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Contents
..
Preface and Acknowledgements vu
Ethics, Knowledge and Action 1
1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Ethics and Knowledge 3
1.2.1 The fad-value distinction
9
1.2.2 Relativism 16
1.2.3 Prescriptivistn and expressivism 23
1.3 Ethics and Action 27
2 Basic Concepts in Moral Theory I 34
2.1 Introduction 34
2.2 The Good 34
2.3 Virtue 45
2.4 Rights and Duties 53
2.5 Rights and Contracts 63
2.6 Rights and Consequentialism 65
2.7 Collision of Rights 76
3 Basic Concepts in Moral Theory II
86
3.1 Intention and Foresight
86
3.1.1 Good, evil and the will
86
3.1.2 The Principle of Double Effect
88
3.1.3 Criticisms of PDE and replies
96
3.2 Acts and Omissions 127
3.2.1 Another derided distinction 127
3.2.2 Initial clarification of AOD 128
3.2.3 The derided distinction defended 130
___________________
Contents
VI
4 Close-Up on the Good of Life 138
4.1 Life as a Good 138
4.2 The Right to Life and the Sanctity of Life 143
4.3 The Sanctity of Life and its Critics 147
4.3.1 Innocence 147
4.3.2 A life not worth living? 151
4.4 Persons and Human Beings 174
Notes and Further Reading 185
Index 192
vithauem adneaefen sorhiubmuasn itatisque
Preface and Acknowledgements
In 1995, the philosopher Professor Peter Singer published a book entitled
RethinLikfe iannd gDe ath. The subtitle is The Collapse of our Tradi
tioEnathlics . Professor Singer announced the conquest of the view of
morality coming down to us through the centuries, and rooted in what he
calls the 'Judeo-Christian' ethical tradition. The 'old ethic', he says with
undisguised relief, is dead; a 'new ethical approach' is on its way, though
its 'shape' is still to be determined.
The purpose of this book, and of its companion Applied Ethics, is to
show that traditional morality is not dead. It may not be the official out
look of most moral philosophers, and one might even question how many
people in Western societies believe it any more. I suspect, however, that
the number is larger than the intelligentsia would have us believe.
In seeking to show that traditional morality is not dead, I do not want
to pretend that there has not been something of a revolution in moral
philosophy, which has filtered down to the population at large. Indeed,
Professor Singer is one of the thinkers most responsible for this startling
change in our attitudes to a wide range of topics. Since his seminal work
in the 1970s, he has been followed by hundreds of writers in the field he
almost single-handedly invented, called 'practical' or 'applied' ethics, all
of them in one way or another assisting in the overthrow of traditional
morality. Professor Singer's moral theory, known as consequentialism,
owes its modem form to the nineteenth-century British ethicists James
Mill, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (among others), and became
the dominant ethical outlook in British moral philosophy in the twentieth
century. Whatever the differences among its adherents, and whatever the
challenges it now faces in the higher levels of moral theory (for example,
from Kantianism), it is still the overwhelmingly pre-eminent theory used
in applied ethics in Britain, the USA, Australia, and elsewhere in the West.
Preface and Acknowledgements
VIII
Traditional ethics has had its defenders, to be sure, but they are small in
number and influence. This book and its companion, it is hoped, will help
to redress the imbalance in the kind of material available to students. If I
do not succeed in convincing the reader of the truth of the positions I
defend, at the very least I hope to show that traditional ethics is a coher
ent system of thought, that it can be done in the modern age, and that it
provides a method for dealing with even the most difficult problems in
practical ethics. In other words, the pronouncement of its demise is, I
believe, premature.
I will not describe here what the traditional ethic amounts to: that is the
work of the following chapters. What I will say, however, is that even if
the bulk of moral philosophers find the conclusions I reach unpalatable,
disagreeable, ridiculous, absurd, anachronistic, barbaric, bizarre, or just
plain wrong, l console myself with the following thought: that every sin
gle one of the major positions I defend was believed by the vast majority
of human beings in Western society for thousands of years, right up until
some time in the 1960s, when the Western Cultural Revolution took place.
