What are your normative ethical views?
Title says it all.
As for myself, I am a consequentialist, specifically a hedonic prioritarian - I think what matters most in ethical decision making are those who are the worst-off. I'm not a sufficientarian, though, because this leads right into a repugnant conclusion. Instead, I see only the perfect as the good.
Personally I cannot see how other normative positions are able to hold water by themselves. Deontological ethics can lead to widely counterintuitive conclusions, and virtue ethics has difficulty prescribing action. Of course, the same could be said of consequentialism (that it has counterintuitive conclusions), but I think these counterintuitive conclusions are counterintuitive in that they force us to accept the extent of morality, instead of showing how it is absurd, as deontic or virtue ethics do in my opinion. I also think that these other positions are essentially based upon consequentialism anyway and end up being similar to rule consequentialism.
As for myself, I am a consequentialist, specifically a hedonic prioritarian - I think what matters most in ethical decision making are those who are the worst-off. I'm not a sufficientarian, though, because this leads right into a repugnant conclusion. Instead, I see only the perfect as the good.
Personally I cannot see how other normative positions are able to hold water by themselves. Deontological ethics can lead to widely counterintuitive conclusions, and virtue ethics has difficulty prescribing action. Of course, the same could be said of consequentialism (that it has counterintuitive conclusions), but I think these counterintuitive conclusions are counterintuitive in that they force us to accept the extent of morality, instead of showing how it is absurd, as deontic or virtue ethics do in my opinion. I also think that these other positions are essentially based upon consequentialism anyway and end up being similar to rule consequentialism.
Comments (72)
I think pleasure is an inadequate basis for ethics, but the utilitarian idea of the common good ties in, for me, with moral intuition, only not in a utilitarian way.
I'm not saying I'm particularly good at following that principle. But that's my aspiration.
A small child gets up early, and creates a disaster area in the kitchen before scattering the results of their efforts all up the stairs and triumphantly presenting their parents, three hours early, with a completely inedible breakfast in bed.
The love is perfect, but the execution is lacking and the consequences are nothing but trouble. For myself, ethics are a matter of the heart being in the right place.
As for how that hedonism manifests, I think the default response, and the one people in general default to, is a kind of pre-modern or 'Homeric' hedonism: eat and drink well, win glory, destroy your enemies, celebrate beauty and like what's naturally better. But in environments where this isn't possible, the only recourse may be a maverick individualistic Cyrenaic-style hedonism, which then might manifest as anything from libertine antics to pessimism, depending on individual proclivities.
I think I've come to prefer virtue ethicism because it doesn't railroad you into only one possible heuristic approach which ultimately leads to unethical results when we demand complete consistency. We're inconsistent and fallible persons and the difficulty of "virtue ethics to prescribe action" is precisely the point; it makes you think it through when you're confronted with an ethical dillema instead of abandoning thought and emotion by following a "rule".
I got depressed because people kept asking me (as a utilitarian) to consider the "best" reasons for killing other people.
Why don't utilitarians spend much time thinking about the best ways to help other people?
And the reality is, there is a correlation between utilitarianism and psychopaths. It was perhaps overblown by the media, but it IS there, nonetheless.
Indeed, I have wondered about this myself. What if there is a non-agential good that really ought to be cultivated?
To everyone else who calls themselves a virtue ethicist or any non-consequentialist: I have problems with virtue ethics (or any other non-consequentialist ethics) as it makes it seem as though you need to have a person breathing down your neck for you to help them. As a consequentialist, it doesn't matter to me where or when something good or bad is happening. Whether it's down the street or in the savanna of Africa, there's no difference, it's still happening. In my opinion, if you care about something, and I mean legitimately care about something, then you'll do something about it. I can't understand how people can reasonably say they despise, say, suffering, and yet not do anything about it, as if recognizing that it exists is "good enough". If you don't do anything about suffering, you either don't care, or you don't actually consciously understand how important suffering is. Being a "nice person" in my opinion does not cut it for moral obligations, although perhaps it's the best we have for legal obligations.
