An Introduction to Philosophy, Second Edition

Created Nov. 6, 2024 by Marc Skuster

Learning Objectives - On completing this chapter, you will be able to:

Discuss, apply, and evaluate utilitarianism as a normative ethical theory.
Explain and evaluate the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism.
Discuss the theory of intrinsic value that is the basis for Kantian ethics.
State and apply the two forms of Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
Distinguish between ethical monism and ethical pluralism, and discuss the role of ethical intuitions in the identification of fundamental values.

Normative Ethics

Our focus in this chapter will be normative ethics. Normative ethical principles aren’t intended to describe how things are, how people think or how they behave. Normative ethics is concerned how we should be motivated and how we should act. Our project here is to think critically about which normative ethical principles do the best job of explaining our assorted moral intuitions about the broadest range of possible cases. We will start with Utilitarianism, a view of right action based on the idea that happiness has fundamental value. We’ll then examine Kant’s ethics of respect for persons. On this view persons have intrinsic moral worth, and ethics is concerned with what respecting the value of persons requires of us.

Both Utilitarianism and Kant’s ethics of respect for persons can be understood as aiming to formulate action-guiding normative ethical principles. Later in the chapter we will consider approaches to normative ethics that are not so concerned with identifying exceptionless “laws” of right action. Our understanding of right action doesn’t have to be expressible in terms of strict rules. Feminist ethics finds value in caring relationships. But taking relationships to be good doesn’t directly lead to specific rules for action as Utilitarianism might. Environmental ethicists have advanced various proposals for expanding the realm of moral relevance to include other species or systems of life as a whole. This is not to deny that people matter morally, but many environmental ethicists deny that people are all that matter. Accounting for the value of non- persons in addition to persons is likely to frustrate attempts to characterize right action in terms of simple formulas or “moral laws.”

At the end of this chapter we will consider a pluralistic approach to understanding ethical motivation and action. The suggestion here will be that a substantive realist approach to normative ethics doesn’t require reducing all ethical value to one fundamental kind. Such a pluralistic account of ethical value undermines the quest for simple exceptionless or absolute moral principles. But it also suggests that substantive realist normative ethics doesn’t require these either.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is based on the idea that happiness is good. Utilitarian thinkers have traditionally understood happiness in terms of pleasure and the absence of pain. Utilitarianism’s best known advocate, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), characterizes Utilitarianism as the view that “an action is right insofar as it tends to produce pleasure and the absence of pain.” If happiness, conceived of as pleasure and the absence of pain, is the one thing that has value, then this criterion of right action should seem to follow straightforwardly.

In any given scenario, every possible course of action will have a utility. The utility of an action is the net total of pleasure caused by the action minus any pain caused by that action. In calculating the utility of an action we are to consider all of the effects of the action, both long run and short run. Given the utilities of all available courses of action, Utilitarianism says that the correct course of action is the one that has the greatest utility. So an action is right if it produces the greatest net total of pleasure over pain of any available alternative action. Note that sometimes no possible course of action will produce more pleasure than pain. This is not a problem for Utilitarianism as we’ve formulated it. Utilitarianism will simply require us to pursue the lesser evil. The action with the highest utility can still have negative utility.

Utilitarianism places no privileged status on the happiness of the actor. It’s happiness that matters, not just your happiness. So Utilitarianism can call for great personal sacrifice. The happiness of my child over the course of his lifetime might require great personal sacrifice on my part over the course of his first few decades. Utilitarianism says the sacrifice should be made given that the utility at stake for my child is greater than the utility at stake in my child-rearing sacrifices.

Likewise, Utilitarianism places no privileged status on the immediate, as opposed to the long term, effects of the action. An action’s utility is the net amount of pleasure or pain that is experienced as a result of the action over the long run. So, while it might maximize a small child’s pleasure in the short run to be given ice cream whenever he wants it, the long run utility of this might not be so good given the habits formed and the health consequences of an over- indulged sweet tooth.

