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When Socrates (as quoted by Plato) said, “We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live,” he suitably introduced our topic for this morning. Louis Pojman echoed Socrates when he said that ethics, unlike its sister subjects of law, etiquette, and religion, goes more deeply into the essence of our social existence, seeking reasons, rather than authority or revelation, to guide our conduct and improve our character. “As such,” he said, “it is the most important activity known to humans.”
Why is it then that we spend so little time carefully examining the fundamental moral principles upon which we base (or at least ought to base) our decisions and our conduct? Let me start us moving us in that direction by exploring three of the main ways in which philosophers have formulated general systems of ethics. It’s probably better than merely living by the “seat of our pants,” as so many people actually do so much of the time. That’s what Socrates was probably driving at when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living, thought it may be equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.
The first and possibly the simplest strategy for organizing our moral criteria into a system is to list and prioritize our leading values and convert them into goals for our ethical endeavors. That’s what the 19th Century British philosopher John Stuart Mill was doing, in his book Utilitarianism, when he said that the pursuit of happiness is the #1 goal to which all our other worthwhile goals must be subordinated. Other philosophers such as Joseph Priestley and Mill’s mentor Jeremy Bentham had said similar things before, but it was Mill who gave it the name Utilitarianism. He genuinely believed that seeking happiness while avoiding its opposite is always the main thing that ought to make us tick, and that we should always care about other people’s happiness as well as our own. Ideally we should try to find the best way to maximize the total happiness in the world every time we make an ethical decision. Even when it’s not a win-win situation and all we can do is try to cut our losses, there at least ought to be a best way to do that.
At first Mill felt that maximizing total happiness was the only moral rule we would ever need. He called this the Greatest Happiness Principle (GHP), and elevated it above all other competing principles such as the Golden Rule as our main moral guideline. Then in the later editions of his book, partly under the influence of his wife Harriet who had raised a child in her first marriage while Mill had been a longtime bachelor, Mill granted that other rules can be used as “rules of thumb” to help us apply the GHP, provided that these auxiliary rules also have a tendency to promote total happiness in the long run. Ironically, as any experienced parent knows, there are plenty of situations where having a few more rules to invoke can actually help us simplify a complex situation, and it can even help us resolve a moral dilemma such as how to preserve a modicum of happiness in a conflicted family setting.
Under this revised system, which is usually called Rule Utilitarianism, as distinct from Mill’s original plan which is usually called Act Utilitarianism, we can have as many extra rules as it takes to get by. But we should not have so many rules that the rule book gets unwieldy, and we should not have so many that we forget the ultimate importance of the GHP. Furthermore, the subordinate rules must always admit of rational exceptions based on the GHP, while the GHP itself has no real exceptions. The pursuit of maximal total happiness is still our #1 goal, though we reserve the right to seek it in the long run, rather than on the case by case basis required by Act Utilitarianism. For example, the best way for a parent to make two competing siblings happiest in the long run might be to require them to take turns with their favorite toys, even though at any given moment one of them might feel ignored or slighted. Sharing the toys instead might be a more ideal way to promote happiness than taking turns, but in real life it may not work as well. Then when a third sibling comes along, some new rules and/or exceptions may be needed, especially if the family can’t afford to buy any new toys or replace the ones that are already broken despite the existing rules of thumb.
Looking at your own lives, I’m sure you can find familiar examples of these sorts of approaches, though you may not have known the technical names for them at the time. Utilitarianism, and especially Rule Utilitarianism, provides a fairly accurate account of how we actually do make lots of important decisions, and perhaps especially of how we make lots of medium range day to day decisions in our complex and busy lives. When we can’t learn to share or cooperate effectively, sometimes we just have to take turns. That’s how life often is.
Long range goals and rules of thumb are a big improvement over “seat of the pants” thinking, but is that the best we can do? Advocates of Rule-Based Ethics such as the 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant say Utilitarian thinking sells us short as citizens of the human race and misidentifies mere expediency as a key moral principle. They need rigid rules for all occasions instead.
