Consider ethics theory readings and contemporary issues

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Consider Ethics Theory, Readings and Contemporary Issues

Bruce N. Waller Third Edition

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Table of Contents

P E A R S O N C U S T O M L I B R A R Y

I

1. Thinking About Ethics

1

1Bruce N. Waller

2. Egoism and Relativism

20

20Bruce N. Waller

3. Ethics, Emotions, and Intuitions

40

40Bruce N. Waller

4. Ethics and Reason

72

72Bruce N. Waller

5. Utilitarian Ethics

87

87Bruce N. Waller

6. Pluralism and Pragmatism

108

108Bruce N. Waller

7. Social Contract Ethics

134

134Bruce N. Waller

8. Virtue Ethics

153

153Bruce N. Waller

9. Care Ethics

169

169Bruce N. Waller

10. Ethical Nonobjectivism

186

186Bruce N. Waller

11. Moral Realism

200

200Bruce N. Waller

12. The Scope of Morality

211

211Bruce N. Waller

13. Free Will

230

230Bruce N. Waller

II

14. Freedom, Moral Responsibility, and Ethics

256

256Bruce N. Waller

15. The Death Penalty

275

275Bruce N. Waller

16. Abortion

291

291Bruce N. Waller

17. Should the Police Use Deceit in Interrogations?

303

303Bruce N. Waller

18. Homosexual Sex

320

320Bruce N. Waller

19. Can Terrorism Ever Be Justified?

334

334Bruce N. Waller

20. Should Performance-Enhancing Drugs Be Banned from Athletics?

346

346Bruce N. Waller

363

363Index

Thinking About Ethics

ETHICS AND CRITICAL THINKING This is an invitation to think carefully about the nature of ethics and ethical inquiry. You’ve no doubt already thought carefully about a good many ethical issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, environmental ethics, academic honesty, and animal rights. We’ll be looking at some of those issues, and others besides. But we’ll also do something that’s not quite so common—we’ll be thinking about the nature of ethics itself: how do we have knowledge of ethical principles? Is knowledge of ethics similar to knowledge of physics? Can we have knowledge of ethical principles? Are ethical principles fixed or changing? Are they absolute or circum- stantial? These are sometimes called metaethical questions, that is, questions about the nature and concepts of ethics. Thinking carefully about those questions may help in thinking more carefully about such issues as economic justice, abortion, and treatment of animals. In any case, it may help us gain a clearer perspective.

Thinking carefully about ethics involves, rather obviously, thinking carefully. So it will be useful to start with some consideration of how to think carefully, critically, and effectively, and how to avoid some common errors. Some people maintain that ethics is not based on reasoning, but is instead built on emo- tions and feelings, or on intuitions. In fact, some maintain that ethics is not a matter of finding truth at all: there are no objectively true ethical principles, and thus there are no true ethical principles to be discovered through reasoning (nor by any other means). Those are interesting positions, and you may ultimately conclude that ethics is not based on reasoning. But even if that is your conclusion, it is still useful to start with some considerations about critical thinking, since in order to reach such a conclusion you will have to use careful reasoning. We will examine several readings by people who argue against reason-based ethics, as well as several readings arguing that reason is the foundation of ethics. Regardless, all of them give arguments for their views, and those arguments must be critically examined.

What’s the Question? Perhaps the first and most crucial step in critical thinking is the most obvious, but also the most neg- lected: be clear on exactly what is at issue. That is, when examining an argument, think first about precisely what the argument is supposed to be proving; get clear on the conclusion of the argument. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this was the most vicious crime I have ever come across in all my years as dis- trict attorney. It was cruel, callous, heartless, and brutal,” the district attorney insists in her argument to the jury. Is the district attorney’s argument relevant?

That depends. It depends on what conclusion she is arguing for. Suppose she is arguing that the defendant is guilty of a brutal murder, but the question at issue is whether the defendant is the guilty party (the defense

From Chapter 1 of Consider Ethics: Theory, Readings, and Contemporary Issues, Third Edition. Bruce N. Waller. Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. Published by Pearson Prentice Hall. All rights reserved.

Thinking About Ethics

claims this is a case of mistaken identity). In that case, the district attorney’s argument is irrelevant to that conclusion. Everyone agrees the crime was awful; the question is whether the defendant did it. (Incidentally, relevance is not determined by whether the claim is true or false, but by whether it matters if the claim is true or false. It may be true that the crime was brutal, but it remains irrelevant to the defendant’s guilt. And on the other hand, a false claim may be relevant: if an unreliable eyewitness falsely claims to have seen the defendant commit the murder, that claim will certainly be relevant to the question of whether the defendant is guilty. It’s relevant because if it were true, it would be strong proof of the defendant’s guilt: it’s relevant because it matters whether it is true or false). Suppose now that the defendant has already been found guilty, and since this is a capital case the trial has moved on to the sentencing phase. In that case, exactly the same argument (“this was a brutal and heartless crime”) will be relevant to the question of whether the person who did the crime should receive the death penalty. Of course the argument may be relevant without being completely convincing; the jury might decide that the crime was indeed brutal, but other mitigating factors (such as the age of the defen- dant) count more heavily against capital punishment.

When an arguer uses an irrelevant point in support of a conclusion, we say that the arguer has committed the fallacy (or argument error) of irrelevant reason. It is sometimes called the red herring fallacy. When fox hunters would send the hounds out to chase a fox, and then ride their horses across the fields in pursuit of the fox and hounds, they would eventually tire of the “sport,” and wish to go back to the lodge for tea and scones. But the dogs would still be chasing the fox, and thus be difficult to col- lar. So the handler of the dogs would drag a bag of oily cooked herring (herring turns red and becomes very oily when cooked) across the trail of the fox. When the dogs ran into the smelly oil from the red herring, they would lose the scent of the fox, mill around aimlessly, and thus be easy to catch. So that’s where we get the name for the “red herring fallacy”: the fallacy “drags a red herring,” drags a distraction, across the trail of the argument, and thus takes listeners off the track. We get so worked up about the red herring of what a brutal murder it was, we forget that the real issue is whether the defendant is guilty.

Red herrings are a common argument trick. When the Bush administration was arguing for an attack on Iraq, they spent a lot of time talking about the importance of fighting terrorism. Of course every- one is legitimately concerned about terrorism, but the real question was not whether we should fight ter- rorism, but whether Iraq was engaged in terrorism. By dragging the terrorism red herring across the trail of the argument, it was easy to distract people from the more difficult issue, for which proof was very thin: the question of whether Iraq was supporting terrorist activities or providing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

So the first step in evaluating arguments is to be clear on exactly what’s at issue, exactly what the conclusion is. If I’m the defendant in a burglary trial, the prosecutor must prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. But my defense attorney does not have to prove that I didn’t do it; instead, he only needs to show that there is a reasonable doubt of my guilt. If you evaluate the defense attorney’s arguments as if they were designed to prove innocence, then you will evaluate them badly.

Ad Hominem Fallacy There are many argument fallacies in addition to the red herring fallacy, but one of the most important in the study of ethics is the ad hominem fallacy. An ad hominem argument is an argument “to the per- son”; that is, an ad hominem argument is an attack on the person. And an ad hominem fallacy is an attack on the source of an argument. If someone gives an argument, we must evaluate the argument on its own merits, not on the merits of the person giving the argument. Suppose you come into your ethics classroom and discover an argument written on the blackboard, say, an argument against the death penalty. In order to evaluate that argument, you don’t need to know anything at all about who wrote the argument on the board. Suppose you read the argument and decide it is a strong and convincing argument, and then you find it was written by Bill Clinton, the politician you most despise. That would not change the argument. Then you learn that a mistake had been made, and the argument was written by Mother Teresa, one of your moral heroes. That does not change one word of the argument. So if you are evaluating arguments, the source of the argument is irrelevant. And if you attack the source of the argument in order to discredit the argument, you have committed the ad hominem fallacy.

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It is especially important to keep that in mind when discussing ethics, because ethics discussions can get intensely personal and downright hostile. If you don’t believe me, have a nice discussion of the abortion question with someone who holds a view diametrically opposed to your own. Such “discussions” often gen- erate more heat than light, and one reason is because they often degenerate into ad hominem abuse: the pro-choice advocate is branded a “baby killer,” and the pro-life side is called a “neanderthal.” Difficult as it may be to discuss such issues without sliding into fallacious ad hominem arguments, it is essential if there is to be serious ethical inquiry. One way to avoid such abusive arguments is to keep in mind that the character of the arguer is irrelevant to the quality of the argument. When arguing about ethics—or anything else— you can attack arguments as vigorously as you wish, but attacking arguers is fallacious. To see why, consider this example. Spring break is approaching, and at the end of class I give you an argument for why you should not drink and drive: drinking and driving can be easily avoided if you plan in advance, it places others at unfair risk, and the negative consequences for you—if you are in an accident, or get arrested—can be very severe, certainly out of all proportion to any benefits you might derive from drinking and driving. Is that a good argument against drinking and driving? Not a very original one, but it does give some legitimate rea- sons to avoid drinking and driving. Now suppose later this evening you see me stagger out of the tavern, fumble around for my keys, finally get my car started, and weave away down the street, taking out three side-view mirrors and one fender in the process. If you now say, “Well, there goes Bruce, totally plastered, driving merrily away. And just this afternoon he was arguing against drinking and driving. Any argument that sleazy hypocrite makes against drinking and driving must be pure rubbish.” That would be an ad hominem fallacy. True enough, I’m a sleazy hypocrite who argues for one thing and then does another. But that does not change my argument. It’s still the same argument, whether I’m a sleazy hypocrite or a paragon of virtue. Suppose you learn that it was my evil twin brother you saw coming out of the tavern and driving away. Would that suddenly rehabilitate my argument? Of course not. It’s the very same argument, and it must stand or fall on its own merits, and it doesn’t matter whether the arguer is drunk or sober, hypocritical or sincere, vicious or virtuous.

