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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A new edition of the bestselling guide which equips readers with the skills necessary for engaging in ethical reflection The Ethics Toolkit offers an engaging and approachable introduction to the core concepts, principles, and methods of contemporary ethics. Explaining to students and general readers how to think critically about ethics and actually use philosophical concepts, this innovative volume provides the tools and knowledge required to engage intelligently in ethical study, deliberation, and debate. Invaluable as both a complete guide and a handy reference, this versatile resource provides clear and authoritative information on a diverse range of topics, from fundamental concepts and major ethical frameworks to contemporary critiques and ongoing debates. Throughout the text, Fosl and Baggini highlight the crucial role ethics plays in our lives, exploring autonomy, free will, consciousness, fairness, responsibility, consent, intersectionality, sex and gender, and much more. Substantially revised and expanded, the second edition of The Ethics Toolkit contains a wealth of new entries, new recommended readings, more detailed textual references, and numerous timely real-world and hypothetical examples. * Uses clear and accessible language appropriate for use inside and beyond the classroom * Contains cross-referenced entries to help readers connect and contrast ideas * Engages both non-Western and Western philosophy * Offer insights into key issues in ethics with a firm grounding in the history of philosophy * Includes an appendix of tools for the practice of ethics, including links to podcasts, web and print resources, and prominent ethics organizations Written by the authors of the popular The Philosophers' Toolkit, this new edition of The Ethics Toolkit is a must-have resource for anyone interested in ethics, from general readers to undergraduate and graduate students.
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THE ETHICS
A Compendium of Ethical Concepts and Methods
SECOND EDITION
JULIAN BAGGINI AND PETER S. FOSL
This edition first published 2024
© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Edition History
Blackwell Publishing (1e, 2007)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baggini, Julian, author. | Fosl, Peter S., author. | John Wiley & Sons, publisher.
Title: The ethics toolkit : a compendium of ethical concepts and methods / Julian Baggini, Peter S. Fosl.
Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023032001 | ISBN 9781119891970 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119891987 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119891994 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethics.
Classification: LCC BJ1012 .B33 2024 | DDC 170--dc23/eng/20230808
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032001
Cover Images: © Grafissimo/Getty Images; timandtim/Getty Images
Cover Design: Wiley
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Part I The Grounds of Ethics
1.1 Aesthetics
1.2 Agency
1.3 Authority
1.4 Autonomy
1.5 Awareness and Consciousness
1.6 Character and Self-Cultivation
1.7 Conscience
1.8 Constraints
1.9 Evolution
1.10 Flourishing
1.11 Harmony
1.12 Hierarchy
1.13 Interest
1.14 Intuition
1.15 Natural Law
1.16 Need and Desire
1.17 Obligation
1.18 Pain, Pleasure, and Happiness
1.19 Power
1.20 Revelation
1.21 Rights
1.22 Salvation
1.23 Sympathy
1.24 Tradition and History
Part II Central Concepts in Ethics
2.1 Act/Omission
2.2 Act/Rule
2.3 Bad/Evil/Good
2.4 Beneficence/Non-Maleficence
2.5 Can/Ought
2.6 Cause/Reason
2.7 Cognitivism/Non-Cognitivism
2.8 Consent
2.9
Dharma
2.10 Excuse/Explanation/Justification
2.11 Exploitation
2.12 Golden Mean
2.13 Harm
2.14 Honour/Shame
2.15 Identity
2.16 Individual/Collective
2.17 Intentions/Consequences
2.18 Internalism/Externalism
2.19 Intersectionality
2.20 Intrinsic/Instrumental Value
2.21 Karma
2.22 Legal/Moral
2.23 Liberty, Freedom
2.24 Metaethics/Normative Ethics
2.25 Moral Subjects and Agents
2.26 Public/Private
2.27 Responsibility
Part III Frameworks for Ethics
3.1 Buddhist Ethics
3.2 Care
3.3 Confucian Role Ethics
3.4 Consequentialism
3.5 Contractarianism
3.6 Cosmopolitanism
3.7 Critical Theory and Culture Critique
3.8 Discourse Ethics
3.9 Divine Command
3.10 Duty and Deontological Ethics
3.11 Egoism
3.12 Naturalism
3.13 Particularism
3.14 Perfectionism
3.15 Rationalism
3.16 Relativism
3.17 Relationality and Ubuntu
3.18 Subjectivism
3.19 Virtue Ethics
Part IV Assessment, Judgement, and Critique
4.1 Ability
4.2 Alienation
4.3 Authenticity
4.4 Class
4.5 Common Sense
4.6 Consistency
4.7 Counterexamples
4.8 Equality and Equity
4.9 Fairness
4.10 Fallacies
4.11 Impartiality and Objectivity
4.12 The Is/Ought Gap
4.13 Justice and Lawfulness
4.14 Moral Sentiment
4.15 Paternalism
4.16 Politics
4.17 Race
4.18 Reflective Equilibrium
4.19 Sex and Gender
4.20 Speciesism
4.21 Thought Experiments
4.22 Universality and Universalizability
Part V The Limits of Ethics
5.1
Akrasia
5.2 Casuistry and Rationalization
5.3 Extreme Circumstances, Grey Areas, and Liminal Cases
5.4 Fallenness
5.5 False Consciousness
5.6 Forgiveness and Mercy
5.7 Free Will and Determinism
5.8 Historical Distance and Time
5.9 Moral Luck
5.10 Nihilism and Amorality
5.11 Pluralism
5.12 Radical Disagreement
5.13 Radical Particularity
5.14 Scepticism
5.15 Self-deception
5.16 The Separateness of Persons
5.17 Standpoint
5.18 Supererogation
5.19 Tolerance
5.20 Tragedy
5.21 War
Appendix Resources for the Practice of Ethics
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Title PAge
Copyright
Table of Contents
Introduction
Begin Reading
Appendix Resources for the Practice of Ethics
Index
End User License Agreement
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Introduction
How do you set about determining what is right and wrong? The most obvious strategy is to establish a set of robust moral principles and apply them. This requires first selecting a general theory that attempts to do things like determine the true nature of ethics, define the meaning of ethical terms, formulate fundamental moral principles, and place those principles in a hierarchy. Doing that requires explaining why your general theory is better than all the rest, and repelling the various challenges that critics are certain to advance. Only then can you set about applying your theory to real-life moral problems, demonstrating how it resolves disputes and answers questions about what to do in various actual circumstances.
