I see the distinction you’re making but I don’t feel it’s the same distinction I’m going for. My argument is that while I generally agree that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, there are situations when I reverse my position and support the individual over society in general. And I can’t say it’s a distinction based on rules or acts because I can’t define a set of circumstances either before or after the situation which causes the reversal.
A man and a woman (or a man and a man) are sleeping together before marriage. We can surely find some people to call that immoral. Could we find anyone to call it unethical? We clearly use the terms differently.
What is Christian ethics based on? As for the atheists, since we are often called immoral, (or lacking in god-given morals at least) books on atheist morality would seem useful to address this no matter what morality means.
I’ll agree that any religious “moral” argument that rests on interpretations of the Bible (or no such interpretation) are ethics. I was not claiming that a writer being religious automatically makes an argument a moral one instead of an ethical one. I was thinking of more extreme cases based directly on God’s supposed word.
I was in no way claiming that these were the only two premises possible. One of the reasons we don’t get closure on ethical arguments is that there are so many premises possible. Think of the ethical systems you get based on differing views of the humanity of fetuses, slaves, and people from other tribes.
Where did you get that idea? I specifically said that the position assigning all or most value to liberty was rational. I am not assigning the term rational only to those things I agree with. The irrational position is that a premise is fixed in stone due to some supernatural justification. Indeed you can come to the same conclusions that way as you might with a rational set of premises. The danger is a lack of examination of premises.
I think that issue might be wrapped up in, or glossed over in, your earlier statement that “our goal should be to promote the greatest good for the greatest number”. That statement assumes that some things can be identified as “good”, but gives us no clue as to what they are. It also assumes that “good” is quantifiable (how else can you have the “greatest good”?) but, again, gives us no clue about how to quantify good, and indeed offers no argument that it ought to be possible.
To that extent, your moral system (as stated in a six-line post on an internet discusson forum) is incomplete. And when you actually come to make moral decisions you find you need to complete it, by having a framework for identifying and valuing goods.
So, it could be that when you find yourself supporting the individual over society, you’re not necessarily abandoning your utilitarian position. Possibly, what you have actually done is to recognise a good which is of such value that it must be prioritised over other goods, even if those other goods are benefitting a large number of other people. The “greatest good” doesn’t have to align with the “greatest number”, does it?
One could argue that “enhancing health” is in the best interests of the tribe. Gives you more resources etc. Man just wrapped a god around it to make it easy to teach.
Also both the left and right would argue that their was is the best way to achieve this.
One of the principles that should be balanced with the reduction of suffering, in my view, is the worth of the individual human life. When this is applied to Philippa Foot’s “trolley problem”, the conclusion I reach may be troubling for some people. For those unfamiliar with Foot’s exercise, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
If I were near the railroad lever, I would not pull it, even if it meant killing fewer people. I don’t believe that I have the moral authority to destroy one life in the name of saving more lives, to say, in other words, to the person tied to the side track that their life and potential for happiness has to be sacrificed for some greater good. I would greatly resent being asked to do the same. If I let the trolley continue on its way, the resulting deaths are a terrible accident. If I switch the trolley, the resulting single death is a murder.
Nonetheless, I am not quite as inflexible as G.E.M. Anscombe when it comes to dealing with deontological ethics. In certain cases–e.g. when a specific person (not merely a number, but a specific person) will certainly die in a given situation no matter what is done, one might take appropriate action in order that others survive. Foot used an example of a fat man being stuck in a cave entrance while the cave is about to flood. Since the fat man is going to die anyway, the others could use dynamite (or other forms of violence) to free themselves if no alternative could be found. And in cases where one conjoined twin could survive independently but the other will soon die (and take the other twin with it), separation seems to me perfectly acceptable.
The human body itself plays a considerable part in my formulation of ethics. Each of our bodies and its parts is irreplaceable; life without one or some of these parts in functioning order makes human existence more difficult in many cases. The irreplaceability of the body and its parts makes me oppose most forms of violence (except in self-defense or, in the case of police, to stop what Anscombe called “violent malefactors”). I reject torture. I oppose circumcision and all non-consensual removal of body parts except under strict medical necessity.
I do affirm the right to abortion during (at least) the time when the fetus is non-viable because it has no bodily autonomy nor any capacity for the same. The question of self-harm in re: bodily autonomy and the right of personal choice isn’t one that I’ve entirely worked out.
I divide morals and ethics based upon their use. Morals I consider a guide to action between individuals. Ethics I consider a guide to action between a Group to an Individual, an Individual to a Group, or a Group to a Group.
