Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY: ETHICS

F R A N K A R AG B O N F O H A B U M E R E , D O U G L A S G I L E S , YA-Y U N ( S H E R R Y ) K AO, M I C H A E L

K L E N K , J O S E P H K R A N A K , K AT H R Y N M AC K AY, J E F F R E Y M O RG A N , PAU L R E Z K A L L A ,

G E O RG E M AT T H E W S ( B O O K E D I TO R ) , A N D C H R I S T I N A H E N D R I C K S ( S E R I E S E D I TO R )

C O L L E E N C R E S S M A N A N D A L L I S O N B RO W N

Rebus Community

Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics by Frank Aragbonfoh Abumere, Douglas Giles, Ya-Yun (Sherry) Kao, Michael Klenk, Joseph
Kranak, Kathryn MacKay, Jeffrey Morgan, Paul Rezkalla, George Matthews (Book Editor), and Christina Hendricks (Series Editor) is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

C O N T E N T S

What is an Open Textbook?
Christina Hendricks

vii

How to Access and Use the Books
Christina Hendricks

ix

Introduction to the Series
Christina Hendricks

xi

Praise for the Book
Björn Freter

xiv

Acknowledgements
George Matthews and Christina Hendricks

xv

Introduction to the Book
George Matthews

1

PART I. CHAPTERS

1. Aren’t Right and Wrong Just Matters of Opinion? On Moral Relativism and
Subjectivism
Paul Rezkalla

7

2. Can We Have Ethics without Religion? On Divine Command Theory and
Natural Law Theory
Jeffrey Morgan

16

3. How Can I Be a Better Person? On Virtue Ethics
Douglas Giles

27

4. What’s in it for Me? On Egoism and Social Contract Theory
Ya-Yun (Sherry) Kao

37

5. Utilitarianism
Frank Aragbonfoh Abumere

45

6. Kantian Deontology
Joseph Kranak

52

7. Feminism and Feminist Ethics
Kathryn MacKay

64

8. Evolutionary Ethics
Michael Klenk

75

About the Contributors 89

Feedback and Suggestions 92

Adoption Form 93

Licensing and Attribution Information 94

Review Statement 96

Accessibility Assessment 97

Version History 99

W H AT I S A N O P E N T E X T B O O K ?

C H R I S T I N A H E N D R I C K S

An open textbook is like a commercial textbook, except: (1) it is publicly available online free of

charge (and at low-cost in print), and (2) it has an open license that allows others to reuse it, download

and revise it, and redistribute it. This book has a Creative Commons Attribution

(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license, which allows reuse, revision, and

redistribution so long as the original creator is attributed (please see the licensing information for this

book for more information).

In addition to saving students money, an open textbook can be revised to be better contextualized

to one’s own teaching. In a recent study of undergraduate students in an introductory level physics

course, students reported that the thing they most appreciated about the open textbook used in that

course was that it was customized to fit the course, followed very closely by the fact that it was

free of cost (Hendricks, Reinsberg, and Rieger 2017 (http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/

view/3006)). For example, in an open textbook one may add in examples more relevant to one’s

own context or the topic of a course, or embedded slides, videos, or other resources. Note from

the licensing information for this book (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-ethics/back-

matter/licensing-and-attribution-information/) that one must clarify in such cases that the book is an

adaptation.

A number of commercial publishers offer relatively inexpensive digital textbooks (whether on their

own or available through an access code that students must pay to purchase), but these may have

certain limitations and other issues:

• Access for students is often limited to a short period of time;

• Students cannot buy used copies from others, nor sell their own copies to others, to save

money;

• Depending on the platform, there may be limits to how students can interact with and take

notes on the books (and they may not be able to export their notes outside the book, so lose

access to those as well when they lose access to the book).

None of these is the case with open textbooks like the Introduction to Philosophy series. Students can

download any book in this series and keep it for as long as they wish. They can interact with it in

ETHICS vii

multiple formats: on the web; as editable word processing formats; offline as PDF, EPUB; as a physical

print book, and more.

