Ethics is a very important discipline, in that it provides the foundations for all human actions, both on a small, individual and a large, political and macro-economic scale. Ethics can be seen a long endeavor in providing an answer to the question “what is the good”. Personal decisions are made by asking ourselves, implicitly or explicitly: What do I perceive as a good, and what are the means to obtain that good? All political discourse is conducted by asking ourselves, implicitly or explicity: What do we as a society perceive as a good, and what are the means to obtain that good?
But what is our source of knowledge to determine good action? My argument here is that the field of ethics, and moral philosophy more broadly, should never be untangled from examining different metaphysical foundations, but always confronts us with the need to philosophize at a deeper level.
Why is this? We can say that reason is the candidate to what uncovers what’s good, as many in our culture do, although often sloppily. But what does this mean? In any dialogue on ethics where we strive for mutual understanding, and hopefully agreement, we’re roughly left with two alternatives:
- We can agree that something is good, because we’ve identified goodness prior to ourselves.
- We can agree that something is good, but this goodness is wholly contingent upon our agreement.
If (1), then ethics is a rational activity. We can agree upon the good, because attempting to discover moral truths is similar to agreeing that evolutionary theory or special relativity describes the workings of nature. Surely, it could be harder to find agreement, but that doesn’t prove it’s invalidity. It could only be that metaphysics, as a more fundamental and thorough-going field of study, is harder than biology or physics. However, if we say (2), ethics is an a-rational activity. What we’re doing when we’re agreeing upon goodness, is not about uncovering a reality existing ontologically prior to ourselves per se, but something else. But goodness contingent upon agreement is not goodness at all. What is preferred by Norwegians is abhorred by Chinese, and vice versa, ranging from a collectivist mindset and treatment of the elderly to freedom of speech and human rights. And if the topics come up to a vote, they vastly outnumber the puny Northerners.
The natural sciences are similarly helpless, as they are modelled to capture the purely quantitative study of quantifiable aspects of objects in motion (Jaki, 2000). Science can help us to eradicate diseases, build more stable structures that will withstand even earthquakes or tsunamis and alleviate suffering among patients. But all of this is posterior to the more foundational activity, where we to identified this as a good worth pursuing, or an evil worth avoiding. Scientific inquiry will never discover value laden theories by itself. So how do we move on in determining the good?
The search for a metaethics, a solid underpinning for ethics, has been less than convincing in modern times. Admittedly, most of us don’t think too much about metaethics in daily life. We take as a given that words like “good” and “bad”, “better” and “worse” are meaningful. That they can be used to communicate real knowledge between different human beings. In a similar way, we take actions, attitudes and states of affairs that we can tag with the label “good” to be worth promoting, and we attempt to combat their opposites. We might say that we believe in goods and evils, but not in a theologically infused and capitalized Good and Evil. Although it’s hard to tell what the difference this capitalization is supposed to make.
In short. Moral language seems to be alive and well in our culture. Few of us would aspire to a project of moral nihilism or total relativism. But at the same time, the enlightenment vision of providing a universal rationale for what constitutes good human action is widely regarded to have fallen apart. On Alasdair MacIntyre’s summary of ethics, this led to the rise of emotivism in the early 20th century. Propositions about good and bad human actions, were nothing more than our emotional dispositions towards them, which could equally be expressed as “yay this” and “boo that” (MacIntyre, 1981). But emotional dispositions, or preferences, hardly provide a solid foundation for normative ethics. Why should anyone else care if I display negative emotional dispositions towards some form of behavior, such as spanking one’s child or robbing one’s neighbor, instead of supporting children and loving neighbors. They might just as well display the opposite emotional disposition or preference, and we’re left with a stalemate.
MacIntyre hence later gives this summary:
“What I had recognized was that the failure of the Enlightenment project left open two alternatives: to reconstruct the moral theory and communal practice of Aristotelianism in whatever version would provide the best theory so far, explaining the failure of the Enlightenment as part of the aftermath of the breakdown of a tradition; or, instead, to understand the failure of the Enlightenment as a symptom of the impossibility of discovering any rational justification for morality as hitherto understood, a sign of the truth of Nietzsche’s diagnosis. So the choice posed by After Virtue was: Aristotle or Nietzsche?” (Borradori, 1994, p. 148-149)
This leaves us with roughly speaking two choices in how to proceed in working out our metaphysics: Aristotle or Nietzsche. Either we can regard ethics as a task for the intellect, attempting to explore something factual that exists prior to us as individual human beings, or it’s purely about will, the will to power. MacIntyre writes:
“For it was Nietzsche’s historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher—certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism—not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy.” (1981, p. 107)
Another way to look at the dichotomy, is through David Hume’s famous fact/value-distinction. If nature in itself bears no normativity, we can only retrieve pure descriptions from our exploration of it. But mere descriptions will not provide a basis for a metaethics, that can lead to a normative ethics, to provide all human beings with the necessary shoulds and oughts that takes them through life, from their very first parental instructions. On the other hand, the reason for why moral investigation is possible in Aristotle, is due to his teleological philosophy of nature, where the good is aligned with the telos, the directedness of natural things.
Then to find out which alternative we should opt for, we need to take a step back from ethics per se, to natural philosophy, and even to metaphysics. Because if MacIntyre is right, engaging the enlightenment project will spiral you towards moral nihilism, even though it might be camouflaged with logical inconsistencies along the way. And if that seems less than satisfying, either intellectually or morally, you might want to investigate pre-enlightenment.
That will however have deep-seated implication. Because you’re not only opting for an ethics, a set of rules that you prefer in modifying your behavior, but it’s another ontology altogether. It is a brand-new way to hold the entire world. MacIntyre concludes:
“(…) either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative.” (1981, p. 111).