Ethics
What should we do? What is normative?
What may a man do and not be ashamed of it? He may not do nothing surely, for straightaway he is dubbed Dolittle—aye! christens himself first—and reasonably, for he was first to duck. But let him do something, is he the less a Dolittle? Is it actually something done, or not rather something undone?1
Contents
- Virtue ethics
- Deontological ethics
- Consequentialism
- Moral antirealism
- Moral realism
- Moral naturalism
- Political philosophy
- Free speech
- Protests and (non-)violence
- Feminism
- Regret
- Compassion
- Ecology
- Aesthetics
- My thoughts
- Annotated bibliography
- Links and encyclopedia articles
- References
Virtue ethics
Introduction
- See the discussion of Stoicism.
- Aristotle
- Stoicism
- Philippa Foot (1920-2010)
Discussion
- TODO
Criticism
- TODO
Deontological ethics
Introduction
- Kant
- Rawls
- A Theory of Justice2
- The original position
- Reflective equilibrium
Kant:
Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world—can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.3
Discussion
- Cushman, F. (2013). Action, outcome, and value.4
- Ayars, A. (2016). Can model-free reinforcement learning explain deontological moral judgments?5
See also:
Criticism
- TODO
Consequentialism
Introduction
- Epicurus
- Bentham
- Mill
- Game theory
- Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem
- Binmore
- Portmore
- Commonsense Consequentialism6
See also:
Hedonism
- Yang Zhu (440-360 BCE)
- Epicurianism
- De Quincey, T. (1821). Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
- Hunter S. Thompson
- Christopher Hitchens. (2003). Living proof. Vanity Fair.
Effective altruism
- Peter Singer
- Toby Ord
- William MacAskill
Criticism
- The Repugnant Conclusion
- Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Pearson.7
- The experience machine
- Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia.8
Moral antirealism
Introduction
- The previous three sections are about ethics; the next three are about meta-ethics.
- Cognitivism and non-cognitivism
- Emotivism
- Hume, A.J. Ayer
- Positivism
- Relativism
- Nihilism
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- J.L. Mackie
- Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)9
- Argument from queerness
- Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)9
- Postmodernism
Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic:
Listen then, I say justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.10
Hume:
Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment. Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived. Or if we reason concerning it, and endeavour to fix its standard, we regard a new fact, to wit, the general taste of mankind, or some such fact, which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry.11
See also:
Is-ought divide
- Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature
- Black, M. (1964). The gap between “is” and “should.”12
- Pigden, C. (2011). Hume on is and ought.
The end of section 3.1.1 from Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, “Moral distinctions not derived from reason”:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.13
See also:
Criticism
- TODO
Moral realism
Introduction
- Plato: Minos
- Objectivity, structure, context, invariance
Plato:
What about someone who believes in beautiful things, but doesn’t believe in the beautiful itself and isn’t able to follow anyone who could lead him to the knowledge of it? Don’t you think he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state? Isn’t this dreaming: whether asleep or awake, to think that a likeness is not a likeness but rather the thing itself that it is like?
I certainly think that someone who does that is dreaming.
But someone who, to take the opposite case, believes in the beautiful itself, can see both it and the things that participate in it and doesn’t believe that the participants are it or that it itself is the participants—he is living in a dream or is he awake?
He’s very much awake.14
Discussion
- Victor Kraft (1880-1975)
- The positivist with ethics!
- Rand’s Objectivism
- Structuralism
- Contectualism
- Björnsson & Finlay (2010)15
- Game/decision theory, again
- Ethical/moral naturalism
- See below: Moral naturalism
- See the outline on Naturalism.
- Murdoch, Iris. (1999). The Sovereignty of Good.
- Scalon’s Contractualism
- Scanlon, T.M. (2000). What We Owe to Each Other.16
Criticism
- TODO
Moral naturalism
Introduction
- TODO
Evolution of morals
- de Waal17
- Evolution of trust
- Patricia Churchland
Churchland:
Our moral behavior, while more complex than the social behavior of other animals, is similar in that it represents our attempt to manage well in the existing social ecology. … from the perspective of neuroscience and brain evolution, the routine rejection of scientific approaches to moral behavior based on Hume’s warning against deriving ought from is seems unfortunate, especially as the warning is limited to deductive inferences. … The truth seems to be that values rooted in the circuitry for caring—for well-being of self, offspring, mates, kin, and others—shape social reasoning about many issues: conflict resolutions, keeping the peace, defense, trade, resource distribution, and many other aspects of social life in all its vast richness.18
- Skarsaune, K.O. (2009). Darwin and moral realism: Survival of the iffiest.19
- Michael Shermer and Massimo Pigliucci debate the role of science deriving morality:
Game theory
- Logics for analyzing games
- Binmore
- Natural Justice (2011)20
- Heads-up poker solved21
- Condorcet’s jury theorem
Science of morality
- Sam Harris
- The Moral Landscape: How science can determine human values22
- Video: Sisyphus55 (2020). The Zen Neuroscientist: A guide to Sam Harris.