See the next section, “How to Access and Use the Books,” for more information on what the open

license on this book allows, and how to properly attribute the work when reusing, redistributing, or

adapting.

viii WHAT IS AN OPEN TEXTBOOK

H O W TO AC C E S S A N D U S E T H E B O O K S

C H R I S T I N A H E N D R I C K S

We hope the books (or chapters in the books) will be adopted for introductory-level courses in

philosophy, as part of required readings. You may use the books as they are, or create adaptations or

ancillaries. One of the important benefits of the Introduction to Philosophy series is that instructors can

mix and match chapters from various books to make their own customized set of readings for their

courses.

Be sure to read the licensing information carefully and attribute the chapters or book properly when

reusing, redistributing, or adapting.

Each book can be read online, and is also downloadable in multiple formats, from their respective

book home pages (e.g., Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-

ethics/)).

• The .odt format can be opened by Open Office, Libre Office, or Microsoft Word. Note that

there may be some issues with formatting on this format, and hyperlinks may not appear if

opened with MS Word.

• The PDF files can be edited with Adobe Acrobat (the full program, not just the Reader) or

printed out. The print version of the PDF does not have hyperlinks.

• The EPUB and MOBI files can be loaded onto digital reading platforms like Adobe Digital

Editions, Apple Books, and Kindle. They can also be edited using Pressbooks or tools like

Calibre.

• Edits can be made using the XHTML format or via the Pressbooks XML format (for easier

adaptation in Pressbooks).

• The book is also available for download as a Common Cartridge 1.1 file (with web links) for

import into your learning management system (see instructions for importing Common

Cartridge files (https://guide.pressbooks.com/chapter/common-cartridge-files-with-web-

links/), from the Pressbooks User Guide).

The multiple editable formats allow instructors to adapt the books as needed to fit their contexts.

Another way to create adaptations is to involve students in contributing to open textbooks. Students

ETHICS ix

may add new sections to an adapted book, link to other resources, create discussion questions

or quiz questions, and more. Please see Rebus Community’s A Guide to Making Open Textbooks

with Students (https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/) for more

information and ideas.

If you plan to use or adapt one or more books (or chapters), we’d love to hear about it! Please let

us know on the Rebus Community platform (https://www.rebus.community/t/let-us-know-about-

adoptions-or-adaptations/1590), and also on our adoption form. (https://is.gd/introphil_adoption)

And if you have feedback or suggestions about the book (https://is.gd/introphil_feedback), we would

really appreciate those as well. We have a separate form for keeping track of issues with digital

accessibility (https://is.gd/introphil_accessibility), so please let us know if you find any.

x HOW TO USE

I N T RO D U C T I O N TO T H E S E R I E S

C H R I S T I N A H E N D R I C K S

This book is part of the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series, a set of nine (and counting?)

open access textbooks that are designed to be used for introductory-level, survey courses in

philosophy at the post-secondary level.

OV E R V I E W O F T H E S E R I E S

This set of books is meant to provide an introduction to some of the major topic areas often covered

in introductory-level philosophy courses. I have found in teaching students new to philosophy that

many struggle with the new ideas, questions, and approaches they find in introductory courses in

philosophy, and that it can be helpful to provide them with texts that explain these in relatively

straightforward terms.

When I began this project there were few textbooks that I was happy enough with to ask students to

purchase, and even fewer openly licensed textbooks that I could pick and choose chapters from, or

revise, to suit my courses. This series was created out of a desire to provide such resources that can be

customized to fit different contexts and updated by instructors when needed (rather than waiting for

an updated version from a publisher).

Each book is designed to be accessible to students who have little to no background in philosophy, by

either eliminating jargon or providing a glossary for specialized philosophical terms. Many chapters

in the books provide examples that apply philosophical questions or concepts to concrete objects or

experiences that, we hope, many students are familiar with. Questions for reflection and discussion

accompany chapters in most of the books, to support students in understanding what to focus on as

they are reading.

