I just got into a rather frustrating discussion with Andrew of Evaluating Christianity over some of his criticisms of the argument from morality. I’m not going to do a complete re-hash of the debate here, rather, I want to see if I can clear up one big source of misunderstanding that I see repeatedly in discussions about ethics.

This one big source is the failure to keep different kinds of ethical questions separate. Here are examples of ethical questions:

• What set of ethical principles is correct? (Sub question: what kind of ethical principles are correct?)
• What is the nature of ethical truth (if there is such a thing)?
• How can we know ethical claims to be true (if that’s even possible)?
• What is the relationship between ethical imperatives and other imperatives?

What set of ethical principles is correct?: Examples of possible answers to this question:

• Do whatever will have the best consequences, overall (consequentialism)
• Act according to maxims that are possible to will as universal law (Kantian ethics)
• Act in accordance with the ideals of virtues that promote human flourishing (virtue ethics)
• Do what will best accord with the ideal of Christian love (situational ethics)

As far as types of ethical theory go, there’s a big division between people who think we can find big, overarching principles (like the four mentioned above) and those who think we can’t. The rejection of overarching principles has been called “particularism” (as in particular rather than general judgments) or “intuitionism” (a confusing lable, because it’s also associated with ideas about ethical truth and knowledge).

Some attempted to divide ethical theories from eachother, though, are pseudo-divisions. A big pseudo-division is between ethical theories that take situations into account, and those that don’t. “Kantian ethics” is listed as an example of something that appears not to take situations into account, but Kant wasn’t a pacifist, which means that he thought killing people is normally wrong, but in some situations, like wartime, it isn’t. Oh, you can state Kant’s principles without explicit reference to situation, but you can do that even with “situational ethics”–my statement above of situational ethics, paraphrasing standard definitions you’ll find online, doesn’t explicitly mention situations. On the other hand, perhaps some forms of particularism would have principles which cannot be rephrased in a situation-neutral way, and if that’s true, there would be an interesting distinction between ethical views that can be stated without reference to situation (even though they don’t really ignore the situation) and those that cannot be so stated.

Another popular, but problematic, distinction is between theories involving “absolute” principles and those not involving absolute principles. This is a bit confusing, because it there’s no standard philosophical way of using “absolute,” and it almost sounds like a question about the nature of moral truth. However, often when people talk about “absolute” morality they’re talking about the distinction between “stealing is always wrong,” and “stealing is wrong under most circumstances.” However, this doesn’t clearly separate moral theories, because if the second claim is in fact right, we should be able to say what circumstances stealing is right under, and craft a moral principle out of that, like “stealing is always wrong, except to save a life.” Such a principle could then be applied absolutely.

What is the nature of ethical truth?: Possible positions here:

• Ethical truths are pretty much like truths about the world, or at least like truths about other abstractions such as mathematics (objectivism or realism)
• What’s true in ethics for one person might not be true for another person (subjectivism)
• What’s true in ethics for one society might not be true for another society (relativism)
• There is no ethical truth, ethical language does not attempt to express truth but rather expresses attitudes (expressivism)

Once these possible positions are spelled out clearly, you see that they say nothing about the particular ethical views discussed in the previous section. One can be an objectivist consequentialist, an objectivist situational ethicist, and so on.

How can we know ethical claims to be true?: There aren’t as many well-defined, widely discussed positions on this issue as on previous issues, but one idea deserves mention: the idea that ethical knowledge depends, at least in part, on ethical intuitions (one of the ideas associated with “ethical intuitionism.”) This is an important view to understand, because while it’s view on ethical knowledge, it’s often mistaken for a view on ethical truth: the ideat that ethics might be nothing beyond our intuitions. This is a pretty egregious mix up, like confusing “we know about the physical world through our senses” with “physical objects are nothing beyond our sense-perceptions,” though it’s somewhat understandable because the philosophcial jargon involved in the ethical version of the misunderstanding isn’t common knowledge.

What is the relationship between ethical imperatives and other imperatives?: Some people think ethical imperatives never conflict with other imperatives. Other people think that conflicts occur, for example, they might think the rational action is always whatever’s in your self-interest, but that morality requires us to go beyond self-interest. Typically, people will say that in such situations, morality trumps, but you could think that morality doesn’t always trump.

One rather important mistake Andrew made in the discussion at his blog was confusing conflict between ethical and non-ethical considerations with conflict between different ethical considerations. If Christian love is of the upmost ethical importance, then saying Christian love trumps traditional moral rules is not the same thing as saying that non-moral considerations can trump traditional moral rules. That cause him to misunderstand this quote from a Christian:

Morality is of over-riding importance. If someone morally ought to do something, then this over-rules any other consideration that might come into play.

As being incompatible with situational ethics, when in realtiy it’s perfectly compatible.

So, keep this stuff straight. Can anyone think of any other commonly-confused moral issues out there?