The first of the two problems I will address is the less formal, perhaps, but the one I personally find more convincing. Indeed, it is this problem that lends its name to the title of this chapter. One of the founders of modern virtue theory, Philippa Foot, has for a number of years now campaigned (in the way that a philosopher is going to campaign at least, that is, through scholarly publication and debate) against what she calls "magic" morality, which happens to be the modern framework I have been somewhat more forgivingly been referring to. As you have probably guessed from the quotation marks, the description is not meant to be flattering, and is to the contrary something of a criticism. I will attempt to explain the criticism using some of my own examples.
If you are well-versed in history, you will recall that there was a period here in Australia as in a number of other countries (and indeed, this is true today for some of those as it was then) where compulsory military service was in place. Let us hypothesise that there is a nation in a state of war on foreign soil today where national service is in place. We are observing a committee hearing where potential conscientious objectors are being interrogated. The committee calls in the next applicant. Once the details are confirmed, the questioning begins.
"Why do you wish to become exempted from national service?"
"I feel, sirs, that I cannot in good conscience participate in the military."
"And why is that?"
"I have a strong moral objection, sirs, that prevents me from taking up arms against another man."
"Very well, objection granted."
Of course, such a hearing would be unlikely to go as I have written; the person would certainly be asked to explain his objection in full and would be subject to a round of questions. For the purposes of our thought experiment, however, it is not necessary to go into such detail; let us simply take the example for how it has occurred.
Now let us imagine the next applicant has had his turn called and once he fronts the panel and his details are taken down as was done before, the questioning begins anew.
"Why do you wish to become exempted from national service?"
"I feel, sirs, that I cannot in good conscience participate in the military."
"And why is that?"
"I made a promise to my mother that I would not willingly harm another person, and I cannot in good conscience break such a promise."
"Your story is touching, lad, but do you not think the safety of your fellow man is more important than one naive promise? Objection denied."
Putting aside the unusually similar beginnings of these simple examples, it is not inconceivable that they might realistically come to pass, though perhaps in a more complicated form, in our hypothetical land. I don't think it is fair to say the committee acted in a clearly biased or unfair fashion here; if anything, they've been reasonably reasonable. And yet still something bothers me about the exemption of one and not the other.
Trying as best we can to deal with the ambiguity of the first objector's reasons, why should the cases be treated differently? Yes, it is not hard to break a promise, especially if the reason is great enough, but perhaps in this person's mind the war, for whatever reason, was not enough to justify the breaking of that promise. Perhaps his family came from a war-torn country and his mother had seen first hand what killing can do. Perhaps this made it practically impossible for the second objector to accept military service as reasonable. Certainly his belief is a strong one, and well grounded. If he explained it to the panel that way, would they still deny him? It is not clear to me they wouldn't. They might say that though the reasons are compelling, they still do not have sufficient gravitas to grant omission. Yes, the promise is meaningful to you, but it is still just a promise, and promises sometimes can and must be broken. This may seem cruel, but war is cruel, and they are all victims of the circumstances they live in.
Perhaps, but why then exempt the first objector? If he claimed religious reasons for rejecting military service, I find it difficult to imagine his objection being denied, unless he was a part of some obscure cult, or couldn't sufficiently demonstrate adherence to his belief system. Even yet, is his belief made stronger by the fact that it is grounded in religion than secular promise? If the beliefs were held equally as strongly, let us suppose, would the panel still decide in the same way? Still, I think so. The fact that the first objector is religious in this paragraph is not of particular importance, I should note. All that is important is that he can prove that he is bound by the modern moral framework I have been talking about, and religious adherence is perhaps the most traditional indicator of that, while the unsuccessful applicant of an equally stringent belief is denied. Herein lies the problem.
