Ethics And Observation
Ethics and observation1. The basic issue-,(Can moral principles be tested and confirmed in the wayscientific principles can? Consider the principle that, if you aregiven a choice between five people alive and one dead or fivepeople dead and one alive, you should always choose to have fivepeople alive and one dead rather than the other way round. Wecan easily imagine examples that appear to confirm this principle.Here is one:You are a doctor in a hospital's emergency room when six accidentvictims are brought in. All six are in danger of dying but one is muchworse off than the others. You can just barely save that person if youdevote all of your resources to him and let the others die. Alternatively,you can save the other five if you are willing to ignore the most seriouslyinjured person.It would seem that in this case you, the doctor, would be right tosave the five and let the other person die. So this example, takenby itself, confirms the principle under consideration. Next,consider the following case.You have five patients in the hospital who are dying, each in need of aseparate organ. One needs a kidney, another a lung, a third a heart, andso forth. You can save all five if you take a single healthy person andremove his heart, lungs, kidneys, and so forth, to distribute to these five3
4The problem with ethicspatients. Just such a healthy person is in room 306. He is in the hospitalfor routine tests. Having seen his test results, you know that he isperfectly healthy and of the right tissue compatibility. If you do nothing,he will survive without incident; the other patients will die, however.The other five patients can be saved only if the person in Room 306 iscut up and his organs distributed. In that case, there would be onedead but five saved.The principle in question tells us that you should cut up the patientin Room 306. But in this case, surely you must not sacrifice thisinnocent bystander, even to save the five other patients. Here amoral principle has been tested and disconfirmed in what mayseem to be a surprising way.This, of course, was a "thought experiment." We did not reallycompare a hypothesis with the world. We compared an explicitprinciple with our feelings about certain imagined examples. Inthe same way, a physicist performs thought experiments in orderto compare explicit hypotheses with his "sense" of what shouldhappen in certain situations, a "sense" that he has acquired as aresult of his long working familiarity with current theory. Butscientific hypotheses can also be tested in real experiments, out inthe world.Can moral principles be tested in the same way, out in theworld? You can observe someone do something, but can youever perceive the rightness or wrongness of what he does? Ifyou round a corner and see a group of young hoodlums pourgasoline on a cat and ignite it, you do not need to conclude thatwhat they are doing is wrong; you do not need to figure anything out; you can see that it is wrong. But is your reaction due tothe actual wrongness of what you see or is it simply a reflectionof your moral "sense," a "sense" that you have acquired perhapsas a result of your moral upbringing?2. ObservationThe issue is complicated. There are no pure observations.Observations are always "theory laden." What you perceivedepends to some extent on the theory you hold, consciously orunconsciously. You see some children pour gasoline on a cat andignite it. To really see that, you have to possess a great deal ofknowledge, know about a considerable number of objects, knowabout people: that people pass through the life stages infant,
5Ethics and observationbaby, child, adolescent, adult. You must know what flesh andblood animals are, and in particular, cats. You must have someidea of life. You must know what gasoline is, what burning is, andmuch more. In one sense, what you "see" is a pattern of light onyour retina, a shifting array of splotches, although even that istheory, and you could never adequately describe what you see inthat sense. In another sense, you see what you do because of thetheories you hold. Change those theories and you would seesomething else, given the same pattern of light.Similarly, if you hold a moral view, whether it is heldconsciously or unconsciously, you will be able to perceive rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, justice or injustice.There is no difference in this respect between moral propositions and other theoretical propositions. If there is a difference,it must be found elsewhere.Observation depends on theory because perception involvesforming a belief as a fairly direct result of observing something;you can form a belief only if you understand the relevant conceptsand a concept is what it is by virtue of its role in some theory orsystem of beliefs. To recognize a child as a child is to employ,consciously or unconsciously, a concept that is defined by itsplace in a framework of the stages of human life. Similarly,burning is an empty concept apart from its theoreticalconnections to the concepts of heat, destruction, smoke, and fire.Moral concepts—Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Justice andInjustice—also have a place in your theory or system of beliefsand are the concepts they are because of their context. If we saythat observation has occurred whenever an opinion is a directresult of perception, we must allow that there is moralobservation, because such an opinion can be a moral opinion aseasily as any other sort. In this sense, observation may be used toconfirm or disconfirm moral theories. The observational opinionsthat, in this sense, you find yourself with can be in eitheragreement or conflict with your consciously explicit moralprinciples. When they are in conflict, you must choose betweenyour explicit theory and observation. In ethics, as in science, yousometimes opt for theory, and say that you made an error inobservation or were biased or whatever, or you sometimes opt forobservation, and modify your theory.In other words, in both science and ethics, general principles
