Or even, Ethics: not just an afterthought with principles so self-evident that there’s no need to think too hard about them because basically anyone can work it out even if they’ve never even studied philosophy before…

by Simon Smith

Last time, we concluded with the rather bad-tempered assertion that neuroethicists, and by extension all other practitioners of applied ethics, should not be allowed to get away with imagining that their training in their original discipline is sufficient to qualify them to make substantive moral judgements about it. Indeed, it is one thing for normal people to pass moral judgement on a whole range of issues about which their knowledge is lacking in detail. It is, however, another thing altogether for supposedly serious scholars to do so.

I would not be able to get away with pontificating on the metaphysical implications of Soft Matter Physics without being able to demonstrate, at the drop of a scientific hat, that I knew a good deal about Soft Matter Physics. This, it seems to me, is a good thing, since it is only by being able to demonstrate such knowledge that anyone could be sure of the quality of my work. This is the essence of peer review and, as such, it is essential to progress in any and every field of study. A scholar who insists on holding forth on a subject in which he or she is not trained runs the risk of making grave errors, or worse, being regarded as a charlatan.

Fortunately, as mentioned before, we have Drs Beauregard and Larrivee to fight that fight and remind their neuro-colleagues that there’s more to philosophical thinking than meets their unphilosophical eye.

And so we come back to the central point. That is, whether neuroethics, or business ethics, or ethics and the computer, or personal ethics, or any other kind of ethics is really anything more than just ethics. Do these worlds of human activity really add anything or change anything when it comes to moral thinking? To put the point a little differently, have these modes of thought and action actually created any new moral problems for us to think about? Or are we, in fact, simply faced with the same old questions about how we relate to one another, how treat one another; how we govern our actions and our impact on others, how we think about those actions and their impact?

Coming back to the matter of technology, where the moral point is often at its sharpest, we can say that our reach and the range of opportunities for behaving badly has certainly been hugely extended. I can now threaten and abuse people all over the world without leaving my nice little study. But if we consider, for example, the recent reports of online abuse suffered by female politicians, it seems as though the question facing those who would indulge in such abuse is the same as ever: are you going to be a massive bell-end? Well, are you?

Oh, you are.

Of course, those who choose the way of the bell-end are very likely bell-ends anyway. They may have found another outlet for their bell-endery, but the bell-end was always there, always a part of them. And, as if explicit bell-end-itude isn’t enough – as it surely is – our modern bell-ends have left us feeling something like sympathy for the politicians who suffer it. I don’t mind feeling sorry for ordinary human beings who suffer unwarranted abuse, but I resent, deeply resent, being made to feel sorry for politicians who cop it.

In the end, it’s not at all clear whether or not the context, however complex and difficult it may be, really adds anything substantial to the development and working-through of ethical theories. The context may be of vital importance, but the ethical principles we apply will always be the same; they must be if they are to be genuine ethical principles. To change one’s morals depending on whether one is conducting business deals, spending time with one’s family and friends, or analysing MRI scans, is a sure sign that moral thinking as gone awry. It boils down to something like this: how I treat people depends on what I want from them, be that money, company, research material, or what have you. Whatever else this might be, it is not moral thinking.

Moral thinking depends, not upon the kind of activity we’re engaged in, or what we want to gain from those others who are engaged in it with us. It is about doing, obviously, but not the particular kind of doing. Rather, moral thinking depends, to some degree, on whether or not we are persons; which is to say, it depends on whether or not we’re the kind of creatures which can be charged with deliberate action and, therefore, at least some degree of responsibility. Are we, moreover, the kind of creatures to which dignity – as problematic as that notion may be – can fairly be imputed? Are we capable of flourishing or developing, in some sense; and are we capable of participating both constructively and destructively in that development? If we are any of these things, then moral demands and obligations will inevitably lie upon us.

Given its essentially social nature, the moral point here is not simply a matter of whether or not that with which I am interacting is a person or an object, someone, as Spaemann would say, to be recognised and engaged with or something to be utilised for some end. The dialectical or interconstitutive structure of ‘personhood’ means that how we interact with others and objects has significant consequences for what we are. Put another way, it’s not simply a matter of what my ‘other’ is, someone or something, that determines how I ought to treat them. This makes morality sound terribly self-centred, potentially sliding into some kind of Cartesian ego-isolationism. That is not at all what I’m driving at. It’s much to long and windy to go into here, but it ties up with a concept of the self that is essentially constituted by the other, that constructs itself in the image of the other, and so by the very nature of its existence is other-oriented or participatory.

Here, however, moving morality away from the question of identity (what someone or something is) was meant to convey a much more basic idea. It’s simply that, drawing a more or less clear-cut distinction between human and non-human animals is not a justification for cruelty or lack of care.

The underlying structure of this kind of moral thinking is obviously Kantian. The influence of Kantian ethics on personalism is hardly surprising, given the emphasis on duty and obligation, and the straight-up opposition to any kind of utilitarianism. That said, it is worth bearing in mind that many personalists regard the absolute reliance on reason, at the expense of and in radical opposition to emotions, to be profoundly unsatisfactory. Consider this, suppose I tell my wife that my fidelity to her is born, not of love and affection, but from an obligation to abide by the moral law within. Suppose I say that to do otherwise would fail the test of universalizability, committing me to willing a contradiction, and setting my face against reason itself. Not bloody likely.

However, this too, is not something I want to get into here; another time, perhaps. The point here is only to suggest that subdivision within the study of ethics do not, I think, bring anything new to the table. In doing the ethics of business or technology or what have you, we are ultimately just doing ethics. That’s not to say these subdivisions are not interesting or, in their own way, useful. Given the necessarily practical nature of ethics, it is always going to be a good idea to think through one’s principles in relation to concrete circumstances and real-life problems. And there are always so many of those.  In the end, however, ethics is always nothing more or less than ethics, no matter the circumstances.

At least, that’s what I always thought….