That's precisely it, though: 'what if?' The fundamental philosophical question to my mind is not 'why' but 'so what?' If there were such a good, it wouldn't matter to the very process of inquiry asking after it, and so is pragmatically self-defeating. So what if? Nothing, apparently, or nothing that matters to us. And what doesn't matter to us, doesn't matter to us. QED.
This. And I tend to think along consequentialist lines, as is common.
Quoting darthbarracuda
What repugnant conclusion would that be? And how does sufficientarianism lead to it? I'm aware of some problems attributed to sufficientarianism, and I'm not sure that they can be internally resolved.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Can you please elaborate?
See here.
I was hoping that it wouldn't be as misguided as it sounded, but unfortunately, after following your link, I realise that it is indeed that bad.
I mean, statements like:
Quoting darthbarracuda
Really?
Indeed.
I know that seems dismissive, but I don't know if it can really be argued against, to be honest. If you can't see how wrong that is, I don't know whether or how I can persuade you. It just strikes me as obviously wrong, given, for example, the massive benefit in doing good for very large numbers of people, despite not achieving perfection.
I'm surprised no one else has objected to this "perfection or nothing" view - either in this discussion or the one linked to.
Isn't this the nirvana fallacy, which involves "comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives" and whereby "the choice is not between real world solutions, but is, rather, a choice between one realistic achievable possibility and another unrealistic solution that could in some way be 'better'"?
An example given on Wikipedia:
Posit (fallacious)
Seat belts are a bad idea. People are still going to die in car crashes.
Rebuttal
While seat belts cannot make driving 100% safe, they do reduce one's likelihood of dying in a car crash.
I mean, the prospect of humanity bringing about it's own extinction on a voluntary basis is almost as unrealistic as the prospect of everyone being in a constant state of happiness with no one ever suffering. I'll go with the sensible, realistic option.
Mmkay...?
I sort of agree with it in a sense. It has a respect for suffering. I may be giving more naunce than it warrants, but I wouldn't automatically read it as saying: " a life without pain, suffering or less than some arbitrary standard is not with living."
We may use "perfection" to refer to our significance regardless of the disappoints we suffer, mistakes we make or wrongs we commit-- I am perfect as I am, even if I didn't achieve something or get what I desired. Sometimes it used to celebrate a life full of failure and disappointment.
In this sense perfection is certainly required. Without it we are caught thinking ourselves worthless for being stuck in world where we can't do everything we want. Life has to be perfect despite (and with) it's failings or else we are eating ourselves for existing.
In short: We should think with normative theories, but not be ruled by them. At the end of the day you just have to judge what's the right course of action in the moment, and no ethical theory will remove the weight of choice.
If it isn't perfect, it's not worth it. How else can that be interpreted? It clearly isn't perfect. Is anything? So, nothing then. Just like arguing against seatbelts, but on a grander scale.
If he thinks I've misinterpreted him or overlooked some nuance, he hasn't exactly put much effort into correcting me.
Okay, pain is not equivalent to suffering. Not sure I agree, but whatever, that might just be down to semantics. I don't see the supposed significance of raising that in response to my comment. Likewise with your previous comment.
That's not a flaw in virtue ethics, it's a flaw with ancient virtue ethicists. And it's easy to point out flaws in some of the views of historical ethicists or how they lived their lives. The first example which comes to mind is John Locke regarding slavery, but there's also controversy regarding Nietzsche and his views on women, and Hume and his views on black people, and I'm sure there are others.
Under virtue ethics, you can ask what kind of person would keep a slave, and you can say that keeping slaves is indicative of vice.
"Perfect is the enemy of good", "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without."
What name would you give that vice? Edit: Perhaps justice is the virtue that is at issue? Hard to see one man owning another as being fair or just.
