PART TWO: RECEIVED MORALITY

In the first part of our exploration, we have explored reasons why the study of ethics might contribute to a better way of living. In this section, chapters 4 through 6, we explore some of the traditional, everyday sources from which we have inherited many of our moral beliefs.

There are many possible ways to consider these questions. We’ll be following an approach that looks at them in the light of various general theories or philosophical positions one might adopt. Each of these theories makes a particular claim about what is fundamental to ethics, highlights certain aspects of our ethical lives and provides some guidance for dealing with ethical controversies in the real world. In this section we’ll consider theories that claim ethics come from culture, religion or the law. Each of these theories, we will see, is rather simplistic and subject to many problems. In the next part of this textbook we’ll explore theories that are somewhat more flexible and more insistent that we reason through our moral judgments, not just simply receive them from others.

It should be said that not all these theories, both in this part of the book and the next, will be found to be equally viable. Many of them fail as approaches to ethics for a variety of reasons that will become clearer in each case. This brings up the obvious question of why we should bother looking at a wide variety of approaches to ethics that often don’t work instead of more directly articulating one that does. There are two reasons to take this approach. First, despite the difficulties faced by these approaches to ethics, all of them continue to be popular and find defenders yet today. Even if these defenses are inadequate, they still have had and have their champions. There is a version of an old joke about anarchists that applies here to philosophers: given three philosophers in a room together there will be four positions taken by them on any topic that comes up for discussion. This is a strength of philosophy, since philosophy is the attempt to articulate and defend a general account of such abstract topics as the nature of reality, knowledge and values, so the more particular positions we can examine the better. Like scientific theories, we should welcome a diversity of approaches rather than rule any out at the start. But unlike science, unworkable philosophical theories have a longer shelf life, since the cost for holding on to them is relatively easy to bear. If a scientific theory is fatally flawed it often quickly becomes clear – one’s prediction of what the experiments or data will show fails, other explanations cover more cases with fewer assumptions and better fit with the data, the bridge built based on one’s earlier theories collapses. The cost of bad science is steep. In philosophy, however, the cost of holding onto unsuccessful theories is merely having to put up with theoretical incoherence, to be willing to hold conflicting views in the mind at the same time. And it turns out that we humans are pretty good at doing these things – all you have to do to live with a poorly worked out set of fundamental beliefs is avoid thinking about them.

The second reason for considering a multitude of approaches to ethics here is that each of these approaches does have the advantage of focusing on some important dimension of ethics. To the extent that these theories fail it is because they tend to overemphasize the dimension in question and ignore others. Looking at a variety of approaches can thus help give us a clearer picture of what ethics is broadly all about, even in the absence of some final master theory that would unify ethics once and for all and win universal assent.

Making sense of our ethical lives and thinking clearly about ethics is hard, but it is worth the effort. Philosophical ethics may not be an empirical science, and debates in ethics may not ever be resolved, but it is a rich field well worth exploring. These next chapters are intended as a kind of a guidebook, pointing out certain general features of the landscape, some important landmarks and major hazards to be reckoned with.