Ad hominem attacks on arguers commit the ad hominem fallacy. But not all ad hominem arguments are fallacious. Some may be perfectly legitimate. Think back to the O.J. Simpson trial. One of the key wit- nesses for the prosecution was police officer Mark Fuhrman (he was the first officer to arrive at the Simpson residence, and he found the famous glove—the one that didn’t fit when Simpson tried it on). He testified under oath that he never used racial slurs, and that he held no prejudice against blacks. But he lied. It turned out that the man could hardly open his mouth without spewing out racial hatred (he once said that he would like to round up all African Americans and burn them), and he particularly despised interracial couples (like O.J. and Nicole) and often harassed them. This key prosecution witness was a lying, vicious racist. The defense made an ad hominem attack on Mark Fuhrman, but it was perfectly legitimate. Mark Fuhrman was giving testimony, not argument, and in order to evaluate his testimony you need to know if he is truthful, unbiased, and objective—or that he is not. If Mark Fuhrman were giving argument instead of tes- timony, then his vile character would be irrelevant: you would have to hold your nose and evaluate his arguments on their own merits. If I give testimony that I have seen extraterrestrials (“Take my word for it, I saw them with my own eyes, they’re here”), then you need to know about my drinking habits, my history of drug use, my mental stability, and my reputation for integrity. But if I give an argument for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (“Think of the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, and all their planets and moons, and how many opportunities there would be for life to develop in other solar systems”), then my character, habits, and mental state are irrelevant to the quality of my argument. So when you are arguing about ethics, you can attack one another’s arguments with all the energy and ingenuity you can muster, but to avoid committing the ad hominem fallacy you must resist attacking the arguer.

The Principle of Charity and the Strawman Fallacy One other principle of critical thinking is especially important in thinking critically about ethics: the principle of charity. That is simply the principle of being charitable or generous toward the positions and arguments we oppose. In other words, you should interpret opposing views and arguments as generously, fairly, and honestly as you can. That doesn’t mean you can’t attack opposing views; by all means, subject them to the closest scrutiny and the fiercest criticism—and be willing to have your own views subjected to

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the same criticism. After all, that’s one of the best ways of separating the wheat from the chaff when we examine ethical issues. But resist the temptation to score cheap points and win false victories by misrepre- senting opposing views. When someone distorts or misrepresents a position in order to make it easier to attack, that is called the strawman fallacy. It’s easier to knock down a strawman than a real man, and it’s easier to defeat a distorted version of a position than the real thing. In both cases, it’s not much of a vic- tory. Following the principle of charity—always represent opposing views in their strongest and most plausible form—is the best way of avoiding strawman fallacies, and it is also essential if you are to have any chance of convincing your opponents that your own view is more plausible. If you attack and defeat a dis- torted and inaccurate representation of my position, I am not likely to be convinced that your arguments are effective.

Strawman fallacies are depressingly common in ethical debate. Think again of the abortion contro- versy. If I am pro-life, I may accuse my opponents of believing that it is morally acceptable to kill infants up to age one. In fact, there are a few people who do hold that view. But obviously that is not the view of most pro-choice advocates, who favor elective abortion but vigorously oppose infanticide. If I represent my opponents as favoring infanticide of one-year-old children, then I am attacking a strawman. I may win that argument against the strawman position, but I’m not likely to convince those pro-choicers whose views I have misrepresented. Likewise, suppose I am pro-choice. I then accuse my pro-life opponents of wanting to outlaw not only abortion but also all forms of artificial contraception—there would be no birth control pills or condoms. Again, some of the opponents of legal abortion do take that view, but it is an extreme view, and certainly not the view of most persons who are pro-life. It is a much easier position to attack, and so I may easily defeat this strawman version of the pro-life position, but again, such a strawman “victory” is not likely to convince many people.

Consistency One last point concerning thinking critically about ethics. A key question in examining ethical views is whether they are internally consistent, and whether they are consistent with our other beliefs. Suppose I oppose elective abortion but support the death penalty, and you accuse me of being inconsistent in my principles. I will respond that my views are not inconsistent: I oppose abortion because it is the taking of an innocent life, but those who are executed are not innocent. Or suppose the argument goes the other way: I oppose capital punishment, but support the right to elective abortions, and you accuse me of inconsis- tency. I will respond that abortion kills a fetus, but a fetus is not a full person; capital punishment is carried out against persons. Or I might say that in the case of the fetus, the mother’s right to control of her own body takes precedence; in contrast, when an imprisoned person is executed there is no question of interfer- ence with a woman’s control of her own body.

Those may or may not be adequate answers to the charge of inconsistency; that will be a much debated question. However, I cannot simply accept inconsistencies in my ethical views. That is, I can- not legitimately say: Okay, so I have views that are in conflict and beliefs that contradict each other; so what? I can’t legitimately make that response, because allowing contradictions within my views makes it possible to prove anything, and thus makes careful reasoning impossible. Think about it for a moment. Suppose that you allow me both of these contradictory premises: “The sky is blue,” and “The sky is not blue.” Then I can “prove” anything at all. What follows from “The sky is blue”? Well, it follows that either the sky is blue or anything you like. (It’s true that I am a human; therefore, it is also true that either I am a human or I am the richest person on Earth, and it is also true that either I am a human or Oprah Winfrey is an extraterrestrial, and it is also true that I am a human or there is no corn in Iowa.) So it follows that the sky is blue or genocide is good. But remember, we also have the contradictory premise: The sky is not blue. So let’s put them together: Either the sky is blue or genocide is good, and the sky is not blue. (That’s like saying “Either Brendan is in the library or he’s at the tavern, and he’s not at the library.”) It follows that genocide is good. We could use the same reasoning to “prove” that Miami is in Maine, or that the Pacific Ocean does not exist, or anything else. If you allow a contradic- tion, then you can “prove” anything. And that makes accurate reasoning impossible. If your views con- tain contradictions, you have to deal with those contradictions (either by rejecting one of the conflicting views or by finding a way to reconcile them); you can’t just let them fester.

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There is a well-known saying by American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” People sometimes use that slogan to defend sloppy think- ing: to defend thinking that includes contradictions and does not insist on consistency. But that’s not what Emerson meant. Emerson knew the danger of internal contradictions. What he meant was simply that it is alright for your ideas and beliefs to change. Beliefs that you now hold don’t have to be held forever; it’s okay to change your mind. Maybe some of your beliefs, perhaps even some of your ethical beliefs, cannot survive careful scrutiny. If so, perhaps you should discard them and replace them with new ones. As Emerson suggested, it’s nice to keep an open mind. But it shouldn’t be so open that it allows internal contradictions.

STUDYING ETHICS If you take a course in geography, you expect that the course will make you a better geographer. If you take a course in creative writing, you anticipate that the course will improve your creative writing. And it is rea- sonable to hope that a course in chemistry will make you a better chemist. So when you take a course in ethics, what should you expect? That you will learn more about ethics? That seems a minimum expectation. But should you also expect that you will become more ethical, more virtuous, and a better person?

Before we go too far in exploring whether a course in ethics is likely to make you a morally better per- son, perhaps we should agree on what would count as moral improvement. And there’s the rub. It’s not so easy to decide what makes a morally superior person. That is the sort of thing we’ll explore: how do we decide—and can we decide—what counts as moral virtue and as morally good behavior? There are many different views on that question, and the purpose is not to tell you which view is correct. Rather, will help you explore a wide range of distinctive and often conflicting accounts of ethics, and the focus will be on helping you decide where your own views fit. Perhaps in the course of examining these views and where your own ideas fit along this wide spectrum, you may decide that some of your ethical opinions should change. But that’s not the purpose. There are plenty of moral self-help books, and there are plenty of books that will tell you in no uncertain terms what you ought to believe about ethics.

The Nature of Ethical Principles Should you expect studying ethics to make you ethically better, the way you expect studying math to make you a better mathematician? Some people say yes, and others say no. That’s one of the questions we’ll examine. But there are lots of questions in ethics. After all, ethics is a vast subject, with a long and remarkable history. There are many good places to start an examination of ethics, but among the most basic (and disputed) questions in ethics is this one: do ethical truths have to be eternal verities, not really part of this world of decay, known through some special power; or are they more mundane, ordi- nary facts, part of the standard furniture of our world, and known through ordinary means? (Of course there is another option: ethical truths don’t exist at all, anywhere; we’ll set that possibility aside for the moment, but we’ll return to it.) When you seek ethical guidelines, what characteristics must they have? It’s hard to know if you’ve found them unless you know what to look for. What would count as an ethical guide, an ethical principle? “If you want to be trusted and prosperous, practice honesty.” Benjamin Franklin thought that was really all the justification needed—and perhaps all the justifica- tion possible—for honesty: it pays, long term. Contrast that with the starkly unconditional form of the Hebrew commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” Of course you could read this as: If you don’t want to get into trouble with God then don’t bear false witness. But most people interpret it not as some arbitrary rule that you must follow to retain God’s favor, but rather as a basic moral principle that God (in His moral wisdom) recognizes and puts in the form of a commandment.

“What counts as ethics?” is a question worth pondering. Think for a minute about what ethical principles would have to look like, in your own view—not whether you think abortion is right or wrong, whether it is wrong to cheat on your taxes or your lover, whether you have an obligation to help the

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impoverished or prevent global warming or protest human rights abuses, and not the question of whether you believe there actually are objectively true moral principles. Instead, think about what you would be willing to count as a genuine moral principle. (If you deny that such principles exist, or that such princi- ples are objectively true, you must have some sense of what it is that you are denying the existence of: you can’t claim that a jabberwocky doesn’t exist if you have no idea what a jabberwocky is.)

The first reason to consider what counts as a moral principle is to avoid talking past one another. Suppose I think that genuine moral principles must be absolutes like “Never lie,” and I deny that there are any true moral absolutes of that sort. You believe that moral principles are much more modest: “If you want to promote trust and harmony, then you should be truthful in your dealings with others,” and you insist that we have good reason to believe that there are such moral principles. We may suppose that we are in basic conflict—“There are no genuine moral principles,” I shout; “There certainly are,” you reply—when perhaps we really agree. You might agree with me that there are no moral absolutes, and I might agree with you that more modest moral principles make perfectly good sense. Or maybe not. Perhaps we really do have a funda- mental difference in our views. But we won’t know that until we look carefully at exactly what each of us counts as a moral principle.