Immanuel Kant was a big fan of the Golden Rule. But he felt it did not go nearly far enough. Something similar to the Golden Rule (but considerably stronger) always ought to apply, but additional rules are required to provide specific situational guidance. Kant called these rules maxims, and he called his strengthened version of the Golden Rule the Categorical Imperative. Every maxim we follow must be consistent with the Categorical Imperative, and the Imperative itself requires us to consistently follow all the applicable maxims. Exceptions are not allowed. Rules of thumb are not rules at all for Kant. The only rules worth following, if you want to claim moral credit for your performance, are the universal rules that every human being would be equally required to follow in the same or similar situation. There are no loopholes for the benefit of yourself, your family, or your friends, and no borderline cases. Legally speaking, it’s like saying there are no aggravating or mitigating circumstances, and no exceptions or excuses, only strict rules and their mandatory applications. Even the law itself is rarely as legalistic as Kant. If Kant were a judge, he would insist on strict sentencing guidelines and permit no plea bargaining, even if that’s the only way to convict other guilty parties.
As a teacher, Kant was known to be strict but fair. He and his students clearly respected one another. Despite starting his first class at 7:00 a.m. six days a week, after his Spartan breakfast and his daily pipe of tobacco, he probably had few students coming late, and he probably didn’t believe in giving any makeup tests or extra credit. Every afternoon, at exactly the same time, he took a walk, by exactly the same route, around his hometown of Konigsberg, and he was so predictable that his neighbors would set their clocks by his routine. So Kant even had rules for his daily exercise. To the best of his ability, he lived by his own strict philosophy. Significantly, he never became a husband or a father, which might have tested the extreme regularity of his habits. His students became his surrogate family instead, and he carefully saved some time every afternoon, between his nap and his walk, for corresponding with graduates who had left the provinces for the capital.
Kant’s rigid schedules were among the maxims that he followed religiously. In fact, the Categorical Imperative itself is merely a very comprehensive rule that says you should always follow all the maxims you’d always want everyone else to follow without fail if they were in your shoes. Even if those additional rules are not written down anywhere, you should try to figure out what they are, or at least what they ought to be, and proceed accordingly. And if you can’t figure it out, you get no moral credit, even if you get good results. You cannot evaluate or rationalize your behavior based on its outcomes if you didn’t know exactly what rules you were following in the first place. Unlike goal-directed ethical systems such as Utilitarianism, Rule-Based Ethics does not focus moral decisions on their anticipated consequences, only on their consistency with the rules. The most desirable outcomes achieved haphazardly, confusedly, or with mixed and/or ulterior motives are actually moral failures in Kant’s book, because genuine moral success entails following the right rules for the right reasons, regardless of the results.
A “little white lie” is still a lie, so if you have rules against lies it’s crucial to put some real teeth in them. When Bobby Jones called a dubious penalty on himself in the 1927 U.S. Open and lost the trophy by a single stroke, he was following Rule-Based Ethics, as every honorable and conscientious golfer must do in a game that has no referee to blow the whistle and enforce the rules. Three years later he was rewarded by winning the Grand Slam, but that’s not the point. Calling the penalty on himself was the only right thing to do, even if no one else saw his ball wiggle ever so slightly after Jones touched his clubhead to the ground behind it. Anything else he did would have been wrong under the Rules of Golf. Jones said if hadn’t called the penalty he wouldn’t have been a golfer. Kant would go one step further and say that calling the penalty on himself made Jones a full-fledged citizen of the human race, and anything else would have made him less of a person, even if only his own self-respect had been at issue rather than the U.S. Open. For Kant there are no practice rounds in the Game of Life. Every stroke is just as important as every other stroke.
Life according to Kant is just like golf, though its rule book is partly unpublished. Everyone is their own referee. To take a nonathletic example, if you’re an unprepared student, and by coincidence you happen to glance unintentionally at the test paper of the best student in the class, you should go immediately to the teacher, hand in a blank paper, confess your guilt, and insist on a zero without a makeup, even if you will therefore fail a required course and have to repeat it. Anything less would make a special exception for yourself, which is not allowed by the Categorical Imperative.
