APPLYING ETHICS: MODES, MOTIVES AND LEVELS OF COMMITMENT

Rajendra Prasad

Ethics and the World

'Ethics does not treat', says Wittgenstein, 'of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic.' (Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914-16, 77e) He seems to suggest that ethics must be a condition of the world in the same sense in which logic must be. Logic must be a condition of the world, as I take him to mean, in the sense that it determines what the world may or may not contain: the world can contain only that which is logically possible and cannot contain anything which is not. This does not mean that it contains, or must contain, all that is logically possible. It means that any x it contains, or may contain, must be logically possible. X's logical possibility is a necessary condition of its being contained in the world.

But no sense can be given to the corresponding terms 'ethically possible' and 'ethically impossible'. Ethical principles do not determine the possibility or impossibility of anything they are relevant to; rather, they determine its desirability or undesirability. Of course, they are not relevant to anything and everything, but only to certain types of things, like individuals, their groups, their actions, motives, intentions, attitudes, plans and policies, projects and projections, etc. Let us then speak of ethically desirable and undesirable things, that is, things which are in accordance with, or violative of, ethical principles, and not of ethically possible and impossible things. But even then we cannot say that ethics must be a condition of the world in the sense that the world must have only ethically desirable things because it cannot have any ethically undesirable thing. To say that would be flying in the face of facts because the world does contain at least a few ethical evils, that is, ethically undesirable things. However, we definitely can say that the world should contain ethically desirable things. It is (almost) a logical truth that a desirable world, a world living in which would be worthwhile, must contain ethically desirable things. Negatively speaking, if a world does not contain any ethically desirable thing or contains lesser number of ethically desirable than ethically undesirable things, it would not be a desirable world, or would at the most be only a marginally desirable world.

To make ethical desirability a condition of the desirability of a world does not imply that a world's being ethically desirable would make it desirable on the whole. For example, a miserable world in which poverty abounds, whose inmates lead by and large a moral life though eating only half a meal a day, would not be a desirable world even if it is an ethically desirable one. On the other hand, even if it is desirable in other, say, political, economic, etc., but not in ethical, respects, it would not be a desirable world. Ethical goodness is foundational to all other kinds of goodnesses in the sense that its presence in any one of them heightens the latter's natural or distinctive value, and its absence in the latter, or the latter's having been polluted with some ethical evil, does the contrary. It can also be asserted with a good amount of reasonable force that no non-ethical goodness can sustain itself, or its dignity, unless it is accompanied, or fortified, with some kind of ethical goodness. A necessary component of our ethical concern is a concern, or care, for the welfare of others. In a world, whose inhabitants completely lack this concern, any non-ethical goodness, like economic, political, etc., can have, if at all, only an anaemic existence. No wonder that life in it would become 'nasty, short, and brutish'.

The things which a world may contain can be classified into the following types: things which it ought to have, things which it ought not to have, things which it may or may not have, and things whose absence in it would not make it ethically poorer but whose presence in it would add some lustre to its ethical value. Slightly stretching the use of a terminology meant to be applicable to human actions, when considered from the ethical (or even some non-ethical evaluative) point of view, we can call the above four types of things obligatory, forbidden, permissible, and recommended. In an ideal ethical world the number of forbiddens would be nil, but all the other three types it can very well accommodate. In any actual world, all the four types of things exist. The normal way to improve its ethical quality is to minimize the number of forbiddens and increase that of the obligatory and the recommended. The permissible are ethically indifferent, and therefore their status, that is, any plan or policy about encouraging or discouraging the existence of one or more of them, is determined, in any society by some other, non-ethical, consideration or considerations. For example, the direction a house should face is generally determined by considerations which maybe climatic, spatial, situational, economic etc. and seldom by some ethical consideration.

Anyway, a desirable world should have as few of the forbiddens as possible and definitely fewer than any one of the three others. This is only to assert that in a desirable world...