The Purpose of Ethics

By Michael Austin

The Purpose of Ethics describes an original moral theory similar in nature to Preference Utilitarianism. However, it is a major unifying theory, reconciling the apparently conflicting differences between moral theories that have been prevalent in the twentieth century: between consequentialist and motivist traditions for example; and between the Utilitarian, Kantian and Liberal Egalitarian approaches. Unlike previous theories, which are grounded on different, unexplained assumptions, the purposive moral theory in this book is deduced step by step to produce, as its solid basis, the purposes of human societal life. These purposes are then analysed in detail in terms of their causal factors to derive a 'society model' containing 285 factors, which represent social behaviour in the areas of medical ethics, sexual morality, human liberty, crime and punishment, socio-economics, military ethics, animal ethics, environmental ethics and health & safety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329412521

Book preview

The Purpose of Ethics

THE PURPOSE OF ETHICS

Michael Austin, MA (Phil) (Open)

Copyright © 2015 by Michael Austin

Michael Austin has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.

First published: 2015

ISBN: 978-1-329-41252-1

Internet contact: [e-mail]

To my father and mother, Ernest and Norah Austin

PROLOGUE

Tyger, tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night.

What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake

Beads of sweat dripped slowly off the end of Clegg’s nose, landing on the right thumb, cocked as it was on the trigger of a hunting rifle. Clegg did not dare to move, fearing that even the least rustle of the leaves of the concealing bush would give the hunter’s position away. The tiger, which had recently stood so briefly but proudly in the clearing before Clegg had had time to draw a bead on the animal, was nowhere to be seen. Clegg was not even sure whether the beast had sensed the presence of man or had simply moved on, in search of a kill or in order to rest up. Clegg waited, uncertainly; time, like Clegg’s beads of sweat, dripped slowly, interminably.

There was a sudden distinct padding of feet and then a flash of black and yellow as the magnificent animal strode back into the clearing. Clegg started, involuntarily; a twig snapped back; a hidden bird flew up, its wings clapping loudly. As Clegg brought the rifle up, the tiger turned towards the noise and began to walk slowly and majestically in the direction of the bush.

When the creature was ten yards away, and plumb in the rifle’s scope, Clegg squeezed the trigger, anticipating the force of the recoil. The bullet would pierce the tiger’s brain stopping it dead in its tracks. Later the beast’s proud head would be stuffed and mounted on the wall of Clegg’s club.

What twist of fate was it that intervened on that hot, still afternoon? What foreign body, however minute, had lodged itself somewhere in the mechanism of Clegg’s rifle? Or else what imperfection in its construction caused its trigger to jam on that vital occasion as Clegg squeezed and, in disbelief, heard no shot? Shortly afterwards, when the tiger broke Clegg’s neck with a heavy blow, it gave voice briefly to add to the commotion of Clegg’s shouts, of birds taking noisily to flight and of other unseen creatures in the trees. Then, silence descended once more on the forest for a while.

Would it have been right for Clegg to have shot the tiger?  In the 19th century, the question would hardly have been worth asking; by the end of the 21st century, when tigers will probably be extinct, the question will also be hardly worth asking – although the answer will then be the opposite of what it once was.  At any rate, whatever the answer, there are many questions, which may be difficult to answer, concerning the rights and wrongs of human behaviour.  (Indeed, we may extend that by considering whether it was right for the tiger to break Clegg's neck!)  It is the purpose of ethics to try to answer such questions or, where the answers are difficult to call, to at least point out the arguments on either side.

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTORY CONCEPTS

(1.1) What the book is about

This book describes a new theory of moral behaviour and some implications of that theory. Ethics is the branch of Philosophy that is concerned with the study of moral theories of human behaviour. Some modern authors distinguish 'ethical' from 'moral'. For example, Ronald Dworkin in Justice for Hedgehogs defines 'ethical' as being about behaviour for personal life and well-being and 'moral' as being about behaviour towards other people's lives and well-being; and credits this distinction to Bernard Williams. A. C. Grayling makes the same distinction: Ethics is about ethos, about the kind of person one is, about the manner and character of one's life and activity. A central part of one's ethos concerns morality, that is, the obligations and duties, the constraints and parameters that apply in one's relationships with others.[1] However, as will be seen in Chapters Seven, Eight and Eleven, in the Purpose of Ethics, I derive individual moral rules from personal ethical behaviour, thus inextricably linking the ethical and moral aspects (as understood from the Williams / Dworkins / Grayling definitions). Therefore I may use 'ethical' and 'moral' more or less interchangeably.

The subject matter of most branches of Philosophy can be neatly summed up by means of a pithy 'big question'. In the case of Ethics, the big question is "How should people behave?" but it is important to explain how it arises.

