Five of the most important Western ethical thinkers.
From top, left to right; bottom, left to right:
Socrates (Wikimedia Commons / Eric Gaba (Sting));
Aristotle (Wikimedia Commons / Eric Gaba (Sting));
Jesus of Nazareth (Wikimedia Commons / Andreas Wahra);
St. Thomas Aquinas (Wikimedia Commons / Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.)
Immanuel Kant (Wikimedia Commons / By Unknown – Source: Eric Gerlach , first upload , Public Domain)

In my last post,  Values, Reality, and Politics, I developed a picture of our increasingly brutal political conflicts as being fights over differing value hierarchies. On closer inspection, each contending structure defines the very heart of the ethics and derived morality of their adherents. One absolutely remarkable observation is the differences between the ethics of progressives and neoliberals (aka conservatives) are not so much with their most fundamental values, but with lower level derived values.

In this picture of ethical evolvements, each level of values requires some prerequisites to acquire those values or ends. Those prerequisites then become valuable themselves as means to achieve the ends of the higher level values. They are therefore derived values one level below the values needing them to be realized. One basic value is security of the community from outside threats, and to achieve national security armed forces are needed. Everything required to produce those armed forces then become derived values to obtain the higher level value of communal security. Yet in my discussion of the hierarchy of values, I left out the most important piece.

The Choice of the Most Fundamental Values

My last post left out a discussion  of how we choose the most basic, fundamental values at the top of the hierarchy. Perhaps, because they appear to be so similar between progressives and neoliberals, the way they were chosen is not as operationally important as thinking about how the choice of derived values is ideologically driven. If the basic values are already given, they can be taken as postulates. Nevertheless, it is extremely careless intellectually and possibly hazardous not to consider how those fundamental values are determined. In fact, in the last section of this essay, we will consider a very important question about fundamental values and ethics: Are they culturally relative, or are they universal and absolute?

But first things first. What are the sources of our fundamental values? How did our forebears in prehistory, or even before them, our man-ape predecessors develop the values that held their bands together? What makes most sense here is social contract theory, in which single humans or mated pairs of humans came together in a band to assist each other in the hard business of survival. For such a band to stay together, not only did the group have to assist in everyone’s survival, but they also had to avoid creating animosity within the band. Such imperatives would create some form of the Golden Rule, which appears to exist in some form in nearly every religion and ethical tradition. From the same impulse, one can think of other ethical principles that spell out how to carry out the Golden Rule in more specific situations. The obvious examples from the Jewish and Christian traditions are the ten commandments, which also have analogues in other faiths and ethical traditions. As one particular detailed example of a comparison between the ten commandments and their Hindu analogues, see the post Hindu Yamas and Niyamas and the Ten Commandments on the Western Hindu blog. As a comparison of the ten commandments with the teachings of Confucius, see wikiHow to Be a Confucian, which shows a number of similarities. What takes the place of the ten commandments in Buddhism are the Buddhist Five Precepts. While there are dissimilarities, mostly in commandments involving the worship of God (or gods, or no god), the social ethical rules in all of these analogues are broadly similar.  Can it be that similar physical constraints imposed by the environment, together with the same problems of human survival faced by all cultures, produce similar social ethical values?

The first of the great ethicists of whom we know much was Socrates of Athens (470 or 469 BC to 399 BC). Socrates’ ethics were oriented on developing a sense of true community and the pursuit of virtues rather than material wealth. It was his focus on community that led him to accept his death sentence, and indeed to be his own executioner. Foremost among the virtues he espoused were intellectual and philosophical, The most famous quote associated with him is “the unexamined life is not worth living [and] ethical virtue is the only thing that matters.” In his view the life of the community superseded the importance of the individual. His acceptance of death rather than exile after his conviction for impiety underlined his priority to his community.

Plato’s student Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a polymath, with interests in physics, biology, metaphysics, logic, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, linguistics, and politics and government, as well as in ethics. During the Middle Ages his teachings profoundly affected Judeo-Islamic thought as well as the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Aristotle continued Socrates’ emphasis on the importance of moral virtues, which he taught needed to be inculcated into habits that are automatically followed. These moral virtues and the righteous actions they motivate are for him the only practical and effective means for a person to obtain the higher level goal of his life’s completion and perfection.

No examination of Western ethics, however brief, would be complete without a mention of Jesus of Nazareth. The major new piece of Western ethics added by Jesus was the predominant need for love in a person’s relations to all people. Christian love, often referred to by the Greek word agape or by the word “charity”, is empathic love of one’s fellow human beings. In the Gospel of Mark 12:28-31, we read

²⁸ And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?

