Moral Philosophy Underlying Professional Ethics

What are good, bad, virtue, rights, justice, duty, morals, ethics, obligations, evil, values, character, and happiness? What are our obligations to our selves, others, and society? How can we make the world a better place? How can we live authentic, fulfilled, happy lives? What should our ultimate goal in life be? Is living morally most conducive to true happiness? What makes something right or wrong? Is it possible for a good enough end to justify bad means, or do considerations of justice sometimes stand in the way of this? Does morality depend on the commands of God? Are there really objective facts about right or wrong, perhaps transcending differences across cultures and times, or is morality ultimately subjective and/or "relative"? Does anyone ever really act from unselfish motives?

Moral philosophy is usually divided into normative ethics and metaethics.

Normative ethics concerns itself with the substantive ethical questions we all deal with, such as
"What has value?" and "What are our moral obligations?". This is the whole range of applied ethics on which most students wish to focus.

Metaethics, on the other hand, asks philosophical questions about ethics, rather than ethical questions per se. Metaethics asks "What is value?" rather than "What has value?" And, "What can make it the case that we ought to do something?" rather than "What ought we to do?".

The term philosophical ethics sometimes refers to the project of integrating metaethics and normative ethics in a systematic way, trying to gain insight into what is valuable and obligatory (normatively) by understanding what value and obligation are (metaethically).

The great systematic ethical philosophies, such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Mill, for example, can all be read as examples of philosophical ethics — attempts to integrate moral requirements in our lives by understanding what ethics are and how they apply.

In this course we want to get some grounding in ethical philosophy to give us tools to solve ethical problems in our personal and professional lives. We will grapple with ethical issues. In the process we will also become familiar with the vocabulary and the general outlines of several major theoretical approaches to ethics.

We will follow two parallel tracks. One is historical and the other contemporary.

We will look at writing by and about major ethical philosophers and explore their ethical systems. We start with the ancient Greeks and move through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, the Romantic era and through the contemporary period. We look at Plato's ideas of Justice and the Good, Aristotle's virtue ethics, Aquinas' divine command theory and various thinker's ideas of natural law. We look at egoism and utilitarianism (including views by both Bentham and Mill). We look at Kant's deontology and his sources in Rousseau. We look at social contract theory and theories of human rights. We touch on theories of relativism, pluralism and particularism. And we finish up with several contemporary theories of care.

Many students are so thoroughly grounded in the contemporary modern perspective that they balk at the historical theories. They reject the absolutism and the extreme rationality of most historical theories (or the more conservative insist of greater absolutism and even more extreme rationality). They stumble over the language and insist on criticizing historical ideas from the perspective of the present. They fail to appreciate how much our current perspectives are grounded in the historical and therefore how an intellectual history can provide insight that is otherwise difficult of impossible to gain.

As a counter balance to this reticence to understand the historical in its own terms, we will simultaneously examine in greater depth one contemporary moral theory - Charles Taylor's Ethics of Authenticity. We will supplement that reading with essays by Isaiah Berlin and Ruth Abby.

Objectives: Why Study Moral Philosophy?

(beyond gaining core credit ... ) Studying moral philosophy provides a key to self-understanding, for our values are largely responsible for shaping who and what we are, both in our social and personal selves. By acquiring an understanding of the development of moral thought - moving beyond commons sense, students acquire a richer appreciation of the present and possibilities for the future.

Intellectual growth entails the development of academic skills. Effective reading, writing, thinking; analysis and synthesis of concepts; and understanding of key events, ideas and forces that have shaped the world, all contribute to the education the University seeks to provide. Gaining insight into the development of ethics, students expand their basis for understanding themselves and shaping their worlds and a reference point for respecting the autonomous development of diverse elements of all cultures.

What are ethics?

Originally, ethics (Greek êthos - êthikos) simply meant people's customs or character and conduct.

Does ethics mean any more than this today?

