Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [15]
A good act, then, is one that makes us more virtuous and a bad act is one that makes us less virtuous. Right and wrong, on this view, are all about you.
The What in Ethics
But we also need to look at the act itself. There’s something about lying, cheating, stealing, and bears that seems inherently problematic. When we judge something right or wrong, it’s the action we’re judging and therefore the action we ought to look at.
To decide which actions are allowable and which ones are morally forbidden we need a set of rules. But where could these rules come from? Further, there are a potentially infinite number of possible actions and therefore potentially an infinite number of rules we would need to know. Since we can’t know an infinite number of things, we could never be held morally responsible for anything since you might not have known the requisite rule.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant solved these problems by coming up with a meta-rule, a multi-rule, a mega-rule, the god-father of rules, the hardest working rule in show business, the categorical imperative. The idea is to strip the situation of all the contextual factors—who did it, why they did it, when they did it, whether the person with whom they did it has appeared in Girls Gone Wild videos—and just get it down to the bare act itself and ask whether the rule that act obeys should be a universal law. So, the question is whether “always lie” or “never lie” should be the universal rule, completely ignoring whether that four year old walking down the street with her Mommy would be happier believing that there really is a Santa Claus.
The How Much in Ethics
But our actions change the world. What we do has consequences. Surely, the morally right thing is that which leaves the world a better place. When we talk about right and wrong, we often refer to how people’s actions affect others and judge it as morally right if it brought about the best consequences for all involved and morally wrong if it did not. There is something morally important in standing up against the growing robot menace even if you have to be tough and nasty to do it.
This view is called Utilitarianism and was championed by many philosophers, including Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), whose dead body was treated by the local taxidermist and remains on display to this day at the London School of Economics (making a portrait hanging in the Smithsonian pale by comparison, no?). Bentham argued that if moral statements were to make any real sense, they should refer to something we can measure: experienced pleasure and pain. Other things may be good as means, but pleasure is an end—no one ever asks you what you want all that pleasure for—and we ought to judge actions based upon whether they bring about the greatest balance of pleasure over pain in the world.
We need to do ethical accounting before we act, tallying up the ways in which we affect the situation. We need to rank the costs and benefits, determine which possible action brings about the greatest returns of good to bad, and act accordingly. Think ThreatDown. We take those aspects of contemporary culture that bring with them the greatest dangers and we must act to stop them … now!
The Whom in Ethics
Then there is the one on the receiving end. Of course, we need to also consider the person to whom the act was done. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the right to swing my fist ends at my neighbor’s nose. I can think about myself and the act of swinging my fist all I want, but in coming to a decision about how to act ethically I also need to think of my neighbor’s nose when