When we think about the behaviour of the lower animals, we can see that their behaviour is mainly instinctive. Such behaviour covers what they eat and how they catch it, their daytime and night-time habits, how they avoid predation, their mating and infant-rearing behaviour and so on. With human beings, whilst some of our behaviour is instinctive (such as reflex actions, bodily processes and strong emotional responses to situations), much of it seems to demand a conscious decision be made by the individual human being. Of course, in many cases, the choice does not have any great significance, for example in deciding whether to watch one film or another or picking a holiday destination. In other cases, such as whether to accept an offer of a new job, the consequences of our actions are much greater and may determine how the rest of an individual's life plays out. Sometimes the choices are clear-cut but in other cases, they may be finely balanced, as in dilemmas. In John-Paul Sartre's novel The Age of Reason, Mathieu, the principal character, faced dilemmas about his girlfriend's abortion and about going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War for the Republicans or staying at home to care for his bedridden mother. But significant decision-making dilemmas can crop up in many other situations such as choice of partner, career, buying a house, emigration. Between the extremes of reflex actions and behaviour arising from making a choice in a significant dilemma, there is a continuum of types of human behaviour. It is natural to ask whether or not there are some general rules to govern how people should choose to behave in the conscious part of this continuum: and if so, what are those general rules. The big question in Ethics is thus concerned with the establishment of such general (or specific) rules for human behaviour.

There have been continual (and documented) attempts to answer this question since the time of the Greek philosophers. Some of the main uses of moral theories are to make moral judgements about peoples' actions and then to impose moral sanctions (punishment) if it is thought that someone's actions were bad ones. Ethics therefore also embraces the nature and justification for punishment – its justification, its nature and society's authority to impose it. In general, our laws are based on moral theory. Morality therefore underpins the law and thus the behaviour and decisions of central and local governments in particular, which thus brings into the Ethics arena the workings of such institutions as the police, the courts and the prison service. Moreover, the need for sanctions for bad behaviour (and rewards for good behaviour) exists in non-governmental institutions as well, notably clubs and business companies; and I draw upon such cases in the book.

Other uses of moral theories of behaviour are to make ethical decisions in medicine (medical ethics) and in business / commerce (business ethics).

Unlike most other branches of Philosophy, which are concerned with descriptive theories of the world (what is the case), Ethics, in seeking to answer those questions posed above is concerned with a normative theory – what ought to be the case.

Ethics has overlaps with other branches of philosophy, notably Political Philosophy, which includes, inter alia, the subjects of Distributive Justice (see Sections 1.5 and 1.9 in this chapter and the whole of Chapter Three) and Retributive Justice (aka moral sanctions or punishment), which topic is addressed in Section 1.5 and Chapter Nine. Ethics overlaps with Psychology, which involves the study of individual human beings and also of animals; in particular, Modern Ethics can hardly be disassociated from Neuroscience, the study of (human) brains. Ethics and Political Philosophy overlap with Sociology, the study of societies of people. Indeed, if there were no society at all, Ethics may well be irrelevant – it may be useless to study the moral behaviour of a single person living alone on a desert island for example. Throughout the book, appeal will be made to different societal contexts – clubs, companies, nation-states (ie society); indeed, the moral theory presented here relies upon analogies between moral behaviour and sanctions in those different social contexts.

The remainder of this Chapter One covers an author profile and then a collection of relevant introductory concepts. The subject matters of the remaining chapters are as follows.

•          Chapter Two addresses the definition and meaning of good in the traditional search for moral truth.

Chapter Three similarly deals with the meaning of fairness through an analysis and criticism of John Rawls's Theory of Justice.

Chapter Four resolves the dilemma caused by the conflicts between good and fairness by looking directly at obligations arising from purposes; it then introduces purpose models.

Chapter Five presents a purpose model for a herd (aka society) of animals.

Chapter Six similarly presents purpose models for a club member and a club.

Chapter Seven similarly presents purpose models for a person and for mankind (aka human society) in the format of optimisation problems.

Chapter Eight constructs a purpose model for human society.

Chapter Nine discusses several contentious relationships employed in the human society model.

Chapter Ten conducts an effect analysis on the human society model.

Chapter Eleven presents the results of the analysis as societal & individual ethics.

Chapter Twelve addresses issues in belief, religion & education.

Chapter 13 contains some mathematical techniques for the solution of optimisation problems and describes a new technique for solving purpose models; it also contains a concise summary of Purposive Ethics.

---

[1]Grayling, The God Argument, Chapter 16, p. 185.

(1.2) Author profile

My interest in Ethics can be traced to my sixth-form maths teacher (at Grimsby Wintringham Boys' Grammar School in about 1963), a gentleman called Mr Frith. He so enthused the maths set that it was a pleasure to be in his classes. Sometimes he got ahead of schedule and would then amuse us with logical paradoxes on the blackboard. I found these compelling and when I went to Manchester University to study Mathematics, I opted to do Logic as my subsidiary subject in the hope that paradoxes would come up. They didn't, but a few years later, my appetite for solving the problem of paradoxes being undimmed, I purchased my first philosophy book – Philosophy Made Simple. The chapter on Logic contained a number of logical paradoxes, but no solution. After thinking about the topic for some time, I formed an idea about how I thought paradoxes could be solved. It wasn't a good solution to the paradox problem and the only comfort that I can draw from it now is that I had started doing philosophy.