There is an obvious concern to address at this point. We often don’t know what the long-run consequences of our actions will be, and even in the short run we are often uncertain about just how much pleasure and pain will be caused for the various parties affected. So we might not be able to calculate the utilities of alternative actions to figure out which action will have the highest utility. These are practical problems for applying utilitarian theory. But while it might be difficult to tell on a case by case basis just which course of action will maximize utility, this is not a problem for Utilitarianism as a normative ethical theory. As a normative ethical theory, Utilitarianism is aimed at identifying the standard for right action, not telling when a particular action meets that standard. Setting the standard for right action and figuring out how to meet that standard are two different projects.

Evaluating Utilitarianism

When we speak of utility as pleasure and the absence of pain, we need to take “pleasure” and “pain” in the broadest sense possible. There are social, intellectual, and aesthetic pleasures to consider, as well as sensual pleasures. Recognizing this is important to answering what Mill calls the “doctrine of swine” objection to Utilitarianism. This objection takes Utilitarianism to be unfit for humans because it recognizes no higher purpose to life than the mere pursuit of pleasure. The objector takes people to have more noble ends to pursue than mere pleasure. According to this objection, Utilitarianism is a view of the good that is fit only for swine. Mill responds that it is the person who raises this objection who portrays human nature in a degrading light, not the utilitarian theory of right action. People are capable of pleasures beyond mere sensual indulgences and the utilitarian theory concerns these as well. Mill then argues that social and intellectual pleasures are of an intrinsically higher quality than sensual pleasure.

We find a more significant objection to Utilitarian moral theory in the following sort of case: Consider Bob, who goes to the doctor for a checkup. His doctor finds that Bob is in perfect health. And his doctor also finds that Bob is biologically compatible with six other patients she has who are all dying of various sorts of organ failure. Let’s assume that if Bob lives out his days he will live a typically good life, one that is pleasant to Bob and also brings happiness to his friends and family. But we will assume that Bob will not discover a cure for AIDS or bring about world peace. And let us make similar assumptions about the six people suffering from organ failure. According to simple Act Utilitarianism, it looks like the right thing for Bob’s doctor to do is to kill Bob and harvest his organs for the benefit of the six patients who will otherwise die. But intuitively, this would be quite wrong. Act Utilitarianism gets the wrong result in this sort of case. This case seems to provide a clear counterexample to simple Act Utilitarianism. This looks like a bit of evidence that calls for a change in theory. But perhaps that change can be a modification of utilitarian thinking rather than a complete rejection of it.

One move open to the utilitarian is to evaluate rules for acting rather than individual actions. A version of Rule Utilitarianism might say that the right action is the action that follows the rule which, in general, will produce the highest utility. A rule that tells doctors to kill their patients when others require their organs would not have very high utility in general. People would avoid their doctors and illness would go untreated were such a rule in effect. Rather, the rule that doctors should do no harm to their patients would have much higher utility in general. So the move to Rule Utilitarianism seems to avoid the difficulty we found with Act Utilitarianism. Or at least it seems to when we consider just these two rules.

But here is a rule that would have even higher utility than the rule that doctors should never harm their patients: doctors should never harm their patients except when doing so would maximize utility. Now suppose that doctors ordinarily refrain from harming their patients and as a result people trust their doctors. But in Bob’s case, his doctor realizes that she can maximize utility by killing Bob and distributing his organs. She can do this in a way that no one will ever discover, so her harming Bob in this special case will not undermine people’s faith in the medical system. The possibility of rules with “except when utility is maximized” clauses renders Rule Utilitarianism vulnerable to the same kinds of counterexamples we found for Act Utilitarianism. In effect, Rule Utilitarianism collapses back into Act Utilitarianism.

In order to deal with the original problem of Bob and his vital organs, the advocate of Rule Utilitarianism must find a principled way to exclude certain sorts of utility maximizing rules. I won’t pursue this matter on behalf of the utilitarian. Rather, I want to consider further just how simple Act Utilitarianism goes wrong in Bob’s case. Utilitarianism evaluates the goodness of actions in terms of their consequences. For this reason, Utilitarianism is often referred to as a consequentialist theory. Utilitarian considerations of good consequences seem to leave out something that is ethically important. Specifically, in this case, it leaves out a proper regard for Bob as person with a will of his own. What makes Bob’s case a problem case is something other than consequences, namely, his status as a person and the sort of regard this merits. This problem case for utilitarian moral theory seems to point towards the need for a theory based on the value of things other than an action’s consequences. Such non-consequentialist ethical theory is called deontological ethical theory. The best known deontological theory is the ethics of respect for persons. And this will be our next topic.

