3.3 The Philosophical Approach to Ethics

Philosophers have long thought about ethics, and they often define ethics in terms of two variables: means (or specific behaviors) and ends (or intentions). The means side looks at types of communication that are acceptable or unacceptable, and leads to guidelines such as “don’t publicly humiliate anyone” or “research the facts before making public statements about something.” Typically, those ethical guidelines can be sorted into “dos” and “don’ts.” Such guidelines have the appeal of being categorical and, depending on the length of the lists, easy to memorize. The problem, as hinted at earlier, is that it becomes difficult to apply these guidelines universally. A guideline saying “Never deceive anyone about who you are,” for example, doesn’t allow for investigative journalism or undercover police work. You could keep adding qualifiers and exceptions, but then the guidelines get harder to remember and apply.

The focus on ends is simpler in that you can boil it down to: did you intend good, or not? Even the law frequently acknowledges that intention is a key factor, and a defining element of crimes like fraud (you may have said something false, but if it was an innocent mistake and you did not intend to mislead anyone, it’s not fraud). Rather than having to stipulate all the behaviors that are acceptable or not, focusing on only one variable simplifies everything. Sort of…. The trouble is, this variable is invisible, sometimes even to the person themselves. If you’ve ever stopped and pondered, “Why did I do that crazy thing? What was I thinking?” it’s easy to see how difficult it is to figure out why someone else acted the way they did. People are great at coming up with nice-sounding justifications after the fact, so what they say their intentions are is not always reliable. And there is a time dimension as well: short-term and long-term goals can look very different from each other, so which “end” should we focus on? This is why the ends vs. means debate has been raging for centuries, and will probably never be resolved.

Another often-cited philosophical principle is the greater good: if an action benefits society as a whole, it is ethical, and if it benefits only a few people but harms many others, it is unethical. A con man who justifies his behavior by saying “Hey, I’ve got to put food on the table” is thinking of his own (and perhaps his family’s) needs, but not about what his actions are doing to the larger society. The simplest way to think about this criteria is to reverse it and think about what “ruins things for the rest of us.” For example, when you watch a YouTube video, it can be fun to read what other people think of the video — but if a few trolls invade the comments section and fill it with toxicity, the moderators shut off the whole discussion. So: don’t be a troll!

Sometimes the principle of greater good is easy to apply; other times it becomes a complicated numbers game. When Robin Hood “stole from the rich to give to the poor” in the Middle Ages, that sounded heroic…except to the rich, who were justified in being upset that now robbery was suddenly a good thing. Attempts to apply the Robin Hood approach to the modern stock market have gotten messy. And as mentioned earlier, this has been used by political zealots to justify all kinds of unethical behavior because they believe their party or candidate will save the world. Who gets to define “the greater good”?