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Reviewed by:
  • Experiments in Ethics
  • Albert D. Spalding Jr.
Experiments in Ethics. Kwame Anthony Appiah. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.

There are many metaphors and models that are used to describe and explain various approaches to ethics. These models tend to oversimplify the contributions of moral philosophers, but they also help to explain the different perspectives that these philosophers have brought to the subject. They serve to introduce important thinkers and essential concepts to students of moral philosophy, and they help to facilitate good classroom discussion.

One of these models makes use of the large steel uprights used in North American football that serve as the goalposts for field goals. When a field goal kicker in that sport kicks the football toward the uprights, the action results in a goal if and only if the ball passes above the bar and between the uprights. The uprights delineate and define that which is acceptable and that which is not. When the game is over, the players, the coaches, the referees, the hot dog vendors, the fans, and everyone else goes home. The stadium is silent. But the uprights still stand, still and strong and vertical, continuing to define (irrespective of what is going on in the stadium) the acceptable boundaries for all field goal attempts.

There are some writers and philosophers who tend to reduce the Kantian deontological tradition to a two-dimensional model not unlike those North American field goal uprights. Likewise, the dictates of religious ethical systems are often similarly articulated in terms of actions that are either within the bounds of moral rightness, or outside of those bounds. Each and every action of human behavior, from these legalistic and simplistic perspectives, [End Page 114] can be assessed in terms of an almost digital valuation of zero or one, wrong or right, or moral or immoral. Goal or no goal.

There have been similar attempts to dumb down other approaches to ethics as well. Consequentialism and the utilitarian tradition are sometimes reduced to little more than a socioeconomic cost-benefit analysis. Virtue ethics is often described in terms that sometimes sound like deontological analyses (i.e., virtues are habits that result in right actions) and sometimes like an individualized approach to consequentialism (i.e., virtues are habits that result in good outcomes). Analytical approaches to ethics focus on quandaries such as the “trolley problem” (where the agent must decide between throwing a switch or not throwing a switch, thereby causing death to one or more people in order to save one or more other people) or similar ethical puzzles. And so on.

I have run across these two-dimensional characterizations and quasiheuristic applications of ethical theory in a number of contexts. One-chapter summaries of the intellectual history of moral philosophy often employ this type of reductionism. Efforts to summarize—within a few pages of text—the ethical explorations of Western moral thinkers from the Ancients to the Enlightenment philosophers, tend to rely on such theoretical minimalism. Along the way, Eastern thinkers, African contributors, feminists, and others who have added their voices to a grand conversation about ethics and morality are largely ignored. The considerable overlap between philosophy and psychology is too often similarly disregarded, sometimes in deference to the Great Divide between these two disciplines that has occurred only during the last century or so. I have probably used this shorthand myself when attempting to reference this or that philosopher or ethical theory, or as a means of contrasting various perspectives. Such attempts to funnel large and profound concepts into small containers with labels are not accurate and are seldom helpful.

Princeton philosophy Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us in Experiments in Ethics that life is not merely lived, it is made. Each of us is on a quest to make a life for ourselves. “Our having a life to make is what our humanity consists in” (203). And a significant part of what it means to make a life is to develop and embrace for ourselves some understanding of such notions as “character, consequences, duties, maxims, reasonableness, consent” (202).

In his discussion of what it means to make a life, Appiah goes beyond a traditional Aristotelian emphasis on...

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