Topics Ethics

Question While I'm aware there are a number of theories of ethics (relativism, utilitarianism, consequentialism, etc.) is there any one that is favoured currently by philosophers (and if so, why)? It would also be extremely useful to see why/where each of these theories break down (often the correct hypothetical situation provides this).

Accepted:
October 21, 2005

Comments

Most of the standard ethical theories have a decent following amongprofessional philosophers. You'll find compelling arguments for andagainst all of them. I tend to lean in a vaguely consequentialistdirection, and so I'll just mention my favorite anti-consequentialist hypothetical: the case of the inhospitable hospital.

Imaginethat you've just injured your ankle playing squash, and so you head tothe hospital for an x-ray to make sure your ankle isn't broken. Asyou're waiting in the emergency room, four victims of a nasty caraccident are brought in. Each is suffering from a different internalinjury (heart, liver, kidneys, and lungs), but all four are in criticalcondition and need an immediate transplant if they are to survive.There is no time to find a donor, and so the doctors grab you out ofthe waiting room, give you a large dose of morphine, and then proceedto harvest your organs in order to give them to the accident victims.They all survive, but sadly you do not.

It seems that the consequentialist is committed to saying not only that the doctors didn't act wrongly, but that they were morally obligatedto kill you and use your organs to save the others (since, of all ofthe actions available to them, this was the one with the bestconsequences).

Of course, hypotheticals like this are never theend of the matter. Consequentialists can always point out aspects ofthe situation that would make the supposedly obligatory act wrong.Thus, a consequentialist might argue that once word got out about whatthe doctors had done to you, people would stay away from the hospitalin question and that this would have rather dire long-termconsequences--consequences certainly more negative than letting thefour accident victims perish. At this point the objector usually tweaksthe thought experiment to rule out this negative consequence (say, bysuggesting that the doctors' action is never made public), and then thecycle begins again: the consequentialist finds another unnoticednegative consequence, the objector tweaks the hypothetical to avoidsaid consequence, and so forth. What eventually happens is that thethought experiment is tweaked so many times that it no longer resemblesany situation we are ever likely to encounter in real life. And then wemay rightly begin to wonder whether we should care at all about whatour intuitions have to say about such an impossible (or at least highlyimplausible) situation.

If you're interested in reading more, youmight look for the Blackwell Readings in Philosophy volumes edited byStephen Darwall. There are volumes on what many consider to be the fourmain families of ethical theories: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and contractualism.