My moral center revolves around the Golden and Silver rules. I find that they work for most situations, though I reject anything that tries to build on them. For simple reference, I can accept “I wouldn’t want to be fired because the executive staff wants bonuses for reducing costs, so I won’t fire anyone.” I tend to reject qualifications or rationalizations like, “I wouldn’t want to be fired because the executive staff wants bonuses for reducing costs, but since the economy is so good right now***** it wouldn’t bother me too much.”
My ethical center revolves around duty. I am employed by XYZ Corp, and they expect certain things for me. I know my wage and benefits going in, so I expect to perform. Any promises broken by either side constitutes a breach of ethics. For another simplistic reference, “I took this job with no medical coverage of punching beehives for $7.50 an hour without a bee suit, and now I’m disgruntled that I get stung all day.” is improper from the Individual to the Group, in this case Employed to Employer. Similarly, “I’m going to promote Ned because he’s my son.” is improper from the Group to another Group, in this case the Employer to Employees.
I know these are deviations from what a lot of people would consider as a division of morals and ethics, but I prefer this neat division. That being said, I hardly expect others to understand that division and usually don’t bring it up.
The Golden Rule is fairly well known, but the Silver may be less so. As a reference:
Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Silver Rule: Do not do to others that which you wouldn’t have done to you.
- Pretend it’s 1997.
I think most people who would call that immoral would also call it unethical, if invited to.
Similarly, most people who would describe (say) cheating on your partner as unethical would also call it immoral, if invited to. And I think they’d certainly agree that the question was a moral question.
But I think there could be something in what you say, to this extent: My view is that morals and ethics are basically interchangeable, so far as the meaning goes, and therefore which one we use is a matter of taste or fashion. And it may the case that, among those whose morality/ethics are authoritarian and socially conservative, the fashion is to use “morals” rather than “ethics”; maybe they’re more likely to use “moral” language.
But the converse is not true. As the example I have given show, and as others have affirmed, among people who are not of that group both terms are used widely, and they are interchangeable. And this is true for both religious and non-religious thinkers.
Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a single “Christian ethics”. There is a wide variety of Christian ethical beliefs and stances. All that they have in common is that they appeal to Christian beliefs to support moral claims.
Some Christian ethical stances are authoritarian; they take the form, essentially, of claims that “X is good because God has said it is good”, and the evidence that God has said it is good is, e.g., revealed scripture. On this view God could say that (say) child sacrifice was justifiable, or mandatory, and it would then be good, because God’s decree is the ultimate source of all goodness.
Others, however, are less authoritarian, taking the form of “God has said that X is Good because it is, in fact, good”. On this view God could not say that child sacrifice is good, because in fact it isn’t good, and God cannot lie. In other words, God’s commandments (as revealed in scripture) don’t create moral norms; they point to them, but they would exist even without the commandment to call attention to them.
Still others don’t focus on commandments at all, or at least assign them a more peripheral role. One of the great divides in medieval Christian theology was between (a) those who argued that God’s supreme characteristic was his Will, and that to be good was to do what God willed, whatever that might be, and (b) those who argued that God’s supreme characteristic was his infinite Love, and that to be good was to be like God, i.e. to love and to be loving. (This second view was very influential with Thomas Aquinas, and it forms the basis of his ethics, and so is - to this day - hugely influential in Catholic moral theology.)
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but I find this a bit surprising. Christian ethical perspectives which don’t arise out of an interpretation of the Bible are few and far between, and are pretty marginal in the Christian tradition. Whatever tradition of Christianity you look to, the bible usually plays a pretty central role.
My mistake, so, and I apologise for misunderstanding you.
But is the irrationality found here in the claim that a moral proposition is “fixed in stone”, or in the claim that it has a “supernatural justification”, or do you need to observe both features before you would describe a moral position as an irrational one?
No, I don’t think that’s the issue in this case. (I agree that it is an important issue worth discussing on its own however.) The runaway trolley problem and the involuntary donor problem are not based on balancing different types of good. Both of them are dealing with only a single good - life - and they assume it’s of equal value to everyone. The issue is whether it’s moral to take a thing from one person in order to give it to a greater number of people. The utilitarian principle would say the answer is clearly yes - a situation where five people have a good is better than a situation where one person has that same good. But that utilitarian answer doesn’t seem moral when it’s applied in these situations.
Maybe the issue is not quite as simple as that. Maybe we’re not dealing with a single good.
