Evolutionary Ethics

The trouble starts with words. Almost every philosopher and lots of non-philosophers from time immemorial have given opinions about ethics and morals. They co-opted other peoples' words when they didn't invent their own. They have given different, frequently incompatible, interpretations to terms such as "good", "evil", "right", "wrong", "intention", "will", "virtue", "vice" etc. Many of those previous uses have become strata in the archaeology of ethics. Like layers of volcanic flow, each eruption emits a red hot fluid that solidifies over older material, and then is eroded away. What remains to latest observers is a jumble of colors and shapes and materials mixed and pressed together. It takes years of work to separate samples into their original sources and structure.
 

Because the language of ethics has been misappropriated over and over again, the result is confusion, only ordered by assigning a sequence of meanings to the words. Thus, there is {good1, good 2, ..}, {right1, right2 ...}, & c. Since the different senses of the words are often at odds with each other, it is often useless to entertain comparisons or developmental sequences. All that can be done with words putatively part of the same subject, ethics, is to try presenting each point of view as a stand-alone system. This prevents having an on-going discipline, ethics, in the same sense as we have mathematics, physics or chemistry.  One can speak of the history of a science, seeing the developments of the science as joined by related subject matter. Chemistry, for example, has always been about materials and their interactions, but ethics is difficult to house under one roof. In ethics, we have Plato, Aristotle, Kant and many others, each of whom has an independent conception of what is good, right, etc. In this sense, ethics does not have a history.

Nonetheless, I think it is possible to unify the subject by applying evolution. There are two senses of ethical evolution: first, the historical record and, second, the nature of the subject. In the first sense, I propose there is a History of Ethics just as there is a History of Science and histories of other subjects. To present an History of Ethics is to claim there is an organizing framework which distinguishes ethics over time; i.e., there is a core subject. Second, Ethics itself is an evolutionary subject; i.e., it is never complete, but advances through time just as do biological entities. Making this second claim is to subsume the History of Ethics into the subject; i.e., one part of Ethics is Ethics as History. Taken together, evolutionary ethics defines the subject in terms of process, not particular ideas or definite components. Evolutionary ethics includes ethical evolution.

The presumption of my view is that all those ethicists believed they were engaging in something they had in common. St. Thomas Aquinas was thoroughly familiar with Aristotle, just as Immanuel Kant was familiar with David Hume, Rene Descartes and Plato. Those who profess ethics usually suppose their views take into account what the old masters claimed, and that theirs is a new and improved interpretation of words such as good, right, etc. There is an assumption that all of us are talking about the very same "good", "right", etc; i.e., there is some essential or even substantial thing behind the words. This is similar to the belief that there are such things as matter and energy which are the subject of physics, even if we don't know exactly they they are. Of course, some physicists and ethicists reify the stuff they study, making Matter, Energy, Good and Right into metaphysical substances, even Platonic eidos and/or unformed, inchoate matter. What is curious about ethics is the common belief that ethicists are thinking about the aame things, even if the objects and relationships they study seem totally different.
 

The evolutionary perspective helps us reconcile these seeming differences and contradictions. I take it that there are ethical species. Each species can be included in a genus, family, order and kingdom just as in biology. At the top level, the kingdom, there are metaphysical dualists and monists. Dualists follow Plato's direction, basing everything on an assumed duality of Form and Matter, the seen and unseen. Aquinas commandeered Aristotle for Catholicism, which I believe puts him in the order of Aristotelian Naturalists. Within that order there are two families: the theological and the secular (skeptics). But all of these schools (species) are subsumed under dualism because they suppose there is something underlying or separate from the matter of our everyday experience. Even Kantian Idealism comes under the dualist heading, as Kant claimed the noumena (the real substance) are there; they are the cause of the phenomena, our experience. But, for Kant, the noumena are always just out of reach. We can realize their perfection only in the limit which only the Infinite can attain. Kantian Idealism was inspired by both Plato and Hume, a sort of halfway house between materialism and dualism (or spiritualism).

