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courage, responsibility, and wisdom. The virtue- ethical versions of Bill and
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Ted would have simply said, “Be excellent.”
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Virtue sounds like a good thing to strive toward. Like consequentialism
13
and deontology, it’s an ostensibly attractive moral stance. Sadly, all of these
14
attractive approaches end up offering different advice in important cases.
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How should we decide what ethical system to abide by?
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That’s a trick question. Knowing how we “should” decide something re-
19
quires that we already have some normative stance, a way of judging differ-
20
ent approaches. Let’s instead contemplate how we possibly could go about
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choosing an ethical system at all.
22
There are many distinct ways of talking that can each capture some im-
23
portant truth about reality. Not all vocabularies capture truth; some are
24
simply incorrect. Our goal is to describe the world in useful ways, where
25
“useful” is always relative to some stated purpose. In the case of scientific
26
theories, “useful” means things like “able to make accurate predictions on
27
the basis of minimal input,” and “providing insight into the behavior of a
28
system.”
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Morality adds an evaluative component to how we talk about the world.
30
This or that person or behavior is bad or good, right or wrong, admirable or
31
reprehensible. The criteria for usefulness that help us choose between alter-
32
native scientific theories are insufficient when it comes to constructing
33
moral principles. The point of moral reasoning is not to help us make pre-
34
dictions or provide insight into a person’s behavior.
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Happily, there are other senses of usefulness besides “helping us fit the
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data.” Each of us comes into the meta- ethical game with a preexisting set of
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commitments. We have desires, we have feelings, we have things that we
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care about. There are things that naturally attract us, and those that repel
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us. Long before we have ever started thinking reflectively about what our
04
ethical stance should be, we already have some kind of nascent moral sen-
05
sibility.
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Primatologist Frans de Waal has done studies to probe the origins of
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empathy, fairness, and cooperation in primates. In one famous experiment,
08
he and collaborator Sarah Brosnan placed two capuchin monkeys in sepa-
09
rate cages, each able to see the other one. When the monkeys performed a
10
simple task, they were rewarded with a slice of cucumber. The capuchins
11
were quite content with this setup, doing the task over and over, enjoying
12
their cucumber. The experimenters then began rewarding one of the mon-
13
keys with grapes— a sweeter food than cucumbers, preferable in every way.
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The monkey who didn’t get the grapes, who was previously perfectly con-
15
tent with cucumbers, saw what was going on and refused to do the assigned
16
task, outraged at the inequity of the new regime. Recent work by Brosnan’s
17
group with chimpanzees shows cases where even the chimp who gets the
18
grapes is unhappy— their sense of fairness is insulted. Some of our most
19
advanced moral commitments have very old evolutionary roots.
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One approach to moral philosophy is to think of it as simply a method
21
for making sense of those commitments: making sure that we are true to
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our own self- proclaimed morals, that our justifications for our actions are
23
internally consistent, and that we take into account the values of other
24
people where appropriate. Rather than fitting data in a scientific sense, we
25
can choose our ethical theories by how well they conform to our own exist-
26
ing sentiments. A moral framework is “useful” to a poetic naturalist to the
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extent that it reflects and systematizes our moral commitments in a logi-
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cally coherent way.
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A nice feature of this perspective is that it is resolutely practical: it is
30
what people actually do when they try to think carefully about morality.
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We have a feeling for what distinguishes right from wrong, and we try to
32
make it systematic. We talk to other people to learn how they feel, and take
33
that into account when developing the rules for functioning in society.
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It can also be terrifying. You’re telling me that judging right from wrong
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is just a matter of our personal feelings and preferences, grounded in noth-
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ing more substantial than our own views, with nothing external to back it
03
up? That there are no objectively true moral facts out there in the world?
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Yes. But admitting that morality is constructed, rather than found lying
05
on the street, doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as morality. All hell
06
has not broken loose.
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The idea that moral guidelines are things invented by human beings based
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on their subjective judgments and beliefs, rather than being grounded in
11
anything external, is known as moral constructivism. (When I say “human
12
beings” in this context, feel free to substitute “conscious creatures.” I’m not
13
trying to discriminate against animals, aliens, or hypothetical artificial in-
14
telligences.) Constructivism is a bit different from “relativism.” A moral
15
relativist thinks that morality is grounded in the practices of particular
16
cultures or individuals, and therefore cannot be judged from outside. Rela-
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tivism is sometimes derided as an overly quietist stance— it doesn’t permit
18
legitimate critique of one system by another.
19
A moral constructivist, by contrast, acknowledges that morality origi-
20
nates in individuals and societies, but accepts that those individuals and
21
societies will treat the resulting set of beliefs as “right,” and will judge others
22
accordingly. Moral constructivists have no qualms about telling other peo-
23
ple that they’re doing the wrong thing. Furthermore, the fact that morals
24
are constructed doesn’t mean that they are arbitrary. Ethical systems are
25
invented by human beings, but we can all have productive conversations
26
about how they could be improved, just as we do with all sorts of things
27
that human beings put together.
