Ethics in five minutes
Sketching the territory
Recently I have been chatting to young people. They did not even shy away, in part, because they asked me about ethics. It is excellent that ethics is included in all kinds of courses at the secondary and tertiary level, as this is a field we need to be understood, but unfortunately in many cases it looks like ethics is not what is being actually taught, so much as an equally virtuous topic, situational awareness and decision making.
This is a common issue when teacher attempt to teach a subject they do not know all that well, and they are not to be criticised (ask me about critical reasoning sometime), but I gave a five minute presentation of what ethics is to one of my victims young persons, and I thought that it might be useful for others.
Now, I'm not a ethicist per se, but I did do two years of it as an undergraduate under some very good teachers, and so far as I can tell, although the field has been extended since then, it has not substantially changed in the fundamental issues. So I will have at it, and those better qualified and educated than I am can correct me in the comments.
First, ethics is not morality. Although it used to be called moral philosophy, always remember that philosophy is one step up from the content it investigates. Ethics is thinking about morals, what makes them moral, what is the basis for good and bad, and how to apply that in actual cases. Most "professional ethics" is simply a list of rules that are usually conventions, and most of its teaching is by case studies. This is backwards. The rules and deeper issues are ethics. What the "industry standards" usually are, in IT for example, are moralisms. Ethics is about what makes them moral.
Secondly, ethics is a tradition. People sometimes get annoyed at the fact that they have to read Plato, Aristotle or some other old and very Western source. But this is the price one pays for entering a tradition, as any student of religion, literature, architecture, or art can tell you. But, and this is important, that is the academic or formal side of ethics. One can understand issues (not all of them) without knowing the canon.
Thirdly, ethics is a conversation, like all philosophy. Despite technical terms like "dialectic", "eudaimonia" and "the Good" (my personal stumbling block at first), ethics is talking about what to do and why, which we all do everyday. Everyone is a philosopher; not everyone is a good philosopher. This means we argue (without, nearly all the time, the raised voices and thumped tables: that's law). People are trying to establish, or debunk, positions for reasons, not emotions.
With these clarifications, let's talk about the main approaches to ethics. There are, in the abstract, three (but many more if you cut them up more finely):
1\. The rightness or wrongness of a decision is based upon the consequences it has, or can be expected to have. This is usually named Consequentialism (-isms are supposed to be ideologies or broad philosophical takes).
2\. The moral choices we have are set by real rules or values, or in older terms, virtues, and so this is called Virtue ethics. It goes back a very long way.
3\. Moralities are socially invented and taught. This is called various things, but I will use the term Relativism, which is what it became called a century and a half ago.
The discipline of ethics is usually divided into four:
- Metaethics (the study of ethical systems and how ethics works)
- Prescriptive ethics (ethical systems that prescribe what is or isn't good to do)
- Descriptive ethics (the study of what ethics different groups have)
- Practical ethics (applied ethics, such as professional ethics, or medical ethics, etc.)
So, a particular ethical question might be dealt with in a prescriptive, realist and consequentialist fashion, or it might be relativist, descriptive virtue ethics, and so on. However, consequentialisms and virtue ethics tend to be realists about values, and prescriptive. Relativisms tend to be "antirealists", and can be either prescriptive (if you are a member of the right group), or descriptive (if you are an anthropologist, for example).
Now, there are many "ethical systems" about. Aristotle had one based on human nature and "flourishing". A later system is Utilitarianism (greatest good or least harm for the greatest number), which is fairly common these days. There are also systems based on politics, biology, religion, and so forth.
Some sources:
Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin Philosophy. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
This is the book I used when I was doing my masters. Mackie is a clear writer, and takes a relativist position, known these days as "error theory" or the claim that we make a mistake when we think that values are facts of nature.
Blackburn, Simon. Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Blackburn is a first class philosopher and a good writer, and this is indeed a very short introduction.
Smart, Jack J. C., and Bernard Williams. Utilitarianism for and Against. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Smart, a utilitarian, and Williams, who was not (and was a critic of philosophical systems in general) go at it in this classic. You should be able to find copies relatively cheaply second hand.