This means that, for example, murdering a person may be an acceptable form of action, such as in self-defense, or in a political assassination. In my view, to see the act itself as immoral (and not the consequences) is to forget why the act was originally seen to be immoral (because of a history of repetitive consequences) and to misplace the focus of ethics, which should be on sentient welfare.
Partial rule consequentialism also tends to reject notions of intention, consent, and instrumentalization as "special" rules of some sort, since doing so would once again forget the bigger picture, the consequences at stake. Instrumentalization, in particular, is what I think to be a disguised way of holding that suffering holds priority over pleasure. So although I reject notions of utility monsters, I can and will still hold that negative utility monsters are perfectly acceptable, which results with the conclusion that the instrumentalization of someone who is not as bad off as the person that this act is meant to help is acceptable, assuming there aren't better options available.
Because (and I think in this I even have science on my side) it is proven, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the circumstances that gave rise to our existence - no matter how bad it might seem - are woven into the fabric of the cosmos. So the sense, common to a lot of existentialism, of having been 'thrown into existence', isn't warranted (although I hasten to add, I could easily understand why many people do feel that way, like the poor unfortunate refugee diaspora.) But we are an expression of the Universe, specifically, the form in which the processes of evolution can become self-aware; because of that we actually have a reason for existence, and it's up to us to work out what that is; I think a good deal of unhappiness is caused by the unwillingness to face up to that fact (for which, see Eric Fromm, Fear of Freedom). And also we have stewardship of 'spaceship earth', which, in my view, is the only vessel we're ever going to have (so we have to overcome our promethean sci-fi fantasies of interstellar travel). This earth is what we have, it is very crowded, it is resource- threatened, and it is rife with conflict, but I don't think we'll get another option.
So the major ethical challenge for me is, well, me. I have all manner of inclinations and dispositions which I know are less than optimal, which seems so simple when I write it out, but so difficult on a day to day basis. So whatever philosophy one has, it has to provide the impetus, and the motivation, to overcome those dispositions, to be grateful, to serve others and to serve awakening. The philosophical lexicon and approach which seems best suited to that is generally Buddhist, but I hasten to add that it's very much a 'working title'. But those are my normative ethical views.
Ancient slavery was a completely different phenomenon from industrial age slavery which is the idea all of us have in our minds when we think of slavery. The slavery where the slave is brutalised and completely dehumanised is not Ancient slavery, but industrial age slavery. A sleight of hand is committed when the two phenomena are associated together, which is the same sleight of hand committed when Victorian age female oppression is associated with practices dating in Ancient Rome. The two ages are different. Plato, Aristotle, and the other virtue ethicists would find industrial age slavery to be ABHORRENT.
Not true. Conditions for the slaves in the Roman mines were famously brutal.
I was talking about slavery as understood by the Ancients - referring mainly to Aristotle and Plato. Yes of course there were cases where slavery was exceptionally brutal - I'm saying though that this wasn't the case for most slaves. During the Industrial Revolution conditions were extremely brutal for most slaves as they were exploited in the name of maximising production; of course even then there were exceptions; some slaves working for noble families on their estates were treated decently, and provided with decent, although not exceptional living conditions, and not demanded inhuman amounts of effort.
Aristotle and Plato, by the way, have never encouraged abuse of people, whether they were slaves or otherwise. Slavery still exists in modern days in a sense alike to the slavery existing for the Ancients in India. Many rich Indians have slaves (they call them servants) - they are bound for a very long term generally to live and work on their estates, and their children are raised and educated on their estates as well. They are provided adequate nutrition and means of living, and are treated with decency. They can leave if they wish, but they're not likely to find employment and means of sustenance with the same ease in other places. I don't agree with such a practice because it highly limits capacity for independence and development, but I can nevertheless notice how much less abusive it is in comparison to industrial age slavery, and how some Ancients, like Plato and Aristotle, could think that such an arrangement was profitable even for the slaves.
I will add though, that if we develop the thinking of both Aristotle and Plato and elucidate and correct their system so that it is internally coherent, then they would indeed be against all forms of slavery or economic servitude.
