A One-Page Overview of the History of Western Ethics

Much of teaching involves giving people rough maps that don't bother them too much as they learn more and go beyond the maps. This scheme anchored my ethics teaching as long as I was working in a fairly conventional mode. I don't use it now, because I think the conventional approach is too far from the challenges facing students, but  at the time, this seemed like a revelation.

Notes on the History of Ethics

The Problem: What principles or ideals should guide my action, my self-education, my development -- in a world in which many alternatives are available and the old guidelines provided by community standards and social pressure are no longer effective?

Socrates: the examination of one’s individual life. (What principles and commitments in fact shape the life I live, the judgments I make?)

Note: this approach has one serious advantage and one serious limitation. It’s advantage is that the results are immediate relevant to the individual’s own life. (There is no possibility of sleeping through a Socratic ethics class.) The limitation is that any view discovered by this method may be no better than the individual who discovers it. If that individual is corrupt or crazy, Socratic questioning could elicit a corrupt and crazy ethics.

Aristotle: the examination of the community’s varied views, searching for a consensus (a critical synthesis).

Thomas: extends the critical synthesis beyond his own community to take account of views held in the past, views held in other places, and views endorsed by scripture.

Note: both of these approaches get beyond Socrates’ problem. They both in their own way provide a mechanism for correcting the individual’s limited viewpoint by taking account of broader experience and deeper wisdom. But neither approach can yield a final product. A person can only synthesize the views available at a particular time and place. As time goes on, views must undergo constant revision.

Aspects of the history of ethics after Thomas:  The search for powerful, simple principles like the physical principles Galileo and Newton discovered. People asked: what fundamental principles are behind sound moral judgment and decent behavior, in the way that Newton’s laws are behind all the different motions that we encounter in the world – from pendulums to stars. Such principles could give us certain, scientific knowledge, once and for all.

Three approaches worth considering:

1.     Descartes’ approach: formulates a provisional ethics for use while one is investigating the basic features of the world, to be replaced later by an ethics adequate to one’s complete and final understanding.

2.     Kant’s approach: locates the requirement of right action in reason itself, so that sanity implies decency, evil is irrational. Posits one simple principle of practical reason: so act that the rule of your act could be a universal law for all rational beings.

3.     Mill’s approach (utilitarianism): locates the source of moral thinking in the universal human striving for pleasures of all kinds. Posit a fundamental principle of practical thinking: so act that you produce, for all sentient beings,  the greatest balance of pleasure over pain that you are capable of producing.