Think about it a little. You have two people, both of whom wish to avoid military service for equally genuine but different reasons. One is granted exemption because his objection lies within the sphere of our modern moral framework, the other is denied because it is a more borderline case; he may not like it, but is it really a moral objection? And yet for all intents and purposes the objections are the same. If drafted, both would have equal difficulty sleeping at nights. It is this differential quality that morality possesses in our society, the quality that makes the mere usage of the word set sentences and ideas apart from the competition, which is the problem, this apparently "magical" ability that, it would seem, it has no right to hold. Indeed, what in the above example sets the religious man's objection apart from the other? One cannot attribute it to his being religious, for religiosity is not a defining characteristic of objector status, nor can one fault the strength of the other man's case. It would seem that by accepting that the panel is reasonable we have nevertheless come to an unjust result, creating an apparent paradox. The only way to resolve the paradox is to accept that moral statements aren't really different to similar non-moral statements. If this is the case, of course, then what is there to differentiate any moral statement? Nothing, and so our framework must be wrong, for a fundamental tenet is that matters of morality are of greater severity and import than other matters, no matter the circumstances.
I should note here that when I refer to moral statements and moral matters, I refer to statements and matters commonly thought of being somehow related to morality. If I thought that all truly moral statements were no different to non-moral statements and that, indeed, there is no such thing as morality at all, we would hardly be having this discussion. To the contrary, I do believe there is a morality, but to reiterate, our current perception of moral matters in distorted, incomplete and wrong. To further press the point, I will now address the other, more commonly cited reason for thinking there is something wrong with the way we look at morality.
A lot of the time it just doesn't work.
"Oh," but you may say, "we all know not to kill each other though, right? And we all know not to rape and steal and generally be unpleasant. Sure, there are the occasional bad eggs that go against the grain, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule." Well certainly we can agree that we know not to be generally nasty to each other, though we may do so anyway. I'm not arguing that point. But since we're putting forward examples, allow me to retort. I have already mentioned Philippa Foot, and I will probably mention her again, as in my opinion she is an outstanding philosopher. She is perhaps most famously known as the creator of the trolley problem, which I know many people not in the least interested in philosophy to be familiar with. Nevertheless I will provide a short description for you in case you are not so well-versed.
Let us suppose you are wandering by the train tracks one lovely afternoon, as you are wont to do. The day has been peaceful and largely uneventful, with only the singing of birds to disrupt your walk thus far. All of a sudden there is a rumble of thunder and it begins to rain heavily, not that you mind. You then (only barely) see in the distance a trolley hurtling toward you at tremendous speed, its sound masked by the downpour. You won't be hurt, of course, because you aren't silly enough to walk on the tracks, only beside them. You have just come to a junction where a lever lies to switch tracks - the thought strikes you that you might send the trolley off to a siding, where it will be stopped by some barrier, but you remember you have just come from that way. The track the trolley is heading down leads to a tunnel where five men are working on the track; why, you had a chat with them on their lunch break. On the other track is a gardener, working to clear the weeds away from the sleepers. Both tracks are supposed to be closed, and busy at work, in this weather, they are all unlikely to see or hear the trolley coming before it is too late. It seems one of the two groups is certain to die, but by a stroke of luck (good or bad) you still have the option, if you wish, to turn the trolley. The question here is this: do you save the five men and turn the trolley on to the track with the gardener, or do you refuse to involve yourself and allow the five men to die?
Clearly there is a moral choice to be made here, but whatever you choose it seems like you can't do the "right thing". Choose not to involve yourself and you allow five people to die needlessly, choose to pull the lever and you become personally responsible for someone else's death. Certainly it is possible to choose one or the other with some degree of confidence that your conscience will be clear, but for the vast majority of people, a nagging doubt lingers. Unsurprisingly, given it was made for this purpose, the thought experiment is a somewhat troubling one for the exact reason that it is so troubling. If we accept that for all "moral questions" there is a correct and an incorrect response, though those responses may be incredibly subtle and nuanced, and whether a response is correct or incorrect can be determined, why should this problem (and indeed, problems like it) be so troublesome? It's almost as if the very question itself forces an inconclusive and unfulfilling solution. But of course why should this be? It's easy to defer to some notion of mystery, that perhaps we simply haven't worked out a solution yet, or to put it down to a matter of interpretation, but to my mind these measured answers are both cop-outs. Why, only before we established, or so I thought, that killing, raping, and general nastiness are all wrong with some degree of certainty. In the real world (and the hypothetical world) things get fuzzy around the edges, but this isn't fuzziness, it's like someone smeared grease all over the lens.
