Western Ethics Theories
The Shortest Possible Overview
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What is Ethics? Is the Law Not Enough?
Ethics is a field of philosophy that tries to sort out which actions are good or right and which are bad or wrong. We all apply ethical principles in our lives: we think that telling the truth is good, while stealing is bad, for example.
But is that even true?
If you think about it for a moment, you will probably see the problem. Telling the truth can sometimes be hurtful: you wouldn’t tell your friend that her new dress looks horrible, for example. And stealing, given the right circumstances, can be a good thing. For example, you might have the opportunity to steal a terrorist’s bomb before he can detonate it. This would certainly be an excusable kind of theft.
So if we want to find out what makes an action morally right, we have to think a little deeper.
Some say, we can just follow the law. Aren’t laws supposed to tell us how to act?
But there’s a problem with that. Can you see it? Sometimes, laws can themselves be immoral. They can either ask of us to act in unethical ways, or they can not allow us to act in ways that would actually be morally right. In short: Moral actions can sometimes be illegal. And legal actions might be immoral.
So what actions are morally right but illegal? Say, your child is injured, and you have to drive it to the hospital. It is night and the streets are empty, and you have to cross a wide, empty intersection with clear sight in all directions. The traffic light is red, and you are supposed to stop, but your child in the backseat needs urgent treatment. So you just run the red light and drive on. This is clearly illegal, but it could be seen as morally excusable.
Other actions are legally permitted, but immoral: legal tax avoidance, for example. You have a huge, multinational company that declares that their headquarters are in Ireland, so that they can save on taxes. Everyone knows that this is a lie, because this is so obviously a US company. But what they do is legal, although it hurts those who rely on the tax income: the underprivileged classes who depend on state welfare, which is financed through taxes.
There are many more examples, but that’s enough for now. We can conclude that the laws cannot reliably tell us what is morally right. We need another way to measure that.
Philosophers have, over the centuries, developed different theories of what actions are morally right and wrong and why. In this post, we will discuss the four most important ones:
- Utilitarianism
- Kantian Ethics
- Social contract theories; and
- Virtue Ethics.
What about Christian ethics?
There are many more systems of ethics than just those mentioned. But the four we discuss in this article are the usually accepted systems of philosophical ethics, by which is meant that they provide a justification for ethics that is purely rational, that is, does not depend on particular religious beliefs.
The problem with religious justifications of ethics is that they are accepted only by those who share the basic belief in the religion that provides the justification. Christian ethics, for example, would not be convincing to a Muslim, in the same way as Muslim ethics would not appeal to a Christian. But with our world today being so connected and our societies being multicultural, we have to find ethical rules for our lives that we can all accept and embrace, no matter what our religious affiliation is. And this is what these four systems of ethics try to do.
When you say, for example, “it is good to maximise the happiness of all,” (as utilitarianism would) then this can be accepted by Christians, Hindus, Muslims and so on. Or all these can equally reject and criticise it, but the arguments by which they criticise it will again be understandable to all. So these four systems enable us to talk about our moral rules across the religious divides, while religiously motivated ethics don’t really help us convince those who don’t share our religion, and as such, their scope and their appeal in a multicultural society is limited.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t follow Christian, Muslim or Hindu ethics. As Aldous Huxley tried to argue (in The Perennial Philosophy, a very interesting book), all major religions basically agree on their ethical principles. Charity, mutual love, love of God, honesty, kindness etc are all part of the different religious ethics systems. But, as for example the abortion debate shows, they are not useful in trying to convince unbelievers that their conclusions are correct.
So while we can privately follow whatever system of ethics appeals to us, when we are talking about making society-wide decisions or agreeing on democratic legislation, we will have to use arguments that are acceptable to all citizens, independently of their religion. And this is what the four systems discussed below attempt to do.
Read more on ethics in general:
Overview: The Four Systems of Ethics
Utilitarianism
First, utilitarianism. This theory was developed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) in the 19th century. The core idea is that a morally right action should benefit as many people as possible. If I have a choice between two actions, then the one which produces more benefit will be the right one.
As Bentham put it: The greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number (of people).
But some disagree. They point out that sometimes, maximising happiness or benefit does not necessarily lead to the most morally right action. We will see examples for that below, when we talk about utilitarianism in more detail. So what other options do we have?
Kant’s Ethics
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a German philosopher of the 18th century, thought that all morally right actions are rational, while all morally bad actions are also, automatically, irrational and self-defeating. Therefore, he thought, the moral rightness of an action is not in its outcome (as utilitarianism thinks), but in the action itself. No matter what the outcome is, for Kant, lying, stealing, or hurting others will always be bad.
