What sort of ethics do you subscribe to?

[ciphergoth]

Does the right thing to do depend only on the consequences, or are some acts inherently right or wrong no matter what likely consequences follow?

From Wikipedia:

Deontological ethics or deontology (Greek: δέον (deon) meaning 'obligation' or 'duty') is an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions.

Consequentialism refers to those moral theories which hold that the consequences of a particular action form the basis for any valid moral judgment about that action.

Virtue theory is a branch of moral philosophy that emphasizes character, rather than rules or consequences, as the key element of ethical thinking.

Which of these best describes your position?

[Poll #1225625]

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I think mine are generally a combination of deontological and consequential; a lot of the time, I hold with the practical approach of "it's more important to be effective than to be right", but there are times when being 'right' matters, I think, in spite of the consequences. I think therefore that ethics are not absolute and must be situationally dependent.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I've never liked the binary nature of Aristotelean philosophy!

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

Well, that saves me commenting. This is absolutely true for me also

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Consequentialist in the sense that I work in the principle of least harm - I don't necessarily think that the ends justify the means.

Touch of Kantian imperative thrown in too - something may not have particularl consequences if only I do it, but if everyone does it, it would be chaos and the rules would break down. e.g. if I were driving a car and ran a red light because I could see there was no danger, that might be OK, but if everyone went around running red lights all the time, there'd be loads of accidents.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

if everyone went around running red lights all the time, there'd be loads of accidents. Here you're making a consequentialist argument for a deontological (Kantian) position. To me, this suggests your terminal values are consequentialist, but from this you derive instrumental values that value certain Kantian imperatives. I roughly agree with this; for example, I'd like to discourage lying to friends to the extent that people don't do so even when it seems the consequences would be better if they did, because although this means that a few decisions will go "the wrong way", overall it leads to a better world.

[andrewducker]

Yup - I tend to justify my deontological positions from their consequences, but having justified them I think of them as deontological.

[werenerd.livejournal.com]

>>overall it leads to a better world

Then even your Kantian imperatives are based on consequnces, thus I'd say you're a consequentialist through and through.

For example, if you knew there could be only positive consequences and no negative consequences in lying to a friend -- say they were about to die, and you could tell them something they wanted to hear which wasn't true -- then you'd do it, right?

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

For example, if you knew there could be only positive consequences and no negative consequences in lying to a friend -- say they were about to die, and you could tell them something they wanted to hear which wasn't true -- then you'd do it, right?

I think I'd be tempted to do that anyway, because I love my friends. Not sure what that falls under.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm definitely a thoroughgoing consequentialist in my terminal values. However, my goal is not just to maximize happiness - if it were I'd aim for the world of Brave New World. So if the dying friend were someone who I knew would prefer the truth to a comfortable falsehood, I might well decide not to lie because I'd consider that their not getting what they want an *inherently* bad consequence that outweighed the difference in happiness.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

It does rather hinge on how you define harm. If you consider 'knowing the truth' to be less harmful because truth is good, then you would always tell the truth even if it caused temporary unhappiness.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

But you'd have to then think that telling the truth always had good consequences!

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

But how are you defining "good" here?

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

Breathtaking. How could you possibly know what they would prefer in extremis, snd how could you measure "good2 or "bad" consequences in that situation?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

if everyone went around running red lights all the time, there'd be loads of accidents.

Only for a brief time. There's some evidence that before long, you'd end up with fewer accidents than when people obeyed the lights. It appears that at junctions with no reliable system of traffic lights, drivers are more cautious, and this dramatically reduces the number of accidents. Some countries are experimenting with removing all road markings and lights in certain areas.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Mine are dentologically driven, but I believe that following the rules correctly will ultimately lead to the best consequence.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

Who makes the rules?

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Well, I think God, obviously, although I imagine that "love your neighbour as yourself" is a rule that atheists can get behind as well. (And actually, I think that the other rule I follow, "love God", is in many ways embodied extremely well by loving your neighbour.)

[battlekitty.livejournal.com]

Somewhere between Deontological and Consequentialist:

The end does not justify the means, but the means don't necessarily justify the end, either. (To put it simplistically...) Or in other words, both the action and the aim should be considered in terms of ethics.

(ION, my friends list is being very philosophical today... *checks the drinking water*)

[robcee.livejournal.com]

like most people, I am somewhere between deontological and consequentialist... with a probably bias towards deontological

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

My view of morality has a decidedly functional focus and, viewed through that lens, consequentialism gives the least-distorted image of an action's 'rightness'.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Predominantly deontological, but with elements of the other two. It's a matter of getting the right tool for the right situation.

