Intro To Normative Ethics

How do we set standards of morality?

Imagine you are enjoying a leisurely walk around a lake when you see a child drowning out in the middle of the water. Immediately your instincts kick in and you swim out to pull the child out, saving their life. It is unlikely that in the moment you stopped to consider why you thought saving the child's life is a good thing to do. However, presumably if you reflected about the morality of the situation you'd conclude that jumping in was the right call. But how do we go about concluding that saving the child is the moral thing to do? One might answer this by appeal to a moral some moral code of the sort that 'all human lives are morally valuable'. However this reasoning might not be sufficient because we can still ask this person what is it about human lives that make them morally important? Perhaps we might alternatively suggest something like the capacity of humans to experience pleasure. After all, it seems like if all else is the same a more pleasurable life is better than a less pleasurable one. In the earlier scenario if we save this child's life we can guess this would lead to more pleasure in their life in the long run. Another alternative is that instead of pleasure it is that human lives have the capacity for some sort of dignity and it is a violation of this dignity to refuse to save the child, hence we morally ought to jump in. Perhaps what is morally important is something else entirely, maybe it is the fact that they are alive, or is it the fact that they can produce language, or the fact that they have hair on their head. Any of these could be candidates for the moral value of humans, it is trying to pin down exactly which ones we are satisfied with is the difficulty.

Identifying what we care about morally is the process of clarifying what we believe to be normative factors. Some philosophers think that there is only one true normative factor, for example hedonism is the belief that the only morally important factor in decision making is choosing the option that results in the most pleasure. Others believe that there are number of normative factors, perhaps pleasure might be important, but perhaps so to might be justice, or dignity or what someone deserves, or all of these.

Intrinsic and Instumental Factors

It is also important to distinguish between factors that are instrumental and factors that are intrinsic. Factors that are intrinsic are the factors that we think are worthwhile all by themselves. Factors that are instrumental are the factors that we think are worthwhile only in as far as they allow us to do what we think is intrinsically important. Take the example of money. Not even the most avaricious person would claim that money all by itself is something worthwhile. After all, by itself money is just pieces of plastic, the card in our hand or the digits on a screen. We only desire money in as far as it can buy us things, things that (hopefully) lead to intrinsically good ends. For instance, money can buy as food, which allows us to survive, which allows us to do what ever we think is ultimately important. If you want to get a good sense of the difference between intrinsic and instrumental factors you could go and find a child who is particularly good at the ‘why game’ (you know, that thing that children sometimes do when they incessantly ask ‘why?’ to every response you give). When you give a reason why you think something is important in terms of something else then it is probably an instrumental good, if you can’t then it is probably an intrinsic good.

So what should we conclude is/are intrinsically important? What are the ultimate intrinsic ends, the things we have no response to if someone asked why? This is a really difficult question to answer and this is essentially the whole task of normative ethics. Some might think there is simply no way to know: humans just have no ability to grasp any truth about what is morally important. However, if you were happy to believe that it was morally important to save the drowning child from earlier then you must think something is morally important and we can work from there, using situations like the drowning child to home in on some normative factors that deserve some consideration. Compare the potential normative factors of why we ought to save drowning children a). because children can experience pleasure and b).because children have hair on their head. Presumably no one is going to argue that saving the child was ultimately a moral thing to do because they had hairs on their head. But why not? Well, one reason could be that you would save the child even if they were bald, therefore hair cannot be what is morally important. However, one could then just consider something that we know all human children have, take red blood cells for example. This might work better than hair, but perhaps there are things out there that have red blood cells that we don't care about morally. For example, if there were a single red blood cell out there drowning in the lake (which you noticed with your microscope you keep handy for surveying the water for morally important cells), would you save it then? Again, presumably no one would. This process of pondering about what we may or may not save from a pond is a process of reasoning about normative factors, and the point is that we can employ our best judgement in such a way to clarify what it is exactly that we care about. In other words, what it is that are intrinsic normative factors?

Does Reason Always Lead to Moral Decisions?

I have given an account of how we might go about reasoning about morally relevant factors. However, there might be alarm bells going off in your head at this point. Consider all the great many moral tragedies that have occurred throughout history which people seemed to have reasoned about. To take one arbitrary example, consider the overtly racist policies adopted my many governments across the globe, the near global legality of slavery, the White Australia policy adopted by the Australian government, or Jim Crow laws implemented in the United States to name a few examples. Presumably people reasoned about why these laws should be implemented, I imagine such justifications might have taken the form of 'these people will corrode our culture' or 'it is good for these people to be segregated or assimilated', or perhaps most explicitly, 'these people are worth less than our kind'. In these cases it seems people have reasoned about normative factors however their judgments are still clearly immoral. Where does this leave our ability to reason?

What we can learn from these sorts of moral tragedies is that our ability to engage in moral reasoning can be swayed quite easily, particularly by social factors. For example if your entire community holds some racist belief as a relevant normative factor then it seems likely you will too. However, what we can say is that the process of moral reasoning cannot just rely on one general intuitions in a way that someone advocating for the implementation of a racist government policy would appeal to. What also has to happen is our challenging ourselves on whether we have good grounds to hold those intuitions, and coming up with answers to these questions in order to have better judgments in moral situations.

Over the last few decades a subfield of psychology has blossomed in order to answer the question of how we form the moral judgments. This field is known as moral psychology. Findings in this field have demonstrated that our intuitions about moral situations can be swayed by a huge array of factors which, upon consideration, we would generally view as lacking the foundations to allow us to give justified moral judgments. An example of a finding that has come out of moral psychology is that we are generally more willing to sacrifice a man than a woman or a gender-unspecified person in order to save 5 other lives (this study analyses responses a variation of the classic 'trolley problem' in an experimental setting). It seems that gender alone is not a good foundation for such a moral decision, though it is shown to play a role in our decision regardless. Therefore, in this scenario gender seems to be normative moral factor for many people when it probably shouldn't be if we reflected about it reasonably. It is the process of the conscious or unconscious normative factors that we would view as unfounded if we were able to reflect clearly about them which if the place for reason in normative ethics.

What Should I Do Now?

These are the kinds of questions that need to be assessed when we do normative ethics and engage in reflection about what we think the relevant normative factors are (particularly the factors that have some intrinsic good). Philosophers have deliberated about these normative factors for millennia. Within Western philosophy, there are generally considered to be three broad classes of normative ethical theories: Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, and consequentialism. These ethical theories each have different views on what are the relevant normative factors and when deciding between which theory you think is most apt to instruct moral behaviour is the process of carefully and critically reflecting on what are the factors that you believe we ought to up hold and deciding which theory best embodies these factors.

Intro to Utilitarianism: Overview Intro to Meta-Ethics: Moral Realism vs Anti Realism