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A man without ethics, Camus warned, is a wild beast loosed upon the world. This lecture from Academy of Ideas takes that warning as its starting point and maps the practical study of how we ought to live. It separates the moral question from mere description, weighs subjectivism against realism, and untangles the two great camps — those who judge actions by results and those who judge by duty. Then it closes with a hard, honest question: can studying ethics actually make anyone good?
Full Video Transcript
The 20th century existentialist philosopher Albert Camus stated that,
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
In this lecture we are going to provide an introduction to ethics.
To do so, we will examine the subject matter of the discipline, discuss some of the most important questions addressed by moral philosophers,
distinguish between moral subjectivism and moral realism, examine the famous is-ought problem,
and look at the difference between teleological and deontological theories of ethics.
As a philosophical discipline, ethics originated in ancient Greece over 2,000 years ago.
Socrates and a group of teachers from ancient Athens known as the Sophists are said to be the first moral philosophers in Western civilization.
Ethics is often defined as the study of morality, but a more detailed and revealing definition is provided by John Day in his book Introduction to Ethics.
Ethics is a study of what are good and bad ends to pursue in life, and what it is right
and wrong to do in the conduct of life.
It is therefore above all a practical discipline.
Its primary aim is to determine how one ought to live, and what actions one ought to do
in the conduct of one’s life.
It will also be useful to define morality, given how often the term is used in ethical
discourse.
He defines morality, in the sense used in philosophical ethics, as
Because moral philosophers attempt to determine how one ought to act in the course of their life,
or in other words, with prescribing action, ethics is said to be concerned with the normative realm.
In contrast, a discipline such as anthropology is said to be descriptive rather than normative.
Anthropologists observe, describe, and explain the actions and behaviors of individuals.
They do not, like moral philosophers, attempt to prescribe action.
In addition to the ultimate question of how one ought to live their life,
a few other questions which have been particularly prominent in the history of ethics include
What makes actions moral, or in other words, good or bad, right or wrong?
And why should one behave in accordance with an ethical theory?
Or in other words, why should one do what morality prescribes?
prescribes. As a quick side note, questions which deal with the nature of ethical statements,
and not with prescribing how one should act, are said to belong to the branch of ethics
known as metaethics. An important question within metaethics is whether morality is objective.
What philosophers are trying to determine when addressing the objectivity of morality
is whether moral judgments have a truth value, or more simply, whether they can be said to
be true or false in a manner which is independent of personal opinions and attitudes. For example,
when one makes a statement such as, the earth is bigger than the moon, or 2 plus 2 equals
5, one can determine whether these statements are true or false in an impersonal, objective
sense. However, the question of interest when attempting to determine the objectivity of
morality is whether the same can be done with moral judgments such as, it is wrong to steal,
one ought to tell the truth.
Those who deny that moral judgments can be true or false in the sense we just specified
adhere to the position called moral or ethical subjectivism.
Such a position maintains that moral judgments are expressions of preference or personal
opinion, and therefore there is no rational way for deciding between two conflicting judgments.
Those who believe on the other hand that moral judgments can be true or false, and are made
so by objective features of the world, are called moral realists or moral objectivists.
Closely related to the question of whether morality is objective is the is-ought problem.
This problem was famously examined by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, and his exposition
of it forms the basis of what is called Hume’s Law.
Basically the is-ought problem concerns whether one can derive a statement of what ought to
be the case from what is the case, or in other words from descriptive statements about the
world.
As David Hume wrote,
In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked that the
author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being
of a god, or makes observations concerning human affairs, when all of a sudden I am surprised
to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions is and is not, I meet with
no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not.
Whereas this ought or ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation, tis necessary
that it should be observed and explained, and at the same time that a reason should
be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from
others, which are entirely different from it.
Philosophers commonly interpret Hume’s stance as being that you cannot logically derive
a statement of what ought to be the case from what is the case, so let us say that we observe
it to be the case that in certain areas of the world there exists a great disparity of
wealth. This would be a descriptive statement about the way the world is. However, from
this statement of how the world is, according to Hume, we cannot derive a statement about
how things ought to be. So from the descriptive statement about wealth inequality, we cannot
derive the normative statement that we ought to equalize wealth through redistribution,
nor the normative statement that we ought to abstain from redistributing wealth. Another
Another important distinction within ethics, which is especially pertinent to the question
of what makes an action good or bad, is that between teleological and deontological ethical
theories.
Robert Almoder, in his work Human Happiness and Morality, A Brief Introduction to Ethics,
nicely distinguishes between the two by saying,
The first kind of theory asserts that the morality or the immorality of an act, and
hence the rightness or wrongness of an act, is a function solely of the consequences of
act and the natural tendency of those consequences to produce pleasure or pain or goodness or
happiness in some degree and in some way.
Any such theory we call a consequentialist or a teleological theory.
The second kind of theory asserts that the morality or the immorality of an act has basically
nothing to do with the consequences of the act.
This latter kind of theory we call deontological.
With a teleological theory of ethics, an end is selected as the ultimate or highest good
in life, and actions are then evaluated as moral or immoral depending on whether they
help or hinder one in achieving that end.
Teleological theories of ethics include egoism, which identifies the ultimate end as happiness
or pleasure, eudaimonism, which identifies the ultimate end as well-being, and utilitarianism,
which identifies the ultimate end as the general good or welfare of humankind.
Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, whose ethical theories are some of the oldest we have record
of, all put forth teleological theories.
The deontological view of ethics differs from the teleological view in that actions are
not evaluated as moral or immoral based solely on their consequences.
Rather, those who advocate deontological theories believe that the morality of an action is
grounded by some form of authority independent of the consequences that such actions generate.
Accordingly, on deontological accounts people must obey the actions prescribed by morality,
not because of the consequences that will follow from such actions, but rather because
they are duty-bound to do so.
Often deontological theories have used a god as the authority which grounds morality, and
the Judaic and Christian conceptions of divine law are believed to be the original inspiration
for deontological ethics.
However, it should be noted that not all deontological theories of ethics make use of a supernatural
being. To conclude this lecture we must play devil’s advocate and question whether ethics
is effective. That is, can ethics as a philosophical discipline striving to understand how one
ought to live be effective at transforming depraved written individuals into virtuous
and good human beings? There have been numerous philosophers throughout history who have been
skeptical that it can. Immanuel Kant, for example, understood that within the discipline
of ethics there is a vast gulf which exists between theoretical speculation and practical
implementation. He wrote,
The point is not always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge.
Today, however, he who lives in conformity with what he teaches is taken for a dreamer.
Arthur Schopenhauer was even more cynical regarding the possibility of ethics
influencing one’s actions, writing,
Virtue cannot be taught, no more than genius. We would thus be just as foolish to expect that
our moral systems and ethics might awaken the virtuous, noble, and saintly, as that our
aesthetics might awaken poets, sculptors, and musicians. However, this view is not shared by
all, and to finish the lecture, we will provide a quote by Richard Taylor from his book, Good and
Evil, who saw ethics in a more optimistic light. The question, what is good, is certainly the most
important question you can ask, for it comes to this. Each of us has one life to live, and that
life can be, as it commonly is, wasted in the pursuit of specious goals, things that
turn out to be worthless the moment they are possessed. Or it can be made a deliberate
and thoughtful art, wherein what was sought and, let us hope, in some measure gained,
was something all the while worth striving for. Or we can put it this way, there will
come a day for each of us to die, and on that day, if we have failed, we shall have failed
irrevocably.
Source: Academy of Ideas