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Ethics Bites

Our consideration of ethics - and ethical boundaries - to download or listen to now: Ethics Bites.

In the week when of the great war photographers, Philip Jones Griffiths, died, Richard Norman talks about what is wrong with killing - and in particular killing in war - as part of the podcast Ethics Bites. This isn’t an arbitary link: Philip Jones Griffiths, like Richard Norman hated war.

His photographs of the Vietnam war, published in his book Vietnam Inc. showed with compassion and visual power the horrors of war and the human cost on all sides (the text of the book removed any ambiguity about the message).

Griffiths presented the particularised photographic case for pacifism, Norman provides a theoretical underpinning. For both the photographer and the philosopher, respect for human life is paramount.

Richard Norman makes the point that we often lose sight of the human consequences of going to war. He isn’t an absolute pacifist. He recognizes that there are justifications for some wars - but not many. The position he defends is known as pacificism (which can easily be misread as ‘pacifism’ but is subtley different). A photographer like Griffiths can keep this human cost of war in our minds by his memorable documentary images. Philosophers can argue us out of our complacency…if you are prepared to listen and think.

Links

Magnum in Motion ‘Vietnam’ podcast by Philip Jones Griffiths 

Further Reading

Richard Norman Ethics, Killing and War, published by Cambridge University Press

About the author

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His podcasts, Philosophy: The Classics and Philosophy Bites, have proved surprisingly popular, regularly topping the iTunes podcast chart. Ethics Bites is his third podcast.

Subscribe to Nigel Warburton's posts

 

Blogging about

Ethics Bites

Our consideration of ethics - and ethical boundaries - to download or listen to now: Ethics Bites.

As the controversy about Dwain Chambers, a British sprinter who was found guilty of cheating by using illegal performance-enhancing drugs rumbles on, Ethics Bites considers a more basic question. Chambers was shown to be a cheat - he clearly broke the rules. But should we allow other kinds of performance enhancement in sport? Should we make genetic enhancement part of sport?

Biotechnology is opening up many possibilities. Athletes will soon be able to inject chemicals that will produce genetic modifications that will dramatically improve their performance; parents will be able to specify many genetically controlled qualities for their offspring. This is not the world our parents and grandparents inhabited. How should we treat these developments?

In his podcast for Ethics Bites, the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel comes out firmly against the pursuit of perfection by genetic enhancement. He explains why, for example, he thinks it would be wrong to permit genetically enhanced athletes to compete. He, of course, defends biotechnical solutions to medical problems. It is when we attempt to enhance ourselves that he objects.

Much of his argument turns on his notion of 'giftedness'. An athlete, for example, has a natural genetic endowment. According to Sandel, to go beyond this 'gift' is a kind of hubris on our part, a Promethean project that involves playing God. This sounds like a theological position. But Sandel believes his reasoning should have force with secularists too.

For Sandel there are three features of our moral landscape that will be transformed if we succumb to this desire to play God:

1. Humility. We will lose the sense of reverence that is appropriate to our fate. Instead we will end up acting with hubris towards our nature.
2. Responsibility. With increases in choice about what we are, responsibility explodes. The consequence will be burdensome.
3. Perhaps most important, though, is solidarity. Sandel believes that the price of enhancement would be a loss of human solidarity. Once we lose the sense that we are subject to contingencies of fate, the successful will, even more than now, see themselves as self-made. And this will be bad for all of us.

Sandel's message is clear:

Rather than employ our new genetic powers to straighten 'the crooked timber of humanity,' we should do what we can to create social and political arrangements more hospitable to the gifts and limitations of imperfect human beings

Much of Sandel's argument will appeal to religious believers, particularly those who seek humility before God's will. But for atheists and agnostics, this could be harder to stomach. Why not improve ourselves if we can? Think of how wonderful it would be if we could increase the number of geniuses per capita, particularly if we could give them a compassion gene and a desire to improve the lot of humanity...

In the area of sport much of Sandel's argument turns on his belief that watching bionic athletes slugging it out would become mere spectacle, and that part of what we value in sport is the limitations of the athletes. I'm not so sure about this. I'd like to watch a football match in which every player achieved the skill level of George Best or Maradonna. And watching the top marathon runners today is already like watching bionic athletes, but no less absorbing for us mere mortals.

Sandel's arguments are interesting and thought-provoking. For some of the arguments on the other side of the debate, try John Harris's book Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. He presents an uncompromising defence of safe enhancement:

Enhancements are so obviously good for us that it is odd that the idea of enhancement has caused, and still occasions, so much suspicion, fear, and outright hostility.

Further Reading

• The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering by Michael Sandel, published by Belknap Press
• Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People by John Harris, published by Princeton University Press

About the author

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His podcasts, Philosophy: The Classics and Philosophy Bites, have proved surprisingly popular, regularly topping the iTunes podcast chart. Ethics Bites is his third podcast.

Subscribe to Nigel Warburton's posts

 

Blogging about

Ethics Bites

Our consideration of ethics - and ethical boundaries - to download or listen to now: Ethics Bites.

While working as a school teacher in 1926, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein hit an eleven year old child so hard that the child collapsed. This was undoubtedly a terrible thing to do, and there was an investigation in the school. But in 1926 it was commonplace to use corporal punishment as a teaching technique. Today in Britain, fortunately, it isn't. Indeed the NSPCC has mounted a campaign to protect children legally from physical punishment.

So is it wrong to judge teachers of the past by today's standards? An easy response is to appeal to ethical relativism. This is the idea that all our judgments of right and wrong, praise and blame, and so on, are relative to the time and place when the relevant acts were performed. On this view it may have been right to control a child by using physical punishment in the 1920s (within limits which Wittgenstein overstepped); whereas it would be morally abhorrent now. Ethical relativism is, however, deeply unsatisfactory and hard to sustain with consistency.

Miranda Fricker in her discussion of this topic for the podcast series Ethics Bites has some interesting things to say. She is surely right that it is a condition of blaming someone that we believe that they could have chosen to act differently. It is wrong to blame someone for something over which they have no control, such as their height.

In the case of Wittgenstein's act, we can rightly blame him: even by the standards of his day he was brutal. There would be nothing anachronistic in that. But if he had caned the child within the limits accepted in 1926, should we hold him blameworthy? Miranda points out that we do want to have some sort of negative attitude to people who did things like this in the past, even though they couldn't necessarily have known any better. Yet blame implies that they could have known better.

We need a richer moral vocabulary to account for our feelings here. Clearly some of Wittgenstein's contemporaries would have thought that all corporal punishment of children was wrong: these were exceptional people who could see beyond the dominant perspective. We appropriately feel moral disappointment at the child-hitters of the past. We are sad that people behaved that way, recognize that, though it would have been difficult, they might have thought differently and judge appropriately. We can't exactly blame them, because that implies that they might have done otherwise. But at the same time, we don't want to have a neutral attitude to them. We are disappointed in them.

About the author

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His podcasts, Philosophy: The Classics and Philosophy Bites, have proved surprisingly popular, regularly topping the iTunes podcast chart. Ethics Bites is his third podcast.

Subscribe to Nigel Warburton's posts