The chapters in the books provide a broad overview of some of the main discussions and debates in

the philosophical literature within a topic area, from the perspective of the chapter authors. Some

of the chapters focus on historical approaches and debates, such as ancient theories of aesthetics,

substance dualism in Descartes, or classical utilitarian versus Kantian approaches in ethics. Others

introduce students to questions and topics in the philosophical literature from just the last few

decades.

ETHICS xi

The books currently in production for the series are:

• Aesthetics (Ed. Valery Vinogradovs and Scott Clifton): chapters include ancient aesthetics;

beauty in art and nature; the nature of art; art and emotions; art and morality; aesthetics and

politics

• Epistemology (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-epistemology/)(Ed. Brian Barnett):

chapters include epistemic justification; sources of knowledge; skepticism; epistemic value,

duty, and virtue; epistemology, probability, and science; social epistemology; feminist

epistemologies

• Ethics (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-ethics/) (Ed. George Matthews): chapters

include ethical relativism; divine command theory and natural law; ethical egoism and social

contract theory; virtue ethics; utilitarianism; Kantian Deontology; feminist ethics;

evolutionary ethics

• Logic (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-logic/) (Ed. Benjamin Martin): chapters

include what is logic?; evaluating arguments; formal logic; informal fallacies; necessary and

sufficient conditions

• Metaphysics (Ed. Adriano Palma): chapters include universals; finitism, infinitism, monism,

dualism, pluralism; the possibility of free action; experimental metaphysics

• Philosophy of Mind (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-of-mind/) (Ed. Heather

Salazar): chapters include Descartes and substance dualism; behaviourism and materialism;

functionalism; qualia; freedom of the will

• Philosophy of Religion (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-of-religion/) (Ed. Beau

Branson): chapters include arguments for belief in God; reasons not to believe; arguments

against belief from the cognitive science of religion; from philosophy of (mono)theism to

philosophy of religions

• Philosophy of Science (Ed. Eran Asoulin): chapters include empiricism; Popper’s conjectures and

refutations; Kuhn’s normal and revolutionary science; the sociology of scientific knowledge;

feminism and the philosophy of science; the problem of induction; explanation

• Social and Political Philosophy (Eds. Sam Rocha and Douglas Giles): chapters include the ideal

society; the state of nature and the modern state; human rights, liberty, and social justice;

radical social theories

We envision the books as helping to orient students within the topic areas covered by the chapters, as

well as to introduce them to influential philosophical questions and approaches in an accessible way.

The books may be used for course readings on their own, or in conjunction with primary source texts

by the philosophers discussed in the chapters. We aim thereby to both save students money and to

provide a relatively easy route for instructors to customize and update the resources as needed. And

we hope that future adaptations will be shared back with the rest of the philosophical community!

H O W T H E B O O K S W E R E P RO D U C E D

Contributors to this series have been crowdsourced through email lists, social media, and other

xii SERIES INTRODUCTION

means. Each of the books has its own editor, and multiple authors from different parts of the world

who have expertise in the topic of the book. This also means that there will inevitably be shifts in

voice and tone between chapters, as well as in perspectives. This itself exemplifies the practice of

philosophy, insofar as the philosophical questions worth discussing are those that do not yet have

settled answers, and towards which there are multiple approaches worthy of consideration (which

must, of course, provide arguments to support their claim to such worth).

I have been thrilled with the significant interest these books have generated, such that so many people

have been willing to volunteer their time to contribute to them and ensure their quality—not only

through careful writing and editing, but also through extensive feedback and review. Each book in

the series has between five and ten authors, plus an editor and peer reviewers. It’s exciting to see so

many philosophers willing to contribute to a project devoted to helping students save money and

instructors customize their textbooks!

