Between the grief triggered about my mother and my two-way passage through the unit of people who are here and yet not here, I invariably leave the nursing home so depressed that I am not much good to anyone else for about twenty-four hours. Should 1 continue to visit my mother's friend?
Your friend has applied for a job and you are on the hiring c o m m i t tee. Objectively speaking, he is qualified but his application does not exactly jump to the top of the pile. Years ago, he helped you find a position. You know f r o m experience the glass-in-your-gut feeling of u n e m p l o y m e n t. Should you try to give his application a boost? Would that be fair? T h e r e is an ancient and much prized virtue called loyalty. How should we balance fairness and loyalty when they come into conflict?
Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, the killing fields of Rwanda, the American harrowing machine of slavery, and the genocide of Native A m e r i c a n s are h u m a n beings beasts? H o w can the h o r d e of us be so easily c o r r u p t e d and transformed into murderers? Or take it one or two notches up from the moral abyss to the recent scandals on Wall Street and in the banking industry: H o w could all of these Ivy L e a g u e - e d u c a t e d businessmen and -women, stalwarts of their c o m munities, defraud people out of their life savings while sipping martinis in the Hamptons?
Abstract, concrete, and in between, the questions about ethics abound. W h a t constitutes moral progress? W h a t criteria should we use to evaluate conduct? C a n I morally justify my actions? Should I do the so-called right thing if it is against my self-interest? W h a t is the right thing anyhow? Is ethics a body of knowledge? If so, how do we acquire this knowledge? From books? T h e s e are some of the p r o b l e m s that fall within the purview of ethics and this collection.
But what unites this family of concerns? W h a t is ethics? Listen to Herodotus. In Book T h r e e of his Histories, he writes:. I have no doubt that Cambyses was completely out of his mind; it is the only possible explanation of his assault upon, and mockery of, everything which ancient law and custom have m a d e sacred in Egypt. If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country.
Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. T h e r e is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country.
O n e might recall, for example, an anecdote of Darius. W h e n he was king of Persia, he s u m m o n e d the G r e e k s who h a p p e n e d to be present at his court, and asked t h e m what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers.
T h e y replied that they would not do it for any m o n e y in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents' dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. T h e y uttered a cry of h o r r o r and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing.
O n e can see by this what custom can do. In other words custom is king. Scholars have noted that both the word "ethics" and the term "morals," which are often used interchangeably, derive respectively f r o m the Greek and Latin words for "customs. On this account, there is n o t h i n g sacred about the injunction not to lie, n o t h ing from on High d e m a n d i n g that we refrain from cruelty. It is the idea of "family values" writ large. From this skeptical point of view, norms are socially constructed rules that t h e strong individual has to learn how to feign following so that he or she can at least appear to be just; but, a la Machiavelli, the appearance is all that matters, and only so that the strong person can get what he or she wants.
T h a t ethics has no objective reality, no basis in nature, is half of the gist of the immortal Ring of Gyges myth see page 40 , again f r o m Plato's Republic. According to the story with which G l a u c o n regales Socrates, a shepherd happens upon a ring that renders him invisible when he rotates the facet inward. T h e shepherd m u r d e r s the king and marries his wife. Glaucon insists that any intelligent man who could slip such a ring u p o n his finger would and should do the same.
And if ethics is in fact just custom, a matter of putting the fork on the left side, then maybe Glaucon is correct and there is no reason to refrain from cheating on our taxes and spouses. In what the philosopher Friedrich N i e t z s c h e would come to see as a sin against h u m a n nature, Plato's Socrates reasons that not only should we act justly with or w i t h o u t the magical ring, but that the righteous individual w h o is wrongly declared unjust and severely punished is happier than the scoundrel who bamboozles people and receives honors from the local chamber of commerce.
H e r e the connection between good living ethics and the good life eudaimonia. In philosophical parlance, Plato and Socrates were both objectivists and cognitivists. T h e y believed that G o o d n e s s exists i n d e p e n dently of the mores of a particular society and that we can c o m e to know it.
Indeed, it was with this transcendent standard of the G o o d in mind that Socrates, the war hero and devoted citizen of his beloved Athens, twice risked his life in acts of civil disobedience. T h e r e are glaring problems with the ethics-equals-customs equation.
