Table Of Content

Fundamentals of Ethics John Finnis Material com Queues Georgetown University Press, Georgetown University, Intercultural Center, Room 111, Washington, D.C. 20057 Copyright C 1983 by John Finnis AU rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Finnis, John. Fundamentals of ethics. 1. Ethics. 1. TUI*. BJ1012.F44 1983 170 83-11693 ISBN 0-87840-404-X ISBN 0-87840-408-2 (pbk.) Printed in U.S.A 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 Contents I. THE PRACTICALITY OF ETHICS 1 1. Ethics is practical 1 2. Implications of the practical character of ethics 4 3. The great questions of ethics 6 4. Practical understanding and nature 10 5. ‘Everyone would say .. .* 17 6. Some conclusions about ‘good’ and ‘nature’ 20 Notes 23 II. DESIRE, UNDERSTANDING AND HUMAN GOODS 26 1. Reduction of ethics to (the desires of) ‘human nature* 26 2. Desire and understanding 30 3. The experience machine, the critique of feelings, and human flourishing 37 A. Activity has its own point 38 B. Maintenance of one’s identity is a good 39 C. Appearances are not a good substitute for reality 40 4. Is understood good the good of a system for securing satisfactions? 42 5. Desire for understood goods: ‘will’ and ‘participation in goods’ 45 6. Thin theories of human good 48 7. The identification of basic human goods 50 Notes 53 III. OBJECTIVITY, TRUTH AND MORAL PRINCIPLES 56 1. Scepticism and objectivity 56 2. The argument from queemess 57 3. Objectivity and truth 60 4. From ‘good’ to ‘right*: from value judgment to choice 66 X CONTENTS 5. ‘Right reason’: the transparency of practical reasonableness 70 6. The variety of intermediate principles and the argument from relativity 74 Notes 78 IV. UTILITARIANISM, CONSEQIIENTIALISM, PROPORTIONALISM ... OR ETHICS? 80 1. The varieties and the terminology 80 A. ‘Utilitarianism’ 80 B. ‘Consequentialism’ 82 C. Teleological ethics’ 84 D. ‘Proportionalism’ 85 2. Incommensurability 86 3. How we evaluate practical solutions as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ 90 4. Standard techniques of rationalization 94 5. A new form of rationalization 99 Notes 106 V. *K ANTIAN PRINCIPLES’ AND ETHICS 109 1. Proportionalism and the Pauline principle 109 2. Proportionalism and Socrates’ principle 112 3. ‘Treat humanity as an end, and never merely as a means’ 120 4. Respect every basic human good in each of your acts 124 5. Can proportionalist weighing be avoided? Punish ment and self-defence 127 Notes 133 VI. ETHICS AND OUR DESTINY 136 1. The significance of free choices 136 2. A fundamental option to be reasonable? 142 3. Objectivity and friendship revisited 144 4. On ‘the last things’ 150 Notes 152 INDEX 155 I The Practicality of Ethics 1.1 Ethics is practical What are we doing when we do ethics? And what is the sig nificance of the fact that, in raising and reflecting on ethical questions, we are doing something? The philosopher who may be said to have initiated, and named, the academic pursuit called ethics also called that pursuit ‘practical’. The knowledge that one may gain by that pursuit is, he said, ‘practical knowledge’. People usually water down these claims of Aristotle’s. But to miss his point here is to miss not merely some truth about ethics as an academic pursuit. It is to miss a good opportunity of learning one of the truths of or in ethics. The misunderstanding goes like this: Aristotle just meant that the subject-matter studied in ethics is human action (praxis), or opinions about human action, or opinions about right human action, or right opinions about human action, or all of these topics. Of course, each of those topics is an aspect, more or less central, of the subject-matter of ethics. But in calling ethics practical, Aristotle had much more in mind. He meant that one does ethics properly, adequately, reasonably, if and only if one is questioning and reflecting in order to be able to act—i.e. in order to conduct one’s life rightly, reasonably, in the fullest sense ‘well*. And doubtless he had in mind that the questioning and reflecting which constitute the academic pursuit itself are themselves actions, the actions or conduct of you or me or Aris totle or those of his students who took his courses seriously. This, of course, is true of all other academic and intellectual disciplines, even the most theoretical and contemplative; to choose to engage in any of them is to make some sort of a choice about how to conduct a part of one’s life, the part that one devotes to that inquiry and contemplation. What then makes ethics practical? 2 THE PRACTICALITY OF ETHICS The question must be answered carefully; if we make a mistake here we misunderstand not only ethics but also, probably, that whole range of our understanding which I am calling ‘practical*. Twenty-five years ago, G. E. M. Anscombe asked: ‘Can it be that there is something that modem philo sophy has blankly misunderstood: namely what ancient and medieval philosophers meant by practical knowledge?’.