This type of ethics is also called a deontological ethics. The main point of this kind of ethics is that it focuses on particular actions that are supposed to be right or wrong in themselves, rather than looking at other factors besides the action itself.
Social Contract
The third system of ethics we will talk about goes back another century or two. Social contract theories try to explain ethics by saying that the purpose of moral behaviour is to make it possible for us to live together in a society. Living together peacefully is much more important than each person’s individual interests, because without a society, survival and a good life would be impossible for most of us. So we sacrifice some of our selfishness in order to create a working society that will benefit every single person in return. And this is how moral rules come about.
Virtue Ethics
The last theory comes from ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE). He thought that it is not the outcomes or any general rules that define what’s right, but the virtues that we display. One might by accident harm someone else in a particular case – but this doesn’t mean that this person is bad. Accidents happen. The goodness of a person must be sought inside their character, in the virtues that drive their behaviour, and not in any outcomes or abstract rules. This theory is called virtue ethics, and it still has many followers today.
That was the shortest possible overview of the main ethics theories, but I’m sure that lots of questions remain about how these theories really work. Let’s go on, therefore, and look at each one in more detail!
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism says that the morally right action is the one that maximises benefit or happiness for the majority of people. But what does this mean? Let’s look at an example!
Say, a thief steals your handbag. As a result of this, you are unhappy, but the thief is happy. So one would assume this to be roughly equal. But things are not so easy to sort out. Maybe you had personal documents in that bag, or photos of your children that are useless to the thief but of great value to you. Then the theft would have caused more harm than happiness. Or, on the other hand, assume that perhaps you are filthy rich and don’t really need the hundred dollars in that bag, and nothing else of value is in it. Now let’s say the thief is a very poor man, starving. Perhaps now the theft is more justified in utilitarian terms. Of course, there are also the other members of society to consider. Every theft makes the streets more unsafe, the people more afraid, and so contributes to a general feeling of unhappiness, which we also have to count in.
But you can see how, for example, a thief like Robin Hood could be said to do something morally right, even if theft is generally a bad thing.
The benefits and harms that utilitarianism is looking into don’t only concern humans. As far as animals can be harmed, they should also count, and maybe plants too should deserve some consideration. Mammals certainly can feel pain and some higher, more intelligent animals can feel fear and unhappiness. And this must count, too, in our calculations.
This would make an argument against eating meat, for example. Animal farming, especially on an industrial scale, causes great suffering to the animals, while the benefit for the human consumers of the meat is questionable. Not only is too much meat unhealthy, but it is altogether unnecessary for our lives and health. Vegetarians generally live healthier and longer lives.
But utilitarianism is not without its problems. Just counting happiness points is not always going to point us to the morally best action. For example, say you see a young, healthy man on the street. He is single, without a family, and you know that he is an arrogant liar, whom everyone hates. You also know that the local hospital is desperately looking for organ donors, because they urgently need two kidneys, two lungs, one liver and one heart for patients who are suffering and dying. And then you have this thought: Six organs, six patients saved. And only one is going to lose his life. Perfect!
Obviously, we have to be careful with calculations like this. Utilitarianism will always tend to benefit the majority of people, but sometimes a minority interest (like the claim of the young man to his own life) can trump a bigger sum of happiness.
This is the issue of rights, which we will talk about in the next section.
Read more on utilitarianism:
Kant’s Ethics
Utilitarianism is all about adding up happiness sums and doing what causes the most benefit and the least harm. But this can sometimes backfire or lead to horrible results. For example, on purely utilitarian grounds, one might painlessly kill one person in order to harvest their organs and save six other people who need transplants. Or one might justify lying or stealing, when these actions, all in all, cause more benefit than harm. This is what worried Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a German philosopher of the 18th century.
We can summarise Kant’s theory in 3 principles:
- What counts is the motivation of an action, not its outcome.
- Act so that everyone could act in the same way as you.
- Treat every other person as an end and not only as means to your own ends.
Let’s look at them one by one!
What counts is the motivation of an action, not its outcome
Kant thinks that we cannot look only at the outcomes of an action. Let’s say, for example, that I want to kill you. So I hide outside your house, pointing a gun at your front door, ready to shoot you when you come out. What I don’t know is that there’s a wild dog attacking people in this neighbourhood. As you step out of your front door, the dog is just passing by and jumps to attack you. At the same moment, I shoot, intending to kill you – unfortunately for me, I just manage to kill the dog, saving your life. After a moment of confusion, you see me and hurry across the street to thank me for saving your life. But did I? Was my shooting of the dog really morally right? After all, I wanted to shoot you instead.
