On the Proper Domain of Ethical Philosophy

(I drafted this initially on Facebook in response to a post by Laura's boyfriend David.)

I am at once deeply fascinated in and deeply aggravated by ethical philosophy. I spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on it as an undergraduate and would say that it comprises a great deal of the intellectual matter of my novel.

I simply think there's something to be said for the maddeningly simple process surrounding all ethical theories (or moral imperatives, or tablets of stone) which purport to give us some rubric by which to appraise the actions of man in the real world. The process is that these very "rubrics of ought" being proposed are then themselves culled for quality by a separate rubric, a "higher" rubric, which is more fundamental and more intuitive. Thus we find, for instance, that Peter Singer's brand of utilitarianism, though founded on agreeable premises, is impugned for those of its implications which appall the mainstream sensibility (from environmentalism to animal rights to infanticide).

This second rubric, of course, is the public consensus of which moral truths should be taken as vital, or self-evident, or incontrovertible. But what is informing this rubric? And why should we trust it? There is no compelling reason to consider it an objective standard, after all, but just the opposite, as one society's "second rubric" — its ethical givens — are often in conflict with another's. The Middle East comes to mind here, as do the Middle Ages in Europe. Woman's rights come to mind. Slavery, the "sanctity of Muhammad", freedom of expression, imperialism, and so on. Such sensibilities, in other words, are subjective — informed by the promptings and the revulsions of our physiologies; the traumas and the nostalgias of our diverse histories; the assumptions, superstitious and empirical, about the laws and forces governing our physical universe; and the challenges of inhabiting an ever-changing often-perilous planet. The rubric is informed also by the occasional groundswells of religious or political ideology, abstractions by comparison which tend to thrive in direct proportion to how well they address the previous, more fundamental concerns.

This is what irks me about ethical philosophy, which, in my view, belongs to this last category of what I called "abstractions". It often asserts itself as an objective standard, or as something "above" or "beyond" subjectivity, and yet morality begins and ends with the human, the subject, to whom the theory or the God must always answer at the end of the day. Human sensibility is not, therefore, a barometer by which to gauge the merit of moralists' rubrics, but the rubric itself — accountable to nothing higher than the incompatible mores of another, more powerful society. To put perhaps too fine a point on it, the final say in any dispute of fundamental values must be wrested by battle or ballot — by war, in other words, peaceful or calamitous — and not by any merit inherent in the values themselves, since the merit is determined by an individual, or a tribe, or a culture, or a nation subjectively (that is, experientially, biologically, philosophically).

Simply put: Don't remove the moral from the man, lest the man should remove himself from the moral.