Do these actions and a million others just as controversial matter at all?
FUNDAMENTALS
safe route. To not do ethics is to stay locked in a kind of intellectual limbo, where exploration in ethics and personal moral progress are barely possible.
The philosopher Paul Taylor suggests that there is yet another risk in taking the easy road. If some- one blindly embraces the morality bequeathed to him by his society, he may very well be a fine embodiment of the rules of his culture and accept them with certainty. But he also will lack the ability to defend his beliefs by rational argu- ment against criticism. What happens when he encounters others who also have very strong beliefs that contradict his? “He will feel lost and bewildered,” Taylor says, and his confusion might leave him disillusioned about morality. “Unable to give an objective, reasoned jus tification for his own convictions, he may turn from dogmatic certainty to total skepticism. And from total skepticism it is but a short step to an ‘amoral’ life. . . . Thus the person who begins by accepting moral beliefs blindly can end up denying all morality.”1
There are other easy roads—roads that also bypass critical and thoughtful scrutiny of moral- ity. We can describe most of them as various forms of subjectivism, a topic that we closely examine in the next chapter. You may decide, for example, that you can establish all your moral beliefs by simply consulting your feelings. In situations call- ing for moral judgments, you let your emotions be your guide. If it feels right, it is right. Alternatively, you may come to believe that moral realities are relative to each person, a view known as subjective relativism (also covered in the next chapter). That is, you think that what a person believes or approves of determines the rightness or wrongness of actions. If you believe that abortion is wrong,
genital mutilation for reasons of custom or reli- gion? Do these actions and a million others just as controversial matter at all? Most of us—regardless of our opinion on these issues—would say that they matter a great deal. If they matter, then ethics matters, because these are ethical concerns requir- ing careful reflection using concepts and reason- ing peculiar to ethics.
But even though in life ethics is inescapable and important, you are still free to take the easy way out, and many people do. You are free not to think too deeply or too systematically about ethi- cal concerns. You can simply embrace the moral beliefs and norms given to you by your family and your society. You can just accept them without question or serious examination. In other words, you can try not to do ethics. This approach can be simple and painless—at least for a while—but it has some drawbacks.