There is another important reason to look carefully at what you count as a moral principle. It may tell you a lot about yourself, and some of your basic beliefs and assumptions. Those assumptions and beliefs may be so deep and influential that you hardly know they are there. Like wearing tinted contact lenses through which you view everything you see, such assumptions color the way you see the world without you even being aware of them. Perhaps you think real moral principles exist, perhaps not. That is a question you have probably thought about already. But what do you count as real moral principles? (Not the question of whether real moral principles exist: I don’t think unicorns exist, but I know what I would count as a unicorn.)

For many people, genuine moral principles must be very special indeed. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, believed they are eternal truths known only through pure reason: reason that sees through the illusions of the senses and discovers the fixed and absolute and immutable truth. Moses found moral truths on a mountaintop, in the awesome presence of God, permanent moral truths carved into endur- ing stone. Descartes, a French philosopher of the seventeenth century, believed that God implants moral principles in our minds as innate ideas. And in the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant discov- ered the basic governing principle of morality through rigorous reason, an absolute and unconditional moral truth that filled him with awe: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily they are reflected on: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”1

In contrast, others have considered moral principles to be much simpler and more mundane. Aristotle, one of Plato’s students, regarded moral principles as basic guides to living the good life. Thomas Hobbes, a British philosopher who lived in the seventeenth century, thought moral principles were devised by humans to bring order and peace to society. Jeremy Bentham, in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- century Britain, asserted that the basic moral principle is simple and obvious: maximize pleasure and minimize suffering for everyone. David Hume, a British philosopher of the eighteenth century, insisted that morality is rooted in the simple affection that human social animals feel for one another.

There are many more examples of this fundamental conflict between those who regard morality as con- sisting in special absolute principles, and those who see moral rules as a more ordinary phenomenon based in natural affections or devised rules of order. And obviously there is enormous variation among those on both sides. For example, Plato thinks absolute moral rules are discovered by Reason, while Moses thinks they are ordered by God. On the other side, Hume thinks moral rules are based in natural animal affections, while Hobbes traces them to social agreement. Those differences within the two camps notwithstanding, it is worth noting the basic contrast between the two perspectives—and worth thinking about where your own sympa- thies lie in this basic conflict. For this contrast involves considerably more than the nature of moral principle. If moral principles are universal, absolute, and eternal principles—as Plato, Moses and Kant believe—then we can’t discover them by taking surveys. Nor can we find them through psychological or biological study, no matter how carefully and thoroughly we try. And we cannot create them by social agreement. Instead, such universal principles will require special ways of knowing. They are discovered, but they are not discovered the way we discover new elements or a new species of beetle or the Loch Ness Monster.

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Knowing Ethical Principles If at last we drag some reclusive beast out of the depths of Loch Ness, then we will discover that some species we had thought long extinct still survives. Maybe such creatures exist—probably not. Uncondi- tional, absolute moral principles are different. Those who believe in them believe that they must exist. They don’t exist only if we like them, or happen to recognize them, or choose to adopt them. Rather, they are universal, eternal moral principles that are unconditionally true whether anyone recognizes them or not. There might have been a Loch Ness Monster; it happens there is not. But eternal moral principles have no such contingency. They are absolute truths, not discovered by fishing in Loch Ness nor by any other form of observation or experiment. So not only are there special universal moral principles but we also require special powers or capacities to recognize them. The sensory powers that reveal a new beetle species are not adequate for this task.

What powers must we have to recognize such absolute moral truths? That varies, depending on what the absolute moral truths are. Some claim the truths are dictated by God, and are given to us by special rev- elation. Others hold that each of us has a special innate moral capacity—a conscience, or a moral sense— that implants in us the basic moral truths. Philosophers such as Plato and Kant maintain that the special power that reveals such eternal moral truths is the power of Reason—not the ordinary reason that enables you to select a horse to wager on in the eighth race at Belmont, but a power of Reason that enables you to see beyond mere appearances and surface features and discern deep, underlying moral truths. But whatever the means by which we discover absolute moral principles—whether by God’s special revelation, or some remarkable innate intuitive power, or through sublime Reason—this is not a natural capacity like sight or hearing that we share with other animals. Rather, this is a special power that sets us apart from the natural world: a power that makes us almost godlike.

If you think of moral principles as more mundane, conditional matters, then you are likely to have a more modest account of how those moral principles are recognized. Moral principles aren’t written in the heavens, nor are they special absolute truths. Since they are not extraordinary, they require no extraordinary powers for their understanding, and they do not set moral humans apart as unique and special. If morality is based in feelings of sympathy and social concern, then morality requires no special powers or esoteric capacities. For example, Darwin believed that morality is simply a natural result of social sympathy:

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.2

Natural Morality Versus Transcendent Morality So, when you think of morality, what is your image of the subject? Is morality something that rises above the natural world, something that transcends the natural world? Or is morality a more natural process: based on our emotions, perhaps, or on rules we draw up for promoting social harmony? We might call it, for conven- ience, the contrast between natural morality and transcendent morality, or between contingent morality and absolute morality.

This is an issue people feel strongly about. Richard Halverson, the former chaplain of the U.S. Senate, insisted that there can be no morality other than absolute morality:

Abandoning an absolute ethical moral standard leads irresistibly to the absence of ethics and morality. Each person determines his own ethical/moral code. That’s anarchy. Humans become their own gods and decide, each in his own way, what is good and what is evil. Evil becomes good—good becomes evil. Upside down morality! Good is ridiculed! Evil is dignified!3

So, only absolute moral standards can keep us from anarchy. Give up absolute moral standards, and soon murder and mayhem will be celebrated as virtue, and we will have no moral guidance whatsoever. Those who oppose absolute ethics have little patience with the transcendent absolutism favored by Chaplain Halverson. Ethics requires no mysteries or miracles, they would insist, and denying transcendent moral

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absolutes does not lead to moral anarchy. After all, humans come equipped with social sympathies and common needs and interests, and we don’t require absolute God-approved moral principles to recognize that some types of behavior undermine society and others enhance the social welfare for all. Whether bond traders in Manhattan, cattle traders in the Sudan, or spice merchants in India, the value and bene- fits of cooperation and honesty are obvious enough, and require neither divine sanction nor special insight.

GOD’S COMMANDMENTS AND ETHICS Let’s start by looking at some views that champion absolute moral principles: moral principles are eternal, universal, fixed truths. Like the stars, they exist whether we discover them or not, and they offer steady points of light for reliable moral navigation. Among such absolutist views we obviously find some religious doctrines. One religious version of absolutism goes by the name theological voluntarism. That’s just a classy name for a very common view: Moral principles are set by God, God commands them; and God neither changes nor makes exceptions, so God’s commandments are fixed, eternal, and absolute. What is right is whatever God commands, or whatever God chooses. God doesn’t condemn murder because murder is wrong; rather, murder is wrong because God condemns murder.

Theological voluntarism is so named because it makes ethical principles dependent on what God wills. Something is good because God wills that it be so, not because God recognizes it to be good. It is some- times called the Divine Command theory of ethics: Good is whatever God commands, and only what God commands is good. On this view, God’s will or God’s command is the whole of ethics. A law or principle is right if and only if it is willed (commanded) by God.

Many people turn to religion for ethical guidance. Indeed, there are some who adamantly insist that their personal religious beliefs provide the only acceptable ethical standards: “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it,” is an example of such an approach. But even for those who have unwavering faith in the pronouncements of their own religion or religious leaders or sacred texts, ethical issues can sometimes pose quandaries. For example, one may insist on the importance of the commandment that “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” and then when faced with a difficult situation—you are hiding escaped slaves from slave catchers—your obligation to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” might lead you to pro- tect these escapees from capture, torture, and enslavement and thus lead you to “bear false witness”: “No, I have not seen any escaped slaves.”

And the problems can get even thornier. In the very same chapter in which God orders “Thou shalt not kill,” God also commands the slaughter of whole cities—men, women, and children—who have the misfortune of living on the land that God assigns to the children of Israel. “Put to the sword every inhabi- tant, and spare not one” is hard to reconcile with “Thou shalt not kill”; so what should we do?

Ethical Principles as Divine Commandments This raises serious questions concerning the relation between ethics and religion. Perhaps the most basic of these troubling questions are these: Is an ethical guideline (or law) right because God commands it? Or does God command it because it is right? That is, do ethical principles exist only because God affirms them? Or does God affirm these ethical principles because (in His or Her wisdom) God recognizes the truth of these ethical laws? If you are religious, you might wish to take a moment to think about your answer to that ques- tion, for your answer makes a big difference in the way you think of ethics.

Does God command us to be honest because honesty is good? Or is honesty good because God approves of honesty? This may seem a strange, perhaps even a disturbing question. The question exposes a tension between two fundamentally incompatible sources that the Western religious tradition has struggled to combine: the religious views of ancient Greek philosophy, particularly the views of Aristotle; and the reli- gion of the ancient Hebrews, of Abraham and Moses. Aristotle’s God is a God of reason. In fact, Aristotle’s

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God is perfect, completely self-sufficient, and absolutely unchanging. He wants for nothing, and passes eternity thinking about thinking. Since He is omniscient, He can’t try to discover new truths: He knows everything already. And since He is already perfect, He can’t engage in any self-improvement projects. Obvi- ously, Aristotle had little sympathy with the popular Greek notions of the gods Zeus and Diana and Triton: gods who plotted, lied, changed their minds, appearances, and affections, and generally seemed to fall a good deal short of perfection. Since God (Aristotle’s God) is perfect, He must be changeless: if a perfect God changed, then any change would have to be for the worse and would result in imperfection.

Contrast Aristotle’s conception of God with the traditional Hebrew notion. The God of Abraham changes His mind more often than some undergraduates change majors. He creates humankind, then becomes disgusted and resolves to destroy them all; but He finds one good man, so He changes his mind and saves Noah and his family to make a new start. God works out a special deal with the children of Israel, then becomes angry at them and sends them into bondage in Egypt. He eventually rescues them and gives them a new set of rules to follow, but then discovers them worshiping a golden calf and His wrath is kindled and He resolves to destroy them all. Again He changes his mind, and instead kills sev- eral thousands. Trying to combine this hot-tempered Hebrew God with the perfect unchanging calm of Aristotle’s God is no easy task, and one place the tension comes into play is in considering God’s relation to the principles of ethics. Aristotle’s God knows all and reasons perfectly and thus knows and under- stands the true ethical principles. He recognizes true ethical principles because He is infinitely wise, not because He makes them. The Hebrew God, by contrast, wills a set of moral laws: the children of Israel must follow those laws because they are God’s commandments, and what makes them ethical principles is that God commands them. Whatever God commands is right, because it is God’s commandment. God does not recognize what is morally good; rather, the commandments are moral principles because God commands them.