[hughe.livejournal.com]

Deontological ... is an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those

what makes the action itself wrong or right? are we talking if it breaks a rule/law or not? surely the (possibly precedential) concequencial outcomes of actions define if the action itself is right or wrong? or are we getting into the realms of ethical theism?

[simont]

I'm really not sure which of those best describes me.

In principle, I feel that the moral value of an action should be independent of its actual consequences, but have everything to do with its reasonably foreseeable probable consequences. So, in particular, two drunk drivers running exactly the same level of risk are morally in the wrong to exactly the same degree, even if one happens to get lucky and not have an accident while the other one kills an innocent person.

In practice, of course, we punish based on actual consequences; and I think we are right to do so, in spite of the principle I state above. The reason being, only an omniscient observer could know enough about the driver's state of mind and speed of reactions to judge the actual level of risk they were running; we poor mortals, in possession of much more limited information, can only infer via Bayes' Theorem what sort of level of risk they were likely to have been running – and naturally, one of the most significant factors we can feed into Bayes when making that judgment is the knowledge of what the outcome actually was. And if a more dangerous driver is more likely to have an accident, then clearly the fact that someone did have an accident makes it more likely they were driving particularly dangerously. It's not morally perfect, but it's the best we can do with our limited information.

So, does that make me a consequentialist? I honestly don't know.

There's also a whole bunch of special cases about whose fault the consequence really was in cases where there are multiple actors. If someone holds a child at gunpoint and makes some demand of me, and I decline to do whatever it was he was asking, and he shoots the child, then clearly the shooting of the child was a reasonably foreseeable bad consequence of my choice, and yet I would say that morally the killing falls on his shoulders and not mine. Does that disqualify me from consequentialism? Again, I don't know.

Here's another thing that convinces me I'm not a pure consequentialist. Consider the old chestnut where I come across a railway track with two people tied to it, and I've only got time to save one before the train arrives. Of course there's no really good way to choose which person to save; but some cases seem more morally questionable to me than others. For instance, if one person is a stranger and the other is my (hypothetical) wife, it seems to me that I couldn't be blamed for choosing to save my wife because I love her. But if one is a stranger and the other cheated me at cards last week, then I would feel distinctly iffy about the idea of choosing to save the stranger because I disliked the other guy – whereas if in exactly the same situation I saved the same stranger because he was closer, that would seem OK to me. So the motivation behind the decision definitely matters to me in addition to the consequences.

So I think that for all these reasons I probably fall a little way outside pure consequentialism. However, I really have no idea at all which of the other two I should be mixing in with it.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

My relativistic beliefs and attitudes to causality and determinism mean that none of those make sense.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

I actually think categorising ethical systems is of limited use in actually making the myriad decisions we all have to make every day in dealing with so-called life. Any "system" other than just always choosing wnat is best for you works for me - fsvo works.

I also think the dichotomies between these systems break down very easily. Take for example the "is it OK to send yopur children to public school2 issue we were discussing recently. My objections to this are political, thus I suppose deontological. You, IIRC, were defending this using consequentialism, but I dont agree that there are no harmful consequences resulting from sending your children to public school (for example, it helps perpetuate the public school system).

The biggest difficulty I have with consequentialism is that it is actually impossible to predict the consequences of most actions with any precision.. The biggest difficulty I have with deontologicalism is that it is absolutist - e.g. adultery is wrong because god says, homosexuality is wrong because it is the product of decadent Western capitalism.

I realise that this entire comment, and indeed your poll, grossly simplify complex philosophical questions.

Tell you what though, I cant see any virtue in "virtue ethics" ! Is that Nietzsche??

[keirf.livejournal.com]

It does seem odd that "virtuous character" is presented as something that can exist without intention or consequence.

[simont]

Last time I had a discussion about virtue ethics, I said much the same thing: specifically, I think, I said that virtue ethics would consider helping someone in need to be good because it was an act of charity and consider the fact that a real person ended up better off to be basically irrelevant to the character of the act. The local virtue ethicist said that was a slur: the fact that a real person ended up better off was entirely relevant to the character of the act, since it was that which made it an act of charity.

At that point I ceased to have a clear idea of what was virtue ethics and what was not.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

Another problem I have with consequentialism is what basis one uses for deciding whether an outcome is "good" or otherwise.

[hamsterine.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Also, even if we do agree on the standards, it can be harder to agree what "value" of good or bad we should place on the many different consequences that will stem from any one action.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

Checked it on Wiki now - hmmmmm - nah, it is what we philosophers call "bollocks" :)

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Virtue ethics was Aristotle's theory.

