Welcome to Experiential Ethics! This assignment serves as a brief introduction to the subject matter of ethics and prompts you to begin thinking about your own experiences from an ethical perspective. You may be familiar with some of the ideas below, especially if you’ve taken a course in ethics or philosophy. However, they may differ from what you’ve encountered before, and it’s helpful to get everyone on the same page.
Ethics is commonly understood as the study of how to act, or how to live one’s life. In Experiential Ethics, we think of ethics more broadly: as we see it, ethics is partly concerned with individual behavior, but it is also concerned with how groups, organizations, and societies should be structured.
As individuals and members of society, you do ethics all the time. You grapple with questions about what to do and how to live your life every day. Probably you have thought about what others should do, how companies and institutions should behave, and what society should look like. The purpose of Experiential Ethics is to help structure your thinking about these topics. Rather than convey a body of knowledge or ethical theories, Experiential Ethics gives you tools, concepts, and frameworks to help you think about ethical questions in more systematic ways. Crucially, it also gives you space to explore ethical questions, on your own and with your peers.
Part 1: Identifying Ethical Claims
One important skill throughout the class will be distinguishing ethical claims from other sorts of claims. The first thing to remember is that ethical claims are normative, not descriptive: very roughly, they are about how things should be, not how they are.
To get some practice with this distinction, read each of the following statements and say whether you think it’s normative or descriptive. Don’t worry if you’re unsure—you’ll discuss these with your group.
- Twitter should/shouldn’t regulate speech on its platform.
- Self-driving cars are more/less likely to get in accidents than human drivers.
- It’s fair/unfair for this algorithm to make predictions in this way.
- Consumers are/aren’t responsible for reading and understanding privacy policies before they consent to use a service.
- Boycotts are an effective/ineffective way to generate change.
Ethical claims are not the only normative claims. Another type of normative claim you may come across in this class is a legal claim. It’s important to distinguish ethical from legal claims, as the two can come apart. For example, if you’re rushing a pregnant person to a hospital on a deserted road in plain daylight, it may be that you legally ought to stay under 40 mph, but all things considered you ought to speed. In Experiential Ethics, saying that someone “should” or “ought to” do something will usually be taken to mean that they ethically ought to do it, all things considered, not just that it’s required by law.
So far we’ve distinguished ethical claims from descriptive and legal claims. One last thing you may be wondering about is the difference between ethics and morality.
There are different views about how ethics and morality relate. As we see it, morality is a subset of ethics: all moral questions are ethical questions, but not all ethical questions are moral. Recall that ethics partly concerns what we, as individuals, should do. Not all facts about what we should do have to do with morality. For example, you ought to brush your teeth. But (arguably) you don’t owe it to anyone to brush your teeth, nor is it anyone else’s business whether you do. So it would be odd to say that you morally ought to brush your teeth, or that you have a moral obligation to do so. By contrast, you morally ought to keep your promises, respect people’s privacy, and refrain from stealing. A helpful rule of thumb is this: whenever you morally ought to do something, you ought to do it, and it’s other people’s business whether you do it or not.
We call this class Experiential Ethics for a reason: its purpose is to help you think about how to live your life, in the broadest sense. However, many of the topics we discuss concern morality as well.
Part 2: Do Ethical Questions Have Answers?
Sometimes people worry that ethics is just a matter of opinion, and there are no objective answers to ethical questions. Although this thought can be tempting, there are reasons to doubt it. Let’s consider a few common arguments for the view that ethics is subjective and where they go wrong. Then we’ll consider some reasons in favor of thinking ethics is objective.
