Kantian Thinking About Military Ethics by J Carl Ficarrotta Professor

Author:J Carl Ficarrotta Professor [Professor, J Carl Ficarrotta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317109655
Google: 92cGDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29999212
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Each Level of Thinking is Useful

I have not claimed that these three levels (the two levels of philosophical reflection, meta-ethics and normative ethics, and the third, ordinary moral life/ morality/“applied ethics”) are completely insulated from one another. On the contrary, as we grow as moral agents, each level will be brought into coherence with every other in an interpenetrating way, moving toward what Rawls has called “reflective equilibrium” (Rawls 1971, 48). It is just that in the main, we should still distinguish roughly between what sorts of activity we are undertaking and at what level. Different questions are being addressed (for instance, “What is the fundamental principle of morality?” as opposed to say “What should I do about the crime I just witnessed?”), with differences in point and focus. Answers to or mastery of one set of questions would not provide, in any direct way, answers to or facility in the other sets.

Of course, engaging in philosophical reflection on an activity is not pointless or unrelated to the activity—I will venture that we would not do it otherwise. What does the discipline of philosophy offer, particularly in its reflection on morality? To start, we no doubt deepen our understanding of the first-order activity and might find that working with the philosophical questions is gratifying in its own right. Moreover, philosophical reflection on any activity, moralizing included, seeks in part to justify the shape and conduct of the practices: it can and has led people to modify the rules of an activity (and occasionally might lead us to the radical move of abandoning the activity or replacing it with something else). Philosophical ethics might tell us, for example, what we think makes something wrong in the first place—we can then articulate where the buck stops in our chains of justification. Making this explicit might help us determine when exceptions to the general rules will make sense, or (as Mill pointed out) give us some additional guidance in puzzling out what to do when rules or values conflict. Moral philosophy can teach us what kinds of reasons ought to count in moral arguments and which are morally irrelevant. What to make of new moral problems and what policies should be put in place to cope with them can also be indirectly informed by the results of moral theorizing. So again, moral philosophy does not replace ordinary moral thinking, but rather provides a framework and reaches into the moral life from the outside, in ways that can and often do improve our practice of moral judgment.

Hence we should recognize that the questions asked by moral philosophers are hugely important; but at the same time we should insist that the point of their questions has most often not been to provide a simple decision-making algorithm for addressing our moral problems. Offering a deep-level understanding of our moral experience (that all experts in moral judgment will properly seek) is not the same thing as providing the entire suite of skills and traits that are needed

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