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My recurring question is whether it is possible to find a basis for ethics which is not already ethical?

Thus some people argue that we should obey God’s commands (let us ignore the fact that almost nobody obeys the complete commands of any religious text) but the idea that obeying God is ethical is already an ethical proposition which can be challenged by other ethical propositions.

The Utilitarian idea of the greatest good for the greatest number, depends on the ethical idea that ethics should benefit the many rather than the few, this also could be challenged by another ethical proposition.

The idea that we should behave in a situation in the way that we would want all such situations to be treated (‘the categorical imperative’), contains an ethical assumption that generality should override specific context. It could be argued that ethics must attend to context. (‘should’ and ‘must’ are almost always terms implying an ethics is going on).

The idea that ethical behaviour resides in a mean (Aristotelian arête ethics), is a proposition which implies that extremes are unethical (and come in binaries!)

Anti-cultural relativism, often seems to assume similarity is ethical and unsimilarity is not.

And so on.

I think people can argue that I am cheating here because I have not given a definition of ethics. But while definitions are helpful I don’t think it solves problems.

I’m not a Platonist, so I don’t believe that giving a definition always provides understanding, or is always possible.

Sometimes people know what they mean well enough…. But let us assume that ethics has to something to do with terms like virtue, good behaviour, right behaviour, morality and things like that. I may not know what ethics is, you (as reader) may, but I all I kind of know is how people use the word.

One gentleman discussing this issue with me gave the following definition:

By “ethical”, I mean “anything that pertains or is related to some system of ethical values and duties”.

I would also stipulate that, according to my own preferred use of terms, a system of values and duties is to be called “ethical” if — at a minimum — it is designed with the (implicit or explicit) goal of protecting (and even of increasing) the well-being of some sentient entities (human or non-human).

This encapsulates part of my problem with ethics as a “set of propositions” and illustrates my question… “Is it possible to find a basis for ethics which is not already ethical [i.e., value-laden]?”

Lets look at the beginning of this definition: “By ‘ethical’, I mean ‘anything that pertains or is related to some system of ethical values and duties’.”

I don’t have to say this is circular, and I certainly couldn’t do any better myself. ‘Ethics is about ethics.’ Obviously he moves on to illustrate what he means by ethics…

“a system of values and duties is to be called “ethical” if — at a minimum — it is designed with the (implicit or explicit) goal of protecting (and even of increasing) the well-being of some sentient entities (human or non-human).”

So he makes what seems to me to be an ethical proposition, that ethics is about ‘protection’, and ‘well being’, of ‘sentient entities’.

There is no non ethical reason why this should be the case. It is already value laden. Thus a person with a different ethical position might argue that not everyone should be protected, only particular special people (this is common in ethical systems – foetuses cannot be killed by surgery, but enemy mothers and foetuses can be killed by bombs). They might object to “well-being” saying that was the decadent ethics of bourgeois society and ‘hardiness’ or ‘spiritual discipline’ should be the end of ethics as it was ethically superior, etc. Finally a non-humanist eco-philosopher could argue that that ethics has to be directed to the environment, as there are no singly existing sentient entities, everything exists together, or that sentience is not that important ethically speaking; it is an “unethical” form of exclusion, structurally comparable to racist ethics, and so on…

If so, and if this makes sense, yet again we have an illustration of it appearing not to be the case that we can have an ethical proposition/axiom which is not already ethical, or value laden…

Tags: complexity, ethics

This entry was posted on April 22, 2018 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.