Usable Ethics

Usable Ethics

I want to say in a flat-footed way, and quite quickly, what I have come to, because I think it is different from what other people have come to, in a helpful way.

 

I thought that what I was learning was to play the game, “follow out THESE assumptions.” But, in a real situation, these assumptions would be made provisionally, because they are not totally secure and because the result matters very much more than tidiness.

So, is moral philosophy JUST a game of picking sides and following out assumptions? Is that its definition?

It doesn’t have a definition. Part of its rhetoric is about getting to the best way of thinking. So perhaps there is a place in moral philosophy for a project that does not begin by picking sides and following out assumptions. To give this a name: call it “usable ethics.” There are already lots of books with titles like “practical ethics” and “applied ethics,” and those seem not to be doing what I want to do.

This is the sort of book I should have written before I read anything in moral philosophy.

One thing to say at the outset: disputes in ethics are not like disputes between Democrats and Republicans, where each side thinks the other is nuts and/or depraved and/or feeble-minded. In ethics, one just knows this isn’t true: one knows that good will, intelligence and basic sanity are at the root of the alternative views. Partly, that’s because they have persisted for so long. So, although in a dispute in moral philosophy one takes oneself to be right, it isn’t the same as taking oneself to be right in a political dispute. One’s confidence in one’s own intellectual and moral rectitude is less.

Moral empiricism as an investigative strategy – I want to think about a loosely bounded strategy for getting clarity on a moral problem: talking to those obviously involved and to those whose opinion might be illuminating, asking them for their take on the problem, following up with the obvious questions, and returning to people one has interviewed before with follow-up questions raised by what other people have said. This is a procedure familiar from life and from every slow-moving crime drama or journalism drama. One can either say one understands this perfectly or that it is very unclear. If one says it is very unclear, one will put pressure on ideas like “being obviously involved,” “obvious questions,” etc. But what if one says, “I understand this perfectly” – taking the interpretation of disputed points to be the sort of thing that becomes as clear as it can become in the process of a definable kind of training – as an investigative journalist, as an investigating officer, as a novelist.

About this strategy I want to say two things. (1) It is where investigators have to start, whatever their theoretical commitments. (2) The nature of such inquiry makes it unreasonable to absolutely confine it by the initial questions suggested by one’s theoretical commitments. Things come up that are outside the initial questions that still must be followed up, must be given their due.