She's dating the gangster moral lesson

Discussion Question Response

Question: Chapter 3 in Rosenstand’s The Moral of the Story deals with the issue of moral truth—what is the morally right thing to do in a particular situation and what are the correct principles or guidelines for a living a morally good life? Moral subjectivism is the view that moral propositions are true only relative to the particular beliefs of a particular person or subject of experience; ethical relativism is the view that what is good, right, and morally correct is true relative to a particular cultural tradition and set of behavioral practices; and moral absolutism (this is what Rosenstand calls “hard universalism” is the view that there are universal moral truths or principles that hold for everyone, everywhere, at all times and under any circumstances.

The most common viewpoint adopted by college students today is ethical relativism, and this is probably because it seems to be the most tolerant and fair-minded position, in that it respects diversity and individuality. However, Rosenstand points to a number of problems with ethical relativism. Where do you place yourself on this spectrum of moral stances? Are you a moral skeptic or a moral subjectivist? an ethical relativist? a moral absolutist? If you have never thought about this before, now is the time to do so. Explain why you hold the viewpoint you do, and defend that view from what might be seen as at least one major difficulty with adopting that ethical stance. Alice Walker's novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), presents a strong case against ethical relativism by denouncing the practice of female circumcision, or perhaps more accurately termed, female genital mutilation, a traditional practice of certain cultures that is seen as morally correct, as not only the right thing to do, but something that one is morally obligated to do. If you are an ethical relativist, you should be able to show why Walker is wrong for condemning this practice as morally wrong. If those who carry out the practice believe that it is the morally right thing to do, who is Walker, or who is anyone with different beliefs, to tell them they are wrong?

Chapter 1 Thinking About Values 1 Do We Need a Code of Ethics? 1 Values, Morals, and Ethics 3 Good and Evil 7 Debating Moral Issues from Religion to

Neurobiology and Storytelling 14 Martha Nussbaum: Stories, Ethics, and

Emotions 24 A Philosophical Example, a Real-Life

Event, and Two Fictional Stories about Lying 27

PRIMARY READING: Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge 31

PRIMARY READING: Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect 33

NARRATIVE: Smoke Signals 36 NARRATIVE: Big Fish 39 NARRATIVE: East of Eden 43

Chapter 2 Learning Moral Lessons from

Stories 50 Didactic Stories 50 The New Interest in Stories Across the

Professions 51 The Value of Stories Across Time and

Space 54 Are Stories Harmful? A New and Ancient

Debate 88 PRIMARY READING: Plato, Republic, Book X 97 PRIMARY READING: Aristotle, Poetics 101 PRIMARY READING: Umberto Eco, The Name of

the Rose 103 PRIMARY READING: Raymond Chandler,

“The Simple Art of Murder” 105 NARRATIVE: Medea 107 NARRATIVE: The Sorrows of Young Werther 111 NARRATIVE: The Education of Mingo 112 NARRATIVE: Pulp Fiction 116

Contents

Preface x Acknowledgments xv

P A R T 1

The Story as a Tool of Ethics

P A R T 2

What Should I Do? Ethics of Conduct

Chapter 3 Ethical Relativism 119 How to Deal with Moral

Differences 119 The Lessons of Anthropology 124 Problems with Ethical Relativism 129 Refuting Ethical Relativism 139

James Rachels and Soft Universalism 141

Ethical Relativism and Multiculturalism 146

PRIMARY READING: Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal” 151

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vi CONTENTS

PRIMARY READING: James Rachels, “Is Ethics Just a Matter of Social Conventions?” 154

PRIMARY READING: John Steinbeck, “Paradox and Dream” 158

NARRATIVE: The Poisonwood Bible 159 NARRATIVE: Possessing the Secret of Joy 165 NARRATIVE: Avatar 168

Chapter 4 Myself or Others? 171 Psychological Egoism: What About the

Heroes? 171 Psychological Egoism: From Glaucon to

Hobbes 174 Three Major Problems With Psychological

Egoism 183 The Selfish-Gene Theory and Its Critics 188 Ethical Egoism and Ayn Rand’s

Objectivism 192 Being Selfless: Levinas’s Ideal Altruism

Versus Singer’s Reciprocal Altruism 200 A Natural Fellow-Feeling? Hume and de

Waal 204 PRIMARY READING: Plato, The Republic 210 PRIMARY READING: Thomas Hobbes,

Leviathan 214 PRIMARY READING: Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of

Emergencies” 215 PRIMARY READING: Frans De Waal, Primates

and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved 218

NARRATIVE: Friends episode: “The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS” 220

NARRATIVE: Return to Paradise 223 NARRATIVE: Atlas Shrugged 226

Chapter 5 Using Your Reason, Part 1:

Utilitarianism 231 Jeremy Bentham and the Hedonistic

Calculus 232 Advantages and Problems of Sheer

Numbers: From Animal Welfare to the Question of Torture 241

John Stuart Mill: Higher and Lower Pleasures 247

Mill’s Harm Principle 254 Act and Rule Utilitarianism 260 PRIMARY READING: Jeremy Bentham, “Of the

Principle of Utility” 263 PRIMARY READING: John Stuart Mill,

Utilitarianism 265 PRIMARY READING: Peter Singer, “A Convenient

Truth” 268 NARRATIVE: “The Blacksmith and the

Baker” 271 NARRATIVE: The Brothers Karamazov 272 NARRATIVE: “The Ones Who Walk Away from

Omelas” 274 NARRATIVE: Extreme Measures 275 NARRATIVE: The Invention of Lying 278

Chapter 6 Using Your Reason, Part 2: Kant’s

Deontology 282 Consequences Don’t Count—Having a

Good Will Does 282 The Categorical Imperative 285 Rational Beings Are Ends in

Themselves 295 Beings Who Are Things 298 The Kingdom of Ends 302 PRIMARY READING: Immanuel Kant,

Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals 304

PRIMARY READING: Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals 305

NARRATIVE: High Noon 308 NARRATIVE: 3:10 to Yuma 310 NARRATIVE: Abandon Ship! 314 NARRATIVE: Match Point 316

Chapter 7 Personhood, Rights, and Justice 320 What Is a Human Being? 320 The Expansion of the Concept “ Human” 321 Personhood: The Key to Rights 321 Science and Moral Responsibility: Genetic

Engineering, Stem Cell Research, and Cloning 327

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CONTENTS vii

Questions of Rights and Equality 337 Distributive Justice: From Rawls to

Affirmative Action 348 Forward- and Backward-Looking Justice

and Affirmative Action 352 Criminal Justice: Restorative Versus

Retributive Justice 355 PRIMARY READING: The United Nations Universal

Declaration of Human Rights 363 PRIMARY READING: Jürgen Habermas, The

Future of Human Nature 366 PRIMARY READING: John Rawls, “Justice as

Fairness” 368

PRIMARY READING: Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” 371

PRIMARY READING: John Berteaux, “Defining Racism in the 21st Century” 373

PRIMARY READING: John Berteaux, “Unseen, Unheard, Unchosen” 375

NARRATIVE: The Island 376 NARRATIVE: Gattaca 380 NARRATIVE: Mississippi Burning 383 NARRATIVE: Hotel Rwanda 386

P A R T 3

How Should I Be? Virtue Ethics

Chapter 8 Virtue Ethics from Tribal Philosophy

to Socrates and Plato 391 What Is Virtue? What Is Character? 391 Non-Western Virtue Ethics: Africa and

Indigenous America 392 Virtue Ethics in the West 396 The Good Teacher: Socrates’ Legacy,

Plato’s Works 398 The Good Life 406 The Virtuous Person: The Tripartite

Soul 408 Plato’s Theory of Forms 412 Plato’s Influence on Christianity 417 PRIMARY READING: Plato, The Republic 418 PRIMARY READING: Plato, Apology 421 PRIMARY READING: Ronald Dworkin, What Is a

Good Life? 425 NARRATIVE: A Man for All Seasons 428 NARRATIVE: “The Myth of the Cave” 431 NARRATIVE: The Truman Show 434 NARRATIVE: The Store of the Worlds 437

Chapter 9 Aristotle’s Virtue Theory:

Everything in Moderation 440 Empirical Knowledge and the Realm of the

Senses 440

Aristotle the Scientist 441 Aristotle’s Virtue Theory: Teleology and the

Golden Mean 444 Aristotle’s Influence on Aquinas 459 Some Objections to Greek Virtue Theory 460 PRIMARY READING: Aristotle, Nicomachean

Ethics, Book II 463 PRIMARY READING: Aristotle, Nicomachean

Ethics, Book III 466 NARRATIVE: “The Flight of Icarus” 468 NARRATIVE: Njal’s Saga 470 NARRATIVE: Lord Jim 472 NARRATIVE: “A Piece of Advice” 474

Chapter 10 Contemporary Perspectives 477 Ethics and the Morality of Virtue as Political

Concepts 477 Have Virtue, and Then Go Ahead: Mayo,

Foot, and Sommers 481 The Quest for Authenticity: Kierkegaard,

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas 490

PRIMARY READING: Søren Kierkegaard, J ohannes Climacus 519

PRIMARY READING: Søren Kierkegaard, Either∕Or 520

PRIMARY READING: Jean-Paul Sartre, “ Existentialism Is a Humanism” 521

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viii CONTENTS

Women’s Historical Role in the Public Sphere 613

The Rise of Modern Feminism 619 Classical, Difference, and Radical

Feminism 625 PRIMARY READING: Harriet Taylor Mill,

“Enfranchisement of Women” 642 PRIMARY READING: Simone De Beauvoir, The

Second Sex 645 PRIMARY READING: Carol Gilligan, In a Different

Voice 648 NARRATIVE: A Doll’s House 650 NARRATIVE: Maids of Misfortune 655 NARRATIVE: “The Woman Destroyed” 658 NARRATIVE: A Thousand Splendid Suns 661

Chapter 13 Applied Ethics: A Sampler 665 The Question of Abortion and

Personhood 665 Euthanasia as a Right to Choose? 668 Media Ethics and Media Bias 671 Business Ethics: The Rules of the Game 681 Just War Theory 688 Animal Welfare and Animal Rights 694 Ethics of the Environment: Think Globally,

Act Locally 701 The Death Penalty 707 The Ethics of Self-Improvement: Narrative

Identity 716 A Final Word 724 PRIMARY READING: Andrew Belsey and Ruth

Chadwick, “Ethics as a Vehicle for Media Quality” 726

PRIMARY READING: Amber Levanon Seligson and Laurie Choi, “Critical Elements of an Organizational Ethical Culture” 728

PRIMARY READING: Scott Gottlieb, “How Safe Is Our Food? FDA Could Do Better” 729

PRIMARY READING: John Rawls, The Law of Peoples 731

PRIMARY READING: Great Ape Project, “The Declaration on Great Apes” 734

PRIMARY READING: Lee Hall and Anthony Jon Waters, “From Property to Person: The Case of Evelyn Hart” 735

PRIMARY READING: “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas” 523

PRIMARY READING: Dwight Furrow, A Culture of Care 526

NARRATIVE: Groundhog Day 529 NARRATIVE: No Exit 531 NARRATIVE: Good Will Hunting 533 NARRATIVE: The Searchers 537

Chapter 11 Case Studies in Virtue 541 Courage of the Physical and Moral

Kind 541 Compassion: From Hume to Huck

Finn 549 Gratitude: Asian Tradition and Western

Modernity 559 Virtue and Conduct: The Option of Soft

Universalism 575 Diversity, Politics, and Common

Ground? 578 PRIMARY READING: John McCain, Why Courage

Matters: The Way to a Braver Life 581 PRIMARY READING: Philip Hallie, Tales of Good

and Evil, Help and Harm 584 PRIMARY READING: Jesse Prinz, Is Empathy

Necessary for Morality? 585 PRIMARY READING: Lin Yutang, “On Growing

Old Gracefully” 589 NARRATIVE: Courage: Band of Brothers, Third

Episode, “Carentan” 590 NARRATIVE: Courage: True Grit 592 NARRATIVE: Compassion: “The Parable of the

Good Samaritan” 596 NARRATIVE: Compassion: Schindler’s List 598 NARRATIVE: Gratitude: Eat Drink Man

Woman 601 NARRATIVE: Gratitude: Pay It Forward 604

Chapter 12 Different Gender, Different

Ethics? 608 Feminism and Virtue Theory 608 What Is Gender Equality? 610

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CONTENTS ix

NARRATIVE: Business Ethics: The Insider 750 NARRATIVE: Business Ethics ∕ Environmental

Ethics: Cold Wind 753 NARRATIVE: The Death Penalty: “The Jigsaw

Man” 756 NARRATIVE: The Death Penalty: The Life of

David Gale 758

Credits C-1 Bibliography B-1 Glossary G-1 Index I-1

PRIMARY READING: Severin Carrell, “Al Gore: Clear Proof That Climate Change Causes Extreme Weather” 737

PRIMARY READING: Myles Allen, “Al Gore is Doing a Disservice to Science by Overplaying the Link Between Climate Change and Weather” 739

PRIMARY READING: Tom Sorell, “Two Ideals and the Death Penalty” 741

PRIMARY READING: Mark Fuhrman, Death and Justice: An Exposé of Oklahoma’s Death Row Machine 744

NARRATIVE: Media Ethics ∕ Business Ethics: State of Play 748

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Preface

L ike the previous editions of The Moral of the Story, the seventh edition is a combi- nation of classical questions in ethical theory and contemporary issues. The general concept remains the same: that discussions about moral issues can be facilitated using stories as examples, as a form of ethics lab where solutions can be tried out under controlled conditions. The book is written primarily for such college courses as Introduction to Ethics; Moral Philosophy; and Introduction to Philosophy: Val- ues. Many textbooks in value theory or ethics choose to focus on problems of social importance, such as abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. This book reflects my own teaching experience that it is better for students to be introduced to basic ethical theory before they are plunged into discussions involving moral judgments. Consequently, The Moral of the Story provides an overview of influential classical and contemporary approaches to ethical theory. However, without practical application of the theories, there can be no complete understanding of the problems raised, so each chapter includes examples that illustrate and explore the issues. As in previ- ous editions, each chapter concludes with a section of examples—summaries and excerpts—taken from the world of fiction, novels and films in particular. Within the last few decades, narrative theory has carved out a niche in American and European philosophy as well as in other academic disciplines. It is no longer un- usual for ethicists and other thinkers to include works of fiction in their courses as well as in their professional papers, not only as examples of problem solving, but also as illustrations of an epistemological phenomenon: Humans are, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, storytelling animals, and we humans seem to choose the narrative form as our favorite way to structure meaning as we attempt to make sense of our reality. The narrative trend is making itself felt in other fields as well: The medical profession is looking to stories that teach about doctor-patient relationships; psychotherapists rec- ommend that patients watch films to achieve an understanding of their own situation, and have patients write stories with themselves as the lead character. The court system is making use of films and novels to reach young people in trouble with the law. The U.S. military is partnering up with authors to anticipate possible scenarios for future assaults on American interests. NASA is teaming up with science fiction writers in an attempt to once again make space exploration exciting for new generations of readers. And neuroscientists tell us that we understand the world by superimposing narra- tive order on the chaos we experience. It seems that new fields are constantly being added to the list of professions that are discovering, or rediscovering, the potential of stories.

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Organization

Like the previous editions, the seventh edition of The Moral of the Story is divided into three major sections. Part 1 introduces the topic of ethics and places the phenomenon of storytelling within the context of moral education and discussion. Part 2 examines the conduct theories of ethical relativism, psychological and ethical egoism, altruism, utilitarianism, and Kantian deontology, and explores the concepts of personhood, rights, and justice. Part 3 focuses on the subject of virtue theory and contains chapters on Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, contemporary virtue theories in America, theories of authenticity in the Continental tradition, and gender theory. The virtues of courage, compassion, and gratitude are examined in detail, and the book concludes with a more detailed discussion of a broad selection of moral issues, applying theories introduced in previous chapters. Each chapter concludes with a set of study questions, a section of Primary Readings with excerpts from classical and contemporary texts, and a section of Narratives, a collection of stories that illustrate the moral issues raised in the chapter. The Primary Readings are selected for their value as discussion topics; they don’t necessarily reflect my own views, and I have made no attempt to select readings that cover all possible angles, because of space limitations. The Narratives will be described in more detail below.

Major Changes to the Seventh Edition

Major changes to the seventh edition include the following: Chapter One has been thoroughly revised, with a new introduction, “Do We Need a Code of Ethics?” invit- ing students to evaluate Montana’s 2011 decision to adopt a “Code of the West.” In addition, it expands on the theory that morality can be “hard-wired,” and discusses the momentum naturalism is gaining in today’s moral philosophy. A new box in- troduces Philippa Foot’s famous thought experiment, the “Trolley Problem”. The section “Good and Evil” has been updated and expanded to examine acts of good- will in the most current of events including the Japanese earthquake, the Ft. Hood shootings, and the Chilean mine collapse. Finally, Chapter One takes a deeper look at Martha Nussbaum’s impact on contemporary moral philosophy, especially her theory that well-written fictional stories can provide a better medium for examining moral issues than philosophical examples or actual events. Chapter Two has been updated with current examples of films and television shows illustrating moral problems, including Dexter and NCIS . Chapter Three has two new boxes, “The Adversarial Method,” which examines the traditional philosophical argumentative approach, and introduces Paul Ricoeur’s alternative approach, and “The Intersection of Moral and Legal Issues” which exam- ines whether a nation’s laws are reflective of universal values of its people or more indicative of a time and place in history—a section revised and moved from the sixth edition’s Chapter One. The chapter has a new Primary Reading, James Rachels’ “Is Ethics Just a Matter of Social Conventions?” A new Narrative, a summary of the film Avatar, encourages a discussion of fundamental cultural differences, seen through the theories of ethical relativism, hard universalism, soft universalism, and moral nihilism.

PREFACE xi

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xii PREFACE

Chapter Four expands upon the concept of “heroes” to explore the actions of the Ft. Hood army civilian police officers who reacted in the 2010 on-base shooting, as well as the workers who elected to stay and cool the Fukushima reactors. In addition, it has a new section on Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, in response to reviewer suggestions. In the Narratives section Rand’s Atlas Shrugged excerpt has been expanded with the introduction to “John Galt’s Speech.” Chapter Five has an expanded discussion of the happiness phenomenon and recent happiness studies, as well as an updated discussion about torture seen from a utilitarian perspective. In the Narratives section, the issues of lying and deceit are explored through Ricky Gervais’ film The Invention of Lying . Chapter Six has a story reinstated to the Narratives section from previous edi- tions, a favorite among reviewers, the film Abandon Ship . In Chapter Seven an updated box examines serial killers who hunt for victims living on the fringes of society as prostitutes and drug users, and the notion that such victims who break the law still have a right to live. In the chapter text, Jürgen Habermas’s critique of genetic enhancement has been added, and an excerpt from his book The Future of Human Nature appears in the Primary Readings. The topics of cognitive and moral enhancement have been added to the discussion. Two new boxes have been added, “A Right to Privacy?” about the new social media, and “An Alternative to Jus- tice Ethics” about the ethic of care. Chapter Eight now includes a discussion of “The Good Life” as presented by Ronald Dworkin, as well as an excerpt from his article, “What Is a Good Life” in the Primary Readings. The Narratives section now has a story from previous editions reinstated, “The Store of the Worlds,” by reviewer request. There are no major changes to Chapter 9, but Chapter Ten has a new section on Friedrich Nietzsche, as a result of repeated reviewer and reader requests. The section includes two new boxes, “Elisabeth Nietzsche and the Nazi Connection,” and “Without God, Is Everything Permitted?” In addition, the chapter has a new box featuring “The New Ethic of Care, a Political Vision,” about the theory developed by Dwight Furrow and Mark Wheeler, with an excerpt in the Primary Readings from Furrow’s Reviving the Left . And finally, the Narratives section now includes the film classic Groundhog Day , as an exploration of Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return of the same. Chapter Eleven includes a new box, “When Empathy is Absent: Welcome to Cyberspace?” which examines how the absence of eye contact in the world of Inter- net social networks and other communication may have hampered our ability to feel compassion for others. In addition, it includes a new reading, “Is Empathy Neces- sary for Morality?” by Jesse Prinz, which investigates whether we require empathy in order to make sound ethical decisions. The Narratives now include a summary of the Cohen Brothers’ production True Grit, which discusses the plot’s focus on moral as well as physical courage. In Chapter Twelve , a new box, “Can a Conservative be a Feminist” examines whether contemporary female political figures and commentators such as Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and Ann Coulter represent a form of feminism or, conversely, a throw-back to male-dominated politics. Also, the chapter has two new Narratives, an excerpt from the Victorian mystery Maids of Misfortune by historian M. Louisa Locke,

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PREFACE xiii

and a summary of Khaled Hosseini’s novel from present-day Afghanistan, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Chapter Thirteen has several thoroughly revised sections, including boxes on “Some Religious Views on Fetal Personhood,” and “Social Media and Ethics.” In the Media Ethics section the British News of the World scandal has been added, as well as a mention of the WikiLeaks phenomenon. The Death Penalty section has been updated with recent facts, including the execution of Troy Davis. And the Narratives section has a new excerpt from C.J. Box’s mystery novel Cold Wind , as an illustration of issues in both Business Ethics and Environmental Ethics, as well as a summary of the film State of Play, illustrating Media Ethics as well as Business Ethics.

