On the Notion ‘Practical Ethics’

Bruce Morito
Athabasca University

INTRODUCTION: 
	Although I am concerned to develop the idea of practical ethics into a more general theory, I will restrict my focus on the distinction between practical ethics and applied ethics. The first part of the paper summarizes some of the key critics of applied ethics, where ‘applied ethics’ refers to the application of theory to “real world” situations, as if theory can be developed independently of the so-called real world.   For this, a review of James Rachels, Nancy Davis, Annette Baier, Thomas Nagel and Barry Hoffmaster will be used to show how applied ethics fails.  The second part of the paper will argue for a re-conceptualization of ethics as an emergent  practical discipline.  If we accept that human brains, minds, feelings and passions emerge within and because of a particular ecological history (evolutionary process), then we need to accept that all the conditions that make moral life possible also emerge in evolutionary history.  Ethical theorizing needs, then, to become more empirical in examining the conditions that make moral life possible and which direct that life.  In the end, I will argue that, by becoming more empirical, we will discover common principles that approximate a universal ethic.  The primary principles are: (a) avoid harm, (2) give what is owed, (3) act with integrity/honesty.
 
Some Anecdotes
	Many situations in which I have been called to “apply” ethical expertise to understanding and resolving conflicts – Aboriginal and environmental – could be used as evidence of the irrelevance of philosophers, when they simply apply an ethical theory to decision-making.  In many cases, Aboriginal people have objected that the core of their ethic is respect, and that their sense of respect is of a sort that crosses between duty-oriented morality, utilitarian calculations and virtue ethics; a situation that might lead some trained in theoretical ethics to conclude that Aboriginal ethics is incoherent.  When such cases are coupled with those cited by the likes of James Rachels and Barry Hoffmaster, we find that many decision makers (e.g., doctors, nurses and hospital administrators) often resent philosophers, not for trying to do the right thing, but for trying to impose what seem to be simplistic solutions to complex cases.  Patients, qua individuals, have unique psychological dispositions, histories, networks of relationships etc., all of which bear on what is important for and to them, what values they hold, how autonomously they can act and how well they can process information.   Moreover, people have complex ends:  they want their autonomy to be respected, but they also desire to be healed and to have networks of relationships remain in tact, robust .  These general descriptions of how complex decision-making contexts and moral ends can be in actual situations illustrate why many decision-makers feel that ethicists are somewhat irrelevant when attempting to contribute to decision-making processes.  In the next section, I will provide further justifications for decision-makers’ dismissal. 

