What it Means to Be Introduced to Ethics

Every time I teach an ethics course, I try to say what we can hope to accomplish. These statements have changed substantially over 40 years. Here is one promising effort from 2006.

 

Ways of Understanding “Introduction to Ethics”

It is natural to be somewhat puzzled at the beginning of a course like “Introduction to Ethics.” The title suggests that the course is about matters that are immediately important, and yet the approach is indirect and historical. We don’t start out talking about abortion or open marriage or the war in Iraq. We start out with Plato and Socrates, people whose issues seem quite different from ours.

Yesterday, I went to Charles Schwab Investments to talk about how to manage some stock I had inherited. The broker suggested that I turn the management of the stock over to Schwab, for a fee of one half percent per year. They would take the stock I had inherited as a starting point, buying and selling according to complex formulae designed to promote profit while limiting risk. They earned profits of 18% last year, with their management formula.

I am a novice in investment; this looked pretty good to me. I wouldn’t have to watch the market or re-decide each month how much risk I wanted to carry, and the experts would handle my affairs, for a small fee. The downside, as I thought about it later, is just that Schwab will put my money into whatever looks profitable, regardless of the stink. So companies that make anti-personnel land mines, companies that rip the government off for billions of dollars, companies that lobby to prevent effective safeguards on dangerous drugs, companies that pollute the water and air – all of these would be potential investments. I would be a partner in all sorts of projects I find disgusting.

Later, other thoughts occurred to me: my holding my little bit of money back from a bad company isn’t going to slow it down. And I am already supporting many enterprises I find disgusting, by my consumer choices. I draw some lines, but not all that many. So, is this a big deal? Couldn’t I just respond to my conscience by putting some of the money I made into groups working to protect the environment, to ban land mines, or to promote campaign finance reform (to make legislators less vulnerable to corporate lobbyists).

I was facing a moral dilemma. One way to structure an “Intro to Ethics” course would be to discuss a sequence of such dilemmas, developing the arguments on each side. That is a natural approach, and, by contrast, the approach taken in this course is roundabout, unnatural. It needs an explanation. Here are some ways of understanding the relation of this course to practice.

Confronting the Basic Issues -- We don’t approach moral dilemmas with a clean slate, without moral ideas. Our approach is conditioned by some very basic decisions we have made, or are in the process of making, about what is important to us in life, what ideal picture we strive to make real and what horrors we seek to avoid. We can surely listen to arguments about moral matters, but our choice of sides will be heavily influenced by our development at some much more general levels. We will simply be unable to hear some kinds of argument.

In this course, we spend time and attention on those fundamental decisions that shape our responses to particular dilemmas. Laches shows us one such decision: what we think courage is, and how much we care about it. The person who doesn’t value courage, or who values only a very limited sort of courage, will take one approach to life; the person who finds many different kinds of courage deeply admirable will take another approach entirely.

In Republic, we are again in very fundamental territory. Plato asks, “Why should we care about this code of inter-personal decency (truth-telling, promise-keeping, debt-paying) in any circumstance in which indecency pays better and the indecent person is not likely to get caught?” This question is prior to talk about the right thing to do; it is really about why one should even bother to care about the right thing to do.

Developing A toolkit – It is widely believed that there are no methods available for settling moral questions.  People often think that moral views, views about value, obligation, and virtue, are just expressions of feeling, without intellectual foundation. This view coexists uneasily with the view that these are the most important matters in human life. One task of an intro course is to show that there are reasonable and plausible ways of thinking about moral matters, starting points for developing and criticizing one’s own views and those of other people. So, for example, in this course, we begin by looking at Socrates’ method for thinking about moral matters: give a definition or account, then see whether that account will cover what it is supposed to cover – whether it stands up to criticism. If it doesn’t, revise the account and start over. This is a powerful strategy for thinking generally: you begin where you are and make progress by criticism and revision.

The next method we examine is Plato’s trick in the Republic: to imagine a world that is ideal in some respect, in order to get clarity about matters that are confused in the real, everyday world. Plato seeks to define “justice” in his made-up republic in order to get light on what justice might mean in Athens. Our first writing assignment is a variant on Plato’s trick: we see what we can learn from our own ideal experiences, what we can take back to our normal, less than ideal lives.

Throughout the course, we practice a third method: setting our stories side by side in order to gain insight into the moral realities we all believe in: friendship, justice, courage, authenticity. Words sometimes become empty and light through over-use; this exercise helps us to see the realities that our words address.

As the course progresses, we will add to our list of methods or starting points for moral thinking.

Understanding what it is to come to know one’s own life – Plato spent much of his mature philosophic career trying to understand huge events in his early life: the loss of the war with Sparta and the execution of Socrates. He returns to these events again and again, probing them. Laches is an attempt to understand how philosophy might have helped to prevent the military disasters that led to the loss of the war. It is also a picture of the limits of Socrates’ power to influence events, and so of the limits of Socrates’ way of working in Athens. Plato explores many different perspectives on Socrates’ activity, sometimes picturing him as a noble hero misunderstood and rejected by those he came to help, sometimes taking a critical perspective: Socrates’ approach was doomed to failure, and he should have known this. Clearly, the execution of Socrates is the central event in Plato’s life; it becomes his personal and intellectual destiny to think about and learn from that event.

In a similar way, each of us have events or circumstances in our lives that define our fundamental problems and possibilities, that are the sources of our insights and power, and also of our blind spots and inhibitions. One goal of this course is to help people find their own individual moral work, by turning friendly, civilized, and informed attention on the central incidents and facts of their lives. Ideas from other people can be useful, but, in the end, we have to do our own work.