Erik Hammar

What’s the point of doing moral philosophy? I do not, for once, take this question in the sense the subject itself would invite, namely, as an ethical or moral or even philosophical question. Instead, I would like to reflect personally on what drives me to pursue it, what I find its attractions are, its purchase as part of a meaningful life for me. What facets of the subject, in other words, compel me and others towards it? The relevance of this question was raised most recently by an old friend who was over visiting me in London. Having no particular interest in the academic study of moral philosophy, he glanced at my bed-side table, noticing a copy of Jonathan Glover’s Causing Deaths and Saving Lives. As I began to tell him about its contents – the rights and wrongs of killing and letting die – he peered at me somewhat curiously and asked (in a tone of friendly disbelief) how it came that I really spent my precious hours off work reading thick books about why I shouldn’t be killing people. A fair question, deserving a reply in kind: personal, reflective, and intelligible not only to the already enamoured. So let me try to reasonably plainly lay out why I do like to spend my time thus, and perhaps, hopefully, offer a view which suggests also to others that it might be worthwhile.

Bar psychopaths and madmen, no one is completely unmoved by moral sentiments, that is, views or feelings about right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust, courageous and cowardly, etc. Though we will often disagree about what the sphere of the ethical encompasses (what facts and features of actions and people are morally relevant), human beings all go through life continually engaging with ethical or moral (I shall use the terms interchangeably here) questions. This can take very various forms, ranging from the detached, Sunday evening thoughts about how I am really living my life, to the suddenly triggered moral distress of seeing refugees crossing seas to escape war and torment, to the question of how I ought to balance my time between my grandmother and my friends. The ethical world is a world widely, near universally, shared, inhabited by virtually all of us. If thinking about ethics (as I often try to do on this blog) is the reflective engagement with the above kinds of questions, this means that it is the reflective engagement with questions which are practically inescapable for human beings. To think about such questions is to take seriously the demands of inhabiting a social world as a human being with reflective capacities.

Immediately connected to the fact of inescapability is the inspiring sense of historical situatedness ethics provides. What I mean by this is that through discovering the multimillennial lineage of ethical investigation we come to see ourselves in an awe-inspiring context of to an extent likeminded inquirers. This reason for reading and doing moral philosophy is analogous to a reason for going to the Grand Canyon: Try it and you may well enjoy the view. A humbling experience, the realisation of our place in the history of moral inquiry, as one turns the pages of Plato’s Republic, or shares the inner turmoil of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, fills at least me with a similar kind of awe as does landscape or perhaps the participation in collective striving towards a shared goal.

The facts of inescapability and historicity also suggest what I have always thought is a fascinating interconnection, namely, between living in a world of constant choice and action on the one hand, and pondering it through reasoned reflection on the other. Ethics done carefully, especially once we are aware of its longevity, raises a set of interesting questions about what kinds of creatures we are. More specifically, this is connected to something very intertwined with thinking about right and wrong, namely, reasons for action. If one is engaged in ethical reflection, no matter how mundane and non-academic, a fundamental feature is the giving of reason. Should I cheat on my boyfriend? How should I vote? Should I report my cheating friend? In discussing such questions, we will soon find ourselves in the business of giving reasons for accepting various answers. This is what distinguishes the despot’s command that something be done, from the discussion among equals about what ought to be done. The second is a reason-giving enterprise, the first is not. Thus is the line between “might and right” drawn. But this very activity raises questions which touch the very fabric of human life. Why do we do what we do? What is a good reason for doing anything at all? And how do we come to decide, in the end, when ethical as well as other reasons have been weighted, what we shall do? These are questions of practical reasoning, and embody the – most quintessentially human – intersection between action and reasoned reflection, one I find deeply engaging.

The three (inexhaustive) features of ethics I have raised – its inescapability, its historical continuity, and its raising of questions about human nature and practical reasoning – are features which underpin my fascination with the whole of the academic ethical enterprise. The three are of different kinds, and evidently overlap in various ways. It is important to say that they are not here presented as analytical concepts to be deployed as part of an argument, issuing in a conclusion that you should go read moral philosophy. Instead, they delineate and express what I take to be three intrinsically fascinating features of ethics. Of course, if you find them utterly unappealing, I have not given you any reason to think differently of ethics or moral philosophy. But if you previously thought that moral philosophy appeared lethally uninteresting, yet find what I have described somewhat interesting, then it might be that I have managed to partly justify why moral philosophy might be slightly more worth pursuing than it previously seemed.