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Book Reviews
Elements of Moral
Philosophy
by James Rachels
Why are moral intuitions treated as if they were sacred, inspirational, and transcendent? Why can't we treat good moral arguments the same way? It is as if we are in awe of the beginning pianist rather than the virtuoso or the composer, as if we admire the briliance of dog that licks his wounds more than the creator of a new vaccine. People would rather read 500 pages of the most banal "role model" biography than one paragraph of moral arguments.
James Rachels argues that it is the duty of all moral beings to have good moral arguments for moral actions. Sacred texts are morally useless: They are unclear. They are internally contradictory. They are contradictory with other sacred texts. They are little or no help on specific issues in specific situations. In particular, they say nothing about issues unique to modern societies. They are full of fallacious appeals to tradition, popularity, and momentum, full of other fallacies, not to mention full of flat out evil prescriptions and evils committed by characters who have been accorded hero status.
He argues that people often believe what they want to believe or whatever a religious leader tells them to believe, then they go hunting for support in some scripture, which they invariably find in some explicit rule or ambiguous claim.
Rachels says it was wrong when Mario Cuomo announced an ethics panel. Cuomo appointed representatives of organized religion despite the high probability that they may have been largely clueless on the subject of ethics. (What do you expect from a politician whose hero is Don Quixote?) In general Rachels argues that we often believe the conclusion we want to believe, then look for or concoct premises to support it, ignoring counter-premises.
Most people have a tendency to assume that the beliefs of their own cultures are automatically better, more real, “natural,” fulfilling, and important.
Elements is not without flaws. It starts slowly. Subjectivism and cultural relativism are handled better in other texts. Rachels claims that female infanticide in Eskimo cultures was okay because many men died while hunting and a lack of infanticide would have resulted in 50 percent more females than males. Big deal. Let women hunt or find a way to live with more females.
On infanticide and cultures not eating cows he writes, “The difference is in our belief systems not in our values.” Huh? Believing a cow contains your grandmother’s soul while your neighbors are starving is a moral issue.
Rachels defines subjectivism as the belief that all moral judgments are always nothing more than feelings. He says subjectivism is mistaken because first, it pretends there is no such thing as disagreement. If someone says using thalidomide is good and I say using thalidomide is bad, according to subjectivism, we are not disagreeing. We are merely stating feelings. Second, we are often wrong in our judgments about our feelings. Third, it is clearly self-contradictory.
The chapters on consequentialism (results) and deontology (rules) are outstanding. Deontological claims are rules that in some situations should receive extra weight even when it leads to worse overall consequences. Ethical thinking is primarily a matter of weighing consequences and deontological rules.
One should choose actions that produce the best available consequnces, except when the alternative with the best available consequences is outweighed by another alternative that has extremely important rules or a combination of rules and consequences that outweigh the best available consequences. For example, if a bus load of football fans got ten units of benefit from throwing an egg at a pedestrian and the pedestrian got six units of harm, the action would still be wrong because deontological claims would add more than enough weight to the pedestrian’s side. The fans violated the rule against humiliating others; they violated the rule against sadism as well as numerous other rules. To give another example, Rachels argues that being a peeping Tom is wrong even if no one could find out, and it led to better overall consequences.
Nevertheless, consequences are extremely important, probably constituting most of ethics most of the time. In fact, in most moral decisions the weight of both extremely important rules and consequences point in a similar direction.
It is sometimes claimed, for example, that it would be wrong to quarantine some individuals and allow them to get a disease to prevent a larger number of individuals from getting the disease, all other things being equal, lacking other alternatives. The reasons given are that the quarantined individuals have rights to benefit, dignity, autonomy and so on. They should not be treated as merely a means. This argument is mistaken. Those who are not quarantined also have the same rights to benefit, dignity, autonomy and so on. They also have the right to not be treated as merely a means by those who would inflict their arbitrary rule of quarantine wrongness. All other things being equal, protecting the greater number of individuals would create the most benefit, deliver the least harm and protect the most rights with the most weight. It is not uncommon for people to pretend only the individuals in one group have rights. There is more to ethics than the rights to being left alone and the rights to make others do things.
If all other things are not equal, the problem changes. Rules carry extra weight in many situations. Important situations are when merit is at stake or when a right is being violated for no good reasons such as when people are being harmed to serve a wrongly motivated pleasure or some lesser right. The quarantine would be wrong if the quarantined group were full of wonderful folks and the non-quarantined group were full of Communist ideologues who created the disease.
To give another example: Infecting an individual with a mildly harmful disease so that a group of doctors could get sadistic pleasure would be wrong, no matter how great the pleasure the doctors enjoyed.
These examples are useful for distinguishing too deontological from too consequentialist. Those who would say "Too hell with saving the greater number, all other things being equal, no quarantine," are too deontological. Their intuitions and glib arguments are mistaken.
Those who would say, "Go for it, sadistic doctors," are too
consequentialist. They do not treat individuals with the dignity and respect they deserve. The rules of merit, motives, rights and duties matter.
Paying attention to consequences is especially important in cases of acquiescing to evil. Those who acquiesce to evil get constantly proved wrong. The easy rationalization that it is only one more little give in and that eventually the evildoers will be satisfied or see the light repeatedly leads to horrible long-term results.
Robert E. Goodin has elsewhere made the excellent point that consequentialism is of limited value in minor everyday personal conduct. Almost no one wants friends and intimates who calculate every action to create some result. Consequentialist calculations are better suited to public policies. Oddly, we allow famous and powerful people to create vile macro-policies using their intuitive, ill-informed preferences, yet spend much of our personal lives fretting about the consequences of gestures.
Rachels also argues that impartiality requires that we treat people the same unless there is a good argument for treating them differently. He covers contract ethics as well. This is the best introductory ethics text I have seen. Highly recommended.
Book review article by J.T. Fournier.
(I reviewed the 1986 edition. Apparently, the latest edition has virtue ethics and some feminist ethics.)