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Adapted from Thomas White, "Ethics," Chapter 1, BUSINESS ETHICS: A PHILOSOPHICAL READER (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1993)
1. Philosophical ethics Ethics is the branch of philosophy that explores the nature of moral virtue and evaluates human actions. Philosophical ethics differs from legal, religious, cultural and personal approaches to ethics by seeking to conduct the study of morality through a rational, secular outlook that is grounded in notions of human happiness or well-being. A major advantage of a philosophical approach to ethics is that it avoids the authoritarian basis of law and religion as well as the subjectivity, arbitrariness and irrationality that may characterize cultural or totally personal moral views. (Although some thinkers differentiate between "ethics," "morals," "ethical" and "moral," this discussion will use them synonymously.) Generally speaking, there are two traditions in modern philosophical ethics regarding how to determine the ethical character of actions. One argues that actions have no intrinsic ethical character but acquire their moral status from the consequences that flow from them. The other tradition claims that actions are inherently right or wrong, e.g, lying, cheating, stealing. The former is called a teleological approach to ethics, the latter, deontological. 2. Teleological (results oriented) ethics A teleological outlook is particularly appealing because it takes a pragmatic, common-sense, even unphilosophical approach to ethics. Simply put, teleological thinkers claim that the moral character of actions depends on the simple, practical matter of the extent to which actions actually help or hurt people. Actions that produce more benefits than harm are "right"; those that don't are "wrong." This outlook is best represented by Utilitarianism, a school of thought originated by the British thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and refined by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). a. Jeremy Bentham: quantifying pleasure Strongly influenced by the empiricism of David Hume, Jeremy Bentham aimed at developing a "moral science" that was more rational, objective and quantitative than other ways of separating right from wrong. Bentham particularly argued against the ascetic religious traditions of eighteenth-century England that held up suffering and sacrifice as models of virtue. Bentham begins with what he takes as the self-evident observations that 1) pleasure and pain govern our lives, and 2) the former makes life happier, while the latter makes it worse. These two concepts anchor Bentham's ethical outlook. "Nature has placed mankind," he writes in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, "under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne." From this insight about pleasure and pain, Bentham develops as his ethical touchstone the notion of "utility": "that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual." Utilitarianism therefore contends that something is morally good to the extent that it produces a greater balance of pleasure over pain for the largest number of people involved, or, as it is popularly described, "the greatest good of the greatest number." Pleasure is Bentham's ultimate standard of morality because "the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question . . . [is] the right and proper, and only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action." Aiming to make ethics practical, Bentham even proposed a system for measuring the amount of pleasure and pain that an action produces. Called the hedonistic calculus, Bentham's system identifies seven aspects of an action's consequence that can be used to compare the results of different deeds: the intrinsic strength of the pleasurable or painful feelings produced (intensity), how long they last (duration), how likely it is that these sensations will be produced by a given action (certainty or uncertainty), how soon they will be felt (propinquity or remoteness), whether these feelings will lead to future pleasures (fecundity) or pains (purity), and the number of people affected (extent). The great advantage of the hedonistic calculus is that it provides a method for talking about ethics that is open, public, objective and fair. The benefits and harms produced by actions can be identified and measured. Furthermore, while everyone's happiness counts, no one's happiness counts for more than another's. Utilitarianism is in many ways very democratic. For example, Bentham's system readily shows why it is wrong to steal money from people at knife-point. The theft will surely make the robber happy. But this pleasure is short-lived, lasting only until the money from each robbery runs out; the thief must also live with the worry of being caught. Moreover, the robber's happiness is outweighed by the victims' unhappiness. The negative feelings of the thief's targets will be intense and, very possibly, long-term. Furthermore, more people experience pain from the thefts than feel any pleasure. Bentham would therefore see such theft as clearly wrong, producing a greater balance of unhappiness over happiness among all those involved in the situation. Notice that this discussion makes no appeal to "rights," a difficult moral theory, personal attitudes, or religious teachings. One need not be a lawyer, philosopher, person of good conscience or religious believer in order to uncover the moral status of actions. All that is required for determining whether or not an action is morally defensible is careful, thorough and fair examination of whom the action helps or hurts and in what ways. Bentham's version of utilitarianism contains major flaws, however. This is evident as soon as we change some of the details of the above scenario, because the scales of the hedonistic calculus would tip the other way. Imagine that the thief is a "Robin Hood" like character who steals only exotic cars of rich people and uses his gains to feed many desperately hungry people. He neither threatens nor physically injures anyone, and his victims are reimbursed by insurance companies who spread the cost out over all policyholders. It's hard to see how Bentham's system would label the robberies "wrong." As long as the thief is appropriately altruistic with his bounty, his actions seem to produce more pleasure than pain.
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