An introduction

A special issue on ethical issues in paediatrics raises the question: What is ethics? It helps to start with two assumptions. First, we can come to know what is right and wrong through our own powers of reasoning. Second, we can freely choose between right and wrong. Ethics, then, can be understood as the disciplined reflection on our beliefs about right and wrong and on our choices, actions and character. Of course, not everyone agrees with these two introductory assumptions (that we can come to know what is right and wrong through our own powers of reasoning and that we can freely choose between right and wrong). Moral determinists, for instance, deny the second assumption. They deny that we have the kind of free choice that morality seems to assume. Determinism is the claim that all our choices and actions are determined by environmental and/or inherited factors. However, though determinism raises interesting and important questions about the kinds of freedom morality requires (some measure of physical freedom, some measure of psychological freedom, some sense in which we are truly the originators of our own actions, etc.), it is inconsistent with our normal habits of praise and blame and with our readiness to hold people responsible for their actions. So determinism seems implausible. Traditionally, ethics is divided into two kinds of reflection: meta-ethics and normative ethics. Meta-ethics concerns questions like the following: What is the nature of moral principles and judgments? Are they conventions? Can they be universal? Are they matters of subjective taste or of objective reality? Can they be true or false? Normative ethics concerns questions like the following: What are the fundamental moral principles? How are fundamental moral principles applied to specific situations? First, then, some meta-ethics. When we discuss moral issues, we say things like: ‘It is wrong to inflict unnecessary pain on patients’, or ‘It is right to obtain the consent of parents to treatment proposals for their children’, or ‘It is wrong to mutilate a child’, or ‘It is . . .’ These sound like factual claims. Are they? Not according to ethical relativists and ethical subjectivists. Ethical relativism is the claim that moral beliefs and judgments are social conventions, the product of a particular community’s history. What makes a belief or judgment morally right or wrong, good or evil, is the approval or disapproval of a community. This is sometimes said of such practices as honour killing and female genital mutilation. (Ethical relativism is thus a denial of the first assumption above: that we can come to know moral truth through our own powers of reasoning.) It is true, of course, that there are widespread differences between the moral beliefs and practices of particular societies and indeed between the moral beliefs and practices of the same society over time. However, ethical relativism is beset with difficulties. It assumes that there are no grounds for arguing against the perceived evils of other societies and indeed of our own. It makes morality a matter of majority view, and it makes nonsense of tolerance. And it ignores the agreements between the moral beliefs and practices of societies (which are at least as significant as the differences!). Ethical subjectivism is the view that moral beliefs and judgments are the expressions of the individual’s feelings, attitudes, desires or preferences. What makes a belief or judgment morally right or wrong, good or evil, is the subjective approval or disapproval of the individual. On this view (which is another denial of the view that we can come to know moral truth through our own powers of reasoning), when I say ‘It is wrong to cause unnecessary pain to children’, I just mean ‘I disapprove of that’ or ‘I wish people would stop that’, or just ‘Boo to that’. However, though ethical reflection is connected with our strong feelings, and though that connection helps to explain moral motivation, and though there is an essentially first person quality to morality (in the end I do have to make up my own mind on moral issues), ethical subjectivism is also beset with problems. It assumes that there are no grounds for rational argument over moral matters. It has no place for the idea that anyone could be wrong or mistaken in their moral beliefs. It cannot account for moral argument for it makes morality a matter of taste. And it fails to account for the fact that we can always ask of a feeling (or ‘value’): ‘And is this feeling (or “value”) appropriate?’ So, ethical objectivism is a more plausible view of morality. As the philosopher Peter Coghlan puts it, ethical objectivism is the view that our moral beliefs and judgments are the product of our critical responsiveness to, and rational reflection on, our experience of what is worth our attention, care and respect, of what is worth desiring or having or doing or being. As he demonstrates, objectivism says that moral beliefs and judgments are beliefs and judgments for which we can give reasons and about which we can be mistaken. Objectivism is the view that we can come to know moral truth through our own powers of reasoning. So far, we have been doing meta-ethics. Let’s move to normative ethics. We are doing normative ethics once we begin to ask the following questions: How do we decide what is objectively right or wrong, good or evil? What sorts of reasons should guide us in our conduct? Though there are many different answers to these questions, that is to say, though there are many different versions of ethical objectivism, they fall into two broad categories. On the one hand, there is the view that good and evil are recognisable (for instance, that sickness is an evil and health a good, that ignorance is an evil and knowledge and truth are goods, that anxiety and loss of control are evils and self-integration and harmony are goods, that loneliness and hostility are evils and friendship and justice are goods, etc.) and that what is good is to be pursued and what is evil to be avoided. This view generates such doi:10.1111/j.1440-1754.2011.02155.x