(I do not speak of the non-Western societies, which even today subscribe
to most or all of the views defended here.) Naturally, this does not make
the views for which I argue right; but it is a fact that offers some solace in
an age in which traditional ethics is held up to such ridicule. Furthermore,
I also believe that there is such a thing as the common sense of humanity,
which extends to morals as well as to everything else. In this I follow
Aristotle, for whom the investigation of morality began with common
sense and was in large part its systematisation. Hence the much-derided
Principle of Double Effect, which is central to traditional moral theory
(and which I defend in chapter 3), is nothing but the codification and
elaboration of what we all know intuitively to be correct, however much
the principle is considered by some to be obscure and repugnant to ra
tionality. Indeed, it has its difficulties, like many other philosophical prin
ciples, traditional or not, but it begins with common sense on its side, and
therefore starts at an advantage.
Moral Theory and Applied Ethics are companion volumes, designed to
be read in sequence. Either book makes sense on its own and could be
read without the other, but there is a dependence between them that makes
this undesirable. Moral Theory presents ethical ideas and principles in the
abstract, and looks to their application to concrete cases; Applied Ethics
discusses concrete cases, and presupposes to a large extent the prior de
fence of the ideas and principles applied to them (although the main lines
Preface and Acknowledgements
IX
of defence are recapitulated). They were written together, and are best
read together.
The structure of the two books is simple. In Moral Theory I set out in
elementary fashion the system of traditional morality as I understand it. I
start with a critique of moral scepticism, not because I have anything
especially new to say or because it has not already been refuted by others.
The reason is that scepticism about the very possibility of arriving at moral
truth pervades universities throughout the Western world. It has seeped
into culture at all levels, in fact, so that students come to university scep
tical about moral objectivity and leave with their scepticism intact and
even reinforced by their teachers. This is one topic on which traditional
moralists, and consequentialists such as Peter Singer, are in substantial
agreement. (Although not even consequentialism, on analysis, escapes from
ethical relativism born of pluralism about values, resort to subjective pref
erences, and a lack of belief in human nature. See further Janet E. Smith,
'The Pre-eminence of Autonomy in Bioethics', in D.S. Oderberg and J. A.
Laing (eds), Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics
(London/New York: Macmillan/St Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 182-9 5.)
No student can be receptive to what traditional morality has to say with
out first shaking off his sceptical prejudices, and this is what chapter 1 is
designed to help him to do.
Chapters 2 and 3 of Moral Theory set out the basic concepts and prin
ciples of traditional morality. The exposition is on the whole elementary
and non-technical. It is not designed as a comprehensive or definitive state
ment of the traditional ethic. I do not engage with all the alternative ideas
explored in recent literature on virtue theory, or Kantianism, or natural
law ethics. I am concerned only to present the leading ideas of traditional
morality in a straightforward way, showing their main interconnections,
in order to prepare the ground for a discussion of specific problems in the
second volume. The vast majority of applied ethics books share the vice
of not giving sufficient space to the theoretical justification of the posi
tions adopted on particular issues. Far too often, an author gives a twenty
page exposition of his ethical viewpoint and then launches into discussion
of difficult concrete cases. I believe this is wholly inadequate, hence my
,desire, at the risk of 'over-egging the pudding', to state and defend at
lengtthhe t raditional ethicist's theoretical presuppositions and general
approanda tco ehxp lain the concepts used in later discussion. Applied
ethics is not like riding a bicycle: you don't just 'do it', as some applied
ethicists seem to think, and convince your reader by doing it well rather
Prefa ce and Acknowledgements
X
than badly. You start with a theory, explicit or implicit, and you apply it.
I have, then, stated the theory of traditional morality as explicitly as pos
sible for my purpose of applying it to concrete cases. There is also some
discussion that has no direct bearing on later applications, but seemed to
me wo.rthwhile for the purpose of elaborating and defending traditional
moral theory for its own sake. These passages, some of which are ab
struse and somewhat technical, can safely be skipped by the reader who
wants to focus on the main points, in particular on the application of the
theory to specific problems.