Paradoxes are statements (more correctly propositions) that are neither true nor false. Here is a typical paradox: Statement A is that 'Statement B is true'; Statement B is that Statement A is false'. (Actually this is a quite boring paradox; one that I prefer, for example, is this: 'short' is a short word; 'polysyllabic' is a polysyllabic word and so on; whereas 'long' is not a long word nor is 'French' a French word. Suppose that words of the former sort are called self-descriptive and words of the latter sort are called non-self-descriptive. The paradox is whether 'non-self-descriptive' is self-descriptive.) My idea about paradoxes stemmed from the notion that in order to analyse a statement to establish that it is a paradox, you firstly have to assume that the statement is true (and then conclude that it is false) and you secondly have to assume that the statement is false (and then conclude that it is true). My idea developed from there but ended up, several months later with a circularity (defining true / false in terms of true / false), which, in logic (and therefore in philosophy) is fatal. By doing this I learned the hard way one of the things that you can't have in logic (an infinite regress is another).

By the way, if you think that the problem of paradoxes has no solution, have a look at Bertrand Russell's Theory of Classes circa 1920, where he restricts logical propositions to the class of statements that do not refer directly or indirectly to themselves … and note that both paradoxes set out above do in fact refer to themselves.

After getting a brusque reply from a Philosophy magazine when I submitted my article on paradoxes for publication and discovering Russell's solution to the problem, I completely lost interest in paradoxes. However I did read the rest of 'Philosophy Made Simple'. I went back to re-read the chapter on Ethics. The way it was presented made the definition of the word 'good' as the central problem. That is, there was the implicit assumption that human beings should do what was good so that, if you could only define 'good', then you would know precisely what human beings should do. There were descriptions of several different definitions of 'good', generally without much in the way of a logical argument in favour of any particular definition. Like paradoxes before, I thought the problem to be a first-rate puzzle and I set about thinking and reading about various possible definitions of 'good'. Little did I know that I would spend the next thirty or more years on the Ethics trail.

In pursuit of it, I attended a one-year course on Ethics at Birkbeck College and the first year of a BA Philosophy course, also at Birkbeck. I then completed a three years Master of Arts course in Philosophy at the Open University, which I found rather easier to 'attend' when I re-located from Essex to Dorset upon retirement. I also read dozens rather than hundreds of Philosophy books, enjoying some rather more than others, struggling to understand some of the ones that I didn't quite enjoy. The writers that influenced me most will come out in the book; I found Plato very readable, and found some parts of Aristotle's works riveting; I marvelled at Descartes's meditations; I enjoyed John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill and also Bertrand Russell and Freddie Ayer; I struggled with John Rawls and G. A. Cohen; I delighted in Peter Singer and Michael Sandel; I loved some of Jon Elster's debates with Rawls; I was privileged to have sat in many introductory philosophy lectures given by A. C. Grayling at Birkbeck.

I mentioned earlier that I chose Logic as a subsidiary subject in my first year at Manchester University; it is a matter of regret now that I found the Mathematics course rather disappointing and that I did not strive as hard as I should have. At any rate, in my second year I switched to a joint course in Mathematics and Psychology, which I found more interesting. However, I ended up with an Ordinary Degree and tried to compensate for it by going on to do a Masters degree in Business Administration (MBA). I quite nearly did do that: after a gap of 12 months, I attended a one year course at Bradford University Management Centre, the course being rather grandly known as a Postgraduate Diploma in Industrial Administration; it was meant to be convertible into an MBA by completing a dissertation after the course; but I started a new job in a new location and somehow never got the required inspiration. However, the main reason for going into this is that the course at Bradford did give me a very good grounding in those practical business quantitative techniques that are variously known as operational research or optimisation theory. They include, for example, Game Theory and Linear Programming.

It is worth making a bit of a fuss about Optimisation Theory at this early stage; the verb 'to optimise' means either 'to maximise' or 'to minimise' or, sometimes, 'to make equal to a target value'. For example, if y = 6x – x squared, and you want to maximize the value of y, then you can do so by making x equal to 3 (this assumes of course that you can control or otherwise choose the value of x – and controllability is another massively important concept in this moral theory). Anyway, when y (the thing you want to optimise) can be expressed in terms of just one variable (x), the maximal or minimal values of y can be found using classical mathematical calculus – you differentiate the expression for y, (6x – x squared), to yield its first derivative (6 – 2x), set this to zero and the answer is x = 3.  When y is expressed in terms of two or more controllable variables, calculus is no good and you need another technique known as mathematical programming. Linear programming is a special (and simplest) case of that where the expression for y involves only linear functions of the controllable variables i.e. not squares, cubes or higher powers. Game Theory is an even more special case allowing competition and uncertainty to be incorporated into optimisation situations.

However, what sort of things might we want to optimize? Well, in business and industry, we would want to minimize the use of resources or costs generally and we would want to maximise market share or sales or profit. In social services including healthcare, we might also want to minimize resources and costs but maximise things like the utilisations of theatre facilities and of surgeons. In terms of electricity generation, we want to maximise load factor and minimize things like power losses, outages (power cuts), CO2 emissions and, again, costs. What about ethics? Well, we will see shortly that, under the most popular moral theory, the idea is to define what 'good' is and then work out human behaviour on the basis of maximising the amount of whatever 'good' is.

