Ethics and Science

It would be a breach of good reporting, however, not to mention that there are some who object seriously to this contrast, even in the form in which it has just been stated. For implying as it does a clear separation between ethics and science, it arouses the sharp criticism of those who wish to show that ethics is itself a science.

Now the desire to identify ethics with science must not be confused with the desire to make ethics "scientific." This latter desire is well-nigh universal, if by it we mean the wish to avoid, in the treatment of ethical questions, the introduction of personal bias, guesswork, or wishful thinking. In ethics, as in any search after knowledge, the investigator wants the facts to speak for themselves and he goes about the pursuit of facts in the most businesslike and self-critical way attainable. To make ethics as scientific as possible in method is a hope cherished by all who regard this study as something more than an entertaining pastime. Carelessness and arbitrariness are no more to be recommended in ethics than in cooking; the results are likely to prove equally unpalatable.

Frequently, to be sure, scientific method has been given a much more specific connotation than that of rigorousness and distinterestedness of procedure. It has sometimes been construed as involving the application of those special techniques that typify the natural sciences. Among the most famous of these characterizations of the method of science is that which describes every scientific investigation as involving--once the problem to be solved has been posed-a sequence of four successive steps, as follows: (1) the collection and observation of materials or data; (2) the formulation of a theory or hypothesis in explanation of these data; (3) the drawing of deductions or of consequences that would follow from the truth of the hypothesis; and (4) the testing of the hypothesis by seeking verification of its predicted consequences in experience.

When scientific method has been so understood, the question of its applicability to ethics has raised a storm of controversy; this issue remains one of the most lively in technical ethical discussions.

Let us look briefly at the sort of proposals made by those who would like ethics to be scientific, not only in temper but also in its approximation to the methods of natural science. First of all, they insist, moral science must be empirical. That is, it must depend ultimately on experience as its source and criterion of knowledge. But the only data, relevant to ethics, that may be observed and precisely described, so it is held, are the moral judgments of human beings. People's reactions with respect to lying and stealing, keeping and breaking promises, and so on, may be assembled and analyzed. Step 1, then, is the securing of as much information as possible about men's beliefs as expressed in their judgments of right, wrong, good, and bad. Following the collection and sorting of these beliefs, the next step is to examine them with a view to generalizing about the types of behavior that men do prevailingly regard as right or as wrong.

For example, if it is found that all the acts that are considered wrong are also acts likely to injure the community, it may be concluded that "wrong" means "tending to injure the community." Such a conclusion will be an ethical hypothesis or theory. From it one may deduce (step 3) that certain other acts, hitherto unexamined, will, if they tend to injure the community, also be held by men to be wrong. The testing of the theory (step 4) will then be a matter of making observations of men's judgments about these acts, verification consisting in the discovery that men do in fact hold such acts to be wrong. If, on the other hand, public opinion is found, in certain cases at least, to be enthusiastic in its approval of acts which are undeniably injurious to the community, some revisions in the theory would of course be indicated.

The question has been raised, in connection with this procedure, whether precise quantitative tests should be required in ethics as they are in the more exact of the natural sciences. It seems obvious that excessive demands along this line would make rather hard sledding for a field whose data do not easily lend themselves to measurement by yardsticks and differential equations. However, the proponents of a scientific ethics have rarely gone--if a pun may be excused--to such extreme "measures." They have nevertheless contended that if ethics is to fill the shoes of science, its theories must be so stated that they give rise to consequences that are publicly testable and verifiable. To approach ethics with expectations less than these, they maintain, is simply to abandon it to the arbitrary caprices of unscientific romanticists.

Those who object to this conception of ethical investigation, however, do not ordinarily regard themselves as formulating their protest in the name either of caprice or of romanticism. Their criticism of "scientific ethics" is more likely to take the following form: The sort of undertaking, which the scientifically minded moralist has delineated and which he supposes to be an enterprise in ethics, is really not such at all. What he describes is not ethics, but sociology or anthropology. It is a process of inquiring what men believe, how they react in certain situations, and of formulating theories enabling one to predict how these same men will react later in similar situations. What this method provides, then, is an accumulation of folklore. Instead of arriving at knowledge of what is right and wrong, it arrives at knowledge of what men think is right and wrong. Public opinion polls are all right in their place, but what one expects and gets from, say, a pre-election poll, is some indication of who will be elected--not of who ought to be elected. Ethics cannot properly be regarded as a glorified, spiritualized Gallup Poll. It does not seek to learn what standards men use in judging conduct, but what standards they should use. And to this end, other methods of inquiry than that of sociology are required, methods whose nature will be discussed and debated in later chapters.

