CHAPTER 3

Morals

How ought we to act? On what basis do we decide on courses of action? What do we mean when we say something is “right” or “wrong” in a moral sense? These are among the many questions that we will most definitely not answer by the end of this chapter. We’ll take a pretty good look at things, though, taking a quick trip through deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, ethics of care, and a couple of issues in religious morality.

Questions in ethical theory, for the most part, aren’t about particular situations. For the most part, they have less to do with what to believe about right and wrong than they do with why we believe what we believe. Any decent ethical theory will recognize the complexity of our lives, and will give us troubling or ambiguous answers to questions about how to act in troubling or ambiguous circumstances. And yet, at the same time, such cases help to throw into sharp contrast the differences between one theory and another. As a result, we end up looking at some pretty inventive and extreme examples. Sometimes these “thought experiments” help us to clarify our views—but sometimes they make complex issues seem far too simple. You’ll see what I mean.

By the way, most philosophers use the words “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably. (Some do draw a distinction, but those distinctions are pretty idiosyncratic to those particular philosophers.) To keep things clear, I’ll be using the two terms as entirely synonymous.

The Best of Intentions

Can good people do bad things? Give some examples.

When good people do things that turn out badly, or have unintended harmful results, does this make them less good or less moral? Why?

Regardless of what it says about the person’s morality, can an action be a bad action if it is done with good intentions? Or is any action taken with good intentions a good action?

The Philosophy

Bad people can clearly do bad things, and an action taken with the intent to harm clearly says something bad about the person with that intention. But are the best of intentions always enough?

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) thought morality was entirely about our intentions. It makes sense that someone as religious as Kant would believe so—this means that we are entirely in control of whether we act morally or immorally, and that helps to justify the idea that God will reward or punish us according to our moral worth. However, Kant’s argument for the idea has nothing to do with his faith. He argues instead that having a good will toward others is the only truly and purely good thing that we can have, and whether you are a good person comes down to whether you have a good will. Even virtues like cleverness and conviction can become evil when held by those with bad intentions.

But surely those who commit evil acts often do so because they have “good intentions.” Anders Breivik, for example, explained his mass murders in Norway in 2011 as a way to raise awareness of the “dangers” of multiculturalism and feminism. Thankfully, Kant gave us an objective test for whether our intentions really are good. He called this the “categorical imperative”: Always act according to intentions that could be adopted by everyone else as well, and which, if adopted by everybody, would result in a world that we’d like to live in. So Breivik is clearly out: The intention to murder, for whatever reason, if universalized, would eventually result in us all being dead. And, for that matter, intolerance of other cultures and the subjection of women don’t work out either.

The White Lie

Have you ever told a white lie? Of course you have. Describe a lie or half-truth that you’ve told that you think was clearly justifiable.

What good outcomes did you close off by lying? What could the truth have changed, if things had gone well?

What kinds of circumstances or conditions do you think justify lies? What needs to be at stake in order to justify a lie—or, alternately, how trivial does something have to be before you are justified in lying about it?

The Philosophy

As we saw before, just telling yourself or believing that you have good intentions, for Kant, isn’t enough. You still have bad intentions in reality if, for example, your so-called “good intentions” are “to save the white race from losing its dominance over others.” But Kant’s categorical imperative also doesn’t give you a free pass on a bad action if your eventual goal is good—say, if Breivik’s goal had been peace, love, and understanding, Kant would condemn killing as a means to that end as well. This means, for Kant, some things are just wrong no matter what, and while that might make intuitive sense when we’re talking about killing people, it also means that an injustice is wrong even when it serves the greater good, that breaking the law is wrong even if it’s a bad law, and that there’s no such thing as a “white lie.”

Many have taken this to be a fatal flaw in Kant’s theory, but a pretty good defense of it can actually be put together. Here’s a troubling example that Kant himself took on:

Imagine that someone comes to your door intending to murder your friend, who is hiding in your house. Lying is wrong for Kant, because it can’t be universalized: If everybody deceived others when it was helpful, deception would become impossible, because no one would believe anyone. So you can’t lie to the murderer at the door—which seems crazy. But consider: You can still defend your friend, and by being honest with the man at the door, you show him respect as a person still able to choose to do the right thing. Deception treats him as a mere murderer; honesty confronts him with the truth and gives him the chance to redeem himself. Always telling the truth may be hard, and sometimes dangerous, but no one ever said being moral was always easy or safe.

Truth or Consequences

Imagine you answer an ad on Craigslist for someone who wants you to be executor of his will. He says he doesn’t trust his family to do it. When he dies and you open the folder, you understand why: His entire estate is to be given to a neo-Nazi group. Would you be justified in “misplacing” the will in a nearby fireplace?

