The Archangel Delusion. Descriptive Ethics and Its Role in the Education of Ethicists

The role of ethicists is to provide a genuine ethical theory to help non-ethicists interpret and solve moral dilemmas, to define what is right or wrong, and, finally, to clarify moral values. Therefore, ethicists are taught to address morality with rational procedures, to set aside their moral intuitions and emotions. Sometimes, professional ethicists are prone to falling into the archangel delusion – the belief that they are beyond the influence of their own emotions. This can lead to ousting moral intuitions from the space of ethical reflection, thus making ethicists unaware of them. They may treat intuitive beliefs about morality as an expression of primal moral feelings. The main question pursued in this article, is how those feelings may influence moral theories, which should be developed by professional ethicists. Ethicists may provide an ethical theory which is merely a rationalisation and justification for their own suppressed moral emotions, rather than the effect of genuine, rational moral reasoning. To help ethicists cope with this delusion, a model of cooperation between descriptive and normative ethics is proposed. Ethicists should therefore use the research tools of descriptive ethics to determine their own intuitions, and the moral emotions in which these intuitions are grounded. --------------- Received: 09/06/2021. Reviewed: 23/07/2021. Accepted: 13/08/2021.

Epilogue

At the end of the first chapter (1.5), I noted that, since having moved to an African country, I have considered myself to have had a moral obligation to engage with its intellectual traditions when teaching and researching. I would have rightly felt guilt had I taught merely Western ethics to African students and contributed only Euro-American-Australasian perspectives to journals published in the sub-Saharan region. Having been principally trained as an analytic moral and political philosopher, I have been in a good position to articulate normative-theoretic interpretations of African morality, to evaluate these moral theories by appealing to intuitions, and to apply them to a range of practical controversies. Now, it would be welcome if the relational moral theory I have defended in this book could explain why I had a duty to make such a contribution to the field. And indeed it does. I have had an obligation of some weight to teach and research African philosophical ideas as I am particularly able to do so for a reason that is by now familiar to the reader. In the way that a newly trained doctor has an obligation of some weight to give something back to his country before emigrating (...

Business Ethics

Chapter 12, the last applied ethics chapter, considers some controversies in business. How should a firm’s owners, and related agents such as managers or state bank directors, engage with others, particularly workers and consumers? The chapter argues that the communal ethic does a better job of accounting for intuitions about who counts as a stakeholder and how to prioritize amongst competing stakeholder interests than does utilitarianism or Kantianism. Roughly, rightness as friendliness entails that not all duties of beneficence are a function of need or voluntary assumption of obligation to aid; a firm can also have pro tanto moral reason to help parties because it has related on friendly terms with them in the past. The chapter also takes up the question of how the production process ought to be structured, arguing that while the Western moral theories could well allow an unconstrained managerialism, the communal ethic probably does not.

Conclusion

Chapter 13 concludes the book. It first highlights some of the communal ethic’s advantages compared to standard utilitarian and Kantian moral theories, recalling how it uniquely grounds judgements such as: animals have a moral status, albeit one less than that of humans; persons have a dignity of a sort that plausibly explains why reducing their quality of life matters morally; and despite people’s dignity’s demanding impartial consideration, an agent has duties to do more for those who have been in relationship with her. Then, the chapter sketches three projects it would be sensible to undertake, supposing the book’s central ideas have been worth taking seriously. Whereas the book focuses on prescriptive matters pertaining to right action in interpersonal contexts, it is also worth considering how well communality describes morality, whether it grounds an attractive account of good character, and what it entails for justice in legal, political, and economic institutions.

Moral Theories of Kalām in The Context of Goodness-Evil (Ḥusun-Kubuḥ)

The main research area of kalām science: Existence, knowledge and value. In this context, God-universe, God-human, human-nature and other creatures and human-human connection are important. Establishing the aforementioned contacts depends on resolving the issue of good (ḥusun)-evil (kubuḥ). The Good-evil problem is to investigate the origin and nature of morality. On the basis of morality, there are voluntary and free actions of the subject. Values should be taken into the research field by establishing a close relationship between will and action. Searching for origins in values is to make it functional. In other words, in order to transfer theoretical values to practical values, the origin of the values must be found. As a result of the search of origins in values, we will encounter two theories subjective and objective values. Subjective values theory depends on the subject. The theory of objective values is independent of the subject. It is al-Ashʿarī who adopts the first approach in theological (kalām) thought. The second one is adopted by Muʿtazila. The source of moral values in the Ashʿarīte doctrine is the subject God. In this approach, the right of divine power and divine wisdom are not given the same proportion. However, it is necessary to think separately on the fact that all subject-dependent issues are always variable. The equalization of the Ashʿarī system with the relativity current, which maintains that God, who gives existence and determines existence, also determines morality, should also be questioned.

The Ethics of Human–Robot Interaction and Traditional Moral Theories

The rapid introduction of different kinds of robots and other machines with artificial intelligence into different domains of life raises the question of whether robots can be moral agents and moral patients. In other words, can robots perform moral actions? Can robots be on the receiving end of moral actions? To explore these questions, this chapter relates the new area of the ethics of human–robot interaction to traditional ethical theories such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics. These theories were developed with the assumption that the paradigmatic examples of moral agents and moral patients are human beings. As this chapter argues, this creates challenges for anybody who wishes to extend the traditional ethical theories to new questions of whether robots can be moral agents and/or moral patients.

Dispensing with the Subjective Moral ‘Ought’

There are cases in which, intuitively, an agent’s action is both morally right in one sense and morally wrong in another sense. Such cases (along with other intuitions about blameless wrongdoing and action-guidance) support distinguishing between the objective moral ‘ought’ and the subjective moral ‘ought.’ This chapter argues against drawing this distinction on the grounds that the prescriptions delivered by an adequate objective moral theory must be sensitive to the mental states of agents. Specifically, an adequate theory of the objective moral ‘ought’ must respect a strong ought-implies-can principle—morally ought implies agentially can—in order to prescribe actions to real-life agents. An agent’s mental states determine what is agentially possible for that agent; thus, what an agent objectively morally ought to do is in part determined by the agent’s mental states. This chapter describes the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory that is both objective and mental state-sensitive. This non-ideal theory illuminates the shortcomings of extant objectivist and subjectivist moral theories and illustrates how we can dispense with the subjective moral ‘ought.’