The scientific technique in ethics is held to breed further difficulties. Suppose, for example, investigation of the moral judgments of human beings should reveal considerable disagreement as to whether certain acts were right or wrong. In such a case no single theory explaining what lay underneath these conflicting opinions could be given. For the theory is supposed to explain agreements: in the face of disagreements, it bogs down. But given such disagreements and supposing that they prove adamant even when confronted by the theory that is supposed to dissolve them, the only course open appears to be that of setting up a variety of theories, each one providing its own special explanation of the special opinions of a special group of moral judges. Since the method under consideration provides no way of comparing these several theories, we are left with something which might be called ethical Relativity. To this view, as we shall see in the chapters devoted especially to its consideration, a number of moralists are resolutely committed.

It may be worth noticing that the definition of ethics with which we originally began was stated without prejudice to the issue of "scientific ethics." The phrase which occurs in that definition, "standards for judging," is neutral, allowing either for the interpretation, "standards which ought to be used for judging," or for the interpretation, "standards which are used for judging,"-- or, for that matter, for several other interpretations, including, "standards which might be used for judging." It is left to the student to decide, after he has more fully considered the problem, which of these meanings he wishes to insert.

In the light of the disagreement among philosophers as to the nature of ethical inquiry, it is pertinent to raise the question: How can any definitive results be achieved in an area where there is not even agreement on the task to be accomplished?

If every moralist could accept the view that ethics is a branch of descriptive science, recording and generalizing on certain aspects of human behavior, the pursuit of ethics might become science and henceforth be carried on in the cooperative spirit of a big, happy, academic family. But it is hardly to be expected that those who regard ethical investigations as something very different from this will resign themselves, for the sake of philosophic harmony and "definitive results," to a method which in their opinion could only produce results, however definitive, in which they were not really interested.

In the face of this not surprising recalcitrance, the sensible procedure is perhaps to cease sighing for a unanimity that is not to be expected in this stage of man's reflection on moral issues, and turn to an examination of what the various attacks on these issues are.

If moralists insist on arguing even over the nature of those questions which they become moralists by asking, we are at any rate not prevented from distinguishing and sorting out the various questions they ask or from examining and evaluating the answers they give. Whatever conclusions we may reach as a result of this examination will at least have run the gauntlet of the best in historical and contemporary opinion on these matters. This includes even the opinions of those who are convinced that there are no meaningful ethical questions to be asked at all and that the whole of what has passed for morality rests on a huge illusion.

Before leaving the subject of the nature of ethical inquiry, a brief comment on our own procedure may seem desirable.

This book is not written as ethical propaganda--and we hope that it will not be so construed. We hope that the student will feel, as the various ethical views are unrolled before his mind, that he is examining them for himself, under guidance to be sure, but under guidance which is not to be thought of as in any sense authoritative or importunate. As in all conducted tours, your guide can be expected to intersperse his designation and description of objects of interest with his own critical comments about them. You may, in fact, come to regard him as a very opinionated person and feel like requesting him to confine himself to the business of pointing out -- which, in the last analysis, is all that guides are paid for. Since, however, there is no chance in this instance, to suppress your guide's enthusiasm for declaring his own convictions, other courses of action must be considered. One is to ignore him, that is, to skip those passages that carry the odor of intellectual autobiography. (As you proceed you will doubtless learn to recognize these passages even from a distance.) The other alternative--the one that your "guide" would naturally prefer to think of as the more intelligent course--is to pay a modicum of attention to his views, according them what seems their due, but no more than their due, in terms of the strength of the evidence offered in their support--and remembering that the discriminating student will wish to gird his critical loins by consulting at first hand the arguments of those who hold beliefs differing from the ones here defended.