Respect for Persons: Kant’s Moral Theory

Like Utilitarianism, Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral theory is grounded in a theory of intrinsic value. But where the utilitarian takes happiness, conceived of as pleasure and the absence of pain to be what has intrinsic value, Kant takes the only thing to have moral worth for its own sake to be the capacity for good will we find in persons. Persons, conceived of as autonomous rational moral agents, are beings that have intrinsic moral worth and hence beings that deserve moral respect.

The opening passage of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals proclaims that “it is impossible to conceive of anything in the world, or indeed beyond it, that can be understood as good without qualification except for a good will.” This is a clear and elegant statement of the theory of value that serves as the basis for Kant’s ethical theory of respect for persons. The one thing that has intrinsic value, for Kant, is the autonomous good will of a person. That said, Kant does not understand the expression “good will” in the everyday sense. In everyday discourse we might speak of someone being a person of good will if they want to do good things. We take the philanthropist’s desire to give to the less fortunate to be an example of good will in this everyday sense. On Kant’s view, the person of good will wills good things, but out of a sense of moral duty, not just inclination. Naturally generous philanthropists do not demonstrate their good will through their giving according to Kant, but selfish greedy persons do show their good will when they give to the poor out of a recognition of their moral duty to do so even though they’d really rather not. So it is our ability to recognize a moral duty and will to act in accordance with it that makes persons beings that have dignity and are therefore worthy of moral regard. On Kant’s view, our free will, our moral autonomy, is our capacity to act according to duty as opposed to being a slave to our desires or inclinations. So free will, in the sense that is associated with moral responsibility, doesn’t mean being free to do as you please without consequence. Rather, freedom comes with moral responsibility for the intentions we act on.

So, understanding the good will as the capacity to will and act out of duty or respect for moral law, we can see having this capacity as part of having a rational, autonomous will. As persons, we have a free or autonomous will in our capacity to weigh our desires against each other and against the rational constraints of morality and reach our own determination of the will. We are the originators and authors of the principles we act on. On Kant’s view, our free will, our moral autonomy, is our capacity to act according to duty as opposed to being a slave to our desires or inclinations. So free will, in the sense that is associated with moral responsibility, doesn’t mean being free to do as you please without consequence. Rather, freedom comes with moral responsibility for the intentions we act on. Having an autonomous good will with the capacity to act from moral duty is central to being a person in the moral sense and it is the basis, the metaphysical grounding, for an ethics of respect for persons. Now what it is to respect a person merits some further analysis.

Kant calls his fundamental moral principle the Categorical Imperative. An imperative is a command. The notion of a Categorical Imperative can be understood in contrast to that of a hypothetical imperative. A hypothetical imperative tells you what to do in order to achieve some goal. For instance, “if you want to get a good grade in calculus, work the assignments regularly.” This claim tells you what to do in order to get a good grade in calculus. But it doesn’t tell you what to do if you don’t care about getting a good grade. What is distinctive about a Categorical Imperative is that it tells you how to act regardless of what end or goal you might desire. Kant holds that if there is a fundamental law of morality, it is a Categorical Imperative. Taking the fundamental principle of morality to be a Categorical Imperative implies that moral reasons override other sorts of reasons. You might, for instance, think you have a self-interested reason to cheat on an exam. But if morality is grounded in a Categorical Imperative, then your moral reason against cheating overrides your self-interested reason for cheating. If we think considerations of moral obligation trump self-interested considerations, Kant’s idea that the fundamental law of morality is a Categorical Imperative accounts for this nicely.

Here are two formulations of Kant’s Categorical Imperative:

CIa: Always treat persons (including yourself) as ends in themselves, never merely as a means to an end.
CIb: Act only on that maxim that you can consistently will to be a universal law.

Kant takes these formulations to be different ways of expressing the same underlying principle of respect for persons. They certainly don’t appear to be synonymous. But we might take them to express the same thing in that each formulation would guide one to act in the same way.

