Thinkers and Theories in Ethics

Britannica Educational Publishing, Brian Duignan

• Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781615304158
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

Perspectives on moral behavior and ethical action are wide-ranging, and often involve divergent standards and approaches that produce ambiguous conclusions—yet we still arrive at universals. Echoes of Enlightenment and ancient Greek thinking resonate through the present day, and various thinkers have adapted the same ideas to respond to emerging social, cultural, political, and technological developments and new moral dilemmas. This volume surveys the major theories that form the basis of ethical thought. Sidebars and detailed images shed light on the vacillating world of ethics, and highlight the individuals whose seminal works confront some of our most fundamental human concerns.

CHAPTER 1
NORMATIVE ETHICS: EUDAEMONISM AND CONSEQUENTIALISM

Normative ethics is the branch of ethics (also called moral philosophy) that is concerned with the moral evaluation of human actions, institutions, and ways of life. The central task of normative ethics is to determine how basic moral standards, or norms, are justified and what basic norms there may be. Two important approaches to this task, eudaemonism and consequentialism, are discussed in this chapter. Other approaches, namely contractualism, deontology, feminism, and egoism, are treated in Chapter 2.

EUDAEMONISM

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Eudaemonism derives its name from the ancient Greek word eudaimonia, which literally means “the state of having a good indwelling spirit.” The usual English rendering of this term, “happiness,” is an inadequate translation, however, because it incorrectly suggests that eudaimonia is simply a mood or a state of mind. It is instead the condition of living a good life, sometimes called a life of “human flourishing.” According to eudaemonistic theories, right or virtuous action is that which enables, brings about, or is constitutive of happiness in this sense. The best known forms of eudaemonism are those of Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BCE), Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and the Stoics.

THE ETHICS OF PLATO

In ancient Greek philosophy the notion of arete—“virtue” or “excellence”—applies to anything that has a characteristic use, function, or activity: the excellence of that thing is whatever disposition enables it (and things of the same kind) to perform well. The excellence of a racehorse is whatever enables it to run well; the excellence of a knife is whatever enables it to cut well; and the excellence of an eye is whatever enables it to see well. Human virtue, accordingly, is whatever enables human beings to live the best possible human life, in other words, to be happy.

Ancient Greek culture recognized a conventional set of virtues, which included courage, justice, piety, modesty or temperance, and wisdom. Plato and his teacher, Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), undertook to discover what these virtues really amount to. A truly satisfactory account of any virtue would identify what it is, show how possessing it enables one to live well, and indicate how it is best acquired.

Because Socrates wrote nothing, almost all of what is known about his philosophy is derived from the portrayal of him in several of Plato’s dialogues, especially the early (or “Socratic”) dialogues. In these works, a character called “Socrates” is represented in conversation with various prominent figures, often in a search for a definition of a particular virtue (e.g., courage, justice, piety, temperance, or wisdom). According to Socrates, all that is needed to live a happy life is to be perfectly virtuous, and all that is needed to possess a particular virtue is to know what it is. But it is exceedingly difficult to obtain this kind of knowledge, as the failures of his interlocutors dramatically demonstrate. (Indeed, the historical Socrates himself professed not to know what the virtues are.) This is partly because the definitions Socrates searches for are not the sort of thing one would find in a dictionary. Rather, they are general accounts of the “real nature” of the thing in question. (The real definition of water, for example, is H₂O, though this fact was unknown in most historical eras.) In the encounters Plato portrays, the interlocutors typically offer an example of the virtue they are asked to define (not the right kind of answer) or give a general account (the right kind of answer) that is inconsistent with their intuitions on related matters.

Justice is just one of a group of conventional virtues recognized by ancient Greek culture. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Because the virtues, according to Socrates, are a kind of knowledge, anyone who knows what a particular virtue is will necessarily act in accordance with it. If one knows, for example, what courage or piety is, one will act courageously or piously, and similarly for all the other virtues. It follows that anyone who fails to act virtuously does so because he incorrectly identifies virtue (or a particular virtue) with something it is not. Socrates’ view also implies that weakness of will, what the Greeks called akrasia—knowingly acting in a way one believes to be wrong—is impossible. Aristotle, the greatest student of Plato, rejected this view as plainly at odds with the facts.

TREATMENT OF VIRTUE IN THE EARLY DIALOGUES

The early dialogues of Plato are generally short and entertaining and fairly accessible, even to readers with no background in philosophy. Indeed, they were probably intended by Plato to draw such readers into the subject.

