How to Ethics?
How should we do ethics if we cannot rely on not-justified-inferentially premises? Greene (2014) and Singer (2005) propose some kind of consequentialism. But there is insufficient reason to accept that problems of cooperative living are best solved by computing a singe attribute. And cutting up healthy people to distribute their organs will not end well.
A better approach may be to accept that we do not know anything much about ethics and adopt the attitude of a successful gambler. In making moral decisions, having a consistent set of principles is not the goal. Identifying and exploiting favourable risk-reward ratios is.
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Essay Question
This section is relevant for answering the following question:
Notes
Thesis: Discoveries in moral psychology pose a challenge to theories in normative ethics which aim to endorse universal and strongly justified moral principles.
Universal: Applying to all people, in all cultures, at all times.
Strongly Justified: Claiming a high degree of certainty or rational foundation (e.g., based on pure reason, intuitions, or a sound method).
The challenge will be that such principles are radically revisionary. This matters not because being radically revisionary is necessarily bad but because it undercuts attempts to provide strong justification for the principles.
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ethical abilities are for solving problems (see Graham et al., 2013, p. table 2.4 on p. 108)
- trading risk from pathogens against risk of hunger (purity; van Leeuwen, Park, Koenig, & Graham, 2012)
- optimizing exploitation of high-risk food sources (fairness)
- balance benefits of group coherence against costs of subordination (loyalty)
- ...
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moral pluralism (see Moral Pluralism: Beyond Harm)
- flows from #1 because diversity of problems indicates that we may have a diversity of fundamental concerns
- significance: we cannot think of ethics as maximizing a single quality without being radically revisionary (see Singer)
- (Should we be revisionary? If so, on what basis?)
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cultural variation (see Operationalising Moral Foundations Theory and Liberals vs Conservatives)
- also flows, to some extent from #1 because different cultures have different problems
- consequence: What feels "obviously right" to one person or group may feel wrong to another, not due to error, but due to putting different weight on different areas of concern.
- significance: we cannot think of ethics as the quest for culturally universal rules or norms without being radically revisionary (see Scanlon)
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fast processes are unreliable outside familiar situations (see Cognitive Miracles: When Are Fast Processes Unreliable?)
- Assuming the dual-process theory, intuitions are consequences of faster processes. These processes are adapted for solving problems in familiar situations (very roughly, the specific environments our ancestors faced). They are unreliable when applied to unfamiliar problems. Many modern ethical dilemmas (e.g., involving global poverty, climate change, bioethics) are unfamiliar problems.
- consequence: intuitions, whether about particular cases or general principles, are not a basis for ethical knowledge concerning unfamiliar problems (and we do not need ethical theories for the familiar problems because faster processes are super reliable for those problems).
Conclusion: The prospects for theories in normative ethics which aim to endorse universal and strongly justified moral principles are not good. We should consider alternatives.
Targets
Which ethical theories are targeted by the challenge?
Nuances
The argument is not for moral relativism or nihilism. It's not saying "anything goes" or that there are no moral truths. It's saying that our access to those truths is more limited than many philosophical theories assume.
The argument does not aim to oppose all ethical theorizing. It's advocating for a more modest, pragmatic, and context-sensitive approach. Indeed the alternative I will propose in a moment, ethical gambling, is still a form of ethical reasoning, but it acknowledges uncertainty.
The argument is not saying we should not be radically revisionary. The challenge arises from recognizing that consequentialism (say) is a radically revisionary project. This makes justifying its adoption challenging, particularly as there are theoretically coherent alternatives. (The alternatives come from a wide range of perspectives including virtue ethics and contractualism.)
The argument is not saying that all existing ethical theories are wrong. It’s saying that the challenge to them justifies extreme modesty in how confident we can be that they are true.
Ethical Bets
How should we do ethics if we cannot rely on not-justified-inferentially premises?
Greene (2014) and Singer (2005) propose some kind of consequentialism. Such theories have many implications covering every decision you and I make, large or small. But the arguments for them are not compelling. Given what we learned about moral pluralism (see Moral Pluralism: Beyond Harm), they views appear revisionary insofar as they are committed to moral monism. Although this is not necessarily a problem, some explanation for the revision is needed. A further difficulty is that philosophers have defended a wide range of incompatible theories. As an outsider, it is not possible to know which, if any, of these theories is the true one.
Meanwhile we face practical problems with ethical aspects. Choosing careers, giving money and time, staying here or moving there. Some people even experience buying a coffee, shopping for food and disposing of their waste as actions with an ethical dimension. Here I think it is helpful to know that we do not know what is right. The complexity of even the most mundane decisions contrasts with the slender justification we might have for any general ethical principle or theory. This is just the kind of situation that calls for gambling.
We can make bets. To illustrate, consider Pogge’s question:
Do ‘the global poor have a much stronger moral claim to that 1 percent of the global product they need to meet their basic needs than we affluent have to take 81 rather than 80 percent for ourselves’? (Pogge, 2005, p. 2)
Confidently making a bet on the answer to this question does not require knowing ethical truths. Nor does it entail commitment to any ethical principles. Gambling is about identifying and exploiting favourable risk-reward ratios, not about having a consistent set of principles.
Pogge’s approach also illustrates one way in which philosophy is useful independently of yielding knowledge of ethical truths. Much of Pogge’s argument is an attempt to show that opposing ethical theories generate the same answer to the above question. And, in particular, that libertarianism, which is usually thought of as strong on property rights and so opposed to redistribution, does nevertheless support a positive answer to his question about the global poor. As ethical gamblers, the existence of multiple routes to the same answer, especially multiple routes with inconsistent starting points, is exactly the kind of thing that can increase our confidence in a bet.
Glossary
Claims made on the basis of perception (That jumper is red, say) are typically not-justified-inferentially.
Why not just say ‘noninferentially justified’? Because that can be read as implying that the claim is justified, noninferentially. Whereas ‘not-justified-inferentially’ does not imply this. Any claim which is not justified at all is thereby not-justified-inferentially.