I don't see how you could disagree with the modern Indian practices of "slavery'' in view of the above quote.
Lots of these people working as "slaves'' would have far worse lives if given independence and released out into the general Indian public,where they would immediately be recognized as poor and weak and subsequently preyed upon by other powerful,less decent people than their former employers.
Furthermore,it seems unreasonable to even call this slavery, since this sort of situation where these people are given decent wages and accommodation is radically different from what slavery refers to generally.
I don't disagree with it in the sense of I want to abolish it tomorrow. I disagree with it in the sense that I think we should gradually move towards a society in which these people can achieve more independence, probably by ensuring their children have access to good education. I'm not condemning their life to be intolerable, and them needing immediate salvation as a revolutionary would. (and the reason you cite, that they will have a worse life otherwise, is precisely the reason why I am not a revolutionary - I understand the contingencies and limitations of history).
Quoting hunterkf5732
When Plato and Aristotle used the word, they frequently referred to this type of slavery, hence why I used the word. People like to import modern connotations into the past, and this doesn't work very well. There is no progression in history, different historical periods are radically different and have totally different conceptions of social and economic organisation, and any broad look will just miss these differences which in the end are essential to understand the period and its thinkers.
Virtue is my ethical foundation. Virtue is the one and only thing that can never be lost, nothing can take it away from you (unless of course you give it). Any other thing such as pleasure is impermanent, and a wise man will never stake his happiness on that which is perishable. Put your dough where crows cannot reach my friend...
If you yourself judge something to be wrong/undesirable/to-not-be-done, then you don't need some outside force/authority to coerce you.
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There isn't a distinction between what I judge to be morally correct and what I judge I should do.
I'm trying to deal with the same problem that you mentioned. Thinking of morality as a set of restrictions which we learn from somewhere has issues. It's like a command without a commander.
You can still believe that you are judging what is correct for everyone in a specific situation, so it doesn't need to follow that it is only moral because you judge it to be moral.
Why do you think so? What if the commands are present in nature - in your own nature, and in my own nature, and in everybody's nature? What if our nature is so conditioned that judgement X is always correct for us? Then the authority is our own nature. Some of us will have a better grasp of our nature than others. And some, despite their better knowledge, will refuse to do that which is good by choice of will.
Commands are a type of linguistic expression. Nature doesn't talk to us and tell us what to do.
Quoting Agustino
Because when I try to make sense of the phrase "you ought not X" I find myself interpreting it as either "don't do X" or "doing X is against the rules" – with the latter interpreted as "some relevant authority has issued the command 'don't do X'". There seems no other meaningful interpretation.
Anscombe addresses the common notion of moral obligation that tries to separate itself from the idea of some person telling us what to do, correctly concluding that the notion is vacuous. It's just "a word of mere mesmeric force" (here's to hoping her Modern Moral Philosophy will be our September reading).
Are you sure? Not all languages are written languages Michael :)
Or spoken for that matter. Nature speaks to you in a different way - through your conscience, through your desires, etc. If you rationally organise these into a coherent whole then you will arrive at the equivalent of commandments.
Sorry, but this is just poetic nonsense. I'm using the term "command" in the literal sense, not in some metaphorical sense.
Unless you're arguing for panpsychism and claiming that nature has a consciousness and is able to telepathically tell us what to do?
It is a command. Kill and you shall suffer says the command. How will you suffer? Well because by killing someone you will do violence towards your own self in so far as your nature provides you with a desire for community and compassion, and in-so-far as you could have profited and found joy in relationship with the person you have killed. You will be faced by remorse and guilt. This is just like any other human law out there. If you break the law of a state there are punishments. If you break the laws of nature, likewise there are punishments. You may fail to perceive them as punishments, because you fail to perceive how they are a consequence of your actions, but that doesn't change what they are. This is nothing but natural morality - which doesn't it is true, emerge from the empirical, but from the spiritual nature of man - from his inwardness. That's why Wittgenstein thought that ethics is the most important, but ethics is a matter of the transcendent, in for example TLP.
