What Does a Practical Ethicist Do?

What is practical ethics? How should we do it well?

There are two broad approaches. The first, the Evangelist Model, aims to convert people to be better citizens, to cause people to behaviour more ethically. It is premised on knowledge of ethical truths, of clear insight into what is right and what is wrong. Peter Singer is perhaps the most famous living bioethical Evangelist.

The second broad approach is the Socratic Model. It is not premised on knowledge of truth or directly aiming at transmission of truth or changing behaviour. Its goal is inquiry and reflection, the discovery of ethical truths. The goal of such an approach is to provoke people to think ethically for themselves, to engage in deeper reflection and to arrive an ethical conclusion of what they should do. This book is an example of the Socratic Model.

While much of my own work argues for a particular course of action, like allowing doping in sport, the primary (unstated) goal is not to realise such actions, but to cause people to think, by the use of provocative argument. There are many ways to encourage people to think. But one way is to consider the unthinkable.

Michael Sandel once famously wrote we should be “open to the unbidden”. I believe we should be open to the forbidden. Open in the sense that we can articulate the reasons for why the forbidden is wrong. But ethics is about progress and reform, as well as justifying our intutions. In many cases, rational reflection will cause us to revise our beliefs about what should be forbidden and indeed what we have moral imperative to do.

It is by considering the controversial that we can get people to think, to exercise their ethical muscles. In that way, we discover our own reasons for action.

Comments

[Stevedore]

Would you espouse views which you do not believe to be true in order to encourage thinking?

Is it ethical to do so?

[Julian Savulescu]

Depends on the circumstances. I once said on radio that reproductive cloning should be banned because it is unsafe. That is true but my main view is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with reproductive cloning. Indeed, we could have good reasons to do it. I did not express my entire view because it was important that legislation be passed that permitted therapeutic cloning. That was Evangelist ethics.
In general, lying has bad consequences, if only in the long term. But there is a paper to be written on Reasons to Lie. Obviously, Kant was wrong that you should never lie. If you have to lie to save an innocent person's life, you should lie.

[Stevedore]

How often have you presented arguments that run counter to your own position, knowing that doing so would be more likely than not to move people away from a course of action that you deem to be ethically best?

Would this be the best test of the Socratic ethicist's avowed privileging of training process over gaining product?

[William]

At the Australian Legal Philosophy Students' Association 2010 launch event last week, Professor James Allan said something very insightful that I was reminded of when I read this. He said (transcribing from an audio recording I made):

"There's a real temptation, I think, and you see it a lot, to think that anyone who disagrees with you is ignorant, stupid or could maybe use a bit of re-education... It's conceivable that after billions of years of evolution, you and you alone have evolved so that your moral antennae are perfectly in-tune with what constitutes people's timeless and inherent fundamental rights. By an amazing stroke of luck, you're the one - you've got the pipeline to God. But I sort of doubt it. On every contentious rights related issue...how to balance the interests of terrorism suspects against public safety, whether to allow same-sex marriage, euthanasia... on every one of those issues there is someone out there who is as smart as you, as well informed as you, as resonable as you, and probably as nice as you. And that person disagrees with you. And it's very difficult to characterise that person as deficient, and unless you do that, you've got to face up to the fact that people disagree about rights. It's not like disagreeing about gravity, where you can take them up to your eighth-floor window and say 'Ok, I know you're a professor in the english department and talk about anti-foundationalism or deconstructionism, but go ahead and jump'... there are right answers in the world of facts... in the world of values it's much more difficult to cash that argument out."

Interesting, but doesn't it engage in a kind of moral relativism? I recently saw Sam Harris' TED Talk on whether there are moral experts (great talk). Even if having a Socratic model is better on a practical level (it's hard to get people to accept positions when they aren't able to engage with them and have their views considered), surely there are right answers, and that maybe not all opinions are equal?

[Walter Sinnott-Armstrong]

The Evangelist Model and the Socratic model need to be supplemented with a third: the Analytic model. Some practical ethicists try to analyze the issues at stake and formulate a theory (perhaps only at a low level of generality) about what makes the acts at issue morally right or wrong. These Analysts are not Evangelists because they do not go out into the streets trying to convert others to their views. Their motivations are curiosity and the desire to figure out a problem that interests them, even if it does not affect them personally. These Analysts are also not purely Socratic because Socrates claimed to know nothing and never espoused any particular positions (despite the later Plato's tendency to put words in his mouth), whereas those who practice the Analytic Model of Practical Ethics do end up with definite positions. Moreover, Socrates went out into the streets trying to show others how little they knew, whereas Analysts are not just trying to expose the ignorance of others. This Analytic alternative should be attractive to philosophers who want to avoid being either Socratic know-nothings and gadflies or moralistic evangelists. Analysts then side with Hume, who told Hutcheson that he was not trying to make people better (either by evangelically leading them to the truth or by Socratically making them aware of their ignorance), but only trying to figure out how morality works.