Steffen - Ethics and Experience : Moral Theory from Just War to Abortion.

Preface

The question that has inspired this book is one that should be of interest to students and scholars of ethics: how might we best think about the moral life as people actually live it? While ethical inquiry can sometimes proceed confined to theory or, conversely, focused exclusively on practical applications, this question turns our attention to the connection between ethical thinking and moral experience, even suggesting that if experience informs our ethical thinking, so too does ethical thinking inform our lived experience. How the moral life ought to be lived is a question central to ethical reflection; it cannot be avoided, and no one should want to avoid it. Here, in these pages, that ought question will be raised in the context of lived moral experience. How do the experiences we have and the decisions we make to act one way rather than another affect our broader ethical thinking; how do the various ways we go about ethical thinking shape our practical decision making; and are our ethical theories adequate to address the complexity of the moral life as it is actually lived?

These questions require attention to both ethical theory and moral practice, and on the theoretical front there are many different resources that can be of help. Readers will not have to delve very far into these pages to see that in this project, a connection between ethics thinking and experience appears to depend significantly on ideas related to just war. The idea of a just war is admittedly controversial, and for all the attention I give to just war ideas in the pages ahead, I join those who are critical of just war thinking as it typically arises in public discussions or is employed as a tool of international policy making. This is a book about ethics and how to think about ethics, however, and we cannot deny that just war ideas are important in our ethics traditions and are routinely discussed in the ethics literature. I believe that attention to just war thinking can advance our thinking about moral experience and ethics in general, and the argument I offer here is that behind just warand beyond itlies an actual ethic that can help us understand the connection between ethical thought and moral experience even as it may transform the idea of just war into something other than what policy makers want to make of it, even to the extent of making it unfamiliar if not quite unrecognizable. That ethic, conformed to the moral point of view and described here as a hybrid ethic, includes duties and obligations, principles, attention to consequences, and virtues. This hybrid ethic seeks to reconcile our ethical thinking with our experience of living the moral life, and as such it also seeks to overcome long-standing conceptual antagonisms between deontology and consequentialism, action ethics and virtue ethics. This hybrid ethic, called a common agreement ethic in the pages that follow, is grounded in the human capacity for reason and reasonableness, which is the heart of what is referred to in these pages as natural law. Terms such as reason, duty, consequences, and even natural law are used throughout these pages in the lowercaseuse of these terms as uppercase realities are beyond the scope of this inquiry.

A few things may be said about this book by way of preface comments.

1. This book is meant to be a contribution to moral theory.

2. This book is offered as a supplement, even a corrective, to the division of moral theories into opposing campsKantian deontology, utilitarian consequentialism, virtue ethics. No one writing in ethics can ignore these theories, and I make use of them throughout the volume and acknowledge my dependence on them. My purpose is not to provide an exhaustive account of these theories or even attend to them more than is necessary for the case I am going to make. Numerous works, both scholarly monographs and textbooks, not to mention websites, can provide a more extensive grounding in any particular theory. Of significance to this study is that factand it is a factthat no moral theory is free from problems, and all have been subjected to harsh, even hostile criticism, as any proponent of a particular theory would readily acknowledge. To be properly schooled in ethics is to know something about the criticisms that attend any given ethical theory.

In the pages ahead I offer neither an in-depth analysis of the major moral theories nor a comprehensive rehashing of the criticisms that attend them, but those criticisms, which do point to real problems and sometimes serious inadequacies, open up the possibility for a different approach to ethics, which my purpose here is to propose. I make reference to just war thinking more for what it exemplifies as a mode of ethical approach rather than as a self-enclosed theory with no relationship to the long-standing theories recognized in our moral traditions. This proposed hybrid ethic respects the best that is in, say, deontological and utilitarian ethics without directing attention once more to the inadequacies of the theories so often the focus of attention in standard accounts of moral theory.

3. The idea of just war is an oxymoron to many people, and I understand thatas already indicated, I even agree with that. Just war has a bad reputation, and I take criticisms of just war thinking with the utmost seriousness. These pages, however, are not filled with historical examples supporting the reasons why criticisms of just war thinking are themselves justified and reasonable. I accept as a given the claim that wars are horrible, much to be avoided, and seem inevitably to end up as unjust, even those that may begin with reasonable claims to being just.

4. This book is sensitive to cultural differences and notes that some things pushed to the background in one society or cultural setting will be brought forward in another. This phenomenon of cultural life lends some apparent support to the idea that societal differences and the cultural divides we have constructed and know so well require us to see ourselves as morally disconnected from one another. Some of this will be sorted out in the upcoming discussion of cultural versus moral relativism, but at the outset the reader should know that in this book I do not regard the idea of human nature or the possibility of a moral community transcending cultural difference as chimerical. I will hold in these pageseven though this is not discussed at any lengththat those ethical theories that deny human nature or discount an ethic grounded in reason and the human capacity for reasonableness are themselves flawed in this sense: they are detached from insight into those values common to reasonable people of goodwill and thus fail to help us understand human action and even the deeper moral meaning of being human. Those values common to all, which I shall refer to as goods of life, are what I mean by human nature in the relevant moral sense.