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Normative Ethical Theories(W13) ON NORMATIVE ETHICAL THEORIES: SOME BASICS From the dawn of philosophy, the question concerning the summum bonum, or, what is the same thing, concerning the foundation of morality, has been accounted the main problem in speculative thought… — John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism As I noted in the course introduction, we will focus our attention on THE BIG IDEAS TO MASTER attempts by philosophers to answer the question what is the well- • Normative ethics lived life? by attempting to answer (in part) two other all-important • Value judgement questions, namely: what is justice? and what, if any, good reasons are • Normative standard/criterion • Ethical foundationalism there to be just rather than unjust (or vice versa)? These two • Value property questions (what we’re calling the justice questions) are at the heart of • Intrinsic value developing a philosophical theory of morality. But what exactly are • Instrumental value we looking to figure out when we ask these two questions? We will • Moral realism focus on attempts to answer the moral versions of these questions, • Naturalistic ethics that is, about moral justice. As such, we will focus on ethics. What, however, does such an ethicist hope to figure out exactly by answering these questions (and related questions) about moral justice? To determine that, we need to make sure we understand which are and which are not the relevant fields of study. Kinds of ethical inquiries Let us begin by first locating our fields in relation to other fields that study ethics. Consider the following taxonomy: Kinds of ethical inquiries Non-philosophical inquiries Philosophical inquiries Descriptive ethics “Moralizing” / Applied ethics Normative ethics Metaethics Moral Training Sociology Psychology Anthropology Philosophical inquiries – the three branches of philosophical ethics § Applied ethics: that branch of philosophical ethics that seeks to determine the moral status of specific actions/practices in light of one or more general normative moral principles. § Normative ethics: that branch of philosophical ethics that seeks to develop a theory regarding the nature of moral rightness and wrongness. In so doing, it seeks to provide a complete, consistent, and authoritative general framework to determine how, morally speaking, a person ought and ought not live. § Metaethics: that branch of philosophical ethics that seeks to answer specific questions about the nature of normative ethics. On normative ethics: a closer look Since this is a course primarily on normative ethics, we need to understand what exactly is means to develop and defend a normative ethical theory. So let us ask what it means to say that we’re seeking a general framework for determining how we ought and ought not live. On the concept of a normative theory We evaluate things all the time, e.g., smart phones, movies, surfing conditions, rock climbing routes, people and their behaviors, etc. That is, we decide whether they have value or not, and if so, what value we think that they in fact have. In so doing, we are making what philosophers call value judgements. So, what is a value judgement? We can’t answer that unless we first get clear on what it is to make a judgement in general. As we all know, the word ‘judgement’ as used in English-speaking societies is often thought of a bad thing. We simply don’t like judgmental people. However, as we’ll see, what we really don’t like are people who make value judgements of a certain sort. For there is nothing problematic about making judgements per se. In fact, not only do we do this everyday of our lives, but we have to do so. Why? The answer is this: When a person makes a judgement, she simply has decided on how she thinks things are. That is, she decides what she thinks the world is actually like. More precisely, we can say: Judgement: When a person S judges that x is F, S decides that x is in fact F. Consider some examples of garden-variety judgements: A. Jones judges that there is enough distance between two cars to park her car, B. Smith judges that the chair will not break under his weight when he sits in it, C. Brown judges that every even positive integer greater than the number 2 is the sum of two primes. In each case, in making any one of these judgements, Jones, Smith and Brown decide, respectively, what each thinks is true. Of course, that this is what it is to make a judgement does not imply that a given judgement is correct. No, Smith might judge that the chair will hold his weight and be wrong; he might sit in it and it collapse underneath him. So, when you and I make judgements, that does not imply that our judgements are correct; no, in so doing we simply decide what we each think is true.1 Now back to the concept of a value judgement. Given what we just said, we can see that a value judgement is simply one type of judgement; it is a judgement involving values. That is, when someone makes a value judgement, she makes a decision about the value status of the thing in question, namely, she decides whether it is (actually) good or bad, right or wrong, how it ought to be or not. In other words, she makes a judgement as to whether or not a thing has a given value property. Consider a few examples of value judgements that people make: 1. Happiness is good, 2. It’s wrong to require Cal Poly students to take philosophy in order to graduate, 3. The President of the United States should listen to the people, and 4. Jones ought not torture Canadians for pleasure. 1 It’s easy to think that judgement making implies no one is right or wrong, or that no person is more (or less) reasonable than someone else. But that’s incorrect. There’s a difference between making a judgement and having adequate support for making a given judgement. At this point, we are not saying when a judgement is right or wrong, reasonable or not. As we can see, each of these sentences asserts that the subject in question has a value property. Each of these sentences describes an evaluation of the things in question, e.g., (1) asserts that happiness has the property of being good, (2) asserts that a certain requirement to graduate from Cal Poly is wrong, etc.2 Now, whether we realize it or not, whenever we make these value judgements, we do so on the basis of a standard or criterion that describes a norm, that is, we determine the value of something against a normative standard/criterion. We do so because we—correctly or incorrectly—take this normative standard to describe the actual ideal for that type of thing. And because of this, it means we are employing a normative theory. What is a normative theory? Let us say that NT: A theory T is a normative theory just in case T specifies the ideal with respect to some issue, i.e., how things ought or ought not be with respect to the issue in question. So, for instance, let us look again at our example sentences (1)–(4). A person accepts or rejects (1)–(4) on the basis of the normative theory that they accept regarding such things. Consider (2), for instance. Some Cal Poly students think (2) is true because they accept a normatively theory that says that a college education should (ideally) prepare a student for a obtaining a job but they do not think that taking a philosophy class serves that end. Of course, one of the all-important questions is this: from where do these norms come? To answer this, we must specify the type of normative theory with which we are concerned. Since we are focusing our attention on the study of moral philosophy, we will focus our question on moral norms. The first principle of morality So, let us re-ask the question: from where do moral norms come? This is one of the primary questions for our thinkers. And it turns out that to answer this is just to answer the first justice question, namely, what is justice? As we will see, there are a variety of answers offered to that question. But before we get into that more, it’s important to note that no matter the answer one offers, every answer takes the form of a normative theory and in so doing, that theory specifies a first principle of morality. Given this, the all-important question we just asked is really: from where does this first principle of morality come? We will more to say about this later since our course will devoted to exploring how various moral philosophers have answered that. Given that every normative theory of morality is committed to there being a first principle of morality, those theories are committed what we are going to call ethical foundationalism. What is that view? It is the view that EF: There is exactly one ultimate criterion of moral conduct (call it ‘C’), such that: (i) C tell us how, morally speaking, things ought to be (that is, it describes the ideal), and (ii) it is upon and in relation to C that we rank and organize any other moral principles that are derived from C. So, according to ethical foundationalism, we see that there is a criterion of moral conduct, that that criterion serves as the foundation for the whole of the moral theory, i.e., it serves as the basis or ultimate determining factor about the moral status of the things in question by specifying the ideal, and any moral principle other than that criterion is both derived from and also ranked and organized according to the requirements of that criterion.
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