Stop Confusing Ethics with How You Feel About Things (Part I)

It's the default position for a lot of people, but not for good reason.

A lot of people say things like, “ethics is subjective.” Not only do they say it, but they think it’s obviously true. Ethics, they say, is how you feel about this person or that way of life or this decision. In this multi-part series, I’m going to explain why I think this is misguided. Or rather, I’m going to explain how controversial this claim is. By the time we’re done with this series, you’ll have a much better grip on ethics, truth, objectivity, and subjectivity. Previous misguided assumptions will be abandoned, the scales will fall from your eyes, and eternal joy will be yours. Obviously.

Ok, full disclosure: a lot of this material comes from my book and other things I’ve written. But I think it should all be in one place and in the right order.

Here’s what you have to look forward to:

Part I: What is ethics?

Part II: Three Really Bad Reasons for Thinking Ethics is Subjective

Part III: Actually, What Do People Even Mean When They Say, “Ethics is Subjective”?

Part IV: There Are Ethical Truths? How is that Possible? What the Hell is Truth, Anyway?

And without further ado, let’s get to it.

Part I: What is Ethics?

The person who asks, “what is ethics?” is standardly looking for a “definition” of ethics. They might even ask “How do you define ‘ethics’?” or “What’s your definition of ‘ethics’?”

But my view of how to get a grip on what ethics is about - and this is really what the inquirer is after - is to think about some of the core questions that we naturally characterize as ethical questions, like these:

• What is a good life?

• Do we have any obligations to each other? What are they?

• Is compassion a virtue? Courage? Generosity?

• Is abortion ethically permissible? Capital punishment? Euthanasia?

• What is privacy and do people have a right to it?

• What is discrimination and what makes it bad?

• Do people have equal moral worth?

• Do individuals have an obligation to engage in self-improvement?

• Is it ever ethically permissible to lie?

• Do corporations have obligations to their employees? To society at large?

• Is Facebook unreasonably incentivizing or manipulating their users into clicking on ads?

• Is it ethically permissible to use black box algorithms to diagnose illnesses?

And so on. What is ethics? Well, don’t worry about a definition of the term - if you really want a definition, just look it up in a dictionary. If you want to know what ethics is about, think about these kinds of questions, and those in the neighborhood of these questions. If you understand this, there’s no reason to get worked up over definitions.

The Confusion

A significant source of confusion for many people who think of ethics as subjective is failing to distinguish between people’s beliefs about ethics – what they believe to be ethically right/wrong/good/bad, etc. – and ethics itself. And in running these two things together, they make misguided claims about the subjectivity of ethics when they’re really making claims about the variance of people’s beliefs. To see this, let’s take a step back.

[If you have my book, Ethical Machines, the rest of this piece is taken from Chapter 1 and so you can read it there if you don’t have a paid subscription.]