LAST MINUTE TIPS – A2 ETHICS

At A2 we encounter wide topic areas which make the idea of predicting an exact question less useful than at AS. Instead I think you should revise along the lines of “what issues are there underlying his topic area?”. Let me go through the syllabus and illustrate what I mean.

Meta-ethics

Here is an area which students are often afraid of but actually presents the easiest to prepare for. This is because there is one mega-issue underlying the whole debate – do I believe (and can I back it up with an argument) that moral values can be reduced to facts about the natural world (naturalism) or do i think that the idea of moral facts is meaningless (emotivism). Kant presents a special case here – because he believes in universal elements of human consciousness which exist as noumenal categories which we can know – so he is a non-naturalistic cognitivist. But never mind if you don’t understand that point – the least thing you need to do is explain why utilitarians are naturalists – they argue that we can know morality as an empirical fact to do witht our expereince in the natural world of pain and pleasure. Not so hard to explain. Whereas Ayer does not believe in moral facts – morality is a layer of emotive expression which overlays the facts. Someone dies (fact). It is murder – that’s just an emotive gloss on the facts. So you need to be able to evaluate Ayer’s view which seems to suffer from a number of problems: it doesn’t seem to be true to the way we talk about moral issues to say “I am just expressing my disapproval”. And it seems to make arbitration between two positions (genocide is great, genocide is terrible) impossible. That is why naturalism has gone through a resurgence in recent years, lead by the new naturalisms of MacIntyre, Foot and other virtue ethicists. You also need to have a view about the “naturalistic fallacy” and whether it is in fact a fallacy at all.

Free will

Hard determinism is the view that because every event has a cause, we can in principle predetermine how people will behave as long as we can identify all the pre-causes. The ‘in principle’ is important here because in practice we can’t determine all the pre-causes and we still don’t fully understand how the human mind works. For this reason I see the free will debate as a meta-physical question – it’s beyond science to judge on this matter and it involves our preconceptions and our premises. For example, scientific materialists like Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape) argue that every time I exercise “free will” I am putting an interpretation on a set of physical changes in my brain which have pre-causes which are physical. This may well be true. But does it prove we don’t have free will? I don’t think so! It doesn’t do so, I would argue, because elements of the human psyche will never be penetrable by scientific observation (that is my meta-physical premise). So consider an analogy. Is a poem composed of words (is a choice composed of physical brain states) – the answer is “yes”! But is a poem just words? Obviously not – there is something more to a poem than just words and by analogy, there is something more to human choice than just brain states. Of course, you the student need to produce an argument about what the “something else” is – and here I hope my revision guide will help you. Candidates might include – a special type of power (Locke), a type of perception (Dennett) and an existential reality we experience but will never understand (Van Inwagen).

Conscience

Theories of conscience are trying to determine what conscience means, where it comes from and how it works. The candidates seem to be three – from reason, from a special intuition (given by God, as St Paul argues as does Aquinas), by evolution, as Dawkins argues with his idea of the ‘altruistic gene”, and from our environment (Freud, Piaget, behaviourism – conscience is programmed response to praise and blame). The mistake is to argue, I think, that conscience is necessarily just any one of these three (reason, intuition and environment). Philosophers are frequently arguing for some combination and interaction between them. For example, Aquinas argues that e have an innate ability to know right from wrong – the synderesis principle – but at the same time, conscience is a faculty of our reason or what he calls ‘reason making right decisions’ which he calls conscientia. This is something closer to what Peter Van Inwagen talks about when he sees the will as a garden of forking paths with our minds agonising over the choice. When Aquinas talks about conscientia, he seems to link it to phronesis (his word is prudentia) – the prudence we develop as we think about the implications of past choices and determine to do better (or think more correctly) next time.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics has come of age in the last fifty years following Anscombe’s article in 1958 which argued that law-based ethics had led us up a blind alley. Virtue ethics is agent-centred because it argues that it is the whole person (reason, emotion, cultural context etc) who makes moral choices according to their character (formed by habits or learnt skills called ‘virtues’) in line with some agreed end. This end which is acknowledged as Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia – the flourishing personal life and the flourishing community. This idea of course is not static, but that doesn’t matter because MacIntrye claims he still believes in an objective standard of goodness even if we, with our lenses coloured by our culture, don’t always see it clearly or very well. These “goods internal to practices” make sense in terms of the rules of that particular ‘form of life’. So there are standards of good parenting, standards of good business practice, standards of good health care – and by good we mean “moral good”. Students need to know that you’re expected to have in your minds a contrast between Aristotelean Greek virtue ethics and some example of modern virtue ethics (MacIntyre, Foot, Hursthouse – I don’t know which one you’ve taken). If it’s MacIntyre be aware that he differs from Aristotle (even if he claims to be in the Aristotelean tradition) in three important respects – he rejects Aristotle’s metaphysical biology (based on the Greek concept of natural purpose and its relation to the soul) and replaces it with a sociology of how groups create values. Then he also rejects the static idea of values existing within a fixed city-state in favour of what MacIntyre calls a “tradition” – a dynamic history of ideas, attitudes, and practices. Finally, when I went through MacIntyre with a tooth-comb trying to find reference to Aristotle’s celebrated Golden Mean, I could only find one reference anywhere in After Virtue. We can safely say that MacIntyre replaces the Golden Mean as way of judging situations with some cultural standard which emanates from the tradition and the form of life.

Tomorrow when we look at applied ethics at A2 I will return to that old chestnut “Virtue Ethics is useless when it comes to making moral decisions” – a view I soundly disagree with!

Peter