Kant went so far as to say that if you’re an executioner and you’re stranded on a desert island with a properly convicted first degree murderer, you must dutifully carry out the mandatory death sentence, even if you’re the last two humans remaining on the planet. Yet Kant also insisted that you must invoke the rules with unqualified respect for all human beings (including yourself, which may be the hardest part). Anything less than complete, universal respect would demean both the rules and the human race. In the paradoxical example of the executioner, the only way to exhibit total respect for humanity is to lovingly eliminate its last remaining member other than yourself. But later, as you die and your race becomes extinct, you can still rationalize that you did the right thing according to the rules, and that the mandatory death sentence was also appropriate, because that’s the only kind of sentence Kant would have for such a crime. (Hopefully one of the two of you is a female and there’s a sperm bank somewhere. But if the murderer is the female, can the execution wait for a child to be born, and what if the child then turns out to be male? Those are practicalities which the system of rules may require us to ignore.)
Rules don’t have to be as painful or fateful as the above examples might suggest in order to be morally suitable. The popular book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum includes a semi-serious set of rules that he says any child can understand. But some of them like “share everything” are highly idealistic even for adults, while others like “work and play some every day” might be better described as rules of thumb.
A much older approach to morality can be traced back more than two millennia to the ancient Greeks, most specifically to Plato’s student Aristotle who diligently wrote it all down in his book Nichomachean Ethics, dedicated to his father Nichomachus. This is widely reputed to be the first complete textbook of ethics. Aristotle said that what we mainly ought to do is to constantly strive for excellence, but to admit that this is a lifelong process which may not achieve fruition very quickly. Life is an ongoing exercise in character building and self-actualization. Another Greek word for excellence is virtue, and the opposites of virtues are vices, so what Aristotle is advising us to do is to constantly upgrade our virtues and minimize our vices.
One of Aristotle’s favorite virtues is courage, because he can use it to show that either too much courage or too little courage can actually be a vice. The rashly aspiring hero can end up dead, as Achilles did at Troy and Custer did at Little Big Horn, while the coward who runs from the battlefield can end up losing all respect. The wisely and moderately courageous person, like Ulysses at Troy or Washington during most of the Revolutionary War, can carefully work out a winning strategy and intelligently carry it out, without being either a hothead or a coward. Life is not a single battle, and Ulysses lived to fight more battles while Achilles did not. So did Washington, and he won the war while winning only a few strategically selected battles.
There is no complete list of virtues, but some of Aristotle’s other favorites are wisdom and moderation, which Ulysses and Washington also exhibited, and justice, which Aristotle says is both an individual and a societal trait. It consists of a balanced and harmonious interaction of various cooperating parts, either of a society or of a person’s moral character. With these four virtues of courage, wisdom, moderation, and justice well in hand, a person has a good head start on having a better and happier life. But without the patience to spread the developmental process out over a normal human lifespan, our levels of both success and enjoyment may be adversely affected. The vice of impatience was perhaps especially the one that Achilles and Custer perversely exhibited, and despite great human potential they left a lack of its actualization as their tragic historical legacy. Yet even they serve a very important moral purpose, because the rest of us can learn from their mistakes. Aristotle would say that every day offers new occasions to practice our virtues and learn from experience, and in the end we can all achieve better moral character as a result. But there is no single formula that everyone should follow, since our talents and our opportunities may differ.
There are many familiar lists of virtues other than Aristotle’s. The Scouts list ten of them, which I once had memorized in my pursuit of enough merit badges to reach first class. Then they threatened to make me the patrol leader, and I left the Scouts to pursue excellence in golf instead. It’s hard to say which experience taught me more. St. Paul lists faith, hope, and charity as his three main virtues, though the third and greatest of these is sometimes translated as love, and some theologians add other virtues such as humility to the docket. There are also various lists of vices, such as the Seven Deadly Sins. But not everyone agrees that pride belongs on the list, despite Dante’s placement of it at the nadir of human imperfection. Whatever list of virtues and vices you decide to follow, be sure to remember Aristotle’s profound advice that the process of character building can be long and slow, which is still quite acceptable if you’re making steady progress toward becoming the best person you can eventually be.
