Part of a series of books looking at issues of our time: this one a series of essays looking at various sides of ethical arguments. In the end it doesn't come out with nice clean answers - more of 'it depends' but then life isn't made of nice clean answers.
this reflects a deeper truth about ethics: values often conflict, not because one is wrong and one is right, but simply because sometimes having more of one good means we cannot have as much of another.Read more at location 83
movements around the Western world are claiming to stand for the 99 per cent against the 1 per cent, the wealthy minority in our countries who together own between a fifth and a third of each nation’s wealth. But, as Ord points out, this indignation is somewhat selective, since if we look at the world as a whole, many of those protesters are in the top 1 per cent and almost all are in the top 5 per cent. ‘When I was earning £14,000 as a student, I found I was in the richest 4 per cent in the world, even adjusting for how much further money goes in developing countries,’ Ord told the BBC in 2010. ‘Giving away 10 per cent of that, I found that I would still be in the top 5 per cent.’17 ‘It’s not particularly heroic or anything,’ he told another reporter. ‘At least half the people in Britain could probably think much more seriously about how much they could give.’Read more at location 604
Given that nearly 50 per cent of people worldwide survive on less than $2.50 a day, almost all of us are among the richest people in the world and the majority of us could give away much more than we do and still be relatively wealthy, enjoying a very comfortable quality of life. Still, if we don’t want to do that, why should we?Read more at location 611
Nonetheless, the argument that most of us do not do nearly as much as we should to help the world’s poor seems strong and compelling. It is no doubt unsettling to conclude this. But why should we expect moral philosophy to provide comfort? It’s role is not to justify everything we do, but to point us to how we might do better. In the case of global inequality, it points the way all too clearly.Read more at location 708
Equasy is not an obscure drug. ‘It is used by many millions of people in the UK including children and young people,’ wrote Nutt. About ten people a year die of it, serious damage is caused once every 350 exposures and it is associated with over 100 road traffic accidents per year. Nutt concluded that, bearing in mind all its harms, ‘it seems likely that the ACMD would recommend control under the Misuse of Drugs Act, perhaps as a class A drug given it appears more harmful than ecstasy.’ So why does the law allow equasy but ban ecstasy? Because equasy stands for Equine Addiction Syndrome, ‘a condition characterized by gaining pleasure from horses and being prepared to countenance the consequences especially the harms from falling off/under the horse’. No government is going to ban horse-riding, but most do ban drugs that are arguably less harmful.Read more at location 722
People are often reluctant to accept that rights are not natural because they think that if rights were just cultural artefacts they would be less binding. But perhaps this ‘just’ is misplaced. A non-natural right that is globally endorsed and upheld is surely worth more than a natural right that most people trample over. What matters for upholding rights is that laws and institutions recognize and value them, not whether they are natural or not.Read more at location 876
Nonetheless, some do argue that life is of such value that it is always worth prolonging, no matter how horrible. But why would one think that? Does anyone seriously believe that it would be better if a person died at midday rather than was tortured for twelve hours from noon onwards and died at midnight? Surely everyone would prefer to die sooner than later in this situation. Although extreme, this example demonstrates the point that simply having more life does not mean having a better life overall. Quality matters as well as quantity.Read more at location 1143
why is it OK if changes are natural and not if they are human-made? Cause seems irrelevant. What matters is whether changes are good or bad, and there is just no way to make sense of things being good or bad for the planet. The planet just is. For billions of years before humans came along it existed with no life, and will probably exist for billions more years after we’ve died out too. Far from making us humble, the idea that we have the power to hurt the earth is hubristic. From the hypothetical perspective of the earth (since, lacking consciousness, it has no perspective) we are at worst a temporary itch on something bigger and incomprehensibly longer-lived than ourselves. Nature doesn’t care what we do because it doesn’t have any thoughts or feelings, but it would not care even if it did.Read more at location 1681
In that sense, what we need to protect is not the environment but our environment. What matters is keeping the planet hospitable to human life. It may seem as though respect for nature for nature’s sake is a worthy value which can only do us good. But it can in fact lead us badly astray.Read more at location 1693
And so murder, infidelity, theft and so on are almost always wrong. But that doesn’t establish rules like ‘murder is wrong’ and it certainly doesn’t mean such actions are wrong because they break a moral rule. In that sense moral rules are more like laws of nature than laws of courts: they describe regularities found in nature, they do not prescribe regularities we ought to follow.Read more at location 2062
We can identify many things that matter for morality: happiness, respect, equality and so on. But it is impossible to say that one principle is the master principle, from which all other moral rules are derived. In different times, at different places, for different people, moral priorities change. Just as babies, children, adults and the elderly need to be treated differently, so other variations in the human condition require different moral responses. That, I suspect, is the truth that makes some kind of relativism inevitable.Read more at location 2302
Let’s say, for example, that you are a Christian. In the Book of Leviticus, there are all sorts of bizarre-sounding rules, laid down by God, which Christians no longer feel themselves obliged to follow. These include the death penalty for homosexuals and children who do not respect their parents, bans on eating hares and calamari, prohibitions on men trimming their beards, and approval of slavery. Most Christians believe, however, that the New Testament supersedes the Old and that these rules no longer apply. What this adds up to is the belief that what was wrong for the ancient Israelites is not wrong for modern Christians, on God’s command. That seems to me like a clear combination of relativism and the belief that God’s will underpins ethics.Read more at location 2326
In many ways this should not be surprising, since many have argued that the trouble with divine command theory – the idea that what is right or wrong is what God commands – is that it leaves open the possibility that God could command what is currently wrong to be right and vice versa. (See the next chapter for more on this.) Christian texts seem to provide evidence that this is precisely what their God has done.Read more at location 2332
If you put all these things together, you can see quite readily how something like morality emerges. Given brute facts and our desires, feelings and needs, we have good reason to uphold justice, to be fair and honest in our dealings with people, to show compassion, not to kill the innocent, and so on. These four factors together add up to a rationale for morality that is more than just enlightened self-interest, although that too is part of the mix and more often than not doing the right thing is better for us than not doing the right thing, in the long run at least.Read more at location 2426
Without an effective police force, it’s not that everything is permitted but nothing is enforced.Read more at location 2463
In morality, as in many other difficult areas of life, we want answers, so much so that we’ll often prefer a clear answer with a weak justification than accept a good justification for why there is no clear answer. Accepting a lack of answers in ethics is particularly difficult, since it seems to most of us that surely there must be some way of knowing what the right thing to do is. But is there?Read more at location 2472
ethics. If we are looking for clear answers, strict objective rules, then I think we’ll look in vain. If we think that all moral dilemmas can be resolved, we will be disappointed. But if we accept that we can make better moral choices, ones with genuinely better outcomes, by thinking clearly and attending carefully to what we really value, then there is a point to philosophical ethics. The final choice is always your own, and only you can bear responsibility for it. And to take that responsibility requires, I think, giving ethics the serious time and thought it deserves.Read more at location 2587
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