Ethics, beliefs and knowledge I

Doc, I think you are doing just what is needed when you attempt to define ethics. Coming to an agreement often requires no more than clarifying what we mean when we use certain loaded but vague words. Especially so in philosophy.

When I read you, I realize we give very different meanings to the word 'ethics'. You say it is about 'good' versus 'bad'. I would take a different starting point and say it is about all the rules of behaviour that we learn from others, as opposed to those that we form ourselves through experience or those that are dictated to us by our instincts. Of course, there is a link with 'good' versus 'bad' because, when one wants to express a behaviour rule, he will often say 'behaviour X is good (or bad)'. Also, when a rule needs support, for example because it is being criticized, people will often try to justify it by showing it promotes behaviour which produce 'good' outcomes. However, as we will shortly see, there are cases when behaviour rules and 'goodness' are not so obviously linked.

I think it is helpful to define ethics as learnt behaviour rules because it clarifies certain problems. First, there is the case of moral relativism. For a criminal gang member, it is a serious offense to report a crime committed by another gang member, even if he is from an enemy gang. Is it good or bad ? Well first we can say that the gang member's ethical system includes a rule to that effect, while others (like ours) do not. If 'ethical' is defined as above, everyone will agree. Then we may go on debating whether that rule is good or bad, but as a separate, second issue. Another reason for liking such a definition of 'ethics' is the realization that our definition of 'good' and 'bad' is very specific to our culture, while having behaviour rules is not since all cultures have some. For example, Indic cultures have a notion of 'Dharma' that may vary according to caste or age. The result is that these cultures prescribe many behaviour rules to their members while it is debatable whether they have anything that corresponds to our notion of 'good'.

As far as I am concerned, I agree with you that trying to define 'good' once and for all is not going to take us very far. However, I am pretty sure that we need behaviour rules. First, it is quite obvious that when established rules start to fail, the short term outcome is invariably something we do not like : violence, abuse of the weak by the strong, poverty and so on. I agree that this is like smell. What I say is that no one likes the smell of chaos when he is unfortunate enough to actually experience it (as opposed to closet revolutionaries like the unabomber). A second reason is that I believe learned behaviour rules do work. Look, for example, at the behaviour of the criminal described above. Empathy, risk evaluation and interest do play a part in people's decisions. But so does the anticipation of other people's judgement. And this judgement largely rests, in practice, on whether one has followed the accepted norms of behaviour or not. Is this good or bad ? Is this conformism ? This is not what I am trying to determine. I just observe that it is the way it works.

To make a long story short, I believe that 'ethics', in the sense of learned rules, do influence our behaviour because it is chiefly how we get praise or blame, and that it helps protect us from chaos. So we now have a case for 'ethics' which is compelling enough, while making no appeal to any notion of 'good', in the traditional way. However, once we have agreed on this, the hardest work is still ahead of us; that of choosing among the rules that are presented to us (and, in our multi-cultural world, there are many) those we want to follow and those we want to reject. I think that we are agreed that there are roughly two methods to go about this :

• We may choose to rely on tradition; see what rules our forebears did follow and try to adapt them incrementally and marginally according to our intuition, experience and judgement.
• Or we may try a more radical approach. We may attempt to establish scientific laws of human behaviour and then frame a set of rules based on this theory.

Our difference lies in the fact that you espouse the second view while I definitely choose the first. I agree that the second option looks attractive. As I said earlier, I would like, as anyone would, to have nice clean ethical building blocks that I could rearrange according to my needs, and those of my comunity, without the fear of nasty side effects. Compared with this rosy view, tradition looks arbitrary and baroque indeed. However, as I also said earlier, we should resist the attraction such an optimistic view of ethics has on us because experience has tought us to be careful. My reasons for saying so are exposed at length in my "Trust vs. verification" post. I will restate them shortly here. The scientific attitude crucially depends on the scientists playing the mistrust game because it is the only way science can be empirically grounded. But this makes this approach unfit for dealing with ethics because :

1. of the importance of trust to ethics.
2. of the fact that, in the case of human behaviour, it is impossible to separate the scientist from its experiment.

2. entails that what scientists do and say has an impact on their experiment, which is the whole of human life if they deal with human behaviour (you cannot hold humans in a lab to prevent the experiments you have done on them to affect the rest of humanity). Since scientists play the mistrust game between them, they are bound to propagate mistrust if they study human behaviour. Because of 1., this is bound to be detrimental to ethics, as examples like the unabomber seem to show.

Therefore, since the scientific approach to ethics seems to fail, we are left with the tradition based approach, which, when you look at it in this new light is not that bad.

When I started that post, I wanted to deal with beliefs and knowlege since I think their opposition sheds some light on ethics. In particular, it is another way to show why trust is so central to ethics. Since this is already quite long, I will leave that for a later post.