The Language of Modern Ethics

 

First edition of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, illustrated by a Picasso painting of a thinking woman. Perhaps, it suggests, too much thinking distorts your features

A review by Julian Baggini is always worth reading, because he has the ability to make philosophy popular; or rather, to remain aware of everyday thinking alongside the sometimes strange paths that academic philosophers take.

 

So I turned with interest to a review article in the TLS where Baggini reviews several books on moral philosophy, and in the course of his review provides what appears to be a very useful summary of recent thinking in this area. Most helpfully, he describes many of the terms used in the current philosophical debate. So here is a mini-dictionary of current ethics. Out of interest, I have compared it with three titles published 25 or more years ago:

• The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (edited by Ted Honderich), first edition, published 1995
• A Dictionary of Philosophy, by A R Lacey, 1976
• The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Thomas Mautner, 1996

What can you do with such knowledge? Well, if you are a geek like me, you can attempt to see the trends in a subject over time. You can see if these terms appear in Wikipedia. You can use Google n-grams to track increases or decreases in usage.

• cognitivism – the claim that statements such as “murder is wrong” are either true or false.
• consequentialism – the theory that actions are right or wrong to the extent that they result in good or bad consequences.
• contractarianism – the theory that morality is an implicit acceptance of mutual obligations and prohibitions.
• deontology – the view that morality concerns duties to follow rules or fulfil obligations.
• incommensurability – theory that you cannot compare the value (say) of museums with the value of hospitals; or individualism versus community-based ethics.
• metaethics – thestudy of the nature of morality itself
• moral particularism – theory that there are no general rules that determine if actions are right or wrong.
• moral relativism
• moral sympathy - Enlightenment theory that we should recognized that others have lives worth living. Held by Hume and Adam Smith.
• realism – in ethics, the claim that moral values have a real, mind-independent existence.
• virtue ethics – theory that goodness resides in character and habit.

Leaving aside "moral sympathy", which Baggini states is from 18th-century writers, that leaves us with ten terms. 

term	Oxford (Honderich)	Lacey	Penguin (Mautner)
cognitivism	yes (actually under “non-cognitivism”	no	yes
consequentialism	yes	yes	yes
contractarianism	no	no	yes
deontology	yes	yes (under “ethics”)	yes
incommensurability	yes	no	yes
metaethics	yes	yes (under “ethics”)	yes
moral particularism	no	no	no
moral relativism	yes (under “ethical relativism”)	no	no
moral realism	yes	no	yes (under “realism”)
virtue ethics	yes (under “virtue”)	no	yes
Total	9	3	8

What does this tell us? The Lacey Dictionary of Philosophy is rubbish, perhaps, but to be fair, it is considerably shorter than the Penguin and Oxford volumes. You could say, perhaps, it was incommensurable, because it is the work of one author who clearly does not appear to be very interested in ethics. You can also see how maddening natural language is. Do we describe an idea under “relativism”, “moral relativism”, or “ethical relativism”?

One wonderful value of the Oxford Companion is a detailed index that lists all concepts, as well as all headwords. This makes it easier to find things in a print volume. You could probably say that nobody these days finds things in a print volume; but it is reassuring to think that behind the scenes, the compiler used a list like this inex to identify where entries would be located.

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion for me is how slowly philosophy evolves. If moral philosophy has become of interest to the public and to philosophers, after many years in the wilderness, it seems that not much has changed in the last 20 years.  Perhaps the key term is “moral particularism”. None of the older works includes this. Perhaps this is the great innovation in 21st-century ethical thinking. Or perhaps, if this is the only really new idea, not much changes in the world of ethics.