These features might, for example, include fallibility and vulnerability. Other moral theories claim to put forward an account of morality that provides a guide to all rational beings, even if these beings do not have these human characteristics, e. Among such theorists it is also common to hold that morality should never be overridden.
That is, it is common to hold that no one should ever violate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral reasons. Though common, this view is by no means always taken as definitional. Sidgwick despaired of showing that rationality required us to choose morality over egoism, though he certainly did not think rationality required egoism either.
More explicitly, Gert held that though moral behavior is always rationally permissible , it is not always rationally required.
Foot seems to have held that any reason—and therefore any rational requirement—to act morally would have to stem from a contingent commitment or an objective interest. And she also seems to have held that sometimes neither of these sorts of reasons might be available, so that moral behavior might not be rationally required for some agents.
Indeed, it is possible that morality, in the normative sense, has never been put forward by any particular society, by any group at all, or even by any individual. That is, one might claim that the guides to behavior of some societies lack so many of the essential features of morality in the normative sense, that it is incorrect to say that these societies even have a morality in a descriptive sense.
This is an extreme view, however. A more moderate position would hold that all societies have something that can be regarded as their morality, but that many of these moralities—perhaps, indeed, all of them—are defective.
That is, a moral realist might hold that although these actual guides to behavior have enough of the features of normative morality to be classified as descriptive moralities, they would not be endorsed in their entirety by all moral agents.
In the theological version of natural law theories, such as that put forward by Aquinas, this is because God implanted this knowledge in the reason of all persons.
In the secular version of natural law theories, such as that put forward by Hobbes , natural reason is sufficient to allow all rational persons to know what morality prohibits, requires, etc. Natural law theorists also claim that morality applies to all rational persons, not only those now living, but also those who lived in the past.
In contrast to natural law theories, other moral theories do not hold quite so strong a view about the universality of knowledge of morality.
Still, many hold that morality is known to all who can legitimately be judged by it. Baier , Rawls and contractarians deny that there can be an esoteric morality: one that judges people even though they cannot know what it prohibits, requires, etc.
For all of the above theorists, morality is what we can call a public system : a system of norms 1 that is knowable by all those to whom it applies and 2 that is not irrational for any of those to whom it applies to follow Gert Moral judgments of blame thus differ from legal or religious judgments of blame in that they cannot be made about persons who are legitimately ignorant of what they are required to do.
Act consequentialists seem to hold that everyone should know that they are morally required to act so as to bring about the best consequences, but even they do not seem to think judgments of moral blame are appropriate if a person is legitimately ignorant of what action would bring about the best consequences Singer Parallel views seem to be held by rule consequentialists Hooker The ideal situation for a legal system would be that it be a public system. But in any large society this is not possible.
Games are closer to being public systems and most adults playing a game know its rules, or they know that there are judges whose interpretation determines what behavior the game prohibits, requires, etc. Although a game is often a public system, its rules apply only to those playing the game. If a person does not care enough about the game to abide by the rules, she can usually quit.
Morality is the one public system that no rational person can quit. The fact that one cannot quit morality means that one can do nothing to escape being legitimately liable to sanction for violating its norms, except by ceasing to be a moral agent. Morality applies to people simply by virtue of their being rational persons who know what morality prohibits, requires, etc.
Public systems can be formal or informal. To say a public system is informal is to say that it has no authoritative judges and no decision procedure that provides a unique guide to action in all situations, or that resolves all disagreements. To say that a public system is formal is to say that it has one or both of these things Gert 9. Professional basketball is a formal public system; all the players know that what the referees call a foul determines what is a foul.
Pickup basketball is an informal public system. The existence of persistent moral disagreements shows that morality is most plausibly regarded as an informal public system. When persistent moral disagreement is recognized, those who understand that morality is an informal public system admit that how one should act is morally unresolvable, and if some resolution is required, the political or legal system can be used to resolve it.
These formal systems have the means to provide unique guides, but they do not provide the uniquely correct moral guide to the action that should be performed. An important example of a moral problem left unsettled by the informal public system of morality is whether fetuses are impartially protected by morality and so whether or under what conditions abortions are allowed. There is continuing disagreement among fully informed moral agents about this moral question, even though the legal and political system in the United States has provided fairly clear guidelines about the conditions under which abortion is legally allowed.
Despite this important and controversial issue, morality, like all informal public systems, presupposes agreement on how to act in most moral situations, e. No one thinks it is morally justified to cheat, deceive, injure, or kill a moral agent simply in order to gain sufficient money to take a fantastic vacation.
