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Ethics-An Overview by William B. Lindley
The editorial board of Truth Seeker has decided that the 1993 theme will be Ethics. It is hard to imagine a more wide-ranging topic. Here is a small sample of some of the areas we'll be covering, with the order and structure yet to be determined: Choice. If ethics deals with right and wrong, it gets nowhere if we cannot choose between right and wrong. We shall examine those schools of thought which hold that we lack choice. These are mainly Determinism, based on the idea of a mechanical, clockwork universe (together with its sister from theology, predestination), and Behaviorism, known mainly from the works of B. F. Skinner, especially his utopian work Walden Two and his challenging Beyond Freedom and Dignity. These points of view will be critically reviewed, and choice defended, so that at least we get through the front door and can begin to explore the mansion. Theology. For most people throughout human history, ethics has been prepackaged and offered as "take it or leave it", and often, if you left it, you ended up being burned at the stake. Not much choice there. Elsewhere in this issue, the theological position is described as being one where obedience is the highest virtue. While we and our readers may agree that that is how theologians believe, I am confident that some religious people will disagree, claiming that independent judgment is not entirely foreclosed to the believer. We expect a lively debate to ensue, and I hope to learn from it. One area where this debate might take place is in evaluating the position of Thomas Aquinas. As we contrast Athens with Jerusalem, Aquinas seems to be the one who thought you could have both. Rush Limbaugh, with his pep rallies, seems to call for both the pursuit of excellence and that old-time religion. He may thus be following Aquinas. Exposing his internal contradictions, and those of Aquinas, will be a rewarding effort and a part of the overall work for the year. Under this heading, we shall also examine whether we can be moral beings without a belief in God (since so many religious people insist that we cannot). We shall note those who believe that we cannot be moral with a belief in God, their reason being that such belief destroys the concept of responsibility. Altruism. "Think first of others. Let the welfare of others be the determining factor in deciding whether your action is good or bad, right or wrong." This attitude, in most popular discussions of ethics or morality, is nearly universal. It needs to be critically examined. The discussion here will cover Plato, Aristotle, Kant and other academics, but it will also include Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, which is diametrically opposed to altruism. We shall ask whether altruism and economic prosperity are compatible, and whether egoism and economic prosperity are compatible. We shall look at altruism and egoism in their pure forms, and then ask whether a moderate, "smoothed" version of either of them can be coherent. Nietzsche. This philosopher looked at ethics from the outside, in his two works Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. We'll review these two works and see if we can bring some of their insights into the late 20th century, notably with sociobiology and other fresh information on human nature. This will raise the question of meta-ethics, the question whether we ought ever to look at questions of right and wrong from the outside, from a thoroughly amoral stance. Academia. We'll make an excursion into the world of university philosophy departments, and what their people have to say on ethics, how and where they are pushing back the frontiers and earning their PhDs and tenure. This will be strictly a once-over- lightly tour, not an examination in depth. We will be amused, bored, appalled, but then we may even learn something. The powerful influence of Wittgenstein will be noted. (People often say, "Oh, those academic philosophers don't know what they're talking about." They're right. Wittgenstein convinced the academics of this, and they've been busy ever since, in all humility, trying to find out. That says more for them than for most of the rest of us.) Another odd fact that I picked up along the way is that there is a discipline called axiology. Roughly speaking, before you can talk about right and wrong, you first have to settle what is good and bad. The area that examines questions of good and bad is called axiology, and once you've mastered that, you can go on to ethics. And I'll bet you thought we could start talking about ethics right off, didn't you? Not to an academic! Moral absolutism and moral relativism. We promise a battle royal here. The sparks will fly. (Someone once asked me: "Are you an absolutist or a consequentialist in ethics?" My reply, too late to answer him at the time, is: "I hold as a moral absolute that it is evil to ignore consequences.") My review of the book Ethical Argument appears elsewhere in this issue and is a part of this debate. We hope to review a classic, Situation Ethics, by Joseph Fletcher. (Later in life, he repudiated some of the ideas in this book, and we hope to get this sorted out.) Those who promulgate general principles do not thereby lock themselves into rigid patterns of behavior. Behavior can depend upon context. Some will argue that this is sneaking relativism in by the back door. Real-world applications. There are many areas of ethical conflict in public life today. These necessarily get into the area of politics, of what rules of conduct will be enforced. We shall examine as much as we can on questions of "ought" alone, but some political issues will be unavoidable. Here are two areas where questions of right-and-wrong figure prominently: Environment. On what grounds ought we to leave the trees alone, to keep our air and water clean (or restore their purity), to refrain from disrupting the multivariate balance of nature? The Gaia worshippers consider it a religious duty, that Mother Earth is to be venerated, treated with respect. The opposite extreme is to say, "anything goes, as long as it benefits humanity in some sense."More moderate humanists will defend their environmentalism by speaking of the long term: while their main concern is humanity, not nature, harming Earth has evil consequences for future humanity, and is therefore wrong. These are strikingly different attitudes, but they lead to the same conclusion: preserve the habitat. The tough questions come in the tradeoffs: how many trees do we chop down to save x lives? Do we go for pristine air, even if the direct consequence is poverty, misery and death for millions? Garrett Hardin has some wisdom here: his attitude might be called "tough love" for humanity. He points out that if you feed a million starving children now, you guarantee two million starving children 20 years from now. To every solution for a pressing current problem, he appends what he calls the ecologist's question: "And then what?" This question is near the heart of ethics, and it will be a part of this year's dialogue. Sex. This is also near the center of humanity's moral or ethical concerns. The political struggle between traditionalists and those who favor sexual freedom continues. There's much moral outrage on both sides, some real, some posturing. Homosexuality, abortion, harassment, underage sex, exotic variationsÑthese are all grounds for conflict. These two issues meet in the problem of overpopulation and what do do about it. The environmental radicals and sex reactionaries consider each other to be evil incarnate. Truth Seeker. How much of this ground ought we to cover? What to omit? What crucial issues haven't been mentioned? We won't pretend to be neutral, but we must be selectively polemical if we are to inform. Here we hope that our readers will help us. Write in, suggest your favorite issues, submit articles, recommend sources, books we "must" read, etc. We look forward to hearing from you.
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