It does not seem right to say that when we c o n d e m n slavery or torture we mean only that these practices are simply conventions that h ave gone out of favor. W h e n we complain that the greed of the champions of finance has w r o u g h t havoc on the American economy and working people, we mean something more potent than the actions of these m o n e y - m o n g e r s is not to our taste. W h a t e v e r ethics may be, it cannot be strictly identified with customs.
N e v e r theless, moral and social life are inextricably bound together. As Alasdair M a c l n t y r e puts it: Moral concepts change as social life changes.
I deliberately do not write "because social life changes," for this might suggest that social life is one thing, morality another, and that there is merely an external contingent causal relationship between them. Moral concepts are embodied in and are partially constitutive forms of social life. For the most part, except in the cases of certain types of crimes, the law is not concerned with intentions.
T h e law does not care w h e t h e r or not you paid your taxes with bitterness or alacrity; it merely demands that you carry out or abstain from certain types of conduct. On most accounts of morals, the springs of your actions speak to the issue of the moral worth of your actions.
T h e r e are, moreover, m a n y acts that would raise the brows of conscience but to which laws are indifferent, actions such as malicious gossip and failing to help the poor. Finally, the halls of history are h u n g with statutes that could only have been written by the devil. Consider some of the Nazi legislation or our own miscegenation laws of a mere sixty years ago.
As T h o m a s Aquinas and his longdistance learning student, Dr. Martin L u t h e r King, Jr. Legal strictures that do not measure up to that standard, and so poison rather than n u r t u r e life, are only simulacra of a law and as such call for acts of civil disobedience.
Although there may be considerable overlap, ethics is neither law nor custom. W h a t e v e r else it may be, ethics is the study of oughts and of relationships; that is, of how we aught to relate to ourselves, ought to relate to others, and as of late, of how we ought to relate to the earth. T h e anthology before you is an assemblage of classical texts on the science of oughts.
But before squeaking open the door to this collection, we might press: W h a t is the use of studying these relationships? Of becoming a student of the literature on ethics? In the first m o v e m e n t of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle responds to this very question: As then our present study, unlike the other branches of philosophy, has a practical aim for we are not investigating the nature of virtue for the sake of knowing what is, but in order that we may become good without which result our investigation would be of no use.
Notice, Aristotle does not offer a preface of this ilk in any of his h u n dreds of other tracts. T h e end of the study of ethics should not be the mere acquisition of knowledge or an increased ability to debate about right and wrong. Instead, the study of ethics ought to transform us in some way. W h a t kind of transformation am I alluding to? In his philosophical m a g n u m opus, The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Soren Kierkegaard observed that he wrote to make life m o r e difficult for his readers.
Almost the same could be said for a w o r t h while collection on ethics. My hope is that spending time in these pages will make our lives m o r e difficult by illuminating problems that used to fly u n d e r the radar of conscience. And while these r e a d ings should sharpen our moral insight, they should also enhance our lives. For as the great Stoic Seneca puts it, " H e who studies with a philosopher"—or, I think, with a book of philosophy—"should take h o m e with him some good thing every day; he should daily return h o m e a s o u n d e r man, or on the way to become sounder.
Plato composed the dialogues Euthyphro and Crito, but it is widely believed that the conversations that comprise these magisterial works of literature and philosophy were based on discussions that his teacher Socrates engaged in at the time of his trial and death.
T h e Republic is a later production and though Socrates is the central character in this work, the views and arguments expressed therein are widely held to be those of Plato himself. Born in Athens in B. Today the philosophers who preceded Socrates, such as Anaximander, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, are routinely grouped together u n d e r the heading "the Pre-Socratics. T h e great city state was a d e m o c r a c y and in order to accrue power in this type of government you had to learn how to convince others of your opinion.
Philosophical sparring was c o m m o n over questions such as: Are morals based in n a t u r e or in custom? T h o u g h a stonemason by trade, Socrates was an intellectual m a r tial artist by calling. He became both famous and infamous for p u b licly dissecting the reasoning of the powerful and elite, often making t h e m seem foolish in the eyes of the crowd gathered at these examinations. A cadre of admirers swirled around him and listened intently as he debated sophists such as Gorgias and Protagoras.
