What is Ethics, What Do Ethicists Do, and Why Can Bad People Be Good Ethicists?
People have lots of ethical views but usually don't know what ethics is. Here's a view of ethics from 30,000 feet.
People have beliefs about what’s ethically right and wrong and good and bad. They go around saying things like, “Defend human rights!” and “It’s wrong to cheat on your spouse!”
And yet, ask them what ethics is or what an ethicist does and most people don’t have a clue. I’m not blaming them; everyone’s education has massive holes. But when people don’t understand what ethics is, they often get confused about how to do ethics and about whether and who the experts are (or whether there’s any expertise to be had in the first place).
I’m going to attempt three things in this piece.
First, I’ll give you a clear view of what ethics is about and what ethicists do. By “ethicist” I mean, for the most part, people with Ph.D.s in philosophy who specialize in ethics, many of whom are professors.
(TLDR: they provide arguments for and against various answers to a very wide range of ethical questions in just the way that, for example, physicists provide arguments for and against various answers to a wide range of physics questions).
Second, I’ll explain (at a very high level) what ethical expertise is.
(TLDR: expertise consists in being very good at engaging in the aforementioned argumentation and being well versed in the general ethics landscape, key concepts, etc., in just the way, say, a good physicist is good at providing arguments (e.g. providing a compelling interpretation of data gleaned from experiments), devising the right kinds of experiments, etc.).
Third, I’ll explain why being an ethicist is not the same as either being a good person or being a social or political activist or even being someone who studies why people hold the ethical beliefs they do.
(TLDR: ethicists are engaged in acts of intellectual inquiry to ascertain the truth about a wide range of ethical issues; they may be neither particularly ethically conscientious actors themselves nor fight for any cause nor have any insight into what causes people to have the ethical beliefs they do).
A Motley Crew of Ethics Questions (Get It? It’s Very Subtle)
I’m going to give you a non-exhaustive list of questions people ask about ethics. They’re presented in no particular order precisely because people ask them in no particular order and that’s precisely because they don’t know how to order them; our goal will be to give them order so that they can be better navigated:
What makes a life meaningful? What makes a life a good life? What’s a life worth living?
What obligations do I have to my parents now that they’re getting older and they need more care?
Is abortion morally permissible? How about euthanasia? And capital punishment? What about designer babies?
Who’s to say what’s right and wrong?
Should we always do unto others as they do unto themselves?
Is there a difference between ethics and social norms?
Is it ever ethically ok to lie?
How do you know what’s right and wrong or good and bad?
Isn’t ethics subjective?
Is ethics bullshit? (For instance, is it just a way to control people?)
Is collecting data about people on Facebook ethically wrong?
Is there anything that is ethically right or wrong if there is no God?
My community, which has given me so much, wants me to devote myself to the community. I love them, but I want to leave; is that ethically wrong?
Is this AI engaging in ethically unacceptable manipulation?
What. A. Mess. And so you say to me:
“How is anyone supposed to answer these questions? Where are am I supposed to start? How should I proceed?”
Alright, alright! Too many questions! It’s all very complicated, so…
Let’s Ease into This with Some Examples
Ethics is an area of inquiry. To help us get a grip on it - to help us impose order on the aforementioned motley crew - let’s take a look at other areas of inquiry: literature, biology, and physics. I just want to give you a sense of how you might order other, more familiar areas of inquiry so you can see how ethics is, at some level, no different than those other areas.
Literature
In literature, we might be interested at the microscopic level of what’s going on in this book. What do we make of Shakespeare’s Othello (the character) or of Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s “Lolita” or of the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s famous work? Does the plot unfold intelligibly and compellingly? Do the character’s actions make sense? What explains their bizarre actions?
We could zoom out to the macroscopic level. What is Shakespeare or Nabokov or Woolf up to? What are they trying to do in this book? What messages are they conveying? Why did they write it this way rather than some other way? What literary devices are they using and why?
And we could zoom out to the supermacroscopic level. Where does Shakespeare’s or Nabokov’s or Woolf’s work fit within their particular genre or within the history of literature more generally? How is their work responding to the times they’re living in or the history of their genre?
There are more questions to ask at each of these levels and there are surely more levels. But the micro/macro/supermacro framework is helpful for seeing how you can get into the weeds or zoom out in literature-related inquiry.