In 399 BCE Socrates was brought to trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. He was convicted and sentenced to death by poison. The Apology represents the speech that Socrates gave in his defense at his trial, and it gives an interpretation of Socrates’ career: he has been a “gadfly,” trying to awaken the noble horse of Athens to an awareness of virtue, and he is wisest in the sense that he is aware that he knows nothing.

Each of the other early dialogues represents a particular Socratic encounter. Thus in the Charmides, Socrates discusses temperance and self-knowledge with Critias and Charmides. The dialogue moves from an account in terms of behaviour (“temperance is a kind of quietness”) to an attempt to specify the underlying state that accounts for it; the latter effort breaks down in puzzles over the reflexive application of knowledge.

The Crito shows Socrates in prison, discussing why he chooses not to escape before the death sentence is carried out. The dialogue considers the source and nature of political obligation. The Euthyphro asks, “What is piety?” Euthyphro fails to maintain the successive positions that piety is “what the gods love,” “what the gods all love,” or some sort of service to the gods. Socrates and Euthyphro agree that what they seek is a single form, present in all things that are pious, that makes them so. Socrates suggests that if Euthyphro could specify what part of justice piety is, he would have an account.

The more elaborate Gorgias considers, while its namesake is at Athens, whether orators command a genuine art or merely have a knack of flattery. Socrates holds that the arts of the legislator and the judge address the health of the soul, which orators counterfeit by taking the pleasant instead of the good as their standard. Discussion of whether one should envy the man who can bring about any result he likes leads to a Socratic paradox: it is better to suffer wrong than to do it. Callicles praises the man of natural ability who ignores conventional justice. True justice, according to Callicles, is this person’s triumph. In the Hippias Minor, discussion of the epic poet Homer by a visiting Sophist (a professional—and usually cynical—teacher of rhetoric and logic) leads to an examination by Socrates, which the Sophist fails, on such questions as whether a just person who does wrong on purpose is better than other wrongdoers.

The interlocutors in the Laches are generals. Here the observation that the sons of great men often do not turn out well leads to an examination of what courage is. The trend again is from an account in terms of behaviour (“standing fast in battle”) to an attempt to specify the inner state that underlies it (“knowledge of the grounds of hope and fear”), but none of the participants displays adequate understanding of these suggestions. The Lysis is an examination of the nature of friendship. The work introduces the notion of a primary object of love, for whose sake one loves other things.

The Meno takes up the familiar question of whether virtue can be taught, and, if so, why eminent men have not been able to bring up their sons to be virtuous. Concerned with method, the dialogue develops Meno’s problem: How is it possible to search either for what one knows (for one already knows it) or for what one does not know (and so could not look for)? This is answered by the recollection theory of learning. What is called learning is really prompted recollection. One possesses all theoretical knowledge latently at birth, as demonstrated by the slave boy’s ability to solve geometry problems when properly prompted. The dialogue is also famous as an early discussion of the distinction between knowledge and true belief.

The Protagoras, another discussion with a visiting Sophist, concerns whether virtue can be taught and whether the different virtues are really one. The dialogue contains yet another discussion of the phenomenon that the sons of the great are often undistinguished. Most famously, this dialogue develops the characteristic Socratic suggestion that virtue is identical with wisdom and discusses the Socratic position that akrasia is impossible.

THE REPUBLIC

The middle dialogues of Plato have similar agendas. Although they are primarily concerned with ethical and other human issues, they also proclaim the importance of metaphysical inquiry and sketch Plato’s doctrine of forms, which Socrates certainly did not hold. According to this doctrine, corresponding to every property or feature that a particular thing may have, there is an unchanging and eternal reality, called a form, in which the thing “participates.” Thus, having a property is a matter of participating in the corresponding form. For example, Achilles is beautiful by virtue of the fact that he participates in the form of Beauty, and the racehorse War Emblem is black by virtue of his participating in the form of Blackness. Likewise, being courageous, just, or pious or possessing any of the other human virtues consists of participating in the form of Courage, Justice, or Piety, and so on. Such forms, according to Plato, are what Socrates and his interlocutors were searching for in their struggle to discover the real definitions of the virtues. However, Plato does not fully specify how the forms are to be understood until the later dialogues, particularly the Parmenides.

In one of the greatest dialogues of the middle period, the Republic, Plato develops a view of happiness and virtue that departs from that of Socrates. According to Plato, there are three parts of the soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—each of which has its own natural object of desire. Thus, reason desires truth and the good of the individual as a whole, spirit desires the honour and esteem obtained through competition, and appetite desires sensually appealing things such as food, drink, and sex. The happy individual, for Plato, is the one in whom the three parts of the soul act in harmony, each desiring what it is appropriate for it to desire and none becoming so dominant that it frustrates the desires of the other two.

