Rules and ethics

The role of rules in ethics is a longstanding debate among philosophers.  It’s often framed in relation to the differences between deontological (Kantian) and consequentialist (Utilitarian) thinkers.  The first group believes that ethics does indeed require rules or general principles, primarily because rules are seen as objective.  They are outside ourselves and our self-interest, at least if they apply equally to all people, the way Kant’s categorical imperative must do.  The categorical imperative says that an action is moral only if it is universalizable: we must be able to want everyone to act in this way.  If that is not true, then the actual or potential action is not ethically good.

(Immanuel Kant)

From the perspective of deontological ethics, rules are indeed necessary because without rules, our moral ideas and behavior might be guided by subjective factors like self-interest, prejudice, loyalty, and the like.  We would not be held to the same standard as others and would try to justify our actions with appeals to principles or foundations that are not really moral.  Rights are a common kind of rule-based ethics. Rights are supposed to be possessed equally by all people in the relevant category (all citizens, all humans, all children, etc.) and cannot be violated. 

Against this position, there are other philosophers who think that ethics does not require rules – and some who criticize rule-based ethics as a false or counter-productive approach to morality.  Some of these point out that rules are always made by a particular person or group of people, and no person can escape his or her subjective perspectives, values, and interests.  To imagine that we can come up with “objective” rules, in this view, is to kid ourselves.  Sometimes, the rules just justify what we think is in our own best interest, or they try to give a “transcendent” and absolute quality to our subjective preferences or even just to something we hope is true but isn’t really.

Some people think that ethics can be a mixture of different kinds of approaches and values – maybe sometimes rules are necessary but they are not all that ethics requires, nor are they the only kind of ethic that matters.  A good example of a mixed ethical model is just war theory, which includes some absolute rules (civilians can never be directly targeted) along with some conseequentialist calculations (you should not go to war unless you have a good chance of winning).  I think that such mixing may be inevitable, or at least helpful, when we try to apply ethics to concrete situations.