One problem with this kind of approach, however, is that more than two millennia of moral philosophy have led to little consensus about the fundamental nature of ethics, the hierarchy of moral principles, or the way to apply them in the real world. Worse, some respectable thinkers have rejected the idea that reaching consensus about such things is even possible.
Meanwhile, of course, the world goes on, tangled in the most profound sorts of moral struggle. If anything, the demand for meaningful and effective moral thinking has become greater than ever. Moral thinking and reasoning, then, despite the limitations of moral philosophy, can neither be put on hold until agreement is reached nor abandoned altogether. Even amoralists need to get clear on what they’re rejecting.
The fact that theoretical consensus about moral issues hasn’t been reached doesn’t mean it can’t be reached. Derek Parfit argued that moral philosophy is a relatively young discipline and so the absence of consensus should not be taken to be terminal. But perhaps there’s another method, another way to think about ethical matters, a way that can bring real intellectual force to bear upon the moral controversies that populate the world but doesn’t require a univocal, general moral theory.
Rather than trying to determine a single, complete ethical theory that answers all the relevant moral questions that may arise, and that defeats all its competitors, perhaps one might instead (or also) try to gain a kind of mastery or at least facility with some of the many different theories, concepts, principles, and critiques concerned with ethics that moral philosophers have produced over the ages.
The Ethics Toolkit aspires to help those engaged in moral inquiry and reflection to do just that. By placing a selection of insights from different moral theorists and theories side by side, we hope to show readers something about ethics that may go missing in the contests among ethical theories. The vision of ethics underwriting The Ethics Toolkit is pluralistic, and unabashedly so, in the sense that it holds that the insights of, say, utilitarianism are of interest and of value not only to utilitarians but also to anyone who wishes to engage in moral reflection.
Indeed, anyone who wants to deliberate and converse with others about the major moral concerns that occupy people today must be able to draw upon not just a single well-crafted theory but also more broadly upon the rich and diverse work of the past 2,500 years of moral philosophy. Competent thinkers simply must have in their possession a well-stocked “toolkit” containing a host of intellectual instruments for careful, precise, and sophisticated moral thinking. As the political philosopher Jo Wolff says,
Generally, if someone has thought hard and long about an area and they’re intelligent to start with and they’re thinking in depth and they present an articulated body of thought, it’s very unlikely that it’s all going to be wrong. The most common mistake people make is to have got part of the truth and to think they’ve got all of it.
These tools, however, cannot simply be picked up and applied blindly to suit whatever need arises. Various tools are more appropriate to certain needs than others. The tools we collect here cannot and should not only be used in a single way. Some may effectively use a screwdriver to take on the same job others would tackle with a hammer. More advanced thinkers may be able to use some of the tools in ways that beginners cannot. Moral thinkers of all abilities will use some tools more than others, using some only rarely.
There are many voices composing the moral discourses of our age, and these different voices address many different problems in different ways. Many tools are necessary to hear them and to respond properly to them, not a single voice or a single tool. The expansion of the range of those voices is one of the most significant features of this second edition. This includes a greater inclusion of non-Western philosophers.
Although we have aimed to be as impartial, accurate, and descriptive as possible, the Toolkit inevitably reflects some of our own conclusions. No such text could ever be be a fully neutral report. Rather, it aspires to be a thoughtful and informed account of what we take to be crucial ethical ideas and techniques, distilled after decades of teaching, writing, and presenting philosophy to a diverse and often non-academic audience.
By producing a compendium like this we also hope to provide readers with a deeper and subtler sense of how different ideas and methods may be enlisted so that people might not only think but also act with regard to moral matters in more effective and satisfying ways. That is why we have included concrete examples that illustrate many of the more abstract ideas of the text, to show readers how the material of the text applies to actual ethical controversies.
Many of the problems that human beings have to deal with are in part conceptual and philosophical. Coming to terms with these problems will require better thinking. Medicines and machines will be needed to help make the world a better place. But, contrary to the charges that are often brought against philosophy, so will the capacity for clear thinking and sound moral deliberation. In this way, we believe that there is a connection between what the ancient Greeks called “knowing that” (theoretical knowledge) and “knowing how” (practical knowledge).
There are different ways to use this text. The Ethics Toolkit can be read cover-to-cover as a course in ethical reasoning. We begin in Part I with the question of the grounds on which ethics stands. We then consider in Part II the most important frameworks that have been constructed to enable us to reason about ethics. Part III describes a number of central concepts in ethical discourse. In Part IV, we look at the ways in which ethical theories and judgements may be critiqued. Finally, we look at the limits of moral reasoning in Part V.
