pdf
keyboard_arrow_up
School
University of Illinois, Chicago *
*We aren’t endorsed by this school
Course
111
Subject
Philosophy
Date
Oct 30, 2023
Type
Pages
87
Uploaded by LieutenantMantisMaster676
CHAPTER
2
E
THICAL
F
RAMEWORKS
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to
:
1.
Explain why multiple frameworks have developed for understanding the
world instead of one unified theory
.
2. Describe the key points of ethical frameworks including deontology,
utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and communitarianism
.
3.
Contrast the traditions described within each of the four frameworks and
articulate how these different developments within the frameworks
enable a wider breadth of application
.
4. Use the contemporary frameworks of responsibility ethics, feminist
ethics, and the capabilities approach to critique the classical
frameworks
.
5. Formulate the key ethical tensions within a story by drawing on the
conceptual resources of the ethical frameworks
.
2.1
INTRODUCTION
What does it mean to “do ethics”?
On a surface level, it’s easy: ethics is figuring out how to live well.
But what does that mean? In trying to assess something another person has
done or something that you might do, what is most important? Is it the
intention behind an action or the consequences that come from that action?
Is it necessary to know something about the character of a person before we
can determine whether or not that person has acted morally? Is it important
also to consider a person’s religious commitments? What about societal
laws and our responsibilities as citizens?
It is widely believed that ethics is only about decision making. But
ethics also involves evaluation and description, and there are better and
worse ways to do that. This chapter provides you with many different
resources and processes for ethical reasoning. It is meant to broaden your
ideas about what counts as ethics. By taking the time to learn about and
think with various frameworks for “doing ethics,” you will discover that the
work of ethics begins long before you answer a question and even before
you ask the question: it begins when you start to describe the world in
which the question arises.
How do you identify an ethical problem? What language should be
used to describe that problem? What, if anything, are we solving when we
address an ethical conundrum? Are we trying to determine whether an
action is forbidden or permitted? Or are we looking for principles so that we
can determine how to act in the future? Perhaps all of these things; perhaps
none of them.
In this chapter, you will become acquainted with several ethical
frameworks. We use the language of “frameworks” rather than “theories”
(which you are likely to encounter in other contexts) for a few different
reasons. First, the word “theory” may seem to be detached from “real life”
or from “practice.” Whereas some ethical theories are intentionally abstract,
they are intelligible only as far as they relate to actual experience.
Second, the theories that we do discuss in this chapter are the product
of ongoing conversations about the good life, about what kinds of actions
are permitted and which are not, and about how we justify our actions.
“Framework” is a broader term. It captures the way a particular ethical lens
is grounded by particular ideas about how to live, act, see, respond, and
describe.
Each framework described in this chapter begins from different ideas
about what is most important when it comes to ethics. Although there is
some overlap, each framework has a different way of conceiving what it
means to be ethical and uses different vocabulary to describe and evaluate
ethical problems. Each will, therefore, yield different answers to questions
like the ones above. By becoming familiar with these various frameworks,
you will gain a broader perspective on the ethical challenges that you will
encounter in your profession and a wider range of strategies for addressing
them.
Within each framework we identify at least two different traditions.
Some of these frameworks correspond to well-known ethical theories, as
they are often packaged up for easy digestion. If you do your ethics
research on the internet, you can find many resources that will tell you that
there is one simple formula for being a deontologist and another one for
being a utilitarian. But it is important to remember that these theories do not
exist out of time; they have a history. They were categorized as theories
merely as a way to organize ideas and to indicate certain patterns found
within different intellectual traditions and communities. (We return to this
point again below: see section 2.1.2.) They were labeled this way only after
long conversations over time about what ethics are, how to evaluate values,
and what it means to live a good life. Simplistic formulas aren’t just a
misrepresentation of a long and complex history; they also fail to capture
why those conversations happened, and why they were so complex.
Ethics as a subject of study and mode of analysis goes beyond the
academic field of philosophy. Especially in recent years, historians,
psychologists, anthropologists, and even neurobiologists have made ethics a
focus of research. Ethical theories can help us identify, describe, and
analyze those perennial problems in ethics that we identified in the last
chapter. Some ethical theories attempt to clarify and define principles in
such a way that they can seem rather abstract, almost like formal logic. But
most ethical theories draw upon a range of ideas and arguments, while also
striving for coherency and consistency.
When it comes to “doing ethics,” you as an individual do not have to
start from scratch. We all are capable of analyzing a situation and
discussing which aspects of that situation matter the most and using our
imagination to think about how we might act or what we might think if we
found ourselves in a similar situation. In this way we are all already “doing
ethics,” insofar as we make choices and live our lives (or try to) as we think
we should. The various frameworks presented here will likely feel familiar
or intuitive to you, at least in parts. In addition to supplying you with new
approaches and perspectives, learning about ethical frameworks can help
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
you become clearer or more consistent in the kinds of ethical reflection that
you were already doing.
2.1.1
M
ULTIPLE
F
RAMEWORKS
The frameworks discussed at length in this chapter are deontology
, virtue
ethics
, communitarianism
, and utilitarianism
. In addition, we offer a fifth
section that briefly describes several contemporary developments in ethics.
Each of these contemporary developments builds on some aspects of the
prior four frameworks, while rejecting or revising other aspects.
Each of the four frameworks offers a different orientation toward the
task of ethics. Stated briefly, deontology emphasizes moral obligation and
prescribes or describes moral principles that govern action. Virtue ethics
centers on human character as the locus of moral activity and pays special
attention to how we develop and exercise good qualities.
Communitarianism focuses on the interdependent nature of human life and
examines how that interdependence shapes our possibilities for well-being
and self-realization. Utilitarianism prioritizes the greatest happiness for the
greatest number of people and therefore focuses on the outcomes of actions.
The thing that none of these frameworks offers is a single specific
answer to any given problem. What unifies a given framework is not the
answers it gives but rather are the terms on which disagreements take place
and the kinds of methods and criteria that matter. Learning about a
framework does not mean that you will be able to identify “the
communitarian point of view” on a given situation or to determine that a
certain kind of action is “good according to virtue ethics,” simply because
these kinds of unified positions do not exist
. You will, however, be able to
recognize a utilitarian (or deontological, or other framework-based)
argument by paying attention to the methods and criteria that shape how
that argument is being made.
To underscore the breadth and variety of each framework and
acquaint you with how they operate in practice, we include a brief
discussion of two or more traditions
within each framework. The traditions
within a given framework share many of the same basic assumptions and
ideas with each other, but they interpret core principles differently or take
different approaches to applying the methods of that framework. Learning
about and comparing these traditions should help clarify that there is no set
of authoritative teachings that must be maintained in order to claim a given
framework or to understand its logic.
Under each framework you will also find a section called “Modalities
for Judgment.” These sections describe the patterns of thought and methods
that characterize each framework. Ethical theories—and more broadly,
ethical frameworks—operate with the presupposition that human life is
complicated and that conflicts will be inevitable. In order to reconcile that
complicated reality with their ideas about how to live well, people have
reflected on and developed principles and conceptual tools for negotiating
between conflicting interests and obligations. These are the modalities of
judgment. We use the term “modality” to indicate that all ethical
frameworks provide an orientation for determining which kinds of actions
are ethical and which are not. A strong ethical framework is one that is
flexible enough to address a wide range of ethical problems and can be
mobilized in a variety of contexts.
It is important to see that the process of describing and reasoning
through
ethical problems can and should be distinguished from the
conclusions
that you reach. Just as a single ethical framework can admit
many different and even conflicting judgments about the same problem, it is
possible for two different frameworks to come to the same conclusion about
what should be done. Similarly, two people using two different ethical
frameworks might arrive at similar conclusions. These modalities for
judgment are not explicit formulas or algorithms. We invite you to see them
instead as lenses to evaluate the challenging problems that come with
developments in technology.
Each ethical framework rests on certain metaphysical
presuppositions, some of which we will identify and discuss below. Briefly
speaking, metaphysics refers to our understanding of how the world works
and the nature of reality, including what human beings are and are for. Even
(or perhaps especially) when we are not aware of them, our metaphysical
commitments shape the way we understand and approach ethics. Some of
the frameworks and traditions in this chapter are grounded in metaphysical
beliefs that may be unfamiliar to you. In order to make those frameworks
and traditions easier to understand on their own terms, we have supplied
some information about their metaphysical backgrounds.
Finally, we have chosen these particular frameworks because of their
explanatory power, which is to say that they have the ability to capture a
wide range of human actions and visions for the moral life. But in the end,
no single moral framework can account for every kind of action or way of
life, even if it seeks to do so. Each has been criticized over the years for
missing some crucial element of ethical understanding and decision
making. Each also takes certain things for granted and makes certain
limiting assumptions about human life, even though it may purport to be
universal (Oyěwùmí 1997). It is through comparing and contrasting these
different perspectives that we begin to see the strengths and weaknesses of
each approach and gain a clearer picture of when and how they can be
helpful to us.
2.1.2
L
IMITED
F
RAMES
The descriptions of ethical frameworks below are not meant to be
exhaustive. While we both provide some context and history as well as
identify main traditions within each framework, we cannot do full justice to
the centuries of development, dialogue, and debate that has shaped these
frameworks. The goal is to present some of the most important features of
these frameworks so that you can think within them or at least with them.
Just as our treatment of these particular frameworks is limited, so too
is our list of frameworks. We aim in this chapter to correct for the
exclusively western focus of most ethics curricula today and to familiarize
you with some recent developments in ethics that are particularly valuable
for thinking about technology. Nonetheless, much of this textbook remains
grounded in Anglo-American ethics, reflecting the biases of the academic
discipline of ethics.
Additionally, we have largely bypassed talking about ethics from a
specifically religious perspective. For many, the moral life is inseparable
from religious beliefs and practices. Although we acknowledge throughout
the religious grounding and teachings that inspire some of the traditions we
discuss in this chapter, we have not made much space to unpack or analyze
the religious concerns and ideas that underlie specific patterns and
judgments.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
It is also important to note that the frameworks and traditions that we
discuss in this chapter still generate debate. This is in part why we introduce
at least two different traditions within each of the frameworks. In reality,
there are many traditions within each of these frameworks—more than we
can include here—but having at least a few helps illuminate the different
ways that the core concepts and mechanics of the framework can operate in
practice. We include some pointers for additional reading in each of the
sections for those who are interested.
2.1.3
H
OW TO
R
EAD
T
HIS
C
HAPTER
As you learn about these different approaches to ethics, you will likely
discover similarities to your own existing beliefs, feelings, or habits of
thought. You will also probably encounter approaches that are difficult to
understand or maybe even offensive insofar as they conflict with your own
values. Sometimes it is in learning what we disagree with that we get
clearer insight into what we really value. And sometimes we find that what
we value is not the same as what others value (Clarke 2010). That’s OK,
too. It is entirely possible to learn about an ethical system without adopting
it as your own philosophy!
We encourage you to learn about these less intuitive approaches to
ethics in the same way that you would learn a programming language or
other specific skill that does not appeal to you: as an architecture of
reasoning that is useful and appealing to others and that therefore helps to
explain/interpret some things that you may encounter. Each of these
frameworks can offer you resources for your own perception and reasoning
even if you don’t embrace them completely. It can also help you understand
the reasoning of others, which is useful when you want to persuade them or
understand why they have reached different conclusions from yours.
As mentioned in chapter 1, this book is not a guide or manual for how
to do ethics. This point is worth repeating because the very notion that we
can apply ethical theories to concrete situations is contestable (see
MacIntyre 2013). The practical work of ethics is not about applying the
rules of morality to social, corporate, or institutionalized subject matter in
order to yield specific results. Nor is ethical thinking solely or even
primarily about applying self-interpreting rules and laws to concrete
situations in life. Even within deontology—an ethical framework that is
known to emphasize laws and rules—things are never this easy. Human life
is much more complex, and the task of ethics is for each of us to live the
best life that we can. That task is complicated and challenging enough that
most people decide, after some reflection, that they will take all the help
they can get.
2.2
DEONTOLOGY
Deontology
as an approach to ethics is best characterized by its focus on
duties
, rights
, and moral obligations
. Its two main presuppositions are that
ethical evaluation primarily concerns the rightness or wrongness of actions
and that ethical reasoning should help determine what we ought to do.
2.2.1
O
VERVIEW OF
D
EONTOLOGY
The word “deontology” comes from the Greek word deon
, meaning duty,
obligation, or “that which is binding,” and -ology
, indicating a particular
branch of knowledge. Deontology has existed in various forms. One of the
most famous is associated with the eighteenth-century German philosopher
Immanuel Kant. Kant’s moral philosophy has been so influential that people
sometimes refer to “Kantianism” as though it is its own ethical theory,
similar to—although distinct from—deontology. Below we discuss
Kantianism as an important development of an older tradition in which
moral principles are said to be obtainable through human reason.
Despite its many variations, deontology does have some defining
characteristics. Most notably, deontology emphasizes the rightness or
wrongness of an action by reference to certain action-guiding principles.
Depending on the context, these principles can be described as laws, rules,
maxims, imperatives, or commands. Whatever the terms used, these
principles are said to place certain constraints on human action. These
constraints apply—or at the very least must be seriously considered—even
in situations in which the consequences of an action are understood to be
desirable or good.
Because deontology bears a minor resemblance to the simplistic,
black-and-white thinking that many people associate with ethics, this
complex and nuanced framework is frequently misunderstood in three
specific ways. The first misunderstanding is that deontology is simple: you
figure out what the law is, and then you do what it tells you to do or avoid
doing what it does not permit you to do. For many people, this is what
ethics is all about: adhering to basic rules and laws. But the demands of
duty are complex, and balancing those many demands requires careful
reflection, not just blind adherence.
The second misunderstanding is that because it is difficult to honor
one’s many duties at the same time, you can therefore pick and choose
which laws to follow as a matter of individual choice or preference (or
perhaps a matter of avoiding the least desirable punishments). But simply
acting on preferences and regarding those preferences as if they are binding
laws is not an accurate description of deontology. In fact, this kind of
picking and choosing has more in common with moral relativism than it
does with any of the ethical frameworks that we discuss in this chapter. A
moral relativist is someone who believes that all moral judgments are based
on individual viewpoints and that no one viewpoint ought to be privileged
above any other—save that person’s own, because most moral relativists are
critical of anyone who disagrees with their position on the matter (Midgley
1991).
The third misunderstanding is that because deontology considers
intention to be important, it therefore does not consider consequences to be
important at all. The problem with this description of deontology is that it
presents only a partial picture. It may help us understand the points of
emphasis within a deontological framework, but it is a characterization that
obscures deontology’s many specificities and variations. Most forms of
deontology acknowledge the ethical significance of the consequences and
context of moral actions and choices (Rawls 1999, especially p. 26), even
though they emphasize principles, laws, rules, and obligations that guide
human action and decision making. Where these duties and moral
obligations come from, and how they relate to each other, depend on the
form or style of the deontology in question.
Unlike the simplistic and piecemeal approaches described above,
deontology offers an approach to ethics that is morally practicable without
abandoning the seriousness of moral laws. Deontology presumes that moral
obligations are a real part of human life and cannot be dispensed with
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
because they are inconvenient, even while it recognizes that honoring all of
one’s moral obligations is rarely a straightforward task. For a deontologist,
the task of ethics is not to choose
which obligations to follow but rather to
consider all one’s moral obligations in order to determine how to live and to
act in light of all of them, especially in situations that put (or seem to put)
these obligations in tension with one another.
Although deontology requires us to take account of all of the rules,
laws, and duties that bind us, this does not mean that deontologists consider
every single rule, law, or duty to be equally binding. For instance, both
jaywalking and manslaughter are against the law in the United States, but
very few people would be willing to argue that these two laws are equally
meaningful or significant. However, most of the time the distinctions are
more subtle, and even in situations in which people have acknowledged that
a particular code of laws has legitimacy, it is not always easy to figure out
what those laws and duties require of us at any given moment. Deontology
does not demand that we follow the law regardless of circumstances—that
wouldn’t make any sense, because nothing in our lives ever happens apart
from specific circumstances. Rather, the task of deontology is to understand
how best to honor one’s duties within those circumstances.
The laws proscribed and enforced by the government are one kind of
rule, but of course they are not the only kind. Some rules or duties may be
particular to a community, such as religious dietary laws, and others may
apply only to a subgroup within a community, such as doctors’ obligation to
provide medical care in moments of need. (For more on profession-specific
obligations—specifically those for programmers and technology developers
—see chapter 6.) Different communities may have different ideas about
which parts of human life must be guided by these rules and which parts are
free of moral obligation.
It should come as no surprise that much of our lives is governed by
rules, laws, and principles of actions. Many human actions and behaviors
are explainable as following rules or laws, often without giving them much
thought, such as walking on sidewalks instead of in the street or going to
the end of the line at your favorite hot dog stand. There are also various
rules of etiquette that we acknowledge, follow, and sometimes knowingly
break, though for most deontologists these more day-to-day kinds of rules
are not necessarily morally significant. Although it is easy to presuppose
that rules and laws are burdens, especially in cultures in which freedom is
highly valued, these less-significant rules make many aspects of our shared
lives easier to negotiate and harmonize. Rules can even provide
satisfactions of their own: after all, rules are what makes it possible to play
many kinds of games and sports together.
A law, rule or duty will matter only if it is rooted in an authority that
is recognized as legitimate. Not all deontologists recognize the same
authorities, or even the same kinds of authority. Often, deontologists will
specifically reject a law they take to be illegitimate—such as a state law that
prohibits carrying weapons or criminalizes political protest—precisely
because another system or authority they take to be more legitimate points
them in a different direction. Also, deontologists can share a commitment to
a particular law or duty, such as respecting the property of others or a
prohibition against murder, but have different explanations for what makes
that duty authoritative.
2.2.2
D
EONTIC
F
ORMS OF
A
UTHORITY AND
T
RADITIONS
In order to highlight the variation within deontology as a framework for
thinking about ethics, below we introduce three different traditions that are
deontological in their orientation. Each of them appeals to a particular kind
of authority to justify and legitimate moral obligations and duties. The first
tradition appeals to a “social contract,” and therefore the authority of the
law is grounded in a political claim about what it means to live together in a
society under reasonable principles that can be applied to all. The next
tradition grounds the authority of moral obligations and constraints on the
existence of a god or gods, to whom duty is owed and who determine
human beings’ duties to others. Finally, we consider a tradition of
deontology that insists that the basic principles of morality are to be derived
from human reason. The feature that unifies all three of these traditions and
warrants, describing them as deontological, is not a particular authority,
duty, or even rule-governed action but is rather the belief that there is a
difference between right and wrong and that this difference is supported by
an authoritative claim about how we ought to act toward others and, in
some cases, toward ourselves.
It is important to note that these traditions are not mutually exclusive.
Thus, there is nothing preventing a deontologist from arguing that moral
obligations can be grounded by all three forms of authority discussed in the
following sections. These traditions were selected because in many ways
they are defined by which authority they deem most important with regard
to morally binding principles and norms.
Political Authority
Political authority comes from an organized human society. There are many
forms of political authority, which vary with political systems. Authority is
distinct from power, which in this context means the ability to materially
enforce rules and punishment, irrespective of legitimacy. Most political
systems and leaders claim to operate from a position of legitimate authority,
serving the interests of the people, even if in practice they operate from a
position of power.
