Topics Ethics

Question Why do most philosophers insist that ethical principles should be universal? Can't I have my own private ethical code, my own set of principles, which I don't expect anyone else to follow, although I would not be against the fact that others follow it, that is, I'm not trying to be a free-rider or harm anyone. One of my principles might be: don't preach.

Accepted:
April 24, 2008

Comments

You could have your own personal code that you didn't expect others to follow. And there's even a familiar sense of the words "ethics" and "ethical" that would let us call this your "code of ethics." No problem there. But there's also a perfectly good sense of the words "ethics" and "ethical," and of related words like "moral" that says there is something else. On the view that these uses of the words aim to capture, there are some things that are wrong whether or not they happen to be part of your private code of ethics. Anyone who thinks that there are such things will say that ethical principles in this sense just are universal.

You might think that there are no such principles, or that no one can show that there are, or that people who insist on them are preachy, or arrogant or confused. And perhaps that's the correct view. But perhaps it's not. Perhaps torturing unwilling victims for your own pleasure is just wrong, period. Perhaps using other people as means to your own ends without regard to what they might think about it is something no one should do. If that's so, then it would be perfectly appropriate to say that the underlying principles are universally valid, even if not everyone recognizes this. (Compare: a certain mathematical principle might be universally valid even if some people just don't get it.)

There's a good instinct behind the worry you have: people can be very preachy about certain sorts of ethical claims, and not nearly sensitive enough to the possibility that they might be wrong. People sometimes make broad ethical claims that they can't back up and that are really quite harmful. All of that is good reason to be sensitive to the difficulties that some moral issues present. But there are other cases that seem clear, and there's not really anything surprising about anyone -- philosopher or non-philosopher -- saying that what happened was simply wrong. On the contrary, what seems surprising is that some people resist this idea.

Let’s consider what it is for ethical principles to be universal. One way of understanding the claim that ethical principles are universal is to take it as the claim that the correct moral principles apply to all of us. Here’s one way to appreciate this claim. Suppose that a particular act, A, is morally obligatory for you (maybe it’s the act of not preaching to others about how they should behave). If that act is morally obligatory for you, but not morally obligatory for someone else, then there must be some relevant difference between the two of you that accounts for this difference in your obligations. There must be a reason why you have the obligation and they do not. Suppose the difference is some feature, D, which applies to you but not to them. We now have the principle: All those who have feature, D, are morally obligated to do A. Note the principle is universal. It applies to all of us, and says that all of us who have the same feature, D, that you do have the same obligation that you do.

I’m not sure though that this way of understanding what it is for a principle to be universal really gets at your question. After all, perhaps the feature D is the following: Adopting a principle that requires one to do A. So our principle is: All those who adopt a principle that requires them to do A [not preach], are morally obliged to do A [not preach]. We have a universal moral principle, but our ethical obligations doesn’t seem universal in the sense that the obligation only holds for people who adopt a principle that tells them to do it. So maybe then the real question here is this: Why is it that our moral obligations are not determined by whatever principles we adopt for ourselves, so that people who adopt different principles will have different obligations? If this is the question, the answer is the following. The view that each person’s ethical obligations are determined by whatever standards he or she adopts has some false implications. Here’s one. The view implies that we never make moral progress by changing our moral principles. So long as we honor our principles at the time, whatever they are, we are doing fine morally, so a change in our moral principles does not constitute moral improvement. Yet, someone who gives up a principle that allows him to harm others just for the sake of doing so and instead adopts one that prohibits such conduct is morally better for the change.

The view that each person’s moral obligations are determined by whatever principles he or she adopts can seem attractive because it seems to promote an attitude of tolerance. You won’t tell me how to behave and I won’t tell you how to behave. If we adopt the principle, Don’t preach, we have an obligation not to preach. Yet, someone else may adopt the principle, Convert, by the sword if necessary, in which case they have an obligation to convert by the sword if necessary. So much for tolerance.