Basic Skills II

The four skills for ethics described in this chapter are imaginative skill, the ability to expand the reach of our empathy to include a wider range of people; assertive skill, the need to finally choose from among the competing values the ones we will embrace and live by; connective skill, that is, linking goodness with happiness—the kind of personal flourishing not available through fame and fortune; and narrative skill, which is our ability to tell true stories about ourselves and others. One key ingredient in narrative capacity is the ability to see that people intersect at different points at their life trajectories and with different moral concerns. The ethics of narration is the effort to tell truthful stories about these complex events.

Basic Skills I

Nine different skills are discussed as essential to ethics, 5 in chapter 2 and 4 in chapter 3. These skills are named according to the capacity that is required to exercise them. The first and most basic skill discussed in this chapter is one of probing—interrogating our moral prehistories. A moral prehistory is what we all acquired from our families of origin and the communities that nurtured us through childhood. None of us chose our prehistories, rather they are the “taken for granted” moral orientation each of us begins with. Learning to look both critically and appreciatively at this moral inheritance is the initial skill for ethics. The others described in this chapter are decentering skill (taming moral vanity and recognizing others), relinquishing skill (the act of giving up the comforts of moral certainty), emotional skill (learning from our feelings), and cognitive skill (thinking slowly).

Dimensions of Moral Experience

Moral perplexities are not of a single type; they take a variety of forms. They need to be appreciated before trying to resolve them through ethical systems or theories. Ethics begins in curiosity about why we think and feel as we do and why we differ from others. Everyone is engaged in ethics, and everyone can learn to exercise the skills that will make for a meaningful moral life. Engaging in moral dialogue is a humanizing activity; it requires suspension of judgment and respectful exploration of our own values and those of others. Three obstacles to ethics are defined: moral arbitrariness, absolute certainty, and perfectionism. Four aims of ethics are explored: discovering and claiming the moral values that define us; identifying the values of others; achieving consonance between internal values and external actions; and solving problems. The final section considers whether and how ethics can be taught and learned.

Skills and Concepts for Ethics beyond the Lifespan

The skills and concepts presented in previous chapters are here illustrated for their relevance for the problem of global warming, a calamity whose full effects will occur beyond the lifespan of many readers. This is arguably the most urgent ethical problem we now face. Five debilitating features of our current thinking are described: our focus on the present; political ineptness; the idea that humans are the crown of the creation; consumerism; and our mechanistic view of nature, including our own physical bodies. It is argued that the way forward is not through correcting our concepts but recognizing our grounding in Earth and embracing it. This kind of love of Earth and other life forms is related to but distinguished from that of scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Stephen J. Gould.

Moral Concepts in Practice II

This chapter continues the exploration of important concepts in ethics. These are ideas that most of us will find to be of crucial value at some point, and many of them will find routine use. The first concepts defined and explored in this chapter are voluntary and nonvoluntary responsibility. It is argued that the more holistic notion of a responsible person is preferable to a focus on separate responsible acts. The other concepts discussed are justice and the measures of impartiality used in justice, liberty, moral rights, conscience, and death. It is argued that conscience is an important facet of moral judgments, but not a final or unassailable authority. Death, it is argued, is an enabler of ethics, and a feature of moral life that gives it intensity and meaning.

Cracking the Case, and Cases to Consider

This concluding chapter deals with the nature and usefulness of ethical cases, and it opens with a prompt to readers to describe a moral problem relevant to their lives. It is argued that the most helpful ethical cases are the ones closest to home, which we have experienced or conceivably could experience. In the first section of this chapter, readers are taught to interrogate case presentations for their assumptions and biases, and some measures of effective ethics cases are offered. In the final section, 12 wide-ranging, contemporary cases are presented, along with prompts for how to explore them further. These are nonprescription use of Adderall; self-driving cars; vaccine refusal; arming school teachers; businesses that provide services selectively; paying student-athletes; cows and global warming; the effects of social media; choosing the sex of one’s children; age as a screen for expensive therapies; buying and selling organ; and divisive monuments.

Some Common Pitfalls

Ethics can go wrong in a variety of ways, some of the experiences and the interpretive related to inept use of the skills described in chapters 2 and 3. Five errors are singled out for special consideration as commonplace in ethics. These are the trap of either/or thinking (a simplistic understanding of ethical choices), expecting too much from theory (overestimating the importance of theory and undervaluing the insights of practice), the desire for a unifying conception of ethics (the misguided search for foundations), restricting what experiences have moral weight (truncating the potential sources of moral discernment), and treating mysteries as moral problems (failing to acknowledge the limits of ethics).

Exercises Using the Skills

This chapter offers a set of prompts designed to probe our understanding and use of the skills described in chapters 2 and 3. These prompts are grouped under 8 headings: curiosity about the contours and adequacy of one’s own moral sensibilities; a broad empathy; conceptual agility to see moral questions from multiple perspectives; identifying emotional registers; sensitivity to suffering; moral certainty/uncertainty; moral authority; and happiness. Multiple prompts under each heading seek to get at the same capacity in a different way. Readers are encouraged to respond to these prompts orally first and then in writing. The exercises are designed for use in pairs or with three people, with each person taking a turn as responder to the prompt and then as a careful listener who voices a follow-up.

Introduction: Purpose and Uses

This book maps the moral terrain in the grounded reality of human experience without relying on theories or systems of ethics as the primary orienting strategy. Moral awareness needs first to be appreciated for what it is before it is made to conform to theories or systems. And moral consciousness is not a steady or stable set of perceptions; as we change, so do the moral challenges that most concern us....

Moral Concepts in Practice I

This chapter and the chapter that follows define and explore a select number of concepts that are central to ethics. The emphasis is on how these concepts operate in moral life, their uses, misuses, and limitations. A lifespan approach to these concepts is important to keep in mind. Concepts that seem remote at one life stage, such as death, take on central importance at a later stage. The concepts discussed in chapter 6 are the anchoring value of truth; forgiveness and freedom; the varieties of love; the moral uses of spirituality; and the persistence of hope. Forgiveness is described as a gateway to a less encumbered life. The varieties of love are enumerated and their relevance to various dimensions and stages of life explored. Spirituality, including religious beliefs and practices, is explored for its moral importance. Hope is distinguished from optimism and does not require an object or something hoped for.