Introduction
Moral or ethical environment = This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live.
Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as
exploitation of the world’s resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable
labor conditions of the third world.
Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves
a story that justifies their system. The ethical climate will sustain a conviction that we are
civilized, and they are not, or that we deserve our better fortune than them, or that we are
intelligent, sensitive, rational, progressive, or scientific, or authoritative, or blessed, or alone
to be trusted with freedoms and rights, while they are not. An ethic gone wrong is an
essential preliminary to the sweat-shop or the concentration camp and the death march.
Part I | Seven Threats to Ethics
This section looks at ideas that destabilize us when we think about standards of choice and
conduct.
The Death of God
For many people, ethics is not only tied up with religion, but is completely settled by it. The
standard of living becomes known to us by revelation of a Being greater than ourselves.
In the nineteenth century, in the west, traditional religious belief began to lose its grip. Our
question is the implication for our standards of behavior. ‘If God is dead, everything is
permitted?’ Dostoevsky said.
God, or the gods, are not to be thought of as arbitrary. They have to be regarded as
selecting the right things to allow and to forbid.
The detour through an external god, seems worse than irrelevant. It encourages us to act in
accordance with a rule, but only because of fear of punishment or some other incentive;
whereas what we really want is for people to act out of respect for a rule.
Plato suggested that religion gives a mythical clothing and mythical authority to a morality
that is just there to begin with. In this analysis, religion is not the foundation of ethics, but its
showcase or its symbolic expression. Religion on this account is not the source of standards
of behavior, but a projection of them, made precisely in order to dress them up with absolute
authority.
If all this is right, then the death of God is far from being a threat to ethics. It is a necessary
clearing of the ground, on the way to revealing ethics for what it really is. Perhaps there
cannot be laws without a lawgiver. But Plato tells us that the ethical laws cannot be the
arbitrary whims of personalized gods. Maybe instead we can make our own laws.
Relativism
Perhaps we are faced simply with rules of our own making. Then the thought arises that the
rules may be made in different ways by different people at different times. In which case, it
, seems to follow that there is no one truth. There are only different truths of different
communities. This is the idea of relativism.
What is just or right in the eyes of one people may not be so in the eyes of another, and
neither side can claim real truth, unique truth, for its particular rules.
We are faced with a distinction between the transcultural requirement and the local
implementation. This is what qualifies relativism. If everybody needs the rule that there
should be some rule, that itself represents a universal standard. It can then be suggested
that the core of ethics is universal in just this way.
On the one hand there is the relativist thought that ‘If they do it that way, it’s OK for them and
in any event none of my business’. On the other there is the strong feeling most of us have
that these things just should not happen, and we should not stand idly by while they do. We
have only perverted or failed solutions to the problems of which standards to implement, if
the standards end up like that.
The moral is that once a relativist frame of mind is really in place, nothing - no claims to
truth, authority, certainty, or necessity - will be audible except as one more saying like all the
others.
Here, there are two thoughts to leave with. The first counteracts the idea that we are just
‘imposing’ parochial, western standards when, in the name of universal human rights, we
oppose oppressions of people on grounds of gender, caste, race, or religion. The second
thought is: relativism taken to its limit becomes subjectivism: not the view that each culture
or society has its own truth, but that each individual has his or her own truth.
Sometimes, indeed, ethical conversations need stopping. We are getting nowhere, we agree
to differ. But not always. Sometimes we shouldn’t stop, and sometimes we cannot risk
stopping.
There exists the view that ethics is somehow ‘ungrounded’. This implies that there is nothing
to show that one view or another is right, or nothing in virtue of which an ethical remark can
be true.
The physical world contains only is and not ought. So there is no fact making ethical
commitments true. Nor could we detect any such fact. Thus nihilism, or the doctrine that
there are no values, grips us, as well as skepticism, the doctrine that even if there were, we
would have no way of knowing about them.
Sections 20 and 21 will elaborate why it is premature to think that discussion about how to
behave should cease because of this view.
Egoism
We are pretty selfish animals. Perhaps it is worse than that: perhaps we are totally selfish
animals. Perhaps ethics needs unmasking.
Grand Unifying Theory =