The problem with ethics6are invoked to explain particular cases and, therefore, in bothscience and ethics, the general principles you accept can be testedby appealing to particular judgments that certain things are rightor wrong, just or unjust, and so forth; and these judgments areanalogous to direct perceptual judgments about facts.servational evidenceNevertheless, observation plays a role in science that it does notseem to play in ethics. The difference is that you need to makeassumptions about certain physical facts to explain theoccurrence of the observations that support a scientific theory,but you do not seem to need to make assumptions about anymoral facts to explain the occurrence of the so-called moralobservations I have been talking about. In the moral case, it wouldseem that you need only make assumptions about the psychologyor moral sensibility of the person making the moral observation.In the scientific case, theory is tested against the world.The point is subtle but important. Consider a physicist makingan observation to test a scientific theory. Seeing a vapor trail in acloud chamber, he thinks, "There goes a proton." Let us supposethat this is an observation in the relevant sense, namely, animmediate judgment made in response to the situation withoutany conscious reasoning having taken place. Let us also supposethat his observation confirms his theory, a theory that helps givemeaning to the very term "proton" as it occurs in his observationaljudgment. Such a confirmation rests on inferring an explanation.He can count his making the observation as confirming evidencefor his theory only to the extent that it is reasonable to explain hismaking the observation by assuming that, not only is he in acertain psychological "set," given the theory he accepts and hisbeliefs about the experimental apparatus, but furthermore, therereally was a proton going through the cloud chamber, causing thevapor trail, which he saw as a proton. (This is evidence for thetheory to the extent that the theory can explain the proton's beingthere better than competing theories can.) But, if his having madethat observation could have been equally well explained by hispsychological set alone, without the need for any assumptionabout a proton, then the observation would not have beenevidence for the existence of that proton and therefore would nothave been evidence for the theory. His making the observation
7Ethics and observationsupports the theory only because, in order to explain his makingthe observation, it is reasonable to assume something about theworld over and above the assumptions made about the observer's psychology. In particular, it is reasonable to assume thatthere was a proton going through the cloud chamber, causingthe vapor trail.Compare this case with one in which you make a moraljudgment immediately and without conscious reasoning, say, thatthe children are wrong to set the cat on fire or that the doctorwould be wrong to cut up one healthy patient to save five dyingpatients. In order to explain your making the first of thesejudgments, it would be reasonable to assume, perhaps, that thechildren really are pouring gasoline on a cat and you are seeingthem do it. But, in neither case is there any obvious reason toassume anything about "moral facts," such as that it really iswrong to set the cat on fire or to cut up the patient in Room 306.Indeed, an assumption about moral facts would seem to be totallyirrelevant to the explanation of your making the judgment youmake. It would seem that all we need assume is that you havecertain more or less well articulated moral principles that arereflected in the judgments you make, based on your moralsensibility. It seems to be completely irrelevant to our explanationwhether your intuitive immediate judgment is true or false.The observation of an event can provide observationalevidence for or against a scientific theory in the sense that thetruth of that observation can be relevant to a reasonableexplanation of why that observation was made. A moralobservation does not seem, in the same sense, to be observationalevidence for or against any moral theory, since the truth or falsityof the moral observation seems to be completely irrelevant to anyreasonable explanation of why that observation was made. Thefact that an observation of an event was made at the time it wasmade is evidence not only about the observer but also about thephysical facts. The fact that you made a particular moralobservation when you did does not seem to be evidence aboutmoral facts, only evidence about you and your moral sensibility.Facts about protons can affect what you observe, since a protonpassing through the cloud chamber can cause a vapor trail thatreflects light to your eye in a way that, given your scientifictraining and psychological set, leads you to judge that what you
8The problem with ethics1Ksee is a proton. But there does not seem to be any way in which theactual rightness or wrongness of a given situation can have anyeffect on your perceptual apparatus. In this respect, ethics seemsto differ from science.In considering whether moral principles can help explainobservations, it is therefore important to note an ambiguity in theword "observation." You see the children set the cat on fire andimmediately think, "That's wrong. - In one sense, yourobservation is that what the children are doing is wrong. Inanother sense, your observation is your thinking that thought.Moral principles might explain observations in the first sensebut not in the second sense. Certain moral principles might help toexplain why it was wrong of the children to set the cat on fire, butmoral principles seem to be of no help in explaining your thinkingthat that is wrong. In the first sense of "observation," moralprinciples can be tested by observation—"That this act is wrong isevidence that causing unnecessary suffering is wrong." But in thesecond sense of "observation," moral principles cannot clearly betested by observation, since they do not appear to help explainobservations