Carlton Vogt's

Enterprise Ethics

Volume 3 Number 4 February 4, 2005

A different type of rule

Not all rules are based on what brings about the greatest amount of good

The discussion of rules over the last two columns has focused on what is called "Rule Utilitarianism," a system in which society is run by a set of rules that is determined by what brings about the greatest amount of good.

Some people were disturbed, or at least intrigued, by the idea that a particular rule could work out poorly, and seemingly unfairly, in an individual situation, but still be considered a legitimate rule because it would, when considered overall, bring about the greatest amount of good.

Not all rule-based morality, however, works from this principle, and in many rule-based systems the amount of good created doesn't fit into the equation at all. The rules are observed for entirely different reasons. Rule-based (or duty-based) systems that don't consider the amount of good produced are generally known as "deontological." They take numerous forms.

We should hope that deontological rules do create good results, but this isn't the justification or the basis of the rule. Rather, the rule is observed because it is the right thing to do -- for reasons quite separate from the amount of good it brings about.

The most basic systems are those that work from objective lists of rules. The rules are there -- mostly because someone put them there -- and need no further justification than that. "Why? Because I'm your father, that's why."

The objective list with which most people are familiar is the Ten Commandments. Many of us learned them as children and -- even if we couldn't recite them verbatim today -- remember them in essence. Some people are more tightly bound to them and try to force them on others as a panacea for everything they see wrong in society.

Now it's hard to argue against the commandments, but there are numerous problems, the first being that there are several versions of them in the Hebrew Bible, so which 10 count as the final 10 is problematic, although most people seem to have settled on the same ones. Of those, several deal specifically with the relationship between people and God, leaving only a few that talk about the relationships among individuals -- and even those are sketchy and often translated poorly.

The other problems with the commandments are the same problems shared by other objective lists of rules. They rarely cover the full range of human experience, at least in its nuances, and often they require extensive interpretation that ends up injecting cultural norms and biases into what are very bare-bones rules. What, for example, do the Ten Commandments say about cloning? Not a whole lot. Actually, nothing.

So, objective lists, while not necessarily wrong as far as they go, often fall short when it comes to the tough cases, unless they've anticipated those tough cases, the nuances contained within them, and have made provisions for them. Most don't. Those that try, end up looking like the U.S. tax code and are particularly unhelpful.

Other deontologists take different approaches in justifying the rules they lay down. Often the approaches allow for new and unanticipated situations, and the methods contain within themselves ways to develop new rules when confronted with new cases.

One particularly common deontological approach is "contractualism," the idea that we agree -- or would agree, as I'll explain -- on a set of rules that encompasses the right thing to do. Now, obviously we haven’t all agreed on anything, much less a set of rules. So where do the contractualists get off saying that we have?

Well, they really rely on what is known as "hypothetical contractualism," what we would have agreed to, had we rally met, and under certain circumstances.

One very famous contractualist is John Rawls, who talked about the rules for justice. He said that these rules would come from a meeting -- which he called the Original Position -- in which we didn't really know who we were going to be when we left the meeting, and our goal was to come up with a set of rules that would maximize our advantage.

Behind Rawls' Veil of Ignorance we would know that there would be genders, races, wealth and poverty, health and illness, risk-taking and risk-aversion, and so on, but we wouldn't know which of those characteristics we would have -- only that we would have some of them.

So, not knowing who we would be and desiring to get the most for ourselves when the exercise was over, our rules would most likely ensure that the natural lottery wouldn't leave us at a disadvantage. When meeting under those conditions, we would be unlikely to ratify something like slavery. We would minimize the opportunity for the strong to oppress the weak. We would see few rules that disadvantaged one gender relative to the other. And we would probably come up with some way to protect the sick.

There has never been such a meeting, of course, but the hypothetical process allows us to evaluate the current social situation to see whether the arrangements we've either made or allowed would pass muster. And it would, Rawls claims, allow us to see whether the arrangements are just -- or fair.

Similar approaches actually allow us to know who we are, but impose on us individually the willingness to reach a decision, and on the group the provision that any rules developed must be those "with which no one can reasonably disagree."

While the rules of the hypothetical meeting are different, the results are pretty close to the same as those we'd get with Rawls' approach. Anyone from any racial group could reasonably disagree with racial discrimination. Anyone of either gender could reasonably disagree with artificial gender disparities, such as in wages or political access.

So, as with Rawls' scenario, this approach could also be used to evaluate existing or proposed rules to see whether they would pass muster under the conditions of the hypothetical contract.

More radical deontologists have suggested that the rules by which we should live are those that we actually do agree on. In this view, the rules change according to current conditions and the whole rule-making process is a work-in-progress.

Many people, as you might imagine, object to this approach and use such terms as "ethical relativism" or "situational ethics," as if they were necessarily bad things. What's odd is that other people embrace this approach without knowing it. How many times have you heard some new practice or policy, previously taboo, which is now condoned with the phrase "9-11 changed everything." If you agree with that rationale, then you are accepting, at least in part, the idea of an ethical code in flux and one that is dictated by changing events.

The bottom line is that rules are tricky things, and -- although they think they know -- people aren't often sure where they get them or know the underlying justification for them.

© Copyright 2005 Carlton Vogt