Abstract
R.M. Hare’s two-level utilitarianism provides a useful framework for understanding the evolution of codes of professional ethics. From a Harean perspective, the codes reflect both the fact that members of various professions face special kinds of ethically charged situations in the normal course of their work, and the need for people in special roles to acquire various habits of thought and action. This highlights the role of virtue in professional ethics and provides guidance to professional societies when considering modifications to their codes. From a Harean perspective, a professional society should ask both “Are there kinds of situations that members of this profession will normally encounter which members of other professions and/or the general public will not?” and “What habits of thought and action would it be good for individuals encountering such situations to have?”
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Notes
Unlike cost-effectiveness analysis, which uses economic analysis to determine the most efficient means of achieving a pre-determined goal, cost-benefit analysis holds that goals should be determined solely by balancing economic benefits and economic costs.
An exception would be Moore [1], who believed that the existence of beauty—even unperceived beauty—adds intrinsic value to the world, and still called himself a utilitarian. That Moore’s utilitarianism was non-standard is underscored by the fact that he felt compelled to give it a special name: he called his view “ideal utilitarianism.”
Kant did not say that one should tell the would-be murderer where his intended victim is, even though one should not lie. So it would be acceptable, in Kant’s view, to keep quiet.
Kant’s emphasis on “pure” moral philosophy in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals suggests this reading, but even there Kant says that moral philosophy “requires anthropology for its application to man” [6, p. 79 italics in original]. As H.J. Paton explains, Kant’s view is that the categorical imperative can be derived from the logic of moral discourse alone, while its application to human beings requires empirical knowledge “of human nature (and indeed of many other things)” [7, p. 14]. Hare is more explicit and clear on this point. While it is the logical features of moral discourse that force one to think like a utilitarian, what utilitarianism implies (and what intuitive level rules an archangel would choose for people to use) depends on many empirical questions [8].
One of the main objections to Hare concerns this claim. People often say that in this choice situation, they would instead operate according to Rawls’ “maximin” rule, which says, in effect, “maximize the minimum payoff” [4]. Rawls claims that people in “the original position,” where they are choosing rules for the society in which they will have to live out their lives (but without knowing who they are going to end up being) would operate according to this rule. Notice, however, that the choice presented in Hare’s theory is crucially different. According to Hare, when one makes a moral judgment, one is in effect deciding which series of experiences or which series of complete lives is preferable. Either way of putting the question turns the choice into a matter of prudence. When it comes to prudential choices, people clearly do not employ a maximin strategy; they do not choose to arrange their lives so as to maximize the minimum payoff they will receive in any one period of their lives. Rather, they are willing to trade sacrifices, in some periods, for increased payoffs in other periods. It seems, then, that they apply something like a utilitarian standard.
Recent work on moral reasoning and neural networks suggests that the rules of common morality are often or usually not fully expressible in language and represent, instead, a “paradigm space” as captured in a trained-up neural network. See work by Clark [9].
The acronym “ILS” is appropriate in part because it is used in aviation to stand for “Instrument Landing System,” a system for finding the right path when one cannot clearly see it and could easily drift off course or be blown off course.
As Hare’s language suggests, there will in fact be more. For one thing, laws are a category of ILS rules intermediate between common morality and professional ethics. Like codes of professional ethics, laws are written down or otherwise explicitly codified, whereas the rules of common morality may be strictly uncodifiable (see Varner in manuscript, Chap. 2, “The Nature of ILS Rules”). Laws are more comprehensive in scope than professional ethics, since the latter are binding only on members of a given profession. Commonly morality should also be more broad in scope than laws, for reasons given by Mill [12].
The ASCE follows the Brundtland Commission, defining “sustainable development” as “the challenge of meeting human needs for natural resources, industrial products, energy, food, transportation, shelter, and effective waste management while conserving and protecting environmental quality and the natural resource base essential for future development” (ASCE Code, footnote #3).
In the United States, there is no umbrella organization for engineers, but Ed Harris (personal communication) suggests that the profession as a whole can be described thus: “engineers are the primary creators (descriptive claim) and custodians (prescriptive claim and more controversial) of technology.”
This may be an over-simplification: Harean ethics makes what is appropriate to a society sensitive to background ecological and economic conditions, so perhaps it is more accurate to say that in modern societies, any such profession should embody concern for animal welfare in its code of ethics.
Here “sentient” is intended in the standard sense it takes in the literature on animal rights and animal welfare, where it means “capable of conscious suffering and/or enjoyment.”
The question of which animals are sentient is a large and complicated one, but the best answer seems to be that probably all vertebrates are capable of suffering (at least from physical pain) while invertebrates (with the exception of cephalopods) probably are not. For a detailed treatment of the issue, see [26, Chap. 3]
In the context of Hare’s theory, note that the AVMA Code also states that the basis of its principles is the Golden Rule.
Another point about general principle #6 that bears mentioning from a Harean perspective is that, as emphasized previously, ILS rules often have a decidedly non-utilitarian “flavor.” From the perspective of Harean critical thinking, nothing has intrinsic value except the conscious experiences of sentient beings, because critical thinking is explicitly utilitarian. Nevertheless, one could argue that ILS rules for ecologists should inspire some kind of non-utilitarian love or respect for ecosystems. The rationale would be that an ecologist who thinks of ecosystems as more than “mere” resources, that they (or their functioning) is intrinsically valuable, will love or respect them in a way that someone who thinks that only conscious beings have intrinsic value will not, and will, as a result, be more likely to avoid indirectly harming people and other sentient animals. Bryan Norton has argued [25, 28] that the implications of environmental holism and “enlightened” anthropocentrism will converge in practice. This “convergence hypothesis” is plausible in a general way [29, 30], so it is questionable whether ecologists will do a better job if they believe that ecosystems have intrinsic value. Surely an air conditioner repairman would not do a better job if he stopped thinking of air conditioning as having merely instrumental value to the residents of the house, but maybe that is the case with regard to very complex systems. Perhaps it inspires a healthy dose of humility.
Perhaps this is what inspired Soulé [23] to say that in conservation biology, concern for animal welfare is not “desirable” and that “Conservation and animal welfare … should remain politically separate.”
Given the catastrophist rhetoric of the environmental movement, it is strange to hear environmental philosophers say, as they commonly do, that a new, non-anthropocentric ethic must be part of the solution to environmental problems. For if long-term human interests are threatened by environmental problems, then enlightened anthropocentrism calls for their solution. However, if it is true that people who think of ecosystems as having intrinsic value are less likely to manipulate them in ways that harm people and other sentient animals, then there is nothing strange here after all. From a Harean perspective: although good utilitarian critical thinking would lead to the management of ecosystems in ways that protect humans’ long-term interests, internalizing some intuitive level rules that are non-utilitarian in flavor, rules that attribute intrinsic value to ecosystems and species, might still be a good thing.
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Acknowledgement
Research for this paper was supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant #0620808, but the opinions expressed herein are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. Jonathan Newman, Ed Harris, and Gary Comstock provided feedback on an early draft of this essay. An anonymous reviewer for this journal also provided particularly focused criticisms that goaded me into shoring up the argument and analysis at various points.
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Varner, G. Utilitarianism and the Evolution of Ecological Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 14, 551–573 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9102-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9102-5