An ethical theory is an attempt to answer generally the question of what makes actions right or wrong.
For most people today, the answer to this question is religious. If you are Christian or Muslim, for
example, you probably believe that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by the
commandments of God as laid down in the Bible or Koran. But making morality dependent on
religion has all the problems that chapter 2 identified about faith. First, which religion should you
look to for moral guidance? Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and the many variants of Christianity offer
different moral prescriptions, and you ought to have some reason rather than the accident of your birth
for following a particular moral code. Second, even if you buy into a particular religion, how do you
know that the divine prescriptions of that religion are moral? For example, in the Old Testament, God
tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, an extraordinarily cruel request that causes Abraham much
anguish. Third, even if you were right in adopting a particular religion, there are often uncertainties
about what to do in particular situations because of the difficulties of applying fairly coarse rules. A
commandment accepted by many religions is that you should not murder, but that does not seem to
help settle the dilemma of whether to torture a terrorist.
Accordingly, philosophers since Socrates have looked for nontheological answers to the question
of what makes actions right or wrong. One of the most influential approaches is to try to find moral
principles that can be justified as true a priori, as was done by the eighteenth-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant. Unfortunately, attempts to find necessary truths in ethics have been no
more successful than the attempts to find necessary truths about reality that I criticized in chapter 2. If
there were any a priori, necessary truths about right and wrong, you would think that many centuries
of philosophical reflection would have identified some. The Kantian view is that there are general
principles, establishing rights and duties that determine right and wrong. For example, one could
argue that torture is wrong because it violates a fundamental human right, so that everyone has a duty
not to torture. But debates continue to rage both about the acceptability of general moral principles
and about their application to particular cases.
We need a moral theory that fits better with the empirical findings described earlier, including the
following:
1. people have vital biological and psychological needs without whose satisfaction they are
harmed;
2. moral intuitions are the result of neural processes that combine cognitive appraisal and bodily
perception; and
3. mirror neurons are a major source of empathic appreciation of harm done to others, motivating
people to care about others.
I will now show how these findings fit much better with consequentialist ethics than with theological,
Kantian, and relativist approaches.
Consequentialism is the philosophical view that whether an act is right or wrong depends only on
the effects it has on all people concerned. There are many philosophical varieties of
consequentialism, not all of them fully consistent with what I have said about the brain. The classic
version of consequentialism was hedonistic utilitarianism, defended by Jeremy Bentham and John
Stuart Mill. They said that an action is right if it produces the greatest good for the greatest number of
people, where good is equated with pleasure and the avoidance of pain. At first glance, it might seem
that my account of emotional consciousness could fit with hedonism, the view that good is pleasure,
and with the idea that good can be measured by a single metric, utility. After all, my theory of
emotions attributed to every emotional experience a positive or negative valence, which sounds a lot
like utility. One might even try to associate pleasure and pain with particular brain areas because of
the high correlations between activity in the nucleus accumbens and pleasurable experiences, and the
correlations of negative emotions with brain areas such as the amygdala and the insula. However, the
EMOCON model fits better with a version of consequentialism in which there are other goods
besides pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
Most notably, the discussion of the neural representation of goals in chapter 6 did not attempt to
reduce goals to the single one of obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain. People operate with a
multiplicity of goals, many of the most important of them concerned with love, work, and play. There
is nothing in the brain suggesting that all goals can be reduced to a “common currency.” I argued that
happiness is not in itself a source of meaning, and that there are pursuits such as raising children that
are valuable independent of how well they generate happiness. I have frequently mentioned the
dopamine system as providing a mechanism for positive evaluation, but this system is only part of
how the brain estimates the value of different situations. The nucleus accumbens is important, but so
are the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and other brain areas. In addition to dopamine,
other neurotransmitters such as serotonin undoubtedly contribute to neural processes of goal
evaluation. Hence instead of trying to reduce the good to a single goal, pleasure, we can allow that
many goals can be relevant to assessing the good. This view is called pluralistic consequentialism,
because it allows a variety of goals whose accomplishment can constitute good consequences. The
argument in chapter 7 that people aim for multiple goals and not just happiness suggests that
pluralistic consequentialism is more plausible than hedonistic utilitarianism.