An example of a deontological tradition grounded in political
authority is contractarianism. Contractarianism begins from the
presupposition that human beings are primarily, if not solely, driven by self-
interest, and therefore the best strategy for deciding which institutions,
principles, and social rules can legitimately place constraints on our
otherwise selfish actions is first to find the ones on which all would agree.
Hence, the need for a contract. In other words, ethical principles and norms
require us to sometimes act in ways that we would prefer not to act but are
justified on the grounds that it is better to cooperate than to be constantly at
odds with each other. Agreement among individuals has normative
importance. Contractarianism grew out of an older tradition known as social
contract theory, which dates to Thomas Hobbes in the early seventeenth
century (Cudd and Eftekhari 2018). Hobbes insisted that humans are driven
solely by their own self-interest but because they are too fragile and weak to
live on their own, it is necessary to be part of a society in which individuals
sacrifice some of their freedom and agree to be governed by a sovereign
authority in which disputes and self-interest can be mitigated appropriately
(Hobbes [1668] 1992). Although starting from the same basic premise—
that human beings are primarily driven by their own self-interest—
contractarianism, as it has been more recently formulated, focuses less on
the giving up of rights and powers to a government authority and more on
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
what “reasonable” people would decide and execute judgment under
democratic rule.
Divine Authority
Divine authority is authority from God or gods. If a set of laws is
understood to have been given or revealed by a divine figure, then those
laws gain their legitimacy from the existence and power of that God or
gods. Different religious traditions have different ideas about how humans
gain knowledge of these laws. In some traditions, these laws are said to be
contained in holy books or sacred writings. In other cases, divine law is
considered to be received through prophecy or through authoritative
leaders. The ethical weight of an action might also be interpreted as gaining
its authority from a God or gods without necessarily using the language of
law.
Divine command theory
is one form of deontology that derives its
authority from God. Broadly speaking, divine command theory holds that
moral obligations consist of obedience to God. Under divine command
theory, an action is obligatory because God or the gods command it and it is
impermissible if God or gods forbid it. If that action is neither obligatory
nor forbidden, it is considered to be a permissible action (Quinn 2006).
Although the notion of god-given laws is conceptually
straightforward, there is an interesting philosophical problem at their core:
did god(s) give this law because it is right, or is the law right because it
comes from god(s)? This is sometimes referred to as the Euthyphro
problem, referring to a dialogue written by Plato in which Socrates asks, “Is
the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is
loved by the gods? ” (Plato, Euthyphro
10a1–3). Most divine command
traditions do not have a settled answer to this question, and it is a topic of
ongoing philosophical and religious debate.
Sidebar: Obligations and Prohibitions
Deontology includes both obligations and prohibitions. Obligations
(sometimes called “positive laws”) are things that you should do and
that require active effort on the part of the agent. By contrast,
prohibitions (sometimes called “negative laws”) forbid certain kinds of
actions: they are obeyed not by undertaking a specific action, but by
refraining from acting in a way that has been described as wrong.
Both obligations and prohibitions can be found in the Ten
Commandments, which is one of the most well-known sets of laws
based on divine authority. In the story recounted in the five books of
Moses, which are sacred text for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the
Ten Commandments are given to God by Moses. There are versions in
Exodus and Deuteronomy that are similar but not identical, and some of
the same laws are also repeated in Leviticus. In fact, the “canonical”
sets differ somewhat among the three religions and among the different
translations.
Obligations and prohibitions might seem like opposites in the
abstract, but in practice there is a great deal of overlap. Consider these
two laws, both of which appear in both versions of the Ten
Commandments:
4)
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
6)
Thou shalt not murder. (Exodus 20:3–4 KJV)
The first of these laws is clearly an obligation, and the second one
is clearly a prohibition. But on closer inspection, the obligations can be
seen to have some prohibitions built in, and the prohibition might well
require some specific positive actions.
Honoring the Sabbath is an obligation. Fulfilling this obligation is
not something that just happens on its own; a Jew, Christian, or Muslim
who is following this law has to do specific things in order to make it
happen. But those specific things include actively avoiding some
activities that one does on ordinary days, as part of a larger obligation to
become more aware of the sacredness of life.
The second law, forbidding murder, is a prohibition. Much of the
time, it can be followed simply by avoiding the forbidden action. But
for someone who finds themself in a position to kill another person, it
might require active effort to refrain, especially if they are very angry or
otherwise motivated to kill that person. In a situation like that—when,
arguably, the prohibition against killing matters the most—abiding by
that prohibition is likely to require some active, positive effort and not
just passive avoidance.
The Authority of Human Reason
The notion that human beings have an inherent moral compass that allows
them to discern the difference between right and wrong is an ancient idea
that became especially popular during the European intellectual movement
known as the Enlightenment (more on this below). Over the centuries,
theologians and philosophers have linked this belief in the human’s inherent
capacity to judge between right and wrong to religious dispositions and
creation stories. In the book of Genesis, for example, the first humans are
said to know the difference between right and wrong. Thomas Aquinas, a
Christian philosopher and theologian, argued that the very first principle of
practical reasoning (i.e., ethical reflection on human action) is quite simple:
avoid evil and do the good (Aquinas Summa Theologica
I–II, 94, 2; see
Aquinas 1948). Aquinas insisted that all human beings know this basic
principle and therefore can discern the difference between right and wrong.
While Aquinas appealed to a divine authority to support this claim, he also
linked this capacity to the human’s ability to grasp the laws that govern and
order the universe (i.e., natural laws).
Natural law theory as a tradition has also been articulated in less
religious and metaphysical terms. As one theorist explains:
Natural law theory accepts that law can be considered and spoken of
both
as a sheer social fact of power and practice, and
as a set of reasons
for action that can be and often are sound as reasons and therefore
normative for reasonable people addressed by them. This dual character
of positive law is presupposed by the well-known slogan “Unjust laws
are not laws.” (Finnis 2020)
Natural law theorists do not hold that ethics is simply a matter of
sensing
the difference between right and wrong, nor do they claim that
deciding what to do in particular situations is easy. In fact, most natural law
theorists are careful to point out that acting morally is very difficult and that
it requires a certain amount of sacrifice. Even more, they tend to emphasize
that even in those cases in which we know what the right choice is, we
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
often fail to act in ways that are right and just. For someone with the
outlook of Aquinas, this shows that natural reason needs to be
supplemented and guided by religious texts and teaching. For secular
theorists, this means that discerning what is right and wrong is never a
private enterprise but must be worked out in a social context in which
people deliberate about the ends that are worth pursuing.
2.2.3
K
ANTIAN
D
EONTOLOGY
The notion that the universe is ordered by laws that can be apprehended by
human reason was an especially popular belief in the eighteenth century,
when Immanuel Kant was developing his philosophy. Kant’s moral
philosophy is similar to Aquinas’s in that Kant believed that human beings
are able to discern the difference between right and wrong. However, Kant
was also writing at a time when people were becoming increasingly critical
of claims that depended on religious authority, whether in the context of
politics, of science, or of morality. And therefore Kant, as many other
enlightenment thinkers, rejected the idea that any code of law handed down
in a religious tradition or promulgated by the state can successfully address
the full breadth and complexity of right and wrong.
Kant acknowledged that external laws often aligned with the moral
law in basic ways and that many (or even most) people require such
externally given laws to remind them of their fundamental duties to others.
He also believed that external laws can be valuable both as constraints on
our behavior and as guidelines for our moral understanding. However, Kant
insisted that human reason is the most important guide to making moral
choices. Because Kant remains one of the most influential figures in moral
philosophy and because he is frequently described as a deontologist, it is
worth explaining his approach to ethics in a little more detail.
Kant’s version of deontology is uniquely universalist in scope. It
starts from the assumption that all human beings are free and rational and
that they are familiar with both the experience of being moved by desire
and the experience of being moved by the feeling of duty or moral
obligation. In response to this baseline assumption, Kant offers an account
of what must necessarily be true in order for us to make sense of this
universal experience of moral duty. He understood himself to be offering a
“metaphysics of morals,” in which he aimed to articulate the universal
pattern of reasoning behind a moral judgment (Kant 1996).
According to Kant, the unity and intelligibility of the moral law is
something all rational beings can grasp. The moral law therefore must be
perfect, and perfectly consistent, in a manner similar to the order of nature.
This means in practice that whereas all our particular duties to individuals,
coworkers, family, and friends are important, they are conditional and
therefore cannot describe the basic sense of duty that applies in every
circumstance. For Kant, only those actions that are unconditional have
moral value. So what kind of actions are these?
For Kant, an action performed in accordance with a law or set of laws
does not necessarily mean that action has moral worth. Kant strongly
believed that people should learn to think for themselves and never blindly
follow any one law or set of laws. And even when following an external
law is in order, that does not necessarily endow it with moral worth. In
order for an action to have moral worth, it must be an action that you, the
agent, recognize as right. But just as importantly, it must be binding for all
rational agents. Otherwise it would be, again, conditional. Only actions that
meet both of these criteria have moral worth. According to Kant, our
capacity to act on such a law is the only indication that we are truly free
agents. Contrary to popular opinion, freedom is not about acting on
whatever desires and impulses one might have in a particular moment, nor
is it following a rule to avoid punishment or condemnation. True freedom,
Kant maintained, is the freedom to act according to a law that you can both
apply to yourself and universally legislate for all. A law such as this is what
Kant calls a categorical imperative, by which he means a law that is
unconditionally and universally valid. His first formulation of this law is as
follows:
Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the
same time will that it become a universal law
. (Kant 1996, 73)
Let’s consider what this means in more general terms. Kant’s
understanding of morality requires us to evaluate an action using criteria
identified by internal reasoning processes, rather than criteria drawn from
outside legal codes and cultural norms. Before acting, a moral agent must
always ask herself: “If I act in such a way, is this something I can legislate
for myself and all other rational agents? Is it something I can continue to
follow and expect others to do the same? ” Lying is a classic example of an
action that might seem justifiable in a particular instance but cannot be
justified as a general practice. If you tell a lie, can you honestly and
consistently legislate that action? Can you coherently argue that it makes
sense, morally speaking, for everyone to be able to lie whenever it is
convenient for them? If not, then clearly lying is unethical, and therefore, a
person shouldn’t lie under any circumstances.
Kant’s categorical imperative, as he formulates it initially, is
intentionally abstract. It is meant to capture something very basic about the
experience of moral obligation. But he also offers a formulation that speaks
more to how we are to treat others. His second formulation of the
categorical imperative reads:
Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person
of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a
means
. (Kant 1996, 80)
This second formulation of the categorical imperative is derived from an
additional claim that because the human being is a rational creature and
therefore are capable of acting freely, all human beings should be treated
with respect and dignity. Whenever we treat another person merely as a
means to achieve some particular end, we are not only disrespecting that
person: we are disrespecting all humanity, including ourselves.
2.2.4
P
RINCIPLES IN
P
RACTICE
It might seem at first that all deontologists—or at least those who
acknowledge the same authority behind moral principles or laws—would
agree with one another about what the right action is in any given situation.
But in practice, those who approach ethics from within a deontological
framework—yes, even Kantians—disagree all the time. Although they may
share the same general idea about the status of “the law” as the source of
ethics and the only guide to ethical action, disagreement often arises around
the meaning of that particular law and/or how it should be applied.
Furthermore, most people recognize more than one system of law, even if
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
they think that one (or more) of those systems is more important or that one
system or code of law is limited in some way. This introduces a difficult
question: what is the right way to resolve an issue when different laws seem
to prescribe conflicting solutions? When a person is duty-bound by more
than one set of laws—for example, religious laws and laws of the state—
how do they decide how to navigate conflicts between them or decide when
one should take precedence over the other? What kinds of punishments are
warranted by different kinds of violations? These are difficult questions to
answer, but rather than providing decisive answers, most deontological
traditions instead offer additional guidelines, suggestions, and even rules
about how to proceed when conflicts and tensions arise.
2.2.5
M
ODALITIES FOR
J
UDGMENT
It is rarely possible to satisfy every single duty, or to satisfy them equally
well, because circumstances often create tensions between our various
duties. This is largely because regardless of their authority, deontology
grounds its rules and laws in relationships. When our duties to different
people pull us in different directions, or when a given duty relationship is
multidimensional (such as a parent’s relationship to their child or a person’s
relationship to their spouse), it is sometimes impossible to honor every duty,
or every dimension of one’s duty. When these conflicts of duty arise—as
they inevitably do—a moral agent is forced to make judgments about which
duties should be prioritized over the others. For deontologists, these priority
judgments cannot simply be a matter of personal preference—after all, the
whole point of a duty is that it’s binding, even when it’s inconvenient or
unpleasant.
When balancing competing duties, a deontologist must consider the
following two concerns.
How Fundamental Is It?
Which duty is most fundamental
? Of the many duties competing for your
attention and action, which ones are the most important to who you are and
your role in the world? In a situation that compels a person to choose
between protecting a stranger and protecting their child, nearly every
deontologist would argue that it’s right and appropriate to protect the child,
not because the agent has no duties at all to the stranger but because parents
have particular duties toward their children.
But this determination might be more complicated if the agent is an
expert or professional (such as a doctor or a firefighter) who is trained to
respond to the crisis at hand, because many such experts and professionals
believe that their expertise imposes a specific obligation to use their skills
and training to help others when possible, or have even signed onto a
professional code that requires them to do so. Even if that parent still
protects their child instead of the stranger, they may feel more keenly that
they have failed in their duty to the other person.
How Relevant Is It?
Which duty is most relevant
to the situation in question? When you are
making a decision about a specific situation, it is often the case that some of
your many duties are more pressing than others because of the particular
circumstances. Imagine a soldier in a combat situation whose platoon-mate
is injured in pursuit of the enemy. Should this soldier stop and assist her
injured comrade, or complete the mission and kill the enemy? Both of these
duties are important, but which is more relevant? The answer will depend
on a number of very specific factors: how badly injured is her comrade? Is
anyone else available to help him? How likely is it that there will be another
chance to kill this enemy?
It is worth remembering that for a civilian who is not bound to fight
the enemy (and might even carry a strong prohibition against killing other
people), this tension would be very different. Both soldier and civilian have
a duty to help another person who is injured and in need, but the soldier has
other duties that the civilian does not, and those duties might be more
relevant than helping the wounded.
These two criteria enable a deontologist to balance the basic
obligations that shape their life (the fundamental) against the particular
demands of specific circumstances (the relevant). When a deontologist
deprioritizes a specific duty—for example, if the soldier above drops her
pursuit of the enemy to assist her platoon-mate—that person is neither
rejecting nor ignoring that one duty; rather, they are determining that the
best way to honor the full range of their duties requires them to prioritize
other duties over that one in this particular moment.
Sidebar: Prioritizing the Right over the Good
Unlike some other approaches to ethics, it is frequently said that
deontology is not organized around the question of what is good, but
rather it is primarily concerned with what is “right.” A system organized
around “right” may initially seem more constricting than a system
organized around goodness, because right/wrong is a binary system and
goodness is not.
But deontology actually allows for more freedom than goodness-
based systems. A system concerned with goodness can encompass
anything: any person, deed, or object can be evaluated in terms of how
good it is compared to other things. When goodness is the metric for
ethics, it’s (almost) always possible to get better, and being good
requires that one constantly try to become better. A system of right and
wrong, by contrast, leaves room for actions and experiences that are
outside the bounds of ethical evaluation—that is, they are neither right
nor wrong, and people can pursue those actions or not purely according
to their preferences.
2.2.6
S
TRENGTHS AND
W
EAKNESSES OF
D
EONTOLOGY:
I
T’S
N
OT
A
LL ABOUT
R
ULES
One of deontology’s strengths is that it insists upon the notion that there is a
difference between the rightness and wrongness of action, and it does so by
appealing to factors that do not automatically depend on the way the
outcome of that action is received. In this way, deontology preserves the
integrity of ethical action: our choices have value, regardless of whether
other people recognize that value. At its worst, deontological thinking can
enable fanaticism, leading people to believe they are justified in punishing
others for doing things they take to be wrong. At its best, deontology can
afford people the moral courage to stand against the majority, even when
there is no obvious reward for doing so.
Another common criticism of deontology is that it does not focus
enough on the consequences of action. Although it is true that deontology
prioritizes human actions and intentions, as suggested above, most forms of
deontology not only address but seriously consider the consequences and
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
context of decisions and actions. Yet because of its emphasis on principles
(laws, rules, and codes), deontology on its own seems to capture only a
small portion of what it means to do ethics. And even more than that, it
seems to operate as though the ethical life is a judicious process backed by
a particular type of authority. In the mid-twentieth century, Elizabeth
Anscombe offered a powerful argument against the legalistic language that
was then dominant in moral discourse, arguing that without religious
backing, such language makes very little sense and that therefore, unless we
want to impose its religious significance upon everyone who wants to
weigh in on matters of ethics, we ought to abandon it altogether. In her
words:
The concepts of obligation and duty—
moral
obligation and moral
duty,
that is to say—and of what is morally
right and wrong, and of the moral
sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically
possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from
an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and
are only harmful without it. (Anscombe 1958, 1)
Those forms of deontology that claim to ground the authority of
moral principles and norms in human reason rather than divine decree have
also been criticized. Kantian deontology in particular is frequently criticized
for being overly rigorous and impractical. As noted, Kant insists that an
action has no moral worth if it is not done out of duty. This means that, for
instance, when someone donates to a charity and finds that the act brings
them joy, and they decide to donate again and again, according to Kantian
standards, this action has no moral worth. It is for reasons like this that
people sometimes call Kant a moral purist or rigorist (Cohen 2014). Kant
claims that a truly moral act is motivated by respect for the moral law and
free from any other particular inclinations or desires. But human experience
tells us that most of us act for a variety of reasons, and desire and emotion
cannot easily be cast aside in order to evaluate the moral worth of particular
actions—whether our own or someone else’s.
But perhaps the most important issue that arises within a
deontological framework concerns what to do when conflicting duties arise.
Although we have described some of the ways deontology handles conflicts
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
and inconsistencies, the fact remains that the principles and rules that guide
human conduct are not always easy to follow nor are the choices between
them always clear. Quite often, the complexity of our lives and
circumstances makes it impossible to abide by all of the rules and duties
that bind us, no matter what we do. The impossibility of choosing a perfect
course does not mean that deontology has failed or that those rules or duties
cease to be binding. Instead, these clashes of duty should be seen as the
reason deontology is valuable: it furnishes us with a way of thinking,
perceiving, and living that enables us to realistically navigate difficult
choices about the things that matter most. That said, there are other ethical
frameworks to consider and other points of emphasis to consider as well.
Sidebar: The Challenges of Deontology and Artificial Intelligence
For most deontologists, the right or wrong decision must always be a
choice; otherwise, one cannot take responsibility for it. The agent may
feel a strong sense of obligation, or the call to duty might be strong, but
in order for responsibility to exist there must be a choice, and the agent
must have the capacity to choose differently. Defining deontology
becomes complicated when we start thinking about automated agents,
which are programmed to do certain tasks and which learn new things
according to programs that have been written by humans. Are
automated entities exercising responsibility in the deontological sense?
Could this be on the horizon?
Deontology focuses on duties and obligations. What kinds of
entities have duties and obligations? Typically, when we reference
duties, rights, and obligations, we have in mind other people. But what
are our duties with respect to other living creatures? And what about
future generations? These are the types of questions deontology has
traditionally asked. But new issues arise when we consider human
beings’ relation to intelligent machines. What does a robot owe to a
human? What does a human owe to a robot? What kind of demand can
an artificial being make on human life, and how would that demand be
justified? What these questions point to is a certain ambiguity about the
nature of the relationship between humans and intelligent machines. If
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
robots cannot have relationships with others, then what is at stake when
we delegate a moral decision to a robot?