But this sort of linear approach isn’t the only way to use The Ethics Toolkit. It can also be used as a reference text upon which people can draw, using either the table of contents or the extensive index, to help understand a specific issue. Or alternatively, readers can simply wander about through the book, following their own noses in a nearly countless variety of ways. The cross-referencing we’ve appended to each entry directs readers to other entries that will complement or elaborate upon the material at hand, helping readers to make connections and articulate contrasts, sometimes in surprising ways.
Most importantly, the text should not be treated as an authority. Philosophy is an activity, one which requires deep questioning. We have striven to be as accurate in possible when describing the views of the innumerable thinkers covered in this book, but it is for readers themselves to determine the merits of the ideas. They may also question whether we have given them too generous or too critical a hearing, or have misunderstood their significance or import. Our aim is to lay out a philosophical buffet, not to spoon-feed.
This buffet not only contains many more additional items than the first edition. Every entry has been revised, many extensively. Each is followed by four or five suggestions for further reading. Usually, these recommendations will tell you more about the subject of the entry, but sometimes we have also included details of works referred to in the entries that concern the specific examples used. Readings particularly suitable for beginners are marked with asterisks.
The index includes the topic areas these examples cover. A list of societies, institutions, websites, and other resources related to the study and practice of ethics has been appended to the end of the text.
No matter how it’s used, we hope The Ethics Toolkit will be a book that readers will return to again and again, whether they are students, teachers, scholars, professionals, or just people concerned with how to think better about morality.
Part I The Grounds of Ethics
1.1 Aesthetics
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats in his 1819 poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Was he the victim of a romantic delusion, or is there really, as Plato (c. 429–347 BCE) suggested, an intrinsic relationship between the true, the beautiful, and even the good? Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) seemed to think there was a connection between at least the last two when he remarked that, “Ethics and aesthetics are one” (Tractatus 6.421). Taking at face value a statement from any thinker as cryptic as Wittgenstein is risky business. But nevertheless, many have argued for deep links between aesthetics and ethics. Beauty can be seen as capable of representing moral goodness, revealing the nature of goodness, and instructing us in goodness.
Representations of the good
Various ethical ideals have been personified in statues and images. At the second-century Library of Celsus in Ephesus, Turkey, for example, you’ll encounter statues of women said to symbolize or incarnate wisdom (sophia) and virtue (aretê), while justice is often depicted as a blindfolded woman holding a pair of scales. Besides personifying ethical concepts, the aesthetic can bear ethical import in much more abstract ways. When one looks at, for example, the Parthenon in Athens, one sees a structure that exhibits exquisite balance, proportion, and harmony. The site of the structure on an elevated, central, and historic location communicates a connection with the divine and with the cultural past; it declares itself and functions as the centring pole of the Athenian polis.
What is it, though, that “moral” art such as the Parthenon communicates, and how does it do so? In his 1790 Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that art cannot directly depict moral principles, but it can offer symbols of morality. By this, Kant meant that the way we reflect upon objects of aesthetic experience is somehow analogous to the way we reflect on moral values. “The morally good,” Kant writes, “is the intelligible that taste has in view” (AK 5:353). That’s why beauty seems bound up with so many notions connected to morality. For example, says Kant, like properly moral thinking our experience of beauty is disinterested; we find beauty in things from which we have absolutely nothing to gain (e.g., someone else’s art). Beauty is, argues Kant, universal in the sense that we think every reasonable person ought to be able to see it that way.
Moral judgement’s connection to disinterested and normative aesthetic universality becomes evident via the trope of analogy: all rational beings ought to be able to apprehend the beautiful in a way analogous to the way all rational beings ought to be able to recognize what is morally right and good. In short, aesthetic thought makes universal claims independent of self-interest in a way analogous to the normative imperatives of ethical thought.
Revealing and defining the good
The connection between aesthetics and ethics isn’t restricted to art representing goodness through sensuous experience. Nature’s aesthetic qualities have also been thought to manifest moral significance. Ancient Pythagoreans believed that there are harmonic or at least harmonious relationships (harmonia) among the various structures of the natural world; and they maintained that achieving the good life entails replicating them in one’s own soul (psychê), making, as it were, the microcosm correspond to the macrocosm. In his own ways, Plato followed the Pythagoreans in this, for example, in his Republic (e.g., 351d–352a, 443d–444b, 462d–462e). Kant saw in the “play” of our cognitive faculties that takes place in aesthetic experience something of the wondrous and natural fit of things in a morally good world.
Later, Romantic thinkers such as William Blake (1757–1827) and William Wordsworth (1770–1850) would also find in natural beauty a source of moral restoration for those suffering from the depravity of urban, industrial society – as well as an expression of a deeper spiritual or divine goodness and beauty. Reframing societal conceptions of beauty and ugliness has also been part of the struggle for political goodness and virtue, too. An important line of resistance and activism in the movement for black freedom and justice followed the proposition “Black is beautiful!” Labour to advance the social-political condition of women and those with disabilities has often focused on the oppressive effects of conventional standards of beauty.