The formulation (CIa), tells us to treat individuals as ends in themselves. That is just to say that persons should be treated as beings that have intrinsic value. To say that persons have intrinsic value is to say that they have value independent of their usefulness for this or that purpose. (CIa) does not say that you can never use a person for your own purposes. But it tells us we should never use a person merely as a means to your own ends. What is the difference? We treat people as a means to our own ends in ways that are not morally problematic quite often. When I go to the post office, I treat the clerk as a means to my end of sending a letter. But I do not treat that person merely as a means to an end. I pursue my end of sending a letter through my interaction with the clerk only with the understanding that the clerk is acting autonomously in serving me. My interaction with the clerk is morally acceptable so long as the clerk is serving me voluntarily, or acting autonomously for his own reasons. By contrast, we use people merely as a means to an end if we force them to do our will, or if we deceive them into doing our will. Coercion and deception are paradigm violations of the Categorical Imperative. In coercing or deceiving another person, we disrupt his or her autonomy and his or her will. This is what the Categorical Imperative forbids. Respecting persons requires refraining from violating their autonomy.

Now let’s consider the second formulation CIb. This version, known as the formula of the universal law, tells us to “act only on that maxim that you could consistently will to be a universal law.” The maxim of our action is the subjective principle that determines our will. We act for our own reasons. Different intentions might lead to similar actions. When I want to make myself a bit more presentable, I shave and shower. My son might perform the same action for a different reason (to get his mom off his back, for instance). We can identify different maxims in terms of these different reasons or intentions. For Kant, intentions matter. He evaluates the moral status of actions not according to the action itself or according to its consequences, but according to the maxim of the action. The moral status of an action is determined by the actor’s intentions or reasons for acting.

According to the formula of the universal law, what makes an action morally acceptable is that its maxim is universalizable. That is, morally permissible action is action that is motivated by an intention that we can rationally will that others act on similarly. A morally prohibited action is just one where we can’t rationally will that our maxim is universally followed. Deception and coercion are both paradigm cases of acting wrongly according to Kant. In both cases, our maxim involves violating the autonomy of another rational being and this is something that we, as rationally autonomous beings ourselves, could not consistently will to be a universal law.

According to Kant, there is a contradiction involved in a rational autonomous being willing that autonomy be universally coercively or deceptively violated. This would involve a rational autonomous being willing the violation of its own rational autonomy. Acting out of moral duty is a matter of acting only on maxims that we can rationally will others act on as well. The person of good will recognizes the humanity of others by not making any special exception for herself even when her interests or inclination would be served by doing so.

There is no higher moral authority than the rational autonomous person, according to Kant. Morality is not a matter of following rules laid down by some higher authority. It is rather a matter of writing rules for ourselves that are compatible with the rational autonomous nature we share with other persons. We show respect for others through restraining our own will in ways that demonstrate our recognition of them as moral equals.

Ethical Pluralism

In ethical theory, we can understand pluralism as the view that there is a plurality of fundamentally good things. Traditionally, ethicists have tried to analyze right and wrong action in terms of a single fundamental underlying kind of value. We can call this kind of approach ethical monism. For utilitarians that single value is happiness, for Kantian respect for persons theorists, it is the value of the person. Ethical Pluralism allows that there may be multiple kinds of fundamental and irreducible value in the world. Happiness and respect for persons might be among these, but there may be others yet. Here I’ll explain how pluralism so understood differs from Moral Relativism and how it is better suited than relativism and monist ethical theories to the goals of social justice sought by pluralism in a broader sense of valuing diversity.

Recall that according to Moral Relativism, what makes something right relative to a group is just that it is deemed to be right by that group. This is a pretty loose characterization of the view. We could get a bit more specific by asking just what the relevant groups are. We would also want to ask who gets to decide for that group, because according to Moral Relativism and other conventionalist views of morality (like Divine Command Theory) right and wrong, good and bad, are ultimately questions of authority.