[I accidentally left this comment anonymously the first time. Sorry!]

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

Sorry about bitty nature of my comments - am tired! Got confused in my first comment. Was going to say re the school example that part of my position I suppose is deontological, as I consider that action wrong for left wing political reasons, but a large part of my position relates to the consequences (as I perceive them from my left wing position) of the public school system. An example of how the dichotomy breaks down very easily.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

IAWTC for the most part; I was thinking that the whole business of creating taxonomies of ethics is problematic in itself, but didn't want to derail the straightforward question asked!

I see what you mean about 'virtue ethics', but I think it rather depends on who's defining them; I'm not sure they have to be unpleasant or oppressive. I'm not sure I understand it correctly, but since the Wikipedia article says;

A system of virtue theory is only intelligible if it is teleological: that is, if it includes an account of the purpose (telos) of human life, or in popular language, the meaning of life. Obviously, strong claims about the purpose of human life, or of what the good life for human beings is, will be highly controversial.

that might seem to me to put Nietzsche somewhat out of the picture. And if we think that an action helps with the overall goal of human purpose (whatever that is), and is taken in accordance with the virtue of reason, then within the system of virtue ethics, it would be good? It does seem to me to be somewhat related to deontological ethics, if one sees virtues as analogous to rules, because both need to be defined and known in advance. But would an action which seems consequentialist be 'virtuous' if it sprang from character rather than end? I'm not sure how we'd define this; would Sidney Carton's "far, far better thing" be an expression of it, for example?

I don't quite know. It's a bit too vague and amorphous to get a handle on it, and that's why I don't like it so much myself, but I don't think it must perforce be negative.

[ladycat.livejournal.com]

I think some of the problem with ethical theory is that it often rests on ideas of right and wrong. Sometimes whatever you do or do not do will cause harm as a conseqence, and an action that may lead to good things must cause harm first.

Hence I prefer the idea that when considering ethics at an individual level we must think of the whole person, their experiences, abilities and desires, and the whole situation. Only then can we make an assessment about ethics.

Of course this sometimes hasn't stopped me saying "what a fuck weasel" about someone I don't know who has hurt a friend!

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Oooh, this is really interesting, but I have little time at work.

I haven't thought about it for ages.

Consequentialist I think. I like virtue theory, but only because developing a good character makes one more likely to do things that have good consequences. I think doing good things is often to do with getting into the habit of behaving a certain way - it's not about deciding whether every single action will have good consequences.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I tickied "virtue ethics" because, er, I think moral judgements are matters for the thought police IYSWIM.

For more practical methods I think I'm more a Consequentialist. But I'm not sure.

Big unfamiliar words, so I might be wrong... some quiz that says "what do you think of X situation" and told me what Moral System I was using might be in order... (yes yes, memesheep and all that).

[simont]

The trouble with that is that each of the frameworks shown here permits you to choose the actual details in a huge variety of ways. (With deontology, what rules do you follow? With consequentialism, what consequences do you consider good and bad? And with virtue ethics, what virtues do you consider important?) So the distinction this poll is asking you to draw has very little to do with what decision you'd make in a given case, and much more to do with why you'd make that decision.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Troo. But suggesting some more concrete examples might make it easier to decide how I think.

Thinking about thinking does my head in TBH (it's what the people I work for do for a living, I don't know how they don't go mad!)

[rasilon-x.livejournal.com]

Probably consequentialist.

However, most actual consequential argument seems to ignore any and all unintended consequences (e.g. destroying the village to save it), and consider the independent consequences of the action to be deontological territory.

[gothbabe.livejournal.com]

The first two, for me, go together a lot so can't separate them. For example, killing an innocent person for no reason is heinous and the consequence is even worse.

[hamsterine.livejournal.com]

For me, it wouldn't make sense to say that something was wrong even if there were no negative consequences. However, it is a practical impossibility to be aware of every consequence that will stem from an action in the short and long term (How long a term should we consider, after all? And how could we possibly know what the course of historty would have been if a certain thing had not happened?) Therefore, it is often useful to generalise that something is inherantly wrong because it has the tendancy to create highly negative consequences.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

Virtue theory is the crap that Republicans believe--that it doesn't matter what GWB actually does, so long as he has "character" (i.e. believes in Jesus and means well).

Deontological ethics are full of holes, because I can't think of any action which has an inherent moral value. The morality of all actions is situationally dependent.

So I guess that makes me a strict consequentialist.

[stgpcm.livejournal.com]

Consequentially derived deontological rules for me.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I think that makes you a consequentialist - see this discussion of terminal vs instrumental values