This is why Kant says that it’s not the outcome that counts for morality, but the motivation, or what he calls the “good will.” In order for an action to be morally right, I must at least intend to act morally right.
Act so that everyone could act in the same way as you
Another point of Kant’s is that ethics must be rational. And if we are rational, we should realise that all human beings are valuable, and that each person’s interests carry the same weight. Morality, Kant says, should make no distinctions between people. If I am allowed to do something, then you should be allowed too.
This is sometimes called the Universalisation Formula of the Categorical Imperative. Lots of long words – but let’s just look at another example!
Let’s say I lie to you about something. In order to see if this was morally right, Kant says, we must imagine everyone doing it. Assume then that we live in a world where lying is perfectly right. Everyone is allowed to lie all the time. What would happen in that world? How would it work?
See, lying works only because it is exceptional, and because the victim assumes that you are telling the truth. In a world full of liars, everyone would be expecting to be lied to all the time. So lies would not actually work, because everyone would know that everyone else is (probably) lying. So what would happen? Nobody would actually lie, because lies wouldn’t work any more in that world. This, according to Kant, shows us that lying is wrong, because we cannot think of a world where everyone is lying. Such a world would contradict itself. If everyone was lying, then no one would be lying. See the contradiction?
Treat every other person as an end and not only as means to your own ends
Finally, the third of Kant’s principles is also based on the idea that we are all equal. He says that we all have ends, that is, goals that we pursue. Say, I forgot my pen at the bank, where I was this morning, and now I realise that and I want to go back and get it. So I take a taxi to bring me to the bank.
In this case, my “end” is to get my pen back. The “means” are the tools that I will use to reach this end: in this case, the taxi. But there’s a catch. If you think of the value of the means I use, it must always be less than the value of my ends. It would not make sense to pay a hundred dollars to the taxi in order to get back a ten-dollar-pen. Then it would be better to just buy another pen. Of course, that particular pen might have a sentimental or personal value for me, and I should count that too. But in total, the value of the pen must be higher than the cost of the taxi, or I’m doing something irrational by paying the taxi fare to get it back.
Now this also applies to human beings. We use humans as means all the time in our lives. When you eat at a restaurant, the waiter and the cook are the means by which you get your meal. When you take a taxi, the taxi driver is the means by which you are driven to your destination. That’s okay. But you should not, as Kant says, treat them only as means. They should always also be themselves treated as ends.
How do you do this? By respecting their own ends as equally valuable to yours. You want to take a taxi to get somewhere, but the taxi driver has his own ends. Perhaps he wants to save money for a holiday. By paying him the agreed fee, you are respecting his freedom to make his own plans and to save for that holiday. This means to treat the driver as an end.
If, for example, I were to jump out of the taxi at my destination and run away without paying, then I would be treating the driver as my means only, without seeing him as an end. I would treat him as inferior to me, because I would be acting as if his plans don’t count as much as my wish to take that taxi. This would be immoral, according to Kant.
Kant’s theory is still very popular today. Its respect for persons helps avoid many problems of utilitarianism. For example, I could not just take out someone’s organs in order to benefit a number of patients in the local hospital, because then I would be treating this healthy person only as means to the end of saving the other patients.
But it also has problems. For example, it tends to make absolute judgements about particular actions. For Kant, as we saw, lying and stealing would always, unconditionally, be morally bad. But this is not what we usually think. Some lies can be excused, or might even be required. If a murderer asks you where your friend is, because they want to kill him, then it seems like lying to the murderer would be a good idea. But Kant would disagree. For Kant, a bad action is always bad, because we could never generalise it. And this doesn’t seem quite sensible in our everyday understanding of ethics.
So perhaps it’s time for a more pragmatic or nuanced approach to ethics. And this is what the social contract theory aims to do. Read on to see how this works out.
Read more on Kant’s ethics:
The Social Contract
The main idea of “social contract” theories of ethics is that moral rules are created to make our lives within a society easier. They are not just based on happiness calculations, like utilitarianism says, or on abstract rationality, like Kant thought. Instead, what justifies moral rules is that they make our societies work.
There are many social contract theories: Spinoza (1632–1677), Hobbes (1588–1679), Locke (1632–1704) and Rousseau (1712–1778) all proposed some version of the basic idea.
