Ethics
— what should I do?

Core idea

Don't ask "what is the right action?" — ask "what kind of person should I be?" Right action flows from a stable character (virtue), trained by habit, exercised with practical wisdom (phronesis), aimed at flourishing (eudaimonia).

Key argument

1. Each kind of thing has a function, and excellence consists in performing it well.
2. The human function is rational activity.
3. So the human good is rational activity performed well — i.e., according to virtue.
4. The virtues are stable dispositions, learned by practice.
5. The good life is the life of virtue, lived in a community that supports it.

Famous virtues

Famous objection

Virtue ethics tells you to do as the virtuous person would do — which is unhelpful when you don't know one, and circular when you do.

The Categorical Imperative

Kant offers several formulations, intended to be equivalent.

1. Formula of Universal Law: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
2. Formula of Humanity: Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means.
3. Formula of the Kingdom of Ends: Act as if you were, through your maxims, a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.

Lying — the test case

Could "lie when convenient" be willed as a universal law? No: if everyone lied freely, the very practice of saying-so would collapse, and lying would lose its point. Lying contradicts itself when universalised. So it is forbidden.

Famous objection — Constant's Murderer

Strengths

Captures something real: the moral significance of intentions and persons. Why slavery is wrong does not seem to be about the math of total utility; it is about treating humans as means.

Weaknesses

Rigorism. Difficulty handling conflicts of duty. The "universalisability" test is doing more work than the procedure can carry.

Core principle — the Greatest Happiness

An action is right insofar as it tends to promote happiness; wrong insofar as it tends to promote the reverse. (Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 2)

Variants

1. Hedonistic utilitarianism — Bentham. Maximise pleasure minus pain. Pleasures differ only in quantity.
2. Qualitative utilitarianism — Mill. Some pleasures (poetry, philosophy) are higher in kind. "Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."
3. Preference utilitarianism — Singer. Maximise the satisfaction of preferences.
4. Rule utilitarianism — follow the rules whose general acceptance would maximise utility, not act-by-act calculation.
5. Negative utilitarianism — minimise suffering rather than maximise pleasure.

Famous objection — the Sheriff

Famous objection — Demandingness

If I can prevent something very bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, utilitarianism says I am required to do so. Singer's "Famine, Affluence and Morality" (1972) draws the consequence: most of us are morally required to give vastly more to effective charities than we do.

Strengths

Impartial, scalable, naturalistic. Animal welfare, public health, cost-benefit thinking — all live here.

Core idea

Right principles are those no one could reasonably reject — or, in another version, those that would be agreed to under appropriate idealised conditions.

Rawls's veil of ignorance

Imagine choosing the principles of justice for your society without knowing who you will be in it — your gender, race, talents, wealth, or even your conception of the good. From behind this veil, Rawls argues, you would choose:

1. The Liberty Principle: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all.
2. The Difference Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity.

Scanlon's test

An act is wrong if it would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behaviour that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement. (What We Owe, p.153) The book's title gives its scope.

Famous objection — Disabled Persons

Strengths

Connects ethics to political philosophy. Captures the idea that morality is essentially a matter of justification to others.

The Switch

A runaway trolley will kill five. You can throw a switch to divert it to a side track, where it will kill one. Most people say: throw the switch. Net lives saved: four.

The Footbridge

Why the asymmetry? Consequentialism predicts identical answers to both. Deontology, with the doctrine of double effect, can distinguish: in Footbridge, the stranger's death is the means; in Switch, it is a side effect.

Hume's guillotine

"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author... all of a sudden... 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." (Treatise III.i.1, 1739)

You cannot derive an ought from an is alone. Without some normative premise, no normative conclusion. Modern ethical naturalists try to bridge this; non-cognitivists embrace it.

Moore's open question

Suppose someone defines "good" as "what we desire to desire," or "what produces pleasure." We can always intelligibly ask: but is what we desire to desire good? Is pleasure good? If so, says Moore (Principia Ethica, 1903), the definition has not captured "good."

Mackie's error theory

Moral judgments purport to be objective. Nothing in the world makes them objectively true. So they are systematically false — though useful. (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977.)