“There are certain things I would never do…”
(An essay on principles, dilemmas and consequences…)
There are certain things I would never do. If I was in a committed relationship, I would never cheat on my partner. I would never steal something out of greed or jealousy. I would never attack a person as an act of aggression. I would never deliberately deceive someone in order to exploit them… I could go on.
Are these principles? They seem like evidence of a strict, rule-based approach to decision-making. However, you might point out, these are perhaps a little too specific. “Why didn’t you say that you would never steal, full stop?” they might ask. And what about ‘do not kill’? I missed that out. Am I saying I think murder is ok?
Well, having studied and taught ethics for a while, I am very familiar with certain awkward hypothetical situations, each of which seems specifically designed to challenge the traditional idea that morality is about following rules. For example, there is now a whole ‘branch’ of ethics that deals with variations on a famous example suggested by Phillippa Foot (RIP) where you have to decide whether to divert a heavy ‘trolley’ away from a track with 5 people onto it, onto another line where it would kill just one. The point of most of these kinds of extreme examples, it seems, is to show cases where following a rule would lead to ‘worse’ consequences, and therefore show that principles are not the right way to approach ethics.
I think there are at least two valid points to these examples. Firstly, as a response to a sort of fundamentalist attitude where people apply Biblical laws in a strict, legalistic manner. Even if most people in the 21st century would agree that some of the laws in the Old Testament are fairly ridiculous - (what exactly is wrong with blending wool and linen?) – they might still argue that we have to accept that the Bible is right about some laws – such as ‘do not commit murder’. “You can’t argue with that”, they claim, hoping to defend religion as the source of an absolute standard of ethics. Well, in my opinion, many of these situational examples show (with a fair degree of plausibility) that in some cases murdering someone seems to be clearly the right thing to do… (when the alternative is the genocide of millions, for example).
Secondly they show us the range of competing intuitions that we apply to life (which, for the vast majority of us, is not a straightforward matter). These intuitions include feelings about such things as freedom, anger, hunger and lust; and taboos about how we behave towards family, dead people, old people, and animals. If ethics were about blindly adhering to simplistic laws such as ‘do not lie’ without any consideration for these feelings about the situation and the potential consequences, then the most ethical people would be those who were most robotic – like following a programmed rule.
Utilitarianism claims to offer a rational and scientific alternative to following absolute laws. Most famously, Bentham defined this approach as seeking to achieve the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’. This can be approached in a systematic and logical fashion, and crucially, it can take into account evidence that might point towards which decision is likely to be most effective in causing positive consequences. For example, if evidence showed that shrimp was a highly tasty, nutritious and healthy food, this could be used to help justify ignoring the kosher rules about not eating shellfish.
So, we should not follow rules blindly, and consequences are important. This does not mean that we should disregard the idea of principles. Principles are a way of codifying the values we feel most strongly – they provide a landmark for an individual or a group that can guide them when our intuitions become confused and when the consequences seem equally awkward for each choice. However, they should not be seen as absolute principles. There is a problem with treating them thus, which is that when there is a situation where two principles conflict, (i.e. in order to keep to one principle, you have to break another), then you need a ranking of principles or some kind of meta-principle to decide which principle to stick to.
So, what did I mean when I said I would never do those things? I meant the following: because I know myself and my values, and despite my moral weaknesses, I cannot imagine ever being put in a position where I would feel any doubt that those things were the wrong choice. So, although I am aware that there might be some very extreme dilemmas where I should be willing to break them, I still think it is correct to say that these moral limits I mentioned are principles for me.