When we think about ethics we focus on the values and norms by which people measure their lives and in which they find meaning. We ask how we (or others) should live, mindful of ends, means and intentions (Midgley 1993).

Ethical Objectivism, Relativism and Pluralism

Have you ever been in a situation where there was a misunderstanding or conflict and you felt, or knew, that the resolution lay in reconciling different standpoints? When people misunderstand one another, sometimes the source of that misunderstanding comes from them having different worldviews or perspectives — different values. We say they are coming from different places.

If the misunderstanding is explicitly about ethical questions, there are potentially many different views. One person or group might hold that justice is the most important issue. Someone else cares most about fairness; another respect; another tolerance; or doing one's duty, or happiness, or doing the right thing, or maximizing good, or avoiding harm or maximum efficiency or following God's commands or being a good person.

What are the sources of these different views?

Max Weber once said,

The imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence
(Weber — Science as a Vocation, 1919).

Our values, norms and the sources of meaning in our lives are part of conceptual and cultural constructions called
'horizons' by Gadamer	and Nietzsche ,

'worldviews' by Dilthey,	'genre de vie' by Vidal,
'epistemes ' by Foucault,	'forms-of-life' by Wittgenstein,
'constellations of absolute presuppositions' by Collingwood
'paradigms' by Thomas Kuhn, and	'character' by Alisdair MacIntyre

I use the term 'framework' to characterize constructions human beings impose on their world to make sense of it.

We all have them. Frameworks are active processes expressed in language and forms-of-life. People use frameworks of feeling and understanding to define the world, its organization, processes and direction. These constructions define how people judge their lives and determine how full or empty their lives are.

Frameworks are our sources of identity — what Charles Taylor (1989) calls

"the sources of the self."

At different times in history and in different places in the world, frameworks have been based on such things as

the belief in an hierarchical chain of being in the universe,
the call of God made clear in revelation,
a theory of correspondence between heaven and earth,
the guidance of dreams obtained on a spirit quest, or
the space of glory in the memory and song of the tribe.

If we are going to successfully resolve our hypothetical ethical misunderstanding, we might force a single viewpoint on all of the participants - "I'm right, you're wrong, this is how it is".

However, such a heavy handed approach would not respect the personal and multicultural diversity that we encounter in the world. It might well fail to preserve justice, fairness, and happiness, etc. — the very values over which the people in our hypothetical disagreement are at odds.

One term for this heavy handed approach is ethnocentrism — projecting our own values and beliefs on to others without adequately taking their frameworks into consideration — claiming one set of views is universal and therefore trumps all others.

If we are going to avoid ethnocentrism, we need to discern the different ethical assumptions that people are making, what it is they are trying to accomplish, what they value, their sources of meaning, and bridge the misunderstanding by finding common ground — often, a common language and ways of understanding the world, that expresses differences in comparable terms.

Philosophy can help us do that. Learning the major moral theories, getting more precise definitions of terms, learning about the different ways or categories of thinking about (and living) ethics helps us clarify our thoughts, understand and empathize with others, and gives us tools to help solve the difficult situations we all face.

That said, most philosophies (and most religions) maintain that there is only one truth, that two contradictory propositions cannot both be true, that all people, everywhere, at all times, if they are seeking truth, are striving toward the same ends. How can we reconcile this philosophical "monism" with personal and multicultural diversity?

Objectivism, Relativism and Pluralism

Objectivism

Western moral philosophy has long sought universal norms that would apply forever, to everyone, in all situations: objective truth. It seeks a single objective foundation for knowledge against which all are judged (e.g., Plato's Theaeteus, Descartes' Meditations , Kant's Critiques, Rawls' Theory of Justice, Habermas' theory of communicative action). Such moral universalism insists we judge others solely by our own criteria, resulting, potentially, in an illegitimate ethnocentric projection of our values onto others.

