The Cruciality Yet Failure of Moral Philosophy
In the quest for the ultimate justification of ethics, a decisive difficulty seems to be that ethics is so exceedingly elusive. After years at a philosophy department, I know what the academic discipline “ethics” is, but what kind of thing is this peculiar thing “ethics” that the academic discipline is all about?
The academic discipline “ethics,” that is to say, moral philosophy, I will hereafter call “moral philosophy” and nothing else. It consists of the two branches, “normative ethics” and “meta-ethics.” This peculiar thing “ethics,” i.e., that which moral philosophy is all about, on the other hand, I will interchangeably call “ethics” or “morals.” Normative ethics is the academic discipline about what the correct morals are, i.e., about which actions ought to be performed and not and what the value of each thing is, that is to say, about what is right, wrong, good, and bad. Meta-ethics is the academic discipline about what morals actually are, what status they have, and how they can be understood.
Is ethics some kind of mysterious entity with its own special existence? Is its existence independent of the physical universe? Some people seem to think so. Or, does ethics exist in the same way as, for example, love exists? Many human beings seem to have no clue. In fact, most people seem to have quite a confused understanding of what ethics is. If ethics at all exists, then when did it come into existence? Was it when time itself began at the Big Bang? Are some persons implying that physicists ought to make a mysterious addition to the Big Bang theory? I hope not.
Is knowledge of ethics accessible through our conscience? Is this the case even though the conscience of one person differs from the conscience of another? Some people seem to think so. Or, is knowledge of this mysterious entity accessible through careful consideration, analysis, and reasoning? Is this the case even though the twenty-four centuries that have passed since the groundbreaking moral philosophical analysis and reasoning of the character Socrates and other classical Greek philosophers have left us human beings with nothing close to moral unanimity? Some moral philosophers seem to think so.
Human beings in general do not seem to understand what ethics is, which could be seen as being at odds with the fact that humans seem to have invented it. That which you have invented, you understand. So, maybe humans, after all, have not invented ethics but rather have discovered it. In that case, we humans surely should know how to observe it. That which you have discovered, you know how to observe. But we do not. How peculiar! Ethics certainly seems confusing.
For years, I have tried to give moral philosophy careful consideration in the light of the observation and understanding of the physical universe, for if knowledge of ethics is not accessible, then at least knowledge of the physical universe is. The only part of the universe to which ethics seems at all applicable or relevant is the part that is alive. This part is organic life, and its science is biology. However, no matter how crucial water and a sun might be to an organism, vast oceans and temperate stars seem to be utterly useless and entirely worthless in a universe that has seen the irrevocable and complete inability of organic life to survive and reproduce. Indeed, universal and permanent death would seem to make ethics in every sense non-existent.
To a large extent, moral philosophy speaks about what is right and wrong, and, therefore, to some extent, speaks about behavior. The academic discipline about behavior is ethology, which is a part of biology and, by the way, is connected to ethics etymologically. Interestingly enough, knowledge of human nature, which, to moral philosophy, might be as relevant as knowledge of behavior, is likewise a part of biology. In traditional moral philosophy, however, biology has been remarkably absent. Perhaps moral philosophy ought to be somehow fitted with biology, especially with ethology and behavioral ecology, which is the academic discipline about the effect of natural selection on behavior and of behavior on survival and reproduction.
The academic discipline of physics displays a truly impressive development. The physical universe is known to our species on a scale that hardly was imaginable a couple of centuries ago. Physics is a major success story of humanity, and so is, for example, biology, mathematics, and technology. We know a great deal about, for instance, galaxies, organisms, and numbers that was unknown a few generations ago, and since then, we have invented scores of machines. But what do we actually know about ethics that was unknown to Socrates and other classical Greek philosophers twenty-four centuries ago? Not much, I am afraid. Moral philosophy, being the final arbiter of the rightness and value of all behavior, might be the one truly major failure story of humanity.
We often have strong opinions about how human beings ought to act and not, about what is right, wrong, good, and bad, and about what is valuable and not. However, we have no knowledge of any of this. The core evidence in physics and biology is massively overwhelming and tremendously compelling, but evidence in moral philosophy never is anything close to that. In fact, there seems to be no core evidence at all in moral philosophy.
That we at all can hold moral opinions with conviction, despite having no evidence for them, is, of course, due to their biological, i.e., organic, and non-academic origin. A mother, for instance, who strongly holds that the killing of her son is bad and wrong does not most strongly do that due to the fact that she has studied moral philosophy, but to the fact that she is an animal created by Darwinian natural selection.
Our knowledge in physics and biology is massive to its extent; our knowledge in moral philosophy is next to nothing. That is, however, not the case due to moral philosophy being unimportant. If, at last, knowledge were achieved of which actions in fact ought to be performed, and which political ideology in fact ought to be implemented, then it would surely be an intellectual and practical revolution of decisive importance for humanity. With moral evidence we could settle our differences.
Politics, political ideology, and political theory are all dependent on moral philosophy, since, firstly, they too are concerned with what is right, wrong, good, and bad, but only politically right, wrong, good, and bad, and, lastly, they do not seek the ultimate justification of these norms and values. Sadly enough, much of moral philosophy is similar; it is concerned with neither norms or values of solitude, for example, nor the ultimate justification of any norms or values, only with which norms and values of sociality that supposedly would be good and right to try to instil in your fellow human beings.
Yet another example of the failure of moral philosophy is that it hardly is used to derive any political ideology at all, let alone any politics of the world. Politics, which directly and massively affects living beings, needs unconditionally to be adapted to reality. Since traditional moral philosophy is not, it fortunately is disregarded or discarded by politicians.
In moral philosophy, our crime- and war-ridden species looks like an utter failure; in physics, biology, mathematics, and technology, on the other hand, this intelligent species of great apes is an impressive success. Mathematically and technologically, we are, without doubt, way ahead of the gorillas; morally, I am not even certain that we are ahead at all. This discrepancy is painfully striking and must be caused by something. Could it be caused by the non-existence of ethics, making moral knowledge not only inaccessible but outright impossible?
In some respects, numbers, and other things that are studied in mathematics, seem to be similar to ethics. Whether numbers were invented or discovered seems to be unknown, and in what way they actually exist seems to be unknown too. Regardless of that, however, mathematics is heavily dominated by purely logical relations, for example, conditional statements, which neither assume nor require the actual existence of what they speak about. Moral philosophy, on the other hand, is far from dominated by conditional statements or other logical relations and speaks about actions of individuals in the actually existing biosphere, which makes the question of whether or not its subject at all exists the more important.
Mathematics is, if possible, an even greater success story than physics, and so lies in stark contrast to the miserable failure of moral philosophy, a failure that instead is comparable to that of theology. The lack of results or progress in theology is, of course, to a large extent caused by the complete lack of evidence for the alleged existence of any God, who, amongst other made-up persons or notions, is what allegedly is studied in theology. Academic disciplines whose research subjects do not even exist have, of course, hard times displaying any results or progress apart from tautologies. So, does ethics at all exist? Ethics as we know it does not. However, ethics in some other sense surely does.
This essay is excerpted from a book the author is developing on a novel moral and political theory.
Tristan Tempest is a Swedish party-political spokesperson and philosophy teacher. He lives with his wife Kajsa-My, who is a researcher, and their children temporarily in Lafayette, Indiana.