in this second sense of "observation." Moralprinciples do not seem to help explain your observing what youobserve.Of course, if you are already given the moral principle that it iswrong to cause unnecessary suffering, you can take your seeingthe children setting the cat on fire as observational evidence thatthey are doing something wrong. Similarly, you can suppose thatyour seeing the vapor trail is observational evidence that a proton is going through the cloud chamber, if you are given therelevant physical theory. But there is an important apparentdifference between the two cases. In the scientific case, yourmaking that observation is itself evidence for the physical theorybecause the physical theory explains the proton, which explainsthe trail, which explains your observation. In the moral case,your making your observation does not seem to be evidence forthe relevant moral principle because that principle does notseem to help explain your observation. The explanatory chainfrom principle to observation seems to be broken in morality.The moral principle may "explain" why it is wrong for thechildren to set the cat on fire. But the wrongness of that act doesnot appear to help explain the act, which you observe, itself. Theexplanatory chain appears to be broken in such a way that
9Ethics and observationneither the moral principle nor the wrongness of the act can helpexplain why you observe what you observe.A qualification may seem to be needed here. Perhaps thechildren perversely set the cat on fire simply "because it iswrong." Here it may seem at first that the actual wrongness ofthe act does help explain why they do it and therefore indirectlyhelps explain why you observe what you observe just as aphysical theory, by explaining why the proton is producing avapor trail, indirectly helps explain why the observer observeswhat he observes. But on reflection we must agree that this isprobably an illusion. What explains the children's act is notclearly the actual wrongness of the act but, rather, their beliefthat the act is wrong. The actual rightness or wrongness of theiract seems to have nothing to do with why they do it.Observational evidence plays a part in science it does notappear to play in ethics, because scientific principles can bejustified ultimately by their role in explaining observations, inthe second sense of observation—by their explanatory role. Apparently, moral principles cannot be justified in the same way. Itappears to be true that there can be no explanatory chain betweenmoral principles and particular observings in the way that therecan be such a chain between scientific principles and particularobservings. Conceived as an explanatory theory, morality, unlikescience, seems to be cut off from observation.Not that every legitimate scientific hypothesis is susceptible todirect observational testing. Certain hypothesis about "blackholes" in space cannot be directly tested, for example, becauseno signal is emitted from within a black hole. The connectionwith observation in such a case is indirect. And there are manysimilar examples. Nevertheless, seen in the large, there is the apparent difference between science and ethics we have noted.The scientific realm is accessible to observation in a way themoral realm is not.4. Ethics and mathematicsPerhaps ethics is to be compared, not with physics, but withmathematics. Perhaps such a moral principle as "You ought tokeep your promises" is confirmed or disconfirmed in the way(whatever it is) in which such a mathematical principle as"5 7 12" is. Observation does not seem to play the role inmathematics it plays in physics. We do not and cannot perceive
The problem with ethics10numbers, for example, since we cannot be in causal contact withthem. We do not even understand what it would be like to be incausal contact with the number 12, say. Relations among numbers cannot have any more of an effect on our perceptualapparatus than moral facts can.Observation, however, is relevant to mathematics. Inexplaining the observations that support a physical theory,scientists typically appeal to mathematical principles. On theother hand, one never seems to need to appeal in this way tomoral principles. Since an observation is evidence for what bestexplains it, and since mathematics often figures in theexplanations of scientific observations, there is indirectobservational evidence for mathematics. There does not seem tobe observational evidence, even -indirectly, for basic moralprinciples. In explaining why certain observations have beenmade, we never seem to use purely moral assumptions. In thisrespect, then, ethics appears to differ not only from physics butalso from mathematics.In what follows, we will be considering a number of possibleresponses to the apparent fact that ethics is cut off from observational testing in a way that science is not. Some of these responsesclaim that there is a distinction of this sort between science andethics and try to say what its implications are. Others deny thatthere is a distinction of this sort between science and ethics andargue that ethics is not really exempt from observational testing inthe way it appears to be.A note on further readingFor a brief argument distinguishing the role of observational evidence in ethicsand in science, see R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 1-3.Alan Gewirth notes some complications in "Positive 'Ethics' and Normative'Science'," Philosophical Review, Vol. 69 (1960).On the "theory ladenness" of observation, see Norwood. Russell Hanson,Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1958),Chapter 1.The role of explanation in inference is discussed in Gilbert Harman, "Inference to the Best Explanation," Philosophical Review, Vol. 74 (1965).The suggestions that there can be intuitive knowledge of moral truths isexamined in P. F. Strawson, "Ethical Intuitionism," Philosophy, Vol. 24 (1949).Paul Benacerraf discusses problems about mathematical knowledge in"Mathematical Truth," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70 (1973).