Moral matters are often thought to be controversial because everyday decisions, about which there is no controversy, are rarely discussed. The amount of agreement concerning what rules are moral rules, and on when it is justified to violate one of these rules, explains why morality can be a public system even though it is an informal system. The old schema was that morality is the code that all rational persons, under certain specified conditions, would endorse. The improved schema is that morality is the informal public system that all rational persons, under certain specified conditions, would endorse.
Some theorists might not regard the informal nature of the moral system as definitional, holding that morality might give knowable precise answers to every question.
This would have the result that conscientious moral agents often cannot know what morality permits, requires, or allows. Some philosophers deny that this is a genuine possibility. However, on ethical- or group-relativist accounts or on individualistic accounts—all of which are best regarded as accounts of morality in the descriptive sense—morality often has no special content that distinguishes it from nonmoral codes of conduct, such as law or religion. Just as a legal code of conduct can have almost any content, as long as it is capable of guiding behavior, and a religious code of conduct has no limits on content, most relativist and individualist accounts of morality place few limits on the content of a moral code.
Of course, actual codes do have certain minimal limits—otherwise the societies they characterize would lack the minimum required degree of social cooperation required to sustain their existence over time. On the other hand, for moral realists who explicitly hold that morality is an informal public system that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents, it has a fairly definite content.
Hobbes , Mill , and most other non-religiously influenced philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition limit morality to behavior that, directly or indirectly, affects others. The claim that morality only governs behavior that affects others is somewhat controversial, and so probably should not be counted as definitional of morality, even if it turns out to be entailed by the correct moral theory. Kant may provide an account of this wide concept of morality.
However, pace Kant, it is doubtful that all moral agents would put forward a universal guide to behavior that governs behavior that does not affect them at all. Indeed, when the concept of morality is completely distinguished from religion, moral rules do seem to limit their content to behavior that directly or indirectly causes or risks harm to others. Some behavior that seems to affect only oneself, e.
Confusion about the content of morality sometimes arises because morality is not distinguished sufficiently from religion. This religious holdover might also affect the claim that some sexual practices such as homosexuality are immoral. Those who clearly distinguish morality from religion typically do not regard sexual orientation as a moral matter. It is possible to hold that having a certain sort of social goal is definitional of morality Frankena Stephen Toulmin took it to be the harmony of society.
Utilitarians sometimes claim it is the production of the greatest good. Gert took it to be the lessening of evil or harm. This latter goal may seem to be a significant narrowing of the utilitarian claim, but utilitarians always include the lessening of harm as essential to producing the greatest good and almost all of their examples involve the avoiding or preventing of harm.
It is notable that the paradigm cases of moral rules are those that prohibit causing harm directly or indirectly, such as rules prohibiting killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises. Even those precepts that require or encourage positive action, such as helping the needy, are almost always related to preventing or relieving harms, rather than promoting goods such as pleasure. Among the views of moral realists, differences in content are less significant than similarities.
For all such philosophers, morality prohibits actions such as killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises. For some, morality also requires charitable actions, but failure to act charitably on every possible occasion does not require justification in the same way that any act of killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises requires justification.
Both Kant and Mill distinguish between duties of perfect obligation and duties of imperfect obligation and regard not harming as the former kind of duty and helping as the latter kind of duty.
For Gert , morality encourages charitable action, but does not require it; it is always morally good to be charitable, but it is not immoral not to be charitable. As has already been mentioned, morality, in the normative sense, is sometimes taken to prohibit certain forms of consensual sexual activity, or the use of recreational drugs. But including such prohibitions in an account of morality as a universal guide that all rational persons would put forward requires a very particular view of rationality.
After all, many will deny that it is irrational to favor harmless consensual sexual activities, or to favor the use of certain drugs for purely recreational purposes. One concept of rationality that supports the exclusion of sexual matters, at least at the basic level, from the norms of morality, is that for an action to count as irrational it must be an act that harms oneself without producing a compensating benefit for someone—perhaps oneself, perhaps someone else.
An account of morality based on the hybrid concept of rationality could agree with Hobbes that morality is concerned with promoting people living together in peace and harmony, which includes obeying the rules prohibiting causing harm to others. Although moral prohibitions against actions that cause harm or significantly increase the risk of harm are not absolute, in order to avoid acting immorally, justification is always needed when violating these prohibitions. Kant seems to hold that it is never justified to violate some of these prohibitions, e.