For the most part, Western moral philosophy views ethics top-down, as an expression of theory. It tries to justify systematized sets of rules of right and wrong through logic and consistency or coherence, looking for a single, universal, objective foundation for moral judgment. This objectivism almost inevitably slides into ethnocentrism as some privileged understanding of rationality is falsely legitimated by claiming for it an unwarranted universality.

However ethics, as a social practice, lived from the bottom-up, goes beyond codified rules to touch our sources of meaning, clarifying for us our understanding of our selves and our lives both individually and in the many collectivities of which we are a part.

Ideally, we want to be able to gain the clarity, precision and understanding that comes from knowing the various systems of moral philosophy. However to use this knowledge we need to know what ethics are both logically from the top down and empathetically and experientially from the bottom up — understanding them in social practice, as an integral part of all our lives and the lives of others, as well as in theory.

Relativism

When I ask my undergraduate students about values — both their own and those used to evaluate other groups, cultures or places — their discussion often settles into a kind of relativism: "everyone has her or his own values, all values are equally valid, we cannot judge others' — 'everything is relative' — 'it's all good' — 'whatever'.

Without further prodding, victim to subjectivization and relativism, the discussion usually stops there.

We are, each day, confronted by personal, social and environmental problems. Dealing with these problems is complicated by various social attitudes, what Charles Taylor (1991) calls 'malaises of modernity'.

The extreme philosophical and personal relativism of some of my students, is an example of this kind of malaise — attitudes that can paralyze us individually, spiritually, intellectually, and socially. This paralysis leads to unfulfilled lives, inaction, misunderstanding and intolerance. It exacerbates social injustice, undermines relationships and institutions, aggravates environmental destruction and alienates us from the world and ultimately from ourselves.

In this course we are reading Charles Taylor's Ethics of Authenticity. Taylor makes several observations:

He talks about several commentators who have condemned the spread of an outlook that makes self-fulfillment the major value in life and that seems to recognize few external demands or serious commitments to others. They claim this selfishness leads to narcissism (Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self) , hedonism (Daniel Bell The Contradictions of Capitalism) or a narrowing and flattening of life (Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind).

Hanna Arendt (The Human Condition) Bellah et al. (The Good Society) and De Tocqueville (De la Démocratie en Amérique) have raised concerns about this slide.

Most strongly contemptuous of this culture of self-directed narcissism perhaps, is Allan Bloom (1987:61) who says this movement has made today's students,

narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that there are alternatives to it. ... Flatter, because without interpretations of things, without the poetry or the imagination's activity, their souls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around.

However, Taylor contends that the egoism of these students has historical roots, that it is founded in a legitimate ideal of authenticity and the closely related concept of self-determining freedom. The problem does not lie in their values but in how they are applied.

Briefly, he sketches out three ideas: (1) that authenticity is a valid ideal; (2) that we can argue in reason about ideals and the conformity of practices to ideals; and (3) that these arguments can make a difference.

The importance of the ideal of authenticity goes back to the late 18th Century and the work of the human geographer and ethnographer, Johann Gottfried Von Herder. Herder was part of the Counter-Enlightenment — those who felt the objectivism of Enlightenment left something essential out its view of the world and led to profound alienation. The Enlightenment for these thinkers was too objective, too cold, too instrumentalist — it left out spirituality and emotion.

In response, Herder’s insight was that for peoples and for individuals, my humanity is unique, it is not equivalent to yours and the unique quality can only be revealed in my life itself.

“Each man has his own measure, as it were an accord peculiar to him of all his feelings to each other” (Herder VIII. 1).

It is not just that people are different. It is that the differences take on a moral importance so we can ask if a form-of-life is an authentic expression of an individual or of a people. How someone lives matters.

Herder, along with Rousseau and Hamann, can be seen as the originators of "Expressivism" (a term used by Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor, among others).

Expressivism views human life as ‘self-expression.’

By expressing our selves, we clarify for ourselves what our values are, and thereby what our selves are. Our lives realize an essence or form.