²⁹ And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:

³⁰ And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

³¹ And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

As in the previous contributions to ethical philosophy, the Christian addition emphasized a person’s duty to reduce suffering and enhance the society’s stability through charity to one’s fellow human beings.

The next large addition to ethical philosophy was provided by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). His major achievement in ethics was to fuse the ethics of Aristotle — and by extension, the ethics of Socrates — to Christian ethics. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that whether an act is good or bad depends on if its results contribute to or direct us away from our proper human destiny. If we reach this desired end, the telos or final goal for which all human actions strive, we achieve happiness. in this context “happiness” is used to mean our completion or perfection as God’s children. Aquinas also agrees with Aristotle and Socrates in saying that to achieve happiness, we need to acquire a number of intellectual and moral virtues. These virtues enable us to understand the nature of final happiness and to understand how to find the way to happiness. Knowing these things and having the moral strength to follow the way to happiness, we can seek it in a reliable manner.

The Break from Classical Thinking with the Age of Enlightenment

The final ethical thinker  I wish to emphasize is Immanuel Kant (1724— 1804). Kant was also something of a polymath with interests in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics. As a child of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, Kant brought together some of the ideas of the Enlightenment with previous ethical ideas. According to Kant, moral law arises from the operation of the categorical imperative, which acts on everyone regardless of their interests, beliefs, or desires. He believed human beings were special creatures who had an inbuilt moral sense. This intrinsic moral sense was the categorical imperative, which arose as the ultimate command of reason, telling us our duties and obligations.

What Kant meant by an imperative is any statement that said that something must be done (or not done) under specific situations. The actions or non-actions are implied from their antecedents by reason. A simple example is “If I wish to pass this exam, I must study.”  By a categorical imperative, he meant an unconditional imperative that must be obeyed under all circumstances, i.e. a moral law. By the use of the word imperative in the phrase categorical imperative, Kant emphasized the moral law arose from the demands of reason.

Kant was strongly opposed to much of the ethical philosophy of his time, since they often justified a moral rule emphasizing the good of those involved, a subjective criterion. For example, a utilitarian would claim theft is wrong because it does not maximize the good for everyone involved. However, such a consideration is irrelevant to a person who is only interested in achieving positive outcomes for himself and is willing to steal. Moral systems such as that of the utilitarians cannot be used to persuade moral behavior, or in its absence to be a basis for moral judgements against malefactors, because they are based too much on subjective considerations. Kant suggested that categorical imperatives removed subjectivity by the demands of reason.

The Age of Enlightenment produced a break from classical thinking in other ways as well. Thomas Hobbes (1588 — 1679) started off the debate in his book Leviathan with the idea of the social contract between individuals of a society for their mutual protection. Although Hobbes concluded the best type of government was an absolute monarchy, later Enlightenment thinkers emphasized the rights of the individual, the natural equality of all men, and the artificial, man-made character of civil society and the state.

For example, John Locke (1632-1704), the father of classical liberalism, declared natural law required any social contract to protect not only the lives of citizens, but their property as well. Any sovereign,whether king or parliament, who would not protect the citizens’ lives and property would have broken the social contract and could justly be overthrown and replaced by the citizens. American rebels from Great Britain would make extensive use of Locke’s ideas in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and later in the Constitution of the United States (1789).

Putting It All Together

Knowing something of the history of Western thought on ethics,  what can we say about the most fundamental level of values in Western civilization? I would suggest the following list of fundamental values is bequeathed to us by our heritage:

1. Government is established for the protection of the lives, property, and natural rights of its citizens.
2. The structure of government should be that of a representative democracy.
3. All men and women are fundamentally equal before the law, irrespective of race or gender.
4. Citizens’ natural rights include the freedoms of religion, speech, press, association, opinion, and the holding of property.
5. We owe to our fellow citizens the sympathy of Christian empathic love, whether we are believers in the Judeo-Christian God or not.

These fundamental values have been shared by the vast majority of both progressives and neoliberals (aka conservatives). From time to time we hear of suggestions that this list should be limited or qualified, particularly with limitations to freedom of opinion, but so far it appears to be a fairly stable list. This has been true at least since the American Revolution for most of it, and since the U.S. Civil War concerning civil rights for all races. It did take almost a century after the Civil War before the equality of rights for all could be fully enforced, but after the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the promise of the U.S, Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution was finally firmly established.

Is Ethics Relative to the Culture, or Universal and Absolute?

There is at least one way  in which some progressives might differ with neoliberals concerning the most fundamental level of values: Are these Western values applicable to all cultures or just to the West? If Western values are not universal and applicable to all nations, must we respect the values of other cultures with immigrants and visitors here in our own country? These questions are raised most often by the issue of multiculturalism, which I will discuss in my next post.

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