How do you make your moral decisions? I’m not asking which things you think are good and which things you think are bad. I’m asking what factors do you consider, and what is the process by which you consider them, when you are trying to figure out what is right or wrong, good or bad?
The online comic Strong Female Protagonist stars a superhero like many others in a story unlike many others. For those who remember Concrete, SFP reminds me more of that book than any other super hero comic I know. Recently, the main character had to make some decisions that any real person would spend some time second guessing. She wondered if she made the right choices. She wondered if she could even be called a hero. And yet, she wasn’t certain that choosing anything else would have been any better. All this is good. All this is appropriate characterization. But these thoughts are thoughts that in other comics would have been dealt with, if at all, in a dramatic moment. Either the hero would mull ethics immediately after a battle while in the midst of unignorable devastation caused by the battle, or the ethics would be glossed over until the middle of the next big battle, when suddenly the hero would seize up and the drama wouldn’t be so much about the goodness of the character as the timing of the character breaking free of the paralysis.
But Strong Female Protagonist is not a typical super hero story. Our Hero ends up wrestling with these questions in the park, speaking to an old professor she ran into by happenstance. One of the themes you’ll see explored here on Pervert Justice will be meta-ethics: how do we make decisions about what is good and what is bad? The creators of SFP did an excellent job with the hero/professor conversation and so I thought I’d take the opportunity afforded by this story to begin a discussion on meta-ethics.
We’ll start just with this one story-page to get a glimpse of a number of major considerations one encounters when attempting to consciously craft a meta-ethics that works with one’s own values and perspectives and experiences. On this page, the hero’s old professor (black hair) is drawn coat-on to represent one side of an ethical debate while the professor is drawn coat-off to represent the other side of the same debate. Our Hero is drawn in the middle of this debate, focussed on listening:
A Page from Strong Female Protagonist where our hero listens to one professor play-act both sides of the Deontology vs Consequentialism debate.
This is one of the first questions we must solve in meta-ethics: will we consider results alone? Or will we consider other factors? Note that consequentialism and especially Utilitarianism (one instance of consequentialism) are not the only systems of ethical decision making that consider the results (or the ends) of an action. Deontology, which is made up of those ethical systems that prioritize following rules or adhering to duties, is frequently asserted to be a system of following rules instead of considering consequences. This, however, is a caricature. Not only are consequences considered at various points in deontic reasoning, but an appeal to consequences is frequently a justification for imposing duties in the first place.
How else would you describe the first argument on the page?
CoatOn: If the ends justify the means, then all is permitted! In the name of the Greater Good we may commit any atrocity we like.
CoatOn is arguing for considering factors other than results, but the argument is that if we fail to examine the means and not merely the results, then we will end up with bad results. This is a Deontic position, a position that ethics is best described as a set of duties and the relationship of individual decisions/actions to those duties. Yet it is not blind to consequences. Rather it asserts that we will get better consequences if we begin our ethical decision making already constrained by certain duties. These duties are different in different deontic systems. In some an important duty/value (often the most important duty/value) is obedience to some authority, typically a god. But not all deontic ethical systems are religious and not all religious ethical systems are deontic.
Consequentialism is typically seen in contrast to deontology. There are other ethical decision making systems to consider, but the most frequently debated today reside in one of these two camps. For now, it’s enough to distinguish deontology from consequentialism and to understand that deontologists don’t ignore consequences, but rather have a belief (sometimes presuppositional) that the best ethical decision making is a process that considers more than consequences alone.
Well firstly, I hadn’t come across SFP, and I really like it so thanks for that. Another Web comic to follow! Yay!
Secondly
Reading the post and the comic, I came to the question slightly differently – seemed to me to be a question of whether there is anything other than results alone – is the concept of deontology anything other than consequentialism with a different frame of reference for the concept of results?
Yes, that’s the standard critique of Deontic ethics from the consequentialist frame. It’s also one I’m trying to dispel.