There is a growing body of work in computer science and related
fields called machine ethics (i.e., programming or teaching machines
how to act ethically) (Christian 2020; Dubber et al. 2020; Lin et al.
2017; Pereira and Lopes 2020; Wallach and Asaro 2020). Work in this
area typically takes one of two main forms. In the bottom-up
approach,
systems or agents are given examples of proper behavior and attempt to
abstract from those what to do in particular situations. In the top-down
approach, systems or agents are given a set of rules in some formal,
logical language and are expected to incorporate these rules into the
actions that they decide to take. An important stream of research in this
area focuses on harnessing the creativity of complex machine learning
methods while still enforcing that the agents make decisions in line with
outside constraints or rules (Rossi and Mattei 2019).
There has been a lot of press coverage of work in this area related
to teaching autonomous cars how to act by surveying millions of people
all over the world (Bonnefon et al. 2016). One key question for us is, do
machines even have ethics?
Whereas they can have rules or patterns of
behavior, who or what is held responsible for the decisions they make?
Consider self-driving cars. They are trained by being given “traces”
of human drivers as well as a set of rules to follow. They observe human
drivers obeying traffic laws, avoiding obstacles, stopping for errant
pedestrians, and other actions. If an autonomous vehicle stops for a
pedestrian, a moose, or a flock of ducklings in the road, can it be said to
be acting ethically? Note that moose are large, and that hitting one can
do significant damage to a vehicle and possibly the occupants of the
vehicle as well as to the moose. Does it make it less ethical (or less of
an ethical concern) to stop for a moose than for a smaller animal? Does
the vehicle’s decision to stop for the ducklings come from a respect for
life or from a societal consensus to not injure cute animals?
Story Point: “Dolly,” by Elizabeth Bear
“She’s a machine. Where’s she going to get a jury of her peers?
”
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Can an android be a person, or could it become one? What obligations
would its potential personhood impose on us? And how can those
obligations be made visible to people or governments that assume they are
only objects? These are the questions that Detective Roz Kirkbride and her
partner Peter King end up wrestling with as they try to solve the murder of
Clive Steele, who has been disemboweled by his new advanced-prototype
home companion Dolly. “Dolly,” the story, offers a compelling window into
how the framework of deontology can help us define and negotiate ethical
conflicts. And the conundrum of Dolly herself illustrates both how our
definitions and descriptions create the conditions for ethical analysis that
follows. In so doing, it offers a way to understand how deontology gives us
the resources to reevaluate baseline definitions and thus the duties and
obligations that follow from them.
2.3
VIRTUE ETHICS
Virtue ethics
is an approach to ethics organized around the idea of human
flourishing and human excellence. Its basic assumption is that all human
beings share some basic qualities of character, though we vary widely in
how much we excel at those qualities and how we express them, and each
of us gets better (or worse) at them according to our experiences. It further
assumes that human beings are concerned with how to live the good life and
that ethics is a subset of what it means to live a full and happy life.
2.3.1
O
VERVIEW OF
V
IRTUE
E
THICS
Unlike deontology and other approaches to ethics, where the focus is
primarily on actions and intentions, virtue ethics focuses on the whole
person: the qualities of character that they have and the patterns of living
that issue from and reveal those qualities. That pattern of being is called a
habitus
. By cultivating excellence in a range of basic human capacities,
called the virtues
, a person likewise builds their capacity for a fulfilling life,
because exercising these virtues is what enables them to live in alignment
with their goals and desires (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016). For this
reason, it is virtuous people who live happy and fulfilling lives (that is, who
flourish
): not because they are rewarded or deemed worthy by some
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
external judge but because the practice of virtue helps them build and
sustain a satisfying and rewarding life.
Nobody is born virtuous. In fact, it’s not really possible to be virtuous
until you are an adult, or at least old enough to maintain the practice of
virtue from your own habitus, rather than because some external force like a
parent or teacher imposes it on you (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016). This
does not mean that we are born vicious. Rather, virtue is developed over
time, by emulating exemplary people and by cultivating good habits (Vallor
2016). Parents, teachers, and culture play major roles in shaping a person’s
habitus, especially while the person is young.
Virtuousness is also not a one-time achievement, at any age. For one
thing, virtue is complex: it is possible to excel in some virtues while being
weak or inconsistent in others. In fact, most of us are like that
(Athanassoulis 2000). Even more importantly, our capacity for any given
virtue is not fixed: although a person’s habitus cannot change overnight, it
can always shift by small degrees, and those small shifts can eventually add
up to significant changes. It’s always possible—though never easy—to
develop your capacity for a given virtue. It’s also possible to lose the
capacity for a given virtue over time. Similar to physical muscles, virtues
like courage or generosity grow stronger if you exercise them regularly, and
they weaken if you don’t use them (Annas 2011). In other words, the
exercise of virtue is not based simply on a theoretical understanding of the
right thing to do, but through ongoing practice (Vallor 2016).
Like deontology, virtue ethics is deeply concerned with the interior
lives of individuals and why we do the things we do. In contrast to
deontology, however, virtue ethics emphasizes the importance of actions as
an indicator of a person’s character
. Although any one individual action
may be hard to interpret (or may even be misleading), the long-term pattern
of a person’s actions across multiple contexts will reveal their character by
indicating how well, to what degree, and in what ways they exercise those
basic human capacities that are the virtues.
Virtue ethics is a goal-driven framework for thinking about ethics. It
aims toward the creation of good outcomes and of happy, flourishing
people. From within a virtue ethics framework, these two goals are
impossible to separate: a good society is good because it makes it possible
for people to flourish and develop human excellence.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
2.3.2
W
HAT
A
RE
V
IRTUES?
Virtues are the basic building blocks of human character; they are
fundamental qualities like kindness, playfulness, or self-respect. Virtues are
not qualities that only some people possess; rather, a virtue is the capacity
to exercise that quality
. According to virtue ethics, every person is endowed
with the same basic library of virtues, and the potential to excel in any of
these virtues is part of our basic makeup. Therefore, what differentiates us
from one another is not whether or not we possess a given virtue, but rather
the degree to which we have developed (or our parents and teachers have
developed in us) the ability to exercise that virtue. Within a virtue ethics
framework, a chronic liar would be understood as being very deficient in
honesty rather than lacking honesty entirely. Given the right conditions and
a genuine desire on that person’s part to become more honest, they could
over time develop a greater capacity for honesty.
Virtues are revealed not through single actions but rather through
patterns of action. For example, a single act of benevolence is not enough to
know that a person is meaningfully kind or generous, because any number
of external causes and internal motivations might have prompted that one
benevolent action. It is only when a person shows benevolence in a range of
circumstances that one can be confident that they have a well-developed
capacity for benevolence (Sreenivasan, 2002). In the words of Rosalind
Hursthouse, virtues “go all the way down”; having a well-developed
capacity for a given virtue means that you will “notice, expect, value, feel,
desire, choose, act, and react in certain characteristic ways” (Hursthouse
and Pettigrove 2016).
Thinking about human character in terms of virtues—that is, in terms
of a common library of basic capacities—is useful in several ways. First, it
helps us think comparatively about the differences between people (or even
different versions of ourselves), because those differences can be
understood as different ways of inhabiting or expressing the same basic
qualities. Second, it provides us with a framework for thinking about how
multiple aspects of a person’s character work in combination to shape how
that person will act in a given moment. And finally, it equips us to think
about how our environments can impact our character, by encouraging or
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
reinforcing the exercise of some virtues and creating barriers to the exercise
of others.
2.3.3
C
ONFUCIAN
V
IRTUE
E
THICS
The predominant form of virtue ethics in East Asia comes from the
teachings of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius (Latinized from
Kongzi
, or “Master Kong”). He was inspired by a desire to return to what he
saw as the excellence of the earlier Zhou Dynasty social system in contrast
to the turmoil of his own time (the late fifth century BCE). Over time after
his death, his disciples compiled quotes attributed to him into the Analects
(Legge [1861] 2017) and expanded the Confucian canon with other classics,
such as the Mencius
and the Doctrine of the Mean
.
In early Imperial China, Confucianism competed with other emerging
ideologies known as the “Hundred Schools of Thought,” including the
heavy-handed Legalism of the short-lived Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE) and
the more libertarian Daoism of the early Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE),
to eventually become a principal guiding force for Han governance. The
later neo-Confucian renaissance, emerging as a secularist response to the
prevailing Buddhist and Daoist spirituality during the Song Dynasty (906–
1279 CE), solidified Confucianism’s place in the core of Chinese
philosophy up to the modern era (Yao 2000).
In the Confucian tradition, our interpersonal bonds are a fundamental
part of what makes us people; the project of growing as a person is one of
developing mutual care and respect in our relationships as parent/child,
teacher/student, friend/friend, and so on (Santiago 2008; Wong 2020).
Though we are each given unique circumstances based on the family,
nation, and other groups we are born into, we are all basically the same by
nature at birth, and it is habituation
that differentiates us (
Analects
17.2).
Confucius’s disciple Mencius posits that this nature includes the “seeds”
that may eventually grow into the core virtues of ren
(often translated as
“benevolence”), yi
(“righteousness”), li
(“propriety”), and zhi
(“wisdom”)
(Yu 2013).
An important tool for cultivating virtues in Confucianism is mindful
exercise of social rituals
(Wong 2020). Consider the practices of offering a
handshake or bow to a business partner, reciting vows at a Western
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Christian wedding, holding a funeral when someone dies, and taking off
one’s shoes before entering an Islamic mosque or a Hindu temple. Rather
than intended to be enacted mechanistically, these rituals are meant to help
the performer get into a mind-set of respect: for their colleague, for their
marital commitment, for the deceased, or for the divine. This idea is central
to how Confucius believed a society should be governed; although people
might be coerced to behave well through the threat of punishment, a gentler
route of teaching them to be virtuous through a system of meaningful rituals
would promote flourishing as well as order.
2.3.4
A
RISTOTELIAN
V
IRTUE
E
THICS
In European and American philosophy, the prevailing form of virtue ethics
can be traced to ancient Greece. Its foundational text is Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics
, which was written around roughly 340 BCE, during
the so-called Golden Age. The first sustained treatise on ethics produced in
classical-era Greece, it remained very influential on Greek and Roman
thought over the next several hundred years. Like most other Greek
language works, the Nicomachean Ethics
was not widely known in Latin-
speaking Europe during much of the Middle Ages. But it remained popular
in the Islamic world in Arabic translation and was “rediscovered” by
Christian Europe during the twelfth century along with several of
Aristotle’s works in other disciplines (such as formal logic, biology, and
political theory), thanks in part to its preservation in Arabic. Within a few
decades, the Nicomachean Ethics
became the Western world’s definitive
account of human nature and how to live well. In the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, Aristotle was the single most important ancient thinker
among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers, who referred to him in their
writings simply as “the Philosopher” and who worked in various ways to
harmonize the Nicomachean Ethics
with their respective beliefs and
practices.
Aristotle’s goal in the Nicomachean Ethics
is to ascertain what things
a human being needs to do in order to achieve deep happiness and
satisfaction with life—to flourish. He concludes that we need a rational
understanding of what things make us happy and how those things can be
acquired and kept. But he also argues that an understanding of general
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
principles is not enough; we need particular qualities of character both to
help us recognize the things that will make us happy and to ensure that we
are able to pursue them effectively. These virtues exist in all of us in
potential, and cultivating them will help us flourish.
The Nicomachean Ethics
lists 11 moral virtues that must be
developed through habituation
. Later proponents of Aristotelianism have
revised and adapted this list in various ways, either to integrate
Aristotelianism with another specific system of thought (such as Islam) or
to help it better match the world as they saw it. Some of the virtues that
consistently feature across different Aristotelian traditions are courage,
generosity, friendliness, temperance, and concern for justice. In order to
flourish, one must also have a well-developed sense of practical wisdom
, or
the understanding of how best to act in a given situation. For Aristotle,
acting in a manner that appears virtuous is not sufficient evidence that a
person is virtuous. Rather, that person must either be acting out of deep
inclinations of their character or because they know that those actions are
good and have chosen them for that reason (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
2.4/1105a16–1105b20).
2.3.5
A
PPETITES,
D
ESIRES, AND
V
IRTUOUSNESS
Because virtue ethics is concerned with the whole life of the moral agent, it
considers more than our actions and intentions. It also considers our basic
physical appetites like hunger and fear, and our emotional or psychological
desires. The fact that these appetites and desires are a basic part of human
nature means that they are fundamentally good for humans, and necessary
for us to flourish. Of course, any of these appetites can be damaging to a
person if they are indulged to excess or at the expense of other good things
(Schwitzgebel 2007). But suppressing the appetites entirely is just as
damaging to a person as allowing them to expand out of control. That is
why virtue ethics insists on the importance of learning to regulate appetites
and desires and to exercise them in moderation.
But not all ways of regulating desires and appetites are the same, even
though they might look the same from the outside. Most of us are familiar
with the experience of turning down something that we want—a piece of
cake, or the answer key to tomorrow’s big exam—because we know that we
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
will be better off without it, in one way or another. This forcible restraining
of one’s own appetites or desires is called continence
. A person can
cultivate their capacity for continence in the same way that they can
cultivate virtues. But continence is not itself a virtue, because it requires us
to suppress our desires and appetites.
A different and better way to ensure that you exercise your appetites
and desires appropriately is to train yourself into wanting to do what is
right. This alignment of desires with right action appears in the Aristotelian
tradition as the virtue of temperance
, that is, having appetites that are
attuned with what is right, and in the Confucian tradition by a state of being
that can be called wholeheartedness
, in which one does not feel internal
resistance or conflict but is genuinely and joyfully committed to a course of
action or way of being. If you have ever been really excited to work on a
class project or found yourself saying no to dessert because you feel
pleasantly full after a good meal, then you have an idea of what these things
refer to.
Continence has much more in common with temperance and
wholeheartedness than it does with various forms of bad living, such as vice
(that is, the extreme states of being that virtues avoid) or being ruled by
one’s appetites. Very broadly speaking, for there is a great deal of
disagreement among thinkers and sages, the Confucian tradition raises
serious concerns about relying on continence, worrying that it could lead a
person to become more concerned with the outward appearance of virtue
rather than true virtuousness (Angle 2013). The Aristotelian tradition,
broadly speaking, is more positive, celebrating continence as the exercise of
the rational part over the nonrational and perceiving it of one’s progress
toward temperance (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
1.13, 1102b26–28;
Scarre 2013; Stohr 2003).
But across traditions, there is widespread agreement that true virtue
requires more than continence: it requires that a person truly want to do
what is right and best. This isn’t just because calibrating your desires with
your judgment means that you will reliably do the right thing, although
that’s also true; it’s because doing so is what will make you happy. And
that, after all, is what flourishing is: living a satisfying and fulfilling life.
2.3.6
H
ABITUATION:
D
EVELOPING
V
IRTUE
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Every culture educates its children into its own ideas about what virtues are
important and how those virtues are expressed and recognized. This
education can come in the form of intentionally crafted lessons, or in simple
immersion in the daily workings of that culture. This cultural training, in all
its official and unofficial forms, is known as habituation
.
As a person grows to adulthood, his patterns of thought and action—
all of which are influenced by his home culture(s), even if they are a
reaction against it—become more entrenched until they seem like the
“normal” way of being for him. This normal way of being is called a
habitus
, or interlocking set of habits that are what feels right or natural for
him. To have a habitus does not mean that one doesn’t understand that there
are other ways to live in the world or that those other ways can be ethically
valid. It is simply to have habits of one’s own.
A large part of a person’s habitus comes from doing the things that
seem “normal” in their country, in their community, in their family, and
among their friends. In general, people are far more aware of those aspects
of their habitus that set them apart from their friends, family or neighbors.
This is because the similarities are often understood to be “normal,” or “just
how people are,” to the point that people do not notice them at all.
According to virtue ethics, and possibly according to your own
experience as well, new habits—whether virtuous or vicious—are hard to
cultivate, and old habits are hard to break. But though it is not easy, it is
possible. Through steady, deliberate choice on the part of the agent, or
steady exposure to a new set of circumstances, an agent can gradually
become habituated to a new pattern or set of patterns. In this way, people
can (and do) become more or less virtuous over time.
Most people never become perfect in any virtue, let alone in all of
them. For this reason, it is better to think of virtue as a spectrum rather than
as a binary. You can become more courageous than you were before without
being perfect at it, or less generous than you were while still retaining some
generosity. Although habitus makes it easy to keep doing what we are doing
already, it is always possible to cultivate greater virtue, or to let a virtue
lapse. To put it another way, virtues are not a pass/fail system—you’re
almost always somewhere between perfectly virtuous and perfectly vicious
—and your grade is never final.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
2.3.7
H
OW THE
V
IRTUES
W
ORK IN
T
ANDEM
Virtues do not exist in isolation from one another or from the rest of our
character; they are
our character, operating in complex combinations in
everything that we do (Chen 2015). This is not because virtue ethics
considers every single action to be moral in the narrow sense, but because
plenty of qualities that are not obviously moral, such as physical prowess or
technical knowledge, can also be understood as virtues, even though
Aristotle did not consider them to be such (Putman 1997; Stalnaker 2010).
By thinking about each virtue as one element of an interrelated whole,
it can become easier to see how virtues that are not obviously moral, like
technical skill or physical strength, can also have moral significance
(Putman 1997). Imagine, for example, that a friend of yours is organizing a
fundraiser for a charitable cause that you also support, and this friend asks
you to donate your time to build a website to manage fundraising for the
event. In donating your time, you are exercising the recognizably moral
virtue of generosity. But you will need more than generosity to build a site
that is appealing, easy to find, and easy to navigate: you will also need
programming and human-computer interaction skills, as well as knowledge
about handling charitable donations, Paypal and credit card accounts, and
perhaps the logistics of relevant tax law. These are technical skills that
could be used for many purposes: you could get paid for these same skills
by your employer (which is reasonable and responsible, but not particularly
generous) or you could donate them to build a website to steal credit card
numbers. Being good at designing webpages does not make you generous,
but it does make your generosity more effective in this situation. It’s also
the case that both your generosity and your skill in web design will be more
valuable if you are practiced at them. However, note that a very skilled and
practiced designer who said yes would be exercising less generosity than a
novice designer who did—after all, the experienced designer can fulfill her
pledge with a lot less time and hassle. Likewise, a person who is unused to
being generous may agree to build the website but is far less likely to
follow through in putting in the time and energy required to build and
maintain a successful and appealing site.
2.3.8
M
ODALITIES FOR
J
UDGMENT
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Because virtue ethics takes a character-based approach to the world, it
cannot and does not aim to offer principles or formulae that can be equally
well applied by any person. Instead, it focuses on ways in which a person
can draw on the resources of their character to attend to the particularity of
specific situations (which, after all, are the only kind of situations we ever
experience). Of course, a person of underdeveloped virtues will find these
modalities much less useful than a person of good character. Likewise, a
person of excellent character is far less likely to need to use these
modalities consciously, as they will emerge organically from that person’s
habitus.