All social contract theories contrast our lives in society with what it would look like to live as wild people outside of any social environment – what is often called the “State of Nature.” In the state of nature, we would all behave like animals, taking from others what we like, attacking whom we want, provided we are strong enough. In this state of nature, there would be no civilisation, no schools, no technology, because everyone would be busy just surviving and defending their lives and their possessions.
Hobbes puts it this way. Life in the state of nature would be “a war of all against all,” and everyone’s lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The other social contract theorists didn’t agree that the state of nature was quite that bleak, but they all think that organised society is better than having everyone living alone, trying to survive in the wild.
So what is ethics then? Our morality is whatever rules we need to obey in order to live together in harmony within an organised society. Every society requires us to give up some of our freedom in order to live together with others. If I insist on stealing other people’s things, and they do the same, then we’d soon be back in the state of nature. So I have to agree to not stealing. But since not all of us are that rational, there will still be some thieves. And so we need police and weapons and courts and all the mechanics of state power to keep the peace among us and to enable us to flourish.
The interesting thing about social contract theories is that they are not only theories of ethics, but also of government. Social contract theories tell us what a good government is: One that helps its citizens live good lives within society. If a government does not do that, if it threatens and imprisons its people, like, for example, the German Nazi state during the Second World War did, then it loses its reason for having power, and the citizens should replace it.
Social contract theories don’t prescribe particular moral rules. Rather, they tend to leave it to the citizens to agree on the actual content of morality. But not any crazy rule will do. Citizens must freely agree to follow the moral rules, because doing so is in their own interest and makes their own lives better. So whether a society works according to Islamic, Christian or Confucian principles, whether it’s a kingdom of a parliamentary democracy, doesn’t really matter, as long as the system guarantees that everyone will be better off than if that government did not exist.
Like all moral systems, social contract theories have their own problems. For example, how do we know that all citizens do actually agree with society’s rules? We are born into a society, and we are never really asked whether we support the ethics of the place we grew up in. So our agreement is implicitly assumed. But what if I disagree with what my society is doing? Social contract theories would suggest that I could leave and move to another place. But in practice, this is not easy. There are no ungoverned places in the world where I could just create a new society. Everywhere I go, I will have to accept the rules of others.
Another problem is how to deal with international agreements. Are we all, the people of Earth, part of one single social contract? If this was the case, then we shouldn’t be able to go to war with each other, or accept that some countries are wealthier than others.
On the other hand, if we are not part of the same social contract, this would mean that we wouldn’t have moral obligations towards the people of other countries. After all, social contract theories justify morality through the existence of that contract between the citizens. We would then be able to pollute the environment of other countries, to go to war and occupy their territories at will, to rob and kill their citizens when they come to our country as tourists and so on. Clearly, there is a problem here. Does an international social contract exist or not? This is unclear and the question is not easy to answer.
To escape the problems of the social contract, but without going back to utilitarianism and Kant with their very strict rules, we can adopt a fourth possible theory that is particularly flexible and adaptable, while still emphasising the goodness of a person. This is virtue ethics, which we will discuss in the next section.
Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics does not prescribe particular actions or rules. Instead, it emphasises that when we act, our actions are expressions of our character as persons. The assumption is that in order to live good, satisfying lives, we need to be good people. Crooks, thieves, murderers will never become truly happy in their lives. True happiness can only be achieved by people who are virtuous at the same time as they are wise: meaning that they know what ends to pursue in their lives, and how to go about pursuing those ends.
The final goal of every human life is what is generally called flourishing or, with a Greek word, eudaimonia, and it is this state of true happiness that we all seek.
A thief, for example, even if he is a good, successful thief, will never really flourish as a person. He will always be consumed by greed, afraid of being caught, unable to enjoy life or look at himself in the mirror. On the other hand, a good person who is virtuous and wise can occasionally make a mistake, but this won’t cause them to lose their virtuous character.
Virtue ethics, therefore, does not judge the morality of individual actions. Instead, it judges the quality of a person’s character, and the ultimate measure of success is whether the person approaches the state of eudaimonia, of ultimate happiness, throughout their lives.
Since virtue ethics does not give us strict rules or ways to calculate the morality of particular actions, it is often seen as a moral theory that is less useful in practice. It is also less interested in the total happiness generated across multiple individuals, and more about the self-perfection of a single agent.
Now, you may ask, how exactly can a person progress towards fulfilment and flourishing in their lives? Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the ancient Greek philosopher who is generally seen as the one who came up with virtue ethics, says that virtues are only good in the right amount.
