ethical relativism is true, then it is impossible to say that one culture is right and the other is wrong. Bearing in mind that some cultures have practiced slavery, or the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands, this is hard to accept.
A more promising alternative to both ethical subjectivism and cultural relativism is universal prescriptivism, an approach to ethics developed by the Oxford philosopher R. M. Hare. Hare argues that the distinctive property of ethical judgments is that they are universalizable. In saying this, he means that if I make an ethical judgment, I must be prepared to state it in universal terms, and apply it to all relevantly similar situations. By “universal terms” Hare means those terms that do not refer to a particular individual. Thus a proper name cannot be a universal term. If, for example, I were to say “Everyone should do what is in the interests of Kim Kardashian,” I would not be making a universal judgment, because I have used a proper name. The same would be true if I were to say that everyone must do what is in my interests, because the personal pronoun “my” is here used to refer to a particular individual, myself.
It might seem that ruling out particular terms in this way does not take us very far. After all, one can always describe oneself in universal terms. Perhaps I can’t say that everyone should do what is in my interests, but I could say that everyone must do whatever is in the interests of people who … and then give a minutely detailed description of myself, including the precise location of all my freckles. The effect would be the same as saying that everyone should do what is in my interests, because there would be no one except me who matches that description. Hare meets this problem by saying that to prescribe an ethical judgment universally means being prepared to prescribe it for all possible circumstances, including hypothetical ones. So if I were to say that everyone should do what is in the interests of a person with a particular pattern of freckles, I must be prepared to prescribe that in the hypothetical situation in which I do not have this pattern of freckles, but someone else does, I should do what is in the interests of that person. Now of course I may say that I should do that, since I am confident that I shall never be in such a situation, but this simply means that I am being dishonest. I am not genuinely prescribing the principle universally.
The effect of saying that an ethical judgment must be universalizable for hypothetical as well as actual circumstances is that whenever I make an ethical judgment, I can be challenged to put myself in the position of the parties affected, and see if I would still be able to accept that judgment. Suppose, for example, that I own a small factory and the cheapest way for me to get rid of some waste is to pour it into a nearby river. I do not take water from this river, but I know that some villagers living downstream do and the waste may make them ill. If I imagine myself in the hypothetical situation of being one of the villagers, rather than the factory‐owner, I would not accept that the profits of the factory‐owner should outweigh the risk of adverse effects on my health and that of my children. Hence I cannot claim that I am ethically justified in polluting the river.
In this way Hare’s approach introduces an element of reasoning in ethical deliberation. For Hare, however, since universalizability is part of the logic of moral language, an amoralist can avoid it by simply avoiding making any ethical judgments. More recently, several prominent moral philosophers, among them Thomas Nagel, T.M. Scanlon, and Derek Parfit have defended the view that we have objective reasons for action. Ethical judgments, in their view, are not statements of fact, but can nevertheless be true or false, in the same way that the truths of logic, or mathematics, are not statements of fact, but can be true or false. It is true, they would argue, that if someone is in agony, and we can relieve that agony, we have a reason for doing so. If we can relieve it at no cost, or a very low cost, to ourselves or anyone else, we will have a conclusive reason for relieving it, and it will be wrong not to do so.
The questions we have been discussing so far are questions about ethics, rather than questions within ethics. Philosophers call this “metaethics” and distinguish it from “normative ethics” in which we discuss what we ought to do. Normative ethics can also be divided into two parts, ethical theory and applied ethics. As we noted at the beginning of this introduction, bioethics is an area of applied ethics. Ethical theory, on the other hand, deals with broad ethical theories about how we ought to live and act, and we will now outline some of the more important of these theories.
Consequentialism is the view that the rightness of an action depends on its consequences. The best‐known form of consequentialism is utilitarianism, developed in the late eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham and popularized in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill. They held that an action is right if it leads to a greater surplus of happiness over misery than any possible alternative, and wrong if it does not. By “greater surplus of happiness,” the classical utilitarians had in mind the idea of adding up all the pleasure or happiness that resulted from the action and subtracting from that total all the pain or misery to which the action gave rise. Naturally, in some circumstances, it might be possible only to reduce misery, and then the right action should be understood as the one that will result in less misery than any possible alternative.
The utilitarian view is striking in many ways. It puts forward a single principle that it claims can provide the right answer to all ethical dilemmas, if only we can predict what the consequences of our actions will be. It takes ethics out of the mysterious realm of duties and rules, and bases ethical decisions on something that almost everyone understands and values. Moreover, utilitarianism’s single principle is applied universally, without fear or favor. Bentham said: “Each to count for one and none for more than one.” By that he meant that the happiness of a peasant counted for as much as that of a noble, and the happiness of an African was no less important than that of a European – a progressive view to take when English ships were engaged in the slave trade.
Some contemporary consequentialists agree with Bentham to the extent that they think the rightness or wrongness of an action must depend on its consequences, but they deny that maximizing net happiness is the only consequence that has intrinsic value. Some of them argue that we should seek to bring about whatever will satisfy the greatest number of desires or preference. This variation, which is known as “preference utilitarianism,” does not regard anything as good, except in so far as it is wanted or desired. More intense or strongly held preferences would get more weight than weak preferences. Other consequentialists include independent values, like freedom, justice, and knowledge. They are sometimes referred to as “ideal utilitarians” but it is better to think of them, not as utilitarians at all, but as pluralistic consequentialists (because they hold several independent values, rather than just one).
Consequentialism offers one important answer to the question of how we should decide what is right and what is wrong, but many ethicists reject it. The denial of this view was dramatically presented by Dostoevsky in The Karamazov Brothers:
Imagine that you are charged with building the edifice of human destiny, the ultimate aim of which is to bring people happiness, to give them peace and contentment at last, but that in order to achieve this it is essential and unavoidable to torture just one little speck of creation, that same little child beating her chest with her little fists, and imagine that this edifice has to be erected on her unexpiated tears. Would you agree to be the architect under those conditions? Tell me honestly!3
The passage suggests that some things are always wrong, no matter what their consequences. This has, for most of Western history, been the prevailing approach to morality, at least at the level of what has been officially taught and approved by the institutions of Church and State. The ten commandments of the Hebrew scriptures served as a model for much of the Christian era, and the Roman Catholic Church built up an elaborate system of morality based on rules to which no exceptions were allowed.
Another example of an ethic of rules is that of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s ethic is based on his “Categorical Imperative,” which he states in several distinct formulations. One is that we must always act so that we can will the maxim of our action to be a universal law.