(1.3) Definitions and meanings

Why have a section on definitions and meanings? Mainly because most moral theories aim to define 'good' and then work out how to maximise the amount of it. For much the greater part of the time I spent on this book, I thought that the definition and the meaning of a term were the same thing; most of the time I spent thinking about the definition of 'good' was spent thinking about what people meant by it when they used the term. However, this equivalence of definition and meaning was questioned on the Birkbeck course one day when the lecturer explained that the definition of water was H2O. I couldn't really argue with that but then the Romans (for example) evidently didn't know what the definition of water was and the snag with that, if definition and meaning are the same thing, is that the Romans didn't know what the meaning of water was either. And this would be despite the fact that they could build ships to sail across the stuff and aqueducts to transport the stuff around. It is clear, I think, that the Romans knew what the meaning of water was even if they weren't aware of its definition.

As it happens, I later gained clarification of this awkward topic from reading A. C. Grayling's book 'An Introduction to Philosophical Logic'. In Chapters 2 and, particularly, 7, Grayling considers several different, and competing, theories of meaning. Of particular interest here are the denotative and use theories of meaning – but that is not meant to cast doubt on others such as the behavioural, ideational or verification theories of meaning.

The denotative theory of meaning is perhaps the most plausible one – that the meaning of a word is the object (or objects) that it denotes – but Grayling discusses two complementary variants of denotative meanings: the intensional meaning and the extensional meaning. The intensional meaning of a word is the property (or set of properties) that qualify a thing to be a member of the class of things denoted by the word in question. So, for 'water', the intensional meaning would be its chemical composition i.e. H2O. Whereas the extensional meaning of a word is the whole class of things so denoted. The extensional meaning of water then is the class of all bodies of H2O, whether they be individual drops of water or entire oceans of the stuff. Clearly then, the Romans knew the extensional meaning of water even if they did not actually know its intensional meaning.

However, it turns out that what works well for words that denote natural things (like water, star, planet, gold, oak, tiger) and man-made things (such as hammer, watch, CD player) does not always work so well for abstract things such as person, goodness and fairness. In those cases, the denotative meanings alone do not tell the whole story and help is needed from some of the other theories of meaning. The meaning and definition of 'person' is addressed in Section 1.7 below; the meaning of 'good' is dealt with in Chapter Two; whilst the definition of 'fair(ness)' is addressed at length in Chapter Three; duty & obligation appear likewise in Chapter Four. There is one interesting difference between 'good' and 'fair' that I would like to explore in this introductory chapter and it appears at Section 1.6.

(1.4) The moral trinity: Utilitarianism, Kantian Ethics, Liberal Egalitarianism

I am indebted to Michael Sandel for identifying the three most influential moral theories of modern times in a TV program in 2011. Of course that is not to say that other moral theories have not been influential at all and, in that context, I would have to mention Hare's Prescriptivism and Peter Singer's Animal Ethics as modern examples as well as the ethics of Plato / Socrates and of Aristotle as classical Greek examples. In addition, the influence of religious belief on morals cannot be overlooked; a morality based upon religion obviously requires a deity as its basis, and then moral behaviour is whatever that deity commands, such commands being set out in an appropriate religious text. You will find further reference to religious morality (and others) in Chapter Two and to religious belief in Chapter Twelve.

You will find that Utilitarianism features very heavily in Chapter Two, whilst Liberal Egalitarianism is dealt with superficially in Section 1.9 here and in some detail in Chapter Three. Kantian Ethics is covered in Section 1.8 here (its distinguishing features are the concepts of 'duty', 'universalisability' and treating people as 'ends' and not 'means'). I will say something in this section about Greek Ethics but first I want to explain the underlying concept of Utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism was popularised by, if not invented by, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who collaborated on the concept. We might characterise Utilitarianism by the following set of  questions and answers.

Q How should human beings behave? A They should do what is good.

Q What is 'good'? A 'Good' is 'Utility'.

Q What is 'Utility'? A 'Utility' is 'Happiness'.

Q What is 'Happiness'? A 'Happiness' is 'Pleasures' minus 'Pains'.

I won't go any further here as this would be to anticipate what is in Chapter Two. However, I will just clarify the answer to the first question and then draw its consequences: to say that human beings should do what is good is to say that they should maximise the amount of good that they do; then the consequences are that they should maximise the amount of pleasure that they bring about and minimise the amount of pain that they bring about. Utilitarianism is probably the prevailing moral theory of the 20th and 21st centuries (as at 2015 anyway!) It is described as a consequentialist moral theory because actions are evaluated as good or bad according to their consequences i.e. how much pleasure and/or pain they bring about. It is a highly social moral theory (because it takes everyone's pleasure and pain into account); but then so are Kantian Ethics and Liberal Egalitarianism.

However, Greek Ethics is rather different and focuses on the individual rather than on the whole of society. It can be characterised by the following set of  questions and answers.

Q How should human beings behave? A They should be virtuous – they should acquire the 'virtues'.

Q What are the 'virtues'? A Courage, temperance, wisdom and justice; also piety, benevolence and others.

Q What is courage?

Q What is temperance?

Q What is wisdom?

Q What is justice?

