[Return to writing page] Chapter 1: IntroductionThe QuestionsHi. My name is Matt. I want to be a good person. It's really hard to know how to be a good person, though. Lots of people have very different opinions about what is right and wrong. Some have given up their lives for what they thought was a good cause. But if people older and wiser than I cannot agree on what is right, how am I ever going to know? Maybe even the wisest philosophers don't know what they're talking about. It sometimes seems as if ethics is just something people made up, and it doesn't really mean anything. Also, if being good is so great, then why is there so much "evil" in the world? Every time I watch the evening news or read the newspaper, it seems that people all over the world are suffering and fighting. Why should I care if I'm a good person or not? Maybe I might as well just be selfish. At least then I will be happy. We can sum up these concerns in a list:
We will call these issues the Questions. Let's imagine a scene in which a boy asks his mom about the Questions: Boy: Mom, why is it wrong to steal? Mom: Because you're taking something that belongs to somebody else. Boy: But why is that so bad? Mom: Because it makes them unhappy. You wouldn't want somebody to steal something of yours, would you? Boy: No, I wouldn't want them to take my stuff. But why shouldn't I take their stuff if I want it? Mom: Because I'm the Mom, and those are the rules! Does this sound familiar? Is this how you learned why it was important to be good? Mom's answer doesn't satisfy me very much. If you think about it, though, most of us never really hear a better answer. Why, after all, should we listen to Mom? Maybe we've been wasting time being good, when we don't really need to! It is very important, then, to figure out just why it is so important to be good. In fact, the Questions are probably the most important questions I can think of. Without thinking about ethics first, we might waste decades of our life working towards worthless goals! What good is it to be driving at 90 miles per hour, if we are pointed in the wrong direction? For this reason, I think the questions are perhaps more important than anything I ever learned in school. I was very worried about the Questions for a long time. In all my years at school, nobody ever bothered to tell me the real reason why I should be good, or how to figure out what to do in tough moral situations. So I left school for a semester to try to find an answer by reading what other people have thought about the Questions. I think I've come to a pretty good solution. Explaining my solution will not be easy, though. The few people who do read books about the Questions usually do not begin until the end of college, or even graduate school. Most people who write about the Questions use very complicated language that is hard to understand, because you need very precise language to discuss these ideas. I will try my best to make my writing readable while still being precise enough to say what I mean, but do not worry if you get confused. I am at least as confused as anyone else. Although it is difficult to talk about ethics, I think we must try. We should not avoid talking about some of the most important topics in life. After all, you don't want to drive at 90 miles per hour in the wrong direction, do you? But saying anything about ethics puts you in a tough spot. I think the answers to the Questions that I have come up with seem to be correct. However, I should not be too sure of myself. Philosophers have been trying to answer the Questions for thousands of years! And still today, people are publishing books and articles with new suggestions. If you go to the moral philosophy section of a college or university library, you will find more pages written about the Questions than you will have time to read in your entire life. I am only presumptuous if I think that I know how to answer the Questions and that so many other brilliant people came up with the wrong answer. So although my answer may sound good – as it does to me – you might have a different opinion. This book is only partially meant to give you my answers. It is also meant to introduce you to moral philosophy, to get you thinking about these important issues. The Questions affect us all the time, and philosophy is so interesting and confusing to think about! I hope I can capture your interest. So why should I be good? Let’s find out!
The two parts of ethicsI think before we do anything else, there is one important matter to discuss. To better understand the task we have set out to do, we need to learn about a division in moral philosophy. There are two types of things a moral philosopher might talk about. The first is to do ethics. When the Supreme Court is trying to decide a case, they are doing ethics. They weigh the reasons for and against each possible decision, and then they make a choice. But this essay is different. The thinking we will be doing is different from the type of thinking the Supreme Court does. We are not so much doing ethics, but rather talking about it. If you have forgotten the Questions by now, reread them. You can see that if we succeed in answering these Questions, we will not have actually made any ethical decisions. Instead, we will be talking about what really happens when we make an ethical decision, why these decisions motivate us to act, and so forth. So do not worry; although this is a book about ethics, I will not be lecturing you about how you are supposed to behave. The words that philosophers use to name these two parts of ethics are very long and confusing. We will see many other big philosophical terms in this little book, so I will make up my own. Hopefully, you will be able to keep track of them better than the originals. The real word for doing ethics – like the Supreme Court – is "normative ethics". See what I mean? Let’s instead use "doing-ethics." The other part of ethics, where we think about the Questions, is called "metaethics." [1] The term I will use instead is "what-is-ethics." Most people do not spend much time thinking about what-is-ethics. However, everybody worries about doing-ethics. We cannot help it. We use doing-ethics whenever we make choices, something that happens all the time. Learning about what-is-ethics does not always change the way we do doing-ethics, but it sometimes can. Hopefully, our thinking about what-is-ethics will help us think through decisions well when we make choices. Also, what-is-ethics is worth doing because it is fascinating! In the thousands of years that people have been thinking about what-is-ethics, we still do not agree on the answers to the Questions, even though they affect us every time we make a choice. [1] "Meta-" is a prefix that means "one level up." So metaethics is not ethics itself, but a type of thinking one level up from ethics. Imagine metaethics looking down from its vantage point above ethics to study it. |