Sometimes in this forum I get a little unsure if we are talking about the same thing when we say "ethics". We're all somewhere in the same ballpark, but it's a pretty big ballpark. So the challenge here is, what is the definition of ethics which you use? And, perhaps, how and why did you come to that understanding of ethics? Are there any assumptions that you can identify?

Mine:

Ethics is a system which defines the preference for possible behaviours.

Why do I use this one?

Every system of ethics I have looked at identifies that there is a distinction between 'good' and 'moral', and the distinction is that while 'good' can happen without someone choosing it, 'moral' only applies to behavioural choice. So it might be 'good' if someone survives an accident, but it is 'moral' to help them survive, and 'bad' for the sun to explode, but 'immoral' to make it explode. The only other point of agreement that I have found is that the purpose of ethics is to encourage moral behaviour. Some systems say something extra, but this definition is the lowest common denominator I have found.

Assumptions:

That free will exists. Very little evidence here, I think, though.

I think ethics is the study of systems by which we balance our own interests with the interests of others in our chosen actions.

I consider it to include innate, family-taught and peer-influenced morality; formal laws under government, church or associations; contractual and employer-employee constraints; universal or restricted general moral propositions like the UN declaration on human rights or the duty of care; and probably lots of others I haven't thought about.

Assumptions? I believe in the 'reversibility of the I-Thou relationship', ie that I am as bound in how I act to you as you are to me - as a broad principle. I believe that its up to me to decide between all the competing claims of different moral guidelines, and that all of them are in the end voluntary.

When someone posts "Is (whatever) ethical?" I feel robbed, as though their words strip the meaning from 'ethics' and pretend there is a yes/no answer that should satisfy all.

I'm just nit-picking here - there are some systems which call themselves ethical system which include god-defined values for right and wrong, something that seems to ignore the idea of personal interests. Would you say, according to your definition, that these systems are not strictly systems of ethics?



Well, I think they are fair questions, but I don't think 'yes' or 'no' is a fair answer - there must be a reason, and it must take into account that all circumstances have something unique about them.

Philosophy professors and dictionary editors refuse to recognize subtle difference between the words "moral" and "ethical", and insist that they are synonyms. However, in common usage, "ethics" refers more to person to person relationships, while "morality" more oftern refers to person to God relationships. It is often said by Judeo-Christi-Islamic fundamentalists that homosexualtiy, bisexuality, and trysexualty, are abominations and sins under God, but it would be very unusual to hear anyone describe consensual sex of any kind between adults as being unethical unless it involves a boss/employee, politician/political aide, or pastor/parishioner relationships which might be inappropreiate due to coercive pressure, subtle or otherwise.
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Eschew Ligneous Nickels

Ethics is a system of determining right and wrong in a certain situation.

Did you ever see the film Quest For Fire? It's a purely speculative account of what life might have been like for our distant ancestors 80,000 years ago in Paleolithic Europe. In particular, at a point in time when there were clearly communities that had evolved a lot further than had others.

Think about it:

What would "ethics" have meant to them back then? Like us, they too had preferences. And, like us, they were [more or less] able to choose between alternate behaviors.

Just on a more primitive level.

We evolved from them. But, at what point did we begin to think about right and wrong behavior "systemically"? At what point did we deem it reasonable to define ethics? What might that mean to archeologists?

And how are our choices both similar and different from their's?

What can we really know for certain?

Also, what can we reasonably speculate about regarding the ethics our descendants might embrace 80,000 additional years into the future?

No, I haven't seen it. But I will imagine the type of communities you are suggesting.



Well, in literal terms I assume the word "ethics" meant nothing, because they probably didn't speak English. But I see no reason why the meaning of our word "ethics" would need to change when considered such a community. There are still more preferred and less preferred behaviours, whether defined through logic or subjectivity.



When did we start to consider things "systematically"? Again, literally, I have no idea. Does it matter? If there is logic to the definition of ethics or to the preferences of behaviour, it doesn't matter if someone thought about them systematically or not - the laws of physics and maths didn't change over time, we just knew more or less about them at different stages of history.



Well, they are the same in the fact that they are choices, and there is either logic to support them or not. They are different in that the decision-makers may have known more or less about their circumstances, similar circumstances, and have only a certain vocabulary for reasoning.



This is either a deep metaphysical question meant for somewhere else other than the ethics forum, or you mean "What can we ever know for certain about ethics?", in which case we can know that: decisions exist, decision-makers exist, decision-makers rank decisions by preference, and that it is most preferable to find the best possible decision, in which case it is most preferable to have the ability to find the best possible decision.



You would probably have to know a lot more than ethics to figure that one out - technology, sociology, perhaps biology etc. What will science be like in 80,000 years? What's the point of the question? If you put up your definition of ethics it might illuminate the purpose of these questions.