28
Philosopher Sharon Street distinguishes between Kantian constructiv-
29
ism, after Immanuel Kant, and Humean constructivism, after David
30
Hume. These are two enormously influential thinkers who tended to come
31
at problems from very different perspectives, perhaps in part due to their
32
differing personalities. Kant, whose strict personal schedule was such that
33
residents of Königsberg were known to set their timepieces by his daily
34
walks, was part of a long tradition within philosophy of trying make every-
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thing precise, rigorous, and certain. He would brook no fuzziness in his
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ethical philosophy. Kant was the deontologist par excellence, and he
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founded his views on morality on the categorical imperative: act in such a
01
way that your actions could become a universal law. At one point Kant
02
seemed to suggest that it would be wrong to lie to a murderer who was at
03
your door in order to protect their potential victim, because lying shouldn’t
04
be a universal law. Scholars debate whether Kant really thought that it was
05
always wrong to lie, but one certainly gets the impression of strict deonto-
06
logical rectitude in his thought.
07
Hume, meanwhile, was much more at home in a world of skepticism,
08
empiricism, and uncertainty. He rejected absolute moral principles, and
09
instead of an objective imperative he proudly proclaimed that “Reason is,
10
and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” Reason, that is, can help
11
us get what we want; but what we actually do want is defined by our pas-
12
sions. Hume was dubious of the natural philosophical tendency to make
13
things look just a bit tidier and more exact than they really are.
14
A Kantian constructivist accepts that morality is constructed by human
15
beings, but believes that every rational person would construct the same
16
moral framework, if only they thought about it clearly enough. A Humean
17
constructivist takes one more step: morality is constructed, and different
18
people might very well construct different moral frameworks for them-
19
selves.
20
Hume was right. We have no objective guidance on how to distinguish
21
right from wrong: not from God, not from nature, not from the pure force
22
of reason itself. Alive in the world, individual and contingent, we are bur-
23
dened and blessed with all of the talents and inclinations and instincts that
24
evolution and our upbringings have bequeathed to us. Those are the raw
25
materials from which morals are constructed. Judging what is good and
26
what is not is a quintessentially human act, and we need to face up to that
27
reality. Morality exists only insofar as we make it so, and other people might
28
not pass judgments in the same way that we do.
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Constructing Goodness
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So then, fellow humans. What kind of morality shall we construct?
There is no unique answer to this question that applies equally
well to all persons. But that shouldn’t stop each of us from doing the
best we can to expand and articulate our own moral impulses into system-
18
atic positions.
19
Perhaps the most well- known approach to ethics is the consequentialist
20
theory of utilitarianism. It imagines that there is some quantifiable aspect
21
of human existence, which we can label “utility,” such that increasing it is
22
good, decreasing it is bad, and maximizing it would be best of all. The issue
23
then becomes how we should define utility. A simple answer is “happiness”
24
or “pleasure,” but that can seem a bit superficial and self- centered. Other
25
options include “ well- being” and “preference satisfaction.” What matters is
26
that there is something we can, in principle, quantify into a number (the
27
total amount of utility in the world), and then we can work to make that
28
number as big as possible.
29
This kind of utilitarianism runs into a number of well- known problems.
30
The attractive idea of “quantifying utility” becomes slippery when we try
31
to put it into practice. What does it really mean to say that one person has
32
0.64 times the well- being of another person? How do we combine well-
33
beings— is one person with a utility of 23 better or worse than two people
34
with utilities of 18 each? As Derek Parfit has pointed out, if you believe that
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there is some positive utility in the very existence of a somewhat- satisfied
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human being, it follows that having a huge number of somewhat- satisfied
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people has more utility than a relatively smaller number of exquisitely
01
happy people. It seems counter to our moral intuitions to think that util-
02
ity can be increased just by making more people, even if they are less
03
happy ones.
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Another challenge for utilitarianism was offered by philosopher Robert
05
Nozick: the “utility monster,” a hypothetical being with incredibly refined
06
sensibilities and an enormous capacity for pleasure. At face value, standard
07
utilitarianism might lead us to think that the most moral actions are those
08
that keep the utility monster happy, no matter how sad that might make
09
the rest of us, because the monster is so incredibly good at being happy.
10
Relatedly, we could imagine technology progressing to the point where we
11
could place people in machines that would render them immobile, but gen-
12
erate in their brains maximal feelings of happiness or preference satisfac-
13
tion or a feeling of flourishing or whatever other utility measure we dreamed
14
up. Should we work toward a world where everyone is hooked up to such
15
machines?
16
Finally, the utilitarian calculus tends to not discriminate between util-
17
ity of ourselves and those we know and love, versus the utility associated
18
with anyone else in the world, or at any other time in history. For the major-
19
ity of people in the developed world, utilitarianism would seem to insist
20
that we give away a large fraction of our wealth to the cause of ridding the
21
world of disease and poverty. That may be a laudable goal, but it reminds us
22
that utilitarianism can be an exceedingly demanding taskmaster.
23
Utilitarianism doesn’t always do a good job of embodying our moral
24
sentiments. There are some things we tend to think are just wrong, even if
25
they increase the net happiness of the world, like going around and secretly
26
murdering people who are lonely and unhappy. There are other things we
27
think are laudable, even if happiness is slightly decreased thereby. Utilitar-
28
ians know about such examples, and are able to adjust the rules to make
29
them seem less problematic. The basic issue remains: the notion of attach-
30
ing a single value of “utility” to every action, and working to increase it, is a
31
hard one to pull off in practice.
32
Deontological approaches run into their own problems. Psychologists
33
have suggested that moral reasoning in general, and deontological reason-
34
ing in particular, functions primarily to rationalize opinions that we reach
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