Within Reason

In the previous post here I complained that I didn’t want to refer to ethical theories and theories of the good life using the blanket term “ethics”. One way to resist this is to insist that any worthwhile ethical theory should show how the good life and fulfilling our duties will or tend to converge. I’m skeptical that any theory is out there.

Fulfilling your obligations may not always make your life go better. Here’s a good example: you have a co-worker who is a real jerk, but conducts herself ethically and is up for a promotion to be your boss where she will make your department’s life terrible. In the hiring process, it’s revealed to you that she’s going to get the job unless you can name something unethical she’s done in the past. What you say would never be revealed to her and she would never know you’re the source. There is no other way to keep her from getting the job.

I think this is a pretty clear case where one’s obligations and one’s pursuit of the good life diverge. Not that it’s hard to find these. If you’re skeptical of the eventual convergence like I am, you have to deal with responses to these examples. You can say, for instance, that while lying in this instance doesn’t make your life go better in the short-term, it may in the long term. (Say, because you will think of yourself as a more ethical person and that’s psychologically beneficial.) Here is another response: even if it doesn’t make your life better, it may still make everyone’s (or a lot of people’s) lives better in the long run. These responses aim to save the inherent connection between ethical duties and the good life. The first appeals to ethical egoism or one’s enlightened self-interest. The second appeals to utilitarian thinking about value. So both appeal to roughly consequentialist grounds.

I’ll guess I need to discuss this further in one of the next installments, but it seems like either I’ll have to give up the idea that ethics and the good life are separable, or say that egoism and utilitarianism are actually theories of the good life in disguise.

Cross-posted over at In Socrates’ Wake:

I just came across this website (via Everyday Philosophy at the Purple Bike Café) that is gradually releasing videos from what appears to be a comprehensive introductory ethics course by Michael Sandel at Harvard. I’ve read Sandel, but I had no idea he was such a gifted lecturer.

The aesthetic is a little weird — the production qualities suggest daytime talk show meets Sunday preaching meets professional comedy. But the intellectual content is excellent and it’s great to see a high profile philosophy professor grappling with highly motivated undergrads and using the discussion to help teach a course — and a very large course at that. Lots of great ideas for how to teach certain issues. It’s also a little eerie to get a peek inside someone else’s intro classroom and see how he interacts with his students. I highly recommend it.

(Also, how cool is WGBH public television to make this kind of thing possible?)

When President Obama took office in January, many Americans (including, of course, myself) breathed a sigh of relief. One of the big thoughts behind this sigh was that we had someone in charge of the executive branch who understood that government could be part of the solution to some of our domestic problems, particularly the tragedy of the American healthcare system. As the administration’s work on healthcare came to center stage in recent months, the debate has largely centered on whether or not the solution should include a “public” health insurance option or “public plan” and if so, how strong that option should be. The function of the public plan would be to provide an affordable, comprehensive alternative to private health insurance plans if those plans became too costly, too limited, or inaccessible due to job loss or other factors.

All of these issues are incredibly important and following the details of what might emerge is even pretty exciting for those of us in the nerdy minor leagues of health policy. Will there be a strong public plan, a weak one, a national healthcare co-op, an insurance exchange of private plans, or some mixture of all of the above? But lately I’ve become concerned that the debate as a whole shows that something far greater is at stake: whether we as a country still have the ability to do big things together.

Continue Reading »

via The New Republic

This piece by Sam Schulman at the Weekly Standard appears to be the newest case against gay marriage that doesn’t have anything to do with either Biblical or secular accusations about the immorality of homosexuality. It’s a variation on the “damaging the institution of marriage” argument in which—get this—homosexual marriage is so inherently romantic that it will irrevocably damage the kinship system by diminishing the proper role of heterosexual marriage as its centerpiece.

The kinship system has never, apparently, adapted to new kinds of relationships before and is hanging by a thread. It is also the only thing standing between children and prostitution.

To say that this argument trades on Byzantine views of female (and male) sexuality and marriage would be being rather unkind to Byzantium. Schulman has Jurassic views of female sexuality and marriage.

Some of the highlights after the jump: Continue Reading »

So if you haven’t been tuned in to the biotechnology buzz in the last few years, you might not know that scientists think they may be able to grow meat without growing animals in the near future. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a reward for it. And it looks win-win, all the taste and texture of real meat (and maybe fewer health problems) without any of the animal suffering. Chris MacDonald, over at the Bioetech Ethics Blog asked if anyone had any good ethical concerns about it. Just about three days ago, I thought the biggest problem with synthetic meat was that it might be disgusting. But I may have changed my mind.

It occurred to me that if someone could synthetically produce animal meat, there really isn’t a whole lot preventing anyone from synthetically producing human muscle tissue and human meat. And, of course, there would be no human suffering involved in harvesting this meat. (For the moment, ignore any problems with the ethics of the research you’d need to do to get this far.) Would there be anything wrong with eating synthetically produced human meat? Continue Reading »