Well, my definition could include 'God' as first among 'others'. In such systems, one's own interst in salvation vs eternal damnation would be very much a personal interest, and a personal relationship with God would too. I certainly meant rigid church rules to be on the list, as you saw, but hadn't privileged then above more generally applicable wording.

iambiguous wrote:

What would "ethics" have meant to them back then? Like us, they too had preferences. And, like us, they were [more or less] able to choose between alternate behaviors.

Just on a more primitive level.



There were basically three tribes---the truly primitive apelike creatures, the cavemen [with a primitive language] and the far more sophisticated "sapien" tribe. The latter had learned to create and to control fire; and they possessed a fully formed language.

Still, in many crucial respects, the preferences of all three communities revolved basically around subsistence, procreation and defense. That was "objectivity" to them.

In other words, ethics back then was far more organic: whatever actually worked down on the ground to sustain the group from day to day to day.

That is what was "logical”. And being so much more empirical, it lends itself rather well to calibration. A new point of view either works or it doesn’t. Or it works better than the old one.

In the modern world, however, the reality of "surplus labor" reached the point where we could employ men and women as philosophers---intellectuals able to pursue ethics in a considerably less organic manner. But, here again, my point is always this: What can logic, epistemology, linguistics etc. really tell us about our behavioral preferences?



It matters to me because at some point the need to pursue an ethical agenda [i.e. functional rules of behavior] begin to leave the ground more and more and, instead, began to reside increasingly up on the sky hooks invented by folks like Plato and Artistotle.

I simply question how efficacious folks like these can be in taking ethics out of the Platonic cave. For me, ethics will always remain a manifestation of the ever changing shadows on the wall. It is rooted in existence and not essence.

iambiguous wrote:

...what can we reasonably speculate about regarding the ethics our descendants might embrace 80,000 additional years into the future?



The point is we don’t even know where to begin in imagining our descendents 80,000 years from now. Ethically or otherwise. Also, that, psychologically, there is a tendency within human communities throughout history to imagine that the manner in which they view the world ethically is, in fact, the most reasonable manner in which it can be viewed.

But, increasingly, in more modern times, there has evolved this sense that we really can know this because, philosophically, we have discovered [invented?] rules of logic that are applicable objectively. There are now even those like Sam Harris who want to boot the job over to science itself.

I believe this may well be both futile and dangerous.

I think you might be missing the point of this particular thread: the point of this thread is that we cannot communicate about whether "ethics was far more organic" until we have a definition of ethics.



Well, the scientific method is the reliable way to gather data and evidence to create an support a hypothesis, so I would hope that if you want a reasonable answer you would use the scientific method. Also, I know you don't think logic is a human invention incapable of helping us as you engage in debate here on the forum.

FWIW, my definition is "a recipe for harmonious and productive person to person relations."

You may tend to agree with this McFate, but others here seem to be talking more about untilitarian or Biblical ethics which are more concerned with man/society or man/God relations.

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Eschew Ligneous Nickels

How did you come to this definition? Do you think there are any assumptions in it?

So far we have:








Two of these look at ethics as a system, which perhaps can be studied to deduce what good and bad or right and wrong is.
One of these looks at ethics as the study of such systems, to compare our individual or collective undestandings of right and wrong, good and bad, etc.
The last one looks at ethics as a way to achieve a specified outcome, where good and bad are specified as a particular state in the definition, and right and wrong are the behaviours which lead to or away from this state.

Any other ideas?

I think that in general definitions tend to defer to some variant among three traditions: the deontological or universalist tradition traceable to Kant and finessed by Moore in the modern era, utilitarian and consequentialist notions similarly associated with Mill and others, and the type of virtue ethics traced to Aristotle’s prioritising of character habits.

It’s difficult for any definition to avoid the grounding problem, i.e, that of self-reference, of needing further definitions of its terms which in turn become self-referential, but that’s what one is obliged to work with. Just a few points that occur to me:

(1) If ‘possible behaviours’ have no consequences for other persons (‘Do I use a 5mm or 7mm drill-bit for this job?’), or if a ‘certain situation’ does not involve other persons (‘How do get in when I’ve lost my key?’), such behaviours or situations seem to lie outside the domain of ethics.
(2) The ‘study of (ethical) systems’ is meta-ethics, but that’s a moot point.
(3) Definitions nominating ‘person to person relations’ and the balancing of interests seem to me to have the apt ingredients.
(4) ‘Systematisation’ may be too formal a concept for a personalised ethics.
(5) A phenomenologically conceived relationship with a nonnatural/supernatural entity is relevantly ‘ethical’ only if it has implications for interpersonal behaviours or effects.
(6) The relationship between ethical concepts and behaviours is always labile and indeterminate; they have different ontologies.

