Where should moral philosophy begin?

It’s my first post! I decided to start with something about the very act of beginning moral philosophy. I’ll see where that takes me.

For a bullet-point summary, click on this endnote:¹

Photo by Avram Hiller, Creative Commons License CC BY-NC4.0. Hover over for alt-text description.

How ought one live? That is a question posed by Socrates.² Bernard Williams writes: “Socrates’ question is the best place for moral philosophy to start.”³ Is he correct?

Of course, as Williams recognizes, there are some alternatives: How should one act? How should I live? How should I act?

One might reasonably have some concerns with the individualism implicit in all these questions, in their use of “one” or “I”. That’s because so many actions are collective ones, and thus it might be at least as important to ask: What should we do? Or, how should we live (together)? Hopefully, one has friends, and one can chat with them about this stuff. Taking a non-individualist starting point may make a difference in where we end up - something I hope to explore on another occasion.

There are three relevant dimensions here: singular I vs. plural we; specific I/we vs. general one/many; how to act vs. how to live. There are thus eight combinations, and all of them make for really good questions. However, I don’t think that any of them are the best place to start. They all ask about how to live or act, but I think that moral philosophy should start at something more broad.

Take Williams’s famous example of Jim and the Indians.⁴ If Jim has a choice to kill one person to prevent someone else from killing twenty, Williams writes that it is at least not obvious that Jim should do it (even if, in the end, that’s the right choice). However, it is obvious, for the utilitarian, that Jim should do it. There is thus something problematic about utilitarianism. It shows that there are relevant reasons other than utilitarian ones that should be factored into the decision.

Now, I’m not sure how strong an argument this is – some mathematical theories deliver answers which are obvious under the theory but not obvious when looking at the problem intuitively - but that isn’t a problem for the mathematical theory. I’ll set that concern aside, though.

Here’s my main worry. I was chatting with a fellow philosopher who is BIPOC. He said that his immediate reaction to the Jim and the Indians thought experiment was not to view the situation from the perspective of Jim – which, all along, was the perspective that I myself had taken. (Perhaps it’s relevant that I have family members named Jim, but no family members from an indigenous South American tribe.) Instead, my friend thought of it from the perspective of the 20 people of color who were hoping and praying that they would not end up being killed. From that perspective, it is indeed quite obvious what Jim should do (even if it is not obvious what Jim will do). One hesitates only when looking at the question from the agent’s perspective.

So: Why should we begin moral philosophy from the perspective of asking what an agent should do (or how a person/group should live)? Perhaps we do so because we, reasonably enough, come to philosophy seeking answers to questions that we ourselves have about what to do or how to be. But I’d like to suggest that we begin moral thinking by including the perspective of those acted upon – the moral patients.⁵ In life, to what extent is each of us Jim, deciding what to do, and to what extent is each of us one of Williams’s Indians, whose life is affected by the actions of others? And because there are many more Indians than there are Jims (in Williams’s example, and, taken proverbially, in many of life's decisions), most of our moral consideration should come from their perspective. Call this the patient-centered perspective in moral theorizing.

This is not the same as claiming that we should take the “point of view of the universe” - whatever that might be - in our ethical theorizing. Rather, I’m saying that in generating moral theories, especially when using thought experiments, we should see ourselves not just as moral agents but as moral patients - even if doing so isn’t (directly) action-guiding.

I’m also not suggesting that central traditions in Western moral philosophy fail to consider the perspective of moral patients - of course they do. And in principle, the end point of moral inquiry may be the same regardless of one’s point of departure. So in what way will adopting a patient-centered starting point make a non-trivial difference in where moral theory will end up?

There are, I think, important consequences. One of the main ones, as suggested above, is in how we should approach thought experiments. Typically, moral agents are more salient to us in thought experiments than moral patients. Ask yourself: in thinking about trolley problems, to what extent have you put yourself in the shoes of the person at the switch (or on the footbridge), deciding whether to flip it (or to push the other person off), and to what extent have you put yourself into the shoes of those tied to the tracks? There is a danger that the results of a thought experiment will be biased if some aspects of it have more salience than others. Taking a patient-centered perspective, we set our own position as the deliberative agent (mostly) to the side and consider actions in a more neutral way, making the patient(s) just as salient as the agent.

