Topics Ethics

Question I have background knowledge in philosophy but I now live in a place where I have discovered no source of any remote answer to the question about ethics which I formulate below. (Honestly). Three propositions follow: (1) Male cardinals are red (2) Hamburgers are delicious (3) Lying is wrong Consider (1) first. To dogs, the color blind, the blind simpliciter, or bees, male cardinals just aren't red. Male cardinals are not red in the same sense that there are 12 ounces of Budweiser in that can. My claim here is that it is actually FALSE that male cardinals are red. What's really true is that we PERCEIVE male cardinals to be red, and others do not. The same can clearly be said about (2), since hamburgers probably taste awful to vegetarian species. I see no reason why we can't similarly say that (3) is 'subjective' as well in that lying is only wrong because we experience the feeling that lying is wrong. Ethical theories like utilitarianism, deontology, divine command theory, etc. don't really move us past our ethical perceptions because they are simply flawed attempts to generalize them. Utilitarians might say that lying is usually wrong because it decreases overall utility (pleasure), but that's similar to saying that hamburgers taste delicious because they have a high fat and cholesterol content. The question can continuously be levied, 'Why is THAT (a decrease in utility) wrong?' I think the answer is always finally that we just feel that way. So it is false that lying is wrong, and it is also false that lying is right, just as cardinals are neither red nor gray. It is simply true that various individuals perceive cardinals and killing in various ways. But nothing additional follows from the fact that I or any number of people perceive things in a certain way; at one point people perceived the world to be flat, but that's not the way things are. Therefore, I hereby (with tongue in cheek) brashly declare all moral judgements on this site and elsewhere false! Aren't I correct?

Accepted:
May 17, 2006

Comments

If I reply that something has gone wrong in your reasoning, you will accuse me of begging the question!

At any rate, that is what I think. Here's why:

First of all, although I take your point that the redness of male cardinals is not something those who are color blind (or simply blind) can experience in the same way you or I do (assuming you are neither color blind nor blind), but that does not make the claim that male cardinals are red false! It just means that its truth is not (easily) discernable to those unable to sense it directly. (After all, the redness of male cardinals could be established by measurements of the frequencies of light their feathers reflect. But perhaps now we can quibble about what "red" really means, so let's move to your main point. Before we do, however, note that my stipulation here shows that there IS an objective correlate, and that in the whole story of "red" there will be at least some reality "out there," as it were.)

As for lying, the first thing I want to say is that not all systems of ethics actually hold that lying is (inevitably or always) wrong. The very example you give (utilitarianism, or at least act utilitarianism) would count lying as right in any case where the utilities to be maximized are produced to a greater degree than they would be by telling the truth. Virtue theorists, too, would sometimes say that lying is morally preferable--for example, in the famous case of lying to a dangerous madman (first introduced as a good time to lie in Book I of Plato's Republic).

Now, your view seems to presuppose that the "why is that good?" question can be repeated indefinitely--after all, if the answer "because I feel that way" is given, why couldn't one simply reply, "OK, well, why is that good?" once again?

One way to avoid this sort of regress of justification is to regard the relevant sort of reasoning as a kind of axiom system. In an axiom system, one can ask the "why?" question and receive a well-founded answer, at the level of theorems of the system--but not at the axiomatic level. Axioms are justified differently than theorems: Theorems are justified by their derivability from the axioms, whereas axioms are justified by the way in which they support and generate the system itself. If they generate a system that does what we want the system to do, then that counts as one ground (but not the only one by which we judge axioms) for regarding the axioms as correct.

So think about another axiom system, such a geometry, say. If you ask about an axiom in geometry, "Why should I accept that?" the correct answer to give to you would be something like, "Do you want to do geometry or don't you?"

Now some philosophers regard ethics as an axiom system, in which case continuing the "but why is that good?" question will at a certain point show either that you are simply fooling around--or that you are incapable of doing ethical reasoning. "Do you want to do ethics or not?" Maybe you think you don't--but let's see whether you can sustain that thought if others really accepted that ethics no longer applied to you (as agent or patient)!

There is also another way to look at this, as well (the apporach given in what is called eudaimonistic virtue theory, which I actually prefer to the idea that ethics is an axiom system), and that is to conceive of ethics as the study of how to live. If we actually do share an interest in living well rather than poorly, then all ethical questions are actually prudential or practical questions about how we can do will and avoid being miserable. Now if you ask, in this approach, "but why is that good?" the answer will be one of puzzlement: "Huh? You mean you would prefer to be miserable than to flourish? Well, then, suit yourself!" Notice, this is NOT a version of your answer, which involves subjective states of feeling, because in eudaimonism, the values are objective--one can be misreable and wretched and not be subjectively aware of that fact (for example, the drug addict when loaded with his or her drug of choice, feels great but is not flourishing). What makes things good, in this view, are those (objective) facts about the world and about human beings that can--all other things equal--make some lives objectively preferable to other lives (and hence, for the most part, because our subjectivity is generally well aligned with objectivity, also subjectively preferable to other lives). You don't want to flourish? Huh? Well, then, suit yourself!