Art as instruction
Perhaps the most widespread view of art’s moral dimension is that it can help through didactic effect to develop our moral sensibilities and understanding. For example, Aristotle’s (384–22 BCE) Poetics investigates the powerful and important effects of theatrical tragedy, which provides us with models of behaviour either to emulate or avoid and teaches us the proper objects of emotions such as pity and fear. When one walks around the ruins of ancient Greece, one is struck by the carefully chosen locations of its theatres. Directly above the great temple of Delphi, for example, stands a theatre whose seats survey the sacred mountain hollow below. The Athenian theatre of Dionysus, similarly, sits snuggly at the southern base of the acropolis just below the Parthenon. That’s because, for the ancient Greeks and many others after them, art offers not simply the exhibition of morality but also moral instruction within a space promoting capable reflection and deliberation.
As Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) argued in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” (1795), part of moral instruction involves the cultivation of our feelings, sentiments, sympathies, and affections. Aesthetic experience can help people sympathize with the victims of war, crime, abuse, and vice. It can cultivate compassion, moral outrage, pity, pride, devotion, admiration, and respect. It can edify, elevate, and motivate.
Consider, for example, Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937), Arnold Schoenberg’s cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (1948), Charles Tindley et al.’s song “We Shall Overcome,” Judy Chicago’s installation Dinner Party (1979), Käthe Kollwiz’s poster Vienna is Dying! (1920), Banksy’s Israeli separation wall murals (2005–). Religious art, of course – from the stained glass in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres to the transcendent geometries of Istanbul’s Sultan Ahmed Blue Mosque – has often been crafted with moral didactics in mind. The relationship between aesthetics and ethics can, in fact, seem so deep as to lead one to wonder whether the former isn’t a condition for the possibility of the latter.
But not everyone agrees that art makes us better people. Many great artists and art lovers have been terrible human beings. Degas was an anti-Semite, Caravaggio was violent and erratic, Picasso was a misogynist, and Bach was verbally abusive and carried a dagger because so many detested him. Art may have the potential to improve us, but its power to do so is far from irresistible.
In his dialogue Ion, Plato argues that art is more likely to corrupt than improve. Art (and artists) thought to be obscene, blasphemous, and corrupting has been condemned and attacked for millennia – for example, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Manish Harijan’s paintings of Hindu gods with cartoon superheroes, Andreas Serano’s Piss Christ (1988), the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and the early medieval Christian frescos of Göreme, Turkey. Recently, art that has been interpreted as racist, fortifying racism, or valorizing racists – such as the statue of slave trader and merchant Edward Colston in Bristol, England – has been withdrawn from public view. Whatever else these controversial artworks mean, the powerful passions generated by them give evidence of a widespread belief that art can influence our ethical outlook. Think of how authoritarian regimes always censor their artists, such as when the Nazis vilified what they regarded to be Jewish, Bolshevik, and otherwise degenerate art, such as Paul Klee’s and George Grosz’s paintings.
Even if aesthetic experience can make a positive contribution to moral understanding, we might still question whether it offers us moral insight, cognition, deliberation, or instruction in a special way that nothing else can match. Which raises the question: is there anything about moral life that aesthetic experience engages best or uniquely? When faced with an ethical problem, is it better to turn to philosophical theory, scripture, friends, paintings, novels, songs, or poems?
SEE ALSO
1.11 Harmony
2.7 Cognitivism/Non-Cognitivism
2.13 Harm
3.14 Perfectionism
3.15 Rationalism
READINGS
★ José Louis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner eds.,
Art and Morality
(New York: Routledge, 2003)
Cora Diamond, “Anything but Argument?”
Philosophical Investigations
5.1 (1982): 23–41
Jerrold Levinson, ed.,
Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection
, new edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
★ Elizabeth Schellekens,
Aesthetics and Morality
(London: Continuum, 2007)
★ Friedrich Schiller, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education Of Man [1795]”, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, in
Essays
, D. O. Dahlstrom and W. Hinderer, eds. (London: Continuum, 1993)
1.2 Agency
If, as the result of an earthquake, a boulder were to break off from a cliff face and kill an unfortunate mountaineer below, it wouldn’t make sense to hold either the boulder or the Earth morally accountable for her death. If, on the other hand, an angry acquaintance dislodged the rock, aiming to kill the mountaineer for the sake of some hostile animus, things would be different. Why?
One of the key differences between the two deaths is that the second, unlike the first, involves “agency.” This difference is a crucial one, as agency is often taken to be a necessary condition or requirement of moral responsibility. Simply put, something can only be held morally responsible for an event if that something is an agent. Unimpaired and adult homicidal people are agents, but the Earth is not (assuming, of course, that the Earth isn’t some animate, intentional, and conscious being). This seems obvious enough, but what precisely is agency, and why does it matter?
Agency for many involves the exercise of freedom. But “freedom” is a tricky concept. For many, being responsible (and thence an agent) requires possessing a free will through which one can act independently of desires, habits, and chains of natural causes. On the other hand, we can specify many of the conditions of agency without committing ourselves to the metaphysical question of whether our actions are ultimately free or not (see 5.7).
Conditions of agency
For thinkers following Aristotle, agency requires (a) that one understands what one’s doing, what the relevant facts of the matter are, and how the causal order of the world works to the extent that one is able to foresee the likely consequences of voluntary courses of action.
It’s also important that an agent possess some sort of (b) self-aware intention – that is, some sense of self-identity, knowledge of who and what one is, what one’s character and emotional architecture are like, what one is capable and not capable of doing, that at which one’s conduct aims, and that one is aiming for it. Agents must be aware that they intend and are the executors of a given action. Self-knowledge is important because it doesn’t normally make sense to think of someone as an agent who is unaware of what he or she does – for example, while asleep or during an unforeseen seizure. (See 1.5)
It can still make sense to talk of some un-self-aware behaviour as the result of agency, however, if the impairments that lead to the unconscious conduct have resulted from the actor’s choices. For example, consider someone who voluntarily gets drunk while piloting an airliner, knowing full well what’s likely to happen as a consequence of consuming alcohol; or consider someone else whose ignorance about the small child standing behind the car he has just put into reverse results from negligence, from his not bothering to look out the rear window or back-view camera.
