophy itself as there are philosophers, if not more. Every philosopher appeals to the etymological definition of philosophy as "love of wisdom," but this doesn't tell us much, since many disciplines seek wisdom. My own view (a fairly common view, as well as the view I was taught) is that philosophy simply is the attempt to answer questions currently (and perhaps forever) beyond the reach of science, by using reason and publicly accessible evidence.

Slide 4:

This slide shows the primary subfields of philosophy, where you will find most of the questions philosophers deal with:

Logic is the study of proper patterns of reasoning, of the connection between evidence and the conclusions one might try to draw from evidence. Obviously, logic is not exclusively the domain of philosophers.

Metaphysics, roughly, asks questions about things: what things exist? What are they like? For instance, do people have free will? Are minds distinct from brains? What is time?

Epistemology asks questions about knowledge itself: what is knowledge? Can we have it? What does it take to get it?

Axiology deals with questions about value, both artistic value in the case of aesthetics, and moral value in the case of ethics.

Slide 5:

Many of you likely have drawn at least some of your positions on philosophical issues from religion. Philosophy, however, proceeds from a secular standpoint. All this means is that the starting point of philosophical inquiry is neutral with respect to religion.

The methods and conclusions of philosophy are not necessarily hostile to religion: it depends what conclusion you actually draw from the methods, and how seriously you take them. It is at least in principle possible for philosophical methods to confirm the authoritativeness of a religion, and there have been plenty of philosophers through the history of the subject who have drawn such conclusions. However, evaluating religion is far outside the province of this course, so we will, for the most part, bracket religion, and simply ask whether secular methods and data can lead us directly to answers to ethical questions. We must not, of course, make any assumptions in advance about where our inquiries will take us, or whether or not the project will even succeed.

Slide 6:

One of the most important distinctions to get clear about initially in ethics is the descriptive vs. normative distinction. Descriptive statements are statements about what is. Normative statements are statements about what ought to be. So, when we describe what people believe about right and wrong and good and evil, or how they actually behave when they have to make a moral decision, we are doing descriptive ethics. This is a matter for anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists. It is not (with a few exceptions) anything philosophers should be expected to have expertise in.

We will be working almost entirely on normative ethics. The questions we are trying to answer are related to what the right and the good actually are, not just what people believe them to be. Descriptive facts may be important data for philosophers to take into consideration, especially when they consider the moral ramifications of trying to institute particular policies, but the normative facts are the ones philosophers really are after.

Slide 7:

This slide presents what I think is a useful way of dividing up the most general stances one can take on the existence of moral facts. Most of it should be self-explanatory, but I do have two comments:

(i) Remember that when this slide talks about moral facts, it is talking about normative moral facts, not descriptive moral facts. For instance:

(a) Nihilists do not deny that people believe there are moral facts, or even that everyone might agree about what they think the content of those moral facts are; rather, nihilists deny that there actually are moral facts.

(b) Relativists do not assert merely that beliefs or customs about morality vary from one culture to another; rather, they assert that actual right and wrong may change from one culture to the next. It's not just that people in culture A will not condemn you if you commit suicide and people in culture B will; rather, the actual rightness or wrongness of your act depends on which culture you are a member of. Parallel considerations go for subjectivism. For this reason, I consider relativism and subjectivism forms of moral realism, even though most people tend to lump them together with moral nihilism.

(ii) Let me make sure the difference between objectivism and absolutism is clear. It is possible that, in the end, the most basic moral facts (moral facts that cannot be derived from another moral fact together with non-moral circumstances) may have equal status, and may come into conflict with one another in certain situations. For instance, let's suppose that it is a basic fact that one ought to protect the innocent, and also a basic fact that one ought not kill. What happens when you are in a situation in which the only way you can protect the innocent is by killing someone? The core moral facts do not give you an answer. If such a conflict is possible (but everyone is still subject to the same moral facts), then your moral scheme is objectivist. If, on the other hand, there is no such conflict (either because all moral facts ultimately boil down to one, single, coherent moral fact, or else because the basic moral facts have a ranking of importance), then you are an absolutist.

(iii) There is no universal usage for all of these terms: read widely, and you will very quickly run into people who use many of the terms differently. That's perfectly fine; all I'm doing is stipulating a usage for this course, to try to minimze purely semantic confusion within our discussions. In general, though, you should not worry top much about what label to attach to other people's views—the important thing is that you understand what their views actually are.

Slide 8:

Most of you probably would not question the usefulness of ethics if there are moral facts. But what if there aren't any? Would that make this class useless? On the contrary, ethics would still have several useful functions, listed in the slide.

Slide 9:

This slide just points out that surface-level moral disagreement does not always point to a fundamental moral difference between the parties involved. Two people can behave radically differently, enact radically different policies, and make radically different claims about right and wrong, all while sharing exactly the same fundamental moral beliefs. It may simply be that the two disagree about some non-moral fact: surface-level moral beliefs arise from an interaction between core moral beliefs and non-moral beliefs about the world. The dispute between Ghanaians who kill their "spirit children" and those who are struggling to end the practice appears to be an example of a surface-level moral dispute that is caused purely by different metaphysical beliefs rather than different core moral commitments.

Slide 10:

This chart just points to the way theory, reason, and intuition (both general and specific) exert back-and-forth influences on one another. Typically, you will start only with intuitions; you will try to find a way to mesh your general and specific moral intuitions in a theory. In the process, you may find that one or both needs adjusting. There may also be one-way input from a number of other sources, such as pure reason, considerations about the properties of human nature, or even divine commands. All of these prospective sources of ethical knowledge, however, are themselves subject to philosophical evaluation.

Some philosophers will argue that ethics really consists only of the sections on the right, except that the boxes must encompass everyone's moral intuitions. To these philosophers, ethics is a human enterprise, with the sole function of seeking stable, universal consensus among human beings about what they ought and ought not do; on this account, once everyone is on the same page—and that same page is coherent—the project of ethics is complete.

Others think that coherence, even with universal acceptance by all humans for all time, is not enough. To them, an ethical theory requires external (so to speak) justification—even if everyone is on the same page, these philosophers worry, everyone could be mistaken, just as getting everyone to believe that the Earth is flat would not make it so. For these philosophers, ethics must seek a foundation that would compel the assent of any rational being imaginable, human or not. It is probably simplest to think of this understanding of ethics as the search for a theory that corresponds to some domain of normative moral facts.

You do not need to choose between these two projects—as you engage in critical reflection on ethical issues, you simply should ask yourself how the arguments you offer bear upon both.

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