Failures of Ethics
Practical
	James Rachels and Barry Hoffmaster go further; they demonstrate how by attempting to minimize or even eliminate concerns over a person’s context, philosophers would harm and have harmed more than help(ed) those for whom decisions were being made.  Both Rachels and Hoffmaster describe situations in which conceiving of persons as ends-in-themselves (never merely as means) have blinded ethicists to patients’ ethnic and historical backgrounds in their condemnation of or advice to decision-makers.  In Rachels’ case, parents who had a second child, partly because it was their only hope of finding a suitable bone marrow donor for their first daughter who had leukemia, were condemned by a New York ethicist, because they were viewed as treating their younger daughter as a mere means to an end.  In Hoffmaster’s case, ethicists are criticized for focusing on the respect for autonomy and adherence to informed consent, when many patients with different ethnic backgrounds and capacities do not or cannot exercise autonomy to the same extent or in the same way.  Experiential, cultural and other sorts of differences can sometimes cause patients to view the medical profession as beneficent healers and the healing process as one in which they submit to the beneficence of the healer.  
	In other cases, such as those having to do with First Nations, the problem of colonialism enters the analytic scheme.  Using the concepts and principles of the dominant ethical systems is often viewed as a further imposition of colonial values and authority.  Assumptions of individuality and the conception of rationality as a justificatory (trumping) scheme and its association with the principle of informed consent define the consultation process in ways that are incompatible with assumptions of collectivity and a conception of rationality as a process of consensus building, dreaming and dealing with ambiguity (with the Trickster).  Beginning with different cosmological and epistemological assumptions can sometimes produce similar conclusions, but the process of reaching that conclusion (decision) might be radically different.  And if it is in the process of dialogue and communication that cultural values are most poignantly exercised, to impose the first set of assumptions implies that the second must be suppressed;  it constitutes a continuation of denying the Aboriginal voice.  
	As an aside, for this reason, I have been attempting to develop a process of values analysis informed by the plurality of perspectives from various sectors, cultures and genders in an attempt to ensure that an adequate understanding of people’s perspectives and value systems are incorporated into decision-making processes.  As a mid-level analytic procedure, it attempts to be inclusive yet enable the various groups who have a stake in a decision to understand one another.
	The final practical reason for challenging the approach to ethics typically used by philosophers is its marginal relevance to issues concerning climate change.  Typically, what we see in the literature on vulnerability studies to climate change is a focus on justice of distributive justice and arguments concerning the distribution of risk and opportunity.  There is a tendency among those on the left to further focus on the unequal distribution of power and, therefore, ability to adapt.  This focus then leads ethicists to analyze the ethics of vulnerability to climate change in terms of re-distribution of wealth and power in order to right balances, provide equality of opportunity.  But as some research has noted, not all people want such re-distribution. Certain peasant economies, for instance, want to maintain stable family and social relations under a hierarchical system, in which relatively rich landlords take their share of goods produced on the land, but also act beneficently in times of scarcity.  Others have shown how some poor in Brazil have established a sub-economy of recycling the waste of richer people, a system of territories and a social network.  They resist efforts to change their situation into ones of greater equity, partly because such equality would count as a reduction in their freedom and way of life.  It would deny their value system as they have constructed it.
	What these instances suggest is that, as ethicists, we need to understand what really matters to people, how it matters and why it matters, before thinking about what ought to be done, since what matters will inform decisions makers about what counts as harms to people and about what will likely constitute an effective decision.  An empirical turn of sorts is needed.  Description needs to precede prescription. 

Theoretical
	From a more theoretical perspective, MacIntyre, Nagel, Williams, Baier and Davis form a block of critics who have criticized what has been called traditional ethics.  MacIntyre attacks the pretense (of armchair Oxford thinkers) of claiming that an objective grounding for moral decision making can be determined, when in fact that ground is nothing more than a preference, which in turn, is based on an emotive response.  And since philosophers tend to refuse to acknowledge that the emotive in their grounding efforts, they are either self-deceptive or hypocritical.{MacIntyre, 1981 #731 @ix}  Nancy Ann Davis takes the issue of hypocrisy further. She argues that from Plato (participation) through Kant (typic) on, philosophers have attempted to ground ethics in some ideal, rational world – in the realm of the intelligible or pure practical reason – which, by definition, is incommensurable with the lower order world of physical objects and biologically driven impulses, desires and interests.  Therefore, the rational and universal has no logical connection to the empirical; it is inapplicable to the real world of moral life. 
	Nagel calls us to be much more tentative about holding moral views, owing to the complexity of human life and confusion in human thought.  Indeed, we should view ourselves as at a somewhat primitive stage, progressing, hopefully, toward a somewhat more coherent understanding of how to live and treat others.{Nagel, 1986 #2806}  Bernard Williams argues for the need to understand philosophy as historically contextualized, not some eternally valid set of principles and concepts.  The upshot of these criticisms is that ethics, at least in the West, belongs to a tradition that has misidentified what moral life is about and what moral language represents.  We need to study moral life and moral utterances as they actually are or have been and understand more deeply what gives rise to moral life, if we are to make genuinely significant statements about it. 

