Is Ethics Practical

When we were considering whether the task of ethics is anything more than that of analyzing actual moral opinion, we might have added one thing--namely, that even those who reject the attempt to define ethics in this way do not by any means regard such analysis as irrelevant or useless to ethical investigation. They would be the first to insist that anyone who wished to come to some conclusions about the rightness or wrongness of conduct should consult the moral experience of men. To deny him access to this experience would come in the same category with cutting a plant from its roots or an army from its lines of communication. For without the materials which human problems and experiences furnish, moral reflection would come to nothing, quite as a plant would wither without nourishment or an army perish without supplies. Ethical theory cannot function in a vacuum.

For that reason even the most highly speculative moral thinker must constantly find his way back to the world of human affairs, if his thinking is to have any dependable relation to conduct. Otherwise his theory may turn out to be like a suit of clothes that fits no one. Imagine, for example, an adequate treatment of the subject of "Justice" by a Robinson Crusoe who had had no experience in social relationships and who had never entertained the idea that there could be another person on the globe than himself--not even a "Man Friday." Or imagine a dissertation on "Human Good and Evil" by a being so different from us that he has no conception of the nature of pleasures or pains, desires or frustrations. From neither an amoeba nor an angel could one expect a sensitive appreciation of the problems of men.

But if ethical thinking needs the stimulation and life-giving touch of the world of human actions, to what extent is the reverse true? What, if anything, has ethics to offer the world? Of what practical significance is ethical reflection for human affairs?

Presumably what is being asked may be put in this way: Assuming that by ethical reflection it is possible to gain some fuller insight into the proper conduct of life, what chance is there that this insight may be applied to good purpose in the actual business of living? Will knowledge of the standards of right action produce right action?

Answers to this question have tended to run to extremes. Some have replied that there is no necessary correlation whatsoever between knowledge and virtuous behavior; that the latter depends on motives, loyalties, emotional drives, whose origin and direction are deeply rooted in the training and experience of the individual If a person lacks the kind of motivation that makes for right conduct, it is argued, no mere adding to his store of information can be expected to affect his impulses to action. Indeed, additions to his knowledge may be held to lend increased potency to his wickedness and to render him more effectively dangerous by enabling him to adjust his sights more accurately on his nefarious objective. With such a target, where ignorance means a miss, 'tis folly to be wise.

This latter thesis has gained widespread credence through reflection on the uses to which knowledge from the physical and biological sciences has been put in atomic and bacteriological warfare. Hence many persons have come to look upon reason, and upon the sciences to which it has given birth, with apprehension and distrust. Man's gift of rationality, on which he prided himself and which he thought of as distinguishing him from the lower animals, has become, they say, too hot to handle, a spiritual explosive more dangerous than the physical explosives it has fashioned, a maddened Jove who has lost control of his thunderbolts. Better to trust to the intuitive impulses and feelings of unlearned men than to tamper further with a science that has brought the world to the brink of destruction.

It may be a proper retort to this point of view that it is one thing to seek knowledge of the nature of an atom, and quite another to seek knowledge of the nature of right and wrong--that the latter can hardly be regarded as having lethal consequences. What is wanted, however, is not assurance of the harmlessness of ethical reasoning, but assurance of its positive value. And offers of this assurance are not hard to find. There are those who are prepared to defend the method of rational understanding, both in ethics and in other fields, with the same vigor and ardor displayed by those attacking it. From the time of Socrates to the present, there have been numerous champions of the view that knowledge somehow guarantees virtue, that ignorance is the root of all evil. If men would resort to rational processes, so it is argued, they could drive evil from their midst. No people, capable of seeing with clarity the road which leads to human good, would deliberately adopt another course. The cure for science, wrongly applied, is simply more science. On this view, the solution to the problems of the world is essentially a matter of education, the creation of a genus Homo whose entire motivations would center about the search for truth. The ideal is perhaps fairly well typified in the cartoon of the modern mother, seeking to overcome her young son's reluctance to eat breakfast, who asks, "Johnnie, tell mother what it is that you don't understand about Oatsies?"

