Image: Anti-Globalization Protest, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, 2001. Conflicts of values and interests require an ethical response. Protest and political activism is one fruit of moral concern.
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To imagine a human world without ethics, but in which life goes well, it is necessary to suppose a golden age:
a world without competition, or causes of strife, or clashing desires, or envy or malice.
- Simon Blackburn (2001) Ruling Passions, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
We live in a world that is rife with conflict, all of which involves questions of ethics. To understand why this is the case, simply think about the moral debates swirling around science and religion, gay marriage, foreign policy, unjust war, corporate citizenship, racism and sexism and ethnocentrism, immigration, globalization, animal welfare, and environmental protection. Conflicts over these and other issues pervade modern life, and are the focus of political debates and policy initiatives. Each is either deeply rooted in a disagreement over moral values, and/or has moral implications for the well-being of others. How do we resolve such conflicts? More importantly, how do we address the ethical roots and fruits of these conflicts?
Historically, people have tried to solve these conflicts through various amoral methods. Many choose to follow established traditions and customs. Others seek out the opinions of powerful religious or political leaders. Still others want to leave matters to a neutral market or objective science. And some resort to violence, oppression and war.
Note that each of these methods already presupposes what is right, good, valuable or just. Partisans of these methods do not resolve conflicts per se, they merely enforce their morality on others. And in so doing, they often commit great harm. It is their lack of moral reflexion and acts of harm that makes them both inadequate and unacceptable.
As Socrates and his children (the intellectual heirs of Socrates the world over) saw long ago, we therefore need to go beyond custom, tradition, authority, the market, science, or violence. We need an ethical response. This response should help us reflect on 'how we ought to live', reveal the moral issues at stake, and align our moral judgement with action.
To my mind, our moral response is best served to do so through practical ethics. Practical ethics is one of several families of ethical thinking. You may be familiar with some others based on their analysis of consequences, duties and virtues. By emphasizing good or bad consequences, rights and correlative duties, or the cultivation of individual dispositions, each of these families has contributed enourmously to ethical thought. Still, there are heated debates over which family is 'right'.
Practical ethics side-steps such debates. Moral problems are too complex for a single family of ethics to provide all the answers we need. It is not a question of which family is right, but what it is right about. Practical ethics therefore approaches moral questions as a meta-ethic, integrating the moral insights of other ethical perspectives, contributing its own insights, and offering methods for bringing the theory and practice of ethics into dialogue with real-world problems.
If you want to jump right in, start with Anthony Weston's short introduction, A Practical Companion to Ethics (2006) followed by James Rachel's classic, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (2006). For a detailed history of practical ethics, read Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen's The Abuse of Casuistry (2000). Mary Midgley is perhaps the most famous exponent and skilled practitioner of practical ethics. I became aware of practical ethics by reading her Can't We Make Moral Judgements (1993) and Animals and Why They Matter (1998). I cannot recommend her other work too strongly. It is superb.
Please see the side bar for links to ethics in general, and practical ethics in particular. These links are selective not comprehensive. Still, I hope they are of help to you.
Image: Anti-Globalization Protest, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, 2001. Conflicts of values and interests require an ethical response. Protest and political activism is one fruit of moral concern.