- Ethical realism and naturalism
- Review: Atran, S. (2011). Sam Harris’s guide to nearly everything.
- Review: Blackford, R. (2011). Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape.
- Review: Orr, H.A. (2011). The science of right and wrong.
- Harris, S. (2011). A response to critics.
- Harris, S., Blackford, R., & Born, R. (2014). The moral landscape challenge: The winning essay.
- Putnam
- The Collapse of the Fact-value Dichotomy and Other Essays23
See also:
Economics
- Harry Markowitz (b. 1927)
- Modern portfolio theory
- Markowitz model
- Markowitz, H.M. (1952). Portfolio selection.24
- Eugene Fama (b. 1939)
- Amartya Sen (b. 1933)
- Ross, D. (2005). Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation.25
Naturalistic fallacy
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Introduced by Moore, G.E. (1903). Principia Ethica.26
- Is/ought divide going back to Hume
- Moore’s open-question argument
- Moore’s moral philosophy
- Schurz, G. (1997). The Is/Ought Problem: An Investigation in Philosophical Logic.27
- Schurz, G. (2010). Comments on Restall, Russell, and Vranas.28
- Schurz, G. (2010). Non-trivial versions of Hume’s is-ought thesis.29
- Russell, G. (2020). Logic isn’t normative.30
- Russell, G. (2021). How to prove Hume’s law.31
See also:
Political philosophy
Capitalism
- Feudalism
- Mercantilism
- Liberalism
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
- Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
- Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)
- Hayek, F. (1945). The use of knowledge in society.32
- Libertarianism
- Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia.33
- Anarcho-capitalism
- Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)
- Neoliberalism
Marxism
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- The Communist Manifesto (1848)
- The proletariat vs the bourgeoisie
- October Revolution AKA Bolshevik Revolution (1917)
- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
- Marxism-Leninism
- Joseph Stalin (1878-1953)
- Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
Criticism
Solzhenitsyn:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?34
- von Mises, L. (1920). Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.
- Berlin, I. (1994). A message to the twenty first century.35
Socialism
- Pëtr Kropotkin. (1880). An appeal to the young.
- Video: Ted Turner asks Carl Sagan if he is a socialist
Shields:
Every one of us has been warmed by fires we did not build. Every one of us has drank from wells we did not dig.36
Free speech
Introduction
- John Milton. (1644). Areopagitica.
- First Amendment to the United States Constitution (1791)
- Orwell, G. (1946). Why I write.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935)
- Christopher Hitchens. (2006). Talk on free speech at University of Toronto’s Hart House Debating Club.
- “Don’t take refuge in the false security of concensus.”
Hate speech
Cancel culture
- NY Times Editorial Board. (2022). America has a free speech problem.
Copyright
- Muller, A.C. (2010). Wikipedia and the matter of accountability.
Protests and (non-)violence
- Ahimsa - Indian principle of nonviolence
- Satyagraha - “holding firmly to truth,” coined by Mahatma Gandhi
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
- Osterweil, V. (2014). In defense of looting. August 21, 2014.
Feminism
Waves:
- Women’s suffrage movements (19th and early 20th centuries)
- 19th Amendment
- Women’s liberation movement (1960s-1980s)
- de Beauvoir, S. (1949). The Second Sex.
- FDA approves the first birth control pill, Enovid in 1960.
- Civil Rights Act of 1964
- Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972
- Roe v. Wade (1973)
- Third wave (1990s-2012)
- Feminist sex wars
- Sex-positive feminism
- Intersectionality (1989)
- In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work.
- Snyder-Hall, R.C. (2010). Third-wave feminism and the defense of “choice.”37
- Fourth wave (2012-present)
- Use of social media; #MeToo movement
See also:
Regret
Thoreau:
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.38
- Chand, S. (2016). How to handle regret.
- Marino, G. (2016). What’s the use of regret?
- Pigliucci, M. (2016). What’s the point of regret?
- Danaher, J. (2019). The wisdom of regret and the fallacy of regret minimisation.
- Malesic, J. (2020). Je regrette tout: Does moral growth demand regret?
See also:
Compassion
- Forgiveness
- Everett L. Worthington Jr.
- Wade, N. (2020). Forgive and be free.
- Kristin Neff - Self-compassion.
- Serena Chen. (2018). Give yourself a break: The power of self-compassion.
- Growth mindset
- Compassion in Buddhism
- Compassion in Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality
- Limits of compassion.
