Philosophy Intro to Ethics

THE ARGUMENT

1. William James, who’s known for his clever analogies and interesting turns of phrase, treats us to a unusual set of thought experiments, the goal of which is to get to the heart of morality and find out where “good” comes from. You’ll notice when you read the next selection from G.E. Moore the same sort of thought experiment being used. First, James asks us to “imagine an absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts, and existing from eternity without a God” (p. 205)—this sounds very much like the Earth before the development of life from a protein-based slurry hundreds of millions of years ago. But it could equally describe a world full of trees, oceans and fairly complex life- forms (up to, but not including the apes and certain other mammals like dolphins and whales). It does not make much sense, to James, to say that any given “snapshot” of this world is any worse or any better than any other, before or after. “Betterness is not a physical relation,” he says (p. 205), and “Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic ‘nature of things’ can realize them.” (pp. 205-206) James says that morality originates in the consciousness of sentient, self-aware creatures and that when “goodness” or “badness” so arises, we act in certain ways, putting values on things that they do not have in themselves. Do you agree? James’s conclusion here has implications for the next reading from G.E. Moore, but also for some of the things we said about evolutionary ethics in Module Four and some of the things we will say about natural law and natural rights ethics in the next module, too.

2. James also seems to think that ethics has a social dimension. His next thought experiment gives us a nice tour of familiar positions in ethics: he gets us to imagine that in this world of purely physical facts, one person appears. Then there are two persons, and finally a number of persons. Here’s a brief synopsis of how James sees the world change morally with the inclusion of these new elements:

# of persons Ethical situation (according to James)

What this implies

one “moral solitude” the “god-like” person who lives alone in this universe may think about goodness and badness, right and wrong, but no obligations exist and there is no standard of right and wrong save his/her subjective views (p. 206)

two “moral dualism”/egoism of each against each other

the two thinkers have their own standards of good & bad, but may be completely indifferent to each others’ standards—there’s no compelling reason to come to some kind of consensus (pp. 206-207)

more than two obligations according to rules derived from “the way the world really is”

“philosopher-types,” dissatisfied with the opposition of moral dualism, strive for some fact about the nature of the

PHIL 212: Introductory Ethics Module 7/Normative Ethics: Happiness and Satisfaction Ultimate Good (Part Two)

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universe in itself that will make one opinion stand out over the other

Notice that only in the third situation do we get anything like what we have been describing as morality. James says, “The philosopher, therefore, who seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one ought to be subordinated, must trace the ought itself to the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as one of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is unable to go” (p. 207). BUT remember, James already said that the “natural” or physical world outside of particular humans with their minds, desires, and demands on each other doesn’t admit of being good or bad: “betterness is not a physical relation.” The traditional ethical philosopher’s move is not “legal.”

3. What does this leave us with? According to James, it leaves us where we were in the situation of “moral dualism”—with competing demands and ethical preferences. So, for example, you can’t be both an Epicurean and a Stoic, and if we all followed the path of ahimsa with Gandhi, we wouldn’t be virtuous in Aristotle’s sense, etc., etc. Multiply this competition a thousand-fold (maybe more!) to represent all the desires, aversions (in a word, preferences) that assail us on a daily basis, and you have the basic ethical situation: lots of needs, many demands, not all of which can be reconciled but all of which cry out that they are the most important!

4. This is where James makes his positive claims about ultimate good and the nature of morality. Ready for a shocker? Each and all of these preferences we have is ultimately good! “Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however weak, may make,” James writes. “Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied? if not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that ran the other way” (p. 208). Competition, lack of time and scarce resources are the main reason why all preferences can’t be satisfied, James says— otherwise, we would live in a perfect world in which (you guessed it!) every preference would be equally satisfied! (James describes such a world at the top of p. 210) This is preference utilitarianism—the idea that “since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can? That act is the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. …[T]herefore, those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed” (p. 210).

III. Moore: good, un-analyzable good A. BACKGROUND G.E. Moore (1873-1958) was professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and a member of the literary group the Bloomsbury circle. Moore is one of the central figures in the early history of analytic philosophy, which pays very close attention to logical

PHIL 212: Introductory Ethics Module 7/Normative Ethics: Happiness and Satisfaction Ultimate Good (Part Two)