Too much honesty, for example, can be hurtful. Too little honesty and you’d be a liar. Too much kindness and you’re being taken advantage of. Too little kindless is obviously also not a good thing. And so on for every virtue. But that “mean” amount of virtue is not always the same. Sometimes, say, at court, we must have maximum honesty. Other times, for example when being asked by a murderer where our friend is hiding, zero honesty is right.
The trick is therefore to know how much of each virtue one should have in every particular situation. And how do we learn this? By practicising. For Aristotle, virtue is a skill. Like all skills, it can somewhat be improved by learning and studying, by watching others who are better than us in acting morally, but mostly we learn it by doing. Everyday practice makes us experts in virtue, and the more we progress, the more we will automatically choose the right actions. In the same way a skilled piano player is never tempted to play a wrong note, a skilled ethical agent is also never tempted to choose a morally wrong action.
In practice, this means that when we have to decide about the ethics of a case, we should consider the virtues of the agents involved. We may ask a person who is known to be wiser and more practiced in the skill of moral action for their advice. Or we may use our own previous experiences as a guide. If you are wondering what this looks like in a real case, then read on. In the next section, we will try to apply these theories to a real case to see how they work in practice.
Read more on Aristotle and virtue ethics:
How to deal with a real ethics problem
To recap, let’s begin with a really easy and obvious case: someone illegally downloading a book from the Internet instead of paying for it.
Utilitarianism would look at the balance between harm and benefit for all stakeholders. Obviously, our downloader has a personal benefit from this action. But the publisher of the book, the author, and all those who worked to create and distribute the book have been harmed. But how much was that harm? It’s hard to quantify, but if the book sold, say, 10000 copies and made its author 10000 dollars, then the one copy we downloaded illegally cost the author roughly one dollar. It’s not a great amount of harm in the big scheme of things. Of course, you could argue that all downloads together cost the author much more, perhaps a total of half or more of the total income from the book. But we can’t argue like that. The individual downloader is not responsible for what all the others do. It’s the one action we have to look at, and this did not cause too much of a harm.
Kant would look at 3 things. First, the motivation: the downloader wants to steal that content, so his motivation is clear and it’s not a good one. The only thing he’s interested in is to benefit himself. This is a selfish motivation, and is the opposite of what Kant would consider a “good will.”
Second, the universalisation criterion. What if everyone just downloaded books for free? Well, then no one could afford to produce more books, at least not within a capitalist economic framework. So this action cannot be universalised and is therefore morally wrong.
Third, the means and ends test. The downloader is treating everyone who created the book as means only to his own ends. He takes something without giving anything back. Therefore, his action is immoral. In summary, with Kant’s theory we can easily see why this action is immoral.
The social contract theory would look at whether rational adults would consent to illegal book downloading because it benefits all citizens. Clearly it does not, and except for the downloader, no one else has any interest in agreeing to such a rule. The downloader is essentially ignoring the social contract and acting as if he were back in the state of nature, taking what he wants without any consideration for others. This behaviour violates the contract and is therefore forbidden.
Finally, what virtues does the downloader exhibit? Is he generous, kind, courageous? Well, depending on how dangerous illegal downloads are in his country and his particular circumstances, there might be some slight courage required. But Aristotle insists that virtues have to be balanced. You cannot just have an abundance of courage but a complete lack of compassion or honesty, for example. In our case, the downloader lacks honesty, he lacks kindness to those who created the book, he lacks a sense of fairness and for his own duty. All in all, he shows his character to be selfish and uncaring. Continuing on this path is unlikely to make him into a flourishing, rounded human being in the long run. Therefore, this action is also immoral according to virtue ethics.
Things become more difficult when we look at more complicated cases, like abortion or euthanasia. It’s much harder to weigh a baby’s life against a mother’s life, and to try and estimate their respective levels of happiness or harm with or without an abortion. But just trying to think in this way is likely to be a good idea, even if we cannot reach a clear result. Some other theories might work better in this case. Virtue ethics, for example, would distinguish between a mother who wants an abortion for selfish reasons and a mother who has an abortion because the baby is predicted to be born with a serious medical condition.
But in the end, the moral theories can only give us guidance and help us clarify the issues involved, but they don’t really tell us what to do. This is okay. We are not machines that obey a sequence of commands. As human beings, it is for each one of us to decide how to act, depending on one’s own preferences and values. Moral theories can be a great help, but the decision remains with every one of us and this is the essential freedom and responsibility that comes with being human.
Read more on applied ethics:
Andreas Matthias on Daily Philosophy:
