Ethics: time to revisit the basics

Humanist, March-April, 2003 by Gregory D. Foster

Ethics could be said to be very much like the weather in the sense that everybody talks about it but nobody does much about it.

Nearly all of us acknowledge the importance of ethics. Most of us hope for and expect ethical behavior and treatment from particular segments of society. Some of us pay close attention to the subject and seek to engage others in discussing (and practicing) it. But regrettably few of us really understand ethics as well as we think we do or as well as we should.

When people discuss ethics, there is a widespread tendency to gloss over the fundamental nature of the subject--as if it is so widely and well understood as to obviate the need for frustrating, time-consuming exegesis. The thinking is that it is better to immerse ourselves in real-world applications. After all, hasn't all that can be said on the subject already been said?

Yet, as with so many ostensibly well-understood concepts that provide continuing sources of disagreement, too much is left to assumption. Otherwise why do so many of us hedge our bets in daily discourse by consistently invoking the semantic couplet of "ethics and morality," much as we do in referring to "training and education" or "order and stability"? We aren't sure if there is a meaningful distinction between the two terms, but we don't want to sound stupid if there is, so we rarely mention the one without the other.

Why, similarly, do we so frequently conflate ethics and the law or morality and religion? Is complying with the law necessarily ethical and breaking the law unethical? Can a person be morally upright only by conforming to the dictates of religion? Conversely, does religiosity equate with ethical conduct?

And why, if we understand ethics so well, can't we reach readier agreement on what issues are ethical ones and thereby deserve to be treated as such? Pick an issue; the possibilities are endless: abortion; globalization; capital punishment; defense spending; gun control; genetic engineering; church-state relations; drugs; foreign aid; poverty, economic inequality, and welfare; intelligence gathering; affirmative action; covert operations; corporate performance and responsibility; democracy; military intervention; environmental degradation; government secrecy; privacy and transparency; health care; campaign financing; law enforcement and criminal justice; literacy and education; trade; immigration; propaganda; unemployment; homeland security.

Such matters, even if they are predominantly political, economic, social, or military in nature, nonetheless have demonstrable ethical dimensions or ramifications. If we fail to recognize this fact, if we fail more fundamentally to understand ethics itself, we do the issues and those affected by them a serious disservice.

Ethics can't be dealt with as Justice Potter Stewart famously dealt with the inherent complexity of pornography. We can't, in other words, avoid defining pornography and say we know it when we see it because it isn't clear that we do. Ethics can be meaningfully discussed and applied only when it is fully understood. Such understanding requires that we periodically revisit the basics.

What Ethics is About

So for starters, what is ethics actually all about? Ethics is about right and wrong:

"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right."--Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.

"We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency."--John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism.

Ethics is about good and bad, or good and evil.

"Things then are good or evil, only in reference to pleasure and pain. That we call good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us the possession of any other good or absence of any evil. And, on the contrary, we name that evil which is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure in us: or else to procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good."--John Locke, Concerning Human Understanding.

"Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different and diverse men differ not only in their judgment on the senses of what is pleasant and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable or disagreeable to reason in the actions of common life.... So long as a man is in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war, private appetite is the measure of good and evil: and consequently all men agree on this, that peace is good, and therefore also the way or means of peace, which ... are justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, and the rest of the laws of nature, are good; that is to say, moral virtues; and their contrary vices, evil."--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.