* These twenty-five years have seen great interest in the philo sophy of practical reason. This renaissance has been fruitful, but remains incomplete and insufficiently appropriated: the lure of an ‘incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowl edge’2 remains strong. Now ethics is contemplative; indeed, it is theoretical (to use Aristotle’s word) and speculative (to use the medieval translation of Aristode’s word, without any of the English word’s connotation of ‘conjectural’). That is to say, to engage in ethical inquiry and reflection is to be con cerned with truth, with the right answer to one’s questions, with knowledge just as such or ‘for its own sake*. How, then, is ethics practical too? Well, consider any theoretical or speculative pursuit, historical, mathematical, scientific or whatever. Anyone engaged in such pursuits, with genuinely theoretical motiva tion, is after a good (real or apparent) which I have already mentioned: the good of a correct or at least the most prob ably correct answer to his questions—if you like, the good of truth. Notice that the good envisaged and pursued has two aspects: (a) the correct answer and (b) one’s obtaining it. For any theoretical inquirer, these two aspects are only for mally distinct: what one wants is, compendiously, ‘to get (i.e. one’s getting) the right answer’. But, to the extent that one’s inquiry is truly theoretical, the precise (‘formal’) object is the truth. When I attain it, my satisfaction may well be mixed with joy and pride that it is my own discovery, or that I am now one of those who know about the matter in question. But the primary and lasting joy of the true theorist is in the truth itself that was striven for and that now can be con templated, both for itself and in its relation to other truths. These facts about pure theory show themselves logically and linguistically. Let stand for any proposition of science *p* 1 Anscombe, Intention (Blackwell, Oxford: 1957), p. 57. 1 Id. THE PRACTICALITY OF ETHICS S or history or literary criticism or common sense . . . The theorist can say to himself (1) ‘I ought to think thatp (since the evidence favours that conclusion)’. Or he can say (2) ‘I think that p (since the evidence . . .)\ But both (1) and (2) are transparent for assertions that omit the first-person pro noun and its vert). That is, the meaning of (1) and of (2) can be found in assertions of the form (3) ‘It is the case that [or: it’s true that) p (since . . or, most simply, the affirmation (3') ‘p\ In formulations in form (3), the theorist-oneself as a human being with one’s objective(s), one’s responsibility and one’s attainment—disappears from view. The logical and psychological phenomena which I call transparency will be a constant theme in these lectures on ethics (see especially III.5, V.2, VL1, VI.3). The reason why sentences of the form (2) ‘I think ...’ are transparent (and thus completely replaceable, except as idioms for expressing uncertainty, by sentences making no use, even implicitly, of first-person terms) is the reason I have indicated already: viz., though the theorist wants to be a person who judges correctly about p, the focus of one’s interest as a theorist is p, and what the proposition *p’ picks out, and the evidence for and truth of it. The focus is not what one is doing in considering whether p, judging that p, affirming that p ... And all that, save the last sentence, is true of ethics, too; for ethics is a genuinely theoretical pursuit. But ethics also is precisely and primarily (‘formally’) practical because the object one has in mind in doing ethics is precisely my realiz ing in my actions the real and true goods attainable by a human being and thus my participating in those goods. Notice: ethics is not practical merely by having as its subject- matter human action (praxis). Large parts of history and of psychology and of anthropology have human praxis as their subject-matter; but these pursuits are not practical. No: ethics is practical because my choosing and acting and living in a certain sort of way (and thus my becoming a certain sort of person: VI. 1) is not a secondary (albeit inseparable and welcome) objective and side-effect of success in the intel lectual enterprise; rather it is the very objective primarily envisaged as well as the subject-matter about which I hope to be able to affirm true propositions. 4 THE PRACTICALITY OF ETHICS It is indeed hard to focus steadily on the fact that this academic pursuit, alone amongst all academic pursuits, has two formal, primary objects (objectives, goods in view); (i) truth about a certain subject-matter, and (ii) the instantiation of that truth in choices and actions—choices and actions of which the first, but only the first, is the investigation and affirmation of that truth (and acceptance of it as the good which discloses all the other real goods to be attained and participated in by my action). So the temptation is powerful, and rarely resisted, to envisage ethics reductively. One reductive strategy eliminates the radical practicality of ethics, by envisaging ethics as a deduction from metaphysical or general anthropology (the descriptive knowledge of human nature), or as an intuition of non-natural properties of agents and actions. Another reductive strategy eliminates the theoretical, i.e. truth seeking, character of ethics, by envisaging ethics as the expression of practical attitudes (say, ‘pro-attitudes’, or commitments) or states of feeling, sought to be conveyed to or impressed upon others for motives either of self-expression or of propaganda. In the latter perspective, common nowadays, the only genuinely theoretical ethics is the (‘meta-ethical’) study of meanings, or of communities and their languages; so this view eliminates the practical character of the study, too. 1.2 Implications of the practical character of ethics But in doing ethics, one does seek truth. What one would