Moral
Properties
A moral property is a property that entails being
good or bad to some degree, where ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ are themselves primitives that express simple properties. (G.E. Moore’s
open question argument might be used as a defeasible test of whether or not a
term is primitive, especially when the thing the term expresses is something we
can know by direct awareness.)
Here is a question: are moral properties a species
of aesthetic properties? I leave that open.
What
Sorts of Things are Good?
Moral properties can evidently be exemplified by at
least these kinds of things: mental substances,
situations (or arrangements), and actions. Substances exemplify virtues, like
compassionate, kind, gentle, lover of the truth, and so on. Substances also
exemplify vices, like cruel, arrogant, impatient, and so on. Virtue ethics is devoted to the study
of moral properties of substances. Moral substances also exemplify axiological
properties to various degrees—or properties of intrinsic worth, from which
their rights are derived.
Situations may exemplify goodness or badness to
various degrees. For example, a situation consisting of a bunch of rabbits
suffering to a certain degree is bad to a certain degree. But
rabbits feeling pleasure is good to a certain degree. Here are two
axioms worthy of consideration:
1. If
situation A is bad to degree D, and situation B is bad to degree D*, then
situation A + B is bad to degree D + D*.
2. If
situation A is good to degree D, and situation B is good to degree D*, then
situation A + B is good to degree D + D*.
Other axioms and theorems still need exploring.
Next, we have actions. Actions can be good to
various degrees. But actions can also be morally
obligatory, morally permissible,
and morally impermissible. I used to
think that the morally obligatory action was simply the one aimed at bringing about a situation
having the greatest good. But after taking a few ethics classes in graduate
school, I’ve come to think that the various forms of consequentialism
are ultimately too simple. First, there may not even be a maximally good situation that one could aim for,
Second, in some cases, it seems wrong
to aim for an over-all better situation if the only means to bringing about
that situation entails aiming for a bad situation. For example, if 5 people are
about to be run over by a train and my only way to stop it is to kill a
bystander and throw him on the tracks to derail the train, it seems to me to be
wrong for me to aim to kill the bystander even to save the 5 lives. This
situation can be contrasted with one in which all I have to do is flip a switch
and the train goes to a different track where only one person would die. In
that situation, it seems to me that I should flip the switch on the grounds
that a situation in which 5 lives are lost is worse than one in which 1 life is
lost. The difference, I think, is that I don’t need to aim to kill anyone to
flip the switch.
Moral laws are true propositions about what sorts of
actions are right, permissible, or impermissible. Deontology is devoted to the study of moral laws. Civil laws are
expressions of the desires of a society that include an implicit proposition
about what consequences would happen were one caught not honoring those
desires. A good society is one that
has civil laws that are consistent with moral laws and that promote actions
that are right and good (this, of course, comes in degrees).
Moral
Skepticism?
Some philosophers (like Joshua Greene) have argued
that that our moral intuitions are ultimately contradictory and so don’t track
moral truths about which actions are intrinsically right or wrong. Rather, they
merely reflect our gut feelings conditioned by evolution and society. But I’m
not ready to give up the project of seeing if we can make sense of our moral
intuitions. There are unsolved paradoxes in math, science, and philosophy, but
that doesn’t mean that we cannot discover mind-independent truths about the
substances, properties, propositions, and so on. The same goes for moral
theory, it seems to me.
Moral intuition, on my view, is awareness of moral
and aesthetic properties. Situations are complicated and have many moral and
aesthetic properties. It’s not always easy to see all or most of the good or
all the bad in any given situation. But I think that careful reflection and
open dialogue with others can help us to become aware of more of the moral
properties exemplified within a given situation. By more accurately understanding the moral
implications of a given situation, I think we can do better to tell whether it
would be right or wrong to seek to bring about that situation.
I propose that moral theorists should seek to
develop axioms (true principles) of moral properties of substances, situations,
and actions. More work should be devoted to understanding the relationship
between the moral properties of these three categories.
The
Role of Ignorance
I’ve heard that ethicists are often the least
virtuous people. That would be ironic. Yet, I would not be surprised if gaining
moral knowledge didn’t generally lead to improvement of moral character. Much
depends upon a person’s motive for gaining moral knowledge. Consider that the
rightness or wrongness of an action seems to crucially depend upon whether the
one performing the action is aiming to bring about a situation that she takes
to be good or bad. This allows someone who is morally naïve—someone who doesn’t
perceive many moral properties of any given situation—to perform morally
permissible actions even when they inadvertently lead to objectively bad
situations. Now as we become more morally astute, we then have more data to
take into account when deciding which action to perform—which situation to seek
to bring about.
I think it should be obvious that we should seek to be morally astute.
However, we should seek to be morally astute with an intention of maximizing
good states of affairs and minimizing bad ones. If we try to become morally
astute with the intention of being smarter than our peers or merely promoting
our career, then we may actually hurt our character and thereby lose our
motivation to pursue what we know to be good. And what higher good is there for
a person than to pursue to good?