If you believe that ethical principles exist only because God commands them (the position we called theological voluntarism), then the study of ethics is for you a rather limited exercise. It consists entirely of trying to discover what ethical principles God wills, and there is no room whatsoever to reason about or critically examine ethical questions. There are people who hold such a view, but it obviously requires powerful faith. After all, on this view you cannot examine the ethical principles pronounced by God in terms of their reasonableness or justice or fairness. If God says that it is good to be kind to others, that is not because God recognizes that kindness is good; rather, it is strictly because God pronounces that kindness is good. Had God pronounced cruelty good, then cruelty would be good, and there would be nothing more to say about it.

Thinking About Ethics

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei.

Problems with Theological Voluntarism Those who adopt such a view hold one absolute principle: if God says it then that settles it. If God com- mands being kind to children, then being kind to children is good. If God commands torturing children, then torturing children is good. Those who believe in an austere and majestic and incompre- hensible God often find this view appealing. It is motivated by the fear that if there were a moral law independent of God, then God would be constrained (by His perfect goodness) to follow that moral law. But God should not be constrained by anything, not even goodness. So God makes morality by His will, rather than following a moral law that He recognizes as true. Adopting this theological voluntarist view (good is whatever God wills it to be) requires a rather reckless leap of faith, for there is no way to criti- cally evaluate such moral principles. You cannot say—if you adopt this view of morality—that you believe in this religion or this account of God because it is morally attractive: such an evaluation would require a standard of morality independent of what God pronounces. It is certainly possible to hold such a theological voluntarist view, and some people seem quite content with it, but it leaves little space for the critical study of ethics.

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When they consider it, most religious people favor the other answer. It is not God’s pronounce- ment or commandment that makes murder wrong; rather, God condemns murder because He (in God’s great wisdom) recognizes the wrongfulness of murder. Such an approach leaves considerably more room for careful thought about ethics. If you hold religious beliefs, think for a moment about why you hold those beliefs. Surely your reason for holding your particular religious views is not merely because “my parents were Muslims” or “I was raised as a Christian” or “all my friends are Jewish.” Your religious beliefs are a serious part of your life, and you have thought carefully about them. (Of course you may regard your religion as just part of your culture—you attend services on the High Holy days, and you enjoy assembling with your friends and community to perform various rituals, but you don’t take the doctrines of the religion very seriously. In that case, you probably don’t turn to your religion for your moral principles. You may find yourself in agreement with the moral principles promoted by your reli- gion, but that is not because they are taught by your religion, and certainly not because you believe they were pronounced true by God.)

So—if you are seriously religious—why do you hold the religious beliefs you hold? There may be lots of different reasons for holding your particular religious beliefs, but among the most prominent is this: the religion I follow promotes sound moral principles. (If you have converted from one religion to another, it is not unlikely that one of the main motives for your conversion was dissatisfaction with the moral teachings of your old religion.) That is, one of my reasons for believing in this religion is that its moral principles seem just, fair, and reasonable. If you offer that as grounds for your belief, you must have some standard of what counts as just and fair that is independent of your religious belief. (“Why did you convert from religion X?” “Because religion X taught that women are inferior to men and should be subservient to men, and I simply cannot believe that a just God would approve of such vile moral principles.” In order to draw such a conclusion, you must have a standard of justice that is independent of God’s pronouncements. You believe justice requires equal treatment of women, and therefore you count any claim that God approves of unequal treatment as false, because you believe God adheres to what is just; not the other way around, that whatever God wills is just.) If you take this view, then your religion certainly is not irrelevant to your ethics, but your critical examination of ethics is not ham- strung by your religious beliefs.

God’s Law and Punishment There is another way God’s laws might be relevant to ethics. In some religious traditions, God metes out very severe punishments to those who transgress against His laws, and substantial rewards to those who follow the rules. Such punishments and rewards might give one a strong motive for obeying God’s com- mandments, but in themselves they provide no justification for believing that God’s commandments are just and good. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in the United States, aiding escaped slaves became a criminal act, and those who helped runaway slaves could be subjected to imprisonment. During the Nazi era, Germans and citizens in the occupied countries were forbidden to help Jews, and those hiding Jews were often punished by death. In both cases, one would certainly have a prudent motive for following the rules: turning Jews over to the Gestapo and slaves to the slave catchers was the best way to escape punishment. That certainly did not establish that the laws requiring such behavior were ethically legitimate and morally just. Likewise, if God’s rules are backed by powerful punishments and rewards, that in itself is no reason to think the rules are ethically sound.

This point is beautifully expressed by a wise Islamic teacher from the Sufi tradition, a woman named Rabi’a. One day Rabi’a rushed through the marketplace, carrying a flaming torch in one hand and a jug of water in the other. When people inquired why she was carrying the torch and the water, she replied that she was going to burn Paradise and quench the fires of Hell so that people would do morally good acts from love of doing the good and not from hope of gain or fear of punishment.4 Rabi’a’s point is clear: the rewards and punishments might motivate people to follow God’s laws, but they do not give good reasons to suppose those laws are morally right. Even if the divine laws are right, when you follow the divine laws only from hope of reward or fear of punishment it is very doubtful you have acted morally.

Thinking About Ethics

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RELIGION AND ETHICS If we reject theological voluntarism, that by no means implies the rejection of religious considerations in our inquiries into ethics. Martin Luther King’s campaign for civil rights had special power and broad appeal because it drew heavily on the language and symbols of God leading the children of Israel out of bondage: a powerful story that is common to the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions. Religious para- bles and traditions have often stimulated reform movements, and sometimes encouraged us to look more closely at our lives, habits, and assumptions. Furthermore, organized religions have often contained groups of people who devoted intense systematic study to questions of theology as well as questions of ethics, and the results of their careful deliberations will merit our attention.

So if ethics is not based on God’s will or God’s punishments, then what is the basis of ethics? Sup- posing that ethical laws are simply willed by God is certainly one type of transcendent, absolutist ethics, but it is by no means the only one. Plato rejected theological voluntarism, but he firmly believed in transcendent, absolute ethical standards. And one of the strongest and most uncompromising advocates of absolutist ethics is Immanuel Kant, who believed that absolute, universal ethical principles could be discovered through the meticulous use of higher Reason.

� GOD AND HUMAN ATTITUDES � James Rachels

James Rachels (1941–2003) develops a powerful critique of theological voluntarism/divine command ethics. In fact, he argues that theological voluntarism cannot be an ethical theory at all, because theologi- cal voluntarism requires that we renounce all critical ethical deliberation and slavishly follow orders, and thus anyone who followed the demands of theological voluntarism would no longer be an ethical actor. Anyone who embraces such a role, Rachels claims, would no longer be autonomous; and if you are not autonomous, you cannot be a moral agent. This essay is from “God and Human Attitudes,” Religious Studies, volume 7 (1971).

Kneeling down or grovelling on the ground, even to express your reverence for heavenly things, is contrary to human dignity.

Kant

1. It is necessarily true that God (if He exists) is wor- thy of worship. Any being who is not worthy of worship cannot be God, just as any being who is not omnipotent, or who is not perfectly good, cannot be God. This is reflected in the attitudes of religious believers who recog- nize that, whatever else God may be, He is a being before whom men should bow down. Moreover, He is unique in this; to worship anyone or anything else is blasphemy. In this paper I shall present an a priori argument against the existence of God which is based on the conception of God as a fitting object of worship. The argument is that God cannot exist, because no being could ever be a fitting object of worship.

However, before I can present this argument, there are several preliminary matters that require attention.

The chief of these, which will hopefully have some independent interest of its own, is an examination of the concept of worship. In spite of its great importance this concept has received remarkably little attention from philosophers of religion; and when it has been treated, the usual approach is by way of referring to God’s awe- someness or mysteriousness: to worship is to ‘down in silent awe’ when confronted with a being that is ‘terrify- ingly mysterious’. But neither of these notions is of much help in understanding worship. Awe is certainly not the same thing as worship; one can be awed by a perform- ance of King Lear, or by witnessing an eclipse of the sun or an earthquake, or by meeting one’s favourite film-star, without worshiping any of these things. And a great many things are both terrifying and mysterious that we have not the slightest inclination to worship—I suppose the Black Plague fits that description for many people. The account of worship that I will give will be an alter- native to those which rely on such notions as awesome- ness and mysteriousness.

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2. Consider McBlank, who worked against his country’s entry into the Second World War, refused induction into the army, and was sent to jail. He was active in the ‘ban the bomb’ movements of the fifties; he made speeches, wrote pamphlets, led demonstra- tions, and went back to jail. And finally, he has been active in opposing the war in Vietnam. In all of this he has acted out of principle; he thinks that all war is evil and that no war is ever justified. I want to make three observations about McBlank’s pacifist commitments. (a) One thing that is involved is simply his recognition that certain facts are the case. History is full of wars; war causes the massive destruction of life and property; in war men suffer on a scale hardly matched in any other way; the large nations now have weapons which, if used, could destroy the human race; and so on. These are just facts which any normally informed man will admit without argument. (b) But of course they are not merely facts, which people recognise to be the case in some indifferent manner. They are facts that have special importance to human beings. They form an ominous and threatening backdrop to people’s lives— even though for most people they are a backdrop only. But not so for McBlank. He sees the accumulation of these facts as having radical implications for his con- duct; he behaves in a very different way from the way he would behave were it not for these facts. His whole style of life is different; his conduct is altered, not just in its details, but in its pattern. (c) Not only is his overt behaviour affected; so are his ways of thinking about the world and his place in it. His self-image is different. He sees himself as a member of a race with an insane history of self-destruction, and his self-image becomes that of an active opponent of the forces that lead to this self-destruction. He is an opponent of militarism just as he is a father or a musician. When some existentialists say that we ‘create ourselves’ by our choices, they may have something like this in mind.