Although the dialogue starts from the question “Why should I be just?,” Socrates proposes that this inquiry can be advanced by examining justice “writ large” in an ideal city. Thus, the political discussion is undertaken to aid the ethical one. One early hint of the existence of the three parts of the soul in the individual is the existence of three classes in the well-functioning state: rulers, guardians, and producers. The wise state is the one in which the rulers understand the good; the courageous state is that in which the guardians can retain in the heat of battle the judgments handed down by the rulers about what is to be feared; the temperate state is that in which all citizens agree about who is to rule; and the just state is that in which each of the three classes does its own work properly. Thus, for the city to be fully virtuous, each citizen must contribute appropriately.

Justice as conceived in the Republic is so comprehensive that a person who possessed it would also possess all the other virtues, thereby achieving happiness, or “the health of that whereby we live [the soul].” Yet, lest it be thought that habituation and correct instruction in human affairs alone can lead to this condition, one must keep in view that the Republic also develops the famous doctrine according to which reason cannot properly understand the human good or anything else without grasping the Good itself. Thus the original inquiry, whose starting point was a motivation each individual is presumed to have (to learn how to live well), leads to a highly ambitious educational program. Starting with exposure only to salutary stories, poetry, and music from childhood and continuing with supervised habituation to good action and years of training in a series of mathematical disciplines, this program—and so virtue—would be complete only in the person who was able to grasp the first principle, the Good, and to proceed on that basis to secure accounts of the other realities.

According to Plato’s doctrine of forms, Achilles is beautiful by virtue of the fact that he takes part in the form of Beauty. The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images

THE ETHICS OF ARISTOTLE

The surviving works of Aristotle include three treatises on moral philosophy: the Nicomachean Ethics in 10 books, the Eudemian Ethics in 7 books, and the Magna moralia (Latin: “Great Ethics”). The Nicomachean Ethics is generally regarded as the most important of the three; it consists of a series of short treatises, possibly brought together by Aristotle’s son Nicomachus. It is also probable that Aristotle used the Eudemian Ethics for a course on ethics that he taught at the school he founded, the Lyceum, during his mature period. The Magna moralia probably consists of notes taken by an unknown student of such a course.

HAPPINESS

Aristotle’s approach to ethics is teleological. If life is to be worth living, he argues, it must surely be for the sake of something that is an end in itself (i.e., desirable for its own sake). Therefore, the highest human good, which Aristotle calls happiness, must be desirable for its own sake, and all other goods must be desirable for the sake of it. One popular conception of the highest human good is pleasure—the pleasures of food, drink, and sex, combined with aesthetic and intellectual pleasures. Other people prefer a life of virtuous action in the political sphere. A third possible candidate for the highest human good is scientific or philosophical contemplation. Aristotle thus reduces the answers to the question “What is the good human life?” to a short list of three: the philosophical life, the political life, and the voluptuary life. This triad provides the key to his ethical inquiry.

Soul

The soul is the purported immaterial aspect or essence of a human being, that which confers individuality and humanity. It is often identified with the mind or the self.

Many cultures have recognized some incorporeal principle corresponding to the soul, and many have attributed souls to all living things. Both the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chinese conceived of a dual soul. The Egyptian ka (breath) survived death but remained near the body, while the spiritual ba proceeded to the region of the dead. The Chinese distinguished between a lower, sensitive soul, which disappears with death, and a rational principle, the hun, which survives the grave and is the object of ancestor worship. The ancient Hebrews apparently had a concept of the soul but did not separate it from the body, although later Jewish writers developed the idea of the soul further.

Ancient Greek concepts of the soul varied considerably. For the Platonists, the soul was an immaterial and incorporeal substance. Aristotle’s conception of the soul was obscure, though he did state that it was a form inseparable from the body. Socrates and Plato accepted the immortality of the soul, while Aristotle considered only part of the soul, the noûs, or intellect, to have that quality. The early Christian philosophers adopted the Greek concept of the soul’s immortality and thought of the soul as being created by God and infused into the body at conception.

Among early-modern philosophers, René Descartes believed that human beings were a union of the body and the soul, each a distinct substance acting on the other, while Benedict de Spinoza held that body and soul are but two aspects of a single reality.

In Hinduism the atman (“breath,” or “soul”) ...