Should Ethics Be Based in Philosophy…Or Practice?

I wanted to share my response in a LinkedIn discussion around ethics (I don’t know if that link will work if you’re not a member of the group). It started when someone asked participants to list a few ethics books they’d found helpful. I posted several titles, culled from the archives of my Positive Power of Principled Profit newsletter, where I review one book per month on ethics, Green business, or service (scroll down).

One of the group members, Professor Allan Elder, wrote back with a long comment; here’s a piece of it:

The concern I have with all the books you recommend is they espouse a certain set of behaviors without explaining the reasoning behind them. For the casual reader (which is nearly all), this leads to prescription without understanding.

This is my response:

It’s true that my list focuses heavily on books that talk more about the behavior than the philosophy behind them. A book like The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid is based on a simple economic construct: there is money to be made helping the world’s poorest improve their lives. Yet several of the authors I mention would, I’m quite sure, be very comfortable showing their roots in Kant and John Stuart Mill.

I don’t see this as a problem; I actually see it as a strength. Self-interest can motivate positive changes in behavior, and thus in society, that more abstract thinking cannot. Those who would never voluntarily expose themselves to deep philosophical thinking start to create changes in the culture–and those who find their curiosity engaged will go deeper.

A practical example from my own life: as a teenager, I got involved with food co-ops, not because I had any particular consciousness at that time about the problems caused by our society’s choices in food policy, but because I was a starving student and it was a way to get good cheap food. But from that beginning based purely in narrow self-interest, I grew to understand some of the very complex web of policy, philosophy, and culture that have caused our food system to be the way it is. Thirty-five years later, I can talk about food issues on a much deeper level–but I still recruit people to eat better by engaging in their own self-interest: better health, better taste, etc. If they seem open to it, I start bringing in issues like the positive impact of supporting the local economy (which can then, in turn, open the door to a larger discussion of ethics issues).

In short, I think the literature has ample place for books rooted in either the philosophical or the practical, because different people will be drawn to the different schemes, and either one is a starting point for understanding the other 🙂

Of course philosophers pay attention to practical matters first, only they use a fancy word: “Praxis.” I didn’t mention that in my response.

What do YOU think?