One common idea is that if ethics were objective, then certain problematic attitudes—like intolerance and disrespect—would be acceptable. Thus people may argue from claims like “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion,” “We should respect other people’s viewpoints,” and “We shouldn’t impose our values on other cultures” to the claim that there are no right or wrong answers in ethics. Now, it is true that if ethics is objective, and we disagree about an ethical matter (e.g., I think the IRS should use facial recognition technology, and you think they shouldn’t), then one of us is right, and the other is wrong. And it can feel uncomfortable to assert that you think someone is mistaken about an ethical matter. However, if you believe the IRS should use facial recognition, given all the relevant facts, then you also believe that anyone who believes the opposite is wrong. (Compare: If you believe it’s raining, then you must also believe that anyone who thinks it’s not raining is wrong.) That’s ok, and it doesn’t mean you have to think they are less intelligent than you, or that they’re bad people. In short, objectivity implies nothing about how we should treat those with whom we disagree, or how we should view them. Objectivity is perfectly consistent with tolerance and respect, and it does not license infringing others’ rights.
Another common thought is that ethical objectivity encourages a kind of dogmatism, closed-mindedness, or lack of humility. If you encounter someone who disagrees with you about an ethical matter, and ethics is objective, then you must think you are right and they are wrong. What entitles you to think you have figured out the truth, and not them? Shouldn’t you be more humble? These are complicated questions, and we won’t get into them here. But the view that there are right and wrong answers in ethics is compatible with a wide variety of views about how much we should doubt our own beliefs in the face of ethical disagreement, including the view that we should become very uncertain.
A third argument for subjectivity has to do with the vast disagreement that seems to exist with regard to ethical questions (consider, especially, political questions). If there are right and wrong answers in ethics, then why does disagreement persist? Now, it’s unclear how much of the existing disagreement is really about values, rather than descriptive facts. But even if there is a great deal of ethical disagreement in the world, that doesn’t rule out objectivity. Across time, people have disagreed vehemently about scientific questions (Does the Earth revolve around the sun? What’s the primary cause of global warming? Do the vaccines work?). This doesn’t lead us to think there are no right answers in science.
Finally, some people find subjectivity tempting because ethical problems are really hard—so hard that it can seem like there are no right answers. Here it’s important to keep in mind what objectivity requires. In order for ethics to be objective, there needn’t be exactly one right answer about what to do in each situation. Most, if not all, ethicists believe there can be multiple acceptable paths forward in any given scenario. What’s needed for objectivity is that there are at least some wrong answers to ethical questions. If you find yourself worrying about subjectivity because of a difficult ethical question, remember that you have probably already identified and ruled out many possible answers as mistaken. And if you haven’t, then thinking about what you should not do, and why, can be a great place to start.
In addition to casting doubt on some common arguments for subjectivity, let’s consider some reasons in favor of objectivity. The main idea here is just that most of us live our lives as if there are right and wrong answers to ethical questions. We seek advice when we’re uncertain; we get outraged when someone mistreats us or someone we love; we debate the politics of warfare and gun rights; we make ethical claims in op-eds, open letters, and on Twitter; we apologize for making mistakes. The list goes on and on. A very good explanation of these behaviors is that there are objective truths and falsehoods in ethics: that two people cannot disagree about ethical claims and both be right.
Are you convinced? Maybe not—and that’s ok. Even if you think ethics is subjective, you still need some principles by which you can act and live your life. Moreover, we still need to collectively decide how to live our lives together, how to interact, how to organize our societies, and so on. This class will introduce you to some systematic ways of solving these problems and some language for articulating your solutions.
Part 3: Asking Ethical Questions
With this background in mind, let’s look at our own experiences and begin to ask ethical questions. Experiential Ethics is designed to help you think about your summer experience from an ethical perspective. Whether you are doing an internship, working, engaging in research, studying, or contemplating your future career, we want you to use the tools discussed in class to think critically and systematically about the ethical aspects of your experience.
To begin this process, we want you to brainstorm at least five ethical questions related to whatever you’re doing this summer. These can be questions about your own behavior, the technology you’re working on, your sector, your company, etc. They can be mundane or unusual, broad or narrow. Just make sure you are genuinely curious about the answers to these questions, and that they are ethical questions.
After each question, write 1–2 sentences elaborating on why it interests you or why you are unsure of its answer.
