This Is Ethics

An Introduction

Jussi Suikkanen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118479858, 9781118479407
• eBook ISBN: 9781118479841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is Ethics presents an accessible and engaging introduction to a variety of issues relating to contemporary moral philosophy.

• Covers a wide range of topics which are actively debated in contemporary moral philosophy
• Addresses the nature of happiness, well-being, and the meaning of life, the role of moral principles in moral thinking, moral motivation, and moral responsibility
• Covers timely ethical issues such as population growth and climate change
• Offers additional resources at https://thisisphilosoph.wordpress.com/ethics/
  
• Features extensive annotated bibliographies, summaries, and study questions for further investigation
• Written in an accessible, jargon-free manner using  helpful illustrative examples

Part One
What's in Our Interests?

1
Pleasure

1.1

Even if some people (usually parents and administrators) seem to think so, studying ethics doesn't necessarily improve the quality of your life or make you a better person. It will, however, give you useful resources for thinking about some of the most important things in life more clearly. If you get your head around these tools and apply them in real life, this can make a real difference to how you will live. Philosophical tools can help you to make important decisions in life and even sometimes to become a better person. In this sense, ethics isn't just an abstract and theoretical academic discipline. It isn't just about talking a lot about nothing.

1.2

The two main practical questions philosophers have thought about are how you should treat other people and what goals you should have in order to live well yourself. It is easier to begin from the second question, which concerns your own life only. When you think about how to live well, you don't have to take other people into account, at least to begin with. All you need to ask yourself is: how can I make my own life go better? This will be the main focus of Part One of this book. The second part will then consider what kind of constraints morality sets on you when you pursue your own good. What are the things that it would be wrong to do when you consider not only your own life but also the lives of others?

1.3

So let's start from the question of how you can make your life go better. Consider the following kinds of concrete questions:

• Should you pursue a career in journalism or health care?
• Should you practice an instrument or play computer games?
• Should you study hard or hang out with friends?
• Should you have passionate affairs or a stable relationship?
• Should you travel or volunteer?

How you answer these questions will, in many ways, decide what your life will turn out to be like. Get the answers right and you will prosper. Approaching these questions can be daunting because it's not immediately obvious how you could even begin to tackle them. What is it that you should be thinking about when you are trying to decide?

1.4

The first two chapters of this book will offer you philosophical tools for finding answers to these basic questions about how you should live. They are some of the first philosophical questions which philosophers started to think about thousands of years ago. The main ethical works of Plato and Aristotle, the founding fathers of philosophy who lived in Ancient Greece, are entitled The Republic and Nicomachean Ethics respectively.¹ These famous books, which were written about 2500 years ago, both consider the question of how to live a good life. Following Plato and Aristotle, it is natural to approach the previous questions by considering the following kinds of things:

• what you would enjoy;
• what would make you happy;
• what would improve your life; and
• what would make your life more meaningful.

Studying philosophy can clarify what you should be focusing on when you make important life choices by using these natural standards. It can also help you to weigh how important pleasure, happiness, well-being, and a meaningful life are. This chapter will focus on pleasure and how important it is. The next chapter will then discuss happiness, well-being, and the meaning of life.² The topics of these chapters are then directly relevant for how we are to live.

Three Questions about Pleasure

1.5

When you consider the connection between pleasure and living a good life, you should follow Aristotle³ and distinguish between three sets of different questions. These are:

1. What are the sources of pleasures? What gives you pleasure?
2. What is it to experience pleasure? What does pleasure consist of?
3. How important is pleasure? Should you pursue pleasure?

These questions can be illustrated with a simple example. Ann is suffering from the common cold. In this case, we also can ask the previous three questions. How did Ann get the cold? This is a question about the causal origin of her cold. An answer to it might tell a story about how Ann met people who were already suffering from the cold or a story about how viruses move from one body to another.

1.6

The second question would in this case focus on what it is for Ann to suffer from the cold. In virtue of what does Ann count as a person who is suffering from the cold? This question is not about Ann's symptoms. It is rather about the nature of her disease. The correct answer to it would tell a story about upper respiratory tract infections which are usually caused by hundreds of different species of viruses.

1.7

The final question about Ann's cold is about how bad it is for Ann to have the disease. This is an evaluative question about good and bad.⁴ The answers to it should tell Ann how much effort she should use to try to avoid getting the cold. You can then ask exactly the same questions about pleasure. What are the things that give you pleasure? What constitutes experiencing pleasure? And, how important is it to experience pleasure?

1.8

The correct answers to these questions might well depend on one another. Views about the nature of pleasure have significant consequences for how valuable pleasure is. However, we should at least attempt to treat these questions separately. As Descartes advised us, we should pursue clarity in philosophy by dividing philosophical problems into smaller parts that can be considered separately.⁵

1.9

Philosophers are rarely interested in the sources of pleasure because you don't need philosophy to tell you what gives you or other people pleasure. We all know what gives us pleasure personally. You probably get pleasure from eating ice cream, seeing friends, sunbathing, and so on. You are also aware that other people do not enjoy the same things as you. They might get pleasure from lifting weights or dancing samba. Different people thus get pleasure from different things.

1.10

The best way to tell what gives other people pleasure is to ask them. This is why it is the job of the psychologists and social scientists rather than philosophers to tell us what the sources of pleasure are. The empirical study of the sources of pleasure has already revealed many interesting facts⁶ Scientists now know that about 25% of people have tongues with a higher density of receptors (Bloom, 2010, pp. 27–29). Because of this, they are called supertasters.⁷ If you are a supertaster, then everything will taste more intense to you. There are things that many other people find pleasant (such as whiskey, beer, bl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• This Is Philosophy
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: What's in Our Interests?
• Part Two: Normative Ethics
• Part Three: Metaethics
• Part Four: Ethical Questions
• Glossary of Terms
• Index
• End User License Agreement