Nihilism and naturalism1. Moral nihilismWe have seen that observational evidence plays a role in science ,and mathematics it does not seem to play in ethics. Moral hypotheses do not help explain why people observe what they observe.So ethics is problematic and nihilism must be taken seriously.Nihilism is the doctrine that there are no moral facts, no moraltruths, and no moral knowledge. This doctrine can account forwhy reference to moral facts does not seem to help explainobservations, on the grounds that what does not exist cannotexplain anything.An extreme version of nihilism holds that morality is simply anillusion: nothing is ever right or wrong, just or unjust, good orbad. In this version, we should abandon morality, just as anatheist abandons religion after he has decided that religious factscannot help explain observations. Some extreme nihilists haveeven suggested that morality is merely a superstitious remnant ofreligion.Such extreme nihilism is hard to accept. It implies that thereare no moral constraints—that everything is permitted. AsDostoevsky observes, it implies that there is nothing wrong withmurdering your father. It also implies that slavery is not unjustand that Hitler's extermination camps were not immoral. Theseare not easy conclusions to accept.11
12The problem with ethicsThis, of course, does not refute extreme nihilism Nihilismdoes not purport to reflect our ordinary views; and the fact thatit is difficult to believe does not mean that it must be false. Atone time in the history of the world people had difficulty inbelieving that the earth was round; nevertheless the earth wasround. A truly religious person could not easily come to believethat God does not exist; that is no argument against
6 The problem with ethics are invoked to explain particular cases and, therefore, in both science and ethics, the general principles you accept can be tested by appealing to particular judgments that certain things are right or wrong, just or unjust, and so forth; and these judgments
Sampling for the Ethics in Social Research study The Ethics in Social Research fieldwork 1.3 Structure of the report 2. TALKING ABOUT ETHICS 14 2.1 The approach taken in the study 2.2 Participants' early thoughts about ethics 2.2.1 Initial definitions of ethics 2.2.2 Ethics as applied to research 2.3 Mapping ethics through experiences of .
Code of Ethics The Code of Ethics defines the standards and the procedures by which the Ethics Committee operates.! More broadly, the Code of Ethics is designed to give AAPM Members an ethical compass to guide the conduct of their professional affairs.! TG-109! Code of Ethics The Code of Ethics in its current form was approved in
"usiness ethics" versus "ethics": a false dichotomy "usiness decisions versus ethics" Business ethics frequently frames things out, including ethics Framing everything in terms of the "bottom line" Safety, quality, honesty are outside consideration. There is no time for ethics.
Values and Ethics for Care Practice Sue Cuthbert and Jan Quallington Cuthbert & Quallington Values and Ethics for Care Practice www.lanternpublishing.co.uk 9 781908 625304 ISBN 978-1-908-625-30-4 Values and Ethics for Care Practice Values and ethics are integral to the provision, practice and delivery of patient-centred health and social care.
POR POR Part of the Academic Professional Development Framework Peer Observation and Review of teaching and learning 1 Contents Section one: Policy outline and summary 2 Section two: The process of peer observation and review 3 Section three: Planning for peer observation and review 4 Section four: A - Observation of teaching and learning 5 A1 Peer observation of teaching and learning
1 Introduction to Medical Law and Ethics Dr. Gary Mumaugh Objectives Explain why knowledge of law and ethics is important to health care providers Recognize the importance of a professional code of ethics Distinguish among law, ethics, bioethics, etiquette, and protocol Define moral values and explain how they relate to law, ethics and etiquette
BUSINESS ETHICS (Please note that these notes are not comprehensive and therefore additional reading is recommended from diverse sources) Books Ethics and Mgmt by Hosmer Business Ethics by Shekher Business Ethics by Chakrobarthy (Oxford publication) Syllabus 1. Evolution of thought of ethics in busi
Intro in Medical Ethics Module 279-17-C Regulations, Standards and Ethics Unit C 17.6 Trends in Medical Research Ethics 17.6.0 Intro in Medical Ethics dr. Chris R. Mol, BME, NORTEC, 2015 What is medical ethics Basic principles . PowerPoint-presentatie Author: Chris Mol