Views that take morality to be a matter of authority, whether it’s God’s, the culture’s collectively, the king’s, or the chess club’s authority, all suffer the same basic defect. They render right and wrong entirely arbitrary. If someone or some group gets to decide what’s right and wrong, then anything can be right or wrong. According to Cultural Moral Relativism, whatever a culture deems to be morally right is right relative to it. So, if our culture says that homophobia, sexism, and racism are fine, then they are what is right relative to our culture and that’s the end of it. If some people don’t like it, that’s just too bad. Moral Relativism denies them any objective standpoint from which to complain or any possibility of providing reasons for changing things. Complaints about the oppressiveness of the dominant group amount to nothing more than the whininess of losers. The group that dominates is perfectly well within its rights to do so. This hardly sounds like a plausible account of social justice. But it is straightforwardly entailed by Moral Relativism and that’s exactly why Moral Relativism is an awful ethical theory. This much is just a bit of review from the last chapter. But bear this in mind for the purpose of recognizing how Ethical Pluralism avoids this defect. For according to Ethical Pluralism the fundamental ethical values are real. The importance of happiness comes with the existence of pleasure. The value of respect for persons comes with the existence of persons. This doesn’t depend on the whim or say so of any authority.

Suppose morality doesn’t depend on the say so of cultures, God, or any other individual or group. On this view goodness is “out there” in the realm of things to be discovered. It needn’t be “way out there,” like goodness in some cosmic sense or goodness for the universe at large. We’re just interested in goodness for human beings and this might have lots to do with our nature as persons. So let us set aside the relativist’s claim that goodness is decided by us and ask what else goodness for humans might be. In doing so, we take goodness to be an appropriate object for inquiry, not merely a matter of custom, something somebody gets to decide, or a tool for tyranny. We have some evidence to guide us in this inquiry and it includes all of our varying perspectives on what is good (the more the better). But just as in the sciences, our evidence is fallible and needs to be tested, both against other evidence and the explanatory power of theory.

From the 17^th through the 19^th centuries, the Holy Grail in ethical theorizing was to find a single, rationally defensible criterion of right action. This quest was dominated by utilitarians like Bentham and Mill, and respect for persons theorists like Kant. Both theoretical approaches are value monist, that is, they take there to be just one thing that has value fundamentally. For the utilitarian it is happiness that matters and the goal is to formulate a single law of morally right action that aims at maximizing happiness. For Kant it is the good will, or the dignity of the person that matters, and the goal is to establish a single moral law that properly captures what it means to respect the value of the person.

The utilitarian might start with the idea that an action is right if it produces the greatest amount of happiness of any available action. But this clearly conflicts with respect for persons as we saw above in the case of Bob and his vital organs. There are various moves a utilitarian might make to try to address this case, but there are more subtle cases yet where Utilitarianism seems to conflict with respect for persons. So, it looks like we can’t coherently sign on to both a utilitarian and a Kantian criterion of right action since they will conflict in interesting ways. Utilitarian standards of right action tend to be logically incompatible with standards like Kant’s Categorical Imperative. If what we are looking for is a single criterion of right action that is based on a single kind of ultimate ethical value, it looks like we have to pick a single winner among competing monist ethical theories. But perhaps this sets the wrong kind of goal for ethical theory.

The idea that there might be a single universal and absolute criterion of morally right action strikes many who value cultural diversity as highly problematic. But lest we abandon monist approaches to ethical theory too quickly, we should note that the standards of right action offered by both the utilitarian and the Kantian are highly abstract and for this reason they are quite compatible with a rich range of diversity in more specific derivative guidelines for action. In fact, lots of cultural diversity can be explained in terms of more broadly shared underlying moral values. Eating the dead may be seen as a way of honoring them in one culture, but be considered a sacrilege in another culture. Both of these diverse practices can be seen as diverse ways of expressing respect for persons. The difference between cultures in this case is not really a difference of fundamental moral values, but a difference in how these are to be expressed.

Similarly we consider infanticide morally wrong while other cultures facing more difficult environmental pressures may practice it routinely. What may seem like conflicting moral standards at this more specific derivative level might instead be understood as differing ways of maximizing happiness that are appropriate for the starkly different circumstances that the respective cultures must deal with. So absolutist, universalizing, monist ethical theories turn out to be considerably more accommodating of cultural diversity than we might have thought at first. Still, they may not be flexible enough.