For Immanuel Kant, the ability (c) to reason is crucial to agency, too. In Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788), what’s important is that one act unselfishly, purely on the basis of a certain kind of rational principle (what Kant calls a “categorical imperative”) instead of on the basis of desire or fear. Only this sort of rational conduct qualifies for Kant as truly moral action, because if we allow our desires (1.16) to be the basis of our decisions, we could just as easily desire to act badly as well. Desires and fears simply come over us, the result of natural and social causes beyond our immediate control. To act strictly from desire is to be a slave to desire, no matter what we desire. Only by acting on the basis of reason and principle alone are we, for Kant, autonomous – that is, self-governing beings worthy of properly moral respect who legislate moral laws of action to ourselves so that we can act according to moral duty.
Other conditions of agency
But perhaps it’s wrong to regard feelings and desires as irrelevant. Indeed, shouldn’t moral agency also be understood to require the capacity to sympathize with others, to be distressed by their suffering, and to feel regret or remorse after harming others or acting immorally? For philosophers such as David Hume, this ability to feel and to sympathise is the very basis of ethics itself. You cannot find the source of judgements of right and wrong, he thought, “till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you” (A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.1.1.26; cf. 3.18, 4.14). Would it make sense to regard as a moral or free agent a robot that behaved rationally and that possessed all the relevant information but didn’t have any inner, affective life? It’s not obvious what the answer to this question is. Could a character like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock be truly moral if the only reason he had for condemning immoral acts was that they were “illogical.”
It might also be thought that the right social conditions must be in place for moral agency to be possible. Could people truly be moral agents capable of effective action to fulfil duties without public order and security, sufficient means of sustenance, access to information and communication, education, a free press, community, and an open government? One reason why Confucian philosophers believed in strong social norms was that they thought they created the conditions for virtuous actions. Although it also seems excessively pessimistic to conclude that moral agency is utterly impossible without many of the supports and constraints of society, it certainly seems to be much more difficult. Think of how, for all their genius, most ancient Greek philosophers were incapable of seeing slavery or misogyny as wrong because they were so normalized in their society.
Types of agents
It may seem strange to consider things like corporations or nations or mobs or social classes as agents, but the issue often arises in reflections about whether one should make judgements that attribute collective responsibility. People did speak of the guilt of the German nation and demand that all Germans contribute to war reparations after World War I. When the government of a truly democratic nation goes to war, because its policy in some sense expresses “the will of the people,” the country arguably acts as though it were a kind of single agent. People also, of course, speak collectively of the moral responsibilities of the ruling class, corporations, families, tribes, and ethnic groups. Because human life is populated by social groupings, institutions, organizations, and other collectives, agency can sometimes be dispersed or at least seem irremediably unclear. These “grey zones,” as thinkers such as Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, 1975) and Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, 2002) have called them, make determining agency in areas like sexual conduct and political action exceedingly difficult.
There are three ways of understanding how we talk about collectives as agents. One is that the very idea of collective agency is just mistaken; and therefore, collectives cannot be agents. The second is that collectives are agents in some alternative, perhaps metaphorical sense – that they are like real agents but not quite the same as them. The third is that collectives are as much agents as are individual people, who are themselves perhaps not as singular, cohesive, and unified as many would like to believe. Is the self, after all, truly singular, persistent, and coherent?
SEE ALSO
1.4 Autonomy
2.14 Honour/shame
2.25 Moral Subjects and Agents
3.15 Rationalism
5.7 Free Will and Determinism
READINGS
Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
, edited by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Book 3
Sandra Bartky, “Agency: What’s the Trouble?” In idem,
Sympathy, Solidarity, and Other Essays
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)
Giuseppina D’Oro and Constantine Sandis, eds.,
Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Anti-Causalism in the Philosophy of Action
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Alfred R. Mele,
Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Michael Oakeshott,
On Human Conduct
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
1.3 Authority
I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. (The Bible, NIV, 1 Samuel 15:2–3)
This is a pretty terrifying command. But Saul and the Israelites had one very good reason to obey it: the order came from God. Surely, God has the authority to command anything at all, even mass killing and total war. No?
Recognizing proper moral authority seems to be central to human moral development. As Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) argued, we all begin our lives under the authority of some caregiver who commands us to do or not to do various things. In growing older, we encounter, in addition to parents et al., the authority of governments, teachers, traditions, customs, religions, social groups, and even perhaps conscience – each demanding obedience to its commands.
Grounding ethics simply in authority, even legitimated authority, is, however, deeply problematic. This would entail the principle that actions are morally right or wrong when they are either commanded or prohibited by the right authority. For this to be justified, it is necessary to demonstrate that there are, in fact, legitimate authorities and then figure out what it is that they may command. But how can one decide among competing authorities and what they command without appealing to a moral basis independent of authority?
If authority determines right and wrong, then how can anyone possibly criticize or oppose authority? Should soldiers who have committed war crimes be excused when they were ordered to act by their lawful superiors? If authority in and of itself determined right and wrong, no one could possibly criticize or oppose authority. Nelson Mandela would have been wrong to stand up to the Apartheid government of South Africa, and soldiers who committed war crimes would have to be excused when they were ordered to act by their superiors. Both judgements would be examples of the argumentum ad verecundiam fallacy: the mistake of justifying a claim through inappropriate or unwarranted authorities. Avoiding this form of error is harder than it looks.
