13.1 — What Ethics Is, and Why "It Depends" Is Not an Answer

Ethics is the attempt to answer one question: what should I do?

Not what does my culture approve of, which is anthropology. Not what will I be punished for, which is law. Not what do I feel like doing.

What should I do — and can that question be answered with reasons that another person could examine?

Three positions to clear away first

Because each of them is a way of not answering, and each is common.

"It's all relative"

The claim: moral judgements are just the customs of a society, and no society's are better than another's.

Three problems.

It is self-undermining as usually stated. "You should not judge other cultures" is itself a universal moral claim.

It makes moral progress impossible to describe. If the standards of a society are the final word, then the abolition of slavery was not an improvement — it was a change of taste. Almost nobody actually believes this, and everybody who says they are a relativist will object to something.

And it confuses two different observations. That moral beliefs vary across societies is a fact, and it is well documented. That moral truth varies does not follow from it. Beliefs about the shape of the earth also varied.

What survives: a great deal of moral variation is real, and it is mostly at the level of application rather than principle. 12.9's finding — near-universal agreement on the core, wide variation in scope and application — is the accurate picture.

"It's just feelings"

The claim: moral statements express approval and disapproval and nothing more.

And there is something to it — moral judgements are accompanied by strong feelings, and the feeling frequently arrives before the reasoning. Volume VI covers the evidence, and it is good.

The problem is that people do not treat moral claims as mere preferences. You do not argue with somebody about whether they like coriander. You do argue about whether something was unjust, and both parties behave as though there is something to be right about.

And people change their minds under argument — about slavery, about who counts, about animals — which is not how preferences behave.

"It depends"

The most common and the most evasive.

It is true and it is not an answer. Of course it depends — on the situation, the people, the consequences.

The question is: depends on what, exactly, and how do those factors trade off?

"It depends" said as a conclusion is a refusal to specify. "It depends on whether he consented, and here is why that is the decisive factor" is an ethical position.

And a person who says "it depends" and stops has not avoided taking a position; they have taken one and declined to state it.

The is-ought problem

Hume's finding (10.8), and it is the reason this is hard.

No collection of facts entails a value.

**"This causes suffering" is a fact. "Therefore you should not do it" requires the additional premise that causing suffering is wrong, and that premise is not a fact about the world in the same way.

Every ethical system has to get its foundational value from somewhere, and the candidates are:

Revelation. Which works only for people who accept the revelation, and 12.9 showed the traditions contradict each other on almost everything except the ethics.

Reason alone. Kant's attempt (10.9), and it produces genuinely useful tests and does not obviously derive its foundation from nothing.

Human nature and flourishing. Aristotle's route (10.4). If there is such a thing as functioning well as a human being, then facts about what promotes it are relevant, and the is-ought gap narrows.

Or bedrock intuitions. The position that some things are simply obvious — that gratuitous cruelty to a child is wrong — and that a theory which denies them is thereby refuted rather than the other way round.

This last one is where most working ethicists actually stand, and it is more defensible than it sounds: you have to start somewhere, and starting from the most confident judgements and testing theories against them is exactly how every other field works.

The three great answers

And Part 13 covers them in the next three chapters.

Consequences. An action is right if it produces the best outcome. 13.2.

Rules and duties. An action is right if it conforms to a principle that holds regardless of outcome. 13.3.

Character. The question is not which act is right but what kind of person to be, and a good person will see what to do. 13.4.

And the honest position, which this Part will argue for: none of the three is sufficient alone, all three capture something real, and a person who uses only one will produce monstrous conclusions in predictable places.

Why you need this even if you are a decent person

A fair objection: most people behave reasonably well without any of this.

Three answers.

Decency handles the easy cases. It does not handle the case where two obligations conflict, which is where all the difficulty is — 2.15, 3.2, 3.9, 10.9 and 11.12 are all the same collision.

Decency is calibrated to your circumstances. It tells you how to treat people in front of you and says nothing about people far away, future people, or people your society has trained you not to see. Every historical moral atrocity was committed by people behaving decently within their frame.

And decency is very easily overridden. 3.9's hall was full of decent men, each with a reason. What is needed at that moment is not better instincts; it is a line decided in advance and a reason you can state.

What ethics cannot do

Stated so the Part is not oversold.

It will not give you an algorithm. Anybody promising one is selling something, and Aristotle's phronesis is the honest account: the general principle never determines the particular case, and judgement is required (10.4).

It will not make hard cases easy. 13.6 works several and none of them resolve cleanly.

And it will not make you good. Knowing the arguments and behaving well are different capacities, and 5.4 and Volume VI both say insight alone changes nothing.

What it does is narrower and worth having: it lets you say why, and it lets somebody else check.

And that is the whole difference between a moral judgement and a preference dressed as one.

What to carry from this page

"It depends" is a position, not an escape. Say what it depends on.

The variation between societies is mostly in scope and application, not in the core (12.9). Which is a much more interesting fact than relativism.

No set of facts entails a value on its own. Find the value premise in every argument, including your own.

And decency handles the easy cases and fails exactly where the difficulty is — when two obligations collide, when the affected people are not in front of you, and when everybody in the room has a reason to say nothing.

Next: 13.2 — the first great answer, which is the most intuitive and produces the most monstrous conclusions.