Philosophy

Building an ethics on what's obvious

There’s hardly an ethics class that begins with “Good is to be pursued and evil avoided” or “One should do what one takes to be, all things considered, the best thing to do.” We rightly recognize those statements as empty. Any attempt to object to them is properly answered by a clarification of the terms involved. One might propose that it is appropriate to enter a house of prostitution to rescue one’s wayward sister, thus apparently not avoiding evil, but the right response is just: well, one’s pursuit of chastity for one's sister is certainly good and one’s overall effort is to avoid the evil of her degradation, even with such an odd project. Similarly, one might propose that people should act spontaneously sometimes, rather than always working out what the best thing is to do – but that turns out to be yet another thought about “the best thing to do, all things considered.” These statements introduce a vocabulary without employing that vocabulary, and their whole charm consists of the invitation to use these words to make sense of one’s life.

The statement, “Faced with two possible actions, one should do the one that has the best consequences, all things considered” is often taken to the starting point for a whole school of ethical thought, opposing another school that teaches, “A decent person does actions he or she can recommend to others.” But I suspect that both of these formulae are empty also, that any apparent objection to either calls forth a clarification of terms. Once one has decided to ask what one should do, or how to live a decent life, one has implicitly declared one’s allegiance to claims like this. For lots of people, the game of ethics consists of trying to formulate claims with real content that are still very close to these claims: “One should produce as much of some non-moral value as one can, in one’s actions” or “A decent person acts in a way he or she could recommend to everybody.” But when people move to these content-richer formulations, all sorts of counter-examples and problems arise. A claim that is just a small variant on an obvious claim is anything but obvious. One doesn’t make something close to the truth by tweaking a true statement.

I think there may be a deep strategic problem here, someplace near the root of how people do philosophic ethics.