Imagine a relative of yours—say, your aunt—is dying, and asks you to leave as her bequest a large sum of money to another relative, who already happened to be well off. You promise to do so, and your aunt dies. Nobody else knows about this money or her request. Would you be justified in donating the money to a homeless shelter instead?

Imagine you promised to pay some kids down the street to take care of your pets and yard while you’re out of town. Once you’re back, you look at the money you’re about to pay them and realize that it would make more of a difference to the homeless. Would you be justified in telling the kids that you’re sorry … but they’re not getting paid?

The Philosophy

Of course, Kant’s theory about the basis of morality is not the only one around. It’s the utilitarian theory of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) that seems closest to common sense to most of us today. The “utility” in “utilitarianism” just refers to anything with usefulness for anyone—so if it helps with anyone’s life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness, it counts. Utilitarianism, then, is the idea that we ought to act to maximize utility. So, the right action to take is the one that best serves the most of everyone’s needs, desires, and goals—as Mill put it in his bumper-sticker version: the greatest good for the greatest number. (Okay, bumper stickers weren’t actually around in nineteenth-century England, but that’s not the point.)

Acting on the basis of the greatest good for the greatest number fits pretty well with our ideas of right and wrong, for the most part, but things can get strange. If we think about utilitarian calculation carelessly, it starts to look like we can justify any amount of lying and cheating if it helps the right number of people.

Consider the three questions we looked at previously. I’m guessing that you were much more comfortable with the first example, the one about the bequest to neo-Nazis, than with the third, about stiffing kids in favor of the homeless. What’s the difference? Of course, there’s a difference in the amount of good and the amount of harm, but there’s also a difference in social trust. If we break our promises, then we undermine the trust and cooperation that our society depends upon. You might be helping the homeless, but you’re not being a good neighbor, and you’re not teaching those kids good values. We care about telling the truth because honesty is usually a great way of getting to the greatest good for the greatest number!

Exceptions, like the first example perhaps, are few and far between. Moral rules are important for the utilitarian, but because ultimately they’re important only because they tend to maximize benefits for people, there can be some exceptions.

Harm for the Greater Good

Imagine you see a trolley rolling toward five people who have been tied to the track. You don’t have any way of stopping the trolley, but you can switch it to a different track. There’s only one person tied to that alternate track. Should you throw the switch? Why?

Imagine there’s no switch, but this time, you do have something nearby that could stop the trolley: a very fat man. If you push him onto the track, the trolley would derail after hitting him, and save the five people tied to the track. Should you?

Forget the trolleys. Imagine instead that a terrorist group has claimed that they will set off a bomb that will kill at least five people. You have a member of the group in custody, but he refuses to talk. Should you resort to torture if doing so will get you information that will allow you to stop the attack? Why or why not?

The Philosophy

These are troubling questions, and if you really think about what it would be like to make the call, it might be hard to imagine throwing the switch (or the fat man) even if you’re convinced that it’s the right thing to do.

The reason why ethicists have played around with these examples—the first originally comes from Philippa Foot (1920–2010), and the second from Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–)—is that “thought experiments” like these help to isolate our moral intuitions and understand why we believe what we believe.

We’re much more likely to find it acceptable to switch tracks than to throw the fat man on the rails, even though the losses and gains are the same in both cases. But why? Some claim it’s because in the first case we’re just reacting to a situation in progress, and all six people are already inside the situation, whereas in the second case we’re adding someone uninvolved into the situation, which makes us feel more responsible. But how important should our feeling of responsibility be compared to saving lives? Another theory is that in the second case we’re actively intending someone’s death, whereas in the first, the death of the single person on the other track is just a kind of side effect of saving the five.

The third example seems the same, but only if we accept the terms of the thought experiment. In reality, you might not be sure that there is actually a bomb at all. Or maybe you won’t be able to stop the attack anyway. Or you could get bad information from the alleged terrorist—people being tortured will confess to things they didn’t do. The real-life circumstances are much more uncertain and complicated than thought experiments, and taking harmful action is very difficult to justify, even in circumstances that seem most in its favor.

Animal Rights

Imagine you’re in charge of making the final choice about where to put up a dam to create a reservoir for a municipal water supply. One valley is used occasionally by hikers. Another is almost never visited but is the nesting ground of a particular bird species, which would be displaced by the reservoir. How do you weigh the inconvenience to the hikers against that to the birds? Does the birds’ happiness have moral weight?

Cage-free eggs are just a dollar or two more expensive than factory-farmed eggs, and they’re right next to one another in the grocery store. What benefit do you (or would you) get from those dollars? Is that benefit enough to outweigh the suffering of chickens who live out their lives in cramped, disease-ridden conditions? Why, or why not?