Adopting a pluralistic version of consequentialism provides ways around some of the most
damaging objections that have been made to utilitarianism. One standard objection is that
consequentialism can be used to justify horribly unfair actions. For example, it might seem that torture
could easily be justified whenever the pain and suffering produced in one individual could be
expected to be less than the pain and suffering of other people. If a terrorist is probably involved in a
conspiracy that would kill dozens of people, then torturing him would save many lives at the cost of at
most one. It would therefore seem that consequentialism could justify the violation of human rights in
many instances, showing the need for a Kantian theory of rights as an alternative or at least as a
supplement to consequentialism. Some acts seem to be wrong even if they do produce the overall
greatest good for the greatest number of people. An extreme example would be the immorality of
torturing an innocent on television just because it would provide enjoyable entertainment for millions
of sadistic watchers.
The best way to deal with this objection is not to abandon consequentialism but to modify it to
include the adoption of some general principles or rules. Many religious traditions, going back to the
ancient Greeks, have some variant of the golden rule, that you should treat others as you yourself want
to be treated. This rule could be viewed as an abstract intellectual exercise, like John Rawls's
proposal that when we try to establish moral principles, we should place ourselves behind a “veil of
ignorance” that takes us away from our own personal situation and requires us to think of people in
general. But I think that the effectiveness of the golden rule depends instead on its role in reminding us
to care about other people in roughly the same way we care about ourselves. If you are asked how
you would feel if you were treated in a cruel way that you are considering for someone else, then you
will be spurred to imagine yourself in the situation of the other. Such imagination may then trigger
empathy via mirror neurons, in which you feel some approximation to what the other people would
feel as the result of mean treatment. Thus the golden rule is a tool for empathy and caring, not for
intellectual exercises such as the veil of ignorance or Kant's categorical imperative, which tells you
to act in ways that you can will to be universal. The natural psychological progression is from mirror
neuron activity to empathy to emotional and intellectual appreciation of the needs of others.
But what aspects of others should we care about? The hedonistic utilitarian view says that we
should be concerned only with happiness construed as pleasure and the avoidance of pain, which
makes no distinction between wants and needs. A broader view says that ethical decisions should
take into account human rights based on people's vital interests.
The philosopher Brian Orend uses Wiggins's conception of needs to develop a rich and plausible
account of human rights. According to Orend, there are five items that are vital interests, required for
minimal functioning as a person:
1. personal security providing reliable protection from violence;
2. material subsistence, with secure access to resources such as food and shelter required for
biological needs;
3. elemental equality, being regarded as initially equal in status to other agents;
4. personal freedom from interference with life choices; and
5. recognition as a worthy member of the human community.
Lacking any of these five items damages one's ability to live a minimally good life. Orend arrives at
the core principle that people have rights not to have grievous harm inflicted on them in connection
with their vital needs.