Your own instincts, and your own account of your decision, tell us that you are making a distinction between murder and accidental death. One life may be as valuable as another life, but morality is about actions, and you clearly don’t see a moral equivalence between killing someone, on the one hand, and allowing someone (or several someones) to die, on the other. One of these is less good than the other; you prefer the one which is more good.
I don’t know that I “believe” in a morality necessarily, but the ethic of reciprocity is probably closest to the way that I typically act on a day to day basis. When things aren’t quite so black and white, I wing it.
Really? Do you have any examples? I’d be hard pressed to think of an ethical argument against it.,
But not hard pressed to find an ethical argument against this. But how about the case of a truly open marriage? Both partners give permission and are fully aware of what the other is doing. Immoral, but unethical? (I say truly open because I doubt many are, and that isn’t the case I’m considering.)
I think that’s a valid observation. Immoral seems stronger to most people.
Surely you’ve seen people say that atheists lack morals. Have you ever seen anyone say atheists lack ethics? I haven’t, and I’ve been insulted for decades. 
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One of the problems with morals is that we get lots of moral systems based on different supposedly absolute precepts. I don’t think it has to be supernatural, but I’m hard pressed to think of a case where a non-supernatural base is strong enough to generate a moral system that people are supposed to adhere to.
And the dilemma if morals come from God or are transmitted by God goes back a long way.
I’m Jewish, and while I haven’t read the Talmud or Mishnah, my understanding is that there is no expectation that humans can read the Bible directly and see what to do - it is too subtle. Many Christians feel the same way - I’m referring to those Christians who point to verses and claim that the clear reading settles moral issues.
Like I said, things fixed in stone are said to have supernatural origins.
I though of another example of the difference - SSM. People against SSM seem to be using a moral perspective, from the Bible. (And some people for it also use the Bible, of course.) In the California Prop 8 trial the moral argument was out of bounds, and the anti-SSM side had to go with factual and ethical arguments - and failed big time. Back when I was in college and various moral laws were getting ignored or repealed, people said that you can’t legislate morals. But you sure can legislate ethics.
So, while I see the point that they are sometimes used interchangeably, I see a good reason to make a distinction.
This makes sense.
Personally, I always took from it a connotation that morals regard things you shouldn’t do, and ethics regard things you should do. i.e., you shouldn’t kill, rape, torture, steal, etc.: those are immoral. Ethically, you should work your hardest for your employer, pay your debts, be honest, be punctual, etc.
But, yeah, there’s also a connotation of “business ethics,” as you say, involving groups, whereas the “moral” crimes I mentioned are pretty usually individual.
I think all of this is out in the field of connotations, and can’t really be attributed to formal definitions.
Isn’t the goal of morality to obey what God commands? But I like the chess analogy, since reasoning from moral precepts can get us into some very odd places. Not to mention that halfway through the morals game the rules get changed. The morality of incessant reproduction, very reasonable in a society where many babies die, is less so in a society where almost all babies and mothers live.
I think that there are “do’s” in morality, too. Help others. Be civil to others. That sort of thing. In my mind you should be active about your morality. You can sit at the edge of a sidewalk and stare at the asphalt and never do anything. I don’t consider that being “moral” just because you are passively not slaughtering and raping people. Although if you were to get into comparisons, I would probably agree that staring at the asphalt for eternity is more moral than the guy who is killing and raping.
While business ethics is certainly a dominant area of my brand of ethics (and the easiest to illustrate) I consider it the same level of unethical when, for instance, a scientist lies to the population at large.
To me: virtue ethics is an “internal” system, concerning itself with the ethical actor’s own state. Ethics of care is more concerned with the interactions between actors, it is there where the morality of actions lie.
No, Pacifism *is *the underlying approach I take, which underpins all my moral thought. But I’m loathe to call pacifism a moral system on its own - more like a foundational axiom for a more elaborated moral system. As such, it’s compatible with any number of systems, no doubt. Ethics of care is just the one I like (currently - I’ve even been Epicurean in the past)
I like your take very much—a particular point in its favor is that, in essentially relating morality to some form of skill, it undermines the argument that in the absence of free will, or of genuine choice, no morality is possible, because for the ‘more moral’ actor, while maybe the decision tree will be the same, the weights attributed to the edges, i.e. the likelihood to move down a certain path, will be different from those of a less skilled moralist; thus, the more moral player will take the path better aligned with whatever moral goal there is in a greater fraction of similar situations than the less moral one. Thus, even though in any given situation, both players actions will be uniquely determined by whatever microscopic factors determine our decisions, across a range of similar situations, there emerges a clear difference between more and less moral.