Thus, there are at least three things that determine McBlank’s role as an opponent of war: first, his recogni- tion that certain facts are the case; second, his taking these facts as having important implications for his conduct; and third, his self-image as living his life (at least in part) in response to these facts. My first thesis about worship is that the worshiper has a set of beliefs about God which function in the same way as McBlank’s beliefs about war.

First, the worshiper believes that certain things are the case: that the world was created by an all- powerful, all-wise being who knows our every thought and action; that this being, called God, cares for us and regards us as his children; that we are made by him

in order to return his love and to live in accordance with his laws; and that, if we do not live in a way pleasing to him, we may be severely punished. Now these beliefs are certainly not shared by all reasonable people; on the contrary, many thoughtful persons regard them as nothing more than mere fantasy. But these beliefs are accepted by religious people, and that is what is important here. I do not say that this parti- cular set of beliefs is definitive of religion in general, or of Judaism or Christianity in particular; it is meant only as a sample of the sorts of belief typically held by religious people in the West. They are, however, the sort of beliefs about God that are required for the busi- ness of worshiping God to make any sense.

Second, like the facts about warfare, these are not merely facts which one notes with an air of indifference; they have important implications for one’s conduct. An effort must be made to discover God’s will both for peo- ple generally and for oneself in particular; and to this end, the believer consults the church authorities and the theologians, reads the scripture, and prays. The degree to which this will alter his overt behaviour will depend, first, on exactly what he decides God would have him do, and second, on the extent to which his behaviour would have followed the prescribed pattern in any case.

Finally, the believer’s recognition of these ‘facts’ will influence his self-image and his way of thinking about the world and his place in it. The world will be regarded as made for the fulfilment of divine purposes; the hardships that befall men will be regarded either as ‘tests’ in some sense or as punishments for sin; and most important, the believer will think of himself as a ‘Child of God’ and of his conduct as reflecting either honour or dishonour upon his Heavenly Father. . . .

3. Worship is something that is done; but it is not clear just what is done when one worships. Other actions, such as throwing a ball or insulting one’s neigh- bour, seem transparent enough. But not so with wor- ship: when we celebrate Mass in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, what are we doing (apart from eating a wafer and drinking wine)? Or when we sing hymns in a protestant church, what are we doing (other than merely singing songs)? What is it that makes these acts acts of worship? One obvious point is that these actions, and others like them, are ritualistic in charac- ter; so, before we can make any progress in understand- ing worship, perhaps it will help to ask about the nature of ritual.

First we need to distinguish the ceremonial form of a ritual from what is supposed to be accomplished by it. Consider, for example, the ritual of investiture for an

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English Prince. The Prince kneels; the Queen (or King) places a crown on his head; and he takes an oath: ‘I do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship, and faith and trust I will bear unto thee to live and die against all manner of folks.’ By this ceremony the Prince is elevated to his new station; and by this oath he acknowledges the commitments which, as Prince, he will owe the Queen. In one sense the cer- emonial form of the ritual is quite unimportant: it is possible that some other procedure might have been laid down, without the point of the ritual being affected in any way. Rather than placing a crown on his head, the Queen might break an egg into his palm (that could symbolise all sorts of things). Once this was established as the procedure to be followed, it would do as well as the other. It would still be the ritual of investiture, so long as it was understood that by the ceremony a Prince is created. The performance of a rit- ual, then, is in certain respects like the use of language: in speaking, sounds are uttered and, thanks to the con- ventions of the language, something is said, or affirmed, or done, etc.: and in a ritual performance, a ceremony is enacted and, thanks to the conventions associated with the ceremony, something is done, or affirmed, or celebrated, etc.

How are we to explain the point of the ritual of investiture? We might explain that certain parts of the ritual symbolise specific things, for example that the Prince kneeling before the Queen symbolises his subor- dination to her (it is not, for example, merely to make it easier for her to place the crown on his head). But it is essential that, in explaining the point of the ritual as a whole, we include that a Prince is being created, that he is henceforth to have certain rights in virtue of hav- ing been made a Prince, and that he is to have certain duties which he is now acknowledging, among which are complete loyalty and faithfulness to the Queen, and so on. If the listener already knows about the complex relations between Queens, Princes, and subjects, then all we need to tell him is that a Prince is being installed in office; but if he is unfamiliar with this social system, we must tell him a great deal if he is to understand what is going on.

So, once we understand the social system in which there are Queens, Princes, and subjects, and therefore understand the role assigned to each within that system, we can sum up what is happening in the ritual of investiture in this way: someone is being made a Prince, and he is accepting that role with all that it involves. (Exactly the same explanation could be given, mutatis mutandis, for the marriage ceremony.)

The question to be asked about the ritual of wor- ship is what analogous explanation can be given of it. The ceremonial form of the ritual may vary according to the customs of the religious community; it may involve singing, drinking wine, counting beads, sitting with a solemn expression on one’s face, dancing, making a sacrifice, or what-have-you. But what is the point of it?

As I have already said, the worshiper thinks of himself as inhabiting a world created by an infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, perfectly good God; and it is a world in which he, along with other men, occupies a special place in virtue of God’s intentions. This gives him a certain role to play: the role of a ‘Child of God’. My second thesis about worship is that in wor- shipping God one is acknowledging and accepting this role, and that this is the primary function of the ritual of worship. Just as the ritual of investiture derives its significance from its place within the social system of Queens, Princes, and subjects, the ritual of worship gets its significance from an assumed system of relationships between God and men. In the cere- mony of investiture, the Prince assumes a role with respect to the Queen and the citizenry; and in wor- ship, a man affirms his role with respect to God.

Worship presumes the superior status of the one wor- shiped. This is reflected in the logical point that there can be no such thing as mutual or reciprocal worship, unless one or the other of the parties is mistaken as to his own status. We can very well comprehend people loving one another or respecting one another, but not (unless they are misled) worshiping one another. This is because the worshiper necessarily assumes his own inferiority; and since inferiority is an asymmetrical relation, so is worship. (The nature of the ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’ involved here is of course problematic; but on the account I am presenting it may be understood on the model of superior and inferior positions within a social system. More on this later.) This is also why humility is necessary on the part of the worshiper. The role to which he commits himself is that of the humble servant, ‘not worthy to touch the hem of His garment’. Compared to God’s gloriousness, ‘all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags’ (Isaiah 64: 6). So, in committing oneself to this role, one is acknowledging God’s greatness and one’s own relative worthlessness. This humble attitude is not a mere embellishment of the ritual: on the contrary, worship, unlike love or respect, requires humility. Pride is a sin, and pride before God is incompat- ible with worshiping him.

On the view that I am suggesting, the function of worship as ‘glorifying’ or ‘praising’ God, which is usually

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taken to be its primary function, may be regarded as derivative from the more fundamental nature of worship as commitment to the role of God’s Child. ‘Praising’ God is giving him the honour and respect due to one in his position of eminence, just as one shows respect and honour in giving fealty to a King.

In short, the worshiper is in this position: He believes that there is a being, God, who is the per- fectly good, perfectly powerful, perfectly wise Creator of the Universe; and he views himself as the ‘Child of God,’ made for God’s purposes and responsible to God for his conduct. And the ritual of worship, which may have any number of ceremonial forms according to the customs of the religious community, has as its point the acceptance of, and commitment to, one’s role as God’s Child, with all that this involves. If this account is accepted, then there is no mystery as to the relation between the act of worship and the wor- shiper’s other activity. Worship will be regarded not as an isolated act taking place on Sunday morning, with no necessary connection to one’s behaviour the rest of the week, but as a ritualistic expression of and com- mitment to a role which dominates one’s whole way of life.

4. An important feature of roles is that they can be violated; we can act and think consistently with a role, or we can act and think inconsistently with it. The Prince can, for example, act inconsistently with his role as Prince by giving greater importance to his own interests and welfare than to the Queen’s; in this case, he is no longer her ‘liege man’. And a father who does not attend to the welfare of his children is not acting consistently with his role as a father (at least as that role is defined in our society), and so on. The question that I want to raise now is, What would count as violating the role to which one is pledged in virtue of worshiping God?

In Genesis there are two familiar stories, both con- cerning Abraham, that are relevant here. The first is the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. We are told that Abraham was ‘tempted’ by God, who commanded him to offer Isaac as a human sacrifice. Abraham obeyed without hesitation: he prepared an alter, bound Isaac to it, and was about to kill him until God intervened at the last moment, saying ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him; for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me’ (Genesis 22: 12). So Abraham passed the test. But how could he have failed? What was his ‘temptation’? Obviously, his temptation was to disobey God; God had ordered

him to do something contrary to both his wishes and his sense of what would otherwise be right and wrong. He could have defied God; but he did not—he subor- dinated himself, his own desires and judgments, to God’s command, even when the temptation to do otherwise was strongest.

It is interesting that Abraham’s record in this respect was not perfect. We also have the story of him bargaining with God over the conditions for saving Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. God had said that he would destroy those cities because they were so wicked; but Abraham gets God to agree that if fifty righteous men can be found there, then the cities will be spared. Then he persuades God to lower the number to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, then twenty, and finally ten. Here we have a different Abraham, not servile and obedient, but willing to challenge God and bargain with him. However, even as he bargains with God, Abraham realises that there is something radically inappropriate about it: he says, ‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes . . . O let not the Lord be angry . . . ’ (Genesis 18: 27, 30).

The fact is that Abraham could not, consistently with his role as God’s subject, set his own judgment and will against God’s. The author of Genesis was cer- tainly right about this. We cannot recognise any being as God, and at the same time set ourselves against him. The point is not merely that it would be imprudent to defy God, since we certainly can’t get away with it; rather, there is a stronger, logical point involved— namely, that if we recognise any being as God, then we are committed, in virtue of that recognition, to obeying him.