Biology
This is an easy one. At the microscopic level we can ask about the cells of organisms. That’s what (among other things), literal microscopes are for. Then we can zoom out to the macroscopic level and seek to understand organisms more generally. We might, for instance, inquire into their parts and how they relate to each other (e.g. lungs, kidneys, heart, etc.). And then we can go to the supermacroscopic level and seek to understand how the organism relates to its environment (e.g. how these kinds of frogs survive in a given swampland, where they fit in the evolutionary tree, who are their predators and who their prey, etc.).
Physics
At the microscopic level, we’re talking about atoms and electrons and neutrons, etc. (If we want to go supermicroscopic we can go to the quantum level and talk about quarks and string theory). Zoom out to the macroscopic level and we get to the physics of medium sized objects. The velocity of baseballs crashing through windows, billiard balls on a pool table spinning and knocking against each other, the speed at which feathers and lead weights fall, and so on. Zoom out again to the supermacroscopic level and we’re in space doing astrophysics and trying to figure out what the hell dark matter is.
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There are experts for each level. In literature, there are those adept at analyzing a given text while others specialize in placing the work in the arc of history. Some biologists are cell biologists while others are expert at biological ecosystems. Some physicists can tell you all about the superimposition of quantum particles while others can lecture us on black holes. Yes, the different levels interact with each other in various ways, but expertise in subfields in an area of inquiry is normal and, given the sheer complexity of the world we’re trying to understand and our limited human capacities, necessary.
Returning to Ethics
We’re about to apply the micro/macro/supermacro framework to ethics. But first, if you’re still reading, you should probably just
Unless you don’t want to read more stuff like this?
Anyway, on with our story…
Microscopic Ethics
Ethical inquiry at this level is about trying to figure what’s right and wrong, good and bad in a particular situation or context. Some of our questions from above fall into this category:
What obligations do I have to my parents now that they’re getting older and they need more care?
Is abortion morally permissible? How about euthanasia? And capital punishment? What about designer babies?
My community, which has given me so much, wants me to devote myself to the community. I love them, but I want to leave; is that ethically wrong?
Is collecting data about people found on Facebook ethically wrong?
Is this AI engaging in ethically unacceptable manipulation?
These questions are just the start. In answering each one, we’ll need details. What’s the context? Who’s involved? What did they do? What did you do? And so on.
For example, we can ask whether abortion is ethically permissible, but we probably want to get more specific. For instance: is abortion ethically permissible if she has the means to take care of a baby but just doesn’t feel like it? Is abortion ethically permissible in the case of rape? What if the baby is likely to have a number of defects that will result in lifelong chronic pain? And if abortion is ethically permissible in at least one of these cases and ethically impermissible in another, what factors make that the case?
How we specify the question and the totality of the details of the situation we’re assessing is crucial to our inquiry. This is one reason why microscopic ethics - called applied ethics by ethicists - is so complicated. There are so many questions, so many contexts, and so many possible answers.
Some people’s reaction to this is to throw up their hands and say, “well, it’s all so complicated, it’s just subjective!” But this is nonsense. It would be like saying, “How cells act in this organism vs. that organism in these temperatures vs. those temperatures in this environment vs. that environment is so complicated, it’s just subjective!” Of course that’s ridiculous. It just means that doing biology is really, really hard, requires really smart people to do it, and takes a really long time to sort through it all (we’re not done yet and may never be).
So too with ethics. The plethora of questions and contexts in which we ask those kinds of ethical questions means that ethics is really, really hard, requires really smart people to do it, and take s a really long time to sort through it all (we’re not done yet and may never be).
What do applied ethicists do? They are working on identifying all the relevant questions, contexts, possible answers and trying to sort through it all to get to the right answer for each of the questions.
For example, applied ethicists working on abortion give arguments ranging from why abortion is always ethically impermissible to why it’s ethically impermissible sometimes but not all the times or why the default is that it’s ethically permissible, and so on. Or to take an example from the AI space, applied ethicists argue, among other things, whether collecting personal data on Facebook constitutes morally objectionable surveillance. (What makes an argument for an ethical position a good or bad one? What, exactly, does their expertise consist in? More on this later).
Macroscopic Ethics
So you go around asking your applied ethics questions about whether it’s ethically ok to do this or that and then you take a step back and ask,
“Hey, are there general rules here for what’s right and wrong and good and bad? Maybe some ethical principles that explain why this is right and that’s wrong? Or a general picture of what a good person or good life is? And if so, what are those general ethical principles and that picture what a good person/life is?”