While it’s possible to reframe Deontic ethics as merely considering different consequences, it’s not very productive. We’re attempting to describe how people go about making moral decisions. If, in the process of making your decisions, you decide you don’t want to break a moral rule, but you don’t actively consider the consequences of breaking the rule, then your decision making process is simply fundamentally different. You look to present rules while others look to the future and imagine possible consequences. While there is a tendency for deontologists to justify deontic ethics with reference to consequences, consider a couple of things:
1. They may be trying to justify their ethics to a consequentialist using consequentialism because they already know that the consequentialist is much more likely to be convinced by appeals to consequences.
2. Many deontic systems have consequences – they simply aren’t consequences that most consequentialist systems are equipped to consider. The easiest example is a religious ethical system with a hell. We can’t really know hell, or measure the consequences of hell against the consequences in this universe. We can’t even be sure of what would send people to hell and what wouldn’t. So an ethics of hell proposes following the religious rules to avoid the consequence of hell, but acknowledging we do that not because hell is a measurable consequence (in fact, it’s frequently an infinite consequence). We don’t actively compare hell vs. some other consequence. We take it on faith, if we follow an ethics of hell, that the rules are there for our benefit. Nonetheless, there’s a consideration of consequences. It’s just that there’s no discussion about which consequence might be worse, which might be preferable, because avoiding hell is always the right thing to do.
Uh, I realize I didn’t finish that thought.
The point of that final bit is that the process is different. Even if certain deontic systems have specific consequences deontologists are trying to avoid, you can’t compare and contrast consequences in order to come up with a decision about which of two choices is the more ethical.
Thanks for that – it makes it clearer.
So in terms of hell, if hell is a consequence there is no way of evaluating other consequences.
But if hell is a consequence that one accepts, is there actually a choice?
Does that imply that a deontic system (at least in the case of hell) is not about decision making, or at least the choice is much earlier (in terms of chosing the code to follow)?
If so, in terms of morality the question from a deontic perspective is how closely an action conforms with the accepted code, and the value of the action is judged by that criterea alone? As opposed to assigning value to the various possible outcomes and evaluating the choices according to those values?
Exactly. Or at least, you’re exactly right in a purely deontic system – not all deontic systems are that rigidly pure. In some cases there is a code that must be followed (and when making moral decisions, one compares how closely an action conforms with that code, as you said), but that code is limited to certain areas of life. The code might not provide any guidance in other areas. In those cases, either the code is supplemented with other moral reasoning (primarily either the reasoning of virtue ethics or the consequentialist reasoning) or the code is supplemented with an additional code.
Jewish law is like this: YHVH hands down the Mosaic law, but it doesn’t tell you much about when you should give up your seat on a bus or whether electric power has any moral significance. In these cases, a new code is created to cover those situations not covered by the original law. While the new code doesn’t have the same justification and may be seen as a “lesser” law, once that code exists, the moral reasoning process is the same: a rule about giving up one’s seat on a bus can be used as a comparison when considering giving up one’s seat on a train, even if the supplementary code hasn’t said anything specifically about trains (yet).
But when your original code is not overwhelmingly complete and when you lack a supplementary code to fill in the gaps (or at least the gap you’re currently considering) then appeals to consequence are common. Another common way to fill these gaps is to ask, “What would this prominent person in my community do?” where the prominent person is considered particularly ethical. In this case, you’re not trying to conform to a code, you’re trying to conform to the model created by a particularly ethical person’s life. We’ll get to that more when we talk about virtue ethics.
So unless you constrain yourself to a limited set of actions all of which are explicitly covered by (or implicitly covered according to accepted interpretation by authority that covers those laws?) the laws within a deontic system, the approach is necessarily hybrid. Either attempting to apply a ‘spririt of the law’ approach (“what do I think the most likely law would be if it were to cover this situation”), an attempt to act in accordance with an authority figure (I assume that is the thinking behind the “what would Jesus do” stickers I hear about in the States – never having been there, I’ve never seen one) or a deontic/ consequentialist hierarchy where the deontic system is followed where applicable and then consequetialism is applied to other situations.
Shades of grey then. Morality isn’t easy. But it is interesting, and important.
Yep. And your parenthetical is right on. I think you’ve got it.