Ethical frameworks involve an overlap of 1) philosophical traditions, 2) religious traditions, and 3) moral principles. Most people will draw from all of these but emphasize one framework or another in their approach to ethics.
Philosophical traditions
When we are confronted with an ethical dilemma, we often use a combination of ethical tools to understand the situation and judge what is best to do. We think about our duty, about the impact on other people, about whether an action is virtuous or fair. Understanding the range of ethical tools helps us approach ethical challenges in a more thoughtful way. These philosophical traditions in ethics have emerged in various epochs of human history. Virtue ethics is from classical civilizations; Consequence and Duty ethics emerged in the Enlightenment period; Justice ethics emerged in the mid-20th century; and Bioethics became a major concern in the late 20th century.
1. Virtue ethics
A person’s long term happiness can only be found through virtue, or being good. At the center of this Greek tradition of ethics was the value of using human reason to rise beyond personal ego and appetites.
Plato emphasized the ideal. His allegory of the cave was meant to show that we live in a world of illusion and that we must often step outside our comfort zone to find the truth.
In his allegory of the Ring of Gyges, a philospher named Glaucon talks with Socrates about the nature of justice and injustice. Glaucon believes that justice is only instrumentally valuable, and that only the threat of punishment keeps people from being unjust. Even a good person, if given the power of gods, would quickly become unjust. Socrates does not entirely agree, maintaining that justice is also intrinsically valuable.
Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics argued that the highest good for humans is eudaimonia, a Greek word often translated as “flourishing” or sometimes “happiness”. Aristotle argues that eudaimonia is a way of taking action (energeia) that is appropriate to the human “soul” (psuchē) at its most “excellent” or virtuous (aretē). Ethics, for Aristotle, is about how specific beneficial habits enable a person to develop a virtuous character by practicing righteous actions and forming a stable character in which those habits become voluntary, which then achieves eudaimonia.
Epicurean and Stoic traditions of ethics followed both traditions. The Golden Mean, the idea that we should seek moderation in all things and that good is usually found between the extremes, is an Epicurean ethical ideal.
The underlying idea of virtue ethics is that people cultivate their better natures, rather than surrendering to their passions or desires. A good example of this issue is in the movie Groundhog Day (above right) where a TV anchor played by Bill Murray learns he is more or less immortal, and ends up making a pig of himself in the local diner. Andie McDowell, playing his producer, asks him why he would lower himself, and recites part of a poem, “Breathes there the man,” by Walter Scott.
God and technology: Another interesting idea about justice and virtue is that many of the modern-day “Tech-Bros” of Silicon Valley have acquired so much wealth and technological power that they believe they are like gods and that those who try to regulate their technology are following the path of the anti-Christ. See the Guardian series on Peter Thiel’s lectures, for example.
2. Consequence ethics (utilitarianism)
This involves considering the greatest good for the greatest number of people. So, in other words, the value of an action is determined by its outcome.This is also called utilitarianism. There are problems with utilitarianism, especially in that it doesn’t include ideas of justice or duty. Taken to its extreme, the greatest good for the majority might be very bad for a minority.
“John Stuart Mill’s explanation of the concept of utility in his work, Utilitarianism, is that people truly desire happiness, and since each individual desires their own happiness, it must follow that all of us desire the happiness of everyone, contributing to a larger social utility. Thus, an action that results in the greatest pleasure for the utility of society is the best action, or as Jeremy Bentham, the founder of early Utilitarianism put it, as the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Mill not only viewed actions as a core part of utility, but as the directive rule of moral human conduct; that is, the rule is that people should only be committing actions that provide pleasure to society.” (Wikipedia)
3. Duty ethics
(Also called deontological ethics, from deon, or duty) Here, ethical decisions are based on adherence to rules. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said that we should do what would be right if everyone did it. He called this the categorical imperative. Its not the consequences that make and action right or wrong, but whether they conform to a greater good.
Immanuel Kant described the categorical imperative with three basic axioms:
- Act only according to a maxim (rule) that you would also want to become a universal law.
- Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.
- Act as though you were, through your maxims, a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.
4. Justice ethics
This ethical tradition stems from the work of John Rawls, whose 1971 Theory of Justice was conceived as a new approach to ethics. The idea is that social choices should be made in non-self serving way from an unbiased original position or “veil of ignorance.” So, for example, you don’t get to choose what society you are born in — no one knows whether they will be among the beautiful or wise or rich or talented. So a just social order would not overly privilege those social strata or penalize the beastly, the unwise, the poor or the untalented.
Another example of the unbiased original position would be the division of estate property among the sons and daughters of a recently deceased parent. Those who divide the property would be the last to chose which portion they would be able to inherit.
5. Bioethics
This is also called environmental ethics. A major inspiration was Aldo Leopold’s 1946 book “Land Ethic” in which he envisioned a broadening scope of virtue, consequence, justice and duty ethics from the purely human realm to other living things and the entire web of life. This was not entirely new. For instance, in Metaphysics of Morals, Kant said that people have a duty to avoid cruelty to animals. But Kant said this was because cruelty deadens the feeling of compassion in people, and not because non-rational beings have moral worth. That would have been a typical idea of the 1700s (and acceptable as part of ethical pragmatism). Today, with a bioethical lens, we see animals as having their own intrinsic moral worth independent of people.
Another source of bioethics was the reaction to unethical human medical experiments. These included Nazi concentration camp experiments, and in the US, the deadly 1932 – 1970 Tuskegee syphilis experiment , the 1950 San Francisco Serratia experiment, along with psychologically damaging experiments like the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment and the 1961 Milgram experiment, These experiments were conducted without consent of the participants. Another controversial experiment, conducted in 1968 on third graders, let blue-eyed students discriminate against brown-eyed students.
An example of ethical media conduct in this area was the story by Associated Press reporter Jean Heller in 1972 that broke the news about the Tuskegee Experiment.
Example of Russian propaganda & information warfare during US elections, 2016. Source: US Senate Intelligence Committee.
6. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Ethics
This is relatively new but, like bioethics, springs from a perception of unethical conduct. In this case, the problem is big social media companies and their drive for profits over people.
Information ethics is a special concern of UNESCO.
Among the issues:
- Misuses of artificial intelligence (propaganda bots and copyright violations);
- Hate speech against individuals, cultures, ethnic groups, nations
- Invasions of personal privacy, surveillance (eg China’s “social credit” system, deep fake videos);
- Violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
- A lack of fairness in the global media structure and the way it can leave young people vulnerable to terrorist recruitment, according to the United Nations.
- Profit-driven algorithms that promote hate speech in social media;
- “Truth decay” or lack of verification about culture war claims (vaccines, election fraud, insurrection, etc);
- Election interference through foreign propaganda