Those kinds of questions are a lot like some we saw at the start of this piece:
What makes a life meaningful? What makes a life a good life? What’s a life worth living?
Should we always do unto others as they do unto themselves? Is that a good moral principle?
Is it every ethically ok to lie? (In other words, is the general ethical principle ‘It’s always ethically wrong to lie’ true?
So we’re no longer asking about this or that particular situation. We’re asking more general questions. Philosophers/ethicists call this level of ethics normative ethics.
There’s a lot to say about what normative ethics is and what normative ethicists do, but at a high level one of the more popular things they do is devise theories. Here are some popular theories (among philosophers, anyway) that are attempts to answer those general questions. I don’t expect you to internalize these; just to get a sense of what the debates look like.
Question: What makes a life a good one?
Theory #1: You get the things you want.
Theory #2: You get the things you should want.
Theory #3: You get the things that are OBJECTIVELY GOOD, including good thing #1, good thing #2, etc. [People debate about what should go on the list.]
Theory #4: You experience more pleasure than pain in life.
Theory #5: You exercise/express the thing that makes you uniquely human.
But wait, there’s more!
Question: What makes an action ethically right?
Theory #1: The action brings about the most amount of happiness.
Theory #2: The action conforms to one ore more of THE BIG ETHICAL PRINCIPLES, including principle #1, principle #2, etc. [People debate about what should go on the list.]
Theory #3: The action is what someone who has a good character would do.
Theory #4: There are no true general theories about what makes actions ethically right. It depends on the situation!
There are a lot more theories than all that and so, so many variations on the theories. Does this means ethics is all subjective because there’s so much complexity? Of course not. As I said above, it just means that doing ethics is really, really hard.
Ok, buckle up. Time to zoom out again. But honestly, if you’ve gone this far and you haven’t yet, it’s time to…
Supermacroscopic Ethics
‘Ugh,’ you’re thinking. What else could ethics possibly be about? Isn’t this horse dead twenty times over already?’
Nope! Alive and kicking!
Inspired by my metaphor you might now ask something like…
“Okay, I get that we can say this or that act is ethically wrong and this thing is ethically good, and I get that we can come up with theories about what it is to be right and good and wrong and bad…but actually, what the hell is goodness and rightness anyway? What do we mean when we say something is right or wrong, good and bad? I guess I want to know if ethics is objective or subjective. Is it culturally relative? Is there a TRUTH about what’s right and wrong?”
So first of all, let me just say how impressed I am by your insightful questions, especially because you had just finished rolling your eyes at me.
Second, since you’re so astute, you see how these questions are just like some of those questions from earlier, including:
Who’s to say what’s right and wrong?
Is there a difference between ethics and social norms?
How do you know what’s right and wrong or good and bad?
Isn’t ethics subjective?
Is ethics bullshit? (Is it just a way to control people?)
Is there anything that is ethically right or wrong if there is no God?
Philosophers/ethicists call this level of inquiry meta-ethics. As for what meta-ethicists do, well, once again, they’re looking to devise theories. Those theories are about things like whether ethics is objective or subjective or culturally relative, about whether there are ethical truths, about how much ethics is about expressing our emotions or other attitudes as opposed to an attempt to describe the world in (roughly) the way scientists are attempting to describe the world, and more.
Here are some examples of those questions and the theories meta-ethicists devise and defend:
Question: What are we doing when we say “punting babies is ethically wrong" or “helping elderly people across the street is good”?
Theory #1: We’re describing those acts as having the property of being ethically wrong/ethically good/etc. in much the way we are describing the world when we say “The table has the property of being made of wood” or “Reid has red hair.” This means, of course, that at least some of our descriptions are false; you can misdescribe me as having red hair and we can misdescribe an act as being ethically right/wrong. We can also (potentially) be correct.
Theory #2: We’re not describing the world at all! When I say “punting babies is ethically wrong” it’s kind of like when I’m boo-ing my most hated sports team. I yell, “Boooooo Yankees!”. But I’m not describing the Yankees as having a property when I do that. I’m expressing how I feel about them. So saying “punting babies is ethically wrong” is me expressing my hatred of such actions.
Question: Is ethics subjective?
Theory #1: Yes, for reasons X, Y, and Z.
Theory #2: No, for reasons A, B, and C.
Ok, that was a bit thin on detail, but I’ve written a 4-part reply to this question:
Question: How do we know that something is ethically good/bad/right/wrong?