To summarize the key differences among these three alternative ethical perspectives, let’s suppose that a Utilitarian, a follower of Rule-Based Ethics, and a practitioner of Virtue Ethics are the captains of three different boats with three different philosophical crews sailing down a long river with many populated islands. You may call it the River of Life, and you man call the captains Mill, Kant, and Aristotle if you wish. Thinking of the Garth Brooks song The River may also help activate your imagination as we travel hypothetically down the river.
The Utilitarian would use the GHP and try to bring the greatest possible happiness to the inhabitants of each island, but without ignoring the happiness of the rest of the human race. It would be a big challenge, because the islanders would be strangers at first and the rest of the human race would mostly remain so. But the captain would give it his best shot. Occasionally the captain might have to make rules of thumb to simplify the immense task of trying to make everyone else happy without making oneself miserable. But of course those rules of thumb would have to permit many reasonable exceptions based on the GHP, because that’s the only rule that always applies fully intact. At times it would just be a question of avoiding pain or unhappiness. If they arrived at an island where visiting strangers are eaten alive or sacrificed to a local deity, it might be a pretty good idea to leave immediately, and hope that the hungry islanders can find something else rather than someone else to eat.
The Rule-Based Ethicist would have one set of universal rules for all the different islanders, and the same set of rules would always apply to the crew and the rest of the human race as well. So at each island it would merely be a question of how to apply the rules to that situation. The rules themselves would be “chiseled in stone,” as it were. Like the Golden Rule, the one rule that would govern all the other rules would be the Categorical Imperative, which is to always follow the maxims that every one else ought to follow in every situation. Many otherwise avoidable conflicts and inconveniences would arise, and some unhappiness would very likely occur. But at least they could rationalize that they were always doing the right thing, even if they ended up being eaten or sacrificed when they tried to persuade the aforementioned islanders that their barbaric customs should be prohibited by moral rules.
The follower of Virtue Ethics would try to pursue excellence by having an excellent and educational overall journey. There might not be equal time to stop at every island along the way, so some of the islands would be visited only briefly. But some of them would be visited at sufficient length to serve as character building experiences. At the end of the journey the captain and the crew would be better and happier people as a result, but they might not feel that way at each individual stopping point en route. If some of the islanders benefit from their visits, so much the better. But even during the longer visits this may not always work out. The journey as a whole is what matters most. It’s probably a good idea to avoid cannibals and human sacrificers. Aristotle himself left Athens to avoid the heroic but tragic fate of Socrates, much as Jackie went off and married a Greek when they kept killing Kennedys. But it’s even more important for the captain to avoid the sharp rocks on one shoreline and the hungry crocodiles on the other. The river is both long and short, and practical wisdom takes both into account.
As you can see from the example of the River of Life, Virtue Ethics has quite a lot of good common sense to recommend it. It’s not just a matter of memorizing a list of virtues such as the Scout code, or avoiding a list of vices such as the Seven Deadly Sins. The pursuit of excellence can never be reduced to such simple formulas.
Likewise, the pursuit of happiness cannot be reduced to a single simple formula either, though some doctrinaire Act Utilitarians have suggested that we ought to try. And there will never be a complete rulebook for the Great Game of Life, let alone a single comprehensive rule that always prevails and helps us decide which other rules to apply to a particular situation or dilemma. Even after the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus still tried to follow all Ten Commandments, but he criticized the Pharisees for making the rules too rigid and the list of rules too long. (Kant would probably claim that the Pharisees got a bad rap for this, because they like Jesus were trying to reform the Jewish church, and they simply adopted a different strategy than he did.)
If I had to choose just one of these three perspectives as my personal guide in the Great Game of Life, I’d probably choose Virtue Ethics, though there have been plenty of times in my own life when I might have chosen one of the other two. The older I get, the more I think it’s the entire strange trip that makes us most completely human. Other critters may have harder lives than we do, but we’re condemned to think about it and wonder why. That’s what makes us unique.
The two perspectives that are most likely to agree with one another are Virtue Ethics and Rule Utilitarianism, which probably yielded similar answers in about 80% of the moral situations we studied during my several decades of teaching ethics classes. The two perspectives that are most likely to disagree with one another are Rule-Based Ethics and Act Utilitarianism, which oppose universal rules on the one hand with case-by-case analysis on the other, ignoring practical outcomes in one instance while seeking the best possible situational outcomes in the other. To explore these relationships further, let’s look at some other familiar examples.