Edited.
This isn't a command. This is a description of (possible) psychological and social consequences. Again, you're just being poetic.
When I say that "normativity only makes sense within the context of a set of commands issued by some authority" I mean it in the literal sense of requiring some person or group of people telling us to do or not do something.
Okay your government, a group of people, tell you, through your own understanding of the written law not to steal. You go ahead and steal. There are consequences for it.
Your nature, through your own understanding of your yourself and your place in the world tells you that if you kill, you will suffer natural consequences. You go ahead and kill. You suffer natural consequences.
What's the difference? A command is nothing else than a cause and effect relationship. Do X and suffer Y. Even a state doesn't just tell you don't steal. They tell you don't steal because otherwise Y will happen to you. Then you are free to steal if you want to. Only that Y will happen to you.
Your nature, through your own understanding of your yourself and your place in the world tells you that if you kill, you will suffer natural consequences. You go ahead and kill. You suffer natural consequences.
What's the difference? A command is nothing else than a cause and effect relationship. Do X and suffer Y. Even a state doesn't just tell you don't steal. They tell you don't steal because otherwise Y will happen to you. Then you are free to steal if you want to. Only that Y will happen to you.[/quote]
The difference is in the meaning of "tell". They're not the same. There's a difference between "so-and-so told me not to do this" and "I can tell that something bad will happen if I do this". The former (use of the verb "to tell") is a command, and is required to make sense of a normative claim, whereas the latter isn't.
Maybe a theoretical difference, but I see no practical one... both tellings play exactly the same role.
Humans (mostly) have natural moral instincts just as social animals have natural social instincts that 'tell them what to do'.
The difference is really that the former is a normative command while the latter is nothing more than a myth.
In the latter case, there is not a necessary consequence at all. Nature doesn't ordain the killer will suffer anything at all. That's down to the actions and choices of those around him. His treatment is always uncertain. Society has to act against him to suffer anything at all. What results from his killing is not "what must happen," but merely what those around him happen to do.
If the killer is to suffer or be punished, those around him have to choose ethically and exert power over him.
But, especially in the Buddhist context, ethical normativity is certainly not underwritten by a cosmic lawgiver or personal deity. The implicit understanding of Buddhism is that the Buddha 'sees things as they truly are', meaning, generally, that he understands the psychological and affective causes of suffering, which arise from craving and identification with sense pleasures. In that, Buddhist ethics are quite convergent with those of other traditional philosophies, but again, not dependent on the notion of an external authority that meets out punishments and rewards. (I suppose it is nearer in some sense to virtue ethics, i.e. virtue or 'right action' being inherently rewarding.)
He understood the cause of stress, which although is indeed suffering, does not cover all bases. Buddhism can help with anxiety, stress, disappointment, fear, etc. But it hardly helps with any other kind of discomfort.
If I can jump in, I agree with this purpose. I share these values. But I view it as a chosen purpose. We can identity with this notion of virtue, having experimented with others perhaps. Quoting Wayfarer
While I'm sure that there are tortured existentialist that fit this bill, I don't think contemplating or pointing out our "thrown-ness" has to be "poor-me" or "a stranger and afraid / in a world I never made." Sure, the scientific image provides a plausible story, but that this in particular happens to be the plausible story is part of our thrown-ness. Upon reflection, the world appears radically contingent. It could have been another way. Other worlds are not all logically contradictory.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is very close to Sartre's existentialism. We are "condemned to be free." So we are tempted to fall into a state of "bad faith" and describe ourselves as objects with a fixed nature. My problem with Sartre was the unstable blend of world-fixer and poet of radical freedom.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm surprised you think we're stuck here. We might destroy ourselves before technology liberates us from this spaceship, of course, but we'll be pioneers again if we don't.