- Rand being against compassion.
- Anger
- Callard, A. (2020). The philosophy of anger.
- Doug Polk interviewing Garrett Adelstein (2021): Being gentle with yourself.
Ecology
- Scalability
- Hatcher, B. (2019). Carrying capacity - Our wickedest problem.
- Vegetarianism/veganism
- Climate justice
- Hyperobjects - Timothy Morton
Aesthetics
Music theory
- Pythagoras on music
- Twelve-tone equal temperment: \(2^{1/12} \approx 1.05946\)
- George Russell. (1953). Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.
- Hemiola: 3/2
Art
- Semiotics
- Roger Scruton
- Scruton, R. (2018). Why beauty matters.39
Taste
- Hume, D. (1757). Of the Standard of Taste.
My thoughts
Debating moral realism with Sean Carroll.
AMA question about naturalism and moral realism.
- My question on Sean Carroll’s AMA on reddit
- Repost of the question on his blog
As a fellow physicist (experimenter with ATLAS) also with an interest in philosophy, I’m really impressed by your efforts to push naturalism and engage philosophers. I fully agree with your materialist and reductionist arguments, supporting that we do understand physics within the everyday regime, and this should inform our metaphysics, philosophy of mind, criticism of pseudoscience, etc. I also like that you emphasize emergence as being an important concept in explaining the nested emergent ontologies in chemistry, biology, economics, etc. My question is why you seem to draw a hard line that ethics and morality cannot be analyzed in the same way. You seem to entertain the criticisms that some people say of “scientism,” that there are some things (like ethics) to which the reductive program of science will not be able to explain. This strikes me as totally inconsistent with the thrust of reductionism and naturalism. I think there are reasonable explanations for why ethics emerge as a set of regularities and good strategies anytime you have groups of people. The constraints on ethics seem to be completely determined by the natural world, including the limits of resources, the needs of our physiology, the laws of probability and game theory, etc. There is no fundamental is/ought divide. “Ought” is a higher descriptive term we give to actions that bring out good situations, for which there are objective metrics, such as health and satisfaction. In this regard, I’m sympathetic with some utilitarians and what Sam Harris seems to be describing in the Moral Landscape. Why do you think emergence from natural laws can introduce new concepts like temperature, phase transitions, supply and demand, but not ethics?
Sean’s reply:
Ryan — Essentially, science is about describing the world, not passing judgment on it. Temperature, phase transitions, and supply and demand are all concepts that helps us understand what happens in the world. Morality is just a completely different endeavor. (Of course you can scientifically study how human beings actually behave — including what they judge to be “moral” — but that’s different than studying how they should behave.) Scientific claims can be judged by experiments, moral claims cannot.
See also:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/05/03/you-cant-derive-ought-from-is/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/03/16/moral-realism/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/03/07/science-morality-possible-worlds-scientism-and-ways-of-knowing/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/01/31/morality-health-and-science/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HCUAR1vH_M
TODO: Drafting a reply.
I know I’m a consequentialist and a moral realist, but those are broad categories.
There’s no unified or received view of the fact/value, descriptive/normative divide since Hume. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t naturalistic philosophers that deny the dichotomy, i.e., would support the idea roughly that there is a scientific way of discussing and determining what is better. Health and nutrition seem like obvious plausible examples, really any reasoned strategy is normative: it tells one what one should do given what is known. In this sense many naturalists are aligned with game theoretic reasoning about what we should do.
Thought experiment on moral naturalism:
- Agree that chess (or poker) has better and worse play
- Add another task to the competition: do laundry while playing, also while trying to sell a product over the phone, or a more typical triatholan: cycle, swim, run, etc. As we add tasks, there doesn’t stop being better and worse overall strategies, albeit complication grows.
- Finally, we ask the meta question of what to do next.
Annotated bibliography
Putnam, H. (2004). The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays.
- Putnam (2004)
My thoughts
- TODO
Portmore, D. (2011). Commonsense Consequentialism.