The book editors, each with expertise in the field of the book they have edited, have done the bulk of

the work for the books. They created outlines of chapters that were then peer reviewed and revised

accordingly, and they selected authors for each of the chapters. The book editors worked with authors

to develop a general approach to each chapter, and coordinated timelines for their completion.

Chapters were reviewed by the editors both before and after the books went out for peer review, and

the editors ensured revisions occurred where needed. They have also written introductions to their

books, and in some cases other chapters as well. As the subject experts for the books, they have had

the greatest influence on the content of each book.

My role as series editor started by envisioning the project as a whole and discussing what it might

look like with a significant number of philosophers who contributed to shaping it early on. Overall, I

have worked the Rebus Community on project management, such as developing author and reviewer

guidelines and other workflows, coordinating with the book editors to ensure common approaches

across the books, sending out calls for contributors to recruit new participants, and updating the

community on the status of the project through the Rebus Community platform. I have reviewed

the books, along with peer reviewers, from the perspective of both a philosopher who teaches

introductory-level courses and a reader who is not an expert in many of the fields the books cover.

As the books near publication, I have coordinated copy editing and importing into the Pressbooks

publishing platform (troubleshooting where needed along the way).

Finally, after publication of the books I and the book editors will be working on spreading the word

about them and encouraging adoption. I plan to use chapters from a few of the books in my own

Introduction to Philosophy courses, and hope to see many more adoptions to come.

This project has been multiple years in the making, and we hope the fruits of our many labours are

taken up in philosophy courses!

ETHICS xiii

P R A I S E F O R T H E B O O K

B J Ö R N F R E T E R

This carefully edited anthology by George Matthews tackles many of the foundational questions of

Western philosophy while beautifully managing to make these philosophical inquiries truly accessible

to anyone who is willing to engage in them. All chapters are written to be understood; the

contributors show an honest and a caring attitude towards their audience.

The anthology is refreshing in its open-mindedness and its intelligible approach. This book will help

undergraduate students of philosophy—and those who teach undergraduates—to get comfortable

with the way Western ethicists ask and answer foundational ethical questions.

The book is written in a jargon-free, culturally sensitive, gender-appropriate, carefully deliberate

language. This is, in my opinion, of the highest importance. Students will thus be given a chance to

learn through these beautiful examples from an early stage in their own intellectual biography how to

address philosophical topics in a non-supremacist manner. They can adapt this attitude to their very

own philosophical work and become attentive in their thinking and their philosophical language to

those who were far too long ignored, rejected and dismissed in the history of Western philosophy.

The wide range of topics—from relativism to contract theory, from Natural Law Theory to feminist

ethics—are approached by asking exemplary questions and devising exemplary ethical situations. This

approach grounds the philosophical discourse in lived experience where it belongs. Philosophy is not

presented as an intellectual prestidigitation but as an existential exercise arising from being troubled

by these strangely incontrovertible questions of life.

I highly recommend this book as an introduction to those who wish to read an accessible yet rigorous

and challenging approach to Western ethics!

— Björn Freter, PhD, Independent Scholar, Knoxville, TN, U.S.A. (Peer Reviewer)

xiv ETHICS

AC K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

G E O R G E M AT T H E W S A N D C H R I S T I N A H E N D R I C K S

G E O RG E M AT T H E W S , B O O K E D I TO R

A project like this, with so many moving parts, is certainly a labor of love. I wish to thank all of the

many people involved in bringing this book to fruition. First and foremost I’d like to thank Christina

Hendricks for her tireless work orchestrating things as series editor and Apurva Ashok for her work

as Project Manager for the Rebus Community.

The authors of course are what make this book possible, and I’d like to thank them all. They are, in

the order of their chapters: Paul Rezkalla, Jeffrey Morgan, Douglas Giles, Ya-Yun (Sherry) Kao, Frank

Aragbonfoh Abumere, Joseph Kranak, Kathryn MacKay, and Michael Klenk. They have contributed

their expertise to this effort to better serve students of philosophy with an openly and freely accessible

textbook of the highest quality.