As for myself, I’m afraid my moral thought is not very sophisticated; I tangle myself up in contradictions no matter what take on morality I pursue. The best I can come up with is that it’s really an illusion that there is any kind of rule-based morality, i.e. that there is some non-contradictory set of principles that can be in the abstract applied to any given situation in order to compute the most moral course of action. Ultimately, I believe moral judgments are a result of our wiring, curtesy of our evolutionary history; they have not developed according to a fixed set of principles, and trying to explain them using such principles will to a certain extend always amount to window-dressing (I don’t want to limit evolution to the biological here, but understand the term as encompassing our social and cultural development as well).
But that doesn’t mean I’m a moral relativist, either: just as evolution is without goal, but there are nevertheless clear criteria—those of fitness, e.g.—that characterise evolutionary success, I think there are criteria separating successful from unsuccessful moral principles (or perhaps moral goals, as per Blaster Master’s model above). A clear one is social stability: a society in which people murder one another at the slightest offense is probably not going to endure, thus such a set of morals may ‘loose out’ to one in which murder is discouraged.
At the same time, I think there’s a contractual nature to morality, with the need to engage in moral contracts being itself a result of some (admittedly vague) kind of sociocultural evolution; thus moral rights are granted to those able and willing to observe my moral rights.
So I guess I’m kind of a contractual pragmatist, with an evolutionary bend? Not sure if that makes terribly much sense, but it’s more or less where I’m at, and I’m under no illusion of having reached the end of my path towards moral enlightenment (or even having ventured terribly far into it).
See, I find the two situations not to be equivalent. When it comes to the railroad situation, I can’t rationalize it away by saying that I didn’t act, therefore it was an accident. My inaction is still a choice, and thus I’m still responsible. Diverting is the right choice.
But I can rationalize the donor problem that way, basically. The reason why is that there is another value, that of liberty, that is involved. In the trolley problem, I am not the one depriving anyone of liberty. I have no choice in the matter in that regard. But in the medical situation, I do. Hence I must choose to let the donor decide.
What makes it interesting is positing that the donor is not involuntary, and is me. That’s when you find that utilitarian ethics breaks down. We do inherently place a higher value in preserving our own life than that of strangers. The only reason this works as a moral system is that everyone does it, cancelling each other out.
I’m not sure if any of this really answers the OP’s question on my ethics/morals, but I’m not sure I can articulate everything I believe. I basically just start by giving myself situations, come up with what I’d do, and then look for patterns that could predict future choices. If I find one, then these patterns form rules that I follow.
I find that subjective morality fails to give me an adequate explanation for why Hitler was wrong to try to kill all the Jews. Obviously, that was wrong, but why? We certainly don’t want to say that if a bunch of people agree that genocide is no longer wrong, then suddenly it’s ok. Nor do we want to say it’s ok if I can get away with it, do we? (PLEASE SAY NO!!) So it would seem that some things are just wrong; moral obligations exist. And one can articulate this in any number of ways - I’m willing to accept the Golden Rule, with or without god, as the fundamental truth.
But “do no harm” does not provide a framework upon which to build one’s life, and organized religion does. I know a lot (A LOT!) of people these days say, “I don’t need the Roman Catholic Church to tell me what to do; I can think for myself!” (as if I am not similarly equipped :rolleyes: ). But I say: why reinvent the wheel? I mean, the church draws on a vast and deep reservoir of human knowledge and experience - to which some of the finest minds in history have contributed. And if “standing on the shoulders of giants” works for math and physics, why should it not work for morality as well?
That’s how I see things, but it’s interesting to see how others see them.
But what if your ethical sense tells you that 10% or 50% or 90% of what the Roman Catholic Church tells you is wrong? Do you have to accept the nonsense, like no contraception, with the good stuff?
Sure we need to build our ethical platforms with the help of others, but we have thousands of years of ethical philosophy to consult, and we don’t have to take the bad with the good.
And any even slightly reasonable ethical system will tell you why genocide is wrong, even if voted on by a majority. Don’t need the church for that - not that Rome was exactly big on trying to stop it - though some priests were.
Roman Catholic morality is subjective too. Compare the bull “Intra Arcana”, which authorized evangelizing through force and arms, or “Dundum ad nostram audientiam”, which ordered a complete separation of Christians from Jews, to modern Catholic teaching. The Bible didn’t change, its interpretation did.