Ethics
Riggs vs Palmer:
In the 1880’s a case appeared in front of New York courts. Elmer Palmer had poisoned his grandfather, Francis Palmer, and he was convicted for the murder. The two daughters of Francis Palmer then petitioned the court to void the parts of Francis Palmer’s will that included Elmer, his murderer. At this point the contract laws regarding the will of the deceased clearly came in conflict with an intuitive moral understanding of the situation. The court, though, has a responsibility to follow the codified laws of the region. In the end, the court ruled that if the execution of a statute results an in absurd or unreasonable result, then the court has the freedom to interpret that statute with regards to the original law maker’s intention. This forces us to ask the question: How can a judge, or an ethical philosopher, reliably identify absurd or unreasonable results? How do we know what is right? What is ethical?
The Allegory of Calumny by Botticelli
ETHICS and the Ways of Knowing:
Faith:
Perhaps the most relevant obstacle to building Ethical knowledge is the grounding problem. Where do we start? Upon what axioms can we build? For many the axioms of Ethical knowledge are linked with the concept of the divine. Divine Command Theory, for example, states that morality is dependent on a God. The most famous refutation of this argument dates back to Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro and has since been called “The Euthyphro Question”. Essentially the question asks whether an act is good because God commands it to be so, or whether God commands an act because it is good? The difficulty answering that question reflects that broader difficulty of the grounding problem.
Mining the works of the philosopher Thomas Aquinas will also surface interesting research on a search for axioms and the associated “Natural Law Theory”. In short, Natural Law Theory, which, in a modified form continues to be used today, claims that we have a natural morality built in (see Intuition). Aquinas linked this with God, but modern advocates find surfaces to build upon.
Reason:
The Enlightenment in Europe birthed efforts to deduce the axioms of morality through the use of reason. Most famously Immanuel Kant articulated Categorical Imperatives to that end. For example, his universalizing principle asks the knower to reason whether a given action can be universalized. “Is it OK to lie about enjoying oneself at a dinner party?” Well, since it is not OK to lie about enjoying oneself every time in all possible situations, then it is never OK to lie about enjoying oneself. This belief that an action can be moral is called the deontological argument.
Another attempt to deduce the axioms of morality is the Utilitarian argument. Utilitarianism states that a moral action creates the most happiness for the greatest amount of people and was promoted most notably by John Stuart Mills and Jeremy Bentham. This is also called the consequentialism since it deals with the consequences of an action rather than the action itself.
Both of these frameworks (the deontological approach and consequentialism) attempt to solve the grounding problem through reason. Kant starts with the action itself and Bentham starts with the impact of the action and assumes happiness and pleasure to be the goal of human behavior.
Memory:
Ethics has a close relationship to rituals involving highly emotional elements of the human experience. Cultural expectations around marriage and or the raising of offspring appear in every culture, though the definition of marriage may differ. These rituals demonstrate a cultural experience or shared memory system passed down from generation to generation.
This is also an area to explore an attack on Ethical knowledge from Cultural Relativists. Cultural Relativism states that there is no universal ethical foundation (no answer to the grounding problem), but that ethics can only be built within a cultural expectation dependent on the shared memory of a given culture.
We can also discuss Contractualism here and how it deals with both shared cultural knowledge and individual shared knowledge. The belief in a social contract, that we all sacrifice parts individual freedoms willingly in exchange for the benefits of social living, depends on a shared knowledge within social communities. Additionally, it explains individual selfless actions through Reciprocal Altruism: the process whereby an organism sacrifices its own fitness temporarily to advance another's with the expectation that will be reciprocated in the future; a personal, biological, manifestation the social contract.
Intuition:
Lon Fuller (1902-1978) attempted to create a secular natural law theory by solving the grounding problem our moral intuition rather than the divine. He articulates a parable of King Rex who fails to make a law disregarding eight principles that include Clarity, Non-Contradiction, and Possibility of Compliance among others.
In the field of Natural Law John Finnis (b. 1940) has expanded on Thomas Aquinas (see faith) and refutes Kant (among others) who believe that Ethical knowledge can be arrived at through reason. He believes reason can help us achieve our desires, but not what we “should” desire. He created a list of seven “basic forms of human flourishing” that are desired for their own sake, intuitively, by all human communities at all times including Life, Knowledge, Friendship, Aesthetic Experience, et cetera.
Additionally, there is an argument among Ethical philosophers to combat the attack from relativism which states that there are universal, instinctual moral issues that address the grounding problem. Take, for example, the ethical treatment of the dead. A quick look at the funerary traditions of different cultures would produce a litany of diverse traditions, which seems to confirm a belief in relativism. But the fact that all these cultures agree that there should be some way of coping with death proves that there is an instinct to do so. Local implementation may differ, but the instinct of moral action persists.
We may also look to examples of instinctive behavior in other animals that appears to have a moral grounding like Reciprocal Altruism discussed above (see Memory).
Imagination:
The jurist Ronald Dworkin claimed that law worked like a novel or play and required interpretation and that the role of a judge is to continue the story by writing a new chapter as new cases expose gaps in the existing narrative through unprecedented dilemas. In this way the legal judge (and often moral judge) is required to activate a moral imagination to build knowledge.
Additionally one could point to attempts to solve the grounding problem through the divine, mythology, or storytelling as an attempt to build moral authority from an instinctual or cultural moral framework. In this way, imagination is a tool for the Ethical philosopher to help construct narratives which aid our understanding of moral issues; the stories are ‘clothes’ we give our ethical knowledge.
Sense Perception:
In the 1980’s and 90’s researchers in Padua realized that monkeys who watched a person handling a snack had the same areas of their brain become active as if they were handling the snack themselves. This neural activity is the result of something called “mirror neurons” and they have a close relationship with the concept of empathy. In this way our sense perception actually triggers empathic reactions.
There is also the question of Ethical art whether sense perception can be leveraged to improve our moral behavior. Baroque art, for example, or the Gothic Cathedral with its use of light and height is founded on this principle.
Language:
Once again we are left with a Wittgensteinian linguistic issue dealing with words like, “Good”, “Bad”, “Right”, “Wrong”, “Rights”, “Freedoms” and so on. The definitions of these words are central to our understanding of Ethics, but different cultures define these terms in different ways and in different circumstances.
Additionally Legal Positivism, associated with the philosophy John Austin, states that laws, which codify and promote ethical behavior, are defined as commands of a sovereign. These commands use language as the exclusively mode of communicating laws and therefore moral behavior is grounded on the use of language by a ruling entity. In short, the grounding problem is solved through hierarchical structures and the use of language.
Emotion:
The notion of Utilitarianism explained above (under Reason) takes a central premise that to do good is to promote happiness and in this way emotion is linked intrinsically to ethics.
Additionally, often our Ethical behavior comes from empathy rather than Reason or any other way of knowing. If we see that a person crying, it will make most of uncomfortable and we will look to help. If we hear about the large number of people impacted by a war torn area, though, we are not similarly animated. We are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior to help an individual in front of us than help a number of people across the world. This, obviously, also includes intuition as a way of knowing, but it is a clear example of our dependance on Emotion rather than reason in Ethical behavior.
Get Lesson Plans
Some lessons plans for teaching Ethics. Please make a copy of any google docs and modify as you see fit and credit the website.