The answers to those questions now diverge and become frustrating. Much of Plato's Socratic Dialogues are conversations between Socrates and some other character, with Socrates questioning the other about what one or other of the virtues means – usually to a point of stalemate (but they are rivetingly good reads!) Aristotle's Ethics is clearer but only in a slightly question-begging way; he would say that 'courage' was a mean position between cowardice at one extreme and rashness / foolhardiness at the other extreme. However most people would probably say that they didn't have difficulty with the extreme positions, but rather with the majority of positions near the middle, and that Aristotle's 'Golden Mean' didn't really help all that much.

Whilst you can see that Greek Ethics stressed an individual human being's character, you can also see that some of those character virtues necessarily impact on wider society: for example benevolence and, particularly, justice, which is the principal subject of Liberal Egalitarianism;  I will now look at justice.

(1.5) Justice and fairness

I have already mentioned punishment (aka moral sanctions) as a topic within Ethics. Punishment is also a topic within another branch of Philosophy, Political Philosophy, wherein it is also known as Retributive Justice. There is also another kind of justice, called Distributive Justice, which is the subject of Chapter Three, and which is about the distribution of social goods. Justice therefore has these two, rather different, aspects. In his TV programme, Michael Sandel seemed to subsume Ethics under Justice, whereas I came to the two subjects of Justice via Ethics, but it doesn't really matter which way round we think of them; certainly you can't have one without the other.

Whilst being indebted to Sandel for presenting Ethics and Justice as being inextricably linked (or even as being one and the same thing), it is certain that they are different: the currency of Ethics, in modern times anyway, is goodness, whilst the currency of Justice, according to John Rawls[2] at any rate, is fairness. But there is a major difference between goodness and fairness that is explained in the next section. Consequently, if goodness is not the same thing as fairness, it would seem that Ethics cannot be the same thing as Justice. Of course, it would still be possible for one of them to embrace the other – well, you will have to wait until towards the end of the book to see if we can achieve that.

---

[2]Influential author of A Theory of Justice – see Chapter Three.

(1.6) Intrinsic and instrumental value

The reason for including a whole chapter on fairness is that, in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls makes a couple of claims that, if they were true, would entirely undermine the moral theory set out in this book. Consequently that chapter is devoted to showing that Rawls's claims are false. One of Rawls's claims is that the right is prior to the good, meaning that matters of justice are paramount, or at any rate more important than matters of goodness. Whereas, in this moral theory, things are presented the other way round, as we shall see. Rawls's great work is subtitled 'Justice as Fairness' and the Rawlsian analyses on justice appeal over and over again to notions of fairness. Now it might be thought that, complex as these concepts are, moral goodness on the one hand and justice / fairness on the other hand are really one and the same thing and, indeed, for a long time I laboured under the assumption that they were. Moreover, Michael Sandel, the distinguished American moral and political philosopher, often presents a tripartite approach to 'justice', identifying Kant's duty-based morality, Bentham's utilitarian morality and Rawls's liberal egalitarianism as the three best (and competing) attempts at a theory of practical justice. Consequently, Sandel makes it sound like moral goodness and justice / fairness are more or less the same thing. However, I came across a difference between goodness and fairness that seems irreconcilable – i.e. they cannot be the same thing – and I will now explain it.

There is a concept in normative philosophy – that of value. In Greek philosophy, where the focus was on personal virtues, all of those different virtues (such as courage, temperance, wisdom) would be considered to have 'value'. Indeed 'justice' was a fourth key virtue and so is also valuable. As Rawls equates justice with fairness, we may suppose that fairness has value too. Finally, for the purposes of this section, there is common agreement that good is a valuable thing. I suppose I should say that all of these examples of valuable things have socio-moral value: there are other kinds of value such as monetary value and health value say.

Two categories of socio-moral value are generally recognised: things that are of value for their own sake are said to have intrinsic value; things that are of value because of their effects or consequences are said to be of instrumental value. (For the remainder of this paragraph, I will assume that we are talking about the value of 'goodness'.) Things with instrumental goodness-value are much easier to find, for example the popular way of justifying custodial sentences for offenders is to say that imprisonment is a good thing because it prevents offenders from continuing to offend (which is a good thing) and it acts as a deterrent to other would-be offenders (which is another good thing). But finding something that is incontrovertibly of intrinsic goodness-value is much more difficult, although that will be answered by the time we get to the end of the book. You can see that we must find something that has goodness-value for its own sake otherwise there would be an infinite regress here, with things having goodness-value because they led to other things that had goodness-value only because they led to further things …

At this stage, all of this is merely to point out that the socio-moral value called goodness has this property, as follows.

If X causes Y,

and if Y is 'good',

then X is 'good'.

Note that X might cause other things, Z perhaps, which might be bad, so it is better to qualify the conclusion as 'X is good at least to the extent that it causes Y'.

Now that is merely what is implied by saying that X is instrumentally good because it leads to Y, which is itself good. But I ask you to think of it as having a 'Causally Transitive Property' (CTP) i.e. a thing with goodness-value has the property of being able to transfer its goodness-value to that thing's causes. CTP is not part of the definition or meaning of good; it's just a property that it happens to have. All very well, I can hear you saying, you've said the same thing in three different ways. So what? Well, so this: let's look at fairness in the same way.

