Topics Ethics

Question I'm a first year philosophy student and I really don't understand what it means when philosophers present the three usual normative ethics of Aristotelian, utilitarianism, and deontology. If all three are equally valid, then that would seem to imply that there are no moral truths and utilitarianism wins out. If there are moral truths, then it would seem deontology takes precedent. But if all three are not equally valid and there are not moral truths, does Aristotelian ethics win out by virtue of elimination? If so why bother teaching the other two?

Accepted:
December 4, 2014

Comments

Philosophical accounts of ethics (e.g., utilitarianism) are theoretical proposals. They are attempts to sum up right and wrong in tidy formulations. It might be that utilitarianism captures right and wrong perfectly, but this is controversial. It might be that the Categorical Imperative does the job. But this is controversial. And virtue ethics isn't an attempt to give a formula for summing up right and wrong, but rather discourages us from looking for rules of that sort. But whether we can understand morality fully in term of the virtues is controversial.

My own guess is that each of these approaches (and by the way: there are others) provides genuine but incomplete insight. But this is controversial.

Whether there are moral truths, however, is NOT the same question as whether any of these approaches to accounting for morality are correct. Thoughtful, intelligent human beings were making moral judgments long before philosophers cooked up their theories. Indeed, most thoughtful, intelligent human beings to this day make moral judgments without consulting ethical theories. Many of the judgments people make could be correct whether or not they fit one of these theories. The philosophical theories are attempts to account for right and wrong, but the existence of right and wrong doesn't depend on our ability to capture right and wrong in our theories.

However, I was puzzled by other things you said. If all of these theories are "equally valid," why would it follow that there are no moral truths? And why would that imply that utilitarianism is right? After all, if utilitarianism is right, there are moral truths, though they are sensitive to the circumstances in a particular way. And if these three approaches aren't equally valid, why would this suggest that Aristotelianism wins?

But to give the already-dead horse another whack: philosophical theories are after-the-fact attempts to systematize our understanding of things. The things themselves don't much care whether our theories do them justice.