Chapter 4 is the link between the two books, setting out the fundamen
tal moral principle of the sanctity of human life. Here I draw the reader
away from general theory and towards my main focus, which is issues of
life and death. The doctrine of the sanctity of human life has come under
merciless attack in recent years, and is the first principle that most applied
ethicists seek to undermine. Without it, there is no traditional morality.
With it, much of what passes for contemporary ethical opinion can be
shown to be false, even morally repugnant and dangerous to society.
The main negative focus of Moral Theory is the critique of consequen
tialism, which by far dominates current thinking and writing in applied
ethics. (For those who doubt that this is the case, a typical example to
look at is A. Dyson and J. Harris (eds), Ethics and Biotechnology (Lon
don: Routledge, 1994 ), in addition, of course, to the well-known texts by
Singer, Glover, Rachels, Harris, Beauchamp and Childress, among many
others.) Hence the subtitle of both books: its aim is to make clear that
they constitute an alternative to the staple fare of applied ethics books, in
which the approach to theory and practice is overwhelmingly consequen
tialist. I do not set out every flaw in consequentialism, however, omitting
even some major ones. Rather, I concentrate on its incompatibility with
the basic demands of rights and of justice (due primarily to its 'maximis
ing' and calculative nature), and hence its fundamentally inhuman char
acter, and I explore some other of its more bizarre and morally
objectionable features. Of course, consequentiali sm comes in various forms,
and I have not explored the species and sub-species that have been formu
lated in the attempt to get around certain objections. Instead, I focus on
the leading ideas central to any form of consequenrialism worthy of the
name. The trend in current ethical writing seems to be for consequentialists
of a more enlightened outlook to alter their theories to such an extent - in
order to make them conform to common sense and basic morality -that
they are barely recognisable as consequentialist. This is a research pro-
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
gramme with an uncertain future, one to which I am happy to leave its
exponents.
In Applied Ethics l discuss particular controversies, all of them revolv
ing around issues of life and death. In chapters 1 and 2 I argue for specific
prohibitions on the taking of human life. In chapter 3 I draw the bound
ary separating those beings which possess the right to life from chose which
do not. Here, although the chapter is entitled 'Animals', the reader will
soon see that I focus almost exclusively on the issue of whether animals
have rights. There are all sorts of facets to the 'animals issue' which I do
not explore. The main reason for this is that by concentrating on the
question of rights, and drawing a logico-moral boundary between human
and animal life, I aim to highlight, or to place in relief, what I say about
rights for human beings. In this sense the question of animal rights is an
integral conceptual part of the overall project of expounding traditional
moraliry. Second, however, it seems that the animal rights movement is
growing strongly and distorting the common-sense approach that most
people still have towards the animal kingdom. Only by seeing the flaws in
the idea that animals have rights will society recover a sane attitude both
to them and to itself.
It might be thought that my position on the animals issue places me
close to Peter Singer's, since he too does not believe in animal rights. Whilst
Professor Singer is to be commended for much of what he has written and
done about the suffering of animals, it remains the case that his attitude is
fundamentally unsound, since it stems from his consequentialist belief
that no being has rights -'I am not convinced that the notion of a moral
right is a helpful or meaningful one' -and that 'I tlhe language of rights is
a .convenient political shorthand. It is even more valuable in the era of
thirty-second TV news clips.' (See Practical Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993; 2nd edn, p. 96; Animal Liberation, London:
Jonathan Cape, 1990; 2nd edn, p. 8.) Whereas, then, Professor Singer
seeks to demote human beings to the same level as anitnals inasmuch as
none of them have rights, traditional morality maintains a fundamental
conceptual and moral distinction between human beings and every other
living creature. Professor Singer's viewpoint may have meant an improve
ment in the lot of many animals, which is praiseworthy; but it also means,
for the traditional ethicist, a change for the worse in the fate of mankind.
· In chapters 4 and 5 I argue for cases where it is permissible to take
human life. It is at this point that some people who see themselves as
partisans of traditional morality will part company with me. They have,