Socrates did not regard his skills of analysis as a tool for amassing power in the worldly sense, but rather as a means of ferreting out the truth. His thinking may have been that both the internal and external worlds are always shifting.
In order to achieve some degree of stability, h u m a n s need to have a compass. T h e only reliable compass in the face of flux is reason and argument. Socrates is not alone a m o n g our moral philosophers in seeking this ballast within the self. In a way, Socrates had nothing to teach but a method. After all, he claimed only one piece of knowledge, namely, that he knew that he did not know anything.
Paradoxically enough, it was on the basis of this self-awareness that the oracle at Delphi judged him to be the wisest person in the world. As Aristophanes's brilliant play The Clouds reveals, there were citizens who believed that Socrates's style of questioning u n d e r m i n e d faith in the gods of the city, and it was for this lack of faith that Athens was being punished.
Socrates was b r o u g h t up on charges of sowing doubts about the gods and of corrupting the youth. He was unsuccessful in his ironic self-defense and was executed by being forced to drink hemlock. O n e of the selections, Crito, is set in Socrates's prison cell as he awaits execution. Plato was surely p r e s e n t at his mentor's trial. A stern critic of democracy, Plato recognized the intimate bond between the health of the individual and that of t h e state.
On his account, one needed to know the Good in order to steer the state in a good direction. T r y i n g Ethics: The Essential Writing. These adventures ended in disaster, making for a certain hidebound quality to Plato's late works. It is difficult to parse out the ethical positions of Socrates from those of his genial student, Both placed enormous emphasis on the relation between knowledge and moral goodness; so much so that it seems that Socrates, at least, held the extreme view that moral virtue is essentially knowledge.
If you truly know the Good, you will do it. For him there is no weakness of the will. Also, as the renowned classicist Terence Irwin notes, Socrates seems to have held that we ought to lead a moral life whether or not such a life leads to happiness. Plato, in contrast, argues that the righteous life is not only good in itself but also a necessary condition of a eudaimonia or a happy life.
These issues as well as the question of whether or not moral laws are customs or objective realities are taken up in the Ring of Gyges excerpt from Book II of the Republic. Surely you can not be engaged in an action before the king, as 1 am. EUTH: What! EUTH: T h e n some one else has been prosecuting you? Perhaps you may remember his appearance; he has a beak, and long straight hair, and a beard which is ill grown.
And what is the charge which he brings against you? Well, a very serious charge, which shows a good deal of character in the young man, and for which he is certainly not to be despised. He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corruptors. I fancy that he must be a wise man, and seeing that 1 am anything but a wise man, he has found me out, and is going to accuse me of c o r r u p t i n g his young friends.
And of this our m o t h e r the state is to be the judge. Of all o u r political men he is the only one w h o seems to me to begin in the right way, with the cultivation of virtue in youth; he is a good husbandman, and takes care of the shoots first, and clears away us who are the destroyers of them.
T h a t is the first step; he will afterward attend to the elder branches; and if he goes on as he has begun, he will be a very great public benefactor. My opinion is that in attacking you he is simply aiming a blow at the state in a sacred place. But in what way does he say that you c o r r u p t the young? EUTH: I understand, Socrates; he means to attack you about the familiar sign which occasionally, as you say, comes to you.
He thinks that you are a neologian, and he is going to have you up before the court for this. He knows that such a charge is readily received, for the world is always jealous of novelties in religion. And I know that when I myself speak in the assembly about divine things, and foretell the f u t u r e to them, they laugh at me as a madman; and yet every word that 1 say is true.
But they are jealous of all of us. I suppose that we must be brave and not mind them. For a man may be thought wise; but the Athenians, I suspect, do not care m u c h about this, until he begins to make other men wise; and then for some reason or other, perhaps, as you say, from jealousy, they are angry. But I have a benevolent habit of pouring out myself to everybody, and would even pay for a listener, and I am afraid that the Athenians know this; and therefore, as I was saying, if the Athenians would only laugh at me as you say that they laugh at you, the time might pass gaily enough in the court; but perhaps they may be in earnest, and then what the end will be you soothsayers only can predict.