Failure of Applied Ethics 
	The project of applied ethics, that is, the philosophical design of imposing concepts and principles developed in some pure rational/intelligible ideal world to describe and prescribe for moral life is bound to fail at a variety of levels and in a variety of ways.  For this paper, I want to focus on a particular kind of failure; that which has to do with not accounting for what is actually important to people when they form moral communities.  I am proposing that, before any prescription is to be sought, understanding is needed.  Put more positively, for ethics to be more successful and relevant, it needs to incorporate the function of understanding as core to moral life.  A more empirical approach to ethics is required to refocus on understanding in at least two senses.  The first is a refocusing on the origins of moral life and how it is to be conceived within the complex context of history, ecology, evolution.  The second is a refocusing on the role of understanding in moral relationships, particularly the dialogical aspects of that relationship.  
If we ask, “Why is it that mutual understanding often dissolves conflict?” , we can begin to see how developing mutual understanding can prevent conflicts and how a denial of understanding can exacerbate or even produce conflict.  What moral significance does this role of understanding have?  For one, it tells us that much of the purpose of moral life – to live in peaceful relationships – can be achieved without employing any explicitly formulated moral precepts or principles.  It does so in a number of ways.  The first is that it creates a dialogical context in which people attune themselves to one another, which has the further effect of making it more difficult to detach themselves from the concerns and perspectives of others.  In turn, they cannot readily treat the others as strangers and enemies whose personalities and intentions can be re-constructed for purposes of demonization (as in propaganda).  The second, is that it makes us more aware of the dependencies we have, not only on one another, but on the wider range of conditions that support moral life and life in general.  By becoming more aware of our dependencies, we are less likely to manufacture conflict.
	If we extend MacIntyre’s arguments further and couple them with the above observations, we can also see how a re-focusing on understanding could produce more of what we want from moral communities than can the focus on justificatory schemes.  If MacIntyre is right and ethics is ultimately about trying to defend the trumping rights of one set of emotional responses over others, the act of doing ethics is, in the end, an act of doing combat (the trumping activity of justificatory schemes).  It is a means for conducting verbal/intellectual battle.  Not only moralism – the dogmatic adherence to moral precepts and rules – but ethical theorizing itself contributes to the manufacturing of conflict.  Further, when understanding the conditions of moral life, what actually matters to people and dependency relations become secondary to justification.  As almost all students in the west who are trained in ethics have experienced, we are taught to use empirical data as examples, rather than grounds; examples of affirming instances or as counter examples to undermine another’s justificatory schemes.  As such, the empirical is used as a weapon to demonstrate superior understanding or lack of understanding, rather than as a means to develop mutual understanding.  
	Focusing on justification and trumping rights, then, not only often increases the conflict its use is intended to resolve, we can expect it to do so.  By assuming an adversarial relationship between interlocutors, traditional approaches shape both the process of conflict resolution and general moral relations into ones constituted by members conceived as winners and losers.  To be the loser, given the complexities of human nature, is to become better aware of what one needs to do to win the next time.  Learning how better to use the systems of justification then serves to escalate conflicts and widen as well as sharpen divisions between people.  If, then, resolving conflict is the point of developing ethical theories, those theories are not well conceived.  	Indeed, the fact that alternative dispute resolution approaches are being designed and implemented attests to a growing disenchantment with the legalistic, adversarial approaches to conflict resolution.  Combative models of normative discourse are being challenged by more consensus building approaches (e.g., Aboriginal healing models, feminism ethics of care and a plethora of other kinds of ethics, such as a return to virtue ethics, relational ethics).  If applying ethical theory fails in so many ways, it makes sense to shift assumptions, approaches and conceptualizations of ethics and moral life; hence the shift to practical ethics.