Because our character—including our ability to make use of the
following modalities—creates the conditions for how we perceive, interpret
and act, a virtue ethicist might say that any given decision is 95% made by
the time you realize that you have to make it. Therefore, the best way to
engage in good decision making, according to virtue ethics, is to cultivate
those capacities that you want to be able to bring to bear in deciding and
acting, by building good habits and modeling yourself after exemplary
people.
Practical Wisdom
The key to acting well in virtue ethics is practical wisdom
, or the ability to
judge what the best action would be in any given situation. Practical
wisdom is conceptualized differently by different virtue ethics traditions,
but it is central to all of them. A person with a well-developed sense of
practical wisdom will be able to perceive and understand the precise nature
of what is going on in a specific set of circumstances and will likewise
understand what kind of response that moment requires (Vallor 2016). This
understanding and response necessarily combines perceptual acuity with the
desire to do what is good; a person who delivers cutting insults at exactly
the moment when they will hurt most might be said to be clever or
perceptive in ways that partially resemble practical wisdom, but such a
person is not practically wise (Clarke 2010; Yu 1998). In keeping with
virtue ethics’ character-based approach to living well, practical wisdom is
itself a virtue, which an individual must develop over time.
Practical wisdom can be developed only through experience. For this
reason, children and teenagers cannot yet possess practical wisdom and
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
shouldn’t be expected to. If this distinction seems unfair to you, consider
the difference in how we might evaluate a well-intentioned teenager who
disregards a friend’s statement that they hate surprise parties and throws one
for the friend anyway, as opposed to a well-intentioned adult who does the
same (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016). It’s not hard to imagine the
teenager being genuinely surprised and distressed to learn that their friend’s
preferences do not match their own, because teenagers have had less
exposure to a wide variety of people with different temperaments and
preferences. We as observers might have known the party would backfire,
but this does not necessarily lead us to doubt the good intentions of the
teenaged party planner. By contrast, the party-throwing adult has had many
more years of interacting with others, and thus has had more time to
develop the perception and judgment that could help them distinguish
between another person’s genuinely felt dislike of surprise parties and their
self-effacing concern that they are causing fuss for their friends. Whether or
not we doubt the sincerity of the adult party-planner’s good intentions, we
are more likely to think of them as at fault for the hurt they cause. Though
neither the teenager nor the adult has exercised practical wisdom in
deciding to plan the party, it is likely only the adult whose actions will make
us think “they should have known better.”
Practical wisdom is culturally specific, in multiple ways. Firstly, a
person who excels in practical wisdom will always be informed by their
own culture and time period’s specific ideas of what constitutes flourishing
(Vallor 2016). Secondly, a given action or way of being will not elicit the
same response across time and place—for example, what seems
appropriately friendly in one setting might come across as cold or distant in
another—and being attuned to that local variation is part of what practical
wisdom entails. Therefore, it must by definition be calibrated to the
specifics of its setting.
Practical wisdom guides the exercise of other virtues, but it cannot
replace them. Imagine, for example, that you and a friend are having an
argument and that you both have gotten very angry. Then your friend says
something that makes you understand the whole situation differently. If you
have a well-developed sense of practical wisdom, you might be able to
perceive how your friend’s comment offers an opportunity to de-escalate
the argument and make peace. But unless you are also disposed to let go of
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
your anger—or at least capable of controlling it—you might not be able to
make good use of that opportunity, even though your practical wisdom tells
you that it would be a good idea.
Finding the Mean
As you have probably already noticed, virtue ethics is organized around the
idea of moderation. Acting virtuously requires finding the middle path
between excess and deficiency (
Nicomachean Ethics
, Book II.7 p. 25;
Analects
15:3). It also requires that we pay attention to the specifics of a
situation, because different situations require different responses: the right
amount of courage (or cheerfulness, or honesty) for one occasion might be
excessive for a different one (Lunyu, cited in Xia 2020). This point of
perfect balance between extremes is known in the Confucian tradition as
“the doctrine of the mean” (
Zhongyong
, cited in Plaks 1999) and in the
Aristotelian tradition as “the golden mean.”
To understand how a virtue could be exercised excessively, imagine a
soldier who is considering a risky solo strike attack to provide cover for the
other soldiers in his unit. Carrying out such an attack would be brave,
regardless of circumstances. But in some situations, it might be too
brave—
in other words, reckless. A hot-blooded soldier who is immune to fear can
make things worse by rushing in even when there is no advantage to be
gained or when she is not sufficiently skilled to succeed. The most virtuous
soldier, therefore—the one who possesses not only courage and skill, but
also sufficient practical wisdom to pay attention to the mean—is the one
who is unafraid to fight when it will be helpful, but not so eager that he fails
to think about tactics.
Aiming for the mean can give you a concrete method for imagining
what excessive or deficient responses would look like and enable you to
come up with a better course of action in order to avoid those extremes. But
realistically, achieving the mean also requires a well-developed faculty of
practical wisdom. And doing the right thing also requires you to have
developed all the relevant virtues to the degree that the situation requires, so
that you are able to go beyond just having the right idea about what a good
response would be.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Sidebar: Aristotelian Virtues as a Mean between Vices
In the Nicomachean Ethics
, Aristotle describes the moral virtues as
existing at an intermediate point between two extremes of vice.
(Aristotle 2.8) The following table lays out some of the moral virtues
described in the Nicomachean Ethics
, along with the vices that represent
an excessive or deficient exercise of that same quality. Presenting them
grouped together in this way should make clearer what “finding the
mean” looks like in practice.
This virtue
is the
midpoint
between this
excess
and this deficiency
courage
recklessness
cowardice
friendliness
flattery and
fawning
crankiness
temperance
overindulgence
lack of appreciation for
pleasures
generosity
careless
overspending
stinginess
It’s worth noting that the precisely suitable degree of exercising a
given virtue (known in the Aristotelian tradition as the golden mean
)
will not be the mathematical center point between the two extremes and
will vary from situation to situation. For this reason, one’s exercise of
virtue needs to be guided by practical wisdom
.
2.3.9
S
TRENGTHS AND
W
EAKNESSES
OF
V
IRTUE
E
THICS:
F
LOURISHING
I
S
E
ASY (
O
NCE
Y
OU’RE
T
HERE)
A person is said to be truly virtuous only if they find it easy to be virtuous:
they are wholehearted in their desire to do what is right, and they do not
require continence or external pressure to continue in virtuous habits.
Connecting virtue to flourishing in this way—to a person’s felt desire
to act virtuously—may seem counterintuitive at first glance. Isn’t it more
courageous to be brave when an action one must take is extremely
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
dangerous (e.g., rescuing a child by running into a burning building), or
more impressively generous for a very poor person to donate money to a
disaster relief organization after a major flood? These are indeed two
examples of exceptional virtue, in which the agents are being virtuous
under conditions of extreme external pressure. Both of them are exercising
their respective virtues (courage and charity) in spite of the risks it poses to
them, in a way that suggests that they truly excel at those respective virtues
(Foot 1978).
But if a person finds it difficult to be virtuous because it does not
match their internal desires and values—in other words, because they don’t
entirely want to be—then that difficulty reflects the limits of their
wholehearted commitment to that virtue (Foot 1978; Tiwald 2018). In
comparison to the two people in the paragraph above, imagine a person who
speaks up in a meeting despite being nervous, or who donates money to
disaster relief even though she dislikes giving money away. In both cases,
these actions are difficult because of insufficient virtue (courage or
generosity) on the part of the actor. That is not to say that these actions
aren’t good! In addition to the contributions they are making, both of these
people are controlling their less virtuous impulses, and possibly building
new habits. Both of these people might be on that path to greater
virtuousness if these actions represent part of an overall shift in habitus. The
timid speaker may find it easier to talk next time, and the resentful donor
may donate again because it made her feel good the first time. But it’s
impossible to know whether either of those things will happen on the basis
of only those first, single actions. The actions a person undertakes to shift
their habitus are best understood in the long term: in six months, or six
years, each of these people may have become more virtuous than they were
before, by cultivating new habits (or shaking off old ones).
Being truly virtuous also requires maintaining those virtues across
interactions with different people; for instance, a truly generous person
finds it easy to help strangers as well as friends and family. But virtue ethics
does not necessarily emphasize universality in the same way as some other
ethical frameworks. It comes naturally to many people to feel the most
concern for the people closest to them. In fact, in the Confucian tradition,
familial love is the root of all other love and it is reasonable to give greater
moral priority to these relationships (with filial piety
being one of the most
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
important virtues); to become a generally moral person is to take your circle
of care for those closest to you and expand it outwards to encompass others
(Curzer 2018; Yu 2007; Zhu 2002).
While virtue ethics’ attunement to local norms is one of its strengths,
this same quality is often criticized as a weakness. Because the virtues
celebrated by one community are sometimes very different from the virtues
celebrated by another, virtue ethics does not furnish a good foundation for
universal principles, including a universal principle of justice. Virtue ethics
has also been criticized for conceiving of the good life in a way that makes
it difficult, if not impossible, for people with some disabilities or
neurodivergencies to meet its criteria for human excellence. In particular,
Furey (2017) has argued that virtue ethics is a problematic fit for
engineering ethics in particular, because Aristotle’s picture of flourishing
presupposes a model of the human mind with strong capacities for
emotionally engaged and intuitionistic decision making, and those
capacities don’t come as naturally to many people on the autism spectrum, a
population particularly heavily represented in engineering.
Sidebar: Understanding Virtue Ethics through Role-Playing Games
One potentially useful way to think about the cultivation of virtues is
role-playing games (RPGs), in which it is necessary to build your
character’s skills slowly over time in accordance with your goals for the
character. Although skill building in RPGs is not always presented as
having a specifically moral dimension, the underlying mechanics can be
helpful for thinking about virtue ethics.
When you start out playing a game like Baldur’s Gate
, Fallout
, or
Mass Effect
, you have an array of skills, but you’re not very good at any
of them yet. If you want to get better at climbing or communication or
spell-casting, then you have to practice. As you practice, your ability
level improves. This practice is not so different from habituation, the
building-up or cultivation of a certain virtue through practice. It’s also
not so different from practicing a sport or a musical instrument.
Moreover, the best way to solve any given problem is not going to
be the same for every player. Some challenges are simply impossible for
lower-level players who have not yet built up their skills to the
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
necessary point. Other challenges will have different solutions. How do
you get past a locked door? Your answer will depend on whether your
character is a magician or a thief.
In an RPG, the mage and the mercenary will be able to address a
given challenge differently because of their different skill sets, but the
way the player perceives the problem is likely to be consistent. In the
real world, the differences between the mercenary and the mage will go
deeper: what seems possible or reasonable to the mercenary (defeat a
guard in combat, break through a door) will seem imprudent or
impossible to the mage, whereas the mage’s solution (unlock the door
with magic) will seem fanciful or impossible to the fighter. Each
character’s habits of thinking will be shaped by their past habits, and by
the virtues or skills that have in their experience been relevant to
making important decisions.
Of course, in real life you don’t usually have the choice to put a
challenging situation on hold and come back when you have leveled up:
you have to face it when it confronts you. That’s why it is important not
to put off cultivating your capacity for virtue until later. You might have
to fight the dragon tomorrow.
Story Point: “The Gambler,” by Paolo Bacigalupi
I try to protest. “But you hired me to write the important stories.
The stories about politics and the government, to continue the
traditions of the old newspapers. I remember what you said
when you hired me.”
“Yeah, well.” She looks away. “I was thinking more about
a good scandal.”
“The checkerspot is a scandal. That butterfly is now
gone.”
She sighs. “No, it’s not a scandal. It’s just a depressing
story. No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than
once. And no one subscribes to a depressing byline feed.”
How can we be the version of ourselves that we want to be, even in
times of crisis or under pressure from the outside world? And how can we
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
influence the world around us for the better when the world doesn’t
necessarily want to be influenced in those ways? These universal questions
take on particular sharpness for Ong, a Laotian refugee who works as a
journalist for a major American media company. Ong writes articles about
the issues he considers most important, such as climate change and the
fallout of government mismanagement. But such articles don’t align very
well with the reading habits of the American public, who instead give their
clicks to product reviews and celebrity scandals. “The Gambler” offers us
several high-stakes moments, but among the various characters in the story
—Marty Mackley, the master of infotainment; Janice, Ong’s results-
oriented boss; Kulaap, who balances her Laotian and American identities in
a way Ong cannot quite understand; and of course Ong himself—there is no
consensus on what kind of response those high-stakes moments call for.
Indeed, there is not even consensus on what really counts as a high-stakes
moment in the first place: each character has different judgments about the
lines between “real news,” distractions, and depressing stories. But as “The
Gambler” illustrates, our choices in those moments are rooted in the longer
arc of our character.
2.4
COMMUNITARIANISM
Communitarianism is an approach to ethics organized around self-
realization in the context of interdependence
. Its basic assumption is that
human beings exist in a state of mutual reliance on one another (Masolo
2010; Smith-Morris 2020). Although this interdependence includes material
goods like shelter and safety, the more significant dimension of our
interdependence concerns the many social, spiritual, and psychological
goods that can only come from relationships with others. Because we are
interdependent, everybody benefits from investing in the common good
, or
the well-being of the community as a whole (Masolo 2010; Wiredu 1992a).
2.4.1
O
VERVIEW OF
C
OMMUNITARIANISM
Instead of conceiving of communities as collections of individuals who
have decided to make common cause, communitarianism posits that
communities exist prior to any individual born and raised within them
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
(Menkiti 1984). By furnishing the language, values and relationships that
form the basis of an individual’s experience, a community is necessarily
foundational to understanding the character, goals, and potential of any
individual within it. Furthermore, because of our interdependence, that
individual’s self-realization
—that is, the fulfillment of the individual’s
potential and aims for themself—can take place only in a community
setting, because relationships with others are essential to the structure and
development of the self and because they create the context that makes an
individual’s aims significant (Gyekye 1997, Masolo 2010).
The idea of community that underwrites communitarianism does not
include every single kind of community that exists. Rather, it refers to the
kind of community in which a person might be said to have grown up. It
requires not only shared interests and values among members but a
sustained mutual commitment and a developed sense of what it means to
live in common (Coetzee 2003; Gyekye 1992). There are many
communities that have some of these qualities, but not all of them. You will
likely find that the communitarian framework is helpful in reflecting on
how these communities work, but that focusing on one such community to
the exclusion of others will give you only a piecemeal picture of the lives of
its members.
While communitarian ethics does not presume any one community
structure or set of norms, it does presume that communities exist and that
they have structure and norms of some kind that they recognize and claim
as their own. It further posits that any person can and must be understood as
being formed by a community (or perhaps more than one). Being formed in
this way means that an individual shares in the social meanings of their
communities, and that their understanding of themselves and of the value of
their goals is grounded in those shared social meanings (Masolo 2010;
Smith-Morris 2020). This is not to deny that there are people who conduct
their lives without strong social ties or a sense of shared commitment to
others. But according to the baseline premises of communitarianism, any
person who lives in isolation from a community of shared values and ideals
—“an abstract dangling personality,” to use Polycarp Ikuenobe’s striking
phrase—will not be able to achieve self-realization (Ikuenobe 2006).
Although it does not presume any specific moral or social norms,
communitarianism does make some general assumptions about how
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
communities work. The first is that they are enduring and have patterns,
processes, and structures that exist prior to the individuals who are formed
by them (Menkiti 1984; Smith-Morris 2020). The second is that their shared
wisdom is carried to a large extent by elders, who are not merely the older
members of the community but are those who have excelled in the forms of
living that the community values, particularly in sympathetic awareness
of
the needs of others (Masolo 2010; Menkiti 1984; Smith-Morris 2020). Both
of these assumptions are more broadly and transparently applicable to
people who spend most of their lives in one place, a pattern of life that is
increasingly uncommon. Nonetheless, when you use the lens of
communitarianism to think about your own life, you will likely find that
you belong to some communities that match this description, even if your
life does not take place entirely within them.
In order to grasp why the communitarian framework presumes
interdependence, it’s helpful to understand the role that community plays in
a person’s self-realization. Even though you as an individual can decide
what kind of person you want to be and what achievements are important to
you, you (like everyone else) rely on others in order to become that person
and achieve those goals, in three distinct but interrelated ways.
The first way is that others in your community furnish you with many
kinds of support in your work and development, from material goods (like
food and public roads) to emotional and psychological goods (like love and
conversation). The second way is that achieving your goals for yourself,
whether in practical accomplishments or in character, rarely feels satisfying
or even real unless somebody else recognizes and affirms what you have
achieved or become (Gbadegesin 1991; Presbey 2002). Shared social rituals
like weddings, coming-of-age ceremonies, and graduations are easily
visible examples of how a community marks an individual’s achievement or
growth. But even small ordinary gestures of recognition like a professional
title are often important for helping someone feel that their achievements
are real and valuable.
The third way individuals depend on their community for self-
realization is rooted in the fact that communities exist prior to individuals
and supply the shared social meanings that individuals use to think about
their lives (Smith-Morris 2020). Imagine, for example, that you have grown
up in a community where most people want to be professional athletes, but
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
you are more interested in becoming a doctor. Although you may think that
this goal sets you apart from your community, the specific shape of your
goal is still shaped by your community. Every society has medical
practitioners of some kind, and different communities have very different
ideas about the social role that medical practitioners play. These varying
expectations occur not only because the nature and rigor of medical training
varies widely but because different communities have different degrees of
trust in what the doctors they know claim to do (or whether they will do
what they claim). Even if your desire to be a doctor is unusual in your
community, your specific ideas about being a doctor will reflect your own
community’s understanding of what doctors are like and what makes that a
valuable goal.
For these reasons, your self-realization needs to be understood in the
context of your community. Your community also shares in your
attainments, whether it is achieving a concrete goal or becoming an
excellent person (Ikuenobe 2006). Not only has the community helped to
support you along the way, but the fact that you aimed for and achieved that
goal is understood as a sign that the community has successfully raised and
educated you to carry on the community’s values and practices (Menkiti
1984). This does not mean that every single community you have belonged
to plays an equal role in your development and your successes, but it does
mean that these things can be traced back to a community that has been
important to you.
2.4.2
S
OURCES OF
C
OMMUNITARIAN
E
THICS
The form of communitarianism discussed here is rooted in indigenous
philosophy, traditions and lived community practices. This type of
communitarianism is challenging to represent here, for several reasons. It’s
important to discuss those reasons here, because they may already be
influencing the way you are thinking about this framework.
The first difficulty has to do with the challenge of retrieving sources
of indigenous thought. Communitarianism was a common form of life in
many parts of the world prior to the era of European colonization which
began in the fifteenth century CE, including the lands that now comprise
Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, much of North America, and parts of
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Southeast Asia. The societies in these regions were transformed, often
violently, when their homelands were “discovered” and settled by European
explorers, who largely treated these societies’ lands (and sometimes the
people themselves) as a source of wealth for their home countries. During
these violent upheavals, large swaths of these indigenous communities’
knowledge and tradition were eradicated. Some strands of knowledge and
tradition were preserved in the minds and memories of survivors but in
decontextualized forms that were different from those of prior generations.
Our contemporary knowledge of those past ways of life is indelibly shaped,
and limited, by that destructive history.
In addition to this very practical challenge, there is also a conceptual
challenge. European nations justified their colonial project by claiming that
the peoples they conquered were lesser forms of humans—or not even
human at all—because they were not “rational” in the same way (Ani 2013;
Biakolo 2003). The idea that humanness depends on rationality can be
traced to ancient Greece and, indeed, was used by Aristotle and other Greek
philosophers to denigrate some non-Greek peoples (Biakolo 2003). But the
specific form of rationality that mattered to the Europeans of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries was the newly developed principles of “scientific
reasoning” (Naudé 2019). Because the worldviews and thought patterns of
the indigenous societies that they encountered did not mesh with their own
recently developed ideas about universal reason, the colonizers (along with
observers in their home countries) concluded that these communities were
incapable of higher-level thought, or at least had not developed it yet
(Biakolo 2003; Nicholas 2018). Although it is easy to look back and see the
error and hubris of that judgment, its legacy continues to shape how non-
European peoples and their knowledge traditions are perceived today—
including in the field of ethics, which (like many academic disciplines) is
only just beginning to reckon with how some of its standards and practices
continue to make it inhospitable to non-European traditions of knowledge
(Ani 2013; Hallen and Sodipo 1997; Outlaw 1987; Oyěwùmí 1997;
Serequeberhan 2003; Wiredu 1992b; see also Wiredu 2009).
Many of the indigenous communitarian societies mentioned above
continue into the present, adapting the core practices of communitarian
ethics to the institutional structures of the settler states that now control
their homelands (Smith-Morris 2020). For both practical reasons and
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
because of ingrained philosophical biases, these communities’ frameworks
and traditions are rarely given the same philosophical credence as writings
from the European traditions. Yet indigenous communitarianism
significantly enriches our conceptual vocabulary for doing ethics.
Although these various indigenous communitarian traditions have
many points of overlap among them, limitations of space make it
impossible to discuss commonalities in a way that can truthfully represent
them all. Therefore, the remainder of this unit focuses specifically on the
communitarianism of sub-Saharan Africa, which is internally diverse but
also coheres around a handful of core ideas and themes. Among these
shared ideas is a particularly well-developed conceptual apparatus for
communally based self-realization.
The communitarian framework presented here cannot be, and does
not aim to be, a direct representation of what precolonial Africa was “really
like.” Instead, it offers an overview of the philosophical efforts by African
scholars to theorize, systematize and reflect on those aspects of
noncolonized African culture that endure, or those elements of precolonial
Africa that can be recovered.
It should be noted that communitarian philosophy and practices have
also emerged in the culture and thought of Europe and America (Masolo
2010). Political philosophers Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer and
philosopher/theologian Alisdair MacIntyre have each argued for the merit
and moral urgency of a turn to communitarianism, responding to and
drawing from the Euro-American tradition (MacIntyre 2013; Sandel 2010;
Walzer 1990). As these thinkers all note, communitarianism is deeply at
odds with the structure of the modern western capitalist state. Nonetheless,
several communitarian movements have developed. One of the most
widespread of these is the Catholic Worker Movement, which began in the
United States in the early 1930s as a means to bring about a “society in
which it will be easier to be good” (Cornell 2006). Initially just a
newspaper, this movement soon expanded to include both independent
houses and cooperative farms. The Catholic Worker Movement now has
over 100 houses and farms in several countries that feed the needy and
house communal workers and continues to stand against exploitation and
inequality (Forest 2010). Another well-known example is the kibbutz
movement. A kibbutz is a form of communal living first established in 1910
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
at Dgania in Palestine. The founding ideals of the kibbutz movement
combined an agrarian communitarianism with the Zionist goal of claiming
land for the Jewish people. Kibbutzim (to use the Hebrew plural) were
founded on a purely egalitarian regime of total equality of the members in
both work and claim on resources. This communalism extended even to
child-rearing; all children on the kibbutz were raised communally in a
separate “children’s house” (Shpancer 2011). Although kibbutzim remain a
small share of Israel’s culture and economy, many have shifted their
practices and community structure to more closely resemble Israel’s wider
capitalist society. Although most remain collectivist agrarian communities,
some have become for-profit enterprises (Sivak 2020). Many, but not all,
modern kibbutzim have differentiated between the management of the
economy on one hand and the community on the other, leading to less
egalitarian wages but a commitment for caring for all members of the
community (Rubinstein 2007).
2.4.3
P
ERSON,
C
OMMUNITY, AND
W
ORLD:
S
UB-
S
AHARAN
M
ETAPHYSICS
The concepts of community and of human self-realization are easier to
understand with a basic understanding of how traditional sub-Saharan
cultures conceptualize the composition of the world at large.
According to most traditional sub-Saharan metaphysics, the entire
world is an interdependent and harmonious system. The boundaries
between different kinds of living things, between mind and body, between
the living and the dead, and between the natural and spirit world are all
gradations of difference rather than absolute divides, and treating them as
categorically separate—as Western metaphysics does—prevents one from
understanding them as they actually are (Ramose 2003; Tangwa 2005;
Wiredu 1992b).
This sense of the world as a harmonious unity informs nearly every
aspect of how sub-Saharan communitarianism is structured. A striking
example can be seen in the way the death of a community elder is
understood. Although the deceased elder is acknowledged to be biologically
dead, they are understood as still present in the community, insofar as their
words and character are remembered (Ikuenobe 2006; Masolo 2010; Okolo
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
1992; Ramose 2003). While their presence is felt in this way, the elder is
still a person within their community. Only when their name is no longer
remembered by anyone living does the elder join the category of ancestors,
a de-individualized collective of wise and beloved persons who have gone
beyond material existence (Menkiti 1984). Furthermore, just as the world at
large is understood to be an ordered and harmonious whole, most African
communitarianism likewise understand human individuals to be,
themselves, each a community of many self-elements (Gbadegesin 1991;
Neequaye 2020; Ogbonnaya 1994).
This principle of organization helps underscore why self-realization
must take place in the context of a community. Because everything that
exists is by its nature part of an interconnected and interdependent whole,
realizing your purpose in the world must necessarily include acknowledging
that you are part of that system of interconnection.
Sidebar: The Role of Religion in Sub-Saharan Communitarian
Thought
It is easy—but also wrong—to assume that the metaphysical outlook
described above is intrinsically “religious” in a way that is not true of
the prevailing metaphysical views of the contemporary West (Oladipo
2003). The relationship between religion and metaphysics is very
complicated, and it is entirely possible (and very common) for a person
to hold metaphysical beliefs that are rooted in a religion they don’t
practice or even know very much about, because those beliefs have
shaped their community and culture in ways that are not obviously
religious. Therefore, although communitarianism is not intrinsically
more “religious” than the other frameworks in this book, it is important
to understand that there are some major differences between the
traditional religions of Africa and the religions that have been
foundational to contemporary Europe and America. For this reason, we
are giving a brief background on sub-Saharan-African traditions—
which, like the Abrahamic traditions, have vital and significant
differences but nonetheless share some important assumptions about the
world.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
In discussing the three classically Western canonical frameworks
that we have looked at, we noted that each is compatible with a
religious or theistic worldview but can also be adhered to without any
belief in God or any religious commitments. Whereas this is true in
general, it is worth noting that discussions of “religion” in the context of
Euro-American ethics almost always mean the Abrahamic traditions:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although these three religions are not
interchangeable, they share many common beliefs about both human
nature and divine nature. Those shared beliefs serve as a metaphysical
baseline for most people raised in communities where Abrahamic
religions are the norm—even people who reject the religions themselves
or do not believe in God. Indeed, they are so widespread that it can be
hard to notice. But these religions differ sharply from the indigenous
religions of sub-Saharan Africa.
The indigenous traditions of sub-Saharan Africa begin with very
different metaphysical assumptions. One major difference concerns the
role of the divine in human knowledge: how much humans know about
the divine or spiritual world, and how they know it. Unlike the religions
of sub-Saharan Africa, the Abrahamic religions are all revealed
religions
: that is, they are based on teachings and insights that were
directly revealed
to human beings by God. Though most Jews,
Christians and Muslims cannot claim to have received a direct
revelation themselves, they nonetheless practice a religion based on
teachings that are understood to have been directly revealed to others.
The religions of sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, are not revealed
religions. Though divinities and spirits exist, they do not communicate
with humans in the same way. Because of this, they are not a direct
source of rules or teachings. Rather, rules and teachings are understood
to come from the community’s own wisdom and knowledge of the
world, which includes spirits (Gyekye 1987).
The second major difference, following from the first, concerns the
relationship between the spiritual realm and morality. One of the
philosophical problems with revealed religions—especially when God
is understood to be an enforcer—is that people can easily end up doing
the morally right thing to avoid punishment, rather than because it is
morally right. Therefore, in European contexts, many thinkers argue that
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
genuine humanism, a commitment to the value and significance of
humans and human life, is not compatible with religious belief. This
tension does not arise in sub-Saharan African traditions, because the
gods are not keepers of morality. Furthermore, the spirit world that
people enter after they die is not entirely distinct from the community of
the biologically living: ancestors remain a part of the human
community, not as gods but as cherished and respected people
(Ikuenobe 2006; Wiredu 1992a).
2.4.4
S
ELF-
R
EALIZATION IN
S
UB-
S
AHARAN
C
OMMUNITARIANISM
Although there are variations across traditions and communities, there are
significant commonalities in the idea of self-realization as it is found across
sub-Saharan Africa (Tangwa 2000; Wiredu 2009). The language used to
describe the achievement of this self-realization is nearly always rendered
in English as “becoming a person.” This conception of personhood does
have a descriptive element that captures the basic biological and
metaphysical features that are intrinsic to all persons; only someone with
these features is capable of attaining personhood in the normative sense
(Ikuenobe 2006). But sub-Saharan communitarianism is focused mainly on
the normative aspect of personhood, the realizing of a person’s potential for
excellence and humanity as a participant in their community (Gbadegesin
1991; Gyekye 1987; Ikuenobe 2006, Menkiti 2005; Wiredu 2009).
Achieving and maintaining self-realization is necessarily a long-term
project, because it involves absorbing values and taking on and upholding
adult responsibilities (Ikuenobe 2006; Menkiti 1984).
Self-realization is not, cannot be, something that an individual
accomplishes by herself. It is part of a community effort, and it is validated
by recognition from the community. The values are those of the community,
as is the responsibility of imparting them, although this responsibility is
shared with the individual in taking them on and in living accordingly
(Kaphagawani 2005; Menkiti 1984; Presbey 2002; Wiredu 2003). The
achievement is likewise shared with the community, insofar as the
successful development of a person is understood to be a communal project
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
that involves education, nurture, and role models (Hallen 2005; Ikuenobe
2006; Masolo 2010).
The achievement of self-realization is often celebrated, and frequently
brought about, by a ritual of training or process of being inducted into
community knowledge (Masolo 2010). Furthermore, complete self-
realization involves claiming specific social roles, such as parent or elder,
which impart specific social responsibilities to other individuals and to the
community as a whole. Like the language of being a person, these social
roles are not biologically descriptive: you are not a mother or a father just
because you contributed biological material to a child, but because you love
and provide for that child (Masolo 2010).
Sidebar: Agent-Centered vs. Patient-Centered Personhood
As you will see in chapter 4, using the concept of personhood to refer to
a distinctively human way of being valuable is not unique to sub-
Saharan Africa. Indeed, ethical description and reflection of any kind
almost always involves some working notion of personhood, even if
that notion is not consciously held. But for this very reason, it is
essential to distinguish the sub-Saharan conception of personhood from
the conception that most frequently appears in English-language work
in ethics (Behrens 2011). As noted above, the sub-Saharan concept of
personhood is focused on how someone can and should conduct
themself; in other words, it is agent-centered
. Living in this way means
honoring obligations to others, but the focus is on the individual
upholding the duties rather than the entities to whom they are owed
(Molefe 2020; Tangwa 2000). By contrast, a patient-centered
approach
to ethics means that the focus is on the rights and protections of
individual persons. In the United States, particularly in the context of
bioethics and medical ethics, the emphasis is often on the patient as a
holder of rights. The logical extension of patient-centered reasoning is
that moral agents should honor the moral patient’s rights, but the focus
remains on the patient rather than the agent.
2.4.5
U
BUNTU
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Ubuntu refers to a crucial human quality that is central to
communitarianism of southern and eastern Africa. (Gade 2011) The word
“ubuntu” comes from a family of Bantu languages spoken in southern
Africa and has close equivalents in several other languages across the
southern half of the continent (Idoniboye-Obu and Whetho 2013). The word
first appeared in writing in the mid-nineteenth century, but the principle has
been transmitted through oral traditions for centuries, in the form of
proverbs, myths, riddles and other narratives (Gade 2011; Kamwangamalu
1999). In the past several decades, ubuntu has been taken up by thinkers
and politicians in South Africa and Zimbabwe, in an attempt to articulate a
distinctly African political philosophy of humane justice. In this same
timeframe, it has also become popular among theologians and philosophers
from English-speaking countries who aspire to a more global approach to
ethics. On account of these two movements, the ubuntu tradition has gained
broad name recognition, but it has become increasingly ill defined the more
widely it has circulated (Gade 2011; Idoniboye-Obu and Whetho 2013).
Even when one focuses on indigenous sources, ubuntu is notoriously
difficult to define because it is understood to encompass so many
interrelated aspects and ways of being (Idoniboye-Obu and Whetho 2013;
Kamwangamalu 1999). In essence, to live with ubuntu means to engage in
the process of becoming and being human: to attend to and embrace the
interdependence of human existence, in the broader context of an
interdependent and harmonious universe. (Mkhize 2008) Ubuntu has been
described not only as a quality of character but as an ethic, an orientation, a
standard of judgment, and a mode of being (Gade 2011; Idoniboye-Obu and
Whetho 2013; Mkhize 2008; Munkaya and Motlhabi 2009). And indeed,
the claims that ubuntu makes on a person are so comprehensive that all of
these descriptions are potentially useful.
Because ubuntu is a human quality rather than an abstract principle, it
is not enough to believe in the values of ubuntu. Rather, it requires
continuous engagement with the ever-changing world around us, and
particularly the active, ongoing affirmation of the humanity of those around
us (Chimuka 2001). This affirmation extends not only to one’s immediate
community, but also to strangers and outsiders (Munkaya and Motlhabi
2009). Because a person living in accordance with ubuntu “cannot look on
the suffering of another and remain unaffected” (Mkhize 2008) in a thriving
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
ubuntu community, all challenges are met both communally and
cooperatively (Munkaya and Motlhab 2009).
There are differences within different branches of the ubuntu tradition
about whether or not humans have distinct metaphysical status or dignity
that set them apart from other creatures (Chimuka 2001; Mkhize 2008), but
the fact of being human means that has one particular obligations to other
members of the human community.
2.4.6
Y
ORÙBÁ
C
OMMUNITARIANISM
Yorùbá communitarianism is a tradition based in the region of western
Africa that is now Nigeria, along with neighboring parts of Togo and Benin.
Although the societies in this region operated under a variety of political
structures, nearly all of them were grounded in communitarianism.
Yorùbá communitarianism is noteworthy because of its distinctive
and well-documented epistemology (that is, its conception of knowledge.)
Instead of using vision as the metaphorical basis for understanding, Yorùbá
communitarianism instead takes hearing to be the foundation of how
understanding works (Oyěwùmí 1997). This approach to knowledge
emphasizes the relational nature of knowledge; whereas the underlying
model of learning-as-seeing invites us to imagine the thing we are learning
as wholly passive under our gaze, learning-as-hearing gives the thing
learned about an active role in the perceiver’s learning and emphasizes the
interaction and exchange between them. This epistemological approach also
underscores the relational, rather than biological, nature of social roles and
relationships, because an individual’s physical appearance is not taken to be
a significant indicator of who they are (Oyěwùmí 1997).
As a consequence of its conceptual rootedness in hearing, Yorùbá
communitarianism draws a sharp distinction between firsthand knowledge,
which an individual has seen and understood for herself, and all other kinds.
The language used to describe second-hand knowledge—whether it is
learned from a book, from tradition, or from a friend’s story over lunch—is
best translated as “agreeing to what one hears” (Hallen and Sodipo 1997).
While this conceptualization of knowledge might at first sound
radically individualist, it in fact underscores the extent to which community
members depend on one another to know and to understand. Furthermore, it
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
calls attention to the importance of relationships in shaping how
information and knowledge is exchanged: an individual who is known to be
conscientious and trustworthy will have a greater voice in shaping the
community’s shared understanding of a situation. For these reasons, being
an observant witness to one’s own experiences, being reliably thoughtful
and measured in understanding those experiences, and being careful and
precise in communicating them to others are all important elements of a
good character in Yorùbá communitarianism (Hallen 2005).
2.4.7
I
S THE
C
OMMUNITY AN
I
NTRINSIC
G
OOD OR AN
I
NSTRUMENTAL
O
NE?
There is no question that community is essential to achieving personhood in
sub-Saharan ethics. Simply put, there is no way to achieve self-realization
apart from a community. What is sometimes less clear, however, is the
exact role that communities play in securing an individual’s self-realization,
philosophically speaking. Is the community an end in itself, the necessary
basis of self-realization? Or is it a means to an end, a necessary path rather
than a destination? (Metz 2011).
Earlier studies of sub-Saharan communitarianism—perhaps aimed at
drawing the sharpest possible contrast with western liberal individualism
(Oyowe 2013)—all agreed that community was the center of sub-Saharan
value systems and that the value of the individual person is fundamentally
constituted by the community and conferred upon them by community
recognition (Menkiti 1984). In recent years, however, many scholars have
argued that, while individuals need community in order to achieve well-
being and self-realization, the true goal of sub-Saharan communitarianism
is to create good for all of the individuals in it.
2.4.8
M
ODALITIES
FOR
J
UDGMENT
Sub-Saharan communitarianism is not unique in understanding ethics to be
about how to live well with others. But the communitarian framework is
distinctive in the way that it positions us to understand individuals and their
development in terms of their communities. This distinctive community
focus is reflected in its modalities for judgment, which can be formulated as
a series of principles that are relational and community-oriented, grounded
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
in the authority of shared humanity and in the reality of our social nature.
This principle-based form of ethical reasoning bears some similarity to
deontology (recall in particular that deontology centers on duties to others.)
But the community-oriented, relational aspect of communitarianism
contrasts with an orientation, for many deontological theories, toward an
autonomous rational subject.
The Consensus Principle
The principle of consensus urges us to find common ground with others
who have a stake in a given issue. This principle is rooted in both the
knowledge theory and the social organization of communitarianism. As we
saw above in the Yorùbá tradition specifically, communitarianism considers
the tasks of knowing and understanding to be cooperative by necessity.
Similarly, Edward Wamala writes of one of the Bantu kingdoms in Uganda,
“Nobody has a monopoly on knowledge; everybody is in need of the
knowledge and opinions of others” (Wamala 2005, 438). Because
communitarianism presumes a strong model of collective participation, it
becomes possible to overcome the limits of our individual knowledge by
working together to understand and decide.
It should be noted that this principle does not assume uniformity of
opinion. In fact, it assumes the opposite—if everyone agreed, there would
be no need for further discussion. Furthermore, the principle of consensus
does not require a community member to surrender to the will of the group.
Rather, it demands that each community member participate in the group’s
deliberations.
Although this principle might at first strike you as irrelevant to at
least some kinds of ethical quandaries, further reflection from within the
communitarian framework will likely reveal that many problems that seem
at first to be yours alone can, in fact, be understood as shared with others in
your life—even if it’s only because of their relationship with you.
The Principle of Building Community
This principle directs us to nurture a sense of common cause and belonging
with others in our community. Because people exist in a state of mutual
dependence, we all benefit when those necessary ties are strengthened by
feelings of solidarity, trust, and belonging. In other words, it is easier to be
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
happy about helping others and to set aside your personal desires in order to
help another if you feel a sense of shared identity or community with those
others and if you trust that they will help you.
Honoring this principle can be as simple as making time for
conversation with others. It can also require more significant acts of mutual
aid. It can even be helpful to create new structures of mutual dependence,
such as a study group, to help strengthen your own and others’ commitment
to helping and being helped by others (Masolo 2010).
The Principle of Peace/Rehabilitation
According to this principle, an individual should always try, within
reasonable measure, to repair relationships with others (Mangena 2015).
This principle grows from the understanding that self-realization requires
that one have good relationships whenever possible. Maintaining good
relationships with others is, therefore, partly an act of self-interest—but
characteristically so for communitarianism, because pursuing one’s own
interest aligns with the good of the whole.
A further dimension of this principle is the importance of restorative
justice
, a form of justice that centers on making restitution to victims rather
than punishing wrongdoers. This principle depends on the cooperation of
everyone involved, including the willing participation of those harmed, and
often involves other community members as advisors and mediators
(Mangena 2015). Honoring this principle means making an effort to
rehabilitate wrongdoers, whenever it can be done without being unjust to
those who have been wronged. This principle leaves open the possibility of
cutting ties with a relentless wrongdoer; good relationships, after all, must
be mutual. But insofar as it is possible for an individual to better themself
and the other individual by remaining connected, one should seek to do so
(Molefe 2020; Wiredu 2009).
2.4.9
S
TRENGTHS AND
W
EAKNESSES
OF
C
OMMUNITARIANISM:
T
ENSIONS WITH THE
L
IBERAL
T
RADITION
Communitarianism is sometimes perceived as radically opposed to the
ideals of individualism that shape Western capitalist nations, requiring the
individual both to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the group or
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
to surrender their power of judgment to the group. Both of these
misunderstandings are rooted in the notion that a community is monolithic
and unchanging rather than a shared baseline of relationships and
understandings between different individuals (Gyekye 1987). They also
significantly exaggerate the differences between communitarianism and its
alternatives.
Although it is true that communitarianism places more community-
oriented demands on individuals than is necessarily the case in the other
frameworks in this chapter (though each of them includes more
communally oriented traditions), these demands are, broadly speaking,
similar to the constraints those frameworks place on a moral agent. Each of
those frameworks offers resources to help the moral actor balance the well-
being of others against her own well-being. Communitarianism is
distinctive in that it understands those constraints in terms of relational
commitments to others and shared values, and emphasizes the ways in
which an individual can pursue her own good through the common good.
But it is not unique in holding the moral agent responsible for the well-
being of others (Masolo 2010; Molefe 2020).
Although communitarianism posits the existence of a common good
that is of meaningful benefit to everyone in the community, critics have
argued that it makes the individual “a mere means to society’s welfare”
(Tshivhase 2011). In particular, communitarianism’s focus on self-
realization is sometimes criticized as stifling or coercive to the individual.
Because self-realization is calibrated to community norms and requires an
individual to succeed according to collectively recognized categories of
achievement, it can create conformity or punish those who are unwilling or
unable to acquiesce to social expectations (Presbey 2002). This description
of communitarianism has been disputed on the grounds that it ignores the
individualism and competitive spirit that can develop in the context of
mutual belonging and shared norms (Wariboko 2020).
Communitarianism has also been criticized for preserving unjust
power imbalances. Because of elders’ high social standing in
communitarian societies even after their biological deaths, sub-Saharan
communitarianism is sometimes said to promote an “epistemological
monopoly of the old over the young” (Kaphagawani 2006). Furthermore,
many of the attainments of personhood are easier to achieve if you are
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
wealthy and of high social standing, and especially if you are male. Since
self-realization relies on recognition from within one’s group, it is
structured in a way that offers fewer rewards to those with private, less
visible social roles. If self-realization is equated in some way with
community standing, then lower standing in the community becomes its
own confirmation of being less worthy (Oyowe 2013). This has led some of
sub-Saharan communitarianism’s fiercest critics to conclude that the sub-
Saharan paradigm of self-realization is fundamentally incompatible with the
idea that all persons are morally equal (Oyowe 2013) and that communities
organized around this form of self-realization are irreparably unjust.
Story Point: “The Regression Test,” by Wole Talabi
I’m not sure if A. I.s can believe anything and I’m not supposed
to ask her questions about such things, but that’s what the
human control is for, right? To ask questions that the other A.
I.s would never think to ask, to force this electronic
extrapolation of my mother into untested territory and see if the
simulated thought matrix holds up or breaks down. “Don’t tell
me what you think. Tell me what you believe.”
What are the things about us that make us distinctly ourselves? Can a
self continue to exist, once its care relationships and community are gone?
These questions are, in some respects, very literal in “The Regression Test.”
Titilope, our narrator, participates in the titular test by cross-examining an
AI copy of her long-deceased mother Olusola—or “memrionic,” as these AI
copies are called—in order to determine whether it still reflects the person
her mother was. What can a human know about a memrionically preserved
person that the memrionic itself cannot? “The Regression Test” directs our
attention away from the what and toward the how: how the menrionic’s
memories and reasoning do and don’t reflect the ways of Olusola’s knowing
and being and her relationships with and within their community, and how
Titilope herself continues to know and relate to the beloved and
complicated person who was so important to her, even though that person is
gone.
2.5
UTILITARIANISM
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Utilitarianism
is an approach to ethics organized around the idea of
happiness. Like virtue ethics, utilitarianism is an outcome-based approach
to ethics that assumes that human beings are motivated by the desire to be
happy. Building on the basic assumption that humans are motivated by
happiness
, utilitarians argue that when it comes to determining how we
should act, we should first and foremost consider what kinds of actions
bring about the most happiness for the greatest number of people. This is
known as the principle of utility
or the greatest happiness principle
.
2.5.1
O
VERVIEW
OF
U
TILITARIANISM
Maximizing happiness sounds great, but in order to make that happen, it’s
necessary to have a definition of happiness that works for everyone who is
impacted. So, what is happiness? One of the most well-known proponents
of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, supplied a definition of happiness within
his own definition of utilitarianism, defining it as follows:
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the
Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as
they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the
reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence
of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure. (Mill 2002,
239)
What Mill was suggesting is that pleasure and pain are what matter in
measuring happiness. Happiness here refers to a state of mind that can be
determined on the basis of how people interpret their experiences or how
they assess the amount of pleasure found in a person or community. Later
philosophers have debated what exactly counts as pleasure, whether the
concept of pleasure alone is enough to describe the intrinsic value that
should be maximized, and what the critical value is otherwise (Feldman
1997), but all utilitarians agree that there is some
form of basic good that
should be promoted as much as possible.
Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, which is a category of
ethical theories that focuses primarily or solely on consequences in
determining the moral worth of an action. (Virtue ethics is also technically
consequentialist because it is focused on outcomes, though its focus on
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
character means it is not often categorized that way.) However, the choice
to focus on consequences still leaves open a major question: whose
consequences should be considered? Should we strive to create positive
outcomes for everyone, or just for a chosen few? Different forms of
consequentialism answer this question differently. According to ethical
egoism, each person should prioritize their own well-being over others’.
According to ethical altruism, each person should improve others’ well-
being without regard to their own. In contrast to both of these, utilitarianism
requires that everyone’s well-being counts equally; as such, the individual
ought to reason about their own happiness in the same way that they ought
to reason about the well-being of others. This mode of reasoning is
sometimes referred to as “agent-neutral” (Parfit 1984, 27) because the agent
does not put herself in a special category. Everyone, no matter their position
in life, counts as one.
One of the strengths of utilitarianism is that it strives to be universal,
and it does so because, in principle, it presupposes that all individuals are of
equal worth. This is called the principle of equality. No one person’s
happiness is more important than another’s. Those who advocate for a
utilitarian framework, historically, have also been deeply concerned with
the freedom of the individual and the creation of a just social structure in
which individuals can pursue happiness without fear.
Utilitarianism is an incredibly influential theory with broad appeal
because of its apparent objectivity and concern for equality. We say
“apparent” because achieving complete objectivity is impossible when
making value determinations. It may be the case that the central formula of
utilitarianism is purely impartial in its abstract form, before key parameters
are assigned. But it is impossible to apply the calculation until the
parameters have been determined, and therefore determining those
parameters necessarily involves making important moral judgments.
Imagine, for example, that you work for a college preparatory program for
high school students and that you are in charge of awarding full
scholarships to a small number of admitted students, on utilitarian
principles. What parameters should be used to determine who should get
the scholarships? Do you select the students whose academic work is
strongest, the ones who seem most likely to benefit from the prep course, or
the ones whose financial need is greatest? If you decide to use a
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
combination of these three (and possibly other worthy parameters), how do
you determine an appropriate balance between them, and how do you
implement that balance? And once you have decided what kind of
parameters you will use, how do you measure them in a way that can be
meaningfully compared among all the students? Keep in mind that even
numerically objective metrics like grade point average or household income
are not necessarily good proxies for the things you are trying to measure
and compare: different high schools have different academic standards and
opportunities, and a family’s annual income doesn’t capture important
aspects of their financial reality, such as meeting ongoing medical expenses.
As even this brief and simplified example shows, utilitarian decision
making always requires the moral agent to make value judgments along the
way, even though those value judgments are aimed at achieving a just and
impartial outcome. If you hear someone calling utilitarianism “objective,”
it’s because they are ignoring (or have not noticed) that crucial part of the
utilitarian process.
To get a group of reasoners to agree on the merits of utilitarianism’s
central formula is, by itself, significant: it means that the group has agreed
that the consequences of voluntary actions is what matters in ethics, and
that the best way to reach agreement about how to act lies in assessing what
brings about the most happiness for the most people. And even then,
reasoners who share these presuppositions may still disagree sharply with
one another about foundational ethical ideas (for example, what counts as
pleasure and pain?), to the point that they cannot find common ground. As
with the other ethical frameworks, the principles of utilitarianism constitute
a common language, but this doesn’t mean that all the people speaking this
language are saying the same thing.
2.5.2
C
LASSICAL
U
TILITARIANISM
Because John Stuart Mill ([1859] 2002) and Jeremy Bentham ([1789] 1996)
are generally understood to be the first thinkers to develop systematic
accounts of utilitarianism; they are sometimes referred to as classical
utilitarians. Mill and Bentham—both nineteenth-century British
philosophers—developed theories of ethics that could then be used to
critically assess and inform law and social policy (Driver 2014).
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Many early utilitarian thinkers thought of ethics as a science, in the
sense of being a systematic study that pertains to knowledge. But even
though they adopted an approach to ethics that was similar to other human
sciences like psychology or sociology, they understood their field of study
to involve a different kind of critical practice. Whereas other fields use
empirical evidence of human actions to describe what human behavior is
like more generally, ethics examines empirical evidence in order to
understand norms of action: what “ought” to be the case, or what is “right.”
Henry Sidgwick (Sidgwick [1874] 1981), another important early utilitarian
thinker who defended and built upon the ideas of Mill and Bentham,
considered the study of ethics to be similar to that of politics: politics was,
in his view, a science that deals with how communities ought to be
structured and what is right for society as a whole. Ethics, to Sidgwick, is
also aimed at evaluating what is right, although instead of focusing on
communities, it considers the voluntary actions of individuals.
Because it defines the good in terms of pleasure and pain, classical
utilitarianism is sometimes associated with what is known as ethical
hedonism. The concept of hedonism (from hēdonē
, the Greek word for
“pleasure”) is sometimes defined as excessive self-indulgence and the
pursuit of pleasure and is understood to be negative. However, in the
context of ethical theory, hedonism is simply the belief that pleasure is the
highest good and proper aim of human life, and that all the basic goods of
human life can be understood as forms of pleasure.
Though ethical hedonism goes at least as far back as ancient Greece,
classical utilitarianism and its successors are relatively recent compared to
the other traditions we examine in this chapter. Utilitarianism, as an ethical
framework, developed mostly in England growing out of the developments
in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual tradition,
including a belief in the possibility of objectivity and a commitment to
empiricism. Because this same intellectual tradition still serves as a baseline
for many people in the English-speaking world and in other places
influenced by English culture, utilitarianism can appear as if it makes no
metaphysical assumptions at all. In fact, it would be more accurate to say
that utilitarianism rests on the same assumptions about knowledge and
action that many of us in the English-speaking world still take for granted.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
2.5.3
P
REFERENCE
U
TILITARIANISM
Preference utilitarianism is typically associated with the work of British
philosopher R. M. Hare (1981), who was strongly influenced by Kant as
well as by classical utilitarianism. Hare arrived at his theory through trying
to answer a meta-ethical question: What kind of statement is a moral
statement? In Hare’s view, moral statements are prescriptive
, expressing a
commitment to a certain course of action (e.g., it would be logically
inconsistent for a person to sincerely say “I ought not to lie” and then to
lie). He further argued, following Kant, that they are also universalizable
(e.g., a moral claim of “I ought to lie to you” in a given situation also
implies “you ought to lie to me” if all the relevant details of the situation
were the same but I was in your position and you were in mine, mentally as
well as physically). The combination of prescriptiveness and
universalizability led Hare to a standard for evaluating moral statements: To
claim that we ought to do something, we must be willing to make the same
claim from the perspectives of everyone affected. This, Hare argued, leads
to a utilitarian decision procedure in which we weigh these individuals’
perspectives against one another. By considering what each stakeholder
would have chosen based on their personal desires and values, this
procedure treats preference satisfaction
as the primary good.
Promoting pleasure is still important to a preference utilitarian. If we
assume that, all else being the same, a person would rather have more
pleasure than less pleasure by definition, then pleasure falls under the
category of a person’s immediate preferences: their present wishes for their
present self, and their future wishes for their future self. But preference
utilitarianism also emphasizes the importance of a person’s present wishes
for their future self. To understand how these are meaningfully different,
consider the tale of the epic hero Ulysses (also called Odysseus), who
survived the deathly song of the Sirens while sailing home after war. The
Sirens’ enthralling song would turn a person suicidally irrational as long as
they heard it, but it was also said to contain divine wisdom. Ulysses wished
to hear the song but didn’t want to die in the process. He therefore ordered
his crew to plug their own ears and tie him to the mast, and to ignore any
orders to untie him until they had made it safely past the Sirens. As
predicted, the influence of the song gave Ulysses a desperate desire to leap
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
overboard, and he began to demand his release. But his crew followed his
previous orders to leave him bound—they sacrificed the preferences he
developed while enthralled in order to fulfill the preferences that he had
expressed beforehand. This tale lends the name to present-day psychiatric
Ulysses contracts
. Suppose that a patient is receiving treatment for a
condition. The patient wants their future self to complete the course of
treatment but anticipates that a relapse might cause their future self to try
quitting treatment early. A Ulysses contract would allow the current
preference for continuing treatment to override the future preference for
stopping (Spellecy 2003).
Another category considered in preference utilitarianism is external
preferences
, preferences about things outside of the preference-holder’s
experience. For instance, suppose I prefer for my friends not to gossip about
me. Such gossip could make me suffer directly if I find out about it, or
indirectly if it causes people to treat me worse. But it is possible for my
preference to be violated without affecting my experience at all; for
example, a friend slanders me in my absence to someone I will never meet.
Likewise, people often have wishes for what will happen to their body and
possessions after they die, even though they will not be around to witness
the outcome. Preference utilitarianism gives these wishes direct moral
weight.
One of the most influential applications of preference utilitarianism is
Singer’s work on bioethics (1994). Classical utilitarianism struggles to
accommodate the fact that people tend to view murder, even painlessly
killing a miserable person or sacrificing one person to benefit several other
people, as almost always immoral. For Singer, beings who are capable of
thinking about their own future state, such as adult humans and other great
apes, usually have a very strong preference to keep living; a general
guideline against killing them is useful because doing so would typically
violate their preferences so severely that the violation would outweigh
anything that would be gained from the act.
2.5.4
V
OLUNTARY
A
CTION
All four frameworks acknowledge the difference between voluntary and
involuntary actions, but deontology and utilitarianism both treat voluntary
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
action as much more morally significant. Yet utilitarianism is particularly
geared toward releasing moral actors from responsibility for involuntary
actions.
To understand what voluntary action is, consider the following.
Imagine that you are skiing down a mountain and suddenly hit a bump and
tumble to the ground. You are not badly hurt, so you begin to get up. Then
another skier notices you but cannot stop. In order to avoid running into
you, the skier quickly steers away from your direction, failing to notice a
tree nearby. That skier hits the tree and is knocked unconscious. When they
awake they have no memory of who they are, and are forever changed by
the experience. In such a situation, who is to blame for the other skier’s
accident? The simple answer to this question, according to utilitarian logic,
is that although you were technically the cause for the other person’s injury,
you did nothing wrong. You did not choose to fall, nor did you choose to
distract the other skier and cause them to become injured. Now, there is
always the possibility that you acted in an unethical way; for example, you
might have failed to wait long enough before heading down the mountain,
or if you were an amateur you might have been trying to impress your
friends by going down a slope that was beyond your ability. But even then,
the utilitarian might argue that when you—and the person you caused to fall
—decided to go skiing that day, you both accepted certain risks that come
with skiing in a public environment. By this reasoning, although it is
unfortunate, and even tragic, that a person was injured as a result of your
fall, you are not morally to blame.
At first, it might seem like this approach to ethics is limited because it
focuses solely on an individual actor and the results of particular decisions
without considering how society affects decision making. Isn’t it the case,
one might point out, that in many ways society determines the kinds of
choices we make and what is acceptable and what isn’t? After all, who is to
say that skiing is an acceptable risk to take? What about drinking heavily?
What about participating in a clinical trial? What about selling stolen goods
on Craigslist? What about buying stolen goods on Craigslist? What about
attending a contentious protest?
You may find it confusing that an ethical framework organized
around consequences would be so concerned with what a moral actor has
chosen (or not chosen) to do. But this focus on voluntary vs. involuntary
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
action makes more sense in light of how utilitarianism conceptualizes
human beings, and what makes it possible for us to be moral at all.
Utilitarianism presumes that human beings are capable, not only of
reasoning about how to live and act but also of communicating their
reasoning process to others. These capacities are what make it possible for
us to talk as a society about why some actions are justified and others are
not (and, as such, make the judicial process possible.) For more on this see
chapter 4, where we discuss Locke and his notion of personal identity.
2.5.5
M
ODALITIES FOR
J
UDGMENT
The central formula for utilitarianism, known as the principle of utility, is
often presented as a universal, objective standard that can be used to
determine the moral worth of human action. But as we have seen above, it
is always necessary to make some basic value determinations first.
The key parameters in utilitarianism can be understood when we ask
the following:
Who
comprises the group whose well-being is under consideration?
After all, everyone who is part of the calculation may not actually
benefit from a given utilitarian decision. There are usually some, and
often many, in this group who will pay a price to contribute to the
overall net good of everyone considered.
What
is the value, or cluster of values, that is being used to define
good/happiness/utility? For example, in classical utilitarianism, pleasure
is the most important factor in considering happiness. But what counts
as pleasure, and what happens when different people experience
different sorts of utility from the same kinds of actions or objects?
When
is the measure of success being taken? The calculation of
consequences often looks different depending on whether you are
looking ahead six weeks, or six months, or six years, or six decades.
There is no easy way to decide what the “right” answers are for these
categories in a universal sense, although there are almost always better and
worse answers under particular conditions. Disagreements, therefore,
cannot simply be a matter of miscalculating the consequences. When it
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
comes to evaluating actions, people often have different points at which
they begin their analysis with different ideas about who, what, and when.
The “Who”
There are two questions here. One is the question of who fits in, and the
other is the question of whether it is appropriate to consider everyone as
equal to one another.
Here are some concrete examples of situations in which the “who” is
contested:
Factory farming
: Who matters, and how much? Consumers, who want
to spend less, or want a particular variety or quality? Vendors and
ranchers, who provide the meat? Processing plant workers, who often
suffer from the hazardous conditions typical to meat processing plants?
Stock animals, who become the meat?
Organ donation
: Who matters, and how much? How should the cost to
the person donating an organ be weighed against the benefit to the
person receiving it? What sort of incentives are fair or appropriate to
offer to donors? How will the possibility of an organ transplant change
the family dynamics of a person who needs one, given that family
members are often the best matches? A shift in organ donation policy
doesn’t just affect patients and doctors. It also affects family members
and friends of patients. Furthermore, it affects people who are ill and are
considering treatment, or who might be eligible for treatment only under
certain conditions. An analysis that looks only at actual patients could
be wildly skewed by failing to consider potential patients (Purtill 2018).
Traffic and surveillance cameras
: Who should be watched with traffic
cameras? Who is being protected? What is the cost of protecting them,
and who bears it? Cameras are becoming more common in public,
private, and semiprivate workplaces and spaces. Cameras can
potentially reduce the number of traffic accidents by catching more
speeders (Vincent 2018); however, these same tools make it easier for
governments, as well as other organizations and entities, to surveil.
In each of these examples, there are people who will argue that the
other side has no moral standing: that the well-being of animals is less
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
important than that of humans, or that people who are caught breaking the
law are less entitled to its protections. Where utilitarians are likely to differ,
however, is in the degree
of importance that they assign to the significance
of the welfare of these entities as compared to a person. For instance,
according to some preference utilitarians like Singer (1994), fetuses and
many animals lack the ability to think about the future and therefore have
preferences only about their immediate experience, so decisions about
killing them are less weighty than decisions about killing adult humans with
a host of wishes about their own future lives. The point, however, is that the
situation may shift dramatically when we consider whose well-being is
being considered and why. Most decisions affect far more people than it
might first appear.
The “What”
Even when you consider one person in isolation, it is difficult to pin down
what constitutes maximizing their happiness when you consider all the
different kinds of things that might count. For instance, consider the
satisfaction of finally getting a challenging program to compile, run, and
produce useful output; the joy of reading a clear and well-presented
explanation; or the pleasure of playing a well-crafted and engaging game.
Most utilitarians would agree that these are all ethically positive
experiences, but how do we value them in comparison to each other. For
example, how many hours of gaming is it worth to finish your final project?
Can these two things be meaningfully compared at all?
The question of comparability was a point of disagreement between
the founding figures of utilitarianism. Mill contended that “higher”
pleasures such as poetry are intrinsically different and more worthwhile
than “lower” pleasures like eating, whereas his predecessor Bentham made
no such distinction, treating pleasure solely as a matter of quantity rather
than quality. Preference utilitarians leave it up to the individual affected to
choose what they value most.
The “When”
The question of timing is especially important when we are trying to
determine how suffering is measured against utility. To what extent should
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
we accept suffering now if it will create greater happiness later on? What
about immediate happiness in exchange for later suffering?
Consequences of an action can reach far into the future, and
consequences farther into the future become harder to predict. To deal with
this, people have a bias toward placing greater importance on the
consequences that come sooner, a phenomenon that economists call
discounting
. Discounting is also invoked on purpose in sequential-decision-
making artificial intelligence (AI), to make it computationally possible for
an agent to reason about an infinitely long future. But prioritizing sooner
outcomes can cause trouble when there is a large difference between the
short-term and long-term impacts. In the case of climate change, for
example, its future effects could be drastic and damaging, but this
knowledge rarely impacts individual, corporate, or societal decision making
to a degree that is proportionate to the damage that we know it will do.
2.5.6
C
ALCULATING
G
OOD
O
UTCOMES
Once we have a clear theory about what values matter and for whom, it is
still challenging to put the theory into practice. To make a decision with the
best possible consequences, we have to calculate what those consequences
are. The complexity of filtering through many options that could affect
many people in many ways, plus our cognitive biases and the limited
amount of information available to us, make the calculation process
difficult and inevitably imperfect. If everyone attempted a thorough
calculation every time they acted, it would leave them with little time to go
about their lives, and they would often calculate poorly
; the end result
would not be “the greatest good for the greatest number” at all!
Fortunately, utilitarianism does not require that each person
individually try to be an ideal utilitarian decision maker; in fact, it can
acknowledge the value of rule following. Unlike in deontology, the rules in
utilitarianism are “rules of thumb” rather than fundamental moral laws,
bypassing the sometimes necessary but laborious and error-prone
calculation process by presenting courses of action that tend to produce a
good outcome much of the time.
Utilitarian perspectives differ on the level at which most of our
evaluations should take place. They exist on a spectrum from act
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
utilitarianism
, which evaluates each action on its individual consequences,
to rule utilitarianism
, which posits that we should follow rules chosen to
bring about the greatest overall good. Hare’s account (1981) famously calls
for a “two-level” model of moral evaluation: We should rely on general,
intuitive principles for most everyday decision making and deploy critical
reasoning to analyze the specifics of a situation in which special
circumstances occur, such as a conflict between intuitive principles.
2.5.7
S
TRENGTHS AND
W
EAKNESSES OF
U
TILITARIANISM:
D
OES
E
VERYONE
R
EALLY
C
OUNT AS
O
NE?
Sometimes, the questions of “who? ” and “how much? ” are inseparable.
For example, if you are at war, are you obligated to consider the citizens of
the opposing country in your calculations? How should you weigh their
well-being, compared to that of your fellow citizens?
But even if we stick within our own society, should people who are
exceptionally beloved or talented matter more than “ordinary” people?
Most utilitarians would agree that some people do deserve special
consideration but might disagree about the reasons for such considerations.
Consider, for instance, the proposition that people with special talents are in
a better position to contribute to overall well-being. Do these people
deserve special consideration? That is, should we value the life of a virtuoso
musician, a promising medical researcher, or a record-breaking athlete more
than the life of an ordinary person? This approach involves broadening the
scope of “the greatest number” to include all present and future people who
might be affected by the public contributions these individuals make. For
many utilitarians, this is a compelling reason to argue that not every
individual should be counted exactly the same.
The other reason offered for prioritizing some people over others is
relational—that is, it concerns the individual reasoner’s personal
relationship to those who are affected by the decision. Is it acceptable to
privilege people in your own group? The principle of equality demands that
we answer “no” to this question. And yet the answer gets more complicated
when you consider the details. Should family members and close friends
matter the same as strangers? What about people who share your worldview
and who probably seem to you to have a more honest and accurate
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
understanding of reality? Should you show preference for people to whom
you are financially bound—bosses, employers, clients, or stockholders? If
not, how can one get the necessary distance to weigh them appropriately?
Giving some individuals special consideration softens the purely
agent-neutral approach found in more strictly egalitarian forms of
utilitarianism. It bears some similarity to the deontological notion of
particular duties or obligations.
Sidebar: Utilitarianism and Machine Learning
Although artificial intelligence seems to be progressing quickly, we are
still some distance away (long or short, depending on whom you listen
to) from fully automated self-driving cars and self-conscious artificial
agents. Nonetheless, people are already asking questions and
developing protocols for building ethics into artificial intelligence (Yu et
al. 2018). Now that we know something about utilitarianism, let us
consider the question: Can a machine be taught utilitarianism?
As we have seen, utilitarianism is based on maximizing some form
of welfare, whether promoting pleasure and preventing suffering in
classical utilitarianism, or fulfilling a wider variety of desires in
preference utilitarianism. Aside from the question of whether a robot
itself can have interests that should be taken into account, is it possible
to program a robot to reason about furthering humans’ interests? Is it
possible to equip a robot with a utilitarian framework for decision
making?
One of the major issues that arises when this is attempted concerns
the fact that decision-making frameworks must rely on models. This
means that programmers must know something about ethical dilemmas
and also about what kinds of actions count as ethical. In order to
identify cases in which ethical dilemmas arise, moral perception is
needed. Before we can program moral perception into artificial beings,
we need to consider the limits of human perception. For instance,
imagine that you are walking down the street and you see a man attack
an old woman, grab her purse, and shove her to the ground. You witness
this act and feel bad for the old woman but now the man is running
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
toward you. What do you do? Are you responsible for risking your own
safety and trying to stop this man? Minimally, should you call for help?
Now imagine a futuristic version of the scenario where a robot is in
the same situation and has the capacity to either (1) taze or somehow
injure the robber or (2) set off a siren for the police. Is the robot morally
responsible to act in a certain way? When we consider the human agent
in the situation, it seems necessary to take into account the risks
involved if that person were to try and stop the robber using physical
violence. The robot’s integrity might be at stake—in other words, it
might be injured or harmed in some way—but does it have a concern
for its own well-being? If it was built to have concern for its well-being,
should that well-being be considered over the loss of property for the
old woman? Note that these are not new questions and are famously
addressed in I, Robot
by Isaac Asimov (Asimov 1950).
Whenever we describe ethical dilemmas, we almost always fit in
information that might be irrelevant to a robot. Does it matter that the
victim was an “old woman”? What if the victim was a younger, athletic-
looking person? Would you feel the same obligation to act? Or would
the siren be sufficient? What if it was an old woman stealing the wallet
out of a young man’s suit coat? Should the robot injure the old woman,
or set off a siren?
Before machines can make moral decisions we need to be clear
about all the factors that we as human beings might consider when we
are making an ethical judgment. Is there some way to come to
agreement about, for instance, which kind of people require assistance
and which kind of people can fend for themselves? Are we willing to let
a machine make these judgments, or alternatively, simplify them into
rule-of-thumb principles and program those principles into a machine?
Who is responsible when that machine makes a choice that society
deems unethical? Would it be the programmer? Or the company that
pays and directs the work of the programmer? If it is the company’s
responsibility, can we evaluate the company as an ethical agent? Or are
we pushing the question of ethics to the legal sphere? Insofar as a
programmer is voluntarily programming machines to behave in certain
ways, and insofar as those behaviors hurt others, couldn’t we hold the
individual programmer (or team) morally responsible? What about the
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
company? Lots of groups are looking at questions like these; for
example, refer to the survey of Fjeld et al. (2020).
Story Point: “Message in a Bottle,” by Nalo Hopkinson
“This fucking project better have been worth it.”
“Message in a Bottle” follows the main character, Greg, in his quest
to understand value and gain success as an artist. The story communicates
the risks and challenges of utilitarianism: the difficulty of reasoning
impartially about what is valuable, or how best to distribute that valuable
thing; the very real trade-offs that come with trying to encompass everyone
(whatever “everyone” means) in one’s determinations about who deserves
value or recognition; and the challenge of conceptualizing value in an
enduring way, as a future-oriented form of ethical reasoning demands.
2.6
CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS IN
ETHICS
The four frameworks discussed above have endured and remained
influential, in large part, because of their explanatory power: they equip us
to perceive and make sense of the world even through a variety of changing
conditions and circumstances.
Yet in the past 75–100 years, these frameworks have come under
considerable criticism by people who perceive them to be significantly
inadequate, or even actively harmful. In some cases, these critics point to
long-standing failures of these frameworks that have only recently gained
traction in public discourse. In other cases, critics of the traditional
frameworks argue that the dramatic technological shifts of the last century
have created the need for new ways to understand how to live and act well
in our transformed and still-transforming world.
This section briefly introduces three of these new approaches to ethics
that have emerged in the past 75 years. These new approaches all draw on
the older traditions described above, as well as critiquing them.
2.6.1
R
ESPONSIBILITY
E
THICS
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
All ethical frameworks are grounded in some account of what human
beings are and what kinds of action we are capable of. Deontology and
utilitarianism in particular lend themselves to understanding human beings
primarily as actors, whether as knowers, doers, creators, or lawmakers. In
contrast to these more action-centered approaches, responsibility ethics is
an approach to ethical reasoning that begins with the notion that human
beings are not only or even primarily acting beings but are beings that are
constantly reacting—responding—to powers, forces, and events that are
beyond our control. The scale and scope of moral action therefore cannot be
confined to individuals as intentional actors.
In fact, as responsibility theorists point out, the emphasis on human
action, along with the attitude of optimism that it breeds with respect to
human power and potentiality, has amounted to humans acting in
unrestrained ways in the world, without sufficient attention to the wider
system of forces, events and beings of which we are a part. This attitude has
led to limitless industrialization and production of resources that is now
putting the future of humanity at risk. But though the future we have
created for ourselves is bleak, it is not cause for despair; rather, it’s a
starting point for thinking about how we can act responsibly in a complex
and interconnected world.
Responsibility ethics is an approach that developed in religious ethics
in the wake of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of nearly 11 million
people by the Third Reich (primarily Jews, but also Catholics, LGBTQ
people, Romani, and political dissidents of all stripes) during World War II.
In the years after the war, Christian and Jewish thinkers alike concluded that
new approaches were needed to reckon with the previously unthinkable
scope and scale of that event. They observed that such efficient,
bureaucratized slaughter was possible only because of recent technological
developments, which made both the transportation and killing more
efficient and which enabled both soldiers and civil servants to play a role in
the killings without having to confront their own actions directly. A few
decades later, German Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas turned the core
insights of responsibility ethics toward the issue of environmental
degradation, arguing that humankind’s reckless exploitation and destruction
of the natural world was similarly both life-threatening and morally
disastrous (Jonas 1984).
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Responsibility ethics contends that the major Western approaches to
ethics—deontology, virtue ethics and utilitarianism—are not sufficiently
attuned to how large, complex, and interdependent the world is. These other
approaches, according to responsibility ethics, understand cause and effect
in a narrow and limited way. In some cases, the limitation is about focusing
only on one’s community or one’s immediate environment; in other cases,
it’s about focusing on a specific sphere of concern (such as economics or
health) and excluding other interrelated spheres from consideration. But
either kind of limitation necessarily simplifies the problems we perceive.
And when our formulation of a problem is too simple and too narrow, it is
impossible to act in a truly responsible way.
Because of the complexity of the systems we inhabit, we rarely know
the full scope of our actions. In this way, responsibility ethics offers a
particularly sharp critique of utilitarianism—not because its aims are bad
but because the idea that we could meaningfully anticipate the outcomes of
our actions is, according to its premises, both naive and unrealistic.
The framework of responsibility ethics could, in principle, be useful
at any moment in history. But its concerns are made more urgent by recent
developments in technology, both by increasing our ability to act and by
making it even harder for us to perceive or understand the scope of the
impact that our actions have. Technologies of all kinds extend our ability to
act in the world, whether by protecting our bodies, making it easier for us to
accomplish certain tasks, or amplifying the effects of the actions we take. In
particular, the rapid pace of technological development in the last 150 years
has dramatically extended our ability to impact the world, both as
individual actors and as societies. This expansion of our ability to act has
far outpaced our ability to adapt to an appropriate understanding of our own
power. Even if we were already good at understanding the impacts of our
actions, and even if we already took seriously the task of understanding the
full scope of impact our actions have, it would be difficult to adjust to the
changes. But in fact we haven’t done a great job of paying attention in the
past.
Some of the concerns of responsibility ethics are made more urgent
by informational and computing technologies in particular because these
technologies make it easy to put ourselves at a remove from the impacts of
our actions, or even from the fact that we ourselves are the ones doing it.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
This enhanced ability to act at a distance is playing out at multiple levels of
society. Many of these new developments would be classified and
celebrated as advances, though through the lens of responsibility ethics it
becomes clear that they also include great risks. Tele-medicine enables
doctors to “see” patients at a distance and even perform remote surgeries;
surveillance technology and weaponized drones have allowed military
personnel and their contractors to distance themselves from the carnage of
war.
In order to cope with this burden of responsibility, and the difficulty
of being responsible under these circumstances, responsibility ethics offers
several core principles and strategies. The first is accountability to all life.
This accountability can be clarified by breaking it into two dimensions:
responsibility for
our actions, and responsibility to
living beings and to the
environment.
Another key strategy, proposed by philosopher Hans Jonas, is the
“heuristics of fear,” a strategy of thought that might be described as a more
pessimistic form of utilitarianism. The heuristics of fear requires that, when
confronted with a choice, we assume that the worst of all possible future
scenarios is what will come about as a result of whatever it is we do.
Anticipating these bad outcomes, Jonas argues, will prompt us to be
cautious. By choosing our course of action based on the bleakest possible
scenario, we deliberately choose to not to take full advantage of our own
power to change the world. We also accept responsibility for trying to make
the world better, instead of assuming that it will fix itself for us.
Story Point: “Codename: Delphi,” by Linda Nagata
It was
a kid. The battle AI estimated a male, fourteen years old.
It didn’t matter. The boy was targeting Valdez and that made
him the enemy.
“Take the shot.”
Karin sits behind a desk all day, but her work is life-or-death: she is a
handler for soldiers in battle, keeping track of battlefield data and advising
them accordingly. Karin is responsible for keeping her soldiers alive, and
often that responsibility involves making sure they kill their enemies and
destroy their resources. Both Karin and her soldiers maintain a tight focus
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
on immediate goals and concerns. They do not even make reference to the
larger war, much less debate the merits of its purpose or the ethical
complexities of fighting an enemy that has far fewer technological and
defensive resources. The soldiers don’t have time for these questions—and
neither, notably, does Karin, who is physically safe and distant but
emotionally and experientially close. By taking us through one harrowing
shift with Karin, “Codename: Delphi” not only calls our attention to some
of the ways that technology extends our ability to act; it also sheds light on
how and why it is so difficult to take that extended power seriously, and
why it is urgent that we do so.
2.6.2
F
EMINIST
E
THICS
As we have shown, the major ethical traditions have all been criticized for
preserving and replicating power imbalances. The structures that shape our
world were, by and large, imagined and implemented by the people who
already had leisure, resources, and social power. As a result, the voices and
perspectives of the least powerful and cared-for in society have largely been
excluded from how they were created and applied. Though all the
frameworks described above all seek to protect (and even elevate) those less
powerful members of society, their notions of how to accomplish this are
still mostly limited to how powerful people think about it; the perspectives
and insights of the less powerful themselves are largely excluded. This
limitation, critics argue, makes these frameworks insufficient to combat
“the pattern, widespread across cultures and history, that distributes power
asymmetrically to favor men over women, creating and maintaining social
institutions and practices that systematically put men’s interests and
preoccupations ahead of women’s” (Lindemann 2019, 10).
Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that aims to repair the
ramifications of this long-term exclusion by focusing on the lives,
experiences, and concerns of women and other disempowered persons. It
frequently centers emotional ties and empathy, not only as goods in
themselves but also as sources (often unacknowledged by traditional
Western ethics) for our reasoning about others (Gilligan 1993; Held 2014).
Rather than offering a single unified theory of ethics, feminist ethics offers
“a way of doing
ethics” (Lindemann 2019) shaped by “the needs of those
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
one cares for in relational contexts” rather than by “abstract, universal
principles” (Norlock 2019).