Not so! 'Stress' is just a trendy translation of [i]dukkha[/I], another Buddhist term which doesn't have a one-word equivalent. But suffice to say that according to Buddhists, Nirv??a is the end of all suffering - not de-stressed, not chilled out, but end of suffering altogether, once and for all.
'Samsara has no beginning but it has an end. Nirv??a has a beginning but it has no end' - Buddhist saying.
For one, I'm no longer of the opinion that any sort of overarching principle-oriented approach is a good idea. Those approaches always seem to lead to what I consider ridiculous stances.
Trying to be less difficult, though, you could probably say that my ethical views tend to follow a combination of ideas related to existential authenticity, a kind of loose, minarchist libertarianism, and some socialist ideals. --As if that's less difficult, haha.
Basically, though, I approach each situation on its own terms and try to reach what seems to me like a reasonable conclusion that errs on the side of permissibility, or that errs on the side of not instituting grossly disproportionate punishments/retribution. Again, I don't think that principle-oriented approaches tend to do that.
My approach doesn't have anything to do with a "law of love" or anything like that, which still seems to be a principle-oriented approach.
John Holbo points out that Plato doesnt include slaves in his Republic. Thats something.
Perhaps Plato had no slaves in his Republic because the majority of its workers in it were no better off than slaves in their subjugation to its ruling class.
LOL! :-*
Maybe you meant that the ruling class was no better off than slaves in their subjection to the citizens... The guardians (ruling class) were raised very austerely, they didn't have families, they belonged equally to all other guardians. Guardians weren't allowed to love each other, they weren't allowed to have sex or be intimate with anyone, they weren't allowed to own any property. They were supposed to devote all their time to study and development, protection and care of the community. There was only one time when the guardians were allowed to have sex (with other guardians), and that was only for reproduction, and it was expected to be promiscuous because the guardians were to develop no love, intimacy, or partisan (exclusive) affection one towards another. Again - the guardian class would deprive themselves of all goods in order to devote themselves 100% to the protection of the community. Plato was keenly aware that given the function of the guardians, they should develop characters which were entirely devoid of the usual joys - their life would be a life of servitude to the Good, above all else.
And this idea is fundamentally correct and has been carried through. There is a reason why priests (the leaders) are, in many religions, required to be celibate for example. It's supposed to be something that they give up, in order for their affection to be universal, and have no elements of partisanship within it. Plato's guardian would love all men equally, and make no distinctions whether it was his son, his wife, etc. - indeed, these concepts didn't exist for the guardian. But remember the function of the guardians isn't to live the best life - but rather to ensure that the best life is possible for everyone else. So don't expect the guardians to live nicely - they didn't.
This is an often misunderstood attitude of Plato. Many think Plato encouraged a community of women, or communism in the same way Marx did - but this is totally false. The community of women was indeed a privation of the goodness of love and intimacy that the guardians undertook in order to be most fit to serve and protect their community. But because people's thinking is twisted - they expect it to be the opposite - they think that because the guardians are rulers, they must have lived the best life, and if they lived the best life, then that means that Plato thought that a community of women and communism was the best socio-political system of organisation. Nothing could be further from the truth. They expect the rulers to be those who have the best lives, and therefore they too desire to be rulers. The truth is that rulers don't live very good lives. Their lives are a sacrifice to the gods - pure duty, and not enjoyment or pleasure characterises the guardians. Nobody would like to be a leader - as is made clear at the beginning of the Republic - but one decides to become a leader because in the absence of one (or worse, in the presence of an incapable one), society, including that person, will be worse off - pretty much one becomes a leader when there is no alternative. Leadership is a sacrifice one makes, because the disease (socio-political disorder) is worse than the pain of the cure (leadership - order).
No - they thought slavery was an evil, but a necessary one (hence the some are slaves by nature from Aristotle), and therefore supported it, because eliminating it would have caused more problems than maintaining it, and gradually eliminating it. Similar to the situation with servants in India today. So yes - there are evil things in our midsts that we have to do something about - but we have to be careful that by solving them we don't bring about even greater evils.