Most moral realists who offer moral theories do not bother to offer anything like a definition of morality. Instead, what these philosophers offer is a theory of the nature and justification of a set of norms with which they take their audience already to be acquainted.
In effect, they tacitly pick morality out by reference to certain salient and relative uncontroversial bits of its content: that it prohibits killing, stealing, deceiving, cheating, and so on. In fact, this would not be a bad way of defining morality, if the point of such a definition were only to be relatively theory-neutral, and to allow theorizing to begin. Some, including Hare , , have been tempted to argue against the possibility of a substantive definition of morality, on the basis of the claim that moral disapproval is an attitude that can be directed at anything whatsoever.
Foot a, b , argued against this idea, but the substantive definition still has the drawback is that it does not, somehow, seem to get at the essence of morality. One might suggest that the substantive definition has the advantage of including Divine Command theories of morality, while such theories might seem to make trouble for definitions based on the plausible schema given above.
But it is plausible to hold that Divine Command theories rest on Natural Law theories, which do in fact fit the schema. Divine Command theories that do not rest on Natural Law might make trouble for the schema, but one might also think that such theories rest instead on a confusion, since they seem to entail that God might have made it immoral to act beneficently. As one gives more substance and detail to the general notions of endorsement, rationality, and the relevant conditions under which rational people would endorse morality, one moves further from providing a definition of morality in the normative sense, and closer to providing an actual moral theory.
And a similar claim is true for definitions of morality in the descriptive sense, as one specifies in more detail what one means in claiming that a person or group endorses a system or code. In the following four subsections, four broad ways of making the definitions of morality more precise are presented.
They are all sufficiently schematic to be regarded as varieties of definition, rather than as theories. Rather, they explicitly recognize the existence of significant variation in what rules and ideals different people put forward as morality in the normative sense. And they doubt that this variation is compatible with moral realism. Consequently, they need to offer some unifying features of these different sets of rules and ideals, despite variation in their content.
As a result of this pressure, some expressivists end up offering explicit accounts of a distinctively moral attitude one might hold towards an act token or type. These accounts can of course be taken to underwrite various forms of morality in the descriptive sense. But they can also be taken to provide the basis of one form of moral realism. Gibbard holds that moral judgments are expressions of the acceptance of norms for feeling the emotions of guilt and anger.
To endorse a code in the relevant way, on this definition, is to think that violations of its norms make guilt and anger appropriate. In fact, reference to praise and blame may be more adequate than reference to guilt and anger, since the latter seem only to pick out moral prohibitions, and not to make room for the idea that morality also recommends or encourages certain behaviors even if it does not require them. For example, it is plausible that there is such a thing as supererogatory action, and that the specification of what counts as supererogatory is part of morality—whether in the descriptive or normative sense.
But it does not seem likely that we can account for this part of morality by appeal to norms for guilt and anger, and it is not at all clear that there are emotions that are as closely linked to supererogation as guilt and anger are to moral transgression. On the other hand, it seems plausible that norms for praising action might help to pick out what counts as supererogatory.
Another version of the present strategy would replace talk of praise and blame with talk of reward and punishment. This view would take morality to be a system that explained what kinds of actions are appropriately rewarded and—more centrally—punished. On this view, the notion of endorsing a code is unpacked in terms of the acceptance of norms for reward and punishment. It is certainly plausible that it is appropriate to feel guilt when one acts immorally, and to feel anger at those who act immorally towards those one cares about.
So norms for guilt and anger may well uniquely pick out certain moral norms. And similar claims might be made about norms for praise and blame. However, it is not equally clear that morality is properly defined in terms of emotions or other reactions to behavior.
Which is hardly easier to discern, let alone to accomplish. T hese leading ideas — of rational action, of the value of happiness, and of achieving the best that our nature affords — are grand ideas. For example: that the evil of the world is explained by the possibility of redeeming it by the sacrifice of an innocent God. Or that we are absolutely predestined to hell or to heaven, yet must strive to act as if what we do could change that.
And very much like the debates over those theological topics, the debates among the foundations of morality are irredeemably insoluble. Theoretical debates can have much to teach us, even if they are of no practical use. In a debate about ultimate values, we might get to ask when a reason is a good reason. We might be led better to appreciate the difficulty of weighing one reason against another. But each morality wants it all: only one ultimate value can be supreme.
So the debate is on. But intuitions conflict. For these foundations are, by definition, the ultimate values, the rock-bottom first principles. When they compete, there is nothing deeper to which they can appeal to settle the disagreement — except everything else.
