swimmer you can save the drowning person. Immediately you jump into action by kicking off your shoes, diving into the water and saving the person. The result is that you were unable to keep your promise to your friend, but you saved another human being. You exercised your practical reason—you observed someone in trouble, knew that you had the ability to assist and concluded that you were obliged to act. You tacitly exercised theoretical reason as well. The action suggested that the immediate need to save someone overrode the obligation to keep a promise to meet someone for lunch. However, your consideration of the matter did not result in thought or contemplation alone. You did not sit down and ask yourself if this episode fell under Ross’s theory of prima facie duties—duties that should be kept other things being considered. Ross uses this example to help us think or contemplate about such an episode. His theory of prima facie duties states that we should keep our promises unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. In so far as we contemplate what we might do, we are engaged in theoretical reason. It may not lead to an action. For instance, in a classroom on ethics, teachers and students consider and discuss prima facie duties without the discussion concluding with an action. If they were holding class outside next to the lake on campus and saw a drowning person, one would not expect a theoretical discussion but an action to save the endangered person.
Ethics then assumes practical reason and students arrive having already been formed to some degree by practices of everyday life that have already required actions from them, actions that ended in moral failure or success. They most likely have also contemplated what was the proper course of action and thus engaged in theoretical reason. Both assume that the subject of ethics is human action either directed to the good (or right) and/or away from evil. “To do good and avoid evil,” wrote the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, is the first principle of the practical reason. This first principle should resonate with Southern Methodist University because the first two rules of the original Methodist societies, rules that remain in theory binding on all Methodists to this day, are first “do no harm, avoiding evil of every kind,” and second “do good.” (There is a third rule to attend upon the ordinances of God.) These first two rules restate the first principle of practical reason. It is, however, only a beginning point that assumes, on the whole, people in the course of their life try to do good and avoid evil. There may be persons who are sociopaths who seek evil and avoid good, but ordinary life would not be possible if they were the norm. Whether out of self-preservation or concern for others, most people do not drive willy-nilly through red lights. Why is this true? Is it because we seek to be (1) virtuous citizens, (2) faithful creatures before God, (3) moral agents who treat others as we desire to be treated, (4) individuals who maximize utility, or (5) agents who have been cared for by others and seek to extend that caring to others? Each of these options offers a theoretical response to the practical question of ethics. They describe how we go about being ethical and they prescribe how we should act. They also bring out five important moments in the history of ethics. One reason for the need to teach ethics is to know how those who came before us thought about ethics.
(1) Aristotle’s Virtuous Citizen
Perhaps we refuse to run through red lights because we have been trained in virtues that make us good citizens in our cities and neighborhoods. This would be the reason given by one of the earliest philosophers who taught ethics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC). Although much has changed in the twenty-four hundred years since he lectured and wrote on ethics, his work is still widely used to help us understand what ethics is. Aristotle identified five “virtues of thought” that assist us in knowing what is true: craft (techne), scientific knowledge (episteme), practical wisdom (phronesis), wisdom (sophia), and understanding (nous). Craft is concerned with production similar to what builders, engineers and manufacturers make. The end product is external to the one who makes it so this kind of knowledge does not necessary produce virtue. For instance, one could be a morally compromised person and an excellent surgeon or car mechanic. It would be better if a surgeon were virtuous, but it is not necessary for her or his specific craft. Scientific knowledge is “demonstrative.” It discovers universals either through deduction or induction. Deduction begins with premises that are universally true and argues from them to conclusions that will also be universally true. Inductive reasoning begins with particular observations or probable premises and argues to conclusions that will be sound albeit not necessarily true. Understanding begins with principles that are undeniable; they are intrinsically known. Understanding provides the first principles for scientific knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to use understanding and scientific knowledge to arrive at conclusions that are “the same in every case.” Aristotle distinguished this from practical wisdom; its conclusions are actions that are not the same in every case. For instance, you should stop at red lights, but if you are driving your injured child to the hospital in the middle of the night, the light is red, and you clearly see there are no cars coming, practical wisdom would tell you to run the red light.
For Aristotle, ethics is not a “speculative” discipline that provides necessary knowledge like mathematics, but a practical discipline whose knowledge can be other. That is to say, ethics cannot create a method, or a computer program, where we input an ethical dilemma and if everything works properly it concludes with a necessary result that would fit anyone in any context with any kind of education, formation or knowledge. Ethics is not a deductive science that is “demonstrative” and known universally. It is about “particulars,” contingent features of everyday life. How we see, define and act on those particulars will always be a matter of judgment made possible by our character. For this reason, practical wisdom is not productive in the same way that a craft is. It affects who the agent is more profoundly than a craft. Practical wisdom is the cultivation of virtue over time within a community that allows a moral agent to see well what is going on in a situation and, in turn, act virtuously. Ethics is as much about vision as it is about action because what we are unable to see excludes proper action. It is also about friendship and happiness or eudaimonia. The latter term translates as happiness or flourishing. For Aristotle, all action has a purpose, end or telos; it aims at a particular end—happiness. It alone contributes to human flourishing. Wealth, honor, status, health, or pleasure are not ends in themselves because even if we have them we want them for something other than themselves. They are means to some end, an end he identifies as eudaimonia.
Aristotle’s ethics depends on the formation of character that requires “habituation.” It is the education resulting from practices that forms young boys into virtuous men. For Aristotle, ethical formation primarily occurred within the Athenian city by free males who had the leisure to pursue their flourishing. Ethics was not available to anyone, and for that reason contingency resided at the basis of ethics. Did a person have the right birth at the right time in the right place that would let him pursue those goods that made for human flourishing? Aristotle’s discrimination against women and slaves is no longer acceptable. His understanding of the ethics of virtue has, however, been translated into contemporary practices that remove these discriminations. Aristotle took as the paradigm for his ethics “the great souled man” who did not depend on anyone else while he himself had many who depended upon him. Few contemporary virtue theorists adopt the “great souled man” as a moral exemplar. Aristotle also argued that friendship was necessary for ethics; many contemporary virtue theorists adopt friendship as an essential aspect for virtuous living. Ethics is not accomplished by an isolated individual, but by a person with friends who assist him or her in the cultivation of virtue.
(2) Thomas Aquinas’s Faithful Disciple
Perhaps we do not run red lights because we seek to be faithful creatures before God, and doing harm to other creatures would at the same time be an offense to God in whose image they are made? However, despite our best efforts we find ourselves not doing the good we think we should do. We look for assistance, for something outside of us given by grace that causes us to do good works in the world. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was a Christian theologian and a member of the religious order known as the Order of Preachers who may have given this kind of answer. He accepted much of Aristotle’s teaching on ethics, but transformed it with theology. Like Aristotle, friendship was of central ethical importance, but Aquinas taught that the true end of the ethical life is found in friendship with God.