Finally I would like to thank the reviewers who patiently read through all of the chapters and

contributed their helpful comments, Björn Freter and Vance Ricks, as well as all of the many

contributors to the initial discussions that gave rise to this textbook on the forums of the Rebus

Foundation. We all hope you enjoy this book!

C H R I S T I N A H E N D R I C K S , S E R I E S E D I TO R

I would like to thank the authors in this book for their patience as we worked through the process of

conceiving the book and getting it to publication. Because this is one of the first books to be published

in the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series, we were sometimes creating processes and

workflows as we went along, and this meant things may have taken longer than anyone expected at

first!

Special thanks to George Matthews, who was one of the first people to volunteer for this series as a

book editor, and has been incredibly flexible, patient, and dedicated to the work all the way through.

He has done an excellent job of selecting authors for chapters and helping them refine their work to

result in the clear and accessible finished book.

Also instrumental to the success of this book are the peer reviewers, Björn Freter and Vance Ricks,

ETHICS xv

who volunteered their time and expertise to read through a draft of the whole book and provide

constructive comments and suggestions.

Jonathan Lashley has done an amazing job with the design of the book covers for this series, using

original artwork by Heather Salazar (who is the editor for the Philosophy of Mind book in this

series (https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-of-mind/)). The book covers are exceptionally

well done, and really bring the series together as a whole.

Colleen Cressman has provided much-needed help with copyediting. I am very grateful for her

thorough and detailed efforts, and for the suggestions she made to help make the chapters as

accessible as possible for introductory-level students. And thank you to Allison Brown for her help

with inputting and formatting the content into Pressbooks so that it looks and reads well.

When I started this project there were many discussions amongst philosophers from various parts

of the world on the Rebus Community platform, and their ideas and suggestions contributed

significantly to the final products. There were also numerous people who gave comments on draft

chapter outlines for each book. Thank you to the many unnamed philosophers who have contributed

to the book in these and other ways!

This book series would not have gotten beyond the idea stage were it not for the support of the Rebus

Community. I want to thank Hugh McGuire for believing in the project enough to support what we

both realized at the time was probably much bigger than even our apprehensions about its enormity.

Zoe Wake Hyde was instrumental in getting the project started, particularly in helping us develop

workflows and documentation. And I’m not sure I can ever thank Apurva Ashok enough for being an

unfailingly enthusiastic and patient supporter and guide for more months than I care to count. She

spent a good deal of time working with me and the book editors to figure out how to make a project

like this work on a day-to-day level, and taught me a great deal about the open publishing process.

Apurva kept me on track when I would sometimes drop the ball or get behind on this off-the-side-of-

my-desk project. She is one of the best collaborative partners I have never (yet!) met in person.

Finally, I want to thank my family for understanding how important this work is and why I have

chosen to stay up late so many nights to do it. And for their patience on the many groggy, pre-coffee

mornings that followed.

xvi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I N T RO D U C T I O N TO T H E B O O K

G E O R G E M AT T H E W S

Is it ever acceptable to lie in order to protect someone from harm? Is selfless generosity really possible,

or are we humans always in one way or another motivated by selfish concerns? Should loyalty to

family, friends and one’s immediate community take precedence over one’s duty to obey the law? Such

questions, which belong to the rich and complex domain of moral reflection, are no doubt familiar

sorts of questions, even if there may seem to be no clear way of answering them with more than a

shrug of the shoulders and the assertion that “it all depends….”

Moral philosophy or ethics (I am here using these terms as broadly synonymous in spite of

distinctions between these terms that are sometimes made) is that branch of philosophy which

is concerned with the critical examination of these kinds of questions, along with the implicit

assumptions and theoretical commitments that lie behind them. Ethics is a branch of philosophical

value theory devoted to exploration of the broad rules which define, regulate and constrain our social

lives, as well as with the more abstract consideration of moral evaluation itself. Thus it also considers

such questions as whether there are general or even universal principles to which we may appeal in

our attempt to negotiate particular ethical dilemmas we may face. What might such principles look

like and why should we in fact follow them when they require us to set aside our impulses or interests?