On the other hand, there are metaphysical monists who claim, as I do, the Universe is made of just one stuff. But, right here, the philosophers divide over the issue of consciouness, individuality, which creates an order of Materialism and an Order of Subjectivism. Either the Universe has to explain the Mind, or the Mind has to explain the Universe. The subjectivist order has generally been the weaker, as most people prefer to accept the world they experience as what is. It seems harder to explain the world as an invention of one's psychology, if only because each of us feels unable to transform it willy-nilly into whatever we would like. That difficulty supports the materialist view, which accepts the world as it is, not merely a trompe l'oeil. Of course, this leads to the problem of consciousness, the sense that there is an immaterial I and, further, that this I can change the world. While I generally consider myself a materialist, I find myself attracted to the subjectivist, even solipsist, understanding of the world, because it makes some things easier to explain. Of course, if the Mind is somehow placed in the material world in a satisfactory way, this distinction and division is waved away.
 

The foregoing categorizations are just suggestions. Since the French Encyclopedists two or more centuries ago, there are many people professionally devoted to the classification and description of Universal Knowledge. Ethics is no exception, as Oxford now publishes a Handbook of Ethical Theories which sets forth an ethical classification scheme of record. This is a useful work, as those investigating ethical problems have at least a descriptive Linnean scheme in which to understand their research. I use this reference scheme in order to place what I am thinking, and to discover what, on the surface of the subject, is connected to what. The reference scheme, whether a Linnean tree or other system of relationships, is only one way to look at things, and does not of itself impose a  theoretically significant ordering of the subject. Just because bats and birds fly does not mean they are directly related. The flying habit has evolutionary convergent characters, but that is not the same thing as having the same ancestral DNA; i.e., phenotype and genotype are different measures. When an ordering is linked to theoretically significant criteria, such as genotype, that ordering may encourage further insights; e.g., we are better able to understand the idea of convergent evolution when it is distinguished from genetic evolution.

A systematic classification scheme is important when it reveals theoretical relationships. In biology, the Linnean scheme started with observable characteristics (phenotype), but continued after the discovery of DNA (genotype) because genetic theory links phenotype to genotype. In the same way, a useful ethical scheme would show how the various ethical theories are related to each other, both historically and in respect of structural elements (key ideas). The utitlity of such a scheme is in regulating contributions to the subject; in following pregnant leads while avoiding dead ends. Although this imposes a certain conformity on practitioners, it does not altogether prevent the introduction of wild ideas. Thomas Kuhn captured the situation in his notion of "paradigms" in science. The virtue of paradigmatic conformity is that it enlists the efforts of many lesser men to toil in the fields; not everyone has to be prodigious or a genius to make progrress. In other words, one does not have to start from scratch just to contribute something. The scheme allows workers to get their bearings.

In further analogy to biological evolution and other sciences, evolutionary ethics never ends. There is no goal or purpose; no final end. There is no particular beginning. What is known is always subject to revision. These ideas about ethics are implicit in seeing it as an historical study, as something in progress. We have similar ideas about most sciences. People work on a defined subject, adding what knowledge they can. Facts and opinions accumulate, supporting or challenging the received wisdom or, sometimes, revealing an anomaly. The Michaelson-Morley experiment was inexplicable in Newtonian physics. I think information theory has something to do with quantum mechanics, but it also involves computing and entropy. The question, whether information is free (does no work), is an anomaly in physics, just as computing was for a time anomatous in mathematics. Eventually these anomalies destroy a science, create a new science or lead to a more inclusive science. Generally, I think it appropriate to see the development of ethics in the light of the sciences.

This is not to make ethics a branch of anthropolgy or sociology or some other science. It is not just ethology. All of those disciplines are "objective" or descriptive; i.e., they record and theorize about what is observed. Evolutionary ethics must take into account the findings of the social sciences, as well as related work in primatology and other animal behavior. How we became judgemental creatures might be important to know. Ethics differs from the social sciences in being both hypothetical and prescriptive; i.e., using 'ought,' 'should' and 'would' in its language, the language of values. Because ethics involves judgements and decisions, it is mostly closely related to economics and law among traditional subjects. In the Ideal State, law is derivative from ethics; i.e., law should be the codification of ethical notions of morality. (Of course, it is not unusual for States and societies to impose immoral laws.) In an ethical society, the economic principles in use recognize ethical concerns, even if amoral or immoral economies are possible or feasible. (For example, Capitalism is at best amoral, but all too often it is immoral.) Ethics involves principles of behavior, what we think is good or right, and gives grounds for moral judgements of approval or condemnation,  which is not the territory of the sciences. I think the Humean wall between 'is' and 'ought' is a fixed feature of the subject.
 

