What Is Ethics? (2) - Moral Coordination

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Continued from What Is Ethics ? (1)

Morals or morality, on one hand, and ethics, on the other, are etymologically very similar, both terms originally referring to custom, convention, tradition, rite. Nowadays, the term morality comprises the practical enactment of normative constraints on human interaction. By contrast, the word ethics, at least as I use it here, denotes (the largely academic practice of) reasoning about morality. 

Ethics can take two forms, one normative, and the other descriptive. The latter tries to describe and analyse moral phenomena, whereas the former takes a stance in demanding moral rules and practices and offering strategies for justifying them.

Though, other breakdowns of ethics are possible. Thus, ethics may be divided into 

• meta-ethics, studying the the conditions underlying the possibility of studying morals, sharpening our picture of what moral behaviour consists of and what tools we have helping us to reason meaningfully about the good and the bad,

• normative ethics, seeking to discover and defend the values on which moral arguments should rely,

and

• applied ethics, narrowing in on specific issues, such as the ethics of market behaviour, doing justice to the need of becoming competent in a subject-matter if one is to engage in informed and responsible moral reasoning.

Three questions are fundamental and recurrent in the history of ethics:

• What is the highest value / good? (Or: What is the right ranking of values?)

• How to conduct oneself in morally correct fashion?

• What does it mean to state that man is or is not endowed with free will?

I shall deal only with the first of these three questions here, possibly writing about the other two in later posts.

What Is the Highest Value? What Is the Right Ranking of Values?

As a finding of descriptive ethics, on the one hand, responses to this question are hard to "control" by authoritative decree. People pursue different approaches to the question and come up with varying answers - to some the master value is a tranquil and safe life, to others it is the fight for communism. On the other hand, not least because of this natural variety in people's ranking of values, there is a need to coordinate the differing rankings. And it might appear that to this purpose one needs to somehow persuade one another of a common morality.

There is no doubt that it is desirable to be intelligible, logically sound and persuasive in one's ethical reasoning with others. And ethical reasoning is something we all engage in some form or other, to a larger or lesser degree. Pondering the common good, for example, is among the staples of ethical reasoning.

But I would caution: we may overemphasise (a) the need for commonly reasoned moral beliefs, which concerns especially the tacit (b) assumption that such common presumptions need to form a consistent, logical whole. I suspect that ethics is apt to be tempted by a presumption in favour of (a) and (b).

I would conjecture that people are capable of coordinating morally without much express public reasoning, or even personal reasoning. The question is how they do it, and what transrational synapses are at work in linking people up in morally coordinated patterns of interaction. This seems to me a hugely important project for descriptive ethics.

Also, I suspect that a strictly hierarchical conception of moral attitudes is more a need derived from academic practices than one of human beings steeped in life outside the ivory tower. Both as relatively autonomous individuals and as socially interacting agents we probably fare better with flexible and permanently rearranged moral weightings, which may be effective because they are often fuzzy, compromise-based, contradictory and dynamically inconsistent (inconsistent over time and in different situations). Bad ethics may actually be a sign of moral fitness. That is to say: adaptable moral comportment may look bad if logically reconstructed, but it may represent the very precondition for attaining stable morally desirable outcomes such as peace and trust.

Moral inconsistency is always a major defect in rationalist accounts of correct behaviour. Yet in practical life it is a tool and disposition that is indispensable in living an alert, judicious and personally satisfactory life.

Thus a man, Mr. A., may well believe in the fundamental equality of human beings, treat his contemporaries of race-and-nationality (ran) 1, and ran 2, and ran 3 in compliance with that rule, yet discriminate against ran 4 in contravention of that principle. The difference being that intermediary conditions that do not apply to ran 1, ran 2, and ran 3, do intervene in the case of ran 4. Unlike those belonging to the other groups, members of ran 4 may happen to exhibit features unpleasant and threatening to Mr. A.

Adherence to a consistent moral philosophy may be injudicious and ultimately even self-defeating (producing morally defective results), owing to at least two reasons. (1) Such adherence may rely on reasoning too abstract to capture the conditions of real life - as in the case above. (2) There may be a trade-off between formal consistency and adaptability, the latter being a highly effective feature of moral behaviour, especially, but not only, in situations where convergence by deliberation no longer progresses and the rationalised moralities of the contending parties arrive at an insoluble impasse.

An ample record of give-and-take (adaptable morality) may be required to build the level of transrational trust that encourages to overcome impasses created by incommensurable rational moral conclusions.

To be continued in What Is Ethics ? (3).