Now many will consider this estimate of the value of the understanding quite as blithely overoptimistic as its extreme opposite is dolefully overpessimistic, and will seek a more moderate view of the function of reflective thinking. For granting that men are not wholly composed of brains, it may yet be possible that a man's knowledge can be brought into some kind of beneficent relation to his conduct.

In the first place, if there are men in whom can be found the wish to acquit themselves in this life as excellently and generously as possible, these men would presumably be grateful for whatever guidance ethical reflection can afford. Whenever individuals are seriously disturbed as to the right thing to do, whenever they seek the "best solution" to a personal or community problem, they are in need of the wisest ethical judgment available. Furthermore, such persons, if they are sincere and persistent, will themselves inevitably indulge in genuine ethical speculation. They will think their problems through in terms of ends they consider worth-while, of standards they feel ought to be met, of a theory of right and wrong. They may not be wholly conscious of the ends and standards they use; they probably will not reach the levels of abstraction which the specialist might attain; and they will almost certainly operate without benefit of that technical vocabulary (invented, as some have thought, for the express purpose of confusing the layman) by which philosophers have hoped to secure precision in the interchange of ideas. To inform such persons that they have been engaged in the practice of moral philosophy would doubtless produce in them as much astonishment as was shown by the man in the play when he learned that he had been speaking prose all his life. But these individuals, during that portion of their deliberations when they are reflecting on standards and not simply on their application, are as truly philosophers as any professional savant. It is necessary only to throw a person into a situation where a suitable perplexity arises, and, assuming that his mind is not in a condition of suspended animation, philosophizing will come as naturally and unconsciously as breathing.

We may conclude, then, that the man of good impulse will be impelled to seek wisdom in ethical reflection and that he will be likely to make good use of whatever wisdom he may come by.

But what, it may be asked, of those in whom the impulse to good works is less strongly implanted? To what degree may such persons be expected to respond to the study of ethics--assuming that they can be led into it at all?

That depends. There is probably no one who does not, to some extent, conduct himself in terms of his beliefs and convictions. He may never reach the point of putting these beliefs into words and of hanging them, appropriately framed, on his bedroom wall. But they undergird his behavior, and can usually be brought to the surface when the occasion demands.

Convictions feed, more or less unconsciously, on many things, including items of knowledge and considerations of logic. Our lives are sufficiently a whole and our various activities sufficiently integrated within our total selves to make it unlikely that a person who has examined in good faith the bases of moral behavior and reflected at all systematically on the ends of human living can escape from this process unscathed. Critical reflection on the springs of one's own conduct, or on that of some group or institution with which one has identified one's self, can produce a reaction not dissimilar to that which comes to the primitive man who for the first time observes his image in a mirror. Motives that are acknowledged are often thereby already changed. Thus, while the study of ethics can hardly be counted on to make us flawless paragons of virtue, it may at the very least be expected to help us fatten our moral batting averages.

The whole point here, of course, is that the relation between belief and behavior corresponds to that between ethics and morality. To say that a man's character cannot be severed from his beliefs is to assert the connectedness of ethics and morality. What a person believes, what he sets up as his objectives and aims, what he wants and works for--these things reveal his ethical convictions as much as they express his moral qualities. To the extent that morality is important, ethics is important, since ethics is, in a good sense, only morality become self-conscious, beginning to think about itself and to take itself somewhat seriously.

But it may be said that nothing is more important for man than morality, since morality is itself nothing more than man's own opinion, translated into behavior, of what he himself regards as important. To be sure, he may be quite unconscious both of the opinion and of the behavior, but it is valuations, preferences, loyalties, as appearing in his behavior--in his selection of a job, of companions, of books and hobbies, of political and religious affiliations, and the like--that are the stuff of morality. By such choices the very course of civilization is determined. Men's wants and valuations elect congresses, support or oppose wars and strikes and Community Chest campaigns, determine the decisions of juries and the violence of the lynching mob, make laws and defy laws, denude the hills of their forests and clothe them again, regulate (through their effect on supply and demand) the functioning of the economic system. The sciences of economics, political theory, and jurisprudence presuppose the existence of those human behavior patterns that are so closely linked to and so much the consequence of human ethical evaluations.

