It all depends on what you take seriously...

... I shall not cease to practise philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to anyone of you whom I happen to meet: 'Good Sir, you are a Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?' -Socrates, at his trial in 399 BC. 

Here by way of revision are a few thumbnail definitions. You shouldn't take them too literally nor imagine that knowing the definitions is going to be enough. It's about discussing, talking through or cross-examining these notions of what we should take most seriously in life, about, in other words, what we ought to do. Plato's term for this process of getting at the truth by a process of discussion and logical analysis was called the elenchus (ἔλεγχος). That's what you've got to do - put notions in the dock and cross examine them to see what stands up to close inspection. Examples are a favorite way to discover the logical fault lines of different concepts. So always try to construct examples and counterexamples in order to see how your notion works out in different situations.

Consequentialism: This says that the status of actions is determined by their contribution to the general welfare of human society. Utiliarianism is a variety of consequentialism which calculates welfare as the sum total of 'pleasure' or more vaguely 'happiness'. I shouldn't do something if it isn't likely to increase the common stock of 'good'. One of many arguments against utilitarianism is that it leaves unsolved how you are going to get people to desire 'better' things - how are you going to get them to prefer gardening programmes on TV to rape and pillage in the town? The problem here becomes, how do you know these things are 'better'? Mill relied on the experience of the more educated people in society to decide these issues, which is honest of him, but which seems to be sneaking in philosopher-rulers by the back door. These varieties of ethics assess moral worth by looking at the consequences of actions.

Deontological Ethics: This view of ethics claims that being a good person - the sort of person one ought to be - is a matter of obeying a set of laws or moral rules. These rules may have religious backing - 'God tells us to obey these rules' - or they may have some sort of rational argument to support the particular rules chosen. This is the case with Immanuel Kant's ethics which rely on his distinction between things that we do because they benefit us and things which we do because we can see that they are things that everyone ought to do, like telling the truth, keeping your promises and loving your neighbour. These things are absolute rules for our lives and involve no contradictions if put into operation. This high-minded ethic also saved the German bourgeoisie from having to do any thinking for themselves. You just had to obey the basic moral law. Deontological ethics sees moral worth as a matter of obeying fundamental rules or laws.

Virtue Ethics: A third variety of moral theory has become popular in recent decades because people have become increasingly disenchanted with Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. Virtue ethics assesses actions as the successful or unsuccessful expression of desirable personal qualities or virtues. A virtue ethicist would approve of an action because it is, say, charitable or generous or courageous. Virtue ethics believes that people can and should strive to become good by developing these qualities or virtues. All of this is essentially a revised and weaker version of Aristotle's analysis of moral behaviour as we see it in the Nicomachean Ethics. The constellation of virtues or personal excellences that Aristotle picks out is designed to produce young men who will be able to take leading roles in the state in their maturity. To be able to exercise these virtues you will need a good sense of judgement which is central to this view. Only then would your life have any chance of being successful in the larger sense, what the Greek sense of what they called eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). Our translation of this as happiness fails to catch the sense of a life that flourishes and goes well because you are a fully developed person playing a full role in society and managing to avoid the pitfalls that chance puts in our way. The Star Wars greeting - 'May the Force be with you' – that’s to say the daimon - comes about as close as we can get today and is probably a translation of the Ancient Greek word eudaimonia, made by some drop-out acid-head who wrote science fiction.


(In very broad terms, Deontological Ethics looks at the actions a person does. It asks, 'Does this action conform to the basic rules? Christians and Kantians are certainly much concerned about a person's fundamental attitudes to others, but they look first and foremost towards the actions that a person does. Consequentialists, especially Utilitarians, are to a even greater extent concerned with actions. Virtue Ethicists, in contrast, have their focus on the sort of person one should be if one is to have any chance of a humanly successful life. They tend to use the  word 'flourishing', as if we were well-watered plants. Good actions would be the natural expression of such a person, they claim. Do you agree that this would seem to assume that the demands of private and public life coincide? The basic contrast outlined in this paragraph is between act-centered and agent-centered theories.)

Of course, these are theories. Nobody's life is a perfect expression of any one of these theories, but still, there are broad brush claims we might make about who embodies which theory. Deontological ethics is the realm of the European Bourgeoisie, especially in the nineteenth century. Consequentialist Ethics is the philosophical theory of the English-speaking liberal intelligentsia and forms the basis of economic theory (thanks to John Stuart Mill). Virtue Ethics is a modern intellectual revival responsible for the proliferation of the word 'excellence' everywhere in the country, but it was a theory that once in a rough sort of way found expression in our better public schools. Today people are all at sea as regards moral questions. Our confusion is illustrated by the sort of people who are praised, or who at least have their day in the sun - Top Shop's Philip Green, Barclay's Bob Diamond and Lehman Brothers Dick Fuld. These are hardly models of human excellence in the Aristotelian or any other sense. Valdimir Putin also has a certain following, at least in among some sections of Russian youth who call him Vozhd, that's to say, Leader of the Nation. What is happening in Russia? And in America and Europe? 

Well, that's it. There don't seem to have been many or perhaps any takers for this little series of posts. If you are about to have an interview for PPE, PPP, Philosophy or Classics, you should go through these examples carefully for yourself before you get to the interview. Philosophy is meant to throw light on life, but sometimes it doesn't seem to be like that. When that happens and it is bound to happen we should persevere until things do start to make some sense, at least until the next difficulty. In the meantime you might like to look at this old Monty Python sketch: Socrates scores! Enjoy the game!  

Ω