As I wrote recently in my review of Moral Minds and elsewhere, ethics starts with the voluntary choices of conscious, intelligent agents. If there are really no choices and no consciousness, then ethics is an empty subject. I do not believe things are that way. I believe in my own ability to make choices, and that there are alternatives among which I may choose. While I also think most of what I do is programmed, even unconscious - a mish mash of habits and rituals sometimes guided by beliefs - I am sure some of what I do is the result of voluntary choice. In law, we recognize that responsibility flows from actions based on decisions made with 'malice and aforethought;' i.e., we knew what were the alternatives, what were the consequences and what we were doing. That is a classical situation for ethical consideration. Any serious study of ethics presupposes such conditions and situations exist. This is no different from the mathematician's belief that Zero, One and Infinity are real, or that there are classes or sets. We can argue the metaphysics (ontology) of mathematial and ethical objects, and all the other objects of knowledge and judgement, but the student must suspend judgement when opening the book.
 

An important feature of ethics is that it is not determined by physiology. Ethical creatures have the prerequisite of sufficient intelligence to override physiological demands. Thus, however unpleasant the thought, suicide is possible. Ethics is not merely altruism (or lack of it, selfishness) in the biological sense, unless we are willing to accept a completely reductionist form of materialism. Just as the other subjects we study in college have their own elan, ethics has its. There is a way of going about poetry, just as there is a way of doing chemistry. It would be ridiculous to attribute the workings of those subjects to our physiology, even if it requires our physiology (brains) to pursue them. Each subject has it own "inner logic," however controversial that term may be, and however many disputes may go on about the nature of the subject. What is mathematics? Physics? Ethics? My view is there is separate body of knowledge called ethics which has its own meta-language and content, just like all the other subjects. That human behavior is entirely reducible to material performance, that there are no "values," is one possible theory of ethics, but only one among many others.
 

Because I am proposing a definition of the subject, a definition I believe sufficiently broad to include almost everyone making ethical claims, I suppose I have a more than usual burden in presenting an ethical theory. To avoid some of the work, I prefer to assign roles to those making claims; i.e., a position in the scheme of ethical thinking. For example, I believe recent scientific work in primatology (DeWaals, Hauser, et al) belongs somewhere in the trunk of the subject. Animal and primate behavior is the foundation on which ethical considerations arise, in the first place because moral agents are one result of biological evolution. I don't exclude those scientists from the lecture hall, but they are not discoursing on the present core of the subject.

Ethics is evolutionary in the sense that what we know about it changes from time to time. Unlike the Victorian Spencerians or Social Darwinians, I don't think there is any "progress" in human morality. Most of the ethical systems that have been in  vogue are workable, given an appropriate social context. There's nothing to prevent Plato's Republic from going into operation, assuming we set up some reasonable method of assigning roles. If the players believe their parts, Plato's society could work; in fact, I believe it was implemented in Medieval monasteries, nunneries and their surrounds. Given modern sensibilities, it doesn't even work in Tibet, if only because the Han Chinese expelled the Dalai Lama.
 

On the other hand, Utilitarianism as conceived by Jeremy Bentham, and developed by J.S.Mills as Liberal Democracy, is rampant in the present world, especially on Wall St., and in parliaments and congresses. The reason for such wide spread acceptance of an ethical and economic theory is obvious enough: it is the preference and advantage of the ruling classes of the hegemon, currently the United States. Utilitarianism was a strange, even radical, collection of thoughts in Victorian England, which ardently practiced Mercantilism. Most Great Powers were Mercantilists during the Victorian era, and it is still the operative foreign trade policy of China, Japan and other Asian countries. The basic Mercantilist idea is adding value: raw materials are imported and worked into more useful products to be sold (usually to colonials). The products have a higher value than the raw materials, yielding a net profit for the manufacturers. This is not a new idea, as it was probably understood by ancient peasant farmers. What makes Mercantilism a modern idea is its combination with Imperialism: the forced import of raw materials and the forced sale of products in captive markets. Modern Capitalism uses this same idea in a new and improved form: mass production for a contrived ("managed") mass market (which is now global). That is how Capitalism reconciles Mercantilism and Utilitarianism. All of those value systems imply political and economic regimes, any of which can and do work for long periods of time. Sometimes, as in the cases of Mercantilism and Liberal Democracy, one system almost effortlessly melds into another.

