We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live.
– Socrates, from Plato’s Republic, Book 1:352d.
Thinking through and acting upon our moral responsibilities is quite a challenge. Yet as Socrates notes, ethics is indispensable to life, providing guidance for “how we ought to live”. I explore the ethical presuppositions that frame our worldviews and actions. I am not so much interested in getting people to agree on a “correct” point-of-view, but in helping all of us appreciate the way ethics informs our individual and collective decision-making and actions in the world.
My approach to ethics is particularly influenced by the philosopher Mary Midgley. I had long struggled with the limitations of axiomatic styles of applied and formal ethics, when I read a passage from her book Animals and Why They Matter (1984, p. 9) that I found eye-opening.
We get… [an] unnerving sense of double vision, of hovering between dream and reality, whenever we are confronted with any unsatisfactory and difficult corner of our moral scene. It happens both when principles collide, and when principle merely collides violently with practice. Ethics is practical [emphasis added]. If standards conflict, or if they are so high and so general that we cannot see easily how we could act on them, we feel dazed. Still more , if it seems that what we ought to do is something that no reasonable person would consider doing, we get skeptical; we suspect fantasy and confusion. We know that morality does actually need remote and general standards, and must sometimes demand actions which no reasonable person at the time would consider. We know that a morality which never shocks anybody dwindles into etiquette. The history of past reforms, like the abolition of slavery, shows this. All the same, ideals which nobody can translate into action are wasted. This tension is a quite general difficulty of life. (To look at it another way, it is a general factor in making life interesting.) In trying to embody remote general ideals — freedom, equality, love — in what we must hastily do under deplorable conditions at a particular time, we have to work out subsidiary, detailed principles of interpretation [emphasis added]. These commonly give us much more trouble than the general and remote ones, because they involve clashes which are simply invisible from the prophetic distance.
Midgley understood that whether justified by logic or revelation, moral truth as axioms (absolutes) are a poor substitute for engaged ethical interpretations of the real world, one where ethical principles and maxims are rules of thumb for developing real-world insights on how we ought to think and act.
There is also a direct connection between this “practical” approach to moral interpretation, and questions of ethics in public policy.
In the work of Aristotle, public policy (and politics more generally) is viewed as “ethics writ large”. There are three basic reasons for this. First moral values are part of matrix of influences that shape our identity as individuals and communities. We cannot understand ourselves or others without understanding the moral sensibilities that inform our worldview. Second, the policies we adopt and implement (or not) have an impact on the well being of the entire community of life. This ranges from local to national scales, and impacts people, animals and nature. Finally, public policy is unavoidably driven by values of many sorts, and in particular values of social justice, animal protection and environmental integrity. Ethical analysis is thus indispensable for understanding the meaning and implications of our public policies.
Image: Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787