129. Reasoning About Ethics

What should we do? This is the central question of ethics, and when we think about ethics we immediately begin to think about rules and principles. What rules are binding in our present situation? What principles should we apply? How do we decide which rules and principles are correct? All of this is open to discussion and debate. Claims will be presented, propositions postulated, and arguments for this and against that proffered.

But beyond the basics, very little will be agreed upon. There seems to be something too complex or specific about what is right and wrong in each situation to come up with a more general answer. And perhaps that is our problem. We quietly assumed that ethics must be reasonable, and that as a result it must be reducible to a set of rules or principles, but it is precisely this assumption we must question.

When we start to reason about ethics we tend to spawn more problems than we solve. Any set of ethical rules we devise has countless exceptions, and it quickly becomes impossible to account for all of the exceptions while also remaining consistent and not producing an unmanageable list of rules.

Rather than continuing along this path, we can instead look at ethics in a different way. If we allow that ethics might not fit within the narrow domain of reason then we will no longer feel obligated to reason about it. And perhaps it is simply the case that what is best in each situation does not diligently obey the rules of logic as we know them. Perhaps what is ethical can be deeply contradictory and even paradoxical in practice. On this understanding, when we start debating ethics we have already failed.

We fail because we get stuck in language, which is itself a game of rules and reasons. We become lost in the maze of words, endlessly seeking the final and perfect solutions to our ethical problems, which we can never find. We would perhaps do better to choose not to talk about what lies outside of reason, since it is outside of language, as well.