The divine
One of the most common moral authorities to which people appeal is the divine. Some versions of this appeal may be collected under the title, “voluntarism,” since they ground morality in God’s “will” (voluntas). This strategy, however, faces two problems. The first is how one is to know what these divine commands are. Some maintain that they are apprehended through revelation (see 1.20), as they were for Moses and Muhammad. Others argue that they’re evident in the order of nature, a position advanced by natural law theorists such as Thomas Aquinas (1224–74), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), and the early modern deists (see 1.15).
The problem here is that people appear to arrive by these methods at very different and inconsistent interpretations of what God or other divine beings will. The Book of Samuel, for example, admits to various interpretations; and even among those who accept the legitimacy of revelation, let alone atheists, not everyone accepts or can even be expected to accept the authority of Abrahamic Scripture. If there’s no way to achieve agreement among reasonable people about a given topic, even when the same methods for determining truth or rectitude are employed, is it meaningful to say that anything can be known about it? In any case, it’s certainly very hard to defend the claim to know God’s will.
The second problem concerns the reasons why God should be recognized as an authority, anyway. It may seem a strange question, but consider the line of inquiry developed in Plato’s (427–347 BC) dialogue Euthyphro. Socrates poses a dilemma that may be recast in the terms of Abrahamic monotheism this way: does God command some actions because they are morally right, or are those actions morally right because God commands them? If the answer is the former, then something besides God grounds goodness and the authority of God’s commands. But if it’s the latter, then God’s authority and moral goodness seem to result from nothing more than a whimsical, arbitrary, even chaotic exercise of power.
Society and tradition
God, of course, isn’t the only authority to which people appeal in moral matters. Many philosophers see reason as having authority. The procedures of reasoning in the sciences and elsewhere have, especially in modern times, made claim to independence, universality, and preeminence in determining what people should and should not believe. But although reason has a major role in determining what we ought to believe, it is not clear it can tell us how we ought to behave (4.12). Reason can have the status of an authority without being a moral authority.
Other philosophers ground morality in social authority, or the authority of one’s society, culture, and traditions (1.24). Social relativists hold that the authority of social conventions and agreements determines what in any given society is moral and immoral. And, most importantly, one cannot appeal to any ground beyond the societas. Society is bedrock. As social agreements and conventions are variable, different, and changing, societies can and do authorize different, changing moralities, none better than the others. Moreover, since conventions and agreements are limited to the social orders that produce them, and since social orders differ widely, there may be no common moral ground across societies. Disagreement about morality among different societies and cultures may be radical.
It is important to distinguish between accepting that traditional authorities help explain why certain moral norms prevail and arguing that they justify these differences. Everyone accepts the former, but the latter is controversial. Conservative thinkers like Michael Oakeshott (1901–90) and Edmund Burke (1729–97), for example, emphasize the authority of tradition in determining moral norms, and they criticize thinkers who would ground morality in some purportedly universal rationality that speciously claims to operate independently of tradition.
A major worry about these conservative ways of thinking about authority is that they can lead to the undermining of critical resistance or to passive acquiescence to immorality. If society defines what’s right and wrong, then taking a moral stance against the current norms of society seems to be ruled out. On what basis, for example, would Martin Luther King, Jr, or others in the US civil rights movement, have launched moral criticisms of racial segregation and discrimination?
The state
The authority of the state has been justified in various ways, by appeals to divine right, nature, tradition, and conquest. During the modern era philosophers have characteristically centred their attempts to justify state authority upon the consent of the governed, usually in some sort of social contract, in addition to appealing to strictly practical or utilitarian concerns. For modern liberal theorists, the “will of the people” is the ultimate authority, at least in matters political.
If one accepts that the state derives its authority from the consent of the people, how can anyone criticize the claimed right of a democratic majority to authorize slavery, the oppression of women, or something like the Holocaust? If we reject the idea that whatever a democratic majority authorizes its government to do is morally right, we are left with the choice of accepting that democratic states have the authority to act immorally or insisting that morality constrains what citizens can legitimately authorize their governments to do.
At the very least, it seems that a proper democratic theory needs to distinguish between government by general consent and a crude majoritarianism in which the 51% are entitled to oppress the rest. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill (1806–73) undertook to do just that.
Wherever one falls on this issue, it’s important to remember that people can do all sorts of terrible things when someone with authority commands them to do it. Atrocities have been committed by people who believe they were commanded to do them by their god, generals, political leaders, or others in authority. If we are to obey authorities, we need to be very sure they deserve our obedience.
SEE ALSO
1.15 Natural law
1.19 Power
3.9 Divine Command
4.12 The Is/Ought gap
READINGS
John Austin,
Lectures on Jurisprudence, or the Philosophy of Positive Law
[1873, 4th Revised Edition 1879] (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002)
Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority,” in
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice
, Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992)
Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
[1975] (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977)
★ Emma Goldman,
Anarchism and Other Essays
(London: Dover, 1969)
★ Fabian Wendt,
Authority: Key Concepts in Political Theory
(Cambridge: Polity, 2018)
1.4 Autonomy
The legitimacy of “living wills” or “advance directives” has been hotly contested. Expressing people’s preferences should they become unable to do so themselves because of illness or injury, these documents aim to make sure that physicians treat individuals as they wish to be treated, not as others think best. The 2005 case of Terri Schiavo – a brain-injured American woman whose husband and parents fell into a painful legal wrangle concerning her wishes – illustrates all too well the reasons why people strike living wills.