What is Right, What is Wrong

There are certain aspects of conduct, however, which taken by themselves are no concern of ethics. What the duration of an act is, that it occurred on Tuesday, that those engaged in the episode had an aggregate weight of 2,310 pounds--none of these are ethical facts. This is not to say that they could have no ethical bearing or that they might not have to be taken into account, in one way or another, by a person passing judgment on the act. But an ethical judgment proper is always a judgment of rightness or wrongness. Judgments of time or place or weight, as such, are not ethical judgments, because they do not assert, except elliptically or by implication, anything as to rightness or wrongness. Assuming a knowledge of relevant circumstances, the details just referred to might, of course, be seen as charged with ethical significance. To take an hour, instead of a few seconds, to begin artificial respiration on a drowning person, to carry out on Tuesday a military mission which total strategy required to be performed on Monday, or to make an exception to a rule allowing only twelve average-sized people to board an elevator--few would deny that circumstances could give ethical meaning to such occurrences.

What is needed is to distinguish between (1) ethical facts and (2) non-ethical facts having ethical import. Many facts which are not facts of rightness or wrongness, and which are therefore nonethical, will nevertheless, on one or another definition of right and wrong, make all the difference in the world in the ethical description of the situations in which they are involved. Indeed, it is safe to assert that on some views of right and wrong there is no single aspect or detail of the universe that might not, in some conceivable fashion, make an ethical difference.

So far our explanation of the distinction between ethical and nonethical judgments has remained at a purely verbal level. We might agree that to say of an employer that he fired a workman is not in itself to say that he did right or wrong. If we knew that the workman frequently reported to work drunk, or that he was an enthusiastic member of a labor union, we might, depending on our views, consider discharging him a right (or a wrong) act; but we would say that the circumstances surrounding or precipitating the act made it right or wrong, not that they were its rightness or its wrongness. Having said this, however, we should not have reached a complete understanding of the distinction involved until we had said what "rightness" and "wrongness" meant.

That it would be presumptuous to try to state the meaning of these terms at this point is obvious from the fact that it is precisely about this meaning that the major disputes in the field of ethics revolve. A large portion of this book will be devoted to the examination of representative ethical theories which are distinguished from one another primarily in terms of the various meanings they attach to the notions of right and wrong. Yet it is perhaps desirable, in order to get before our minds a working conception of the field of ethics, to see whether there may not be something about the different definitions of right and wrong on which all the theories could agree.

Perhaps the best approach to such a common denominator can be made by examining a contrast often made between ethics and science. This contrast has been phrased in many ways, most of which come to about the same thing. Science is said, for example, to be descriptive; ethics, to be normative (or perhaps, in greater antithesis, prescriptive). Science is said to deal with facts; ethics with values. Or more simply still, science is described as dealing with the "is" and ethics with the "ought." In other words, rightness and wrongness imply and express "norms" or standards of conduct, and not simple descriptions of conduct. They are held to be predicates of value, rather than of fact; of appreciation (or depreciation) rather than of description; of what should be rather than of what is.

If we accept this sort of contrast (and we shall see that it is likely to be misleading unless restated in more precise terms than the above), it is natural to extend its application by associating ethics with other value fields such as logic (the study of right reasoning, of how a good argument ought to proceed), and aesthetics (the study of norms and standards of beauty, of what good taste would dictate as to what ought to be appreciated). Some have even included inquiries in the areas of economics and religion among the value studies. All of these are described as falling within the domain of the "philosophy of value" and are contrasted sharply with such disciplines as botany, psychology, and chemistry, which as sciences are characterized as being concerned wholly with description.

Few would be inclined to dispute the validity of this contrast so far as it touches the sciences. For a scientist, as such, to be concerned with anything beyond description is generally regarded as unthinkable. Botanists may also be flower lovers and prefer roses to gardenias; pyschologists may also be politicians and prefer democracy to communism; chemists may also be gentlemen and prefer blondes. But let the botanist's partiality for roses affect by one jot or tittle his cataloguing of their botanical characteristics, let the psychologist's political feelings compromise the objectivity of his treatise on "The Affective System in Man," or let the chemist's love life influence his laboratory analysis of hydrogen peroxide, and the wrath of the scientific heavens would surely fall on their heads. It is simply not the business of a botanist to evaluate the beauty of flowers, of a psychologist to criticize ideologies, or of a chemist to appraise the uses to which his discoveries might be put--any more than it is the business of a political scientist to counsel kings or form governments or that of an economist to play the stock market. This is not to say that scientists do not and should not do all of these things--only that when they do so, they have temporarily, and often quite properly, abandoned their roles as scientists.

