Does Ethics Have a History?

Does Ethics Have a History?

It might be thought obvious that it does: hasn’t ethical thought changed over time? What we used to find morally acceptable we now find abhorrent. But be careful: are you distinguishing right and wrong from our thought about right and wrong? Ethical thought certainly has a history, but does it follow that ethical truthdoes? A great many things have a history—the things themselves not just our knowledge of them: human beings, animal species, planets, stars, galaxies, towns, countries, etc. Thought about these things has a history, and so do the things thought about: they came into existence at a certain time, and changed over time, sometimes perishing in due course. They were caught up in the causal web we call history. But is that true of everything—what about logic, mathematics, natural laws, space, time, the empty set, Platonic universals (if there are any)? Apparently not. Does the law of noncontradiction have a history, or the law of gravity, or the number 2, or time itself? If they did have a history, it would be sensible to ask when they came to exist, how they have changed, when they might perish, what caused them—but it doesn’t. They have no history—how could time have come into existence at a particular time? They are ahistorical.[1] Thought about them has a history, but they don’t have a history. Evidently, we can have historically situated knowledge about ahistorical things, as well as historical things. Might the same be true of ethics?

We think it is true that happiness is better than misery, that we should keep our promises, that murder is wrong, that pain is undesirable; but when did these things become true? Not when we discovered them to be true, or accepted them as true, because we were recognizing an antecedent fact. It would be absurd to say that promise-keeping became obligatory on a certain date; that would preclude us from saying that an earlier act of promise-breaking was morally wrong. Nor would it be appropriate to ask what caused promise-keeping to become obligatory, as we might ask what caused a certain war. Did pain become undesirable only when people first formulated that thought? Pain has always been undesirable, a bad thing, something to avoid causing if at all possible. It would be absurd to ask whether pain became bad gradually or suddenly, before the holidays or after. Justice was always good; it didn’t become good at a certain period of history—though it may well have been recognized as good at a certain period. Ethical truth, like logical truth, has no history: there was no time at which the law of noncontradiction didn’t hold, only to come to hold later; and there was no time at which murder was not wrong, only later coming to be wrong. Wrongness is not something that can come and go with the vicissitudes of history, like prosperity and the plague. In a slogan: moral values have no history. We can be wrong about them, to be sure, but that doesn’t imply that they change with our attitudes; there is no alteration in their nature. They don’t grow old or fall apart or get bigger. They are not subject to the law of causation. So, ethics has no history, if we mean ethical value itself; of course, ethical thought and practice have a history, a checkered one. Logic has no history either, if by logic we mean logical laws themselves; of course, logical thought has a history, part of the history of the human species. When people write books called things like A History of Ethics, we must bear in mind that the title is misleading; the author means A History of Ethical Thought. The word “ethics” is systematically ambiguous. Keeping the two meanings apart aids clarity.[2]

[1] Suppose we ask whether identity has a history—that relation in which Leibniz was so interested. The question is bizarre: are we eager to be told where it lived and when? Do we expect to learn the date on which identity became subject to Leibniz’s law (sometime in the seventeenth century, or possibly at the time of Plato?). Identity undergoes no maturation process, suffers no setbacks, finally asserting its dominion over all of reality. There cannot be a history of identity. But there can be a history of human thought about identity, taking in Leibniz, Frege, and Kripke. I am asking whether goodness is similar to identity: are the truths about goodness and identity truths of history or are they essentially ahistorical?

[2] If you are one of those benighted souls who thinks it’s smart to define right and wrong in terms of beliefs about right and wrong, then it will follow trivially that ethics (the subject-matter) has a history—at which point you might want to consider contraposing. This paper is intended for those who see the distinction and are confused by the phrase “history of ethics”. Ethical reality itself has no history; it undergoes no change. To put it differently, the only history that ethical values have is a history of human (possibly also animal) psychology—when and where ethical truths came to be perceived, accepted, and taught.