My Frustration with Ethics
Ethics is at once my favourite and least liked area of inquiry, especially ethics courses. One such course was an ‘introductory’ Bioethics course I took last year; a course which familiarized and focused on Utilitarianism, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and Virtue Ethics in relation to the ‘problems’ of Bioethics. The problem is that ethics as it’s currently practiced is impossible, and it frustrates me. The result is that I’ve taken to reading books on ethics (and virtue) and the outlook looks fairly bleak.
It was a common requirement of my Bioethics course to examine different issues from the perspectives of at least two moral theories. I usually chose Utilitarianism and Kant’s Categorical Imperative (I think now I would run to Virtue Ethics first). The problem that makes ethics impossible is that there doesn’t seem the possibility of consensus — by this I mean progress, or one ethical formulation being superior to another — of one being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’. Ethics courses as I’ve experienced them only allow for the possibility of talking about meaningful fictions, of concepts that are abstractly useful but lack any real correlation with reality. There is no independent-of-human-thinking right or wrong. Take Utilitarianism, for example.
Of the Utilitarian view of happiness and suffering guiding our actions, Alasdair MacIntyre says:
If someone suggests to us, in the spirit of Bentham and Mill, that we should guide our own choices by the prospects of our own future pleasure or happiness, the appropriate retort is to enquire: ‘But which pleasure, which happiness ought to guide me?’ For there are too many different kinds of enjoyable activity, too many different modes in which happiness is achieved. And pleasure or happiness are not states of mind for the production of which these activities and modes are merely alternative means. The pleasure-of-drinking-Guinness is not the pleasure-of-swimming-at-Crane’s-Beach, and the swimming and the drinking are not two different means for providing the same end-state. The happiness which belongs peculiarly to the way of life of the cloister is not the same happiness as that which belongs peculiarly to the military life. For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weight them. Consequently, appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me where to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a solider. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 64)
Yet while this was acknowledged, the expectation was to still be able to produce some sort of qualified set of moral actions. The problem becomes compounded when you realize that such decisions are future oriented (i.e. future happiness, future pain). The theory fundamentally fails, yet I’m expected to use it. That wasn’t the worst of it, for in all this I was told (paraphrased), “While the theory as a whole has gaps, there are still nuggets of truth — such as being concerned about happiness, and suffering and the consequences of our actions — that should be gleaned”. But why should I be concerned about happiness, suffering or the consequences of my actions? Doesn’t this itself presuppose some higher moral order which Utilitarianism attempts to correspond to? Or when we talk about the ‘greater good’ of society, we only push the problem back one step while now talking about some abstract idea — ‘society’ — instead of people on an individual basis in specific circumstances. Unless I have given these terms (“happiness,” “suffering,” etc.) some sort of authority in my thinking, they are meaningless to me. Isn’t that the whole point of the exercise, my being a moral agent able to weigh decisions accordingly?
Ethics (morality) is then reduced to a series of “is” or “should” statements, rather than “ought” statements. Playing make-believe is fun for a little while, but I’m not that imaginative.
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