A Brief Introduction to Formal Ethics
You've been thinking about and discussing
the torture situation in
class. You've been asked to think about what course
of action would be (or would have been) right or wrong in that
situation.
You were not just asked, for example, what would be (or would have
been) legally correct in that situation (which would be
a purely legal question). You were not just asked what most people
might do in that situation (a purely sociological question). You
were not just asked what might feel most pleasant or unpleasant
in that situation (a purely psychological question). You were instead
asked what course of action you thought would be the best (or worst)
one to take in those situations. That's the kind of question that
ethics deals with.
How does one think about ethical questions?
Do you just go on your gut feeling and follow whatever your feelings
tell you? Do you
just go on what people in authority have told you in the past? Do
you just go with what the laws and courts have to say? How does
one go about deciding
what course of action would be the best, or most right, course of
action in a given situation? Or rather, how should one even start
to think about
questions like that? What methods of analyzing these questions would
be most helpful and would be most likely to lead to the best
answers?
In the history of thinking about ethical
questions in the West, several methods for analyzing these questions
have emerged. Many
of those methods can be classified under two main headings: Teleological methods
and Deontological methods. Below is a brief description of
each of these two methods of thinking about ethical questions. In
our discussions
about ethical situations in class -- the torture situation and some
others we'll be discussing in the coming weeks
-- you'll want to be able to identify which kind of thinking is being
used to come to the conclusions people come to. Are they using a
primarily teleological
approach (TEE LEE uh LAW jih kul), or are they using primarily a
deontological approach (DEE AWN tuh LAW jih kul)?
So here's what each kind of method is:
Teleological methods, sometimes called consequentialist methods,
are based on estimating what the likely outcomes of a given course of action
will be, and then choosing the method that has the most positive consequences
and the fewest negative consequences. According to these methods, those actions
should be chosen which lead to more positive and fewer negative consequences,
and those actions should be rejected which lead to more negative consequences
and fewer positive consequences.
In class, for example, some of you who said that it
would be good to torture the person who had been arrested argued that the
outcomes would be better if we did torture him (lives saved, etc) than if
we did not (thousands killed, etc). That is using a teleological or consequentialist
kind of thinking to determine which course of action would be best.
John Stuart Mills Utilitarianism is
usually seen as the classical expression of consequentialist
ethical thinking, and
so is Joseph Fletchers Situation Ethics. Future readings
in the course will examine Mills utilitarian method as the
primary example of teleological ethical thinking. Mill's most famous
book
outlining this
method is titled Utilitarianism.
Fletcher's book on the subject, taking a somewhat different approach,
is titled Situation
Ethics.
...
Deontological, or duty-based, ethical systems,
on the other hand, are those that simply claim, directly and simply, what
the fundamental ethical duties are. The
Ten Commandments (from Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Torah) would
be examples of deontological ethical thinking. According to the Ten Commandments,
these actions -- honor your father and mother, do not steal, do not commit
adultery, keep holy the sabbath, etc -- are stated as simply right things
to do or wrong things to do. They are said to be our clear moral duty. The
Ten Commandments do not merely suggest, for example, that you look at the
consequences of actions and then weigh the possible outcomes to determine
if an action is right or wrong. Instead they say that some actions are just
plain right and others are just plain wrong.
This is what characterizes deontological ethical methods: they simply
state that some things are right or wrong. Some things are your
duty to do (Greek deon, duty) and other things are your duty
to avoid. Human Rights documents, for example, are instances
of deontological thinking. When The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948)
says, for example, that "No one shall be held in slavery or
servitude" (article 4), or that "No one shall be subjected
to torture" (article 5), it is saying these things are just
plain wrong. When the UDHR says that "Everyone has the right
to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country"
(article 13), or that "Everyone has the right to freedom of
peaceful assembly and association" (article 20), or that "Everyone,
without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal
work" (article 23), it is saying that these things are simply
right and good.
Human Rights documents, therefore, exemplify deontological
thinking. After all, rights and duties are just the mirror images of each
other. When these documents say that person A has a certain right,
that means that person B (or state B) has the duty to see that that
right is fulfilled. If person A has the right to not be tortured,
then person B has the duty to not torture them. Rights and duties
are just two sides of the same coin.
How does deontological thinking figure out exactly which
actions are right and which are wrong, though? Several different analytical
methods have been developed for determining what our ethical duties are.
Two of the more famous methods can be found in the writings of Natural Law
ethics and in the writings of Immanuel Kant, particularly his books titled Fundamental
Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, and his Critique
of Practical Reason. A future lecture in this course will explore
Immanuel Kants ethical system as our primary example of deontological
thinking. The Human Rights documents we will be examining in the coming weeks
will also be examples of deontological thinking.
The Human Rights document we will be looking
at first is The
Nuremberg Code. This document, a response to the gruesome biological
experiments that were done by the Nazis using prisoners in the concentration
camps, was published in 1947. It is the first official statement
of what ethical principles should guide biomedical research involving
human subjects.
We will be studying it in detail in about two weeks.