Theory #1: We have a special moral capacity that gives us access to ethical truths.
Theory #2: There are no truths to be known in the first place.
Theory #3: We can learn ethical truths in just the way we learn other kinds of truths.
As you can see, this is insanely abstract and complicated. And this is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. (It’s also what I specialized in when I was a philosophy professor).
How Ethicists Make Progress
So! To summarize:
Microethics (aka applied ethics): Is this or that action ethically right/wrong, this person good or bad? We’re calling balls and strikes here.
Macroethics (aka normative ethics): Forget for a moment about what’s a ball and what’s a strike - what are the damn rules of the game?!
Supermacroethics (aka meta-ethics): Should everyone play by the same ethical rules or should/do they vary? Did we discover the rules or did we just make them up?
Amidst all these levels, all the questions that exist in each level, all the possible answers and theories on offer…how the hell do ethicists make progress? What are they doing all day? And what does their expertise consist in?
There’s a lot to say but at the core of it is they’re giving arguments and counterarguments for and against various answers to various questions. Put slightly differently, they’re engaged in creating and assessing arguments for various applied/normative/meta-ethics positions. And their expertise lies in how skilled they are at giving those arguments and counterarguments.
It’s hard to show you exactly how that gets done without actually doing it, but that would take us into doing philosophy in a real way and this isn’t the piece for that. For now I just want to give you a sense of how this is done. More specifically, I want you to notice that some arguments are really bad and some are clearly a lot better for different ethical positions. If you can see that - and I know you can - you can see (from 30,000 feet) how progress gets made:
Here’s a really bad ethical argument:
If Reid likes cheese then ethics is objective in the sense that there are a set of true ethical rules that everyone should live by.
Reid likes cheese.
Therefore ethics is objective.
I don’t even have to tell you that’s a really bad argument. It’s obvious. And it’s obviously bad because obviously there’s no connection between my liking cheese and ethics.
But here’s a less bad argument:
If pretty much everyone (except maybe sociopaths) think something (like genocide or rape) is ethically bad, then that thing is ethically bad.
Pretty much everyone thinks genocide is bad.
Therefore, genocide is ethically bad.
Now I’m not saying this is a good argument. In fact, I think it’s a pretty bad argument. But it’s definitely better than the first one. So now our mission is to see if we can come up with a third or fourth or fifth, etc. argument until we find one that is actually compelling. Engaging in that pursuit is what ethical expertise consists in.
I’m an Ethicist, but I’m a Very Bad Man
There are various ways that people misunderstand what ethics is and what an ethicist does. Here are three confusions:
Confusion #1: “If you’re an ethicist then you’re a good person/you do the right thing.”
That would be lovely but, alas, it’s just not true. Ethicists are engaged in an intellectual inquiry. And while getting a Ph.D. in philosophy correlates with being intelligent, being intelligent doesn’t necessarily correlate let alone cause ethically good characters. Lots of bad people are very smart. True, some people get into ethics because they want to be better people, but for the most part it’s driven primarily by a desire to understand something about the world - the ethics-y part of the world as opposed to, say, the literature/biological/physics-y parts of the world.
Confusion #2: “I fight against injustices like climate change and a racist criminal justice system, so I’m an ethicist.”
No, you’re not. You’re someone who has a certain ethical view and you want to push that view and the actions that view calls for into the forefront of people’s attention. This can be a great thing, especially when you’re right about something being unjust and you’re pushing for the right kinds of actions. It just doesn’t make you an ethicist. It makes you an activist. (Of course, you could be an activist and an ethicist, but being the former doesn’t make you the latter).
Confusion #3: “People who study why people have the ethical beliefs they do and how those beliefs evolve and/or how they can be manipulated in both rational and non/irrational ways are ethicists.”
Nope again. These are psychologists. One popular psychologist who does this kind of work is Jonathan Haidt. It’s very interesting empirical work. And it has ethical implications. But psychologists are not ethicists. They are looking to explain why people have the beliefs they do, while ethicists are focused on assessing whether their ethical beliefs are true.
What Should be Next?
Ok, that’s my crash course in what ethics is and what ethicists do. Let me know what you think and what you want to hear more about. (For instance, does a crash course in meta-ethics interest you? What about what AI ethicists do outside academia?) And one more time for the people in the back…
This is great. Really enjoyed reading this. Nice shout out to Jonathan Haidt. I always recommend "The Righteous Mind" to those that think that they have all the answers.