Philosophy 103: Ethics

Reading list 2022–23

NB. There are ten topics on this reading list. The first eight are topics in what’s known as ‘normative ethics’; the last two are topics in ‘metaethics’. Metaethics is closer to metaphysics and the philosophy of language than normative ethics. By default we'll cover only the topics in normative ethics—i.e. topics I–VIII. But if you would prefer to study some metaethics in place of one or two of the first eight topics, discuss it with me and your tutorial partners.

Essays should be shorter than 2,000 words and ideally submitted as Microsoft Word documents, which allows me to make use of Word’s comment function.

I. Well-being

What is it for someone’s life to go well? It’s quite natural to think that this question is at the foundation of ethics. For it seems that both how we should plan for our own lives and how we should treat others depends fundamentally on what it takes for our and their lives to go well. The thought that we should start theorising about morality from an account of well-being may also be familiar to you from your first-year study of J.S. Mill. This week, then, we consider competing theories of well-being.

Question: In what way does one’s well-being depend on one’s subjective states?

II. Options and demandingness

Act-consequentialists typically believe that an act is permissible if and only if it brings about the best available outcome. This requirement to maximise the impartial good is widely thought to be too demanding in some important sense. How forceful is this objection? What could justify us in failing to bring about the most good we can achieve?

Question: ‘Consequentialism is impossibly demanding. So it cannot be correct.’ Discuss.

III. Non-consequentialist constraints

Although consequentialism may be more theoretically elegant, everyday moral thinking seems more naturally captured in non-consequentialist terms. One striking illustration is provided by ‘agent-relative constraints’, which disallow certain courses of action even if these appear to have the best consequences. These can seem puzzling, even irrational, despite widespread intuitive acceptance of them. Non-consequentialists have therefore been at pains to try to give a theoretical rationale for them, and even some consequentialists have tried to show that their favoured view can accommodate them.

Question: Is it sometimes wrong to harm someone even when I can save more people from comparable harms thereby? Why?

N.B. After reading Kamm’s overview and the seminal discussions, it may be wise to focus on either the distinction between doing and allowing or the significance of intentions/the means principle, but not both.

IV. Kant: acting from duty

Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is perhaps the greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition, and certainly one of that tradition's great peaks. It is dazzling in its creativity, in its technical ingenuity, and in its ambition—although it can also seem forbidding, thanks to Kant's difficult style. From an analysis of everyday moral thinking that identifies the notion of a good will at its heart, Kant proceeds to argue that our very freedom depends on conforming to the moral law. On the way, he introduces ideas of universalisation and humanity as ‘an end in itself’ that have great resonance even for many of those who reject Kant's theory.

Question: Is Kant right to conclude that only action from duty has moral worth?

V. Kant: universalisability

The centrepiece of the Groundwork is the ‘Categorical Imperative’, Kant's master principle of morality. The first of several supposedly equivalent formulations of the Categorical Imperative is the ‘Formula of Universal Law’ (FUL), which makes the possibility of universalising one's intention in action a test of the action's permissibility. In making universalisation central, Kant recalls an injunction that is at the heart of many moral traditions: that one should treat others as one would be treated oneself (sometimes known as the ‘Golden Rule’). But the FUL differs in important ways from the Golden Rule, and has a distinctive theoretical basis. This week we analyse the FUL, consider Kant's argument for it in Groundwork II, and assess its adequacy as a moral principle.

Question: Can universalization be the basis of a plausible account of the content of morality?

VI. Scanlonian contractualism

Scanlonian contractualism is a non-consequentialist moral theory according to which an act is wrong if and only if it is disallowed by a principle that no one could reasonably reject who was motivated to find such principles. Developed in the second half of the 20th century by T.M. Scanlon, it has become enormously influential in contemporary ethical theorising. Its key attraction is in the way it captures the idea that permissible actions must be acceptable from all reasonable points of view. But there are doubts about whether the theory is genuinely explanatory, about whether its avoidance of the unpalatable conclusions associated with consequentialism is gerrymandered, and about the way it handles risk, among other things.

Question: Does contractualism offer a compelling account of wrongness?

VII. Virtue ethics

According to one narrative about modern moral philosophy, it was by the end of the 19th century regarded as a contest between two ‘methods of ethics’: deontology and consequentialism. The 20th century saw the revival of a third method, inspired by classical Greek ethics. This third method has come to be known as ‘virtue ethics’. It makes the notion of a virtue theoretically central, displacing the deontological emphasis on duties or rules and the consequentialist focus on assessment of acts by reference to the good that they produce instrumentally. Critics argue that virtue ethics fails to be action-guiding, or that it is fundamentally unattractively egoistic, or that it's not really a distinctive method of ethics at all, among other objections.

Question: Are virtue ethicists right to make virtue fundamental in ethical theory?

VIII. The authority of morality

One of the most abiding questions in moral philosophy is: “why be moral?” This question presses us to find a reason that would be sufficient to persuade a sceptic (the ‘amoralist’) to comply with moral requirements. Of course, sometimes the sceptic's self-interest will favour doing the morally right thing anyway, but that doesn't seem to be the kind of reason we are seeking. Some try to show that moral reasons are constructed from self-interested reasons; others doubt that the question even makes sense. This week, we try to get to grips with the question, and we consider various strategies for addressing it.

Question: Why should I be moral?

IX. The reality of moral properties

When we describe an act using a moral term such as ‘wrong’, we appear to ascribe a moral property, such as wrongness, to the act. Taken at face value, our moral discourse therefore commits us to the reality of such properties. But how are we to understand this? It seems that moral properties are not obviously ‘out there’ in the way that, say, molecules or light waves are. And even if they are out there in some other way, that raises questions about how we are able to perceive them. Moral realists think that these doubts can be assuaged. This week, we consider their arguments and the forms of moral realism they defend.

NB. The network of Stanford Encyclopedia entries on moral realism and anti-realism and associated arguments is of a very high standard.

Question: Is any form of moral realism plausible?

X. Moral anti-realism

Some philosophers are persuaded by reflection on the kinds of objections we considered for topic VII to reject moral realism in favour of some form of anti-realism. There are a range of broadly anti-realistic views; some focus on the moral metaphysics (e.g. the error theory, moral relativism, constructivism), others on moral discourse and psychology (e.g. expressivism, emotivism). Each view faces its own distinctive challenges. There is also the general challenge of vindicating our everyday conduct, which an anti-realistic view faces if it does not aim to be radically revisionary. This week, we set aside other forms of anti-realism in order to focus on non-cognitivism. (There are a couple of readings on other views in the further reading, however.)

One of the most important objections to non-cognitivism that we'll be discussing is the ‘Frege-Geach problem’. There is a nice YouTube introduction to this problem here. Note that the presenter tends to exaggerate the degree to which the problem (as he sets it out) has been shown to be fatal to non-cognitivists, among other things.

NB. (again) The network of Stanford Encyclopedia entries on moral realism and anti-realism and associated arguments is of a very high standard. The Internet Encycopedia of Philosophy's entry on expressivism is also very good.

Question: Can non-cognitivism be successfully defended?