My suggested variant: A reflective and informed framing of interpersonal relations deemed best capable of enabling the negotiation of conflicting interests and the minimisation of harm.

(Ungrounded terms in these definitions, including mine, are ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘harmonious’, ‘productive’, and ‘harm’.)

I like your thoughts, Davoz!



Sometimes you can use either drill-bit, but sometime the drill-bit you use will affect how likely it is the whatever it is you are making will be able to be put together or how easily it may fall apart, which has ethical implications if it harms someone or someone needs to rely on it (I mean, it falls into the ethical domain, whether it is 'good' or 'bad' or something else.) Ditto, if you break a window or ask your neighbour or drive your car through the wall when you've lost your key could have implications in the domain of ethics as well.

I think most things that involve people, or consciousnesses, have a potential ethical implication.

Aptly pointed out, mcfate, what you say picks out a limiting condition of consequentialist ethics, which is that human neurocognitive equipment simply cannot compute all the probabilistic outcomes of a prospective action. All the same, ingenuity might be severely stretched in coming up with the counterfactuals in all cases. What might they be, other than highly fancifully, in calculating the ethical spin-off of my choosing to wear my green rather than my blue briefs?

A factor one can’t easily avoid taking into account in defining ethics is the accumulating neuropsychological evidence that decisions assumed to have ethical import engage primarily emotive neural processing, and that purportedly ethical, rational explanation plays the role of post hoc justification. That's what makes it tempting to conflate the characteristics of ‘ethical’ and other decision-making across quite a broad spectrum of everyday moment-by-moment instances. On that score, I find myself sympathetic towards your view.

Well, some options could be equally preferable, I think. The problem as I see it is that you don't know what the ethical effects of picking different brief colours are (and therefore know if one colour is more preferable to wear) unless you know what criteria count as having an ethical impact. But I have to agree that mostly we don't need to check ourselves against all decisions, primarily because so many are quite small and have negligible or easily reversible impacts. That said, you never quite know...

I'm coming more into the opinion that "decisions" are not discrete situations but an ongoing continuum, which means that there will never be sufficient time to analyse most decisions because they contain effects on future decisions and the decisions of others. Instead, I look more towards generic decision-making values rather than context specific values (if you have seen my posts in "Ethics sans God" you will note that the value I propose is maintaining the ability to reason).

My point though is this: the only reasonable manner in which to communicate ethics is by integrating any particular definition into the actual moral claims that are made. The words and the world are must be interwined.

iambiguous wrote:

There are now even those like Sam Harris who want to boot the job over to science itself.

I believe this may well be both futile and dangerous.



Logic can penetrate only so far into conflicting moral narratives. Then it must give way to moderation, negociation and compromise.

The danger lies in the illusion that, in utilizing the scientific method [or whatever some construe to be the philosophical equivalent of it], we can somehow rationally differentiate what is truly right from what is truly wrong. And although there is a broad and deep consensus regarding reactions to extreme behaviors [child abuse, genocide, cold blooded murder] there are hundreds of moral and political conflicts that dearly effect our lives but in which there is anything but a consensus.

Its not a danger, really. Anyone using the 'scientific method' in moral ways is gonna end up wrong. Treat it as a certainty, at least if they dont keep a sense of humour.

I think you'll find the four definitions in the post above all cover "actual moral claims". Furthermore, the people who proposed these definitions have different ideas about what "actual moral claims" are, and that's why they have different definitions. The definitions proposed present different people's understandings of what "actual moral claims" are. If you have an idea about what "actual moral claims" are, then you have a definition of ethics - that is, you have an understanding of what you believe ethics to be. That is what these definitions are.



Are you suggesting that moderation, negotiation and compromise should not include logic? Are you suggesting that the point at which people should begin using moderation, negotiation and compromise should be decided without using logic? Is your idea to use moderation, negotiation and compromise founded upon reasons that don't have an element of logic? This is certainly my understanding of your sentence.



I think the philosophical equivalent of science is science in most fields of philosophy, and just plain old logic in the others. In asking people what definition they use when they use the word "ethics" I am not proposing that there is a rational way to differentiate what is truly right and wrong - that is a completely separate argument which has been put forward in your thread "Ethics sans Gods". Yes, there are many things for which there are no consensus opinions, no, I don't see the danger in discovering if something is truly right or truly wrong, yes, the search for truly right and truly wrong may provide no results. If you share your definition of ethics we may be able to understand (a) if consensus opinion is applicable to your definition (you may note it is not applicable to mine), (b) the axioms may provide argument for or against objectivity in ethics, and (c) if this is dangerous. But it is difficult for me to tell what is really relevant or consistent in your argument if you do not share your definition of ethics.