In a sense, that is what's going on here. It's this reliance of thinking in terms of magic morality that leads us questions like these which have no proper solution. I hope it seems a little clearer now why we need to shift our thinking away from the idea that moral considerations are somehow separate and of superior importance to non-moral considerations. Some of you may (and rightly so) still be sceptical, however. I hope to, in Chapter 3, outline how virtue ethics is different to magic morality in both theoretical and practical terms while still dealing in generalities. I hope that by the end of that chapter I will have given you reason enough to think that virtue ethics has at least some truth and some reason to it, and by that point we can move onwards to more specific matters.
"Oh," but you may say, "we all know not to kill each other though, right? And we all know not to rape and steal and generally be unpleasant. Sure, there are the occasional bad eggs that go against the grain, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule." Well certainly we can agree that we know not to be generally nasty to each other, though we may do so anyway. I'm not arguing that point. But since we're putting forward examples, allow me to retort. I have already mentioned Philippa Foot, and I will probably mention her again, as in my opinion she is an outstanding philosopher. She is perhaps most famously known as the creator of the trolley problem, which I know many people not in the least interested in philosophy to be familiar with. Nevertheless I will provide a short description for you in case you are not so well-versed.
Let us suppose you are wandering by the train tracks one lovely afternoon, as you are wont to do. The day has been peaceful and largely uneventful, with only the singing of birds to disrupt your walk thus far. All of a sudden there is a rumble of thunder and it begins to rain heavily, not that you mind. You then (only barely) see in the distance a trolley hurtling toward you at tremendous speed, its sound masked by the downpour. You won't be hurt, of course, because you aren't silly enough to walk on the tracks, only beside them. You have just come to a junction where a lever lies to switch tracks - the thought strikes you that you might send the trolley off to a siding, where it will be stopped by some barrier, but you remember you have just come from that way. The track the trolley is heading down leads to a tunnel where five men are working on the track; why, you had a chat with them on their lunch break. On the other track is a gardener, working to clear the weeds away from the sleepers. Both tracks are supposed to be closed, and busy at work, in this weather, they are all unlikely to see or hear the trolley coming before it is too late. It seems one of the two groups is certain to die, but by a stroke of luck (good or bad) you still have the option, if you wish, to turn the trolley. The question here is this: do you save the five men and turn the trolley on to the track with the gardener, or do you refuse to involve yourself and allow the five men to die?
Clearly there is a moral choice to be made here, but whatever you choose it seems like you can't do the "right thing". Choose not to involve yourself and you allow five people to die needlessly, choose to pull the lever and you become personally responsible for someone else's death. Certainly it is possible to choose one or the other with some degree of confidence that your conscience will be clear, but for the vast majority of people, a nagging doubt lingers. Unsurprisingly, given it was made for this purpose, the thought experiment is a somewhat troubling one for the exact reason that it is so troubling. If we accept that for all "moral questions" there is a correct and an incorrect response, though those responses may be incredibly subtle and nuanced, and whether a response is correct or incorrect can be determined, why should this problem (and indeed, problems like it) be so troublesome? It's almost as if the very question itself forces an inconclusive and unfulfilling solution. But of course why should this be? It's easy to defer to some notion of mystery, that perhaps we simply haven't worked out a solution yet, or to put it down to a matter of interpretation, but to my mind these measured answers are both cop-outs. Why, only before we established, or so I thought, that killing, raping, and general nastiness are all wrong with some degree of certainty. In the real world (and the hypothetical world) things get fuzzy around the edges, but this isn't fuzziness, it's like someone smeared grease all over the lens.
In a sense, that is what's going on here. It's this reliance of thinking in terms of magic morality that leads us questions like these which have no proper solution. I hope it seems a little clearer now why we need to shift our thinking away from the idea that moral considerations are somehow separate and of superior importance to non-moral considerations. Some of you may (and rightly so) still be sceptical, however. I hope to, in Chapter 3, outline how virtue ethics is different to magic morality in both theoretical and practical terms while still dealing in generalities. I hope that by the end of that chapter I will have given you reason enough to think that virtue ethics has at least some truth and some reason to it, and by that point we can move onwards to more specific matters.
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