As you will see when you get through Chapter Three, I laboured long and hard to discover if and how Rawls actually defined 'fairness' in a comprehensive way. In the process, I discovered an intriguing property of fairness. I overlooked it when I first read it but because I would read and re-read the early chapters of A Theory of Justice, I eventually saw the significance of his claim. The claim can be extracted easily enough from the following passage describing Rawls's 'original position'.

The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favour his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain. For given the circumstances of the original position, the symmetry of everyone's relations to each other, this situation is fair between individuals as moral persons, that is, as rational beings with their own ends and capable, I shall assume, of a sense of justice. The original position is, one might say, the appropriate initial status quo, and thus the fundamental agreements reached in it are fair. This explains the propriety of the name justice as fairness: it conveys the idea that the principles of justice are agreed to in an initial situation that is fair.'[3]

Rawls's claim, about fairness, which he just manages to avoid expressing entirely in any one sentence, is as follows.

If a particular agreement (i.e. the two principals of justice) results from a particular negotiating situation (i.e. the original position),

and if the negotiating situation is 'fair',

then the resulting agreement is 'fair'.

In Chapter Three, I will explore this a little further, including questioning whether this seemingly very reasonable claim of Rawls is true. Using some symbolism, as I did for the CTP illustration, we get the following.

If Y is an effect of X (synonymous with 'X causes Y' and with 'Y results from X'),

and if X is 'fair',

then Y is 'fair'.

Now this is the opposite way round from goodness, which has the Causally Transitive Property. Instead, fairness has the opposite property, as follows: a thing with fairness-value has the property of being able to transfer its fairness-value to that thing's effects (or consequences). We can say that it has the Effectually Transitive Property or ETP. Just as with CTP, there must be something that has the fairness-value for its own sake in order to avoid an infinite regress. (Again, please be patient as this will be addressed in Chapter Three.)

It would thus be impossible (if Rawls is right) for goodness and fairness to be the same thing since CTP and ETP are opposing and therefore incompatible properties.

---

[3]A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition, John Rawls, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 11.

(1.7) Moral responsibility, moral agents, moral patients & persons

As well as expanding on the principal aim of Ethics given in Section 1.1, this section also aims to provide the meaning and definition of the term 'person'. If the first aim of Ethics is to identify good and bad human behaviour, having identified bad behaviour, the logical next step is to apply moral sanctions (i.e. punishment) to people who persist in bad behaviour. Now some people are let off moral sanctions because they are not considered to be responsible for their own actions: babies, for example, and other young children below the age of criminal responsibility; but we could also add adults of very low intelligence; and probably elderly people with dementia; special cases are sometimes made for other adults under the influence of drugs, under severe stress or under duress. Excepting those cases, we can say of all other people that they enjoy moral responsibility for their actions and, consequently, they can be legitimately punished for their bad behaviour i.e. without any injustice thereby arising.

A convenient label for such people is moral agent. One meaning of 'moral agent' is then clear enough – they are anything that is liable for moral sanctions for their bad behaviour. But this cannot be an (intensional) denotative meaning of 'moral agent' as it stops short of providing a property or set of properties that would qualify something to be a member of the class of moral agents: you could not use this meaning to identify, in practice, whether something was or was not a moral agent. Well, if it is not a denotative meaning, what kind of meaning is it?

On pages 221 to 226 of An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Grayling introduces the Use theory of meaning. Quoting from Pitcher, Philosophy of Wittgenstein, he writes as follows.

Consider how one might talk of the uses of objects or stuffs, like hammers or olive oil. One can talk about how the hammer is used ('grasp the handle …'), and with what purpose (to drive nails, as a paperweight … to call meetings to order); one can talk about what olive oil is used in (salads, dressings) and for (frying).

Grayling continues by conceding the value of the Use theory of meaning.

Explanations of the uses of such items – the how, the what in, the what for – explains, or goes a long way to explaining, the nature of the item in question.

But Grayling adds a cautionary note: But not all explanations of how, when and what for will be explanations of meaning.  Now that does rather make sense. Consider the use meaning of water: you can drink it; you can cook vegetables and pasta with it; you can wash and bathe in it; you can swim in it; you can create ornamental ponds with it; you can sail boats upon it; you can freeze it to make ice cubes. And so on and so on, but you still wouldn't stipulate its intensional denotative meaning of H2O.

And so it is with moral agent. If the meaning given above of 'moral agent' (anything that is liable for moral sanctions for their bad behaviour) is a use meaning, what would count as a denotative meaning? There are at least two possible approaches. One is to proceed by exception e.g. a 'moral agent' is any human being except babies, young children, adults of very low intelligence, elderly people with dementia or adults under the influence of drugs, severe stress or duress. You can see that this approach is rather forced to restrict the scope of moral agents to human beings and thus is open to problems of whether higher animals, robots, computers and aliens might or might not be moral agents.

An alternative approach, which avoids that problem, would involve a more positive test of agent-hood e.g. anything that has free will and can self-identify – this is due to Locke and is in fact his meaning of 'person'. (And you can probably guess that I take 'person' and 'moral agent' to be synonymous.) This is clearly a denotative meaning and, moreover, allows for the possibility that some robots, extra-terrestrials and non-human animals could be moral agents (or persons). Note also, however, that this approach opens up the problems of personal identity and free will, for which see Section 1.17 of this chapter.

