The New York Times Magazine recently remotely convened five people to talk about the ethics of when and how to "reopen America" from the current coronavirus pandemic. While only one of the five, Peter Singer, is a professional philosopher, all five are using philosophical models for ethics.
There are three main schools of ethics.
The first is virtue ethics, which has seen a resurgence in the past 50 years. It stems from Aristotle, and its base idea is doing good for personal ethical development. I think in small part Aristotle may have developed it as a sort of humanist way around the Euthyphro dilemma articulated by his teacher, Plato. It says that there's a paradox or dilemma on ethical beliefs, and thus actions: do we hold something as good because a god or gods command it, or is something good because it's divinely commanded? The first leaves the door open for divine tyranny; the second for ethics being independent of divinities.
There is one issue, and that applies more directly to the second school. Virtue ethics is relativistic. (Many virtue ethicists will, I think, downplay this if they don't totally deny it. But, I stand by my guns.) Also, while one other ethics theory has problems the other direction, virtue ethics attempts to be normative, but, as shown by Aristotle's 11 principles, there's a lot of wiggle room outside of the social relativity factor.
Wiki uses utilitarianism for an umbrella over what it says are a family of consequentialist ethics. Both these words say something. The first — is the action useful? The second —what is the result? This is often summarized as "the greatest good for the greatest number" or similar.
This is an obviously relativistic school at the top level, and not just at lower levels. Per the "consequences," it also can be seen as "the ends justify the means." Rule utilitarians, per Wiki, try to minimize this by using some basic framing rules. And, people who focus on the word "consequentialist" usually stipulate that the issue of consequences is itself a norm.
Besides this, utilitarianism has one other problem, re the "greatest good for the greatest number." As I have said repeatedly in criticizing John Rawls' 20th-century political science liberal utilitarianism, we simply cannot achieve a "view from nowhere." Something that looks great for 330 million now (as in the coronavirus "lockdown") might be horrible for 50 million in just months. And it might be enough worse for them than the 330 million now to be worse overall. Something that looks great for them in three months (ending the lockdown quickly and with no controls) might look horrible again for 330 million in another three months.
Deontology is the third school. It was formulated by Immanual Kant, keyed by his "Categorical imperative," which tried to nail down a rule-based ethics apart from religious metaphysics.
It has huger problems than the other two, per that imperative.
1. Different people have different ideas for what should be a universal ethical law, especially once we get away from a hot-button item like murder. (Behind Kant's mindset, IMO, he's trying to create a secularist version of something that runs into Euthyphro. Biological evolution, contra this, isn't determinative for ethics any more than a god, re the first fork, and cultural evolution cannot develop ethical absolutes, re the second fork.)
2. The second bullet point comes off as a crude caricature of utilitarianism, where almost nobody talks about treating fellow humans only as means. (Bentham had not been published until after this, but utilitarian ideas were in the air of the Enlightenment.)
3. It assumes a level of human rationality which the post-Enlightenment real world has devastated. Sorry to friend Massimo and his love of Stoicism, but behavioral economics and psychology, as well as quantum mechanics at base-level physics showing this about the world as a whole, are a good indicator.
In reality, per Martha Nussbaum saying that virtue ethics doesn't clash with either of the other two schools, few professional philosophers, or other professional ethicists, are members of a single school. I would probably call myself about 45 percent virtue ethicist, 45 percent rule-utilitarian within utilitarianism, and 10 percent theoretical deontologist — that is, the idea that per the imperative nature of deontology, we should always seek to codify ethics better.
With that, let's dive in.
Peter Singer, the professional, is a deep-dyed utilitarian. He's well known, or notorious, for his articulation of animal rights issues. He has otherwise declared himself to be a hedonistic utilitarian, among the different schools of utilitarianism considered to exist today. (And that no more means debauchery than it did with Epicurus and Epicureanism.)
Rev. Joseph Barber II would exemplify liberal Protestantism's version of divine command deontology, with an admixture of virtue ethics.
Vanita Gupta, I would say, is about 60 percent virtue ethics and the other 40 percent, given her position, a secularized version of Barber's version of divine command deontology.
Zeke Emanuel is a rule-based utilitarian with some admixture of virtue ethics, as best as I can determine. Outside of medical schools run by religious organizations, this is, from what I grasp, the default position for academically-taught medical ethics.
Anne Case? Aside from jokes about economists and ethics, I would call her, per the piece and what I know about her and Angus Deaton, a preference utilitarianism.
Gupta and Barber both note that both the coronavirus and what we see in governmental response, especially at the federal level, are hammering minorities more. They don't argue for a quick reopening; they argue for more help for the poor.
Case says that some of this is a sort of comorbidity of ongoing "hollowing out" of American economic life, but she doesn't get prescriptive about that. She and Emanuel both note psychological factors of a longer shutdown.
Singer then reminds everybody that their discussion to this point has been focused on America, and to a lesser degree, other affluent countries. He then notes how the poor in India are being devastated by its sudden and brutal crackdown.
As a hedonistic utilitarian, he then talks explicitly about quality of life vs loss of life.
Barber then counters that, as a pastor, this utilitarian type counting offset is troubling in some ways.
Singer also, at least in the short confines of this discussion, doesn't discuss how to weight different hedonic issues within quality of life. And, of course, if he has such a sub-utilitarian calculus, another hedonic utilitarian will differ.
As for starting the reopening? All are OK with schools taking the lead in some way, if parents are OK.
They conclude by discussing long-term consequences. Emanuel thinks the US will ultimately have an "immunity passport." How discriminatory that would be without national health care, he doesn't touch. But, he is Rahm Emanuel's brother. His rule utilitarianism, even more than Case's preference utilitarianism, is in part capitalist driven.
Beyond that, there's some great discussion. I won't try to summarize it.
Friend Massimo Pigliucci noted a couple of weeks ago that deontology hits the wall hard at times like this. Issues such as medical triage are ultimately utilitarian.
That said, the other two main schools hit the wall themselves, albeit a lot less hard. The reality is that on tough issues like this, no single school of ethics controls the commanding heights. With utilitarianism, that's more obvious. Virtue ethics, though, has its own issues. A religious person praying for a dying secularist in the hospital, despite express desires otherwise, is one example. It's virtue developing for the person offering prayer, but a washout at best utilitarianly, and if I try to twist the Silver Rule into a secular deontology different from Kant's, a bad thing there. Wikipedia sadly (one of many shortcomings) doesn't have a separate entry on the Silver Rule.
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