It might be that some cultures value respect for persons over happiness while others value happiness at the expense of respect for persons and yet others value community or kinship relations more than happiness or respect for individual persons. That is, we might find conflicts in the most basic or fundamental moral values upheld by diverse cultures. How can ethical theory account for this without begging questions against one set of cultural values or another?

Recall that the ethical monist is out to discover a single rationally defensible moral truth that is grounded in a single kind of moral value. In discussing monist ethical theories I insisted that you can’t be both a utilitarian and a Kantian respect-for-persons theorist. This is because these theories offer logically incompatible principles of morally right action. There will be actions (like harvesting the healthy patient’s organs in the simple versions) that one theory will deem to be right and the other will deem to be wrong. So, you can’t coherently hold both a utilitarian principle of right action and a Kantian principle of right action to be true. If the principles disagree on even a few cases, they can’t both be true. But let’s set principles aside for a moment. I’m not suggesting we be unprincipled, I just want us to focus on the underlying moral values without worrying about truths that might be based on them.

There is nothing logically incoherent about taking happiness and respect for persons to both be good in fundamental ways. And there may be other plausible candidates for fundamental goodness. Happiness and respect were just the ones that got most of the attention in the 18^th and 19^th century. Since then, feminist philosophers have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in caring relationships. Environmental ethicists have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in the natural world. Hindus and Buddhists have long suggested that there is a kind of fundamental value in consciousness.

Perhaps this short list is long enough. Or perhaps it is already too long. A moral value is only fundamental if it can’t be explained and supported in terms of some other fundamental value. So if caring relationships matter just because they bring happiness to human lives, then we already have this kind of value covered when we recognize happiness as a kind of fundamental value. But it is not at all clear that happiness fully explains the value of caring relationships. There are issues to explore here and feminist philosophers are just starting to map out this terrain. In any case, kinds of fundamental value might be rare, but still plural.

So what should ethical theory say about cultures that differ in the fundamental values that shape their customs and codes? Monist approaches to ethical theory would insist that we pick winners in this kind of situation. But should we? Certainly, in some cases we should. The fundamental values of Nazi culture were racist through and through. Good ethical theory should not be accommodating this kind of cultural diversity at all. Recall that our most compelling argument against Moral Relativism was that it is committed to accepting that racism is right relative to racist societies and our condemnation of racism has no more moral force than their endorsement of it.

But what about cases like Confucian cultures that give kinship relationships a higher priority than respect for persons? The more individualistic cultures of the West would favor respect for persons. Must we pick a winner here? Monist ethical theories would insist that we do. But pluralism about ethical value offers us a few other options. The ethical pluralist can say that both cultures are structured around worthy fundamental values and neither unjustly favors one kind of fundamental value at the expense of another. Or a pluralist might allow that some ways of prioritizing worthy fundamental ethical values really are better than others, but that there is no strict rational formula for working out which is best. Because we have a plurality of worthy fundamental ethical values and these are not reducible to each other or anything more basic, rigorous rational methods might not be up to settling the matter, and the best we can hope for is good judgment. But however we settle these issues, pluralism about fundamental ethical value opens some new avenues for counting a broader range of cultural diversity as ethically sound.

There are many issues to address yet in exploring Ethical Pluralism and I won’t get to them all here. But a few loom too large to ignore. In particular, you might be worried that over the past few paragraphs I merely assumed that the fundamental values of Confucian cultures are worthy ethical values but the fundamental values of Nazi culture aren’t. How do we figure out which fundamental values are worthy and merit a place in our ethical theorizing and which don’t?

Monist ethical thinkers like Kant and Mill faced the same issue; they were just limiting themselves to identifying one kind of value. If I’m given a fundamental value, say respect for persons, then I can argue for more derivative values, being honest for instance, on the grounds that these are required for respecting persons. But when it comes to fundamental values, this strategy for justifying value is no longer open. I’ve come to the end of the explanatory and justificatory line. So what now? What’s my evidence for taking some fundamental values to be worthy ethical values but not others? The evidence in ethics is not like the evidence in physics. But then the evidence in physics is not really like the evidence in anthropology. Still, I think we do have evidence in ethics. The evidence in ethics consists of our ethical intuitions. We do have a moral sense about things.

