Kitchen Table Ethics Rules
It is generally agreed that every adult human being carts around a mixed bag of ideas about ethics. For most
people, that bag is very mixed indeed. Some of the ideas, neuroscientists are beginning to think, may be the
result of the fact that human beings evolved in social groups (similar to those of other pack animals, and in
particular predatory pack animals, such as wolves). Some of them we were taught within our first social group,
namely our family. Some of the ideas seem to come primarily from the larger social groups of which we find
ourselves members, including our religious social groups. At least some people also carry around ideas about
ethics that are informed by the discipline of philosophy, which--in the Western tradition--has been using reason
on ethics for more than twenty-five hundred years.
Most people's mixed bags are too heavy. They contain many contradictory ideas, and some false ones. Since
two contradictory ideas can't both be true, one of the things the philosophical study of ethics can do is lighten
people's baggage. If two ideas contradict each other, the law of non-contradiction tells us that at least one of
those ideas must go! Similarly, most people's mixed bags of ethics also contain ideas that are just false. The
false ideas have to go, too.
Lighten the Load
In the United States at this time, one very commonly-held false idea is that "ethics is relative." This idea comes
in two flavors. One flavor is individual relativism, also called "subjectivism." According to this incorrect
position, what is "ethical" depends on the opinion of the person who makes the judgment. There are many
reasons why this position is false. Here are two. (1) Subjectivism makes ethics useless for arriving at
interpersonal judgment or criticism. Where each person's position is at the same level of "correctness" as any
other person's, there's no way of deciding between opposing views. But one of the primary purposes of ethics is
precisely to enable such decisions, whether in the context of enabling cooperation or in that of managing
competition. To say that something that is supposed to make arriving at judgments possible instead makes
arriving at them impossible is self-contradictory. Since subjectivism leads to self-contradiction, it can't be true.
(2) Subjectivism doesn't get us closer to achieving the goal of morality. Instead it conflicts with that goal. The
goal of morality is to secure human flourishing in social groups. One of the primary purposes of morality is to
make sure there is a social group/society for us to flourish in. Subjectivism views humans as atoms which, like
balls on a pool table, don't stick together even in small groups, let alone in societies. It takes the position that life
is each person for him- or herself. But this is factually inaccurate. We do stick together in families and
communities. This factual inaccuracy means subjectivism is conceptually incoherent: it doesn't even honor the
facts about human beings, let alone provide any help in reaching part of the goal of ethics, which is to maintain
the social groups that are required for humans to flourish.
The other flavor of ethical relativism is cultural relativism, also known as "conventionalism." According to this
incorrect position, what is "ethical" is identical with the norms of a given culture or society. There are many
reasons why this position is false. Here are three. (1) Conventionalism makes it impossible to criticize any socalled "ethical" principle, whether inside or outside one's own culture, even if it obviously conflicts with the goal
of ethics. For example: a culture that practices genocide, infanticide, or other forms of mass killing of a group or
groups either inside or outside its borders cannot be criticized ethically. Another example: a culture that views
slavery as morally correct cannot be criticized ethically. (2) Conventionalism makes it impossible to argue that
laws are unjust, and further makes it impossible to argue that such laws should be changed; it also makes it
impossible to argue that some law should be adopted in order to make a given "unethical" practice illegal. (3)
Conventionalism assumes that there is some easy or obvious answer to what a "society" or a "culture" is, and it
further assumes that each and every person belongs to one and only one such "society" or "culture." Both of
these assumptions are false: it is in fact extremely difficult to define "society" and "culture," and (especially
perhaps in modern pluralistic societies) many if not most people belong to several different subcultures, often
with wildly different norms. How does a person who belongs to two subcultures with conflicting norms decide
which action actually is morally right? The law of non-contradiction tells him or her that those two opposing
norms cannot both be right!
What We Have in Common
Now that those bags of ethical ideas are lighter we can move to identifying a major portion of what they usually
have in common. It is a serious mistake to think that people have "the same" ideas about ethics. Our bags are
often highly, and dangerously, idiosyncratic The "highly" comes from the origin of the ideas. All our families
are different from one another. We belong, or have belonged, to different social groups--including religions-from one another. We have different personal histories from one another. The fact that the bags are idiosyncratic
is dangerous because it means that it's often very, very difficult even to have a reasonable discussion about what
actions are ethical and what actions are not--let alone to decide what is ethical and what is not. One individual
will simply assume that a premise in an argument about which action is ethical is plausible. She or he will say,
when challenged, "Everyone knows that's true." The fact, however, is that "everyone" doesn't know it's true.
Some people may even "know" exactly the opposite.
These disagreements are a major cause of the fact that discussions in contemporary society that have one or more
ethics components often appear to go in circles, generating much heat (in the form of blog posts, responses to
blog posts, claims and counterclaims by those on the left and right of the political spectrum, tweets, speeches,
and so on and so forth) and very little light (i.e., truth--or even agreement) on policies, laws, or how to spend tax
dollars. Another major cause of this obvious characteristic of public discourse is, of course, the refusal to engage
in rational argument.
We already know that philosophy, and in particular avoiding poor reasoning, can help with this problem: it
simply isn't that hard to engage in good arguments rather than bad ones. Don't commit informal fallacies; do use
reason instead of emotion when constructing arguments. But philosophy can help with more than the
structure/form of our reasoning. The philosophical study of ethics can help us establish common ground even
with our opponents, by helping us to identify where our bags of ethics differ from theirs, and where they are
similar. That allows us to build on ideas we can be fairly sure are held in common. By doing so we can avoid
offering long, unnecessary explanations about the truth of premises whose truth is already accepted by those
with whom we argue. We can focus instead on making plausible those ideas in our arguments that are less
widely-held.
Parents and caregivers all over the world begin to teach the children for whom they care what we will call
"kitchen table ethics rules," or KTER, by about the time those children are two and a half. These rules, which
we learn in a very simple form when we are small, are ones that--either in their initial very simple form or in the
much more sophisticated versions we learn when we are older--have been shown, through the millennia of
human existence, to help us reach the goal of ethics when we follow them. They also prevent us from reaching
the goal of ethics when we don't follow them! Here is a sample, partial, list of KTER that we can rely on others'
having learned, just as we did, starting at an early age:
Don't hurt others.
Don't lie.
Help others.
Share.
Treat others fairly.
Say "please" and "thank you."
Don't steal.
Don't do wrong in response to wrong.
Keep your promises.
Reciprocate.
There are other KTERs, of course, and we will inevitably talk about them, as well as those in this list, as we
continue our philosophical study of ethics. What they will all have in common is that (a) we learned the core of
the rule early in our lives, (b) it is easy to explain how following the rule helps us to reach the goal of ethics, (c)
there is widespread agreement that the rule is part of ethics.