If we may conclude, then, that the range of influence which must be assigned to ethics is hardly less than the whole of human life, we can turn to our examination of the grounds of conduct with a sense both of the immensity and of the dignity of our task.

A Definition of Ethics

"Ought I to report the student across the aisle for using crib notes in the examination?" "Should I support the claim of workers in the steel industry to the right to strike?"

Questions such as these we all face at one time or another. They are questions of right and wrong, of personal responsibility and social action, which we recognize as coming within the area of ethics. But familiar as we are with questions of this sort, we may yet wonder how ethics as a field of study deals with them--how they can become data for systematic investigations comparable to those of chemistry or biology. After all, ethical investigators don't use test tubes and microscopes and similar instruments such as often lend concreteness to studies in other areas.

It may be well, therefore, to consider at the outset a preliminary statement of the nature and aims of ethics, with a view to clarifying what we are going to try to do and how we hope to accomplish our purpose. It should be borne in mind, however, that a preliminary definition must be imperfect and provisional at best and that ethical inquiry, like being in love or feeling homesick, is something that we cannot claim to know for what it is until we have made it a part of our own experience. For this reason, the present chapter might almost better have been placed at the end than at the beginning of the book.

It should also be borne in mind that not all writers on ethics would agree on the definition of the subject that we shall examine, any more than they would agree on the answers to the specific problems which have been raised in the history of ethical thought.

Thus forewarned and with a weather eye open for objections and counterproposals, let us consider the following definition: Ethics is the critical study of standards for judging the rightness or wrongness of conduct.

Since "conduct" is referred to as the object of ethical study, we may begin by asking how this term is to be understood. What kinds of events may and what may not properly be called "conduct" and made subject to ethical judgments?

In the first place, it seems clear that whatever events lie beyond human control should be excluded from such judgments. Earthquakes and rainstorms, falling temperatures and falling dice, the specific gravity of gold and the specific moment of an individual's birth are in greater or lesser degree beyond the pale of ethical criticism. To the extent that men learn how to regulate the behavior of rainstorms and gaming devices and human embryos, these things (or, more precisely, the controls exercised over them) will come to have a place in the ethical sphere. But so long as they remain mere events in an external nature, the application to them of the name "conduct" would appear incongruous.

If, however, we take the presence of deliberate control as marking the kind of behavior with which ethics is concerned, certain borderline cases come to mind. One thinks, for instance, of those types of human actions which are not strictly and immediately under the control of the persons who perform them. The sleepwalker, the kleptomaniac, the hypnotic subject, we tend to regard as exempt from moral censure. Their actions are not rightly to be ascribed the name of "conduct" at all since these persons an not acting as "conductors" or directors of their own behavior. One would as reasonably attach blame to a gun that fired a fatal shot as to a person acting under hypnosis. It is, rather, with the person pulling the trigger or inducing and exploiting the hypnotic condition that responsibility properly rests.

It is true, of course, that such individuals as we have been mentioning may exercise a kind of indirect or "remote" control over their behavior. Thus, a person who knows himself to be addicted to somnambulism may, under certain conditions, be well advised to see to it that he does not place himself in a position where he may fall asleep--just as Peter Rabbit, in the story, would have done well not to hide himself in the flowerpot whose dampness induced the involuntary and almost disastrous sneeze.

It may be added that this type of control is more often available to those who aspire to bring about a given result than is usually realized. In the sphere of conduct, as in the sphere of chess or military strategy, the "moral general" who can deploy his forces and his resources so as to delimit in advance the moves at the disposal of the enemy, may already have made the outcome of the battle inevitable. This is true even when the only way to prevent the loss of the battle is not to fight it.

Habits, too, fall in the category of actions which are virtually uncontrollable when once the accustomed stimulus has come into play, but which, had precautionary measures been taken before the habitual behavior had become ingrained, might have been prevented. Habits, like a good game of golf, take practice, and like the common law, depend on precedent; discovered and treated in their early stages, they need not prove fatal.

For that matter, even an old habit, though it lacks the flexibility of youth, may not prove hopelessly stubborn. People can and do throw off habits successfully--consider the record of Alcoholics Anonymous--and techniques for doing so have been widely studied and advertised by psychologists and others.

