The ethics of writing on ethics

Question: Is it ethical for faculty to write columns about ethical questions?

Like a number of faculty members, I have been asked by editors of this newspaper to contribute to a fortnightly feature in which members of the faculty and University community respond to ethical problems and quandaries. I was flattered to be asked, and one cannot gainsay that a number of these columns — I think particularly of those by Professors George, Viroli and Ober — have been models of how such ethical issues such as just war, patriotism and citizenship ought to be addressed. And yet, for all my admiration, I could not bring myself to agree to write such a column — at least not before I answered the "ethical" question that I have assigned for myself today, one that was not on the lengthy list of questions that was provided by the editors of The Daily Princetonian.

Ethical questions are, by definition, "hard questions." Were they easy, there would be no need to discuss them. More often than not, the answers to such questions end up being some version of "it depends." It depends on the situation, on context, on the specific actors, on a whole range of particular and nontransferable factors that make any sweeping pronouncements difficult. To take just one example: Just War doctrine does indeed present a number of criteria under which the prosecution of war can be justified, but those criteria are sufficiently broad to allow for significant disagreement even among thinkers who subscribe to the "doctrine." Thus, in the current debate over the impending war on Iraq, one can easily find critics and supporters of the war who agree upon just war criteria, but disagree vehemently upon how the current specifics are to understood in light of those criteria.

Aristotle got it right a long time ago: "The subjects studied by political science are moral nobility and Justice; but these conceptions involve much difference of opinion and uncertainty . . ." It is not surprising that hard cases lead to disagreement. Such disagreement is both unavoidable and desirable as a feature of democratic self-government, a means by which citizens can inform themselves of the various implications of particular actions. More problematic, in my view, is the inclination, particularly among academics, to pose ethical questions in the abstract: Is civil disobedience allowable? Is torture always disallowed? Is affirmative action a sound public policy? These, and like questions, seem to me to inhabit a gray area whose resolution depends significantly on circumstances about which we would have to inform ourselves before we could reasonably reach a conclusion, however tentative and open to refinement.

In the meantime, the posing of such questions, and the heated attempt to answer them, points to the relevance of another observation by Aristotle: "The young are not fit to be students of Political Science. For they have no experience of life and conduct, and it is these that supply the premises and subject matter of this branch of philosophy. And moreover they are led by their feelings, so that they will study the subject to no purpose or advantage." Now, I'm not suggesting that all politics majors should transfer to other departments (I'm not quite as selfless and eager for unemployment as that). But Aristotle here suggests that most young people have certain inherited dispositions that incline them toward a particular stance on ethical questions, and that the passion such questions tend to evoke can actually stand in the way of the necessary openness to countervailing evidence, mitigating factors and extenuating contextual circumstances. Aristotle is fearful that such questions, posed when people have achieved insufficient training in self-control, can actually lead to a deficient appreciation of particulars — an appreciation that results from a cultivation of the moral virtues of temperance, liberality, gentleness, amiability and "greatness of soul" that are among hallmarks of ethical persons. Aristotle's work on ethics is not given over to a study of pressing ethical controversies of the fourth-century B.C., but is instead exclusively a study of character, and specifically the particular moral and intellectual virtues that want cultivation from the time a person is very young with an aim toward achieving the good and happy life of a "kaloskagathos," or fine and good person.

It's helpful to remind ourselves that in ancient Greek "ethos" means "character." Most of what passes for ethics in the contemporary academy takes the form of "act-centered" ethics — that is, the attempt to arrive at a set of principles or guidelines that can lead us in rightly deciding how to act or respond in certain situations. Aristotle, by contrast, argues on behalf of what is now called "agent-centered" ethics — the preliminary cultivation of good character that would lead one in the first instance to want to act "ethically," and beyond, to act with judiciousness, moderation, virtue and above all, prudence. The contemporary emphasis on "act-centered" ethics — of which the Princetonian ethics column is one example — operates on the assumption either that character is unimportant, or that each of us has already acquired by happenstance the requisite excellence of character that undergirds judicious treatment of ethical conundra.

Contemporary approaches to ethics incorporate a whole range of assumptions about human beings that are themselves almost never subject to reflection or investigation, and include the implicit assumption that "character" education is undesirable to the extent that it suggests untoward interference in self-formed identity or individuality. By presenting "ethics" exclusively as the investigation into how one should respond to acts external to oneself, one thereby avoids thorny questions about character and the responsibilities of teachers and institutions in cultivating such excellence of character. Hidden in the widespread good-feeling and self-congratulation that accompanies the engrossing attempt to grapple with significant ethical questions (feeding into dreams that each of us might be appointed someday to the Supreme Court) is an implicit but studied unwillingness to ask much about, or of, ourselves. In sum, attempting to answer hard ethical questions is not itself unethical, but to the extent that it is undertaken to detract attention from more fundamental questions of moral character, it may well be. Patrick Deneen is an Assistant Professor in the politics department. He can be reached at pdeneen@princeton.edu.