In contrast to moral agent, we have the concept of a 'moral patient', which is anyone, and arguably any thing, that is affected one way or another by the actions of a moral agent: clearly all other human beings are potentially moral patients of each and every moral agent; consequently most people are both moral agents and moral patients during the course of every day. If the above is the denotative meaning of 'moral patient', then the use meaning is more elusive e.g. anything whose well-being needs to be considered in evaluating whether a moral agent's actions or behaviour are good, bad or indifferent. There will be much more to say on this in later chapters, but the focus for now reverts to the meaning of 'person'.

As already noted, for my part, I am content to equate 'person' precisely with 'moral agent' but when the matter cropped up as an essay topic on my Open University course and we students discussed it via email, my take on 'person' incensed a fellow student who, presumably, equated 'person' with 'moral patient' and who, at any rate, claimed to know of someone who believed that even worms were persons. It was at that point that it struck me that the difference between the denotative and use meanings of 'person' was crucial here: that is, you could adopt either denotative meaning of 'person' or indeed any other meaning (for example lift manufacturers employ the word person to mean any human being – or maybe any adult human) and it really would not matter until you had decided what you wanted to do with a person once you had identified one. So, if you want to be able to apply moral sanctions to persons, you had better pick 'moral agent' as the denotative meaning; whereas if you wanted to take their well-being into account when you were considering the effects of a proposed action, you had better pick 'moral patient' as its denotative meaning; or if you just want to count how many people can fit into a particular lift, you had better pick 'any human being' as the denotative meaning. So the denotative meaning of 'person' can be settled only once the use meaning of 'person' has been decided.

So much for the meaning of person. It is not really the main issue here but we will be concerned with the meanings of 'good' and 'fair' and there are, at least, lessons to be learned. It is not so much that we must decide, in particular, the use meanings of those two concepts before we can settle what the denotative meanings are but rather that we may need to examine more than one different type of meaning of those concepts before we say all that we need to say about them.

For the record, the different types of meaning (of X) identified by Grayling are as follows.

•          Denotative meaning – the property or properties that qualify a thing to be an X.

Use meaning – how, when or what things can be done with or to an X.

Behavioural meaning – what reaction or behaviour a speaker (or writer) expects from listeners (or readers) when they use the word X; we will see this in the case of 'good'.

Reference / causal meaning – appears to be restricted to proper names or at least to names of material objects rather than abstract concepts.

Ideational meaning – the mental idea (due to Locke) associated with X; Grayling notes that this makes meaning rather subjective.

Verification meaning – appears to apply to sentences or propositions rather than individual words and equates meaning (of a proposition) with the method of verifying whether it is true or false.

(1.8) Kantian Ethics

Immanual Kant's influence on Ethics is more theoretical than practical. Some elements of his moral theory seem to be irrefutable (theoretically) but when you try to explore their practical implications, all sorts of difficulties arise. Moreover, Kant's written contributions to Ethics are dense and hard to understand. Nevertheless, I have great respect for the elements of his moral theory and you will find that some of them are incorporated into the moral theory in this book.

Like Utilitarianism, Kant's Ethics are concerned with societal rather than individual considerations; however, unlike Utilitarianism, which we have described as a consequentialist moral theory, Kantian Ethics is usually described as a motivist moral theory, by which it is meant that Kantian Ethics evaluates behaviour as right or wrong not according to the consequences of actions but according to the kind of action in question. (I always felt that 'motivist' did not really capture that meaning but the term is commonly so used.) We might characterise Kantian Ethics by the following set of  questions and answers.

Q How should human beings behave? A They should do what is 'in accordance with duty'.

Q What sort of actions are in accordance with duty? A Actions are in accordance with duty if (a) they are universalisable and/or (b) if they treat people always as ends and not only as a means to an end.

Q What is a 'universalisable' sort of action? A One that you can accept being a universal rule i.e. for everyone to behave so.

Q What does treating people as ends not only as a means to an end mean? A Here are some instances of treating people as a means to an end: slavery; worker exploitation of any sort; unduly harsh punishment of offenders in order to set an example so as to dissuade others from offending in the same way.

A term invariably associated with Kantian moral behaviour is categorical imperative: 'categorical' means 'unconditional', in particular, that the moral behaviour is unconditional regardless of both its circumstances and its consequences; whereas 'imperative' means obligatory, that you must do it or, as Kant has it, it is your duty to behave so.

We may illustrate the difference between a consequentialist and a motivist moral theory by the following puzzle-case. You know that your friend, A, has gone for a drink in the Red Lion; another person, B, approaches you and demands of you in an enraged voice, whilst waving a pistol about, Where's A? I'm gonna kill 'em. Under a consequentialist moral theory, like Utilitarianism, you weigh up the consequences of telling B the truth (B probably kills A) and telling B an untruth (murder probably averted) and conclude that a white lie is best, saying I think they've gone to the match. Under a motivist moral theory, like Kantian Ethics, you generalise the matter into lying and truth-telling, work out that if everyone routinely told lies, society as we know it would collapse, and so conclude that it is better to always tell the truth regardless of the circumstances and the consequences – so you say A is in the Red Lion.

