1.5 Philosophical Ethics
Philosophical ethics is bringing critical thinking and logical reasoning to bear on our reflection about our own values, actions and decisions. Even though we all have the capacity to reflect on our lives and choices, we do not always spend the time or make the effort to do this carefully and deeply. This is because we are mostly preoccupied with the immediately practical details of our lives. We are too busy living to take the time to stop and think about the significance of what we are doing. However, at times in the lives of both individuals and societies the need to reflect more clearly on what we are doing becomes more urgent. For individuals, the need to stop and think and to reconsider the basic assumptions on which we act often arises in relation to important life events or radical changes – the sudden loss of a loved one; the birth of a child; living through a natural disaster or a war; or even the transition to adulthood in which one assumes full moral and legal responsibility while also gaining the full rights and privileges of adults. For groups and organizations, the need to establish professional rules of moral behavior and a formal list of professional ethics demands careful rational thinking. These are topics and situations, as we will see later, that are often the focus of discussions in the branch of philosophical ethics called applied ethics. In the case of societies, philosophical thinking likewise flourishes in times of great stress or change – for example when radically different societies suddenly make contact with each other; when new groups and ways of living displace old groups and ways; when traditional answers no longer meet contemporary needs; when new discoveries challenge peoples’ basic views of the nature of things; when societies find their very existence threatened by seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In cases like these it becomes more obviously important to reflect carefully on what we assume is valuable to us both individually and as a society, on what counts as a good life.
A philosophical approach to ethics, or moral philosophy, looks at a few different kinds of questions. So the broader field of ethics can be divided up into at least four different sub-fields. These are:
Descriptive ethics
What do people and cultures think about right and wrong?
How can we best describe and explain people’s moral claims and beliefs?
Descriptive ethics is not exclusively a philosophical approach to ethics – sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists are also interested in studying people’s ethical, moral and social beliefs. From the perspective of descriptive ethics, our beliefs and principles are things to be studied, categorized, organized and explained. This is what social scientists do for a living.
Meta-ethics
How does ethical thinking work and how does it compare with other forms of thinking?
Are ethical claims nothing but opinions as opposed to the factual claims made scientists?
Meta-ethics is a higher-order or “meta-level” discussion about ethical thinking. Here again, philosophers as well as social scientists often ask meta-ethical questions in their attempts to understand what is distinctive about ethical thinking as opposed to other modes of cognition. Looking at ethics from this perspective does not involve taking a stand on particular ethical principles or issues.
Normative ethics
What is really the right thing to do?
What moral principles are really justified and should be followed?
This approach to ethics is the uniquely philosophical attempt to find the true basis of ethical thinking and to come to sound moral judgments. We will be spending a lot of time here examining various attempts to give an account of the basis and justification of ethical thought, belief and action. Normative ethics is not content to describe ethical behaviors but is in the business of helping people come to moral conclusions. Normative ethics is typically found in the fields of philosophy, law, and theology.
Applied ethics.
What is the right thing to do in real-world cases of ethical controversy?
What assumptions and principles lie at the basis of ethical controversies?
How does all of this play out in real life cases? Under this heading are also to be found discussions of ethical issues associated with some specific areas of human life, professions, or subject matters – hence medical ethics, business ethics, legal ethics, environmental ethics, bioethics and so on are sub-fields within applied ethics.
We should keep in mind as we proceed that these various approaches are not always so clearly separate from one another. Our description of what people believe about ethical questions, for example, is clearly often informed by what we think they are justified in believing. Nevertheless we should remember that we can look at ethics from each of these different points of view and recognize that failing to do so may result in unnecessary confusion.
In conclusion, we might say that philosophical ethics involves deliberately reflecting on our ideas about ethics in general and on specific applications of these ideas to actual cases and controversies. Even though all of us can reflect generally on our own beliefs, desires, actions and values, it does take some effort and quite a bit of practice to be able to do so rationally. This is because critical thinking about morality is a skill like anything else that we might do with our minds (like solve algebra problems or identify different species of trees) and we shouldn’t expect it to be natural to us but to take practice.