Using the Narratives

The Narratives have been chosen from a wide variety of sources ranging from epic prose, poems, and novels to films. I wish to emphasize that from a literary and ar- tistic point of view, summaries and excerpts do not do the originals justice; a story worth experiencing, be it a novel, short story, or film, can’t be reduced to a mere plot outline or fragment and still retain all of its essence. As Martha Nussbaum says, the form is an inherent part of the story content. Usually, there is more to the story than the bare bones of a moral problem, and in writing these summaries I have had to dis- regard much of the richness of story and character development. Nevertheless, I have chosen the summary or excerpt format in order to discuss a number of different sto- ries and genres as they relate to specific issues in ethics. Because I believe it is impor- tant to show that there is a cross-cultural, historic tradition of exploring moral prob- lems through telling a story, I have opted for a broad selection of Narratives. Each chapter has several Narratives, but it is not my intention that the instructor should feel obligated to cover all of them in one course; rather, they should be regarded as options that can be alternated from semester to semester—a method I like to use my- self for the sake of variety. There are, of course, other ways than summaries in which stories and ethical theory can be brought together; one might, for instance, select one or two short stories or films in their original format for class discussion. I hope that instructors will indeed select a few stories—novels, short stories, or films—for their classes to experience firsthand. However, the Narratives are written so that firsthand experience should not be necessary to a discussion of the problem presented by the story. The summaries and excerpts give readers just enough information to en- able them to discuss the moral problem presented. I hope that some readers will become inspired to seek out the originals on their own. In most cases the ending is important to the moral significance of a story, and whenever that is the case, I in- clude that ending. In cases where the ending is not significant to the moral drama, I have done my best to avoid giving it away because I don’t want to be a spoiler. Because space is limited, I have not been able to include more than a sampling of stories, and I readily admit that my choices are subjective ones; I personally find them interesting as illustrations and effective in a classroom context where students come from many different cultural backgrounds. Because I am a naturalized U.S. citi- zen, originally a native of Denmark, I have chosen to include a few references to the

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xiv PREFACE

Scandinavian literary tradition. I am fully aware that others might choose other stories or even choose different ethical problems to illustrate, and I am grateful to the many users of the previous six editions, instructors as well as students, who have let me know about their favorite stories and how they thought this selection of stories might be expanded and improved. The new Narratives reflect some of those suggestions. Some students (and instructors) may be disappointed that this edition has no narratives from graphic novels. That is not because I find graphic novels to be any less suitable for exploring moral issues than films and novels—I just don’t have much experience with them, and I am considering including a few graphic novels in my ethics classes; if the experiment is successful, a future edition may contain such stories. However, one area which I have decided against including at this point is video games. I hear from my students that video games are increasingly focused on elaborate narratives rather than merely accumulating points and killing enemy enti- ties, and I can imagine that at some point, video game narratives may offer interesting ways of experiencing moral problems and decision-making, even involving scenarios of emotional and ethical complexity. However, judging from my research into current games, that level of complexity is not yet present in most games. I would be interested to hear from readers with another perspective on video games, and would welcome examples of games with plots involving moral complexity. As was the case with previous revisions, I have had to make some difficult choices, similar to choices made in the sixth edition: To keep the cost of the book down, I have had to cut materials from previous editions to make room for new readings, updates, and narratives. This is never easy, because many of the older readings and stories are favorites of mine, and I am well aware that they may also be the favorites of instructors using this book, and important elements in well-functioning syllabi. Fortunately, in this electronic age we can include new materials without losing all of the older elements. A website has been established by McGraw-Hill (www.mhhe .com/rosenstand7e) that includes a number of narratives from previous editions, such as Dead Man Walking, Do the Right Thing, Thelma and Louise, and The Count of Monte Cristo, for easy access and downloading by instructors. As in previous edi- tions, I emphasize that I wholeheartedly welcome e-mails from students as well as instructors who use this book, with relevant comments and suggestions for new stories as well as additional philosophical perspectives: nrosenst@sdccd.edu.

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Acknowledgments

A s always, I first want to thank my students in the classes Introduction to Philosophy: Values, Philosophy of Women, Issues in Social Philosophy, Reflections on Human Nature, Human Nature and Society, and Philosophy and Literature for their enthusiastic cooperation in suggesting good stories and discussing drafts of the stories and study questions with me—an invaluable help in fine-tuning the summaries and questions. Next, I would like to thank the Project Team at McGraw-Hill Higher Educa- tion for good communication and support: Sponsoring Editor Jessica Cannavo; Developmental Editor Nicole Bridges; Senior Project Manager Lisa A. Bruflodt; Marketing Manager Angela R. FitzPatrick, Permissions Editor Wesley Hall, Photo Researcher David A. Tietz, and Project Manager for MPS Ldt. Vivek Khandelwal. The cover painting is by artist Karen Barbour, and I am delighted that her evoca- tive visions have represented The Moral of the Story through seven editions. I also wish to thank the following reviewers, and one anonymous reviewer, for their suggestions:

Tamela Ice, Kansas City Community College

Jon Inglett, Oklahoma City Community College

Alice Independence Kyburg, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

Joy Branch, Southern Union State Community College

Russell H. Swanson, Edison State College

My colleagues at the Social Sciences and Behavioral and Multicultural Studies Department at San Diego Mesa College, which includes professors, adjuncts, and professors emeritus of philosophy, history, political science, and geography, are a wonderful support group—many of us come from different professional fields and have different outlooks on many things, but we all cherish the ambience of profes- sional integrity in our workplace and find time to discuss ethics-related issues on a regular basis: Thank you to my colleagues from the Social Sciences Department as well as other departments: In particular I wish to thank Department Chair Jonathan McLeod, Donald Abbott, Ken Berger, Michael Kuttnauer, Richard Hammes, Dean Charles Zappia, Terry Valverde, and Melinda Campbell. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to Michael Mussachia, Josef Binter, and Arelene Wolinski for sharing their research—including informative articles—with me, and to Tony

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xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Pettina for being an advance reader on the section on Asian moral philosophy. A special thanks goes to Dwight Furrow for continual congenial collaboration on maintaining the high standard of teaching philosophy at Mesa College, and for jog- ging my memory about one of my favorite films, The Searchers, and pointing out its usefulness in illustrating Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of the face of the other. Because of Dwight’s inspired insight, The Searchers, one of the narratives in the first editions, found its way back to the sixth edition, in a different context. At Mesa College we have a biannual Meeting of the Minds tradition where philoso- phy faculty, contract as well as adjuncts, meet and share our thoughts about teach- ing and engage in debates about classical and current philosophical topics. I want to express my appreciation for the professional enthusiasm of all the philosophy faculty who participate regularly in these meetings in particular a very enlightening discus- sion of recent happiness studies. I treasure these discussions, which have inspired the establishing of a blog, Philosophy on the Mesa, administered by Dwight Furrow and myself, which I hope users of this book will visit from time to time: http://philosophy- onthemesa.com. My colleague John Berteaux, philosophy professor at Monterey State University, deserves my heartfelt thanks for being an old friend and colleague from the adjunct days who shares my concerns for issues in social ethics and who has gener- ously shared his work, including his archive of newspaper columns with me. A special, word of appreciation goes to my friend and colleague Harold Weiss, associate profes- sor of philosophy at Northhampton Community College. I would like to also thank Dominic Cerrato, TNCC, for sharing his insight on the Catholic Church and person- hood, and my good friend Linda MacDonald Glenn, University of Vermont School of Nursing and Allied Health Care, for her inspiring suggestions and continued passion for bioethics. Also, I want to thank Jeremy Hall, Newington College, Stanmore, NSW, Australia, editor of Dialogue , for his continued interest in my work, and encouraging e-mails. And I would like to say a very special thank you to my former colleague, Pro- fessor Emeritus of history Mary Lou Locke, who has taught me that (1) there is a life after teaching, and (2) that a post-teaching career can make history come alive through storytelling. I am grateful for her permission, as author M. Louisa Locke, to include an excerpt from her first novel in Chapter 12. The first and second editions wouldn’t have been possible without my first edi- tor at Mayfield Publishing Company, my good friend Jim Bull. And the previous editions have benefited from the help and suggestions from the following friends and colleagues: Michael Schwartz, School of Economics, Finance and Marketing Pro- fessor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia; the late Stephen George, Brigham Young University; independent scholar and author Maxine Sheets- Johnstone; Helmut Wautischer, Sonoma State University; Eugene Troxell and Peter Atterton, San Diego State University; Betsy Decyk, Daniel Guerriere, and G. A. Spangler, California State University, Long Beach. In addition, I am grateful to the late Richard Taylor for his correspondence, to the late Philip Hallie for his inspiration, and to his late wife Dorrit Hallie; to Russell Means for sharing his views on American Indian traditions; to Leonard Maltin for his time and advice while I was working on the first edition; to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh for her time and comments on a draft of the second edition; to Carol Enns, College of the Sequoias; John Osborne, Butte

