Two and One-Half Ethical Systems
Two and One-Half Ethical Systems
Corpus Entry — Sterling/Kelly Philosophical System
Author: Grant C. Sterling
Source: International Stoic Forum
Date: August 18, 2011
Preserved and posted by: Dave Kelly, Stoic News (stoicnews.blogspot.com), July 10, 2022
Layer: Theoretical Core — Ethical Theory
Attribution: Sterling
Summary
Sterling argues that consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics do not constitute three independent ethical theories of equal standing. Consequentialism and deontology offer competing accounts of how to define a correct action. Virtue ethics adds the requirement of settled character to one of these accounts but offers no independent action-selection criterion of its own. The result is not three rival theories but either two and a half, two, or one and a half — depending on how completeness is measured. The argument identifies deontological intuitionism as the natural and smooth fit for Stoic virtue ethics, with the Stoic framework additionally requiring that the good not be identified with external consequences.
Commitments Engaged
Moral realism: The argument presupposes that the question of what Jones should do has a genuine answer — not a matter of preference or cultural norm but a real moral fact.
Ethical intuitionism: Ross's prima facie duties are directly apprehended contextual moral demands, not rule-derived outputs. Sterling identifies this intuitionist structure as the basis of the fit between deontology and Stoicism.
Correspondence theory: Ethical theories are evaluated against how things actually are morally, not against internal consistency or social utility.
Foundationalism: The action-selection question is foundational; character theory is an addition to it, not a replacement for it.
Substance dualism: Jones is treated as a rational agent distinct from his circumstances throughout. Consequentialism's reduction of correct action to circumstantial calculation implicitly undermines this.
Libertarian free will: The entire inquiry presupposes that Jones's assent is genuinely his to give or withhold.
Propositions Engaged
The argument engages the propositional layer of the Sterling/Kelly system at the level of the relationship between correct action, virtue, and the good. Specifically: the identification of virtuous action with the right use of impressions (not defined in terms of virtues but the reverse); the rejection of external consequences as the definition of the good; and the grounding of appropriate action in truthfulness rather than outcome-calculation.
Text
Are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics three ethical systems? I think they are not.
Let us stipulate that consequentialism and deontology can be collectively summarized as ethical theories that try to answer the question "what should I do now?" (This is a wretchedly simplified account, but I'm hunting bigger, or at any rate different, game here so please allow the oversimplification.) They give competing answers to that question, so they are clearly not a single ethical theory. Obviously, you could break each general category down into any number of more specific versions, but let's leave that complication out of the matter for a moment — for the purposes of this thread, I will use Benthamism and W.D. Ross's version of intuitionism.
So let's imagine a simple case. Jones is a married man. While having lunch one day his best friend's wife happens by. She stops to chat with him, and then to his great surprise she tells him that she has always been sexually attracted to him, and that she hopes very much that he will stop by her house the next day while her husband is out of town at a conference, and she promises him that it will be worth his while. Coincidentally, Jones' wife will be out of town the next day on a shopping trip with some friends. What should Jones do now?
Bentham will say that Jones should calculate how much pleasure he and his friend's wife are likely to have if he has an affair with her. He must also calculate the chances of them getting caught (presumably displeasing his wife and her husband/his friend), although in this case the chance seems extremely remote. Other longer-term factors must be considered (could she get pregnant? could one of them transmit a sexual disease to the other? will either of them want to insist on further encounters? will it change their sex lives with their spouses? etc.). After all these factors have been weighed, he ought to have sex with her if the total pleasure-minus-pain for everyone affected will be higher than the total p-p if they don't do it. It seems that in some circumstances having sex with her would almost certainly turn out to be the right thing to do, but in many (probably most) other circumstances it wouldn't.
