Topics Ethics

Question Is it possible to have an empirical theory of ethics?

Accepted:
March 7, 2007

Comments

If one were an ethical relativist, then there's a sense in which the answer to your question is a straightforward Yes. Ethics could only legitimately be a description of the ethical attitudes and practices that were operative at a given time in a given moral culture. If one were a utilitarian, too, so that one thought (roughly) that right action consisted in action which, as a matter of fact, generates most happiness, then once the utilitarian view is stated and argued for, ethics becomes an essentially empirical exercise - finding out what sorts of actions make for most net happiness.

But most people probably regard ethical reflection as crucially capable of changing our attitudes, and that means that the basic kind of ethical relativism mentioned above, and also utilitarianism, are too conservative. Human beings are reflective creatures, capable of bringing new critical thought to bear on their attitudes and on what makes them happy, and moral consciousness in particular is surely a matter of remaining open to new insights and perspectives, so that it is (I would argue) an essential dimension of ethical thinking that it is not merely empirical, not merely descriptive of current attitudes, but instead an endlessly dynamic, critical enterprise.

Moral questions typically have an empirical component. For example, the question whether we have an obligation to paint all the roofs in the world white depends in part of the question whether doing this would reduce global warming, and that is an empirical question. And as Miranda Fricker points out, if utilitarianism is correct, then you can work out what is right across the board by answering the empirical question of what would generate the most happiness. But the question whether utilitarianism (or pretty much any other ethical theory) is correct does not seem to be an empirical question. What experiment would help? So while applying an ethical theory to determine what is right may depend on empirical evidence, testing and ethical theory does not seem to be an empirical matter. The empirical facts only seem to take us so far when it comes to determining what we ought to do.

Question Is it possible to have an empirical theory of ethics? Accepted:March 7, 2007

Question Is it possible to have an empirical theory of ethics?

Accepted:
March 7, 2007