Proponents of the practice argue that one of the most important bases for responsibility is the ability not only to choose and to act on those choices but also to choose for oneself, to be the author of one’s own life. This capacity is known as “autonomy.” But what does it mean to be autonomous?
Autonomy requires, at the very least, an absence of compulsion. If someone is compelled to act rightly by some internal or external force – for instance, to return a lost wallet packed with cash – that act isn’t autonomous. That means, for many ethicists, that even though the act was morally proper, because it was compelled it merits little or no praise. Properly autonomous conduct, alternatively, grounds human dignity, respect, and honour (2.14).
The work of Immanuel Kant, has been canonical for the case that truly moral action requires autonomy. Kant explains in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and elsewhere that autonomously acting without regard for one’s desires or interests is possible because people are able to act purely on the basis of rational principles they grasp by and for themselves. Indeed, the word “autonomous” derives from the Greek for self (auto) and law (nomos) and literally means self-legislating, giving the law to oneself, or rather holding oneself to reason’s imperatives. Actions done through external or internal compulsion or even desire are, by contrast, for Kantians “heteronomous” (the law being given by something hetero or “other” to the rational self).
Note that for Kant it is not exactly up to us to decide what rationality demands. Kantian autonomy consists in our ability to understand and act according to reason’s demands, not arbitrarily to invent them. Kant’s idea of autonomy is expressed clearly by Winston Smith of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, when he argued that, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four,” even if we want it to be five, and even if someone else commands us to accept that it’s five. Autonomy is our recognizing and acting upon the norms discerned by our capacity for reasoning, regardless of what we want and what others demand that we do.
In this way, Kantian autonomy differs from, though also presupposes, metaphysical freedom, which is commonly understood as our practical ability to act independently of the causal order of nature. But many philosophers argue that sound ethical thinking doesn’t require controversial metaphysical commitments of that sort. People can be metaphysically free to criticize their rulers, but if doing so lands them in a gulag, they are not politically free to do so. By the same token, people can be understood to be politically free, even if metaphysical freedom doesn’t exist.
Politics
Conceptions of autonomy are important politically, because one’s ideas about politics are often bound up with one’s ideas about what people are and what they’re capable of doing or not doing. Those who think that people are not capable or little capable of self-legislating, self-regulating action are not likely to think that people are capable of governing themselves.
Liberal democratic theory, however, depends upon that ability. The authority of government in liberal democracies draws its justification from the consent of the governed. Through systems of elections and representation the people of democracies give the law to themselves. Liberal democracies are also configured to develop certain institutions (like the free press) and to protect political and civil rights (such as the rights to privacy and property) toward the end of ensuring people’s ability to act autonomously and effectively. In this way, liberal democrats recognize autonomy not only as an intrinsic human capacity but also as a political achievement and an important element of human well-being. Liberal feminist philosophers, for example, have argued this point; and it has figured centrally into controversies concerning women’s access to property, employment, and political power.
The legitimacy of liberal democracy is therefore threatened by claims that human beings are not the truly autonomous agents we believe ourselves to be (at least potentially). And there is no shortage of people prepared to argue this view. Many critics maintain that there is no free will and, more prosaically, people really can’t act independently of their passions, of their families, of the societies in which they live, of customs, conventions, and traditions (1.24), or of structures of privilege, exploitation, and oppression, including internalized oppression. Some go as far as to claim that the sort of political autonomy liberal democrats describe is the fantasy of wealthy, white, European and North American males – or, worse, a privilege a few enjoy only because they deny it to others. In some accounts, the idea of autonomy is part of a mystifying ideology through which the ruling class convinces people that they are free in order to blind them to the exploitive system under which they labour. For example, people are persuaded that they have infinite consumer choices, while corporate powers actually determine which limited choices they are able to make.
Medical ethics
The concept of autonomy has become increasingly important, in any case, in medicine. As reflected in the 1947 Nuremberg Code, many medical ethicists have effectively argued that because human beings are autonomous, no medical treatments ought to be administered to patients without their informed consent – unless they’re not competent to make informed choices (e.g., perhaps because of mental illness or impairment). That is, in order to make a truly autonomous choice about a medical therapy, patients must both: (1) understand what is to be done to them, what risks are entailed, and what consequences may follow; and (2) explicitly agree to the treatment in light of that understanding. When they fail to acquire informed consent, medics are said to act paternalistically, invasively, and disrespectfully, deciding what’s best for adults who really should be allowed to make such decisions on their own. Children are not generally regarded as capable of satisfying the first condition. Abortion rights advocates have argued that women’s autonomy requires their control over their own pregnancies, including access to abortion; while others argue that one reason why a foetus requires protection is that it is unable to give informed consent.
Problems, however, with the requirement to respect autonomy arise in trying to determine precisely when a patient is incompetent, as well as when a patient is sufficiently well informed. Just how much mental impairment is too much; just how much information is enough? Is it sometimes wise, even necessary, to accept the limits of our autonomy and consent to others more informed than us to make choices on our own behalf?
