An Adventure

The word ethics comes from the Greek ethos, for custom, but ethics has long meant prescribing, and not simply describing, what our customs ought to be.  Ethics answers the question, how should we live?1 Some philosophers distinguish morality from ethics by claiming that ethics necessarily involves critical reflection, whereas morality may simply refer to the moral rules and customs of a culture.2 In everyday usage, however, the adjectives ethical and moral are interchangeable. Ethics is moral philosophy.3

Studying ethics, I suggest, is like hiking on a (conceptual) mountain, where the wider paths reflect the main traditions of ethical thought, and the narrower trails branching off these paths represent the arguments of individuals. As we have little time to explore this mountain (ethics), I will generally guide us along the paths (theories), but endnotes offer observations about some of the trails (philosophers/issues).

To illustrate what doing ethics means, consider how we might describe an actual mountain in diverse ways. We could emphasize its unusual rock formations, or point out a striking waterfall, or recall the sweep of the forest below the summit, or identify wildlife in the meadows. Each of these four descriptions would tell us about the mountain, but all four would be necessary to convey our impression of the whole mountain.

Thus, to gain an overview of moral philosophy, I will lead us along paths that reflect four patterns of thought, which I identify by the keywords duty, character, relationships, and rights, and a fifth path identified by the keyword consequences.

Each keyword represents the crux of the debate within the pattern of thought it identifies. The first four patterns of ethical thought (concerning our duty, character, relationships, and rights) assert that some actions or ways of being have intrinsic worth. The fifth pattern of thought (involving predicted consequences) rejects the notion of intrinsic worth, and argues that actions and goods only have extrinsic value (derivative or use value) based on their utility (usefulness) for us.4

analogy to rule of law 
constructing presumptions
critical reasoning
faith and reason
environmental ethics 
ethical traditions
feelings
ethical relativism
right and good 
testing presumptions

1.   Socrates in Plato’s Republic says, “We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live.” Quoted in James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, fourth edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 1.

2.   The word morality comes from the Latin mores, which refers to custom. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives two meanings for morality. First, the word can be used to “refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or some other group, such as a religion, or accepted by an individual for her own behavior.” Second, morality may be used “normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.” Online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition.

3.   “Ethics, or moral philosophy, asks basic questions about the good life, about what is better and worse, about whether there is any objective right and wrong, and how we know it if there is.” Barbara MacKinnon, Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues, fifth edition (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007), 3.

4.   “[S]omething has intrinsic value if it is valuable because of its nature, or because of what it is in itself. Intrinsic value contrasts with extrinsic (or derivative) value, for example the instrumental value that things (such as tools and machines) have because of their actual or potential usefulness, or the value that (say) works of art have because people are benefited through appreciating them...and it is important to avoid the widespread confusions that misrepresent aesthetic value or even all non-instrumental values as intrinsic value.” Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003), 12.

     Making Sense...

The image of a mountain is a familiar way of describing diverse aspects of one reality. Using a metaphor, such as this, is a way of reasoning.  If moral philosophy is our mountain, there are many more than five paths on it.  But I suggest that the various ways that we talk about ethics can be organized into five patterns, each with a keyword that is easy to identify and remember.

The following diagram depicts these keywords as five sections of a circle. The four sections in the top half of the circle represent the ways we argue for what we believe has intrinsic worth.

The lower half of the circle represents the argument that what's right or good depends entirely on outcomes.  If we think the likely consequences of taking an action will be more beneficial than not, then it is the right action to take, because it realizes as much good as is possible.

In doing ethics we consider all five of these forms of moral reasoning.  First consider the arguments for intrinsic worth, which involves assertions about duty and rights, or the virtues of character, or the responsibilities inherent in our relationships.

Then we construct a presumption that says what we should do, and what kind of person we should be.  But before we act, we test this assumption against the likely consequences of doing what we think is right, to see if our prediction is consistent with our presumption or if, on the contrary, our forecast challenges our presumption.

If what we think will happen seems to confirm what we think is intrinsically right and good, we have verified our ethical presumption.  But if our prediction of consequences does not confirm our presumption, we should review our reasoning in order to make sense of our moral responsibility.