The items that Orend identifies are all consonant with the golden rule. You know that you do not
want to be physically threatened, starved, discriminated against, coerced, or rejected as a human
being. Hence empathy should motivate you to treat others in ways that do not threaten their vital
interests. Human rights on this view are not products of pure reason; rather, they derive from
empirically
ทฤษฎีจริยธรรมการเป็นความพยายามที่จะตอบคำถามที่ทำให้การดำเนินการเหมาะสม หรือไม่ถูกต้องโดยทั่วไปสำหรับคนส่วนใหญ่ วันนี้ ตอบคำถามนี้ได้ศาสนา ถ้าคุณเป็นคริสเตียนหรือมุสลิม สำหรับตัวอย่าง คุณอาจเชื่อว่า rightness และ wrongness ของการดำเนินการเป็นไปตามบัญญัติของพระเจ้าที่ทรงไว้ในพระคัมภีร์หรือ Koran ขึ้นอยู่กับศีลธรรมแต่ทำศาสนามีปัญหาทั้งหมดที่บทที่ 2 ระบุเกี่ยวกับความเชื่อ ครั้งแรก ศาสนาที่ควรคุณเพื่อหาแนวทางจริยธรรมหรือไม่ อิสลาม ศาสนาฮินดู ศาสนายูดาย และตัวแปรหลายศาสนาเสนอข้อกำหนดทางศีลธรรมต่าง ๆ และคุณควรจะมีเหตุผลบางอย่างมากกว่าอุบัติเหตุเกิดสำหรับต่อรหัสคุณธรรมเฉพาะ สอง แม้ว่าคุณซื้อเป็นศาสนาเฉพาะ วิธีทำคุณทราบว่า สถานีตำรวจพระเจ้าของศาสนาที่มีคุณธรรมหรือไม่ ตัวอย่าง ในพันธสัญญาเดิม พระบอกอับราฮัมสละบุตรอิส คำรองโหดร้ายที่ทำให้อับราฮัมมากความปวดร้าว ที่สาม แม้ว่าคุณได้ในการใช้ศาสนาเฉพาะ มีมักจะไม่แน่นอนเกี่ยวกับวิธีการทำโดยเฉพาะอย่างยิ่งสถานการณ์ เพราะความยากของการใช้กฎค่อนข้างหยาบ Aบัญชาที่หลายศาสนาที่ยอมรับว่าคุณไม่ควรฆ่า แต่ที่ดูเหมือนไม่ได้ช่วยจ่ายลำบากใจว่าทรมานเป็นผู้ก่อการร้ายตาม ปรัชญาตั้งแต่เขามองหาคำตอบสำหรับคำถามที่ nontheologicalof what makes actions right or wrong. One of the most influential approaches is to try to find moralprinciples that can be justified as true a priori, as was done by the eighteenth-century Germanphilosopher Immanuel Kant. Unfortunately, attempts to find necessary truths in ethics have been nomore successful than the attempts to find necessary truths about reality that I criticized in chapter 2. Ifthere were any a priori, necessary truths about right and wrong, you would think that many centuriesof philosophical reflection would have identified some. The Kantian view is that there are generalprinciples, establishing rights and duties that determine right and wrong. For example, one couldargue that torture is wrong because it violates a fundamental human right, so that everyone has a dutynot to torture. But debates continue to rage both about the acceptability of general moral principlesand about their application to particular cases.We need a moral theory that fits better with the empirical findings described earlier, including thefollowing:1. people have vital biological and psychological needs without whose satisfaction they areharmed;2. moral intuitions are the result of neural processes that combine cognitive appraisal and bodilyperception; and3. mirror neurons are a major source of empathic appreciation of harm done to others, motivatingpeople to care about others.I will now show how these findings fit much better with consequentialist ethics than with theological,Kantian, and relativist approaches.
Consequentialism is the philosophical view that whether an act is right or wrong depends only on
the effects it has on all people concerned. There are many philosophical varieties of
consequentialism, not all of them fully consistent with what I have said about the brain. The classic
version of consequentialism was hedonistic utilitarianism, defended by Jeremy Bentham and John
Stuart Mill. They said that an action is right if it produces the greatest good for the greatest number of
people, where good is equated with pleasure and the avoidance of pain. At first glance, it might seem
that my account of emotional consciousness could fit with hedonism, the view that good is pleasure,
and with the idea that good can be measured by a single metric, utility. After all, my theory of
emotions attributed to every emotional experience a positive or negative valence, which sounds a lot
like utility. One might even try to associate pleasure and pain with particular brain areas because of
the high correlations between activity in the nucleus accumbens and pleasurable experiences, and the
correlations of negative emotions with brain areas such as the amygdala and the insula. However, the
EMOCON model fits better with a version of consequentialism in which there are other goods
besides pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
Most notably, the discussion of the neural representation of goals in chapter 6 did not attempt to
reduce goals to the single one of obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain. People operate with a
multiplicity of goals, many of the most important of them concerned with love, work, and play. There
is nothing in the brain suggesting that all goals can be reduced to a “common currency.” I argued that
happiness is not in itself a source of meaning, and that there are pursuits such as raising children that
are valuable independent of how well they generate happiness. I have frequently mentioned the
dopamine system as providing a mechanism for positive evaluation, but this system is only part of
how the brain estimates the value of different situations. The nucleus accumbens is important, but so
are the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and other brain areas. In addition to dopamine,
other neurotransmitters such as serotonin undoubtedly contribute to neural processes of goal
evaluation. Hence instead of trying to reduce the good to a single goal, pleasure, we can allow that
many goals can be relevant to assessing the good. This view is called pluralistic consequentialism,
because it allows a variety of goals whose accomplishment can constitute good consequences. The
argument in chapter 7 that people aim for multiple goals and not just happiness suggests that
pluralistic consequentialism is more plausible than hedonistic utilitarianism.