The idea of who I am is not fully determinate before hand, but only made clear in being fulfilled, in the sense that sometimes I don’t know what I think until I am able to articulate it or act it out—to express it.

Living our lives expresses our purposes, allows us to realize them and can clarify for us our purposes. Expression is not only the fulfillment of life but also can clarify its meaning. e.g. by being brave, I redefine what being brave means, for myself and others in my community.

In living a ‘good’ life, I not only fulfill my humanity, but clarify what my humanity is about. As clarification, my life-form is not just the fulfillment of purpose but the embodiment of meaning—the expression of an idea.

So for my students who say 'all values are equally valid, we cannot judge others' — underlying their reasoning, as a limit of thought, is something like the following:

People have the right to develop their own forms-of-life based on what they think is important. Each of us should find some way of life that satisfies us and is authentically our own. No one else can dictate its content—to let someone else tell us who to be would be to give up our freedom to be ourselves. Our values are compatible with our forms-of-life. Because our lives are unique, each of us will have a unique set of values. Since values are a matter of opinion, we cannot criticize others' values.

However, subjectivization of the manner of one's life does not require subjectivization of the matter. Each person or people are their own measure but we can still argue that the background of what we take as significant comes from our situation - interactions with others, our place in nature, against a horizon of meaning that we only arrive at in interaction with the world and with one another through discourse and experience. The horizons of significance are not of our own choosing. Charles Taylor (1991:40-41) says:

I can identify my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters. Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.

And that insight is a way out of the dilemma of relativism. We can judge if someone is living up to their potential. We can judge whether they are living up to their own values. And, in the context of shared experience or a shared problem, we can judge different values as better or worse at achieving a particular end. We move our students beyond the malaise of relativism by getting them to think about what it is that matters to them, crucially. We strive to help them see their own frameworks - their horizons of significance - and those of others.

Pluralism

In social science in general, to move beyond ethnocentrism, we need to be open to changes in our own worldview as we engage others in discourse to solve our mutual problems. To avoid ethnocentric prejudice we must move beyond objectivist explanations to understanding and interpretation that makes sense of agents by contrasting their self-understanding with our own. In coming to know others we expand our horizons and come to deeper understanding of our selves. This also helps us understand science's "situatedness" — the importance of geographical and historical perspective in understanding natural and human phenomena (Geertz 1983; Taylor 1985b; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Barnes and Duncan 1991).

Other societies may be incomprehensible in terms of our own frameworks and we must strive for a perspective that explains what they do and shows it to make sense to us under their description. This is not to suggest that we should solely adopt the point of view of the "other" assuming all societies are relative and cannot be compared. Taylor calls this kind of cultural relativism the "incorrigibility thesis" because describing cultures solely in their own terms rules out accounts which show them up as wrong or confused—they are incapable of being corrected or critiqued, i.e., incorrigible. Our discourses should explain what the agent is doing and they should improve upon common-sense understanding. When judging others, how can we avoid making cross-cultural study an exercise in ethnocentric prejudice?

The answer lies in confronting other's frameworks while authentically being open to change in our own viewpoints. This is close to Gadamer's (1975) 'fusion of horizons'. Openness to change in theoretical stance and self-understanding of the researcher is missing from the grand totalizing theories of science — e.g., psychoanalysis, evolutionism, or sociobiology.

Our investigation should challenge both our language of self-understanding and theirs, maintaining science's own, proper, critical role. We seek a language of clearly understood contrast that compares our framework and the other's framework as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both.

We are always in danger of seeing our ways of being as the only conceivable ones. The language of perspicuous contrast allows us to make finer distinctions, sensitive to the other's perspective. In finding this language we redescribe what we and others are doing. If done while authentically open to change in our normative viewpoints, such activity provides the flexibility to alter our own self-understanding and avoid ethnocentricity. Potentially, understanding is increased, the range of possible human expression is enlarged, we gain new tools with which to approach human problems and achieve social science as cultural critique.

References