Thinking Philosophically by David Roochnik

Author:David Roochnik
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119066996
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Precision in Ethics

Early in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers a warning about the work on which he is about to embark. “Our discussion,” he says, “will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter. For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike” (1094b10–14). So, for example, when it comes to mathematics, whose subject matter is abstract and formal, the highest level of precision and clarity is possible to attain and therefore is expected. It is unacceptable for a geometer to state that, more often than not, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to the sum of two right angles. Instead, a proof is required to demonstrate that this is a necessary truth, an invariable fact about all triangles. Its steps follow logically one from the other and its conclusion admits of no exceptions. Such a proof is the paradigm of precision.

By contrast, it would be, Aristotle thinks, a terrible mistake to expect such mathematical rigor in all other disciplines. When it comes to ethics, whose subject matter is human happiness – the dimension of human life concerned with and guided by a conception of what is good – there is obviously great dispute, and there always will be. In China, for example, free speech is not accorded much value, whereas in the United States it is. In Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to have a driver’s license; in Sweden this is considered absurd. Because there are a vast number of divergent answers to the question, how should we live?, it is tempting to think that values, or conceptions of the good life and happiness, exist only “by convention” (1094b17), that they have no deeper root in reality other than the fact that people agree about them.

That Americans greet each other with a handshake, while Japanese do so with a bow, is clearly no more than a minor cultural difference. But does such conventionalism apply to the question, what is the best life? Many people, let’s call them relativists, believe this is the case. For them, there is no right answer to a practical question, except the one that a culture or a community has put into place.

Aristotle disagrees. He thinks happiness, activity according to virtue or excellence, objectively grounded as it is in the human function, is a matter of nature (1094b17), not convention. This means that in principle there are objectively correct answers to ethical questions that are not determined by cultural practices. It is arguable, for example, that the suppression of free speech in China, however widely it is approved there, is just plain wrong. At the same time, however, Aristotle acknowledges that this region of reality, the practical or ethical, is not amenable to mathematical proof. The best he hopes for, then, is “a rough and general sketch” (1094a20), an “outline” (1104a2) rather than a technical treatise or systematic exposition of the good life. For the practical realm is so complicated, contingent, and variable that it simply does not admit of precise solution.

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