Political and economic systems have ethical implications because, in the first place, they are based on ethical conceptions. What is fair value? What is justice? In most cases, ethical principles are deeply imbedded in the world's cultures. The great religions represent unique ethical concerns and relationships. Most people do not think about the ethical principles or maxims (morals) that guide their everyday moral judgements. They learn patterns of behavior from birth by observation and imitation. Many young Muslims believe they will be rewarded by their gods for making a suicidal sacrifice, so they volunteeer as Jihadists. The same behavior was encouraged in Japan by the Samurai Code of Bushido, but for different reasons. In most Western countries, undertaking a suicide mission  is felt to be abhorent and immoral, except in last ditch situations. Suicide and murder are aspects of the Lifeboat problem, but different peoples have different thresholds for applying that tableau. What is universal is the Lifeboat Problem, but very few people act on an instant analysis of that problem. Instead, they simply follow rules they learned. This is shown by the consternation most people have when confronted with a simulated or actual lifeboat situation: they don't know what to do. They are usually horrified and even paralyzed by what the situation demands. That is why doctors undergo special training for Triage: the problem is not mechanically soluble and isn't covered by the standard rules. A choice has to be made on the spot for which there may be no precedents, no escape from responsibility. Emergency room triage requires making moral choices based on ethical principles that are not deeply imbedded or imminent in local cultures.

The fact that most human behavior is fairly automatic deceives some analysts into thinking it must be deeply programmed, possibly even genetic. But all those immediate, seemingly unthinking, responses show is that people are equipped with excellent learning abilities. Both children and adults learn a lot more from their experience than most observers care to guess. This fact becomes obvious when a movie goer is asked about a film before and after seeing it. Regardless of their initial expectations, ordinary people can relate the minute details of the characters and situations portrayed and explain the meaning of their acts and relationships. Many people wax lyrical about the use of color, scenery, costumes and motion in a film. None of this is obvious when reading most scripts or hearing audience comments before the showing. The filmmaker has a knack of capturing the sense of the story on film. Master filmmakers very often create an entirely new story on film which may be only loosely related to the original script. Are there genes or predispositions for reacting to films? I doubt it, unless human evolution is happening faster than anyone imagines. In his Poetics, Aristotle said theatrical performance requires a "suspension of belief." What we are forced to do by the play is set aside our everyday worlds and discover a new one. In a few hours, we have to learn an entirely new set of rules and situations. What all of us have are excellent abiltiies to extract the factual, emotional, patterned content of what is presented to us.
 

Ethical theories must consider that there may be several possible solutions to a given problem. For example, in biology, there are many ways of going about being a plant, an animal, a predator and its prey. As in evolution, some solutions stand for a short time, others for very long periods. Bacterial forms are the longest and shortest lived creatures on this planet. Animals ultimately depend on plants for survival, so plants must be resistant to predation in addition to getting what they need to survive. Which life forms last a long time is not simply determined: survival is the result of interactions with the environment including other life forms. There are parallel situations in human affairs. Each culture develops rough and ready methods to deal with its everyday world. Most cultures stop developing when the situation stabilizes. It is rare for people to ask what is best; rather, the usual question is what is good enough. Plato's Philosopher King would have been unsatisfied with a compromised answer, but modern democracy depends on the substitution. Evolutionary ethics is always relativist, not absolutist, because 'good enough' is the rule of thumb.
 

I have no doubt that ethical principles and morals have changed dramatically during the last five or millenia. For example, polygamy and slavery were generally accepted, not condemned as immoral, in ancient times. It was not considered unethical to sell children into apprenticeships, indentured servitude or even slavery until recently; it was all a matter oif circumstances. In the wake of World War II, we adopted new and different International standards of behavior. The Iraqis are trying Saddam Hussein, not summarily executing him. Soldiers and, now, governments are expected to observe various Geneva conventions about war, justice and international relations. Abu Ghraibs are no longer acceptable anywhere. We expect government and business to treat their charges in a respectful and humane manner. We expect our institutions to provide for emergencies, medical care, education, jobs and much more on a regular basis. None of these modern standards had any significant following just two or three centuries ago.

The fact of changing morals justifies my ethical principle of moral evaporation; i.e., over time, moral maxims are discarded, usually gradually. "Evaporation" is intended to evoke an analogy to liquids, inidcated that morality is both flexible and changeable. Morality depends on circumstances. It is often stretched one way or another. In moments of heat or cold, it is transformed altogether. But all that is analogy, which I use for the purpose of shaking up thinking. One of the major problems in ethics is the iron grip of absolutism which prevails in popular and religious belief, as well as among ethicists. Ethical problems are much easier to solve when one allows of 'thinking outside the box.'
 