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii

College; Thomas Wren, Loyola University, Chicago; Lawrence Hinman, U niversity of San Diego; Peter Kemp, Danish University of Education; Hans Hertel, University of Copenhagen; Steen Wackerhausen, University of Aarhus. As in previous editions, I want to thank a few good friends outside the philo- sophical profession for their support, friendship, and intellectual contributions to this edition: author and historian J. R. Edmondson; author and film historian Frank Thompson; author Mark Fuhrman; vocational historian Phil Martin; Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at SDSU Randi McKenzie; my close friends since the early days of childhood, Christa W. Blichmann, M.D., and Susanne Schwer, M.D.; my cousin, author Søren Peter Hansen and his wife Jytte; my sister-in-law, Lois Covner; my brother-in-law Russell Covner; my cousin Karin Winther Rasmussen; close fam- ily friends Marianne Ammitzbøl, Karen Herand, and Elisabeth and Mie Millev Rix; my mother-in-law, Nancy R. Covner; and lastly my niece Jessica Humphrey and my cousins Astrid Marie Hansen, Ellen Marie Hansen, and Katrine Winther Rasmussen, four wise young women who are discovering the art of asking philosophical ques- tions, and making positive contributions to the world of tomorrow. My mother, Gladys Rosenstand, passed away in 2007, but I find myself daily reminded of her courage, her deeply ethical outlook on work and life—and, not least, her keen appreciation for life’s droller moments. I have the immense privilege of being able to again thank my father, Finn Rosenstand, for continued inspiring discussions about everything in life that matters, for always looking out for interest- ing books and articles for me, and for introducing me, at an early age, to his motto, adopted from Greek antiquity: Maeden agan. A man of great wisdom and a gifted storyteller, he has been instrumental in opening my mind to intellectual curiosity, human compassion, and a passion for history, literature, and film. Most of all, I want to thank my husband, Craig R. Covner, for his strength and loving support, for always being ready to share his insight into American history as well as Hollywood film history, for his understanding and patience with me in my writer’s work-mode, and for his wonderful sense of humor.

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1

Chapter One

Thinking About Values

Do We Need a Code of Ethics?

In 2011 the state of Montana’s Senate made an announcement about moral values that elicited fairly strong responses from a variety of groups, both positive and nega- tive. The Senate President Jim Peterson announced that the Montana legislature had decided to adopt as the offi cial state code what they called the Code of the West, based on James P. Owens’s book Cowboy Ethics. The concept itself is not new—Wyoming adopted the same code in 2010, and people of the Western United States have known the “Code of the West” or Cowboy Code of Ethics for a long time. And while the idea of doing things in a “cowboy way” or “go cowboy” may associate, to a modern urban mind-set, to handling things in an unorthodox way, perhaps through the use of force rather than negotiations, nothing could be further from what the Montanans had in mind. The code has a ten-point set of rules to live by, including “Live each day with courage,” Be tough, but fair,” and “Know where to draw the line.” The responses ranged from applauses and praise to anger, skepticism, and ridi- cule. Some felt that this was a very positive thing: Offi cials were fi nally reaching back to a set of values of common sense and decency that would help guide a young generation while at the same time keep the offi cials of the state of Montana on the straight and narrow if they felt the need to stray. Some laughed, and some pointed out that the Code of the West, or Cowboy Ethics, really was never part of the ruth- less life on the frontier in the nineteenth century, but a concoction created by mak- ers of Western movies and so-called cowboy poets in the early twentieth century. Some observers remarked that it really wasn’t the business of a state legislature to dictate people’s personal behavior, and others found that perhaps the whole thing was a business ploy to make the state of Montana look like a place where honor- able people could move their businesses to in morally shaky times—bottom line: money. But what perhaps was the most interesting response was that some observ- ers commented in their blogs, Why not? Why not fl oat a benign set of values that really doesn’t amount to much more than what ordinary good people expect of each other, if it can make a statement about the values of one of our fi fty states? Why should we be afraid to stand up and say, I really prefer if we all refrained from being devious and selfi sh and thought a little more about the needs of other people?

Some Current Values Discussions

You may fi nd that you’ve already made up your mind about the Montana and Wyoming decisions: commendable/silly/offensive/outdated—or perhaps totally un- important. But the entire issue serves as a kind of cultural mirror to hold up and take

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2 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

a look at ourselves, so this will be a question we return to several times in this book: Can we rely on people having their own set of values that not only will guide them through hard times, but will also make life with others run more smoothly? In other words, do we need a code of ethics as part of the social rules we learn as we grow up and move into society as active members? Is it the government’s business, or perhaps our schools’? Or is it strictly something we should control, as parents? The fact is that we all encounter issues involving moral values on an everyday basis; sometimes they involve small decisions, sometimes large ones. Some everyday issues that are in the news are questions about Internet fi le sharing /copying/down- loading of copyrighted material. Some fi nd it is rightfully illegal, while others fi nd it to be completely acceptable and even a morally decent thing—sharing new ideas with others. Another issue that you may have been engaged in discussing is the ethics of texting and Facebook communication, and what exactly is an appropriate level of intimacy and sharing of information if it risks getting into the wrong hands? And what is the kind of information we can, in all decency, text to each other—Is it acceptable to break up though a text message? Sexting—send sexy pictures taken without the portrayed person’s permission? Share gossip? All these questions involve an underly- ing code of ethics. So, too, do the major moral issues we as a society are struggling with: Some of the big questions and even confl icts we have dealt with during the fi rst decade of this century have involved the right to marry whomever you choose, including a person of your own gender, the question of the appropriate response to terrorism (through the civil courts, or military actions and tribunals), the use of tor- ture in interrogations of presumed terrorists, the right to have access to euthanasia, the continued question about the moral status of abortion, the periodically resurfac- ing discussion about the right to gun ownership, the moral status of pets as property or family members, and other such issues that involve both moral and legal perspec- tives. This book will deal with some of those issues, but perhaps more important, it will deal with the values underlying those issues—the moral theories explaining those values. Later in this chapter we look at the terms of values , morals, and ethics . For each of the issues mentioned above there is generally a side promoting it, and a side arguing against it. We’re used to that kind of debate in a free society, and you’ll see some of those questions discussed in this book, in particular in Chapters 7 and 13. What we have also become used to during the past decades is that our nation seems more divided than in previous decades—what some political commentators have la- beled a “50-50 nation.” In election years, particularly in 2000 and 2004 (where presi- dent George W. Bush was elected and re-elected), it was clear that political opinions divided the country almost in half—at least if there were only two options to choose from, Democratic or Republican. In 2008 the election of President Obama was a clearer majority than the previous two presidential elections, but many other issues on the ballot showed the same half-and-half support. Even if we have “blue states” and “red states” showing up in the electoral map, there are blue and red areas within each state. This is of course politics, and our main topic is going to be ethics and val- ues, but there is a relevant connection: There is a set of moral values commonly asso- ciated with Democratic policies, such as being pro-choice/ proabortion, increased gun control, pro-gay rights, and scaling back military operations, and another associated

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VALUES , MORALS , AND ETHICS 3

with Republican politics generally advocating pro-life/anti-abortion, pro-gun owner- ship, anti-gay rights, and strong support for the military. These are stereotypes that don’t always hold up, and in addition there is a growing movement of Independents, voters who “decline to state” a party affi liation on their voter registration form. So it may be misleading to say that the nation is divided down the middle—but it is a clear indication that across this nation we just don’t all agree on the details of how one should be a good citizen, other than it is a good thing to have a form of government where the people have the opportunity to vote. So if we’re looking for a code of ethics to live by, and even to promote, we should expect that not everyone is going to agree. But what is also commonplace is that we tend to think that those who disagree with us are either stupid, ignorant—or perhaps even evil. The blogosphere is full of such assumptions. And that lends itself to thinking that we, perhaps in fact, are citizens of two cultures within the United States, the culture of liberal values and the culture of conservative values (a pattern known in many other countries with a Western tradi- tion of democracy and right to free speech). Some call it a culture war . So here I have a little recommendation—an introduction of a moral value, if you will: For the sake of a good discussion—either in the classroom, online, or perhaps just as an internal dialogue with yourself, it may be useful not to jump to the immediate conclusion that people who disagree with you are stupid, ignorant, or evil. As we strive to become a nation of successful diversity, we sometimes forget that moral and political diversity also deserves a place alongside of diversity of gender, race, religion, economic back- ground, sexual orientation, and so forth. In other words, people have a right to have a wide variety of opinions, and some of them are arrived at through honest and consci- entious deliberation. We have little chance of being able to talk with one another and even learn from one another if we keep thinking that everybody who doesn’t agree with us is automatically wrong or wrongheaded. On the other hand, an acceptance of the fact that people disagree on moral issues doesn’t have to lead to a moral relativism, or an assumption that there is al- ways “another side” to everything. Despite our moral differences in this culture, most “reasonable” people are going to agree on some basic values: In my experience, the majority of Americans are in favor of justice and equality, and against murder, child abuse, racism, sexism, slavery, animal torture, and so forth. In Chapter 3 you’ll fi nd a discussion of ethical relativism, and in Chapter 11 you’ll fi nd a further discussion of the search for common values in a politically divided culture.