Veal comes from young calves separated from their mothers and kept physically inactive to keep their meat tender. Can the experience of eating veal justify this treatment? Why or why not?

The Philosophy

If we adopt the utilitarian view that the right action is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number, then we just need to do a kind of cost-benefit analysis to figure out how best to act. For each possible choice, we add up the happiness of each individual benefited and then subtract the suffering of each individual harmed. We can then take whichever action has the greatest net benefit (or, if all our options are bad, whichever action has the least net loss). But who counts as an individual? Do birds count, for example? Do we weigh their happiness as heavily as that of a person?

Australian philosopher Peter Singer (1946–) thinks we can account for this using his “preference utilitarianism.” What counts for him are preferences that can either be met or denied. This allows him to set up a kind of moral spectrum among animals. People have all kinds of preferences—not just suffering and pleasure, but plans for the future, desires, intellectual enjoyment, furthering our causes and values in the world, and so on. Other animals, like dogs and cats, can’t have, for example, political causes or favorite pastimes, and this limits the range of preferences they can have. Still other creatures, like clams or insects, have very limited preferences, perhaps limited to preferring not to suffer.

For Singer, animals count insofar as they are able to have preferences, and this is sufficient to allow us to compare the limited but serious preferences of nonhuman animals, like those in the questions you answered, against the less limited (but often trivial) preferences of humans. As soon as we set up any such grounds for interspecies comparison, Singer thinks we should immediately realize that veal is obviously unacceptable, that cage-free eggs are certainly worth the extra dollar, and that animals need to be included in all sorts of public policy choices. As we’ll talk about later, in Chapter 11: Death, it also has some implications for our responsibilities to different kinds of humans, like fetuses and the brain dead.

The Childhood Hero

Make a short list of people you admired when you were growing up. Try to think of people who inspired you at different ages.

What about these people made them important to you?

How do you think your attachment to each of them influenced your development?

The Philosophy

Modern ethical theory concentrates on how to act, but the ancient Greeks were more concerned with who you should be—character rather than choices. We still think about this issue today, of course, and philosophers continue to think about these questions of character, most often by returning to Aristotle’s theory of virtues.

Having a virtuous character means that you have a habit and inclination to do virtuous things—being courageous, for example, means you’re likely to take the right action even when it’s dangerous to do so. How do you become virtuous? By making virtuous choices, and developing the habit of doing so. We become moderate in our eating, for example, by making healthy choices—eventually, the urge to stuff our faces recedes, and we become better people, less driven by our desires.

We can use reason to help develop good habits and virtuous character. The principle of “moderation in all things” helps us find courage between the extremes of cowardice and foolhardy impulse; healthy desires between the extremes of self-hating abstinence and being driven by gluttony or lust.

Very often, though, the path to virtue comes not by abstract reasoning, but through a moral exemplar—a role model that we admire, and seek to emulate. How much have the character traits you value in yourself been brought about by careful thought, and how much by emotional connections to people who represented those traits for you? Even when we become disillusioned about a role model, as we often do—perhaps this is part of what it is to become an adult—we owe much to the people we thought others were, and we seek to embody the virtues we thought we saw in them.

Care and the Limits of Justice

Imagine you’re judging a talent show for elementary school students, and your child is competing. Is there any reasonable way you could justify choosing your child as the winner, if you believe another child had put on a better performance?

Now imagine that a fire breaks out. There’s not enough time to get every child to safety. Are you justified in rescuing your child rather than another child who is nearer to you and whom you are more likely able to save? After all, that child has parents who love her too. Is your child more important than theirs?

What about buying your child a new toy, when the same money could be spent funding vaccinations that could save a child’s life in Africa? Is this form of favoritism moral?

The Philosophy

Modern ethical theories like Kantianism and Utilitarianism focus on justice and impartiality. While this focus leads us well in many ways and helps us explain why we believe what we believe about right and wrong, in some situations impartiality can seem immoral. Theories of morality that emphasize impartiality struggle to make sense of why we think it is not only acceptable, but moral and appropriate to show favoritism to those nearest and dearest to us.

A recent movement in ethical theory—the ethics of care—offers an alternate, corrective account of morality. Feminist theorists noted that the ethics of justice and impartiality were grounded in public life and policy choice—traditionally male domains—while ignoring the ethical realms of home and family—traditionally feminine aspects of the moral life. It is certainly a sign of how male dominated our society has been that ethical theorists did not view as a fatal flaw that the ethics of justice are contradicted by everyday life within domains associated more with women than men.