Ross would say that as a result of marrying his wife and taking vows of faithfulness to her, Jones has a duty not to betray her sexually. (This is a "duty of fidelity.") This is only a prima facie (that is, "ceteris paribus") duty, so it can in principle be outweighed by other duties. It is unlikely that any other duty would outweigh this in the imagined case (we are not considering some bizarre science fiction case where only by having an adulterous affair can he save the world from being consumed by malevolent space aliens or something), so on Ross's view Jones must not have sex with her even if it seems likely to produce more slightly pleasure than refraining.
What about virtue ethics? As should no doubt be clear, neither theory we have cited has mentioned Jones' character (either his actual character, or his ideal character). Aristotle might say that Jones should act "in the way that a person with virtue [or, perhaps, with the virtue of temperance] would act." Now this seems to be a third way of answering our question, and so we seem to have a third ethical theory.
But I think this is far too fast. How, exactly, would a virtuous person behave, on Aristotle's view? Luckily, Aristotle tells us specifically about Jones' case:
But not every action nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g. spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and suchlike things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excesses or deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong. Nor does goodness or badness with regard to such things depend on committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way, but simply to do any of them is to go wrong.
Sounds remarkably deontological, doesn't it? I think it not merely sounds that way, it is that way. And not just with Aristotle, for the Stoics also talk about our duties and identify virtuous action with (at least) the right use of impressions — and the right use of impressions is based on truthfulness, and is not defined in terms of virtues (but rather the reverse).
In other words, I think virtue theories add to obligation theories an extra element — the idea that the ultimately correct action must include a settled disposition of character that will produce such actions consistently. In other words, if Jones refuses to have sex with his best friend's wife the deontologist will say that he has acted rightly, and the consequentialist will say that he has acted rightly (if the circumstances are such that the p-p value is lower for sex than for no sex), and they will stop there. The virtue ethicist will go further and say (using Stoic language now) "Jones' action was appropriate, but it can only be fully virtuous if Jones has the character of the Sage [if his moral judgment in general has been perfected]." But getting the choice of actions correct is a necessary requirement for a virtuous action, and the method by which we define which choices are correct could in principle be identical to the method used by the deontologist. (Indeed, I think they might not only be identical in principle, I think that the two theories are a natural and smooth fit, which is why I claim to be both a deontologist ethical intuitionist and a Stoic.)
So the virtue ethicist may well argue that his theory is superior to either of the other two theories because those theories are incomplete. (The Stoic virtue ethicist will have to go farther in the case of consequentialism — insofar as consequentialism identifies the good with the external consequences to be maximized, it is fundamentally mistaken. But in theory a non-Stoic virtue theory could be compatible with consequentialism.) But this doesn't leave us with three rival ethical theories on the same level — it leaves us with two theories that offer rival accounts of how to define a correct action but which neglect the question of character, and a third theory that emphasizes character but offers no independent account of how to define a correct action.
That means, I think, that we have either 2½ ethical theories (two accounts of correct action, and one theory that piggybacks an additional consideration on top of one of the other two), or 2 ethical theories (one complete theory, and two half theories), or possibly 1½ ethical theories (three theories each of which only answers half the question).
Grant C. Sterling
Eastern Illinois University
Deontologist Stoic
Notes
This post is [not] one of Sterling's nine foundational excerpts hosted on Stoic News. It demonstrates the Six Commitments functioning simultaneously as discriminating tests applied to ethical theory: moral realism establishing that the question is real; ethical intuitionism identifying the method of correct apprehension; correspondence theory providing the evaluative standard; foundationalism establishing the priority of action-definition over character-addition; libertarian free will as the background presupposition of the entire inquiry; and substance dualism as the implicit structure distinguishing the deliberating agent from the circumstances presented to him.
The identification of the Stoic framework with deontological intuitionism rather than with a rule-based system is precise: both Ross's prima facie duties and the Stoic kathêkon are directly apprehended contextual moral demands requiring judgment for their application, not rule-prescribed outputs. The smooth fit Sterling identifies is grounded in this shared intuitionist structure.
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