Call for Inversions
	If we are to avoid failures of the above sort, I suggest that we need to invert some of our expectations and the overall conceptual framework, initially to give an account of the conditions that give rise to moral life (e.g., what actually matters to people, dependency relations etc.)  and then to re-consider the role of ethics in moral life.  For the sake of argument, I will assume that the first has been established.  As moral beings, we emerge in the historical evolution of human societies and are embedded within ecological processes.  No less is true of moral life.  The second will be treated as a means for articulating the idea of practical ethics.
	Let me begin by assuming, along with the tradition, that our rational nature make us distinct from other animals in so far as it enables us to deliberate and make decisions based on those deliberations.  It allows us to systematize our reasons for action in thought and to form, as a result, intentions and decisions.  Ideal world constructions are part of this function of reasoning, but they do not indicate that we belong to some detached, intellectual or pure rational world.  From an ecological perspective, they are to be conceived as useful instruments for clarifying lines of thought.  As such, they do not dictate what judgments ought to be, in and of themselves, but inform moral judgment.  Justificatory schemes provide reasons for deciding one way rather than another, but cannot be the final determinant.  Much more needs to be taken into account before a decision can be made.  When we examine the conditions that make moral life possible and why people enter into moral communities – here, the analysis will not be given – we might find that MacIntyre is indeed right; emotional responses are the core of moral life.  We might find that moral life is deeply and ineluctably vague and ambiguous.  If so, then the task of ethics is not to try to ignore or make emotions irrelevant, but to understand how they inform the ends of moral life.  If life and moral life are deeply ambiguous, we will need to re-conceptualize the task of ethics to help us deal with it, not eliminate it.  If complexity and ambiguity are core and ineluctable conditions of moral life, no one justificatory scheme (e.g., deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics) alone will be sufficient to enable us to develop and sustain moral community.  They, at best, become tools for informing us about possible courses of action.  The implied plurality of moral ends that will have to be addressed will demand an approach to ethics that will invert the roles of justification and judgment.  Justificatory reasoning will not be conceived as dictating moral judgment, but as a tool for informing such judgment.
	Developing moral competence at integrating the plurality of ends and forces, becomes far more important as the purpose of educating students in ethics, rather than developing combative techniques.  We would be taught to turn our attention to developing well-informed and well attuned members of the moral community.  Such members pay as much attention to seeking mutual understanding, as to argumentation.  We would first be concerned to protect the moral community and then to justify beliefs about the right things to do.
	Moral competence, according to the above argument, is not something that can be defined ahead of time, except in general terms.  Generally, it is the ability to integrate and make good judgments.  But what constitutes good judgment depends as much on recognition by a moral community as on individual capacities and demonstrations of excellence.  The notion of practice, therefore, becomes useful for describing the process that leads to determinations of moral competence.  It is a philosophically pragmatic notion that cannot be fully determined apart from engagement in community.

Conclusion
	Whenever ethical thought turns toward the empirical, philosophers trained in the West tend to react with accusations that the naturalistic fallacy is just around the corner and that the demand for universality is being sacrificed at the alter of practicality.  Whatever objectivity that can be hoped for is also sacrificed.  This reaction, however, is not to consider the task very carefully.  On this matter, I can even appeal to the arch rationalist, Leibniz, to show that we do not sacrifice as much as we fear by taking an empirical turn.  Leibniz claims to have conducted and empirical investigation into the foundations of all societies that have a legal tradition.  He found was that all such societies adopt three general moral principles: 1) Harm Principle; 
2) Giving what is owed; 3) Integrity or honesty.  Indeed, my own cross-cultural investigation has led me to draw similar conclusions about these three moral principles.  But with something more primitive that integrates them into a single set of moral sensibilities.  It is plausible to conclude that a thorough analysis of any culture, or society that has an interest in becoming well-ordered and safe, will adopt these three principles.
	This general level, however, these principles do not tell us how to act in specific situations.  Thus, to adopt them is to seek shared understanding and agreement over the substance of these principles.  As would be expected from a pragmatic perspective, dialogue is the only means through which understanding and agreement could enjoy the stamp of legitimacy.  People who enter into such dialogue would begin to develop a shared language and meanings, as well as a shared life world (to use a Habermasian concept).  Like Habermasian ethics prescribes, we would find ourselves having to be reflective about our own values, perspectives etc. and prepared to re-conceive them in an effort to protect the dual concerns of individual and community.
	I consider this approach to ethics practical as opposed to applied, then, for what I hope by now are obvious reasons.  The problem with practical ethics, I will admit, is more far-reaching than most critics (as noted above) have indicated.  A key problem is that we need to re-value and re-conceive the enterprise of doing ethics.  With MacIntyre, we cannot expect to be the armchair philosophers of days past and remain relevant.  If theory is to serve judgment, which is concrete and contextualized in actual communities, than theorists need to be engaged with this contexts before they can be seen as having legitimacy.