If we take this position on the function of the scientist, however, we must not be led to conclude that everything that is not the business of the scientist is the business of specialists in the so-called value fields. It is surely not the business of the aesthetician to occupy himself with sniffing scents or languishing before the loveliness of a Botticelli, any more than it is the business of a logician to argue at the drop of a hat or of a moralist to head up citizens' reform movements or write modern versions of Aesop's Fables.

Not that some or all of these activities might not be of use to these persons in the prosecution of what is properly their business. For that business is of a very special sort and--strangely enough and in apparent repudiation of the contrast we have been drawing -- is, in a sense, on the side of description rather than of appreciation or adoration or appraisal. The difference between the descriptive activities of the scientist and those of the student of values is that the latter's, instead of being directed at the investigation of natural laws, are directed at the investigation of standards of value. The function of the value theorist is not to judge by standards, but to explain standards; it is not to criticize or evaluate, or to praise or condemn, but to examine the bases on which criticisms are made and to consider the meaning and justification of criteria of evaluation. The aesthetician tries to say what the charm of a Botticelli is and what might be meant by a critic's assertion that a Botticelli is "better than" a Botticini. The logician describes the "facts" that constitute the laws or standards of correct reasoning. The moralist examines the criteria by which men conduct their lives or by which they evaluate the conduct of others.

In other words, there lies between the scientist and the philosopher of value a third sort of person: the critic, the lover, the debater, the reformer. This person uses standards (or, as it sometimes appears, abuses them) in forming his judgments and making his decisions. He is the man of action, of conviction, of opinion--the practical man, if you like. As such, he is of course to be distinguished from the scientist. But often, especially in his role as critic and evaluator, he is confused with the philosopher. And yet it can be said that the difference between him and the scientist is much the same as that between him and the philosopher. It lies in the fact that he is concerned with something more than just knowing. If he wants knowledge, he wants it to use; he wants it as something that has value for believing things or proving things, for changing or promoting or getting things. He is not interested in the "is" as such, but rather in the "might be," either in the form of the "ought to be" or the "I'd like it to be."

This person may also, of course, be a scientist, and conceivably a philosopher as well. If so, he might be thought especially well equipped for his "practical" activities. For he would have the "know what" and "know how" of the former and the "know why" of the latter--this, of course, on the assumption, soon to be examined, that it is possible to "know why." But granting the possibility of having "knowledge why," it is perhaps clear that all intelligent enterprise involves the three phases of (1) formulating goals or standards, (2) taking stock of facts, and (3) acting in the light of the knowledge of the goals and the facts. A more familiar analysis is in terms of means and ends; it is frequently said that science provides the means, ethics the ends, and the practical man (the executive, the judge, the legislator, the technician) the action.

At any rate it may be hoped that this somewhat sketchy treatment of the relation between the scientific and value studies has made a little clearer the kind of judgment with which ethics deals. Let us summarize what we have said on this point: The scientist and the philosopher of value have both been described as interested in knowledge for its own sake. (Only as critics or as doers, i.e., as practical men, do they transfer their interest to the uses of knowledge.) They are to be distinguished, however, by the kinds of objects they seek to know, the scientist being concerned with the events and facts and laws of nature (including human nature), the philosopher with what may be called value facts--with the laws of valid inference, of "good taste," and of right conduct. In a sense, then, knowledge, scientific and philosophic, is always of facts, of the "is"; for a fact about values, it may be held, is quite as much as a fact about nature. It may, for example, be a fact that injuring people for no reason at all is always wrong; if so, such a fact might be said to have as much being as the "existential" fact that some people actually are made to provide diversion for others in this particular manner.

But it is also true that a fact about nature is always a fact about how things and events are arranged or ordered in the space-time world; whereas a fact about values may be regarded as a fact about how things ought to be arranged in that world and hence as not necessarily constituting a description of that world. From the standpoint of the kinds of facts that science and philosophy investigate, the contrast between the "is" and the "ought," between descriptive and normative concerns, may appear to be valid and unobjectionable.

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.