Introduction

Suppose I asked you to pick one kind of action that was clearly and obviously wrong. You might well suggest, as an Uncontroversial example, killing an innocent person.

K: Killing innocent people is wrong.

But there is a second kind of difficulty with the proposition that it is wrong to kill innocent people. It is that some morally serious, caring people have felt that there is at least one sort of case where killing clearly innocent people is not only not wrong and not unde­sirable but actually desirable and right. That case is when a seriously ill person, in great pain, asks us to kill them. Killing someone in these cases is called “euthanasia,” which comes from a Greek word meaning “a good death.” Reflection on euthanasia can easily lead you to wonder whether it is always wrong to kill even the innocent.

The two kinds of difficulties with the principle, K, exemplify two of the major kinds of issue that are central to ethics, which is the name we give to philosophical reflection on morality. The first prob­lem had to do with the analysis of a concept—innocence—that we make use of in forming our moral decisions. It was a question that forced us to try to define the concept clearly. The second question had to do not with understanding and defining a concept but with whether a particular moral belief, K, was true. Obviously we should want to have a good understanding of the concept of innocence before we decided whether K was correct, so that the questions of definition are prior to questions about truth. But even once the questions of definition are settled, the substantial questions remain.

Whether or not K is true is a very important question, and peo­ple have very strong feelings about it. It is surely right to feel strongly about such questions. But because they are so important, we should try not to let our feelings get in the way of deciding about them. Precisely because we care deeply about human life, it would be a tragedy to let the strength of our feeling lead us into error.

How, then, should we try to settle these issues? With scientific questions, as we saw in the last chapter, we set about developing theories and look to see whether, by experiment and observation, we can find reasons for thinking they are true—or, if we follow Popper, no reasons at least for thinking they are false.

Even if such a monster did carry out this horrible test, however, that would obviously not settle the matter. What are we supposed to look for when we see an innocent person dying that will show us that the killing is wrong? Even if seeing such a thing convinced you that it was wrong, there seems to be nothing about the killing that you can observe and which you could point to in order to persuade someone else that the killing was wrong. If someone could not see that the outcome of a Mendelian crossing experiment was that some of the peas were purple and some white, we could conclude that there was something wrong with their eyes. On the other hand, a psychopath who did not believe that a killing was wrong would not need to have anything wrong with his or her senses. (Unless we have a special moral sense, a possibility I'll discuss in 5.4.)

But we do not need to experience actual killings to judge that they are wrong. Simply thinking about a possible killing of an inno­cent person would lead most of us to judge that we should not carry it out. Someone who carried out this sort of test would display a seri­ous misunderstanding of the status of moral claims, because such tests are simply not relevant. Moral claims seem to be, in this respect, like formal ones: we decide them not by experience but by thought.

Notice that we have been led from thinking about whether an action is right or wrong to thinking about how we should decide whether an action is right or wrong. We are now asking questions about the status of moral judgments, as well as about which judg­ments we should assent to.

Questions about what is right and wrong, good and bad, we call “first-order” moral questions. They are questions about which moral beliefs we should accept. Questions about the nature, struc­ture, and status of first-order moral views, on the other hand, we call “metaethical.” They are questions about our first-order moral views. This distinction is crucial in the philosophical discussion of moral questions. People who have very different metaethical theo­ries can agree about which actions are wrong; and people who share the same metaethical theories can disagree about it. Nevertheless, as we shall see, there are many occasions where our metaethics and our morals interact.

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