Living Together

Let’s define ethics to be the study of standards for human behavior and morality as the application of those standards in our everyday lives. We need these standards of behavior because we are social beings. We live together in social groups and sometimes our desires come into conflict.

One approach to ethics has been to say that ethical statements are simply an expression of human preferences about human behavior. It is difficult to find an experience that directly corresponds to “Do not kill”. This is a command and as such does indeed express a human preference. The problem is that some people have concluded from this that there is no basis for discussion on ethical issues. If ethical issues ultimately come down to preferences, how can we judge someone with different preferences? If we do, it seems that we are in effect saying, “I don’t like that your preferences are different than mine. Change yours!”

Even if this were the total situation, it would still be very useful to have some common basis for discussion. For example, if most people want to survive, we can analyze ethical judgments in terms of their usefulness for our survival. Take the example of “Do not kill”. It would seem that if everyone would avoid killing, it would improve all of our chances for survival.

So on the one hand, ethical statements do ultimately seem to be expressions of desire, but if we have some agreement on some basic desires, then we can use our knowledge and skill to find rules of conduct that work well in meeting those basic desires.