- Portmore (2011)
My thoughts
- TODO
More articles to do
- TODO
Links and encyclopedia articles
SEP
- Aristotle’s Ethics - eudaimonia
- Climate justice
- Civic Humanism
- Consequentialism
- Constructivism in Metaethics
- Decision Theory
- Deontic Logic
- Doing vs. Allowing Harm
- Game Theory
- Epictetus (55-135)
- Evolutionary Game Theory
- Existentialism
- Fitting Attitude Theories of Value
- Feminist perspectives on argumentation
- Foot, Philippa (1920-2010)
- Game Theory and Ethics
- Grounds of Moral Status
- Hume, David (1711-1776)
- Hume’s aesthetics
- Hume’s moral philosophy
- Identity politics
- Legal Positivism
- Logics for analyzing games
- Metaethics
- Moore’s Moral Philosophy
- Moral Anti-Realism
- Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism
- Moral Dilemmas
- Morality and Evolutionary Biology
- Moral Motivation
- Moral Naturalism
- Moral Non-Naturalism
- Moral Realism
- Moral Reasoning
- Moral Relativism
- Moral Responsibility
- Moral Sentimentalism
- Moral Skepticism
- Music, Philosophy of
- Natural Law Tradition in Ethics
- Naturalism in Legal Philosophy
- Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction
- Nature of Law
- Normative Theories of Rational Choice: Expected Utility
- Normativity of Meaning and Content
- Original Position
- Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation
- Repugnant Conclusion, The
- Russell’s Moral Philosophy
- Socialism
- Torture
- Utilitarianism, The History of
- Value Theory
- Virture Ethics
IEP
- Abortion
- Collective Moral Responsibility
- Consequentialism
- Egoism
- Epictetus (55-135)
- Ethics
- Evolutionary Ethics
- Evolutionary Psychology
- Existentialism
- Game Theory
- MacIntyre, Alasdair (b. 1929): The Political Philosophy of
- Metaethics
- Modern morality and ancient ethics
- Moral Egalitarianism
- Moral Epistemology
- Morality and Cognitive Science
- Moral Particularism
- Moral Realism
- Moral Relativism
- Music, Analytic Perspectives in the Philosophy of
- Nihilism
- Non-Cognitivism in Ethics
- Personal Identity and Ethics
- Ross, William David (1877-1971)
- Russell, Bertrand: Ethics
- Stoic Ethics
- Utilitarianism, Act and Rule
- Victor Kraft (1880-1975)
Wikipedia
- Absurdism
- Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)
- Big Book thought experiment
- Condorcet’s jury theorem
- Consequentialism
- Emotivism
- Ethical naturalism
- Ethical non-naturalism
- Ethics
- Epictetus (55-135)
- Eudaimonia
- Existentialism
- Existential nihilism
- Fact-value distinction
- Good reasons approach
- Is-ought problem
- Kingmaker scenario
- Legal positivism
- Meta-ethics
- Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873)
- Moral Realism
- Moral Relativism
- Murdoch, Iris (1919-1999)
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Nihilism
- Normative ethics
- Political philosophy
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)
- Scalon, Thomas M. (b. 1940): Contractualism
- Social Contract, The
- Trolley problem
- Utilitarianism
- Veil of ignorance
- Victor Kraft (1880-1975)
- Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem
- Yang Zhu (440-360 BCE)
Others
- Consequentialism - RationalWiki.org
- Hume’s law - RationalWiki.org
- “The Kids Are All Right: Have we made our children into moral monsters?” - Daniel Engber
- “Scientism wars: there’s an elephant in the room, and its name is Sam Harris”
- “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts” - Justin McBrayer
- “Why I think Sam Harris is wrong about morality” - Jonathan Haidt
- The evolution of trust
- The Economy - an online textbook on economics
Videos
References
The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, March 5, 1838.↩︎
Rawls (1999).↩︎
Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, § 1.↩︎
Cushman (2013).↩︎
Ayars (2016).↩︎
Portmore (2011).↩︎
Parfit (1984).↩︎
Nozick (2013), p. TODO.↩︎
Mackie (2007).↩︎
Plato, Republic I 338c, Cooper & Hutchinson (1997), p. 983.↩︎
Hume (2007), Section XII, p. 120.↩︎
Black (1964).↩︎
Hume (2009), p. 715-6.↩︎
Plato, Republic V 476c, Cooper & Hutchinson (1997), p. 1103.↩︎
Bjornsson & Finlay (2010).↩︎
Scanlon (2000).↩︎
de Waal (1982).↩︎
Churchland (2011).↩︎
Skarsaune (2009).↩︎
Binmore (2011).↩︎
Bowling, Burch, Johanson, & Tammelin (2015).↩︎
Harris (2010).↩︎
Putnam (2004).↩︎
Markowitz (1952).↩︎
Ross (2005).↩︎
Moore (1988).↩︎
Schurz (1997).↩︎
Schurz (2010a).↩︎
Schurz (2010b).↩︎
Russell (2020).↩︎
Russell (2021).↩︎
Hayek (1945).↩︎
Nozick (2013).↩︎
Solzhenitsyn (1974), Part 1, Ch. 4.↩︎
Berlin (1994).↩︎
Shields, M. (2020). The last night of Mark Shields on the PBS News Hour.↩︎
Snyder-Hall (2010).↩︎
The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, November 13, 1839. (What the hell did Thoreau know about regret at age 22?)↩︎
Scruton (2018).↩︎