This is Part 1 of 4 of the AOK Guide for Ethics
Ethics is an AOK which most people wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Hopefully, this guide will make it more ACcessible (wink) to people who think ethics is interesting but just can’t wrap their heads around it.
Morality
For any action or moral agent (ie. a being capable of moral action such as humans), three states of morality can be defined:
- Morality: A state of “goodness”
- Immorality: A state of “badness”
- Amorality: A state of neither “good” nor “bad”. In other words, it is permissible
Morals vs Ethics
Morals and ethics are two key terms which seem indistinguishable at first glance. However, the distinction is important for those who want to discuss this AOK.
Morality is a personal sense of “good” and “bad” whereas ethics are frameworks which guide moral thinking. Frameworks systematise, define and defend their assertions of “good” and “bad”. They exist in many forms. Philosophical theories like utilitarianism and Kantianism, legal codes, professional codes such as those used by the medical and legal professions all count as ethical frameworks since they systematise, define and defend their assertions of “good” and “bad”. The work of ethicists is mainly concerned with deriving an ethical framework to distinguish “right” from “wrong” when there is no clear answer.
An act can be moral but unethical, and vice versa. For example, if you were a lawyer working as a defense for a client whom you know is guilty, doing your best may be ethical as it follows Professional Conduct in the legal profession, but may be immoral because you are defending a person who is not worth defending.
The Ethical Argument
The most fundamental skill in ethical reasoning, I would argue, is knowing how to debunk an argument.
A good ethical framework fulfils these two conditions:
- What the framework defines as ethical is moral to most people
- What is moral to most people is defined as ethical by the framework
Let’s use classical utilitarianism as an example. Classical utilitarianism, tl;dr, advocates the course of action which maximises happiness and well-being for all those affected. The maximisation of happiness takes place within a framework of “hedonistic calculus” to calculate pain and pleasure which accounts for the intensity, duration etc of the pain or pleasure experienced.
Sounds reasonable, right? Picture this: You are a doctor with five patients who need organ transplants, including a heart transplant. Without organ transplants, they will die. Your patients have family and friends who will miss them dearly if they die. Joe is your lazy neighbour with no friends or family, is unemployed, and makes no meaningful observable contribution to society. No one will miss Joe if he dies. He also happens to be a perfect match for organ donations to all five patients.
Do you take Joe’s organs? Classical utilitarianism says yes since it maximises pleasure although most will find it horribly immoral to do so. Hence, I have debunked the classical utilitarian framework by proving that it fails the first condition.
By taking a framework and applying to various contexts, we can debunk theories and analyse why they fail to fulfil the two conditions outlined above
The next 3 parts of the AOK Guide will cover three broad fields of ethics:
- Meta-ethics: The study of the nature of ethical knowledge and moral facts
- Normative ethics: The study of standards for the “rightness” and “wrongness” of actions
- Applied ethics: The study of moral courses of action in specific situations
Author: lmaozedong
