Topics Ethics

Question There are some moral issues where opponents or supporters use pragmatic arguments to support their moral standpoint. For example, people might say promiscuity is immoral because of the risk of diseases; or that abortion is morally permissible because of the inconvenience of unwanted children, or that it is immoral because of the risk of damage to the body. My question is this: to what extent are pragmatic arguments relevant in discussions of morality? That promiscuity brings with it the risk of disease is an extrinsic problem, not an intrinsic one - in a world without STDs, it would no longer be relevant. The problem of unwanted children being an economic burden is also only relevant as long as it really is an economic burden - a rich woman with an unwanted child could easily hire a nanny and build some extra rooms onto her house, and the problem disappears. In both cases, the problem that disappears under the right circumstances can't really be a moral problem, can it?

Accepted:
January 4, 2011

Comments

Many philosophers (and many non-philosophers, for that matter) think that whether something is right of wrong is at least partly a matter of consequences. If smoking were good for people, it might be a good thing to encourage them to do it. Since smoking is unhealthy, it's wrong to encourage it.

More generally, it looks like you're assuming something doubtful: that whether something is right or wrong is always something about the thing itself. That's what I take your point about the connection between promiscuity and disease to be. You seem to be saying that if promiscuity really is wrong, it must be because of something about its very nature rather than something about the consequences of being promiscuous. But why would we think that?

A couple of caveats. First, thinking about consequences isn't simple. In the case of promiscuity, for example, there are many kinds of consequences we might want to take into account, and some of them -- how our way of living general affects our relationships with other people -- are subtle. Second, saying that consequences matter morally doesn't mean that nothing else matters. Motives matter; so do other things such as fairness. But it only seems mysterious that "extrinsic" considerations matter if you set aside the ways we usually go about sorting out what's right and what's wrong.

A final note: you raised the issue of whether certain things (promiscuity, for example) are "moral" or "immoral." I put it in terms is right and wrong. That was on purpose. Saying that promiscuity is "immoral" seems to lead us away form asking useful questions. It suggests that promiscuity is just by nature "moral" or "immoral" apart from how it happens to mesh with the rest of our lives. That's not a very helpful way to look at it. Saying that something is right or wrong seems to leave us more inclined to ask a perfectly sensible question: Why?