But that everything else is what we have without moral theory: competing reasons of all kinds, without any privileged class of reasons to which all others must yield. The systems that sort reasons into moral and non-moral aim at identifying right and wrong. But those systems can themselves be bad. This is my fourth complaint. Surprisingly many philosophers have held that a person who is truly virtuous will have all the virtues. It implies that no one is truly virtuous for, as Christians are wont to remind us, we are all sinners.
But despite its popularity among philosophers, this doctrine is repugnant to common sense, as well as indefensible in the light of recent empirical research on the piecemeal nature of moral development. As illustrated by many a caper movie, pulling off a major crime requires several traits traditionally regarded as virtues: prudence, courage, intelligence.
The possibility of a bad morality challenges us to define what counts as a good one. Amoralists have little hope of weaning many others from their addiction to guilt and blame. A fundamentalist jihadist might feel guilty for secretly teaching his daughter to read. Deciding between good and bad moralities will once again lead to a wild-goose chase after foundations.
It can only add a distracting complication to the already difficult task of assessing the force of reasons. In their psychological profile, in the way that they structure a life and give rise to moral emotions, bad and good moralities are alike. Perhaps, as Nietzsche argued, such emotions, rooted in fear and resentment, are what above all motivates us to believe in morality. For morality licenses a right to blame that we are reluctant to forfeit. This brings me to my last complaint: morality licenses ugly emotions.
It encourages us to feel contemptuous of others who fail to share our principles, or superior to those who fail to live up to them. It allows us a daily twinge of the pleasure that St Thomas Aquinas promised the elect, whose eternal bliss, he assured us, will be enhanced by witnessing the torments of the damned. Guilt is the primary moral emotion. The benefit claimed for it is that it motivates you to behave better in the future.
But simple regret is no less apt to inform and guide future choices. Unlike guilt, regret is not tied to the moral domain: I can regret missing a concert as readily as acting unkindly. We can learn from the past without laying claim to moral authority. What do we lose by giving up morality? I daresay I care about most of the things that many moral people care about. That includes the wellbeing of others, as well as my own. What I give up is above all the convoluted process of sorting my reasons into moral and non-moral.
Insofar as that process aims to provide me with fresh reasons to act, it could do so only on the basis of double counting, or by attempting to derive my existing reasons from obscure and disputed intuitions about ultimate values. I have plenty of reasons to be kind, not to cheat or lie, just as I have reasons to read some books rather than others or travel here rather than there. The label adds nothing to the reasons.
And if nevertheless I cheat or lie, those same reasons can lead me to regret it. As the philosopher Joel Marks has argued before me, to renounce morality is to wake up to the fact that in every choice we are governed by desires.
Some desires are for something we just want for itself; others are for ways or means of satisfying those. All constitute or are grounded in reasons to act. Those reasons can be almost exactly those that move a moralist. I merely forgo that added layer of pseudo-reasons that lets some of them count twice. I have perfectly good reasons for my desire not to cause harm, not to act unfairly, or to be kind.
These reasons derive both from my first-order reasons and from my reflection on them. They matter not because of morality, but because I care.
For an amoralist, moral discourse is nothing more than misleading rhetoric. Given the psychological power of the emotions that sustain moral fervour, we amoralists have little hope of weaning many others from their addiction to guilt and blame.
Neither do I expect professional ethicists to resign their jobs. Exploring the consequences of an act or policy envisaged is always to be encouraged. Some speculative debates are undoubtedly fascinating in their subtle complexity, even when, like those of theology, they lack an existing subject. But even those who do not simply reject their theist presuppositions might concede those debates to be stubbornly undecidable, as well as of doubtful practical relevance.
Similarly, the history of moral theory is full of baroque edifices of thought that might be intriguing to the historian of ideas. But they are no less irrelevant, at best — or toxic at worst — to the conduct of life. Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings. Nitin K Ahuja. If ethical theories are to be useful in practice, they need to affect the way human beings behave.
Some philosophers think that ethics does do this. They argue that if a person realises that it would be morally good to do something then it would be irrational for that person not to do it. But human beings often behave irrationally - they follow their 'gut instinct' even when their head suggests a different course of action.
Most moral issues get us pretty worked up - think of abortion and euthanasia for starters. Because these are such emotional issues we often let our hearts do the arguing while our brains just go with the flow.