Moral evaporation is more than a heuristic. It implies the existence of moral evolution, but it is not identical with change. Moral evolution might occur by accretion without any change to pre-existing  maxims; i.e., moral evolution is possible without any moral evaporation. In analogy to fluids, some lakes grow ever larger as they are filled by rivers and creeks, but have no outlet to lower levels. Other lakes are roughly in equilibrium or oscillate with the seasons, depending on the balance of inflows and outflows. In this last, usual case, it is only the particular parcels of liquid that change; the overall body is perceived as existing over time.

The body of morality is, in fact, very much like most lakes, as its content is always changing. While many moral maxims observed in modern societies were also observed thousands of years ago, a very large number of maxims have been added and subtracted. Many Christians, for example, think of their moral codes as relatively fixed, having been given by their god, but, in fact, that is not true. Christian thinking about sexuality changed a lot shortly after its founding, from monastic or military abstinence to reluctant acceptance of mating. More recently, some Mormons, claiming Christian heritage, reverted to the Old Testament practice of polygamy. Whenever a Christian sect adheres to one or another variant of Christian theology, that belief propagates as changed practices (habits and rituals) throughout society. Thus, monogamous and polygamous societies are necessarily organized differently at the household level, and use different moral maxims to govern relations between the sexes, parents, children, etc. This is very obvious when American Mormons are interviewed about their participation in polygamy. Most of those growing up in polygamous societies accept their circumstances as normal. They think about familal relations differently than the non-polygamous Americans who are shocked and horrified by polygamy. Mormon culture is different from Christian culture. Each culture reflects the absorption of slightly different ethical principles, consequently different moral maxims. Those living each culture do not feel uneasy about their lives, which illustrates the ethical principle of relativism (different ethical systems are not only possible, but viable). Of course, moral missionaries - zealots, crusaders and jihadists - do feel uneasy about other people living different sorts of lives, which has motivated endless strife throughout History.

One ubiquitous criticism of ethical relativism is that it permits anything at all; i.e., there are no universal standards. Seen without its emotional loading, that is what the criticism comes to: there are no universal standards, a notion implicit in the label 'relativism.' What the crtiics fail to provide is any reason why there should be any universal ethical standards aside from their absolutist preferences. I think there are only three sorts of absolutist ethics: those which propose a metaphysical order that imposes values, those which propose a universalist epistemology and those which propose an immutable human nature. In the first category, I place theologies which attribute ethical principles and morals to the will of the gods. I also place in that category Plato and all the other dualists who allege there is an underlying real world which structures things thus and so. In the second category, I place Kant and any other Idealists, who rely on what can be known to establish the order of things. In their view, knowledge, once acquired as principles and laws, is fixed and immutable. This view was very strong during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras, because it comports with Newtonian physics and modern technology. This orientation, like that of Realists, is inclined toward the existence of a natural order. The difference, I think, between Realism and Idealism is just that Realists say it is there whereas Idealists aren't sure it is there, but they agree it works as if it were.
 

The third category of absolutists includes those who reject theology, Platonism and Idealism, and usually dualism as well, but nonetheless claim ethical principles are universal. In this category comes many modern ethicists who are one form or another of determinist. Determinism was more popular a century or more ago than now, because it seemed science held out the possibility of universal explanations. As Quantum Mechanics developed and took hold in widely used practical applications (e.g., transistors), determinism lost its grip. It's isn't reasonable to think about the Universe as a giant clockwork when there are Quarks, Black Holes, Hawking Radiation, and, lately, Dark Matter. We use the Hall Effect to make magnetically operated switches. Our IPODs and cell phones depend on tunnelling, while transistor action involves the movement of holes (virtual charges). All of that weakens the notion of some built-in, perpetual order, whether or not divinely inspired. Nonetheless, the latest charge of "Biological Naturalists," as in Hauser 's Moral Minds, supposes there is a universal, built-in "moral faculty" which is the current product of on-going evolution in Homo sapiens. The point of the Naturalist argument is to see all instances of H. sapiens as essentially the same, therefore inventors of, and subject to, the same ethical principles. While Naturalism is far more flexible than Determinism, it still suffers from the fact that ethical principles have not converged during the last five millennia. Different cultures have persisted in their different ethical conceptions.