To see why this is so, we must first notice that ‘God’ is not a proper name like ‘Richard Nixon’ but a title like ‘President of the United States’ or ‘King’. Thus, ‘Jeho- vah is God’ is a nontautological statement in which the title ‘God’ is assigned to Jehovah, a particular being— just as ‘Richard Nixon is President of the United States’ assigns the title ‘President of the United States’ to a particular man. This permits us to understand how statements like ‘God is perfectly wise’ can be logical truths, which is highly problematic if ‘God’ is regarded as a proper name. Although it is not a logical truth that any particular being is perfectly wise, it nevertheless is a logical truth that if any being is God (i.e. if any being properly holds that title) then that being is perfectly wise. This is exactly analogous to saying: although it is not a logical truth that Richard Nixon has the author- ity to veto congressional legislation, nevertheless it is

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a logical truth that if Richard Nixon is President of the United States then he has that authority.

To bear the title ‘God’, then, a being must have cer- tain qualifications. He must, for example, be all-powerful and perfectly good in addition to being perfectly wise. And in the same vein, to apply the title ‘God’ to a being is to recognise him as one to be obeyed. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of ‘King’—to recognise anyone as King is to acknowledge that he occupies a place of authority and has a claim on one’s allegiance as his subject. And to recognise any being as God is to acknowledge that he has unlimited authority, and an unlimited claim on one’s allegiance. Thus, we might regard Abraham’s reluctance to defy Jehovah as grounded not only in his fear of Jeho- vah’s wrath, but as a logical consequence of his accept- ance of Jehovah as God. Camus was right to think that ‘From the moment that man submits God to moral judg- ment, he kills Him in his own heart’. What a man can ‘kill’ by defying or even questioning God is not the being that (supposedly) is God, but his own conception of that being as God. That God is not to be judged, challenged, defied, or disobeyed, is at bottom a truth of logic; to do any of these things is incompatible with taking him as One to be worshiped.

5. So the idea that any being could be worthy of worship is much more problematical than we might have at first imagined. For in admitting that a being is worthy of worship we would be recognising him as hav- ing an unqualified claim on our obedience. The ques- tion, then, is whether there could be such an unqualified claim. It should be noted that the description of a being as all-powerful, all-wise, etc., would not automatically settle the issue; for even while admitting the existence of such an awesome being we might still question whether we should recognise him as having an unlimited claim on our obedience.

In fact, there is a long tradition in moral philosophy, from Plato to Kant, according to which such a recogni- tion could never be made by a moral agent. According to this tradition, to be a moral agent is to be an autonomous or self-directed agent; unlike the precepts of law or social custom, moral precepts are imposed by the agent upon himself, and the penalty for their violation is, in Kant’s words, ‘self-contempt and inner abhorrence’. The virtu- ous man is therefore identified with the man of integrity, i.e. the man who acts according to precepts which he can, on reflection, conscientiously approve in his own heart. Although this is a highly individualistic approach to morals, it is not thought to invite anarchy because men are regarded as more or less reasonable and as desir- ing what we would normally think of as a decent life lived in the company of other men.

On this view, to deliver oneself over to a moral authority for directions about what to do is simply incompatible with being a moral agent. To say ‘I will follow so-and-so’s directions no matter what they are and no matter what my own conscience would otherwise direct me to do’ is to opt out of moral thinking alto- gether; it is to abandon one’s role as a moral agent. And it does not matter whether ‘so-and-so’ is the law, the cus- toms of one’s society, or God. This does not, of course, preclude one from seeking advice on moral matters, and even on occasion following that advice blindly, trusting in the good judgment of the adviser. But this is to be justified by the details of the particular case, e.g. that you cannot in that case form any reasonable judgment of your own due to ignorance or inexperience in dealing with the types of matters involved. What is precluded is that a man should, while in possession of his wits, adopt this style of decision-making (or perhaps we should say this style of abdicating decision-making) as a general strategy of living, or abandon his own best judg- ment in any case where he can form a judgment of which he is reasonably confident.

What we have, then, is a conflict between the role of worshiper, which by its very nature commits one to total subservience to God, and the role of moral agent, which necessarily involves autonomous decision-making. The point is that the role of worshiper takes precedence over every other role which the worshiper has—when there is any conflict, the worshiper’s commitment to God has priority over any other commitments which he might have. But the first commitment of a moral agent is to do what in his own heart he thinks is right. Thus the follow- ing argument might be constructed:

a. If any being is God, he must be a fitting object of worship.

b. No being could possibly be a fitting object of wor- ship, since worship requires the abandonment of one’s role as an autonomous moral agent.

c. Therefore, there cannot be any being who is God

. . .

The argument . . . will probably not persuade any- one to abandon belief in God—arguments rarely do— and there are certainly many more points which need to be worked out before it can be known whether this argument is even viable. Yet it does raise an issue which is clear enough. Theologians are already accustomed to speaking of theistic belief and commitment as taking the believer ‘beyond morality’, and I think they are right. The question is whether this should not be regarded as a severe embarrassment.

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Thinking About Ethics

EXERCISES 1. Do you expect this study of ethics—that you are now undertaking—to make you more virtuous, less virtuous,

or to have no effect on your moral character? 2. John has been found guilty of academic dishonesty by the student-faculty review board. He plagiarized a his-

tory paper (he bought it off the Web) and was caught with a cheat sheet during a chemistry exam. Assume that we all agree that such academic dishonesty is wrong. What would you recommend as the best way of reforming John’s dishonest behavior and character? Would your proposed reform process include a course in ethics?

3. The university has decided to develop a special ethics course for students who have been found guilty of vio- lations of the honor code. First-time offenders can take the class, and if they pass the class they will have the academic dishonesty conviction removed from their permanent record. Is that a good idea?

Set aside your answer to that question: don’t worry about whether the course is a good idea or not. Whatever you think about such a course, you have been given the job of designing the course honor code violators will take. What would you include in such a course? Are there any novels you would assign? Movies you would show? Field trips you would make?

4. One of your high school friends has a deep-rooted prejudice against homosexuals. You would like to help your friend get over this prejudice. What would you do? Do you think it would help if your friend took a course in ethics? If you were designing the course, what would you include?

5. I have come into possession of a small but lovely drawing by Michelangelo. (Never mind how I came to possess this drawing. Let’s just agree that I own it fair and square, and that I did not gain possession of it by theft, deceit, or fraud. The drawing is legitimately my own.) I have decided to paste the drawing over my dartboard, and use it as a target. You may think this quite stupid (even if I don’t care for the drawing, it is obviously worth an enor- mous sum of money). That’s not the issue. The question is this: Would I be doing anything morally wrong by destroying the drawing in this frivolous manner?

6. If a movie wins an Oscar, that obviously increases its box office appeal and results in greater profits for the producer. Not surprisingly, there have often been intense campaigns to persuade members of the Academy to vote for a particular picture. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the folks who are in charge of the Academy Awards, or Oscars) have become disturbed about the amount of campaigning and lobbying for the awards. Producer Sid Ganis, who headed an Academy committee to look into the issue, said, “In the last number of years, there has been verbose campaigning, along with the press’ depiction of studios vying against each other for Oscars, leading to a sense that Oscars could be bought with a lot of money.” As a result of their study, Ganis’s committee developed a set of guidelines in an effort to curtail such campaigning for Academy Awards. The guidelines note that recently there have been “an unfortu- nate series of manipulative and excessive Academy Awards ‘campaigns,’ ” and the guidelines “set out some standards for ethical conduct where Academy Awards are concerned.” But is this an ethical issue? If a film producer throws lavish parties and pays a public relations firm to run a campaign to have his film win the Academy Award for “best picture,” has the producer done something unethical? (Of course if the producer bribes some of the Academy voters to vote for his picture, that raises ethical issues; but is campaigning for an Academy Award itself an ethical issue?)5

7. Oral sex was once widely regarded as a moral wrong (in some religious traditions it still is); indeed, in many U.S. states engaging in oral sex was a criminal act until just a few years ago. Today, most people in Western cultures regard consensual oral sex as not a moral issue at all. What standard would you use for determining whether something counts as a moral question?

8. I find the idea of cannibalism repulsive. But is it a moral issue? Suppose that some small religious sect in this country included in their death rituals the eating of a small portion of flesh from the deceased, and regarded that as a very important part of their religious practices and an important part of honoring their dead. Should such practices be legally prohibited? Would such practices be morally wrong?

9. We can divide and subdivide ethical views along a number of different cuts. This may be thought of as a pre- view of some of the issues we’ll examine. You might use it to locate your own ethical perspective (your per- spective for the moment, at least; you may change—and you may find it useful to compare your ethical views at the end of the class with those you hold now).

A. Do you think ethics is a matter of natural processes, or is it transcendent (divinely given, or perhaps enshrined in a transcendent realm)? You might believe that ethical truths are special truths, not derived by observation of this world—transcendent truths—even if you doubt or deny the existence of God.

B. Are ethical principles made or discovered?

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Thinking About Ethics

C. Is ethics objective or nonobjective? (Are there actual objective facts in ethics, or is it all just a matter of opin- ion? Can I be dead wrong about one of my ethical beliefs, the same way I am simply wrong if I believe that Venus is the largest planet in our solar system?)

D. Is ethics a matter of protecting the individual, or enhancing the welfare of all? That is, is ethics basically individualistic or in some way communitarian? Another way of thinking about this: If you were marooned on a small isolated tropical island, and would never see another sentient being (you will have to subsist on bananas, nuts, and berries), would ethics still be important for you?

E. Is ethics known more through reason or by experience of some sort (including intuitions)? Even those who deny there are objective ethical truths can split on this question (“If there were ethical facts, they would have to be known by pure reason”).

F. Is ethics universal or more local or even individual? (If people from a different culture have different ethical rules from our own, must at least one set of rules be wrong?)

G. Saul Smilansky divides views of morality into two categories: the laudatory and the deprecatory. He distinguishes them thus: “Laudatory views hold moral behavior to be the highest achievement of civilization, the hallmark of humanity’s superiority over other species, the measure of one’s personal worth . . . . Deprecatory views of moral- ity, by contrast, perceive morality as a burden, at best an unfortunate social necessity that obstructs the pursuit of more interesting and important matters.” (10 Moral Paradoxes [Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007]) Is your own view of morality laudatory, or is it deprecatory?

10. Go back to your own answers to Question 9, and think about how they are connected. For example, if you changed your mind about your answer to the first question, would that also lead you to revise your answer to some of the other questions? Of the questions in Question 9, which one would you select as the most basic question in ethics?

11. Suppose that we could build a society in which everyone naturally and happily and eagerly behaved in a morally virtuous manner; that is, suppose that acting morally required no effort whatsoever, that doing the morally right thing was always attractive and pleasant. (This is not a society filled with zombies or automa- tons; you still choose to do the right thing, it’s just that the choice is always easy and pleasant.) Would that be a desirable or undesirable way of structuring society? (This question is inspired by Saul Smilansky’s “Morality and Moral Worth,” in 10 Moral Paradoxes [Oxford:Blackwell Publishing, 2007]).

12. The story of Joshua, in the Hebrew Bible, tells of Joshua following God’s commandment and destroying entire nations of people: all the men, women and children in every city:

And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to Debir; and fought against it; and he took it, and the king thereof, and all the cities thereof; and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed all the souls that were therein; he left none remaining: as he had done to Hebron, so he did to Debir, and the king thereof; as he had done also to Libnah, and to her king.

So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. Joshua 11, 38–41.

Suppose someone says: God’s commandment to kill all those people was morally wrong. Is that a denial of the existence of God (or at least a denial that the God depicted in the book of Joshua is really God)?

Suppose that—in response to that account in the book of Joshua—someone says: the Israelis must have gotten it wrong. Perhaps they thought that God ordered such genocidal slaughter, but they were mistaken, because God would never order such a cruel bloodbath. Would that response be a rejection of theological voluntarism?

13. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates puts the following question to Euthyphro:

We are agreed that the gods love piety because it is pious, and that it is not pious because they love it. Is this not so?

To phrase a similar question in more contemporary terms, we might say: “We are agreed that God loves just acts because they are just, and they are not just simply because God loves them, right?” If you agree that God’s love of justice is determined by the goodness of justice (rather than God’s will determin- ing what counts as just), does that in any way diminish the power or majesty of God?

14. The eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote a dialogue in which he argued that a just God would never condemn nonbelievers to eternal torment: perhaps God would punish, but would then pardon. After all, if a child does something wrong and asks forgiveness, a loving father does not ban- ish the child forever, but eventually pardons the child and welcomes the child back into his care; a loving

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Thinking About Ethics

God would do the same for His wayward children. In the dialogue, the person speaking with Diderot disputes that claim: God’s justice is not our justice, and we cannot understand the ways of God. Diderot responds that either the same concept of justice must apply to all of us, as well as to God, “or I no longer know what justice means, and I am completely ignorant of what will please or displease God.” Is Diderot right? If it were true that “God’s justice is not our justice,” would that make the concept of justice unintelligible?

15. If you adopt a theological voluntarist view of ethics—you hold that you are morally obligated to do whatever God commands you to do—would you still count as an autonomous person?

16. The classic case of theological voluntarism is the story of Abraham and Isaac, told in the 22nd Chapter of Genesis: God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham’s beloved son, as an offering to God; and with- out questioning, Abraham obeys God’s command: “Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.” Thus, if God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, then killing Isaac becomes morally good—at least from the theological voluntarism perspective. However, Søren Kierkegaard—a Danish theologian/philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century—interprets the story differently: Abraham, in choosing to follow God’s terrible command, moves beyond all considerations of ethics, beyond all understanding, beyond reason: he transcends ethics. Thus (according to Kierkegaard), Abraham does not adopt an ethic of theological voluntarism, but instead moves beyond ethics altogether through his act of faith. Is that a more plausible interpretation of the story?

ADDITIONAL READING There are many excellent guides to critical thinking. Among them are S. Morris Engel, With Good Reason, 6th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Theodore Schick, Jr., and Lewis Vaughn, How to Think About Weird Things, 4th ed. (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2004); and Bruce N. Waller, Critical Thinking: Consider the Verdict, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2011).

On the subject of the relation between ethics and religion, Plato’s Euthyphro (available in a number of translations and editions) remains the classic source for the argument against theological voluntarism. Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God (London: Pemberton Press, and Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1973), is perhaps the best and clearest contemporary argument against basing ethics on religion. A very sophisti- cated and interesting opposing view—which argues for the importance of religious considerations in ethics—can be found in George N. Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-Time Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). A brief argument for how ethics might be based on religion is given by Jonathan Berg, “How Could Ethics Depend on Religion?” in Peter Singer, editor, A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Philip L. Quinn develops a detailed and sophisticated defense of theological voluntarism in “Divine Command Theory,” in Hugh LaFollette, editor, The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

There are two excellent anthologies on the subject: P. Helm, editor, Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and G. Outka and J. P. Reeder, Jr., editors, Religion and Morality: A Collection of Essays (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973). An excellent online discussion of theological voluntarism is an essay by Mark Murphy in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; go to http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voluntarism-theological/. Lawrence M. Hinman offers a very interesting presentation in his “Divine Command Theories of Ethics.” Go to http://ethics.sandiego.edu/ and click on “Religion and Ethics.”.

Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac can be found in his Fear and Trem- bling: A Dialectical Lyric, which Kierkegaard wrote under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. An interesting book on Kierkegaard’s ethical views is C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Among general works, Peter Singer’s edited work, A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), is a superb guide to many topics in ethical theory as well as applied ethics. An excellent collection of readings is edited by Hugh LaFollette, The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Another collection of outstanding contemporary articles is Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, editors, Moral Discourse and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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Thinking About Ethics

For an examination of some key contemporary debates in ethics and ethical theory, see Bruce N. Waller, editor, You Decide! Current Debates in Ethics (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006); and James Dreier, editor, Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).

NOTES 1Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. L. W.

Beck (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 259. First published in 1788. 2Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1875), p. 99. First published in 1871. 3Quoted (with strong approval) on July 7, 2002, by Cal Thomas, syndicated columnist. 4For more on Rabi’a, see Margaret Smith, Studies in Early Mysticism in the Near and Middle East (Oxford:

Oneworld Publications, 1995); and Margaret Smith, Rabi’a: The Life and Work of Rabi’a and Other Women Mystics in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1995).

5This case is based on a report by Gregg Kilday in The Toronto Star, September 5, 2003.

Credits James Rachels, “God and Human Attitudes.” Religious Studies, volume

7, 1971: 325–337. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.

Glossary Ad hominem argument: Ad hominem literally means “to the

person.” An ad hominem argument is an argument that focuses on a person (or group of people), typically attacking the person. For example, “Joe is a liar,” “Sandra is a hyp- ocrite,” “Republicans are cold-hearted.” Ad hominem arguments are fallacious only when they attack the source of an argument in order to discredit the argument; for example, “Joe’s argument against drinking and driving doesn’t carry much weight, because Joe himself is a lush.” When not attacking the source of an argument, ad hominem argu- ments do not commit the ad hominem fallacy, and can often be valuable and legitimate arguments. For example, an ad hominem attack on someone giving testimony (“Don’t believe Sally’s testimony, she’s a notorious liar”) is relevant, and not an ad hominem fallacy; likewise, it is a legitimate use of ad hominemargument (not an ad hominem fallacy) if you are attacking a job applicant (“Don’t hire Bruce; he’s a

crook”), a politician (“Don’t vote for Sandra; she’s in the pocket of the tobacco industry”), and in many other circumstances (“Don’t go out with Bill, he’s a cheat and a creep”).

Ad hominem fallacy: See Ad hominem argument. Divine Command ethics: The view that all values and ethi-

cal principles are established by God’s command or by God’s will; also known as theological voluntarism.

Fallacy: A standard argument error or deception; usually one that is so common that it has been given a special name.

Moral agent: One who is capable of performing a good or bad moral act.

Strawman fallacy: The fallacy of distorting, exaggerating, or misrepresenting an opponent’s position in order to make it easier to attack.

Theological voluntarism: See Divine Command ethics.

19

Egoism and Relativism

From Chapter 2 of Consider Ethics: Theory, Readings, and Contemporary Issues, Third Edition. Bruce N. Waller. Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. Published by Pearson Prentice Hall. All rights reserved.

Egoism and Relativism

Ethical egoism and cultural relativism are very different ethical theories, but it may be useful to consider them together. In some ways, cultural relativism is a bit like ethical egoism writ large. The ethical egoist maintains that whatever benefits me is the right thing to do. The cultural relativist says that whatever my culture approves is what I should do. Advocates of both views tend to present themselves as tough-minded and scientifically oriented: the egoist claiming to start from stark psychological facts, and the cultural relativist from the hard facts of sociology and anthropology. Both tend to share a reductionist orientation: whatever else you might romantically or idealistically imagine ethics to be, what really is involved in ethics is just seeking one’s own good (the egoist says) or following the customs of one’s culture (the cultural relativist claims). Both views are interesting, both views are admirable in their attempt to integrate scientific and empirical considerations into ethics, and both views are worth considering.

EGOISM Egoism comes in two varieties. First is psychological egoism: the view that—as a matter of empirical psycho- logical fact—all our behavior is selfish, or self-interested. Second is ethical egoism, which is the very different claim that we ought to always act in a way that is self-interested. Though often run together, they are very different positions. Sam could be a psychological egoist while fervently rejecting ethical egoism. That is, Sam could believe that we are psychologically constructed to always behave selfishly; but Sam might also believe that is an ethical disaster, since selfishness is bad. And Sandra could be an ethical egoist, who believes that we ought to act selfishly, but also believe that our psychological makeup is such that we often fail to act selfishly (according to ethical egoist Sandra, we sometimes behave altruistically rather than selfishly, and those altruistic acts are morally wrong). If one is both a psychological and an ethical egoist, then one is in the fortunate position of believing that everyone always and inevitably does right: selfishness is virtue, and we cannot avoid acting selfishly, and thus we cannot avoid acting virtuously.

Psychological Egoism Psychological egoism has great appeal for many people, and psychological egoists are typically confident of the irrefutable wisdom and plain truth of the position they hold. From the right perspective, psychological egoism seems clear and unassailable truth. Why did you buy a cup of coffee? Because you want a cup of coffee, obviously; you have a selfish interest in enjoying a delicious, rich cup of coffee. But why did you give money to a drought relief fund? Because I want to enjoy the reputation of a generous and public-spirited person; it’s in my selfish interest to have such a reputation. But why did you make a secret anonymous donation last

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Egoism and Relativism

week? Because it made me feel good to think I was helping others: I received more satisfaction from spending the money that way than by any other use I could have found for the money. So even that “generous act” was actually selfish. But what about when your dear old mother rose from her bed and interrupted her own much needed rest, in order to hold a cool cloth to your fevered brow and bring you medicine and comfort? Was that a selfish act? Yes, that too was selfish. She gained greater pleasure from ministering to her child than she could have derived from resting. She did it, ultimately, for her own selfish pleasure.

Criticisms of Psychological Egoism Psychological egoism begins to sound seductively convincing. No matter what case one proposes—the generous anonymous donor, the selfless loving mother—the psychological egoist easily shows it to have been a selfish act. But perhaps too easily. After all, psychological egoism is supposed to be an empirical claim. It is not based on logic, or pure reasoning, or definition, but based instead on empirical observation and testing. But if it is an empirical claim, then it must be possible to tell what sort of empirical evidence would count against the claim. Since psychological egoists believe that psychological egoism is empirically true, obviously they need not provide evidence that it is false. If it is to be an empirical truth, however, they must be able to tell us what would count as evidence that it is false. Suppose I claim that all moose are brown, and I assert that as an empirical truth based on long observation of moose. If it is an empirical truth, then I have to be able to say what would count against it. Easy enough. If you show me a purple moose, and I investigate to make sure the moose has not been dyed a different color, and this purple moose is a DNA match to brown moose, and its mother and father were perfectly respectable moose, then I will admit that I was empirically mistaken: it’s not true that all moose are brown. (If I insist that this purple animal is not a moose, since all moose must be brown, I am proposing a new definition of moose, rather than making an empirical claim about the moose species.) So if psychological egoism is an empirically based claim that all behavior is selfishly motivated, what would count as proving the claim wrong?

That’s the problem. Not even the most generous, selfless, noble act escapes the clutches of egoistic selfishness. You plunge into icy water, at great risk to your own life, to rescue a small child to whom you are not related. No one else is around, so there is no hope of reward or recognition. The child is a thor- oughly obnoxious and ungrateful wretch, who is more likely to kick you in the shins than thank you for your heroic efforts. Even then, the egoist categorizes this as selfish, self-interested behavior: you take pleasure in the rescue, and you avoid the suffering of watching a small child perish. But this makes the claim empty: nothing could count as an unselfish act, since every purposeful act has some motivation, and the egoist is redefining all motivations as selfish. The claim is true, but it is reduced to a tautology: all selfishly motivated acts are selfishly motivated acts. But the psychological egoist is supposed to be giving us a genuine psychological claim, not a claim that is rendered true on the basis of a special definition.

The persuasiveness of psychological egoism rests on a special and all-inclusive meaning of “selfishness.” If we are short of food, and you make a greedy secret raid on our limited food supply, then that is a selfish act. If you offer to take the smallest share, but you know that we are only minutes from being rescued and supplied with abundant food, and your only motive is to win honor and praise for your pretended generosity, then your behavior hardly counts as a shining example of generosity. But if you offer a portion of your food simply because you are concerned about the welfare of another member of your party, and you have no ulterior motives other than the benefit of that person, then that is a genuinely generous and unselfish act. If the act brings you satisfaction, that does not transform it into a selfish act. After all, finding genuine satisfaction and joy in the good of others is the hallmark of a generous person, one who is not acting for his or her own selfish goals. Furthermore, even when we do act for self-interested motives, those motives need not squeeze out all generous motivation. You want to do well in your calculus class, for self-interested reasons. You also want your friend to do well in calculus, and you unselfishly provide tutoring to help him reach that goal. By tutoring your friend, you may learn the material better yourself; but that doesn’t transform your motivation into something selfish. When in high school you did volunteer work at an extended care facility for the elderly, you may have had a selfish interest in how attractive such volunteer work would appear on your college application; but that does not mean that you could not also have a genuine and unselfish motive as well: the motive of bringing comfort and joy to the people with whom you worked.

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Far from selfish egoism being a universal truth, the fact is that we can find examples of unselfish generosity not only among humans but in other species as well. Charles Darwin cites examples of blind helpless birds that were fed by their companions. Whatever one thinks of unselfish behavior in other species, there seems to be abundant evidence of it in our own—mixed in, of course, with a substantial amount of cruelty, selfishness, and callousness. But the presence of some level of unselfish behavior is sufficient to undercut the claims of psychological egoism.

Ethical Egoism If we do sometimes act unselfishly, then the next question emerges: should we act unselfishly? Or should we instead, as the ethical egoist insists, always act for our own benefit?

Individual Ethical Egoism Actually, there are at least two different versions of ethical egoism: individual ethical egoism and universal ethical egoism. The individual ethical egoist maintains that everyone ought to do what benefits me. If Susan is an individual ethical egoist, then Susan believes that everyone, Susan included, ought to aim at the benefit of Susan. Universal ethical egoism is the position of extreme rugged individualism: everyone ought to aim exclusively at his or her own benefit, and should neither give, ask, nor receive help from others.

By its very nature, individual ethical egoism has few advocates. That is not to say that individual ethical egoism is a rare position. To the contrary, judging by the behavior of some corporate executive officers who enrich themselves at the expense of employees and investors and stockholders, one suspects that individual ethical egoism is alive and flourishing. But individual ethical egoists are unlikely to publicly promote their views. If Ken is a dedicated individual ethical egoist, who firmly believes that everyone should be working for the benefit of Ken (and that no other ethical rules apply), then Ken may attempt to create the impression that he is dedicated to the welfare of all and eager to help others. After all, if everyone else should be striving for my benefit, then the best way to accomplish that is to convince them that their work will benefit everyone, including themselves. That being the case (and since an individual ethical egoist will have no moral reluctance to tell lies, though he will of course think it wrong for you to lie to him), it is very difficult to tell how many individual ethical egoists there really are.

It is sometimes suggested that individual ethical egoism is self-contradictory, because advocating such a system is self-defeating: by openly asserting that you are only interested in yourself, and you believe that others should sacrifice everything for your benefit, you are likely to become an outcast. People will be reluctant to associate with you, much less devote themselves to promoting your welfare. But what this shows is not that individual ethical egoism is inherently contradictory, but only that the individual ethical egoist would be wise not to publicize her ethical views; or to speak plainly, the individual ethical egoist would be wise to lie about her ethical views (a policy she can adopt with no ethical qualms).

Is there any way to convince the individual ethical egoist to change her views? That’s a difficult question. If it’s possible, it won’t be easy. After all, the genuine individual ethical egoist thinks no one else really matters. If we point out that other people are hurt by her actions, that will be a matter of indifference to her. We might point out to her how profoundly isolated she is: she can never really reveal herself to anyone, can never be open with others, cannot have any friends for whom she feels real affection and deep bonds of shared honesty. Individual ethical egoism begins to look like a rather lonely, loveless, and uneasy life. But if that is the sort of life one wants—a life lived with narrow and exclusive concern for oneself—then perhaps that will not be disturbing. In short, if you regard a totally self- centered life as a real and attractive possibility, then it is difficult to offer you good reasons not to adopt individual ethical egoism. Of course we can give good reasons for appearing to take a larger view, in order to gain the social benefits that accrue to that appearance; but it is much more difficult to give reasons why you should genuinely pursue a moral life, rather than a fraud that takes every possible exploitative advantage. Noting the implications of individual ethical egoism, however, is likely to severely limit its appeal. Few would wish to live a life of constant deception, a life cut off from genuine intimacy, friendship, concern for others, and mutual affection. Individual ethical egoism looks more like a path to psychopathology than to happiness.

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Egoism and Relativism

Why Care for Others? If we seek self-interested reasons that can answer “Why be concerned for others?” we encounter other problems. There are traditional attempts to prove that a calculating egoist would not be happy: your conscience will bother you, your life will require constant deception, you will cut yourself off from any genuine relations (you hide your real motives, so no one can care for you as you actually are). But if you are the sort of person who can genuinely consider a life of systemic selfishness as an attractive “lifestyle,” then probably such concerns will not weigh heavily on you.

Individual ethical egoism is a difficult position to refute. Some people take that as evidence of its strength. But it may instead be because the position starts from such an alien perspective—a perspective of absolutely no concern for others—that it is difficult to find any common ground for discussion. It is per- fectly reasonable and morally legitimate to have a healthy regard for one’s own interests. In fact, without at least some degree of self-respect, it is difficult to imagine having satisfactory relations with others. But exclusive concern for oneself, coupled with indifference to the needs and interests of others, is not likely to strike many people as a desirable or fulfilling perspective on the world.

Universal Ethical Egoism Universal ethical egoism—everyone should pursue what is to his or her indi- vidual self-interested advantage—does at least have the advantage of being a position one can openly advocate. And it has had some champions. Some people argue that universal ethical egoism is simply nature’s way: we all struggle for our own selfish purposes, the strong survive, the weak and unfit are eliminated, and thus we evolve and get better. It’s harsh, but that’s just the way it is. And if we want to be successful, we have to follow nature’s plan.

Universal ethical egoism is red-blooded, two-fisted ethics. Unfortunately, it is based on a crude and distorted view of evolutionary science. Natural evolution doesn’t have a plan, and it certainly has no goal or purpose. The evolutionary survivors aren’t superior, morally or otherwise; rather, they are simply better suited for the particular environment in which they happen to land. In any case, the paved ground, polluted air, and shopping malls in which we now function, the bioengineered and heavily processed foods we eat, and the high-tech medical treatments we receive make talk of “natural” processes a bit strained. Even if we set all that aside, the old “every man for himself” stuff is more suited to Hollywood action movies than our own evolutionary history. Rather than rugged individualists, we are a profoundly social species. Due to our extraordinarily long and vulnerable infancy, humans form strong family and social bonds. This has great advantages for our species—otherwise it would not have been a successful evolutionary strategy. Mutual affection and concern and cooperation are essential to making that strategy work. The notion of humans as rugged individuals is an artificial contrivance, while cooperation and affection come naturally to members of our deeply social species.

A second version of universal ethical egoism is based in economic considera