Are universal principles even desirable as a goal in ethical deliberation and human development?

Clearly moral reflection and deliberation lie at the core of what it means to be human, members of

a species dependent upon each other and yet often unreliable and opportunistic at the same time.

Nevertheless moral thinking presents us with a deep puzzle. We are all intimately familiar with moral

thinking, while at the same time it may seem completely unclear how to approach it in anything

but a piecemeal fashion, reliant upon received ideas, customary approaches, and gut feelings. And

this is certainly not for a lack of attempts to get things right about the nature, origin, and basis of

judgments about right and wrong. These go back to at least the beginning of recorded history as is

evident in some of the earliest extant written artifacts, such as the stele of Hammurabi from ancient

Mesopotamia and the Buddhist King Ashoka’s inscriptions on pillars and boulders from the Gangetic

plain in ancient India. The following chapters take up this puzzle as their authors explore some of the

major theoretical approaches to moral philosophy under the conviction that we both can and should

subject moral reflection to critical analysis in search of the truth (or maybe the truths) about ethics.

ETHICS 1

As a way of setting the stage for the detailed accounts of various philosophical approaches to morality

and moral thinking in the following chapters, it may be helpful at the outset to distinguish between

three different ways in which we might approach moral thinking. We might first of all take an

approach similar to that of scientists interested in understanding and explaining some given set of

phenomena. We can call such an approach “descriptive ethics” since it is concerned with describing

and explaining the workings of moral deliberation as it actually takes place in the minds of real

people. Although this approach serves as the starting point for some contemporary approaches to

ethics (especially evolutionary and feminist approaches as discussed in the last two chapters), by and

large philosophers are less interested in describing and explaining moral thinking than they are in

the second of the two approaches, which more directly engages the evaluative side of the questions

with which we started. That is, philosophers, unlike scientists, are interested not only in clarifying

and explaining the workings of ethical thinking but also in examining the cases that can be made for

particular moral principles and approaches. This “normative” or “prescriptive” side of philosophical

ethics will be central to many of the chapters of this text, since they examine various philosophical

arguments as to why some particular approach to ethics should in fact be the one we accept as

opposed to its theoretical rivals. We may wonder, however, about the justification for this kind of

partisan approach to ethics in the first place. This brings us to the third way we might approach ethics,

by taking a step back from particular approaches to look at ethical thinking as such, as it relates to

other aspects of our intellectual and emotional lives. That is, we might ask more abstract theoretical

questions about the warrant for both rational ethical deliberation and prescriptive approaches to

ethics. This “meta-ethical” approach is important not only since it addresses the place of ethics in

our larger mental lives, but also as a way of addressing concerns that seem to get in the way of the

normative approaches we will be exploring.

The first chapter explores the metaethical claim that, in fact, there can be no real rational deliberation

about ethics, since ethical thinking is always bound by norms embedded within distinct human

cultures. Here Paul Rezkalla examines the case for and against different variations on the claim

that ethics is bound by norms of culture and place. In general relativism is found wanting in its

strongest version as a meta-ethical theory about the limits of rational approaches to ethics, although

it continues to be appealing in weaker versions for its defense of tolerance and cultural sensitivity as

fundamental ethical principles.

Next, Jeffrey Morgan considers the historical and currently popular claim that ethics is rooted in

religion. He does this by examining two particular approaches, that of Divine Command Theory,

which insists that without the authority of a purported divine author of moral commands, such

commands fail to bind human actors, and that of Natural Law Theory, which argues that a divinely

created natural order of things lies at the basis of all truths concerning right and wrong human actions

and decisions. Both of these approaches are found wanting, even if morality and religion remain

closely allied in their concern for human and social well-being.

The third chapter, written by Douglas Giles, directly considers the question of human well-being as

articulated by a family of approaches known as Virtue Ethics, as …