Adopting a pluralistic version of consequentialism provides ways around some of the most
damaging objections that have been made to utilitarianism. One standard objection is that
consequentialism can be used to justify horribly unfair actions. For example, it might seem that torture
could easily be justified whenever the pain and suffering produced in one individual could be
expected to be less than the pain and suffering of other people. If a terrorist is probably involved in a
conspiracy that would kill dozens of people, then torturing him would save many lives at the cost of at
most one. It would therefore seem that consequentialism could justify the violation of human rights in
many instances, showing the need for a Kantian theory of rights as an alternative or at least as a
supplement to consequentialism. Some acts seem to be wrong even if they do produce the overall
greatest good for the greatest number of people. An extreme example would be the immorality of
torturing an innocent on television just because it would provide enjoyable entertainment for millions
of sadistic watchers.
The best way to deal with this objection is not to abandon consequentialism but to modify it to
include the adoption of some general principles or rules. Many religious traditions, going back to the
ancient Greeks, have some variant of the golden rule, that you should treat others as you yourself want
to be treated. This rule could be viewed as an abstract intellectual exercise, like John Rawls's
proposal that when we try to establish moral principles, we should place ourselves behind a “veil of
ignorance” that takes us away from our own personal situation and requires us to think of people in
general. But I think that the effectiveness of the golden rule depends instead on its role in reminding us
to care about other people in roughly the same way we care about ourselves. If you are asked how
you would feel if you were treated in a cruel way that you are considering for someone else, then you
will be spurred to imagine yourself in the situation of the other. Such imagination may then trigger
empathy via mirror neurons, in which you feel some approximation to what the other people would
feel as the result of mean treatment. Thus the golden rule is a tool for empathy and caring, not for
intellectual exercises such as the veil of ignorance or Kant's categorical imperative, which tells you
to act in ways that you can will to be universal. The natural psychological progression is from mirror
neuron activity to empathy to emotional and intellectual appreciation of the needs of others.
But what aspects of others should we care about? The hedonistic utilitarian view says that we
should be concerned only with happiness construed as pleasure and the avoidance of pain, which
makes no distinction between wants and needs. A broader view says that ethical decisions should
take into account human rights based on people's vital interests.
The philosopher Brian Orend uses Wiggins's conception of needs to develop a rich and plausible
account of human rights. According to Orend, there are five items that are vital interests, required for
minimal functioning as a person:
1. personal security providing reliable protection from violence;
2. material subsistence, with secure access to resources such as food and shelter required for
biological needs;
3. elemental equality, being regarded as initially equal in status to other agents;
4. personal freedom from interference with life choices; and
5. recognition as a worthy member of the human community.
Lacking any of these five items damages one's ability to live a minimally good life. Orend arrives at
the core principle that people have rights not to have grievous harm inflicted on them in connection
with their vital needs.
The items that Orend identifies are all consonant with the golden rule. You know that you do not
want to be physically threatened, starved, discriminated against, coerced, or rejected as a human
being. Hence empathy should motivate you to treat others in ways that do not threaten their vital
interests. Human rights on this view are not products of pure reason; rather, they derive from
empirically
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