Unreal Ethical Questions

While thinking about ethics, it occurred to me that one difference between western jurisprudence and Islamic jurisprudence is that in the west judges only deal with real cases.  Muslim clerics might be called on to make rulings on cases that appear to be constructed from pure fantasy.  I remember one example from Bernard Lewis of property rights for a man who had been half transformed into an animal.  The rights depended on whether it was the upper half or the lower half that had been transformed.

It strikes me that this is in sharp contrast to the approach that is taken in ethics.  Ethicists will ask all sorts of questions about what you should do if you are operating a switch that will control which way a railroad car would go.  The train will kill either a smaller number of people or a larger number.  There is the instance of whether it is moral to push a large man onto the tracks so as to stop the train.  Never mind that pushing a large man onto the tracks is unlikely to stop the train in any case.

By devoting time and attention to solving these imaginary questions ethicists run the risk of wasting valuable time on matters that are of no practical significance.  How we assign blame and credit under conditions that will never take place is a matter of indifference.

In order for a system of moral and ethical values to have meaning it must effect our actions in some way.  One of the chief confusions in ethics comes from the fact that most people have the opinion that a system of moral and ethical values will determine our actions directly.  Actually it is a method of assigning blame and credit to actions.  It will determine to what extent you consider an action to be worthy of blame or credit.  More specifically this should consist of a rank ordering of actions.  Some actions are better than others, and some are worse.

In general the degree to which an action is good or bad will effect how it will alter the positions of the people you know in terms of how you value time with each, which will have a rank ordering of itself.  By blaming people you give information that would tend to lower the position of those people in the rank order of other people.  Through praise you attempt to lift it.  The situation with respect to sexuality is somewhat more complicated.

The law deals with situations where coercion is appropriate.  That is why when it comes to ethics I deal with only assignments of blame and credit.  Muslim jurists divide actions into five categories.  Forbidden, discouraged, allowed, recommended and required.  As far as ethics deals only with assignments of credit and blame rather than coercive punishment, we do not need to consider the first and last category, but only the middle three.

Here is another area of common misunderstanding.  Many ethicists make the mistake of reasoning that it would be beneficial if everyone acted in some way, and that therefore everyone has a moral and ethical responsibility to do so.  Imposing a moral and ethical requirement is inherently harmful.  We are stating that failure to do the required thing is blameworthy.  We would only want to do this if there was no alternative that was more humane or efficient.  If all we are interested in is encouraging a certain type of behavior, then this can be accomplished by giving credit to those who do it, rather than blame to those who do not.