I can now describe a severe difficulty with Kantian Ethics and then finish with one very powerful attraction. The difficulty is illustrated by the puzzle case. For a start, do we really want a moral theory that makes it our duty to tell would-be killers where their intended victim is hiding? Note however that this difficulty is not as severe as you might think: it relies upon an appeal to our intuitions and not only are our intuitions notoriously unreliable in non-moral situations, moral theories based upon intuitions are as variable as the social and cultural backgrounds of the people we might consult, for their intuitions, upon any particular moral matter. However, there's another difficulty. Kant expects us to acknowledge that if we universalise telling lies, then society would collapse (e.g. because no-one could trust anyone else) and therefore to conclude that telling lies is (always) wrong and telling the truth is (always) right. Similarly for stealing – if everyone routinely stole, the notion of property ownership would collapse and so would the entire retail sector of the economy. Similarly for injuring or killing fellow members of society if they offended us or just on a whim – if everyone did that, then society would quickly die out. Well, so what's the problem with that then?

Well this is the problem. In order to come to the opinion that stealing, say, is wrong, I have to know two things: (a) what its consequences would be if everyone did it; and (b) whether those consequences would be, in some sense, good or bad. But hold on! This is supposed to be a motivist not a consequentialist moral theory and yet surely here we are determining moral behaviour by its consequences. Moreover, I also have to know whether those consequences are good or bad. But isn't that what a moral theory is supposed to tell me? It seems that I have to be able to evaluate consequences as morally good or bad in order to work out whether the behaviour that caused them was right or wrong. So the whole of this universalisability test seems to be circular.

However, all is not lost; the Kantian notion of treating people as ends and not just as a means to an end seems quite powerful if only because of the counter-examples that I gave. Once again, this comment is not necessarily true as it relies upon intuitions. Let me suppose for the time being, at any rate, that the notion is true. Where does it take us? Well, it's much easier to give examples of people being treated as means to an end than it is to give examples of treating people as ends. After all, in my own case, my working life was spent working for somebody else and, whilst they paid me to do that, they treated me as a means to an end pretty well most of the time. Perhaps the payment of wages per se is the only evidence we need that I was also being treated as an end, in that case. This make us think of contracts – contracts of employment in that case, but social contracts in the more general case. However, a common approach nowadays is to introduce the notion of autonomy – the idea that autonomous agents, in some sense and to a greater or lesser extent, determine for themselves how they live.

There is some overlap here with Liberal-Egalitarianism and when, in due course, I unfold my own moral theory, I will show how contracts, autonomy and aspects of Liberal-Egalitarianism, as well as Utilitarianism, are incorporated into it. In fact, so far as the particular notion of treating people as an end is concerned, I will show how this equates to one of the central planks of my moral theory. For these reasons, I feel justified in describing my moral theory as a substantially unifying theory, bringing together the apparently conflicting ethical theories that have been prevalent in the twentieth century.

(1.9) Liberal Egalitarianism

Liberalism & Egalitarianism (LE) tend to be linked together for the following reasons.

Liberalism is expressed in terms of rights (or freedoms) for human beings to do this and that but it is no use talking about human rights unless you make it clear just who it is that enjoys them. (The need to do this is not confined to Liberalism – in Utilitarianism, for example, merely expressing a moral objective in terms of maximising aggregate utility implies straight away that everybody's utility is to be counted.) If you answer then that everybody is to enjoy the specified rights, then you have advocated equality (and hence LE). Otherwise, if you answer that only some people and not others are to enjoy the specified rights, you then have to justify the discrimination e.g. in terms of slavery, a class system, apartheid or whatever, and this may be difficult to do with any logical rigour.

(1)   Egalitarianism, on the other hand, is one solution to the problem of distributive justice and it has to be expressed in terms of just what is to be so equally distributed. In Theory of Justice, apart from wealth & income, all the things to be distributed are rights of one sort or another. Hence, a large part of egalitarianism is to do with rights and so we come back again to the notion of LE.

The most influential proponent of LE is almost certainly John Rawls, whose 'Theory of Justice' (ToJ) is subtitled 'Justice as Fairness' but is in fact an exposition of LE. Because of what Rawls says, particularly about 'the right' having moral priority over 'the good', I spent a considerable time reading ToJ so as to understand where Rawls was coming from. Although Rawls is frequently commended for analysing his subject in great detail, the critical foundation parts of his theory are found wanting in this respect. Chapter Three is devoted to showing that the entire foundations of ToJ are false or, at best, simply unproven. In particular, I devote considerable effort to showing: that Rawls's arguments in support of egalitarianism are invalid; and that Rawls's claim that the right has moral priority over the good is false because its 'proof' requires a notion of the 'good' (a similar logical error to the one discussed in the previous section on Kant's universalism).

(1.10) Logic part 1: truth & falsehood

All Philosophy primer books and foundation courses tell you that you can't really get very far in philosophy without having to employ a valid logical argument to prove whatever your philosophical theory happens to be. To that end they include a chapter or a course topic on Logic. It is a matter