Abstract
Like everyone else nowadays, philosophers are expected to demonstrate their usefulness to society, and the way they favour is practising practical ethics, of which this eminently readable collection of sixty-two brief essays by forty-seven practised thinkers provides an instructive sample. The result is a collective exercise in latter-day casuistry.
The essays address contemporary moral issues posed chiefly by advances in medicine, sexuality, religion, sport, crime, warfare, terrorism, and the internet. There are some imaginative, if sometimes impractical proposals attesting their authors’ independence of mind: Fabre (essay 9) criticises the restitution of looted property to its former owners on the grounds that the latter acquired it in an unjust world; MacAskill (essay 22) defends bankers’ high salaries, since a well-paid banker who ‘earns to give’ to charities does more good than by working for a charity himself; Coady (essay 21) offers a liberal Catholic’s view of his church; Singer (essay 41) urges that Islamic extremism be publicly called just that; and Armstrong (essay 57) suggests that we might all be better off in a totally surveilled society. Disappointingly, there is only one debate between contributors, on American gun laws (essays 4 and 5); whilst Rini’s condescending condemnation of an archbishop’s condemnation of homosexual marriage (essay 47) and Sandberg’s distasteful discussion of ‘trans-species eroticism’ (essay 51) will be found unacceptable by many readers.
Practical ethics arose in large measure as a reaction to the perceived sterility of much previous moral philosophy concerned with such theoretical matters as the analysis of moral language and the grounds of moral judgement; but practical ethics itself is open to graver charges. By and large its practitioners provide no statement of their moral theory, taking their typically liberal and utilitarian ethical premisses for granted, display an unhealthy predilection for fantastical examples, and simply assume that technology, toleration, and economic activity will advance indefinitely. They are apparently unaware that Western civilisation rests upon an ethic enjoining self-restraint, so releasing energies for cultural enhancement, that community and tradition formerly contributed greatly to human welfare, and that we may be creating a world whose denizens we should not understand, who would not understand us.
Let us hope, then, that this book will stimulate theologians and ministers who read it to revive their neglected role of arbiters of morals and offer an alternative take on the world. They might also ponder Kappes’ concluding sentence on internet shaming (essay 48): ‘Guilt offers redemption, shame does not.’