Ethical First Principles
I've been getting presented with a lot of ethical thought experiments lately. Often in real world contexts by people who don't read this blog. At work someone asked me why we can't trade box office futures but we *can* gamble in Vegas. On a different online forum someone asked me whether killing an enemy soldier for your country is any better than killing an opposing religious person for your God. At the root of these questions are ethical first principles, and the systems that are derived from them. How you determine what's "good" or "bad" depends on how you want to judge that criteria. I'm a total philosophy n00b, but as far as I've been able to work out there are at least three major categories:
Virtue ethics asks us to be good people by developing virtues of our character. Virtuous characteristics - honesty, chastity, empathy, silence, generosity - are by definition moral.
Deontological ethics are rule-based ethics, often favored by religious people. "Lying is good. Murder is bad." Religious ethics are often rule-based and therefore deontological ("coveting is bad because God says so"), but not all deontological ethics are based on religion. For example Kant argued for the rule that "good will" is a necessary precursor for anything that can be called "good".
Consequentialism judges the morality of a decision by its outcomes, not the intent of the person doing it. If you have the best of intentions but your actions turn out badly, you've committed an immoral act. If you try to do something good and it screws things up, you've still acted immorally by not being more careful.
Asking which of these is 'best' is a bit of a circular discussion. I can't say which of these is the 'best' first principle of morality without picking one of these as a basis of judging which of these was best. I also have a hard time intuiting which is best from my inherent human moral sense. I can think of both silly abstract situations and real-world situations where strict application of any of these rules becomes silly. North Korea's Monument to Party Foundation celebrates the virtue ethic of Juche, which does not necessarily make the DPRK a moral country. Sheikh Al Obeikan's rule-based fatwa in favor of adult breastfeeding is an example of deontological ethics gone terribly awry. There's an old riddle that mocks consequentialism by asking "If you try to hit a beggar on the head with a silver dollar, and you miss, and he picks it up and buys bread, have you committed an act of charity?" If Tony Hayward really tried to observe the rules of deepwater mining and develop the virtues of safety at BP, the oil spill would be the result of a moral act under deontological and virtue ethics but not consequentialist ethics. Euthanizing a suffering cancer patient to kill themselves would be moral from the virtue of compassion and a consequentialist desire to minimize suffering but immoral from a deontological system that forbids murder. A mafia member who enters witness protection to turn in his boss would be acting morally from the consequence of reducing crime and the rules of plea bargaining while acting immorally because he has compromised his virtue of loyalty. None of these is "wrong" or "right"; most complex ethical decisions can be either of those things, or somewhere in between, depending on the basis you use to judge them, and in the end I think it's our inherent human morality that's really driving the decision of which standard to use right now.
I'm mostly writing this post to refer to it later. If you're reading this because I linked to it in some future comment, it's probably because you asked "which of these is better?" and I asked "What do you mean by 'better'?" I'm not trying to be a wiseass, it's just that we can't really answer that question until we decide what "good" or "bad" means.
Virtue ethics asks us to be good people by developing virtues of our character. Virtuous characteristics - honesty, chastity, empathy, silence, generosity - are by definition moral.
Deontological ethics are rule-based ethics, often favored by religious people. "Lying is good. Murder is bad." Religious ethics are often rule-based and therefore deontological ("coveting is bad because God says so"), but not all deontological ethics are based on religion. For example Kant argued for the rule that "good will" is a necessary precursor for anything that can be called "good".
Consequentialism judges the morality of a decision by its outcomes, not the intent of the person doing it. If you have the best of intentions but your actions turn out badly, you've committed an immoral act. If you try to do something good and it screws things up, you've still acted immorally by not being more careful.
Asking which of these is 'best' is a bit of a circular discussion. I can't say which of these is the 'best' first principle of morality without picking one of these as a basis of judging which of these was best. I also have a hard time intuiting which is best from my inherent human moral sense. I can think of both silly abstract situations and real-world situations where strict application of any of these rules becomes silly. North Korea's Monument to Party Foundation celebrates the virtue ethic of Juche, which does not necessarily make the DPRK a moral country. Sheikh Al Obeikan's rule-based fatwa in favor of adult breastfeeding is an example of deontological ethics gone terribly awry. There's an old riddle that mocks consequentialism by asking "If you try to hit a beggar on the head with a silver dollar, and you miss, and he picks it up and buys bread, have you committed an act of charity?" If Tony Hayward really tried to observe the rules of deepwater mining and develop the virtues of safety at BP, the oil spill would be the result of a moral act under deontological and virtue ethics but not consequentialist ethics. Euthanizing a suffering cancer patient to kill themselves would be moral from the virtue of compassion and a consequentialist desire to minimize suffering but immoral from a deontological system that forbids murder. A mafia member who enters witness protection to turn in his boss would be acting morally from the consequence of reducing crime and the rules of plea bargaining while acting immorally because he has compromised his virtue of loyalty. None of these is "wrong" or "right"; most complex ethical decisions can be either of those things, or somewhere in between, depending on the basis you use to judge them, and in the end I think it's our inherent human morality that's really driving the decision of which standard to use right now.
I'm mostly writing this post to refer to it later. If you're reading this because I linked to it in some future comment, it's probably because you asked "which of these is better?" and I asked "What do you mean by 'better'?" I'm not trying to be a wiseass, it's just that we can't really answer that question until we decide what "good" or "bad" means.