In focusing on societal patterns of power and disempowerment,
feminist ethics seeks to correct for imbalances that it perceives in the
traditional Western frameworks. These imbalances include focusing on
isolated autonomous actors, at the expense of recognizing our
interdependence and the constraints that shape our choices (Jaggar 1992;
Lindemann 2019); emphasizing public issues at the expense of private ones
(Noddings 1984); and treating abstract versions of a given problem as more
real than specific instances (McLaren 2011). This focus on the public and
the abstract, feminist ethicists contend, works to obscure the realm of
private and interpersonal experience and by extension trivializes any
insights or modes of reasoning that emerge from taking that realm seriously
(Jaggar 1992; McLaren 2011; Noddings 1984). For instance, consider a
variant of the dilemma originally posited by Lawrence Kohlberg and
developed by Carol Gilligan (Gilligan 1993). In the original, a man steals a
drug that his wife needs to survive. Kohlberg argues that one can look at
this as an issue of the man’s virtues, for instance, or his duties to the law
and to his wife. Gilligan, taking a feminist ethics lens, argues that it is just
as important to look at the systems of oppression that deny his family
insurance that would cover the cost of her care (by relegating them to
working as Uber drivers or university adjunct instructors, for example) and
at the environment in which they live, and how her ill health has led to their
poverty, which in turn creates the conditions for poor health.
Because of its attention to care relationships in the context of
systemic power imbalances, feminist ethics is especially useful for
understanding how different forms of systemic oppressions interact and
reinforce one another. Although early feminist ethics tended to focus solely
on women’s disempowerment, later waves have expanded to encompass
LGBTQIA
+
people, Black and indigenous people of color, and other
minoritized communities as within their sphere of concern. Overviews with
many references can be found in Norlock (2019) and Lindemann (2019).
The relational structure of feminist care ethics can help illuminate
dimensions of human experience that are often overlooked by the classical
Western frameworks. One example of a concept made visible by feminist
ethics is emotional labor (Hochschild [1983] 2012). This term, coined by
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, describes jobs that require the worker
to express or suppress specific emotions, such as the warmth and
friendliness that is often expected of service workers in the United States,
regardless of how they are being treated. Although almost any kind of paid
work requires labor of some kind, emotional labor jobs are distinctive
because those workers are hired for, and evaluated by, their ability to
“manage and produce a feeling” when relating to others (Beck 2018). Fields
that require significant emotional labor, such as childcare and customer
service, typically have a large percentage of female employees; workers in
these same fields often struggle for professional credibility, on the grounds
that their emotional labor is not recognized as work (Fairchild and Mikuska
2021; Kruml and Geddes 2000). Although every ethical framework deals
extensively with the importance of managing one’s own emotions, none of
the traditional Western frameworks pay attention to the dynamics or
demands of care work in the manner that feminist ethics enables us to do.
This oversight not only obscures an important dimension of human social
relationships but creates the conditions for emotional labor to continue to be
undervalued.
Another type of labor or work made visible through feminist ethics is
invisible work. The traditional concept of work is those activities that we
“have to do” as part of our paid work. The discussion of invisible work
originally began with the observation that work typically associated with
women, especially in the home, is unpaid and many times not recognized as
work (Daniels 1987). The underlying idea is that many things can affect
how and what we count as work, and often work that happens in private
and/or is largely done by women or minorities has historically not been
counted as work. This type of devaluing is clearly illustrated, for instance,
in the way national gross domestic product (GDP) is computed: if a parent
stays home and provides child care, this is not reflected in GDP. However,
if the parent obtains a job and then pays someone to provide child care, then
both the income from the outside job and the payment to the child-care
provider are tracked as part of GDP (Glynn 2019). As we discuss in chapter
3, this is one example of how we choose to report data is a value-laden
proces. The concept of invisible work has been expanded in recent years to
address the process by which some work is made invisible for particular
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
reasons, such as outsourcing or contracting to reduce the number of official
employees (Crain et al. 2019).
Feminist ethicists have provided important perspectives on
technological developments and their interaction with larger societal
structures. Examples include feminist responses to the misogyny and other
biases in the gaming culture, and the #GamerGate backlash; ethicists have
engaged with both the gaming culture (“geek masculinity”) and the
backlash (Braithwaite 2016); a general response to online harassment and
violence (Puente et al. 2019), and the ethics of digital vigilantism
(“digilantism”) (Jane 2016). This list focuses on online culture; others have
analyzed the culture of computer science and computer technology (e.g.,
Schinzel 2018) or computer research ethics (e.g., Toombs et al. 2017) from
a feminist viewpoint. Others have looked at the many issues entangled with
fairness, accountability, transparency, and the like (see, e.g., Gebru 2020).
Story Point: “Today I Am Paul,” by Martin L. Shoemaker
Today I was Susan, Paul’s wife; but then, to my surprise, Susan
arrived for a visit. She hasn’t been here in months. In her last
visit, her stress levels had been dangerously high. My empathy
net doesn’t allow me to judge human behavior, only to
understand it at a surface level. I know that Paul and Anna
disapprove of how Susan treats Mildred, so when I am them, I
disapprove as well; but when I am Susan, I understand. She is
frustrated because she can never tell how Mildred will react.
She is cautious because she doesn’t want to upset Mildred, and
she doesn’t know what will upset her. And most of all, she is
afraid.
Mildred, an elderly woman with dementia, spends her days being
cared for by a highly advanced care android. Because the android is able to
physically and emotionally emulate people, Mildred does not realize that
the android exists; she believes that people she knows and loves are visiting
her every day. The android’s presence spares Mildred’s son, granddaughter,
and daughter-in-law some of the worries and responsibilities they might
otherwise have borne. But it also makes it harder for them to stay connected
to Mildred or to provide care for her in ways that they want to or that they
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
might find beneficial or comforting despite its challenges. Mildred’s own
situation—and the situation of the family who chose it for her—raises vital
questions about care relationships: what counts as care, what we gain by
giving it, and what is at stake when we decide to outsource it to
programmed entities.
2.6.3
T
HE
C
APABILITY
A
PPROACH
Capability is an approach to ethics that was derived and adapted from a
broader normative framework used across many fields. It aims to create the
conditions for people to fulfill their potential, not by celebrating freedom in
the abstract but by paying attention to the practical conditions of people’s
lives—the actual freedoms, resources and opportunities that are available to
them. Accordingly, it evaluates both individual actions and broader social
policies in terms of how they support people’s capabilities
and thus their
functionings
: that is, the resources that they draw on (capabilities) in order
to do and to be in the ways that matter to them (functionings).
The Capability Approach (CA) was first introduced by the economist
Amartya Sen in the 1980s, in response to trends in political theory and the
international policy that (Sen argued) were narrowly focused on economic
growth at the expense of human well-being. All forms of this versatile
framework are rooted in a political vision of real, feasible human freedom,
in which people have the opportunities to live and act in ways that they
themselves value. CA has been developed as an ethical framework by the
philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others, but it is frequently used in
economics and political science and has been especially influential in the
field of international development (Torrente and Gould 2018, 596).
Like utilitarianism, CA is consequentialist and pragmatic, and it relies
on factual, empirical data. But unlike utilitarianism, CA is concerned
primarily with creating the potential
for good outcomes. This focus on
potentiality means that it is able to take seriously an individual’s actions,
their ability to choose, the importance of their own individual goals and
preferences, and the circumstances that shape and constrain their lives.
Rather than focusing primarily on individual agents acting in pursuit of the
good, CA focuses on the development and organization of society. And
rather than insisting on the possibility of free action localized in the human
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
individual, it emphasizes the conditions that make it possible to expand the
capacities for action itself. Instead of simply valuing freedom in the abstract
sense, CA examines people’s real opportunities to do and be what they have
reason to value.
Capabilities are the resources that individuals have. Those resources
include material goods such as money or property, shelter, and food, but
they also include intangibles like health and access to education,
transportation, and other intangible resources. Although Sen did not think
there is or should be a list of core capabilities, Nussbaum’s adaptation of
CA has proposed a list of what she calls basic capabilities
, which
emphasizes human dignity (Nussbaum 1997; Sen 2005). The 10 basic
capabilities are being able to live a normal lifespan; having good health;
maintaining bodily integrity; being able to use the senses, imagination, and
thought; having emotions and emotional attachments; possessing practical
reason to form a conception of the good; having social affiliations that are
meaningful and respectful; expressing concern for other species; being able
to play; and having control over one’s material and political environment
(see Nussbaum 2000, 33, paraphrased from Jacobs 2020). Furthermore,
Nussbaum explicitly stresses the importance of both the internal and
external conditions, distinguishing between internal capabilities and
combined capabilities. Internal capabilities are “the characteristics of a
person (personality traits, intellectual and emotional capacities, states of
bodily fitness and health, internalized learning, skills of perception and
movement)” (Nussbaum 2011, 21). Combined capabilities are thus the
internal capabilities in combination with the relevant external conditions.
Whether a particular person has a particular capability depends both
on the state of the person and on the barriers that they encounter. Barriers
could include availability of resources—money, food and water, electricity,
material goods, and jobs—or accessibility. For instance, someone might
live in a time and place in which jobs or leisure activities might be
available, but because of transportation issues or a lack of internet access,
those things are not meaningfully available to that person. The example of
the bicycle is frequently referenced to illustrate this point (Sen [1985]
1999). For one person, a bicycle could enable them to get to a job or leisure
activities, which greatly increases their options. But for someone unable to
ride the bicycle, it does not. The imperative that comes out of this is not to
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
stop providing bicycles, but rather to consider the individual’s situation and
their ability to make use of the bicycle.
In some cases, capabilities are best supported when the political state
does not intervene in people’s lives. In other cases, supporting people’s
capabilities requires social or political policies to make sure that capabilities
are available to all. Consider, for example, wheelchair-accessible public
spaces (Nussbaum 2006). Simply supplying someone who cannot walk with
a wheelchair is insufficient if they are excluded from political participation
by inaccessible voting places, rallies, or courts. While museums and movie
theaters may provide capabilities of play and leisure, a lack of ramps or
elevators limits some people’s ability to transform these capabilities into
functionings.
Though CA is concerned with both the individual and the context in
which that individual is situated, it was originally developed to address
governmental, institutional, and society-level choices more than individual
choices. It therefore helps us address big-picture questions about
technological development, and for that reason it is worth considering. For
individual decision making, CA is often paired with a political theory of
justice or with another ethical framework, typically virtue ethics.
Story Point: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,”
by Rebecca Roanhorse
“So,” White Wolf says, “tell me about yourself.”
You look around the bar for familiar faces. Are you really
going to do this? Tell a Tourist about your life? Your real life?
A little voice in your head whispers that maybe this isn’t so
smart. Boss could find out and get mad. DarAnne could make
fun of you. Besides, White Wolf will want a cool story,
something real authentic, and all you have is an aging three-
bedroom ranch and a student loan.
But he’s looking at you, friendly interest, and nobody
looks at you like that much anymore, not even Theresa. So you
talk.
Jesse Turnblatt doesn’t have a lot going for him. He doesn’t have
close friends or strong community ties, and he’s terrified that his wife is
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
going to leave him. The only thing in Jesse’s life that’s going well is his job
at Sedona Sweats virtual reality (VR) company, where he works as a Spirit
Guide, offering American Indian–themed VR Experiences for Tourists
seeking spiritual transformation. Jesse draws on movie stereotypes rather
than his own heritage in crafting these “authentic” Indian experiences, and
the Tourists love him for it. When Jesse does meet a Tourist who wants an
Experience closer to Jesse’s own lived reality, Jesse’s life begins to unravel.
Authentic Indian Experience raises many difficult questions about who gets
to be “authentic” (and who gets to decide what authenticity means), but it
also challenges us to recognize all the barriers in Jesse’s life—material,
social, cultural, and political—that constrain his capabilities and limit his
ability to be the person he wants to be.
2.7
CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE
IMPORTANCE OF MULTIPLE FRAMEWORKS
In this chapter we have shown that ethical frameworks are not a set of fixed
rules to be memorized but rather are a variety of interpretive lenses that can
furnish us with criteria for ethical description and reasoning, so that we can
both judge value for ourselves and understand the viewpoints of others. The
ethical frameworks that we have discussed—deontology, utilitarianism,
virtue ethics, communitarianism, responsibility, feminist ethics, and
capabilities—are all conceptually rich and dynamic approaches to ethics;
each of them can support many kinds of inquiry and many kinds of
normative positions. We have encouraged you to view ethics as a resource
to describe and reason through issues, and to remember that the framework,
viewpoint, and process, can be separate both from your own ideology and
from the conclusions you reach. Each framework answers the question
“What is at stake? ” differently, because each framework takes up the work
of ethics from a different starting point: duties, happiness, living well, the
social nature of the self, the world around us, social patterns and equity, or
the concrete freedoms available.
In chapter 3 we build on what we have learned here and turn our
attention to some of the fundamental units of modern communication and
computing technologies: data and information. We examine one way of
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
understanding the difference between data, information, knowledge, and
wisdom, and how our understanding of these concepts can provide a
valuable window into issues around the design, development, deployment,
and use of information and communications technologies.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. What are the three ways in which people commonly misunderstand
deontology? What are the shortcomings with each of these
misunderstandings?
2. Consider an ethical quandary in your own life, or something you’ve
read about recently in the news, which you can describe in terms of
competing duties. What aspects of the situation could help you
determine which duties are the most fundamental? What aspects of the
situation could help you determine which duties are most relevant?
3. Recall our example in section 2.5 about deciding who should get a
scholarship. Reflect on a time that you were either a part of or subject
to a decision that required trading off various goods and measures.
What were the measures? What was included and what wasn’t? Were
all these measures meaningful or comparable?
4. One of the central challenges for utilitarian thinkers is breadth:
including everyone who should be part of the “who,” including all of
the relevant kinds of good (and harm) in the “what,” and thinking of
the long-term consequences as well as the near-term ones
.
a. Why do you think this is difficult? Give a specific scenario where
changing the “who” can lead to a vastly different calculus for
outcomes
.
b. Are there any ways for utilitarians to get better at including
everything and everyone that should be part of their calculations?
5. Think of a situation—professional, personal, or societal—that could
have been better handled by those involved if they had given more
weight to long-term consequences, as opposed to short-term ones. Why,
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
specifically, do you think the long-term consequences were ignored or
undervalued? What, realistically, could have helped the decision
makers to consider or understand the long-term effects of their
choices?
6.
Think of a habit you have tried to adopt (or tried to break). What about
it was easy, and why? What about it was difficult, and why? What
personal qualities helped you succeed in (or prevented you from)
altering your habit?
7.
How do goals differ from virtues? Can you list some of your goals, and
the virtues that could support you in working toward those goals?
8.
Think of someone you admire. What virtues do you think they strive for,
and why? Do you think that they are usually successful in their
attempts to live according to those virtues? How do they handle their
failures to live up to their (apparently) chosen virtues?
9.
The term “digital divide” is used in this book and in the media to call
attention to the fact that not everyone has access to reliable and
modern information and communication technologies including
computers, smartphones, and even the internet. Analyze how one or
more of the following aspects of modern society that you take for
granted can happen via these technologies: registering for classes,
paying your friends for dinner, applying for a job, or figuring out how
to get from your home to a new location. How would being on the other
side of the digital divide change what you are able to do? What would
be easier? What would be harder?
10. Think of a community that has been important for your personal
development. What values do you hold, or patterns of behavior do you
have, that were instilled in you by that community? How did they come
to be part of your own identity?
11.
What goals of self-realization do you have for yourself? What are the
community contexts in which those goals are meaningful?
12.
Compare two traditions encompassed in a single framework. What are
the similarities? What are the differences?
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
13.
What is a contemporary issue in technology that is not well addressed
by the four major frameworks discussed in the chapter? How could one
or more of the three contemporary responses help us describe and
address that issue?
BACKGROUND REFERENCES AND
ADDITIONAL READING
Bewaji, John Ayotunde Isola. 2004. Ethics and morality in Yorùbá culture.
In A Companion to African Philosophy
, edited by Kwasi Wiredu, 396–403.
Blackwell.
Cohen, Alix. 2014. Introduction. In Kant on Emotion and Value
, 1–10.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Friedman, Marilyn. 1993. What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on
Personal Relationships and Moral Theory
. Cornell University Press.
Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory
.
Crossing Press.
Fulmer, Russell. 2019. Artificial intelligence and counseling: Four levels of
implementation. Theory & Psychology
29, no. 6: 807–819.
Gotlib, Anna. Feminist ethics and narrative ethics. In The Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://iep.utm.edu/fem-e-n/
.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. [1983] 2012. The Managed Heart
. University of
California Press.
Lindemann, Hilde. 2019. An Invitation to Feminist Ethics
. Oxford
University Press.
National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Studies. 2019.
Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and
Engineering
. National Science Foundation.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2003. Capabilities as fundamental entitlements: Sen
and social justice. Feminist Economics
9, no. 2/3: 33–59.
Oosterlaken, Ilse. 2015. Human capabilities in design for values: A
capability approach of “design for values.” In Handbook of Ethics, Values,
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Browse Popular Homework Q&A
Q: Breaking Strength of Steel Cable The average breaking strength of a certain brand of steel cable is…
Q: In a BIP problem with 3 mutually exclusive alternatives, x₁, x2, and x3, the following constraint…
Q: A light beam is reflected by a planar mirror. So, what will the angle of refraction be?
Q: The figure shows two tiny 5.0-g spheres suspended from very light long threads of length L= 1.0-m.…
Q: Find the impedance, Z, shown in Fig..
of 60 Hz.
Z
10 mH
ww
1Ω
252
10 μF
at a frequency
Q: Consider CaCO3 (s) --------> CaO (s) + Oz (g)
At equilibrium, 0.01 Molar O₂ (g) was formed
The Kc…
Q: Perform the indicated operation.
5 3 -6
2 −8 8 +
5 0 -4
5 6 9 −
2 5 9
−11 5 −1
Q: Which of the following could not be a constraint for a linear programming problem?
Multiple Choice…
Q: The cost of electricity varies widely throughout the United States; $0.120/kWh is a typical value.…
Q: Suppose you want to find
y² + x² = 9, z = : 0, and x
-
N
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
0.0
-3 -2 -1
<2<…
Q: Find the circumference and the area of the circle using 3.14. Round your answers to two decimal…
Q: how many rows does the resultant of the relational algebra expression
desc,acqcost (acqcost<1000…
Q: By how many times does the sample size have to be increased to decrease the margin of error by a…
Q: Write a taylor serries that represents the following integral:
INTEGRAL(e^(3x^2))dx
Q: Find the mean of the given probability distribution.
The random variable X is the number of houses…
Q: To what extent should enslaved narratives be taught in K-12 education? College?
Q: a student weights out 1.118 g of impure KHP, dissolves the sample in deionized water and titrates it…
Q: 2. The Molarity of 2.7 N H3PO4 is
Od
Oc
Q: What's the big deal about TCP vs UDP?
Q: When monochromatic light of an unknown wavelength falls on a sample of silver, a minimum potential…
Q: Given the following product structure, master production schedule, and inventory status below and…
Q: Refer to the following payoff table:
Alternative
A1
A2
Prior Probability
State of Nature
S1
S2
-40…
Q: Adam and Eve live on two sides of the Garden of Eden, a small suburban development. After they move…
Q: Using the definition, find the Maclaurin series for f(x) = sin(x). Show all work!
Q: 3-a Draw a cubic system lattice, which has the base: ....
3-b Draw a Tetragonal system lattice,…