Evolutionary ethics is able to encompass all of the foregoing ethical systems, exactly because of the relativity of ethics. As it is established practice in cultural anthropology to examine each culture on its own merits, so evolutionary ethics studies each ethical system separately and without judgement; i.e., a main focus of evolutionary ethics is structural. We can establish what theists, idealists and naturalists alike believe, and examine the internal structure (logic) of their beliefs, without any commitment to the validity of those beliefs. (The easiest stance to adopt in such studies is the meta-ethical rule that they are all equivalent so far as they can be successfully applied.) From this standpoint, we can establish the premises and deductions of those ethical systems. We can try to determine what is logical, what not, and what indeterminate. Whether we adopt any of those systems for ourselves is a matter left to personal choice.

The application of ethics, morals, is an important part of every known culture; i.e., ethics is a cultural artifact. This makes it possible to study ethics in a scientific fashion by determining what moral maxims are in operation, when they are applied and how they interact. The ethical principle involved in such studies is that the moral concepts imbedded in beliefs guide behavior. For this to be true, one  must assume that moral agents have concocted some causal structure of the world in which they act; i.e., do this, get that. The physical world need not actually operate as conceived, as long as what the agent perceives confirms its hypothesis. In other words, moral agents assume their beliefs are efficaciously enacted. Ex: I want to kill that man, so I aim and throw a spear which pierces him, and then he dies. (Note: when we cannot connect ethical beliefs with observable results, as in the Aztecs' belief that human sacrifice was required for proper operation of the world, I will assign those beliefs to mythology or some other subject than ethics.) Ethics is practical; it is about actual, observed relations among moral agents. Examination of culture should suggest the moral maxims that guide behavior. Very often, cultural participants will tell observers what they believe, and how their beliefs are put into practice. In the United States, there are large numbers of preists and ministers who tell people everyday how their beliefs should be applied. So, there is no dearth of evidence for the recommended, putative and effective moral maxims of a culture. It is from moral maxims, thus abstracted, that we generalize to ethical principles.
 

What follows from the foregoing is that intentions involve predictions, the same sort of predictions we make about thousands of non-ethical matters every day. Intentionality, or purposiveness,  is not strictly an ethical problem, but it is assumed in the assignment of ethical responsibility. What is different about ethical intentionality is the planning of behavior that has ethical implications; i.e., the act or scenario is covered under moral maxims. There is no mystery in this process, as, for example, our Courts routinely discover intention when examining commission or omission. It is difficult to pin down intention when something was or wasn't done suddenly, which is why there is consideration of "aforethought," and there are categories such as crimes of passion, at Court. When there is aforethought, there are observable cues of forthcoming behavior; otherwise, what happens is known in advance only to the actor. Sometimes not even the actor knows that a certain behavior will occur, in which case we say it is involuntary. Without going further into intentionality, it is enough for the moment to say that we recognize it in our everyday lives. We even recognize it in our pets and other animals. Intentionality only becomes a mystery when we attribute it to some spirit or 'ghost in the machine' no one has ever observed, rather than the workings of intelligent brains.

At this point, I suggest there are two sorts of ethical principles: local and general. Local ethical principles apply only in a limited range of cultures, usually a main culture and its variants. For example, there are Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, but all of them pledge obedience to Shari'ia law, a construct devised by Muslim Immans. Similarly, there are divisions of  the other religions and non-religious "ways of life." All of these may be coinsidered sub-cultures of a dominant or more abstract, formal culture, so it is reasonable to lump them together in a local class of ethical applications. General ethical principles are those principles held in common over many or all cultures, whether specifically as a whole (word for word), as an instantiation (fixing or substitution of variables), or by derivation (logical deduction).
 

Are there any universal ethical principles? In principle, I do not know the answer. I think we propose ethical principles and moral maxims, based on our knowledge of the world, and see how it works out. It is a trial and error process, based on experience, just as in the sciences. Perhaps most people reject this sort of ethics, for the reasons relativism is criticized: almost anything is permissible or forbidden. But I take that as a theoretical virtue, not a vice. If it is otherwise, we are back to rationalist, a priori, absolutist or meaningless schemes which have plagued the subject for millennia. Ethics is supposed to be practical philosophy, or so said Aristotle, which means it is supposed to work for ordinary people going about their ordinary business.