Most of you are currently deciding how to vote in the presidential primaries, and most of you probably belong to one of the two major political parties (I won’t say which). Are you basing your vote on the likely electability of the candidate, which would be a Utilitarian approach, or are you basing it on the purity of the candidate’s ideological perspective? This would be a more Rule-Based approach, with a key rule being “always vote your conscience regardless of the outcome.” In the primaries do you also look ahead to the likely opponent in the general election, or do you just try to support the most worthy winner of your own party’s nomination?
And in the general election might you then vote for a third party candidate who more closely reflects your own political viewpoint, even if this takes a vote away from someone else who can realistically defeat a candidate with whom you deeply disagree? Or do you compromise your ideological principles and support your party’s nominee in order to help defeat a highly undesirable contender from the other major party? Many people have refused to make such compromises in recent elections, and they’ve had to live with some unhappy outcomes as a result. Such decisions are not just political, they are also moral in nature, so as you face your own political dilemmas in 2008, please keep some of the ideas we’ve just examined in mind. If you can’t decide between goals and rules, ask old Aristotle for some help. He may have the practical wisdom we’ll all need to sail safely down the turbulent political river ahead.
For another timely example of moral decision making, consider the ethanol issue. At first glance promoting ethanol may seem to be good for the environment and good for Midwestern farmers, but on further analysis that may not be the case. It takes a lot of other energy including quite a bit of petroleum to produce the energy we get from ethanol, and the increased production of corn for ethanol instead of feed corn, using mechanized farming techniques, may not be good for either the environment or the balance of the economy. Increased feed corn prices may cause meat and milk prices to rise, while decreased wheat production may cause bread prices to rise. Or a corn glut may then cause corn prices to fall drastically while the other prices remain high until the market adjusts. With wheat production lagging in other countries due to droughts this year, global wheat shortages are yet another possibility. In the big picture the Midwestern farmers might be wiser to devote some of their fields to windmills instead, as quite a number have already done just a few miles east of here. Sugar cane is a much more efficient source of biofuel than corn is, but that does not help farmers in cold climates. We may think of these as purely economic decisions on the parts of the farmers, but they are ethical decisions as well, and the policies of state and national governments in promoting energy alternatives like wind power and nuclear power are intensely ethical in their theoretical dimensions. During the talkback we can try to decide how our different philosophers would come down on the issues of ethanol versus petroleum and other options such as wind, solar, or nuclear.
As a sequel to this preliminary effort at presenting classical ethical theory in a more practical modern vein, hopefully you will indulge me another time soon. Then I can try to explain why the recently deceased Harvard philosopher John Rawls thought the American Constitution was a truly wonderful application of moral theory to a political situation, but that a much more perfect Social Contract would have emerged if the participants in the Constitutional Convention had merely pretended to be the most disadvantaged members of their society rather than the highly advantaged people that they actually were. All of them were adult white male property owners, and most of them were at least moderately wealthy, in land and possibly slaves if not in money. But what if they had been slaves or women or children instead? What kind of a Constitution would have emerged? Clearly it would have ended slavery rather than waiting for a bloody Civil War to do that, but would it also have included as Constitutional provisions such things as child labor laws and women’s suffrage and some of FDR’s social legislation of the 1930’s, and perhaps even some other measures that are still being debated such as universal health care and the ERA?
That’s the sort of question that Rawls would require us to ask in his uniquely American version of Social Contract Theory, and in 1971 it gave rise in A Theory of Justice to a book that is widely touted as being the greatest philosophical treatise of the 20th Century. But our time today is too short to permit anything other than a brief preview of Rawls, so let me end by asking what questions or comments you may have about the three ethical viewpoints that I’ve just summarized.
By the way, Rawls is just one of several Unitarians whom I’ve mentioned today. The others are Priestley and Fulghum, both Unitarian ministers, and Mill’s wife Harriet, whose first husband John Taylor was a leading Unitarian layman in London. As in so many other intellectual arenas, Unitarians have always had more than their share to say about ethical theory.
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