But there's another way of tackling these issues, and that's where philosophers can come in - they offer us ethical rules and principles that enable us to take a cooler view of moral problems. So ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework that we can use to find our way through difficult issues. Using the framework of ethics, two people who are arguing a moral issue can often find that what they disagree about is just one particular part of the issue, and that they broadly agree on everything else.
That can take a lot of heat out of the argument, and sometimes even hint at a way for them to resolve their problem. Indeed more and more people think that for many ethical issues there isn't a single right answer - just a set of principles that can be applied to particular cases to give those involved some clear choices.
Some philosophers go further and say that all ethics can do is eliminate confusion and clarify the issues. After that it's up to each individual to come to their own conclusions.
Many people want there to be a single right answer to ethical questions. They find moral ambiguity hard to live with because they genuinely want to do the 'right' thing, and even if they can't work out what that right thing is, they like the idea that 'somewhere' there is one right answer. But often there isn't one right answer - there may be several right answers, or just some least worst answers - and the individual must choose between them.
For others moral ambiguity is difficult because it forces them to take responsibility for their own choices and actions, rather than falling back on convenient rules and customs.
At the heart of ethics is a concern about something or someone other than ourselves and our own desires and self-interest. Ethics is concerned with other people's interests, with the interests of society, with God's interests, with "ultimate goods", and so on. So when a person 'thinks ethically' they are giving at least some thought to something beyond themselves.
If a group believes that a particular activity is "wrong" it can then use morality as the justification for attacking those who practice that activity. When people do this, they often see those who they regard as immoral as in some way less human or deserving of respect than themselves; sometimes with tragic consequences. Ethics is not only about the morality of particular courses of action, but it's also about the goodness of individuals and what it means to live a good life.
At times in the past some people thought that ethical problems could be solved in one of two ways:. But now even philosophers are less sure that it's possible to devise a satisfactory and complete theory of ethics - at least not one that leads to conclusions. In this view, the role of ethics is limited to clarifying 'what's at stake' in particular ethical problems. Philosophy can help identify the range of ethical methods, conversations and value systems that can be applied to a particular problem.
But after these things have been made clear, each person must make their own individual decision as to what to do, and then react appropriately to the consequences. Do ethical statements provide information about anything other than human opinions and attitudes? The problem for ethical realists is that people follow many different ethical codes and moral beliefs. So if there are real ethical truths out there wherever! One form of ethical realism teaches that ethical properties exist independently of human beings, and that ethical statements give knowledge about the objective world.
To put it another way; the ethical properties of the world and the things in it exist and remain the same, regardless of what people think or feel - or whether people think or feel about them at all. On the face of it, it [ethical realism] means the view that moral qualities such as wrongness, and likewise moral facts such as the fact that an act was wrong, exist in rerum natura, so that, if one says that a certain act was wrong, one is saying that there existed, somehow, somewhere, this quality of wrongness, and that it had to exist there if that act were to be wrong.
That's the sort of question that only a philosopher would ask, but it's actually a very useful way of getting a clear idea of what's going on when people talk about moral issues.
We can show some of the different things I might be doing when I say 'murder is bad' by rewriting that statement to show what I really mean:. Moral realism is based on the idea that there are real objective moral facts or truths in the universe. Moral statements provide factual information about those truths.
Subjectivism teaches that moral judgments are nothing more than statements of a person's feelings or attitudes, and that ethical statements do not contain factual truths about goodness or badness. In more detail: subjectivists say that moral statements are statements about the feelings, attitudes and emotions that that particular person or group has about a particular issue. If a person says something is good or bad they are telling us about the positive or negative feelings that they have about that something.
These statements are true if the person does hold the appropriate attitude or have the appropriate feelings. They are false if the person doesn't. Emotivism is the view that moral claims are no more than expressions of approval or disapproval. This sounds like subjectivism, but in emotivism a moral statement doesn't provide information about the speaker's feelings about the topic but expresses those feelings.
When an emotivist says "murder is wrong" it's like saying "down with murder" or "murder, yecch! So when someone makes a moral judgement they show their feelings about something. Some theorists also suggest that in expressing a feeling the person gives an instruction to others about how to act towards the subject matter.
So if I say something is good, I'm recommending you to do it, and if I say something is bad, I'm telling you not to do it.
There is almost always a prescriptive element in any real-world ethical statement: any ethical statement can be reworked with a bit of effort into a statement with an 'ought' in it. For example: "lying is wrong" can be rewritten as "people ought not to tell lies". Supernaturalism makes ethics inseparable from religion. It teaches that the only source of moral rules is God.
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