Here’s another way in which patient-centered moral theorizing is tangibly different from an agent-centric⁶ approach. The excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on Williams quotes him as dreaming of “a philosophy that would be thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful”.⁷ As is typical, Williams means something rather complicated in the original context (concerning the direction of philosophical inquiry). But it prompts us to ask: How can moral philosophy be helpful? It seems to me that Williams approached his academic work on ethics to be helpful for the moral agent in deliberation. But if we moral philosophers care about being helpful, I can’t see why helpfulness should extend primarily to people-as-agents rather than being helpful for people in general. Everyone.

I haven’t said what I think the question at the beginning of moral philosophy should be. Alas, there is a lot of context-sensitivity in proper question-asking: if one is a student asking a wise mentor for advice, then perhaps “How should I live?” is indeed the way to go. But for those engaged in discussions of moral theory that are typical of academic philosophy in the contemporary English-speaking tradition, I propose (as a first suggestion) that the question it should start with is How should things be for us?

That’s not quite it, however. Who is us? Who are the moral patients? We shouldn’t make assumptions at the outset as to the answer to that question – maybe it’s all persons, maybe it’s all sentient beings, maybe it’s all living things, maybe it even includes relationships or biotic systems as a whole. In light of that, the best question from which moral philosophy should begin is something like: How should the world be?

And this, it seems, points in the direction of consequentialism. If you approach the Jim and the Indians thought experiment by asking, “Is the world a better place with twenty people dead or one,” while barely considering which agent is responsible, you’re going to be a lot more likely to end up a consequentialist. It admittedly, and I suppose unabashedly, rejects the Kantian idea that it is my agency that matters in my practical deliberations. But it might be worth asking yourself: insofar as you agree with that Kantian idea, is it because you have assumed that moral theory should be concerned, from the very start, with how one should act? As a Bizarro-Kant might wonder, what makes you - qua agent - so special, so as to treat yourself in an exceptional way?

Something similar can be said about virtue ethics: if you think that what is central in moral philosophy is character, perhaps you are operating under the starting assumption that moral theorizing is about giving advice to individuals about how to live their lives. It is that assumption that the patient-centered approach calls into question.

There’s of course a lot more to say about all this! My brief ruminations in this post certainly don’t clinch the case for consequentialism against Kantianism or virtue ethics. Even when taking a patient-centered approach, one might still end with the view that the world should be such that I always respect others’ dignity, or that the world should be such that I have certain virtuous character traits.⁸

Last, I’ve discussed moral philosophy here, but something similar can be said about contemporary epistemology. A great deal of epistemology in the last 60 years has asked: “What does it take for S to know that P?” My own sense is that instead, we should begin inquiry into epistemology by asking something like: “What does it take for P to be known by S?” This approach, which can be called patient-centered epistemology, can shed a lot of light on important epistemological questions. (Spoiler: it lends some support to a knowledge-first view.) But that too is a topic for another day.

Thanks for reading! I’ll try to elaborate on all this in future posts. And I'd be grateful to hear your feedback.

1. Bullet-point summary:

1. We shouldn’t begin ethics by asking how one (or I) should live (or act).

2. That’s partly because we should be thinking in more collective terms - how should we act/live.

3. It’s primarily because it puts too much focus on the moral agent, rather than the moral patient. We should have a patient-centered perspective in moral theory.

4. This matters in part because whether we focus on agent or patient may affect our responses to certain thought experiments, like Bernard Williams’s “Jim and the Indians” case.

5. Insofar as we want moral theory to be helpful, it should be helpful to both agents and (especially) patients.

6. A better place to start is by asking: “How should the world be?”

7. This points in the direction of consequentialism rather than agent-centric or character-centric traditions like Kantianism or virtue theory. But it does not prove that consequentialism is correct.

8. Some similar considerations regarding apply in epistemology.

2. Socrates points towards this question in a couple places in the Republic (618b-c, and, as Williams cites, 352d) and in the Gorgias (500c).

3. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 4.

4. A Critique of Utilitarianism, §§3-5.

5. “Moral patients” is an expression coined by Tom Regan (in The Case for Animal Rights). Regan, however, uses it to refer to those who are only moral patients and are not also moral agents. I am using it to refer to anyone who deserves moral consideration, including those who are also moral agents.

6. Terminological note: “agent-centered” has a specific meaning in ethics that differs from what I intend here, so that’s why I contrast "patient-centered” with “agent-centric”. I’m happy to hear suggestions about better terminology!

7. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, 212.

8. Keep an eye out for a future post on the consequentializing project.