What's the right thing to do?

Michael Shaw Perry has published Moral Dilemmas, Identity, and Our Moral Condition: A Guide for the Ethically Perplexed.  Perry is well-equipped for such a discussion. He earned a BA in philosophy from Dartmouth and an MA and PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins. Apparently an over-achiever, he also obtained a JD from the University of Michigan Law School.  His book reflects his "personal and intellectual struggles with the framework for ethical thinking and trying to figure out how to live a purposeful, fulfilling life." It is not light reading.

Ethics, says Perry, "is the study of how one ought to structure one's life and it is from this that ethically correct actions follow." When one is faced with a moral dilemma, ethics can help us understand the right thing to do. Perry says there are three kinds of moral dilemmas:

1) The pedestrian—the kind of daily choices we have to make, between, say, going to a child's birthday party or finishing a project at work; between telling a cancer patient she has six months to live or saying nothing.

2) The theoretical—push a fat man off a bridge to his death to stop a runaway trolley that will otherwise kill five people tied to the track? I.e., that is should you kill one person to save five?

3) The critical—a dilemma in which someone, through no fault of her own, must make an impossible choice. I.e., a mother in a concentration camp is told to choose which of her two children may live. Fortunately, such dilemmas are rare if only because there is no satisfactory solution.

After discussing moral dilemmas generally, Perry clears the ground of earlier philosophical approaches to ethics by discussing the weaknesses of theological, deontological, consequential, and value-based approaches. While each of these may have value in a specific situation, history has shown that they are not universally applicable—and philosophers like Plato, Bentham, Mill, Kant, and others have tried to develop an ethical theory that would be universally applicable.  Perry argues, cogently, that such an approach is bound to fail because they leave a gulf between the theories and "our moral condition as we find and experience it."

Perry's approach is to ground ethical behavior in identity. "I am a human being and as such have various needs, interests, and obligations. I respond to reasons, show sympathy with others, desire certain ends, feel affinity with my fellows, etc." Moreover we often have many other identities: child, brother, father, husband, citizen, employee, manager, and many, many more. Some of these identities you can never shed. You are still someone's child even if your parents are dead, even if you were an orphan. Other identities are more transient. You may be a member of the PTA, but you can drop out without serious consequences.

With these identities, says Perry, come ethical norms and obligations. These are perhaps clearest for people like doctors and lawyers, professions for which the norms and obligations have been hammered over time. It means that a doctor, a lawyer, a psychologist, a police officer, a President may perform an ethical act in that role that would be someone who is not a doctor, a lawyer, etc.
It also seems to mean that ethics are culturally bound. That is, an act that would be unethical for a businessman in one culture (offering a bribe, for example) may be perfectly ethical for a businessman in another—same identify, same act, different ethical norm.

As I said above, Moral Dilemmas is not easy reading. It would have been helped with more concrete examples, less passive voice, and a good editor. (The chapter about ethics and lawyers is among the most lively and accessible.) Nevertheless I believe the book is worth the effort to absorb if only to help clarify your own thinking about the right thing to do in what seems to be a moral dilemma.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee

According to Publishers Weekly, "This candid autobiography...will richly reward the serious reader." Except that it's not very candid. Bryan Magee, who is apparently gay, says almost nothing about his private life. He says the point of the book is to introduce the reader to philosophy and its history "through the story of one person's encounter with them." But it's not really a history of philosophy, nor is it much of an autobiography.

Rather it is 463 pages of Magee writing about his experiences as a philosophy student at Oxford and at Yale, his successes as a television producer and interviewer, his personal relations with Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, his experience writing his one novel, his taking a year to write music, his frustrations as a teacher at Oxford (the students didn't really challenge him), his intellectual mid-life crisis, his appreciation of Kant and Schopenhauer, and much more. "Serious reader" means that while Magee is trying to make things clear (and has very critical things to say about philosophers who clothe simple ideas in complex and obscure language), it is not an easy book to read.

I found the book both frustrating and fascinating. Frustrating when I had trouble following the arguments (my bad), fascinating when I could. For example, I have long claimed that virtually everything I know is provisional. Just because every time I drop something it falls does not mean it always will. (Astronauts drop things in the space station and they float.) Karl Popper pointed out that this applies to scientific "laws" generally: They can never be proven true (a million experiments with the same results won't do it); they can only be proven untrue. For example, for a long time it was a scientific law that all swans are white. Then we discovered black swans in Australia.

Magee seems to want to know ultimate reality--whatever that is. I'm not sure what the difference would be between "ultimate" reality and reality. Be that as it may, philosophy students learn early on that because all of the information we have about the world of objects—how they look, sound, smell, taste, and feel—comes from our senses, and since, as we know, our senses can be mistaken or misled (think of magicians), we can never know what anything is "really" like. This seems to bother Magee, but it seems to me to be a non-problem. As long as we understand that our senses can be mistaken and act prudently—the way most of us live most of the time—I do not see the value of "knowing" what this desk, this keyboard, this monitor is "really" like.

For all my frustration, however, I found the Confessions of a Philosopher interesting and stimulating. I plan to let it sit for six months or a year and then read it again.

(By the way, The Modern Library, which published the book, should be ashamed. Two chapters (12 and 14) start without an opening page, another (16) ends by stopping in the middle of a sentence, and yet another has a makeup problem. All in all, a shoddy production.)