Our ethical intuitions do differ around lots of issues, but that’s not an argument for skepticism or relativism. People disagree about how to understand scientific evidence, too. The evidence of our senses can be misleading and even systematically distorted. We certainly don’t just sense that the earth spins and travels around the sun. What we sense seems quite contrary to the truth of this matter. So the evidence provided by our ethical intuitions is fallible and even has the potential for misleading us systematically. Things are no different here than they are in any branch of inquiry. Our job as inquirers in ethics is to account for the evidence of our various ethical intuitions as best we can by formulating theories that help make sense out of them. As we try to systematize our ethical intuitions we will encounter problem areas where some intuitions conflict with our best theories and explanations. Since our intuitions are fallible, such conflicts don’t automatically mean our theories are just wrong. There might be creative ways to reconcile such evidence with our best theories, or we might find that the evidence is defective or distorted in some way, or we might find grounds to alter or refine our theories in light of the evidence. There are at least these different paths our inquiry might take. Likewise, each of these paths is open when the evidence of the senses seems to conflict with our scientific theories. Inquiry in ethics is pretty much like other kinds of inquiry. Our reasoning engages us in a continual negotiation between our experience and how to best understand it. Our experience shapes our theoretical understanding and our theoretical understanding shapes our experience in turn in a more or less organic process of intellectual growth. Reason doesn’t dictate any outcomes, it merely provides the system of currency in which this negotiation towards deeper understanding takes place.

So let’s illustrate how this negotiation works with the case of the Nazis. Why reject their fundamentally racist values? There are probably lots of good reasons, but here’s one: The value of respect for persons accounts for a very broad range of ethical intuitions about how we should treat people and there is no way to reconcile general respect for persons with Nazi racism. So much the worse for Nazi racist values, they don’t merit any place in our ethical theory. The ethical intuitions of Nazis should be rejected as systematically distorted.

The last issue I’ll take up here has to do with oneness. Just why is oneness so special? Why would philosophers like Kant and Mill think it so important to have just one kind of fundamental ethical value? One powerful appeal of oneness is that is allows for a high degree of precision and rigor. Bentham even hoped that we would one day have a calculus of utility that would allow us to rigorously prove which actions will maximize utility and therefore be right. The powerful appeal of oneness here is that it allows us to completely replace human judgment with rational calculation. We have yet to outgrow this intellectual lust for reduction. Many of us still want to see the sciences as in some way reducible to just one, physics. But philosophers of science have been raising a steady stream of questions about our reductionistic inclinations over the past few decades. And even physics itself appears to be stuck with a kind of force pluralism. The fundamental forces, according to our best theory, include nuclear, gravitational, and electrical forces. We have specific theories that explain the behavior of things if we abstract away from other forces and focus only on gravity. And we have specific theories that explain the electrical behavior of things, but only when we ignore other forces that might be at play. Similarly, some version of Utilitarianism might give us the ethical truth about the value of happiness at least when no other important ethical values are relevant. And some interpretation of Kant might give us ethical principles that get at the truth so long as we abstract away from ethical values other than the moral dignity of persons. Plurality in both ethics and physics denies us the satisfaction of a single specific formula that accounts for absolutely everything. But that shouldn’t bother us too much. I rather doubt that this kind of intellectual satisfaction is really worthy of human beings.

Review and Study

Review Questions:

What, according to Utilitarianism, has fundamental value?
What is the utility of an action?
How does Mill’s Utilitarianism understand happiness?
What is it for an action to be right according to Act Utilitarianism?
Describe a problem case for Utilitarianism.
Explain Rule Utilitarianism and the risk it faces of collapsing back in to act Utilitarianism
What has fundamental value according to Kant?
What is the difference between a hypothetical imperative and a Categorical Imperative?
Explain a version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
What does it mean to refer to Utilitarianism and Kant’s respect-for-persons theory as monist theories?
Explain Ethical Pluralism.

Names, Concepts, Terms

Normative Ethics
Utilitarianism
Utility
Act Utilitarianism
Rule Utilitarianism
Hedonism
Consequentialism
Deontological Theory
Doctrine of Swine Objection
Good Will
Intrinsic Value
Autonomous Will
Categorical Imperatives
Hypothetical Imperative
Ethical Monism
Ethical Pluralism
Ethical Intuition

Return to top