Defining Ethics: Part 1

It is not uncommon for the term "ethics" to conjure feelings of restriction, rule, and prohibition. In this sense, ethics is thought to be a ball and chain on human freedom; something to hold us back from destructive activities that we would otherwise very much like to do. For the child, this manifests as: “don’t hit your sister," "don’t eat those cookies," "don’t talk back.” Similarly, for the teenager: “don’t have sex," "don’t drink," "don’t dab.” By adulthood, any contact with a theory of ethics is just one more pestering rule. 

So, what is ethics? Is it a system of oppression or something else? 

The next few posts will walk through several definitions of ethics and highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of each. 

Beauchamp and Childress define ethics 

In their fourth edition of The Principles of Biomedical Ethics, authors Tom Beauchamp and James Childress define ethics as, “a generic term for various ways of understanding and examining the moral life.” Here morality is defined as, “social conventions about right and wrong human conduct that are so widely shared that they form a stable (although usually incomplete) communal consensus…”  

Ethics then, for Beauchamp and Childress, is an umbrella term that describes different approaches to examining stable social conventions of right and wrong conduct. These different approaches could include: normative ethics, applied ethics, descriptive ethics, and metaethics. This jargon is more modern (the authors note that normative ethics is a 20th century term) and not usually identified with plain vanilla ethics, but it is essential to understanding the definition offered. 

First, normative ethics seeks the general standards of right and wrong action (or norms) and the theories that describe these norms. Applied ethics asks how one should apply the normative theory to specific real-world scenarios. Descriptive ethics is the scientific study of moral behavior or beliefs. It describes the ethics of groups. Finally, the meaning, nature, and justification of knowledge of moral terms and judgements is known as meta-ethics.  Examples of each branch are: 

Normative Ethics: Is stealing wrong? And if stealing is wrong, why? 

Applied Ethics: Should this starving man steal? 

Descriptive ethics: 80% of men believe that stealing is wrong (this is fake news). 

Meta-ethics: What does, “wrong” mean? 

Weaknesses of the Definition 

While this definition accurately captures what broad considerations come under ethics, there are some initial concerns. First, morality is described as a social convention, meaning that they come about via humans acting in society or relationship with one another. What then if two societies make mutually exclusive moral claims? For example, let’s suppose society A were to make the claim, “killing babies is wrong human conduct” and society B makes the claim, “killing babies is right human conduct.” Both A and B’s claims conflict with each other, yet the definition offered would hold that they are both correct. If they are objective claims, logic would dictate one must be remedied. On the other hand, if the claims truly are relative to the subjective preferences of the consensus of each society, then the claims do not conflict. This is similar to two societies claiming that one prefers vanilla ice cream and the other prefers rocky road.  

Another problem from the Beauchamp and Childress definition is the reliance on a communal consensus. Now the problem here should be obvious, because there are so many historical instances of the majority being wrong. For instance, the stable communal consensus of the social convention of slavery in Southern states. Under this definition of morality, abolitionists would have had a wrong position. When observing in hindsight, it seems silly to say that the reason we consider the abolitionists correct now is that the community changed their minds.  

Finally, what is meant by, “communal consensus” is fuzzy at best. For instance, is my family the community whose consensus determines whether my actions are licit or illicit? My neighborhood? City? State? United Nations? If it is the nation state that is the community of interest, one has the unenviable task of defending the statement, "killing Jewish people is ok, because Germany decided as a community." Further, how shall this consensus be determined? Do we need to take polls from year to year to see whether murdering my neighbor or committing adultery is a-ok? Needless to say, the specifics of their definition of morality need to be ironed out to be helpful.  

It seems in both the conflicting societies and the abolitionist cases an appeal to an objective third source is necessary. What could this third objective source be?