The problem of determining the degree in which moral competence is present or absent is notoriously difficult in the case of crimes committed by children, by the criminally insane, and by persons who are intoxicated; and the legal mind has been hard put to it to arrive at satisfactory criteria for judging accountability in such cases. Even among these cases there are differences. The possession of impaired faculties may or may not be the consequence of a lapse on the possessor's own part, and we tend, therefore, to raise the question whether the causes lie beyond his control; on the other hand, we are hardly likely to blame a child for being as young as he is. However, the theme which used so to exercise moralists of a bygone era: When does naughtiness become viciousness? remains, under a more sophisticated formulation, a serious and practical problem in the field of juvenile delinquency.

In the case of the "drunk," it may be noted that while we may speak of him on occasion as "conducting himself shamefully," we realize that this remark, in so far as it implies his responsibility for his behavior, holds good only to the extent that there is self-regulation present.

We have been speaking of conduct as controlled human behavior. The question has been raised whether the term may also be applied to animals. Thus, assuming that "man bites dog" is worthy not only of newspaper coverage, but also of ethical (and, perchance, psychoanalytical) appraisal, what shall we say of the more prosaic, "dog bites man"? Does the dog mean to do it? Is it morally1 appropriate to chastise or find fault with the dog for an act which may be as spontaneous and involuntary as salivation or tail-wagging?

The usual reply, made to be sure, at the risk of mortally offending all true dog lovers, has been that the capacities of dogs and human beings for making discriminating choices are, to say the least, not precisely on a par, and that until animal psychologists can demonstrate the contrary, it may be supposed that there exists, in this respect, a considerable breach between even the latest canine marvel of the silver screen and the man who obsequiously feeds him his daily rations.

Conduct, then, may be defined as behavior over which the performer exercises critical and selective control The fact that there are certain kinds of behavior in which the amount of control present is difficult to estimate, complicates the task of saying whether or not a given act is to be classified as morally judgeable conduct, but does not affect the validity of the criterion. It is something to know what we are looking for even if there are times when we are not sure that we have found it.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The idea of the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right and as the key to ethical questions has been a great liberalizing force in ethical and political thinking. It is the guiding idea in the classical defenses of liberty written libJohn Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and John Stuart Mill. These thinkers maintain that concern for common happiness of all people is the proper guiding principle of government, and they proclaim the right of the individual to be free to pursue his own happiness in his own way. This type of philosophy, however, is faced with theoretical difficulties of two kinds. One is the ethical difficulty of maintaining both the right of the individual to pursue his own happiness and his duty to pursue the happiness of the community. The other is the psychological difficulty of showing how an individual presumed to be concerned with his own happiness can be directed to take adequate notice and positive action directed to the general happiness.

The philosophy which makes the general happiness its ethical goal has generally been known as Utilitarianism, its principle being that the right or wrong of an action is to be judged by its utility in the production of happiness. We have seen that both Hutcheson and Hume adopted this view and it was Hutcheson who coined the phrase which became the slogan of the Utilitarians, "the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers."

One would have expected that thinkers who accepted this as their ethical goal would have gladly welcomed the refutation of psychological egoism presented by Hutcheson, Butler, and Hume even if they were unable to accept the theories of a moral sense or conscience or emotions of approval as adequate grounds for the assertion that the moral life, or virtue, consists in adherence to the principle of utility, or neighbor-love. But ancient fallacies die hard, especially when they are due to elusive psychological confusions and supported by semantic ambiguities. Instead of the abandonment of psychological egoism after 1725 and 1726, when Hutcheson and Butler published their works, we find that, until the end of the nineteenth century, most of the thinkers who accepted the general happiness as the goal of right conduct also accepted the egoistic view that private happiness is the only goal of desire. Almost the only opposition came from the Intuitionists who, like Butler, denied that happiness is either the sole object of desire or the sole criterion of right conduct. The conflict between Intuitionists and Utilitarians goes on today, but our contemporary Utilitarians reject two of the distinctive doctrines of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century school. They no longer hold either that pleasure is the only good, or that pleasure is the only object of desire. We shall see the reasons for changing these views as we examine the difficulties into which those Utilitarians who held them were drawn.