EUTH: I dare say that the affair will end in nothing, Socrates, and that you will win your cause; and I think that I shall win mine, s o c : And what is your suit?
SOC: Your father! EUTH: Yes. A man must be an extraordinary man and have m a d e great strides in wisdom, before he could have seen his way to this. EUTH: Indeed, Socrates, he must have m a d e great strides, soc: I suppose that the man whom your father m u r d e r e d was one of your relatives; if he had been a stranger you would never have t h o u g h t of prosecuting him.
EUTH: I am amused, Socrates, ac your making a distinction between one who is a relation and one who is not a relation; for surely the pollution is the same in either case, if you knowingly associate with the murderer when you ought to clear yourself by proceeding against him.
T h e real question is whether the murdered man has been justly slain. If justly, then your duty is to let the matter alone; but if unjustly, t h e n even if the m u r d e r e r is u n d e r the same roof with you and eats at the same table, proceed against him.
My father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. M e a n t i m e he had no care or t h o u g h t of him, being u n d e r the impression that he was a murderer; and that even if he did die there would be no great harm. And this was just what happened. For such was the effect of cold and h u n g e r and chains u p o n him, that before the messenger returned from the diviner, he was dead.
And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the m u r d e r e r and prosecuting my father. T h e y say that he did not kill him, and if he did, the dead man was but a murderer, and I ought not to take any notice, for that a son is impious who prosecutes a father.
T h a t shows, Socrates, how little they know of the opinions of the gods about piety and impiety, soc: G o o d heavens, Euthyphro! EUTH: T h e best of E u t h y p h r o , and that which distinguishes him, Socrates, from o t h e r men, is his exact knowledge of all these matters.
W h a t should 1 be good for without that? I think that T can not do better than be your disciple, before the trial with Meletus comes on.
T h e n I shall challenge him, and say that 1 have always had a great interest in religious questions, and now, as he charges me with rash imaginations and innovations in religion, I have become your disciple. N o w you, Meletus, as I shall say to him, acknowledge E u t h y p h r o to be a great theologian, and sound in his opinions; and if you think that of him you o u g h t to think the same of me, and not have me into court; you should begin by indicting him who is my teacher, and who is the real corruptor, not of the young, but of the old; that is to say, of myself whom he instructs, and of his old father whom he admonishes and chastises.
EUTH: Yes, Socrates; and if he attempts to indict me I am mistaken if I don't find a flaw in him; the court shall have a great deal more to say to him than to me. For 1 observe that no one, not even Meletus, appears to notice you; but his sharp eyes have found me out at once, and he has indicted me for impiety. And therefore, I adjure you to tell me the nature of piety and impiety, which you said that you k n e w so well, and of murder, and the rest of them.
What are they? Is not piety in every action always the same? EUTH: Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting any one who is guilty of murder, sacrilege, or of any other similar c r i m e — w h e t h e r he be your father or mother, or some other person, that makes no d i f f e r e n c e — a n d not prosecuting t h e m is impiety.
And please to consider, Socrates, what a notable proof I will give you of t h e t r u t h of what 1 am saying, which 1 have already given to others:—of the truth, I mean, of the principle that the impious, whoever he may be, o u g h t not to go u n p u n i s h e d.
For do not m e n regard Zeus as the best and most righteous of the gods? And yet when I proceed against my father, they are angry with me. T h i s is their inconsistent way of talking when the gods are concerned, and when I am concerned, soc: M a y not this be the reason, E u t h y p h r o , why I am charged with i m p i e t y — t h a t I can not away with these stories about the gods?
But, as you who are well informed about t h e m approve of them, I can not do better than assent to your superior wisdom. For what else can I say, confessing as 1 do, that I know nothing of them. I wish you would tell me whether you really believe that they are true? T h e temples are full of them; and notably t h e robe of Athene, which is carried up to the Acropolis at the great Panathenaea, is embroidered with them.
Are all these tales of the gods true, Euthyphro? EUTH: Yes, Socrates; and, as I was saying, I can tell you, if you would like to hear them, many other things about the gods which would quite amaze you. But just at present I would rather hear from you a m o r e precise answer, which you have not as yet given, my friend, to the question, W h a t is "piety"? In reply, you only say that piety is, Doing as you do, charging your father with murder?
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