Values, Morals, and Ethics

In its most basic sense, something we value is something we believe is set apart from things that we don’t value or that we value less. When do we fi rst begin to value something? As babies, we live in a world that is divided into what we like and what we don’t like—a binary world of plus and minus, of yes and no. Some psychoanalysts believe we never really get over this early stage, so that some people simply divide the world into what they like or approve of, and what they dislike or disapprove of. However, most of us add to that a justifi cation for our preferences or aversions. And this is where the concept of moral values comes in. Having “values” implies that we

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4 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

have a moral code that we live by, or at least that we tell ourselves we try to live by, a set of beliefs about what constitutes good conduct and a good character. Perhaps equally important, having values implies that we have a conception of what society should be, such as a promoter of values we consider good, a safety net for when things go wrong, an overseer that punishes bad behavior and rewards good behavior, a caregiver for all our basic needs, or a minimalist organization that protects the people against internal and external enemies but otherwise leaves them alone to pursue their own happiness. In Chapter 7 we examine several of these conceptions of social values. In the late twentieth century the number of college classes in introductory ethics and value theory swelled. When they hear I teach ethics, people who are unfamiliar with how college classes in the subject are taught say, “Good! Our college students really need that!” That response always makes me pause: What do they think I teach? Right from wrong? Of course, we do have discussions about right and wrong, and we can, from time to time, even reach agreement about some moral responses being pref- erable to other moral responses. If students haven’t acquired a sense of values by the time they’re in college, I fear it’s too late: Psychologists say a child must develop a sense of values by the age of seven to become an adult with a conscience. If the child hasn’t learned by the second grade that other people can feel pain and pleasure, and that one should try not to harm others, that lesson will probably never be truly learned. Fortu- nately, that doesn’t mean everyone must be taught the same moral lessons by the age of seven—as long as we have some moral background to draw on later, as a sounding board for further ethical refl ections, we can come from morally widely diverse homes and still become morally dependable people. A child growing up in a mobster type of family will certainly have acquired a set of morals by the age of seven—but it isn’t necessarily the same set of morals as those acquired by a child in a liberal, secular, humanist family or in a Seventh-Day Adventist family. The point is that all these chil- dren will have their “moral center” activated and can expand their moral universe. A child who has never been taught any moral lessons may be a sociopath of the future, a person who has no comprehension of how other people feel, no empathy. If having moral values has to do with brain chemistry, and with simple likes and dislikes, why don’t we turn to the disciplines of neuroscience and psychology for an understanding of values? Why is philosophy the discipline that examines the values issue? That question goes to the core of what philosophy is: Neuroscience can tell us about the physical underpinnings of our mental life and possibly whether our mental reactions have a correlation to the world we live in, but as you saw earlier will see below, it can’t tell us whether our mental processes are socially appropriate or inap- propriate, morally justifi ed or unjustifi ed, and so forth. Neuroscience has recently identifi ed areas in the brain where moral decisions involving empathy take place, but that doesn’t mean that neuroscientists can tell us which moral decisions are more correct than others. Psychology can tell us only what people believe and possibly why they believe it; it can’t make a statement about whether people are justifi ed in believing it. Philosophy’s job, at least in this context, is to question our values; it forces us to provide reasons, and preferably good reasons, for giving our moral approval to one type of behavior and disapproving of another. Philosophy asks the fundamental question Why, in all its fi elds, including the fi eld of value theory/ethics. (Box 1.1 gives

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VALUES , MORALS , AND ETHICS 5

In the chapter text, you read that philosophy traditionally asks the question Why . This is one of the features that has characterized Western philosophy from its earliest years in Greek antiquity. We generally date Western philoso- phy from approximately seven hundred years B.C.E./B.C. (“before the common era”/“before Christ”), when some Greek thinkers, such as Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, began to ask questions about what reality truly con- sists of: Is it the way we perceive it through the senses, or is there an underlying true real- ity that our intellect can understand? Thales believed the underlying reality was water; Heraclitus believed that it was a form of ever- changing energy; and Parmenides saw true reality as being an underlying realm of per- manence, elements that don’t change. We call this form of philosophy metaphysics; in Chapter 8 you will read a brief introduction to Plato’s famous theory of metaphysics, but otherwise the topic of metaphysics has only indirect bearing on the topic of this book. A few centuries after Thales, the next area of phi- losophy that manifested itself was ethics, with Socrates’ questioning of what is the right way to live (see chapter text). Two generations later the third area of philosophy was introduced, primarily through the writings of Aristotle: logic, the establishing of rules for proper think- ing as opposed to fallacious thinking. But the fourth area of Western philosophy didn’t re- ally take hold in the minds of thinkers until some two thousand years later, in the seven- teenth century, when René Descartes began to explore what the mind can know: epistemol- ogy, or theory of knowledge. All four branches of philosophy are represented today in school curricula and enjoy vibrant debates within the philosophical community. The only branch to have languished somewhat is metaphysics, since modern science has answered some of

its ancient questions: We now know about the subnuclear reality of quantum mechanics. But a classical question of metaphysics remains unanswered by science to this day: What is the nature of the human mind? Do we have a soul that outlives our bodies, or will our self be ex- tinguished with the demise of our brain? Until the mid–twentieth century, philosophy was usually taught in the West with the underly- ing assumption that philosophy as such was, by and large, a Western phenomenon. That rather ethnocentric attitude has changed considerably over the last decades. It is now recognized un- equivocally among Western scholars that Asian philosophy has its own rich traditions of explo- ration of metaphysics and ethics in particular; and some philosophers point out that in a sense, all cultures have metaphysics and ethics, even if they have no body of philosophical literature, because their legends, songs, and religious sto- ries will constitute the culture’s view of reality as well as the moral rules and their justifi cations. As for logic and epistemology, they are not as frequently encountered in non-Western cul- tures: Indian philosophy has established its own tradition of logic, but epistemology remains a Western philosophical specialty, according to most Western scholars. To the four classic branches, philosophy has added a number of specialized fi elds over the centuries, such as philosophy of art (aesthetics), social philosophy, philosophy of religion, politi- cal philosophy, philosophy of sports, philoso- phy of human nature, philosophy of gender, and philosophy of science. What makes these fi elds philosophical inquiries is their special approach to their subjects; they investigate not only the nature of art, social issues, religion, politics, and so on, but also the theoretical underpinnings of each fi eld, its hidden assumptions and agen- das, and its future moral and social pitfalls and promises.

Box 1.1 T H E F O U R C L A S S I C B R A N C H E S O F P H I L O S O P H Y

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6 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

an overview of the classic branches within philosophy.) Why do we have the values we have? Why do values make some people give up their comfort, even their lives, for a cause, or for other people’s welfare? Why do some people disregard the values of their society for a chosen cause or for personal gain? Is it ever morally appropriate to think of yourself and not of others? Are there ultimate absolute moral values, or are they a matter of personal or cultural choices? Such fundamental questions can be probed by philosophy in a deeper and more fundamental way than by neuroscience or psychology, and we will explore such questions in the upcoming chapters. If having values is such an important feature of our life, should elementary schools teach values, then? It may be just a little too late, if indeed a child’s moral sense is de- veloped by the age of seven, but at least there is a chance it might help; and for children whose parents have done a minimal job of teaching them respect for others, school will probably be the only place they’ll learn it. Some elementary schools are developing such programs. Problems occur, however, when schools begin to teach values with which not all parents agree. We live in a multicultural society, and although some parents might like certain topics to be on the school agenda, others certainly would not. Some parents want their children to have early access to sex education, whereas others consider it unthinkable as a school subject. There is nothing in the concept of values that implies we all have to subscribe to exactly the same ones, no matter how strongly we may feel about our own. So, beyond teaching basic values such as common courtesy, perhaps the best schools can do is make students aware of values and value differences and let students learn to argue effectively for their own values, as well as to question them. Schools, in other words, should focus on ethics in addition to morality . So what is the difference between ethics and morality? Ethics comes from Greek ( ethos, character) and morality from Latin ( mores, character, custom, or habit). Today, in English as well as in many other Western languages, both words refer to some form of proper conduct. Although we, in our everyday lives, don’t distinguish clearly between morals and ethics, there is a subtle difference: Some people think the word morality has negative connotations, and in fact it does carry two different sets of asso- ciations for most of us. The positive ones are guidance, goodness, humanitarianism, and so forth. Among the negative associations are repression, bigotry, persecution— in a word, moralizing . Suppose the introductory ethics course on your campus was labeled “Introduction to Morals.” You would, in all likelihood, expect something different from what you would expect from a course called “Introduction to Ethics” or “Introduction to Values.” The word morality has a slightly different connotation from that of the terms ethics and values . That is because morality usually refers to the moral rules we follow, the values that we have. Ethics is generally defi ned as theories about those rules; ethics questions and justifi es the rules we live by, and, if ethics can fi nd no rational justifi cation for those rules, it may ask us to abandon them. Moral- ity is the stuff our social life is made of—even our personal life—and ethics is the ordering, the questioning, the awareness, the investigation of what we believe: Are we justifi ed in believing it? Is it consistent? Should we remain open to other beliefs or not? If we live by a system of moral rules, we may or may not have understood them or even approved of them, but if we have a code of ethics we signal to the world that we stand by our values, understand them, and are ready to not only act on them

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GOOD AND EVIL 7

but also defend them with words and deeds. (And that is, of course, why it was an interesting choice for the Montana legislature to get involved in advocating a code of ethics for their state.) In other words, it is not enough just to have moral rules; we should, as moral, mature persons, be able to justify our viewpoints with ethical arguments or, at the very least, ask ourselves why we feel this way or that about a certain issue. Ethics, therefore, is much more than a topic in a curriculum. As moral adults, we are re- quired to think about ethics all the time. Most people, in fact, do just that, even in their teens, because it is also considered a sign of maturity to question authority, at least to a certain extent. If a very young adult is told to be home at 11 P.M., she or he will usually ask, “Why can’t I stay out till mid- night?” When we have to make up our minds about whether to study over the weekend or go hiking, we usually try to come up with as many pros and cons as we can. When someone we have put our trust in betrays that trust, we want to know why. All those questions are practical applications of ethics: They question the rules of morality and the breaking of those rules. Although formal training in ethical questions can make us better at judging moral issues, we are, as adult human beings, already quite experi- enced just because we already have asked, “Why?” a number of times in our lives.

Good and Evil

You have probably heard the “E-word” (evil) recently, in conversation or in the media. And “good” is surely one of the most frequently used words in the English language. But interestingly, for most of the previous century ethicists preferred to use terms such as “morally acceptable and unacceptable,” or “right vs. wrong,” rather than good vs. evil. That pattern seems to be changing, and we’ll talk about why in this section. When terrible things happen to ordinary people, including natural disasters as well as calamities of human origin, from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan to

DILBERT © 1997 Scott Adams. Used by permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

Ethicists point out that having a system of values isn’t enough for a person to be morally mature— one must also engage in thinking about those values and critically examine them from time to time. Cartoonist Scott Adams obviously agrees.

Dilbert by Scott Adams

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8 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

In The Lord of the Rings (2001–3) the concept of evil is symbolized by the Ring. Here the hobbit Smeagol (Andy Serkis) fi nds the Ring on his birthday (top). Many years later the effects of evil are clearly visible: Smeagol has become Gollum (bottom), a solitary creature whose mind is focused exclusively on the Ring.

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GOOD AND EVIL 9

the inundation of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and terrorist attacks around the world including September 11, 2001, we usually hear stories of people who are not only victims of the disaster, but also subsequent victims of human schemes of violence or fraud. But we also hear about people who go out of their way to help oth- ers. During the nuclear crisis in Japan following the earthquake and tsunami, what became known as the Fukushima 50 (actually around 300 volunteers) chose to go in and work in the damaged nuclear reactors, in peril of their lives and certainly exposed to high levels of radiation, for the sake of the community. It was clear that they knew the risk, but also that they volunteered because they felt it was the right thing to do for their community. During the collapse of a mine in Chile in 2010, 33 miners who were trapped deep underground were rescued through a concerted effort by several teams from different parts of the world, literally inventing drilling methods that even- tually, after more than two months, brought up every single miner from the dark on live television as well as online coverage, to the cheers of a worldwide audience. In November 2009 at Ft. Hood, Army psychiatrist-turned- gunman Major Nidal Hasan shot into an unarmed crowd of military personnel (because on-base soldiers ordinar- ily don’t carry weapons) and managed to kill thirteen and wound thirty before he was shot and incapacitated by two police offi cers, Kimberly Munley and her partner Mark Todd, who exposed themselves to his gunfi re and were themselves wounded. In the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 in Blacksburg, Virginia, thirty-two students and professors were murdered by a student, Seung-Hui Cho, but many more might have died had it not been for Dr. Liviu Livrescu, a 76-year-old semi-retired professor who blocked the door for Cho until all his students could make their escape through the window. In the end Dr. Livrescu couldn’t hold the door any longer, and Cho burst in and killed him, and subsequently killed himself. Such stories (of which you will hear more in Chapter 4 where we will discuss the phenomena of selfi shness and altruism) remind us that dreadful things can happen in the blink of an eye, but also that there are extraordinary people who will rise to the occasion and make decisions that may cost them their lives, for the sake of others. That, to most of us, may be the ultimate form of goodness, but the everyday kindness of a helping hand or a considerate re- mark shouldn’t be discounted, even if the kind person isn’t endangering his or her life. There is hardly a word with a broader meaning in the English language than “good”—we can talk about food tasting good, test results being good, a feeling being good, but also, of course, of actions being good and persons being good, and we mean something different in all these examples. In Box 1.2 you’ll fi nd a discussion of moral and nonmoral values, and “good” fi ts right into that discussion: It is a value term because it expresses approval, but it can be an approval that has to do with moral issues (such as actions and a person’s character) or it can be unrelated to moral issues, such as judging the result of a quiz, or a medical test, or something we ap- prove of because of its aesthetic qualities (it looks good, tastes good, sounds good). If we assume that we’re interested mostly in the moral value of “good,” we have only narrowed it down somewhat, because now we have to defi ne what, in our context and in our culture, is considered a morally good act. It could be acting according to the rules of one’s culture’s religion; it could be acting with compassion or with fore- sight as to the overall consequences of one’s actions; or it could be simply doing one’s

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10 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

duty. A “good person” could be someone who is simply nice by nature, but it could also be someone who struggles to do the right thing, perhaps even against his or her nature. Or it could be simply someone we approve of, based on our cultural rules. That particular moral attitude will be discussed in Chapter 3, Ethical Relativism . But there is also something called being “too good,” like a Goody Two-Shoes, so perhaps being morally above reproach isn’t always good? In the Narrative section at the end of this chapter, you’ll fi nd a selection from John Steinbeck’s famous novel East of Eden, with a discussion of not only the ultimate story of good and evil but also how the ideas of good and evil can be perceived by an adolescent who wants to be good like his twin brother but fi nds himself to be of quite a different nature. In our everyday life we encounter the term “evil” frequently in the media and entertainment, and most of us use it regularly. We even have a character in a popular series of comic movies about retro hero Austin Powers, Dr. Evil, who really is quite evil, and enjoying it. Entire fi lm franchises and book series are centered around the

What is a value? Most often the word refers to a moral value, a judgment of somebody’s behav- ior according to whether or not it corresponds to certain moral rules (for example, “Tiffany is a wonderful person; she always stays after the party to help with the dishes”). However, some value judgments have nothing to do with moral issues, and so they are called nonmoral , which is not the same as immoral (breaking moral rules) or amoral (not having any moral standards). Such nonmoral value judgments can include statements about taste (such as “The new gallery downtown has a collection of exquisite water- colors”; “I really dislike Bob’s new haircut”; and “Finn makes a great jambalaya”), as well as state- ments about being correct or incorrect about facts (such as “Lois did really well on her last math test” and “You’re wrong; last Saturday we didn’t go to the movies; that was last Sunday”). Like moral value judgments, nonmoral value judgments generally refer to something being right or wrong, good or bad; but, unlike moral value judgments, they don’t refer to morally right or wrong behavior. Nonmoral value concepts abound in our present-day society: What we call aesthetics, art theory, is a form of nonmoral

value theory, asking questions such as, Are there objective rules for when art is good? and Is it bad, or is it a matter of personal taste or of ac- culturation? If you dislike hip-hop music, or like Craftsman-style architecture, are there valid ob- jective justifi cations for your likes and dislikes, or are they relative to your time and place? Art theory even has an additional values concept: the relationship between light and dark colors in a painting. But the most prevalent nonmoral value concept in our everyday world surely has to do with getting good value —with buying something for less than it is worth. That prompted a po- litical commentator, Michael Kinsley, who was fed up with the political talk about moral values a few years ago, to quip, “When I want values, I go to Wal-Mart.” And McDonald’s has been running a commercial suggesting that parents who want family values should take their kids to McDonald’s for the Value Meal, appealing to the perennial parental guilt. In other words, sati- rists and copywriters can have a fi eld day doing a switcheroo on our conception of values, from nonmoral to moral and back again, and what we readers and consumers can do is stay on our toes so we aren’t manipulated.

Box 1.2 M O R A L A N D N O N M O R A L V A L U E S

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GOOD AND EVIL 11

fi ght against evil, such as the Harry Potter series, The X-Men , and Lord of the Rings . But entertainment is one thing that we can leave behind—another thing is real life: The surviving students at Virginia Tech will have those memories for the rest of their lives, and many a young life was cut short that day, bringing grief to their families. And why? Cho apparently had psychological problems which perhaps could have been helped and Cho could have been stopped in time—he felt aggression toward other students whom he perceived as being “rich.” The Ft. Hood massacre is still a traumatic moment in our military history, and the events of 9/11 are seared into the memories of an en- tire nation. And then we have the media favorites: the serial killer stories where killers manage to evade the law for months, sometimes even decades, preying on young or otherwise vulnerable members of society—children, or prostitutes and drug addicts. From the Green River Killer James Ridgway to the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) killer Dennis Rader, to Joseph Duncan who killed an entire family in Idaho so he could abduct and abuse the two youngest children (of whom only the little girl survived, to become an excellent and clear-minded witness against him). In Austria Josef Fritzl was arrested for having kept his own daughter captive in a hidden room in the basement for twenty-four years, raping her and fathering seven children with her. And in Cali- fornia a young woman, Jaycee Dugard, resurfaced after eighteen years of captivity, kid- napped at the age of eleven by a man and his wife who then kept her prisoner in their backyard. She, too, was a victim of multiple rapes, resulting in two pregnancies. And football star Michael Vick confessed to being involved with an international dog fi ght- ing ring. He served twenty-one months in prison and two months’ home confi nement. Are such people who victimize others—humans or animals—evil? Or should we just say that their actions are evil? Or should we use another term entirely, such as being morally wrong ? What do the professionals say—the ethicists who make a living teaching theo- ries of moral values and writing papers, monographs, and textbooks? Interestingly, most contemporary ethicists tend to talk about issues such as selfi shness and unself- ishness, informed consent, weighing moral principles against overall consequences of one’s actions, group rights versus individual rights, and so forth. We hear dis- cussions about the concepts of moral right and wrong and the principles by which we determine such concepts. What we rarely hear mentioned by any contemporary ethicists are the concepts that most people associate with moral issues: good and evil . Exceptions would be American philosophers such as Philip Hallie and Richard Tay- lor and the British philosopher Mary Midgley. Why are so few philosophers these days interested in talking about good and evil, when it was one of the key topics in centuries past? For one thing, there is an underlying assumption that good and evil are religious concepts, and as we shall see, the philosophical discussions about ethics and values these days tend to steer clear of the religious connection to ethics. For another, talking about good and evil generally implies that we pass judgment on what is good and what is evil—which means that we take sides, we no longer analyze concepts in some lofty realm of objectivity, we engage ourselves in seeking good and shunning evil. It also means that we condemn those who are labeled evil and praise those we call good. In other words, we engage in what some would call moralizing, and most ethicists have for decades tried to avoid just that, with some

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12 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

exceptions. However, since September 11, 2001, the concept of evil has been part of our political vocabulary, spearheaded by President Bush, who labeled nations sup- porting terrorism as an axis of evil and referred to the terrorists of 9/11 and others as evildoers . A precedent was created when President Reagan labeled the Soviet Union “The Evil Empire” in the 1980s. Although that terminology, to some critics, is far too close to a religious vocabulary for comfort, for other Americans there is great relief and, indeed, comfort in being able to use a word with the weight of tradition behind it to describe something most of us consider dreadful acts committed by people with no consideration for human decency. But what exactly do we call evil? Is evil a force that exists outside human beings—is there a source of evil such as the devil, some satanic eternal power that tempts and preys on human souls? Or is it, rather, a force within the human mind, disregarding the needs and interests of other human beings just to accomplish a goal? Or might it perhaps be a lack of something in the human mind—a blind spot where the rest of us have a sense of community, belonging, empathy for others? In that case, might we explain the acts of “evildoers” as those of sick individuals? But wouldn’t that entail that they can’t be blamed for what they do, because we don’t usually blame people for their illnesses? Those are questions that involve religion, psychology, and ethics, and there is to this day no consensus among scholars as to how “evil” should be interpreted. Some see terrorists, serial killers, and child molesters as evil, but we may not agree on what makes them evil—a childhood deprived of love, a genetic predisposition, a selfi sh choice that involves disregard for other people’s humanity, a brainwashing by an ideology that distinguishes between “real” people and throwaway people, an outside superhuman evil force that chooses a human vehicle? For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whom you’ll meet in Chapter 6, there was no doubt what evil is: the self-serving choice that individuals make freely, even when they know full well the moral law they ought to be follow- ing. But that may not be all there is to it. When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal hit in 2005, many people were reminded of two groundbreaking American psychology experiments: the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments at Yale University in the nineteen sixties, wherein Professor Milgram showed that if you are under the infl u- ence of an authority who takes responsibility for your actions, you are likely to be willing to commit acts of atrocity toward other human beings; he demonstrated that test subjects, believing themselves to be assisting with an experiment, would over- come their unwillingness to give electric shocks to test subjects in another room (in reality actors who weren’t being harmed at all) to the point of killing them, as long as they were told they had to do it, and it was not their responsibility. The other infamous experiment was the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, conducted by psychologist professor Philip Zimbardo, wherein a group of experimental subjects— ordinary male college students—were divided into “prisoners” and “prison guards,” in order to examine why conditions would deteriorate so quickly in a real prison setting. Before long the “prison guards” began treating the “prisoners” with abusive cruelty, believing that such behavior was somehow warranted to maintain author- ity, and Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment within less than a week. Both an American fi lm and a German version, both titled The Experiment , are chilling reen- actments of the experiment. Some see such an event as proof that human nature is

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GOOD AND EVIL 13

fundamentally bad—it doesn’t take much for the veneer of civilization to wear thin, and our true, evil nature surfaces. For others, all this means is that there are all kinds of reasons why people do what they do; some of what we call evil is based on a moral choice, and some of it is an outcome of environmental pressures or brain anomalies. In 2007 Zimbardo published a book, The Lucifer Effect, in which he drew par- allels between the experiment and the Abu Ghraib incident. You’ll fi nd an excerpt from this book in the Primary Readings section of this chapter. But already in 1963, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt had coined an expression for this particu- lar shade of wrongdoing: the banality of evil . Arendt was living in Germany when Hitler came to power, but she managed to fl ee to Paris before the Holocaust: She was a German Jew, and would undoubtedly have been swept up in the extermina- tion process. Years after the war she was tormented not only by the thought of the atrocities perpetrated in the death camps but also by the knowledge that so many human beings either stood by and let the Holocaust happen or actively participated in the torture and death of other human beings. (And, for the record, the Holocaust did happen—13 million people perished in the Nazi death camps on the orders of Hitler and his henchmen Himmler and Eichmann, and those who deny that fact are playing political games. Enough said.) The conclusion reached by Arendt and pub- lished in her book Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is that the German public who had an inkling of what was going on and the Nazis who were actively engaged in the Endlösung, or the “Final Solution,” were not evil in the sense that they (or most of them) deliberately sought to gain personal advantage by causing pain and suffering to others. Rather, it was more insidious: Little by little, they came to view the atrocities they were asked to perform, or disregard, as a duty to their country and their leader, as something their victims deserved, or simply as a normal state of affairs and not something hideous or depraved. They became banal, everyday acts, corrupting the minds of the victimizers. In Arendt’s words about Eichmann’s execution for his participation in the Holocaust:

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought- defying banality of evil. . . . The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels—that this new type of criminal . . . commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. . . .

But before we begin to assume that all evil acts are of the kind that may lurk in ordinary people’s hearts, let us just remind ourselves that not all evil acts are “banal.” Surely, the deliberate torturing and killing of children by a Joseph Duncan is not the kind of evil that ordinary people are periodically persuaded to perform under extraordinary circumstances, and neither are the deliberate mass murders at Virginia Tech and Ft. Hood. For such acts involving deliberate choices directly intending and resulting in harm to innocent people we may want to reserve the terms egregious

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14 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

or extreme evil . If we want to adopt the vocabulary of “evil,” in addition to “morally wrong” and “misguided,” we must also recognize that there are degrees of evil, rang- ing from reluctantly causing pain (such as in the Milgram experiments) to humiliat- ing other human beings, to abusing, torturing, and killing them with deliberation and gusto. And perhaps it is a disservice to our sense of evil to assume that “we’re all capable of doing evil.” Some forms of evil are the result not of ordinary people being seduced into insensitivity but of some people’s deliberate choices to cause harm. And even in the Stanley Milgram experiment some test subjects refused to turn the shock dial. In Chapter 11, in the section about the philosopher Philip Hallie, you’ll read a story that goes into detail about rising up against evil: the story of a French village that rebelled against the Nazis. Hallie presents this story as an “antidote to cruelty,” and you will fi nd an additional reference to Philip Zimbardo and his coining of a new term, “the banality of heroism,” a theory that claims that if evil is a possibility in our hearts, so, too, are heroism and altruism—in other words, inherent goodness . Even if we have now taken a look at some different meanings of the term “evil,” we have of course by no means exhausted the topic, but a further discussion would be outside the scope of an introductory chapter. We might continue talking about where we think evil originates—as a failing to see others as equal human beings, maybe even a brain defi ciency that excludes empathy? Or is it willful selfi shness? In Chapter 4 we look at the concepts of selfi shness and unselfi shness. Or is it just a matter of perspective—one culture’s evil is another culture’s goodness? We look at the question of different cultural values in Chapter 3. Or we might also ask the question that has troubled many cultures for thousands of years, generally known as the Problem of Evil: If there is a god, and he, she, or it is a well-intended, all-powerful being, then why do terrible things happen to good people? That question, profound as it may be, belongs within Philosophy of Religion, and lies beyond the scope of this textbook. That doesn’t mean you’re not welcome to think about its implications.

Debating Moral Issues from Religion to Neurobiology and Storytelling

Every functional society on earth has had a “philosophy” of what one should do or be in order to be considered a good person. Sometimes that moral code is expressed orally in stories and songs, and sometimes it is expressed in writing. When it is ex- pressed as a set of rules with explanations justifying the rules, we may call it a code of ethics . For it to become a philosophical discipline, we must add the practice of examining and questioning the rules.

The Socratic Beginnings of Ethics

The Greek philosopher Socrates (fi fth century B.C.E.) is often credited with being the fi rst philosopher in the Western tradition to focus on ethics. That can be a reasonable observation, provided we don’t confuse ethics with morals. It would, of course, be preposterous to claim that any one person, including a famous philosopher, should get credit for inventing morals. Every society since the dawn of time has had a moral code, even if all it consisted of was “respect the chief and your elders.” Without a

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DEBATING MORAL ISSUES FROM RELIGION TO NEUROBIOLOGY AND STORYTELLING 15

communal moral code you simply can’t maintain a society, and in every generation parents have been the primary teachers of the continuity of morality. In addition, as we’ll see in the next section, every society on the planet has had a religion of some sort, and into every religion is built a moral code. So what did Socrates contribute, if he didn’t invent morals? He elevated the discussion of morals to the level of an academic, critical examination, exploration, and justifi cation of values. It became an abstract discussion that was, for the fi rst time in the West, removed from both reli- gious dogma and social rules, at the same time becoming a personal matter of growth and wisdom. Most of our knowledge of Socrates comes from the works of the phi- losopher Plato, one of his students. In his series of Dialogues, conversations between Socrates and various friends, students, and enemies, Plato has Socrates observe, on his fi nal day before being executed for crimes against the Athenian state (see Chap- ter 8), that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and that the ultimate question for every human being is “How should one live?” Acquiring moral wisdom is thus a requirement for a person who doesn’t want to go through life with blinders on. Although we can imagine that wise old men and women may have taught the same lesson throughout human time, Socrates was the fi rst that we know of to incorporate critical questions about moral values into a study of philosophical issues for adults. In other words, Socrates became the inventor of ethics as an academic discipline, not just a critical lifestyle. And for over two thousand years, philosophers in the West have included the study of ethics in their curricula, including the notion that to be a morally mature person you must engage in a personal critical examination of your own values and the values of your society. The famed Socratic or dialectic method has two major points: that if you approach an issue rationally, other rational minds will be able to accept your conclusion, and that a useful approach is a conversation, a dialogue, between teacher and student. The teacher will guide the student through a series of questions and answers to a rational conclusion, rather than give the student the answer up front. The method is to this day a favorite among philosophy instruc- tors, psychotherapists, and law school professors.

Moral Issues and Religion

Cultures developing independently of the Western tradition have experienced a sim- ilar fascination for the subject of acting and living right. Socrates’ version remains unique among ancient thinkers because he encouraged critical thinking instead of emphasizing being an obedient citizen. In China, Confucius expressed his philoso- phy of proper moral conduct as a matter of obedience to authorities and, above all, respect for one’s elders at approximately the same time that Socrates was teaching students critical thinking in the public square in Athens. In Africa, tribal thinkers de- veloped a strong sense of morality that stressed individuals’ sense of responsibility to the community and the community’s understanding of its responsibility to each in- dividual—a philosophy that has become known to the West in recent years through the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” Among American Indian tribes, the philosophy of harmony between humans and their environment— animate as well as inanimate nature—has been part of the moral code.

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16 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

For all cultures, however, there is a common denominator: Go back far enough in time and you’ll fi nd a connection between the social life of the culture, its mores, and its religion. In some cultures the connection is clear and obvious to this day: Religion is the key to the moral values of the members of the community, and any debate about values usually takes place within the context of that religion. In other cultures, such as large parts of Europe, Canada, Australia, and to some extent the United States, the connection to religion has become more tenuous and has in some cases all but vanished; public social life has become secularized, and moral values are generally tied to the question of social coexistence rather than to a religious basis. That doesn’t mean that individual people can’t feel a strong connection to the reli- gious values of their family and their community. This raises several questions, all depending on one’s viewpoint and personal experience. If you have grown up in a culture where religion is a predominant cultural phe- nomenon, or if you have grown up in a religious family, or if you fi nd yourself deeply connected to a religious community today, do you regard your moral values as being inextricably tied to your religion? Do you regard moral values as being closely con- nected to religion as such? If that is your background, then chances are that you’ll answer yes. And if you have grown up in a Western, largely secularized culture such as big-city USA, and have not grown up in a religious family, or have distanced your- self from religion for some reason or other, do you view the question of religion as irrelevant for moral values in a modern society and for your own moral decisions? Chances are that you’ll answer yes, if this description applies to you. Here, in a nutshell, is the problem when talking about religion and values. In this diverse world—diverse not just because of nationalities, ethnicity, gender, and religion but also because of the vast variety of moral and political views even within one community—it is very hard for us to reach any kind of consensus or fi nd common ground about values if we seek answers exclusively in our religion. Chances are that if you have a religion, it is not shared by a large number of people you associate with. If you stick exclusively to the group you share your faith (or nonfaith) with, of course you will feel fortifi ed by the confi rmation of your views through your religion, and your ideas aren’t going to be challenged; but if you plan to be out and about in the greater society of this Western culture, you can’t expect everyone to agree with you. (In Chapter 3 we discuss the issue of how to approach the subject of moral differences.) So how does moral philosophy approach this issue? Interestingly, you’ll fi nd religious as well as nonreligious moral philosophers in modern times. Go back to the nineteenth century and beyond, and you will fi nd that almost all the Western moral philosophers were religious—Christian or Jewish. In the twentieth century there was a sharp increase in moral philosophers who chose a secular basis of reasoning for their ethics, and that remains a feature of today’s ethical debates. But even in centuries past, most philosophers who argued about ethics and who professed to be religious tended to avoid using their religion as the ultimate justifi cation for their moral values. Because, how can you argue with faith? Either you share the faith or you don’t. But argue on a basis of rationality, and you have a chance of reaching an understanding of values, even if you disagree

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about religion—or at least you may gain an understanding of where the other per- son is coming from. Reason as a tool of ethics can be a bridge builder between be- lievers, atheists, and agnostics. For agnostics and atheists, there can be no turning to religion for unquestioned moral guidance, because they view religion itself as an unknown or nonexistent factor. Agnostics claim that they do not know whether there is a God or that it is impossible to know. Atheists claim that there is no God. Both the agnostic and the atheist may fi nd that religion suggests solutions to their problems, but such solutions are accepted not because they come from religion but because they somehow make sense. For a philosophical inquiry, the requirement that a solution make sense is par- ticularly important; although religion may play a signifi cant role in the development of moral values for many people, a philosophical investigation of moral issues must involve more than faith in a religious authority. Regardless of one’s religious belief or lack thereof, such an investigation must involve reasoning because, for one thing, philosophy teaches that one must examine issues without solely relying on the word of authority. For another thing, a rational argument can be a way for people to reach an understanding in spite of having different viewpoints on religion. Accordingly, a good way to communicate about ethics for both believers and nonbelievers is to approach the issue through the language of reason .

Moral Issues and Logic

As we saw at the end of the section on moral issues and religion, it has been a choice of philosophers from the earliest times to argue about moral issues on the basis of reasoning rather than religious faith, regardless of their own religious affi liations. That means that the classical philosophical fi eld of logic is considered a valuable tool for discussing moral issues, because if philosophers can agree on anything, it is usu- ally whether or not an argument violates the rules of logic. An “argument” in philosophy is not a heated discussion or a screaming contest but a certain type of communication that strives to convince a listener that something is true or reasonable. Here is an ultrashort account of the basic principles of logic: An argument has at least one premise, and usually several premises, followed by a conclusion. Such an argument can be either inductive or deductive . The conclusion of an inductive argument is based on a gathering of evidence (such as “Tom prob- ably won’t say thank you for the birthday present—he never does”), but there is no certainty that the conclusion is true, only that it is probable. On the other hand, in a deductive argument the premises are supposed to lead to a certain conclusion. A valid deductive argument is a deductive argument whose conclusion follows nec- essarily from its premise or premises. (For example, “All dogs are descendents of wolves; Fluffy is a dog; therefore, Fluffy is a descendent of wolves.” This is valid whether or not dogs actually are descendents of wolves, which inductive evidence shows they probably are.) A sound deductive argument is an argument that is valid and whose premises are also factually true (such as “On the vernal [spring] equinox, night and day are of equal length all over the planet. So, on the vernal equinox, the day is twelve hours long in Baghdad as well as in Seattle”).

DEBATING MORAL ISSUES FROM RELIGION TO NEUROBIOLOGY AND STORYTELLING 17

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18 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

Logical fallacies invalidate a moral viewpoint just as they do any other kind of viewpoint. Have you heard someone claim that because she has been cheated by two auto mechanics, no auto mechanics can be trusted? That’s the fallacy of hasty generalization . Have you heard someone who is an expert in one fi eld claim to be an authority in another—or people referring to some vague “expert opinion” in defense of their own views? That is the fallacy of appeal to authority . When someone tries to prove a point just by rephrasing it, such as “I’m right, because I’m never wrong,” that is the fallacy of begging the question, a circular defi nition assuming that what you are trying to prove is a fact. How about a bully arguing that if you don’t give him your seat/purse/car, he will harm you? That’s the ad baculum (Latin for “by the stick”) fallacy, the fallacy of using physical threats. And if someone says, “Well, you know you can’t believe what Fred says—after all, he’s a guy,” that’s an ad hominem ( “to the man”) fallacy, which assumes that who a person is determines the correctness or incorrectness of what he or she says. And a politician declaring “If we continue to allow women to have abortions, then pretty soon nobody will give birth, and the human race will die out” offers a slippery slope argument, which assumes that drastic consequences will follow a certain policy. Closely related is the straw man fallacy, in- venting a viewpoint so radical that hardly anyone holds it, so you can knock it down: “Gun advocates want to allow criminals and children to own weapons, so we should work toward a gun ban.” And if you claim that “it is my way or the highway,” then you are bifurcating —you are creating a false dichotomy (unless, of course, we’re really talking about a situation with no third possibility, such as being pregnant—you can’t be a little bit pregnant; it’s either/or). Another fallacy is the famed red herring, familiar to every fan of mystery and de- tective stories. A “red herring” is placed on the path to confuse the bloodhound. In other words, it is a defl ection away from the truth. In an everyday setting, this can be accomplished by changing the subject when it gets too uncomfortable (“Why did you get an F on your test, Bob?” “Mom, have I ever told you you’re prettier than all my friends’ moms?”). The notoriety of the red herring fallacy in court cases is well known, from introducing the race issue in the O. J. Simpson criminal trial to attacking a rape victim’s sexual history to defl ect attention away from the defendant. A fallacy most of us who make our living teaching are very familiar with is the fallacy of ad misericor- diam, appeal to pity: “Please, can I get an extension on my paper? My backpack was stolen, my cat ran away, my grandma is in the hospital, and I’ve got these really killer hangnails.” Or is it hangovers, perhaps? We’ve heard them all, all the bad excuses. But an excuse becomes an ad misericordiam fallacy only if it is nothing but an excuse. Sometimes a person truly deserves special consideration because of individual hard- ship, of course. Those and other logical fallacies are rampant in media discussions, and part of proper moral reasoning consists in watching out for the use of such fl awed arguments, in one’s own statements as well as in those of others.

Moral Issues and the Neurobiological Focus on Emotions

But is logic all there is to a good moral argument? Some philosophers would say yes, even today: The force of a moral viewpoint derives from its compelling logic. But

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increasingly, other voices are adding that a good moral argument is compelling not just because of its logic but also because it makes sense emotionally . If we have no feeling of moral approval or outrage, then do we really care about whether something is morally right or wrong? If we don’t feel that it’s wrong to harm a child, then how is logic going to persuade us? A classic answer has been an appeal to the logic of the Golden Rule: You wouldn’t want someone to harm you, would you? But, say some, that’s an appeal to how you’d feel in the same situation. An appeal to pure feeling isn’t going to be enough, because feelings can be manipulated, and appeals to emotions don’t solve confl icts if we don’t share those emotions; but combined with the logic of reasoning emotions can form the foundation of a forceful moral argument, according to some modern thinkers. And they fi nd support from a group of researchers who normally haven’t had much occasion, or inclination, to converse with philosophers: neuroscientists. In 1999 researchers at the University of Iowa led by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that a general area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, plays a pivotal role in our development of a moral sense. And in 2007 came a new conclusion, also published by Damasio with other scientists in the journal Nature, that the human brain contains an area that enables us to think about other people’s lives with empa- thy. And while Damasio is not a philosopher, he has a keen understanding of, and an interest in the history of philosophy and the philosophical and moral implica- tions of his fi ndings. Damasio sees human beings as primarily emotional beings, not predominantly rational beings. For generations philosophers have relied on the power of reason and logic to come up with solutions to moral problems; now that is being challenged by neuroscientists such as Damasio, and philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum (below), claiming that there is more to a good moral decision than relying exclusively on logic. But laypeople, without having much knowledge of the more elaborate moral theories expressed by philosophers, have generally relied on their moral and religious upbringing as well as their moral intuition : Some

DEBATING MORAL ISSUES FROM RELIGION TO NEUROBIOLOGY AND STORYTELLING 19

DILBERT © 2001 Scott Adams. Used by permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

Lately, research has pointed to the existence of certain areas in the brain where moral deliberations happen. If those areas are damaged, the individual seems to have a hard time acting on moral de- liberations or even understanding moral issues. Obviously, this Dilbert cartoon takes a dim view of whether people in management have a functioning moral center.

Dilbert by Scott Adams

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20 CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUT VALUES

actions have just seemed obviously right, and some obviously wrong, based on each person’s cultural and religious background (in Chapter 3 we discuss whether there might be universal moral values). Now neuroscientists are telling us that the old controversial assumption that we have a moral intuition is not far wrong—most of us seem to be born with a capacity for understanding other people’s plights, which means that naturalism as a moral philosophy is staging a strong comeback (Box 1.3 explores the new interest in moral naturalism as a result of the latest fi ndings in neu- roscience). But that doesn’t mean we always automatically know the right thing to do, or the proper way to be, especially when the world changes dramatically within a generation. Scientists tell us that much of what goes on within our moral intuition is based on the way humans used to live together thousands of years ago when we were living in small tribal groups consisting of perhaps 100 members, all of whom we knew personally. Our sense of duty, our concern for others, our joys of friend- ship, and our sense of fairness have for tens of thousands of years evolved within such small groups, and we have not yet adjusted to the world of relationships being so much bigger and more complex. But we all (at least those of us who are born