By setting up care as a fundamental moral category, we can begin to make sense of why we think partiality has a rightful place in a moral life. It’s not that women have “care” and men have ”justice”—men and women participate in both, of course. However, we have overemphasized justice and failed to appreciate care, just as we have overvalued the stereotypically male domains of work and government and undervalued the stereotypically female domains of friendship, hearth, and home. Working out the proper balance of justice and care, and in which situations one or the other ought to determine our actions, is not an easy matter, but it’s a good starting point to recognize that impartiality by itself is clearly not enough to stand alone as the basis for a moral life.

Christianity: A Morality of Weakness?

The Christian Bible teaches to love one’s enemies, that the meek shall inherit the earth, and that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Does this mean that Christianity teaches us to be complacent, subservient, and poor? If not, why not?

Do these teachings help us become better people, or easier to control—or both? Why? Give an example.

How can a Christian justify being wealthy or powerful?

The Philosophy

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that Christian morality is a reflection of the wretched and oppressed position of Jews and early Christians under Roman rule. He saw in it a “slave mentality” that was based in resentment. These oppressed peoples looked to their masters and saw that they held every benefit that was denied to the oppressed and enslaved. The masters had wealth, power, strength, health, vitality, conviction, and purpose. Unable to act on their hatred of the masters due to their weakness, they projected this resentment—too painful to hold on to while they were so impotent—onto the world itself through the idea of God’s judgment. It is as if they said, “I don’t hate you—I love you, my enemy. But God hates you, and will punish you for having everything good that I lack.”

The result, according to Nietzsche, is that Christianity, defined by its resentment of these natural goods, becomes a religion that preaches weakness and hatred toward the values of the world—so much so that Christian ascetics took to whipping themselves, living as hermits, and denying themselves the pleasures of food and drink. This, in Nietzsche’s view, is why Christianity preaches that we should deny the value of this world and view the pleasures of the body as evil; Christianity is based in the resentment of slaves toward their masters, and this slave mentality continued even after Christians came to dominate Europe.

Today, however, we might ask why so many American Christians seem to ignore these calls for humility, poverty, and service. One possible biblical justification for seeking wealth is “The Parable of the Talents,” which some Christians interpret to be literally about money rather than a parable about God’s gifts. But it seems strange to me to interpret this parable literally when most parables are interpreted metaphorically—especially considering that it is so much in conflict with so many other biblical teachings about wealth and worldly power.

Christianity and Standing for the Downtrodden

We recognize the value of “turning the other cheek” as it is usually understood: refusing to meet violence with violence. But does turning the other cheek mean that we (or at least that Christians) should allow oppression to continue? How can we reconcile the idea with resistance?

Choosing on your own to overlook offenses against you seems noble. But what about attacks against others? Is it noble to “turn the other cheek” when you see a wrong done to someone else? Why or why not?

What about actions or words against you that affect others indirectly? If you were a minority, (or if, in fact, you are one), would you turn the other cheek when someone insults you for your race? Would doing so be noble, or would you be failing to do your part in standing up to abuse and hatred that also harms your sisters and brothers?

The Philosophy

Walter Wink (1935–2012), a Christian theologian, gave a compelling but too-little-known account of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount that provides an understanding of these elements of Christian ethics in line with nonviolent resistance, and similar to the ideals and practices of Martin Luther King Jr., and the American Civil Rights movement.

If we understand the real-life meaning of the claims in the Sermon on the Mount in historical and cultural context, these questions can be resolved. Then as today, striking someone with the back of your hand expressed contempt and superiority. If you think about the physical act of turning your left cheek to someone who has struck you on the right, you can see that, if the Jews listening to Jesus did so when they were struck by a Roman, the Roman would be forced to either use his left hand—which was considered improper—or hit with a fist or open hand. Far from being submissive, turning the other cheek forces the Roman to attack the Jew as an equal instead of using the backhand, and makes a strong political claim of equality and worth without resorting to violence or retaliation.

Jesus also advised to “give the shirt off your back” in a time when being naked in public was shameful. Debt holders were legally allowed to demand cloaks from those unable to pay. By advising Jews to give their shirts as well, Wink claimed, Jesus showed how the Jews could demonstrate that they had been insulted and oppressed by purposefully debasing themselves. In the same way, people in occupied territories could be forced by Romans to carry their packs for a mile—but only a mile. By “walking an extra mile,” as Jesus advised, Jews could take control of the situation, and through overcompliance, implicate the soldier in breaking the law!

In this understanding, Jesus didn’t teach passivity at all, but passive resistance. What has been interpreted as a moral teaching of weakness was really a political teaching about insisting on equality and standing against injustice.