SEE ALSO
1.2 Agency
1.16 Need and Desire
3.10 Duty and Deontological Ethics
4.22 Universality and Universalizability
READINGS
Gerald Dworkin,
The Theory and Practice of Autonomy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds.,
Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
★ Ellen Frankel Paul, Red D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., “Autonomy,”
Special Issue of Social Philosophy & Policy
20.2 (2003)
Gerard Rosich,
The Contested History of Autonomy: Interpreting European Modernity
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
1.5 Awareness and Consciousness
Wham! “Gotcha!” The sharp crack and exclamation signalled that a killer blow with a swatter had brought to an abrupt end the life of a meal-interrupting fly. “What makes it alright for you to kill that living being?” asked the assassin’s partner. Her retort was a common one. “Don’t be silly. It’s not like it was a conscious being. Are you going to object to my eating the broccoli in our salad?” Her appeal to a distinction between what is conscious and what is unconscious carries a lot of weight in ethical reasoning. For many, it’s basic to moral thinking.
Moral standing and moral consideration
What kinds of things have moral standing? If something has moral standing then (a) it can be treated morally well or badly, and (b) morally capable beings are obligated to give it moral consideration. Human beings have moral standing, but paperclips don’t. You have no moral obligation to take into account the well-being of the paperclip or take its best interests into account. The difference seems to be that human beings are sentient: able to experience and perceive things.
What about dolphins, cats, forests, or mountains? Or flies? If sentience is both necessary and sufficient for something to have moral standing, then a fly probably qualifies, but a forest does not. If it is wrong to destroy forests, that would be because it would harm the sentient life that depends on it, not because it is wrong to harm the forest per se.
By this reasoning, if something isn’t conscious, it doesn’t have moral standing; and if it doesn’t have moral standing, it doesn’t deserve moral consideration. Does that mean it is wrong to kill the fly?
What consciousness, and what has it?
There are few concepts more difficult than consciousness. However you understand it, what seems uncontroversial is that humans are not the only things to have it. Descartes (1596–1650) is commonly accused of regarding non-human animals as mere automata without consciousness, but even he believed they felt pain. It’s just that their pain didn’t matter, since they were no more than biological machines unable to think or reason. Few would agree today but it illustrates how it is not obvious that being sentient by itself gives a being moral standing.
We might also distinguish between sentience and consciousness. Could something be conscious but without feeling? That seems to be logically possible. It would mean that the entity in question was aware of itself and/or its environment but had no sensation, physical or emotional. If so, it is difficult to see why it would have moral standing. A thermostat, for example, could be said to be “aware” of the temperature of a room, but since it neither felt anything nor cared about it, turning it off would seem to be morally neutral. But this isn’t what most people mean by consciousness. For practical purposes, we can assume that sentience and consciousness go together.
Today, the class of creatures that are believed to be sentient is growing all the time. Close relatives to humans in the primate family, such as bonobos and chimps, were admitted to the club long ago. Dogs and cats are also members, and fish are finally being admitted, sometimes reluctantly. Peter Tompkins and, more recently, Peter Wohlleben have argued that even plants are in a sense conscious. Philosophers called panpsychists, such as Timothy Sprigge (1932–2007) and arguably Benedictus Spinoza (1632–1677), as well as some First Peoples, have held that everything in fact is conscious, or at least has mind.
But even if we think that sentience brings with it moral standing, it doesn’t follow that all sentient creatures have the same moral standing. For example, there is nothing inconsistent in accepting that farm animals are sentient and therefore deserving of humane treatment while not granting them an absolute right to life. Acknowledging the ubiquity of consciousness in nature presents us with three choices: treat all conscious life equally, which would seem to be impossible and absurd; deny the link between sentience and moral standing, which seems no less impossible and absurd, or proportion moral standing to the degree and kind of sentience. For example, it might be worse to kill a creature with plans, hopes, and ambitions than it is to kill one that acts totally on instinct, in the moment.
Considerations like these could be important in the future ethics of artificial consciousness, which for the time being would be machine consciousness. It is widely believed that it is only a matter of time before computers become conscious. Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines (and lost his job) when he announced that in his judgement the company’s LaMDA system had already become sentient. But consciousness could turn out to be a biological phenomenon that requires a special kind of neural apparatus. If so, then only biological entities with sufficiently complex nervous system architectures would be conscious. Even if machines could be conscious, there is no reason to suppose they would be conscious in the same way that human beings are. We would still have to determine what sort of moral standing its consciousness demands, and it could be closer to that of flies than people.
For those who take consciousness as a criterion crucial to determining moral standing and for engaging in moral deliberation, answering questions about the degree and kind of sentience different things have very much matters. Resolving questions about non-human animal rights and welfare, for example, may depend upon the answers. So may issues in medical ethics regarding abortion, end-of-life care, euthanasia, and disability. Is abortion morally permissible when foetuses are not-yet conscious, or does the potential for consciousness and its likely realization demand that we prohibit the practice? Can we end, without moral risk, the lives of those in persistent vegetative (unconscious) states? We could go on.
Consciousness and moral agency
Even if consciousness is enough to give something moral standing, it is not enough by itself to make it a moral agent. To be capable of moral action requires not only conscious awareness of oneself, awareness of one’s circumstances, awareness of what one’s doing, and of the likely consequences of one’s action; it also requires awareness of some kind of moral content. Moral content might be thought of as ideas or feelings of right and wrong, good and evil, as well as how they apply in the case at hand. An awareness of moral intuitions (1.14) and the commands of conscience (1.7) might count as moral content.
Consider the difference between intentional and accidental killing. Clearly, shooting someone accidentally with a gun one consciously thought was loaded only with blanks (e.g., when director of photography Halyna Hutchins was killed with a prop gun on the set of the film, Rust