like to know, or at least to become clearer about, is the truth about the point, the good, the worth, of human action, i.e. of one’s living so far as it is constituted and shaped by one’s choices. And in ethics, in the full and proper sense identified by Aristotle, one chooses to seek that truth not only ‘for its own sake’, nor simply for the sake of becoming a person who knows the truth about that subject-matter, but rather (and equally primarily) in order that one’s choices, actions and whole way of life will be (and be known by oneself to be) good, worthwhile. Amongst one’s choices is the choice to engage in the activity of pursuing this ethical quest. It would be irrational to assert that that choice is not a good and worthwhile choice; THE PRACTICALITY OF ETHICS 5 for like any other assertion, that assertion would need justifi cation, and the identification of reasons for the assertion would itself be an instance of the very activity asserted to be not worthwhile. The claim that ethics is not worthwhile is either unsupported (and so not worth considering) or it is self-refuting. (What I have just said does not entail, of course, that it is not sometimes inappropriate for me to engage in ethical reflection; as we shall see, practical reasonableness requires more of one’s choices than that they simply be ori entated to some genuine good, however basic.) Thus, to engage in ethical inquiry (on an appropriate occa sion) is to be succeeding already, to some extent, in fulfilling one’s fundamental intention: one’s action already is a partici pation in an undeniable good. By one’s action in engaging in ethics, one has already partially accomplished what one hoped to be able to accomplish at the end of one’s inquiry and reflection. To put the point even more starkly, by one’s choice to do ethics one has already made a choice of the very sort that one hoped to be able to make at the end of the perhaps long and arduous programme upon which one entered by making that choice. Furthermore: ethics, its object, and the conditions under which that object can be attained, arc properly part of the subject-matter of ethical inquiry and reflection. Ethics is genuinely reflexive. It can advance its understanding of the full human good by attending to the sort of good which leads one to engage in the pursuit of ethics. It can refute certain ethical or ‘meta-ethical’ claims by showing how they refute themselves; for it is explicitly aware of the intellectual com mitments one makes by making any rational claim at all. And it can advance from the study of forms of good to the study of the conditions under which those goods can reason ably be pursued; for if one is doing ethics with awareness of what one is doing, one will reflect on the conditions under which the goods directly at stake in ethical inquiry are reasonably (appropriately) pursued. One will observe, more over, that those conditions relate not only to an assessment of appropriate and inappropriate occasions for engaging in ethical (or any other) studies,but also to an assessment of the human virtues required for any successful intellectual pursuit: truthfulness, open-mindedness, the courage to maintain 6 THE PRACTICALITY OF ETHICS open-mindedness in face of external and internal pressures and compulsions, self-discipline, and so on through a cata logue of desirable aspects of human character. Finally, since the truths to be discerned or clarified by doing ethics will concern everything that one is most deeply interested in, one may well find oneself confronting a choice between fidelity to truth (even when coming to acknowledge it will disappoint some of one’s keenly felt hopes and desires) and preference for other desires and their satisfaction .. .;and the experience of confronting these open alternatives, and of choosing (say) Fidelity to truth, can afford a paradigm example of free choice, and of the way in which our free choices last as virtues (or vices) and thus constitute us the particular persons we actually have come to be (VI. 1). 1.3 The great questions of ethics You may at this point feel some alarm. Is it being asserted that ethics is completely self-absorbed? Isn’t ethics as I have been delineating it one of the last (or, remembering Aris totle, one of the First) follies of the academic mind, con cerned exclusively with itself, its own objectives and pursuits, and thus wilfully (or perhaps just forgetfully) cut off from the serious business of living in a world of riches and scarcity, of sex and power, of laws, states and force? Or again: when I’ve been calling ethics ‘practical’, haven’t I been using the word in a hopelessly unpractical sense? And indeed, don’t Aristotle’s own treatises on ethics notoriously fail to confront some of the great and practical questions of morality, and even fail to give an account of practical wisdom that we could recognize as really moral? These lectures are not in defence of Aristotle. Nor are they about Aristotle and his work in ethics, even though much contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophy is a debate with and about that work. I shall be saying why some of Aristotle’s ethical conclusions are unsatisfactory. But the questions he worked on are real and central. For a start, take what he says about the subject-matter of ethics: The question of the morally admirable and the question of the just— these are the subject-matter of political science |of which ethics is the