The Genus of Morality¹

        People sometimes do things they should not do. They do things which are morally wrong. We judge people on moral grounds, as good or bad, virtuous or vicious. We judge actions on moral grounds, as right or wrong, as good or bad. We judge policies on moral grounds. We judge characters, and maybe even events, on moral grounds. But what is it to make a moral assessment of something, to judge something from a moral perspective?

        We might try to explain what morality is by saying that morality is concerned with right and wrong, or with good or bad. And this seems correct--as far as it goes. Morality does seem to be a realm of evaluation. The genus² of morality, so to speak, is an evaluation of actions, persons, and policies (and perhaps also of habits and characters). That's the kind of thing morality is. But there are other sorts of evaluation of these things that are not moral evaluations. For example, we might say of an answer to a mathematics question that it is the "right" answer, without any suggestion of moral evaluation. So saying that morality is a matter of what is right and wrong will not do as a complete account of what morality is.

        But the problem here is not limited to incompleteness. To say that morality involves a judgment of what behavior is right and what is wrong may be circular. After all, we may then ask what we mean here by "right" and "wrong." Saying that two plus two equals five is to say something wrong. To say it equals four is right. But this, surely, is not what morality is. Morality involves instead what is morally right and what is morally wrong. But that is to say that morality involves moral assessments. And that tight circle surely leaves important questions unanswered.

The Moral and the Non-Moral

        What is the opposite of "moral?" To answer this we must distinguish between two distinctions. One is the distinction between the moral and the immoral. The other is the distinction between the moral and the non-moral.³ If you help an elderly person across the street, you are doing something moral. If instead you knife her and take her money, you are doing something immoral.⁴ Both the moral and the immoral are within the sphere, so to speak, of the moral, as opposed to the non-moral. To say of some action, rape, for example, that it is immoral, is to make a moral assessment of it. To say of an action, even of the same action, that it is illegal or stupid or costly is to assess it on non-moral grounds, to judge it by some other yardstick. The distinction between the moral and the immoral is a distinction within the realm of the moral. The distinction between the moral and the non-moral, on the other hand, is between spheres of assessment or kinds of judgment, and even kinds of rules. Specifying a principle as a moral principle distinguishes it from legal and prudential principles, for instance. Thus, while we may say of some actions or people that they are immoral, we would not, in this sense speak of them as being non-moral. On the other hand reasons and rules can be moral or non-moral. So can judgments, advice, and questions. In saying a rule or a reason, for instance, is non-moral we are saying that it is not a reason or rule that purports to offer moral grounds for doing something, although it may offer other kinds of support for an action.

        In order to get clear on what morality is, it is useful to consider what it is not. That is, it is helpful to consider what other kinds of assessment there are, apart from moral assessment. What are these non-moral evaluations?

        I have already mentioned the domain of legal assessment. Some things are legal. Some things are illegal. But whether some action is legal or illegal is a different question from whether it is moral or immoral. Helping slaves escape their masters may at one time have been illegal in the United States. It does not follow that it was immoral. Marital infidelity may be perfectly legal in some states. It does not follow that it is morally acceptable.

        Prudence also seems to differ from morality.⁵ Prudence is a matter of looking out for what is in your own best interest. Morality, it is typically assumed, involves looking out also for the interests of others. It may be prudent but immoral to lie to your philosophy teacher about whether your sister wrote your term paper for you.

        There are reasons of etiquette which differ from those of morality. Etiquette is a matter of what is polite and proper manners. But what proper manners are may have little to do with what is morally right. Eating your potatos with your dessert fork may be contrary to etiquette, as may wearing shorts and a tee shirt to a funeral, but it is not under ordinary circumstances immoral.

        Then there are reasons of custom, which go beyond etiquette. Someone may suggest that turkey be served on Thanksgiving not because it would be impolite not to, nor because it is required by morality or law, but simply because it is traditional to do so within a certain segment of society. Again, the requirement that turkey be served on Thanksgiving is not a moral requirement.

        Religious reasons are also distinct from moral reasons. There may be religious reasons not to eat certain foods or to go to religious services on certain days or to wear (or not wear) certain articles of clothing. But these are not necessarily moral reasons.⁶

        Then there is the epistemic domain, the domain of what we should believe. If I say that given what we know about how the world works it is wrong to believe that a Santa Claus climbs down the chimneys of millions of households each Christmas morning, I am probably not making a moral assessment. I am using the word "wrong" and could even use the word "should" ("You should not believe that"), but I am making an epistemic assessment, not a moral one. So here is another non-moral realm of assessment.⁷

        In all these cases (legality, prudence, etiquette, custom, religion, and epistemology) there is talk of a right and a wrong. But it is not a matter of what is morally right or wrong. When we are considering whether or not we should do some act, we may consider several different kinds of reasons. There may be lots of considerations in favor of and against some action. But we can distinguish the moral reasons for and against an action from other, non-moral reasons. In considering whether it is morally right to do something, or whether it is a morally good thing to do, we need look only at the moral reasons involved.

What Distinguishes Morality From Other Domains of Assessment

        We have seen that morality is a kind of evaluation of actions, persons, and policies. We have seen also that there are other kinds of evaluation which provide other sorts of reasons for or against actions. But what we would like to find is the nature of the difference between these non-moral domains and morality in order to understand more clearly what morality is.

        Such distinguishing characteristics of morality are unfortunately hard to identify. Indeed, some philosophers argue that there is not an important fundamental difference between morality and etiquette, for example.⁸ Others think morality is simply a subcategory of custom.⁹ Still others think that morality amounts to a kind of prudence. (This appears to be Plato's view.)

        The attempts that have been made to distinguish morality from other kinds of evaluation of behavior can be divided into two general categories: formal approaches and material approaches. This is a fancy way of saying that some find the difference in what morality is about. These are the "material" approaches. Others see the difference in the, so to speak, logical structure of moral evaluation. These are the "formal" approaches.

        The material approaches are easier to understand, so let us start with them. Some say morality is distinguished by the fact that moral considerations, moral reasons, must relate ultimately to the well-being of persons, or human flourishing. Some say that morality must relate to the survival of human beings (individually or as a group), but others go further to say it must relate not just to whether we survive, but to how well off we are. Still other approaches suggest that morality involves the rational appropriateness of certain feelings, specifically guilt and resentment.

        Notice that any of these material approaches distinguish morality from legality and other nonmoral domains of assessment. There may be all sorts of grounds for legal reasons. Some laws might be made simply because the law makers want to make them. Others might be necessary for the running of the society. In either case, legal reasons seem to be grounded in the actions of the lawmakers, whether they be "the people" or some despot. Religious reasons might be grounded in some supposed commands of God that we do not eat certain foods, for example. But moral reasons are grounded in neither of these things, but instead, according to some of these "material" accounts of morality, in the fact that they further the ends of persons.

        What formally might distinguish morality from other evaluations of actions? Some say it is that moral reasons are intended to be overriding. What that means is that when there is a conflict between what you morally should do and what you legally or prudentially or aesthetically should do, the moral reasons always win out. In other words, you ought on balance to do what you ought morally to do. It is not to say, however, that people always do act in accordance with the stronger moral reasons. We are not perfectly rational creatures.

        Others within the formal camp say that the difference between moral evaluations and nonmoral evaluations is that the former are categorical, to use Kant's term.¹⁰ What this means is that moral injunctions apply to all persons regardless of whether they are citizens of any country, regardless of what desires and cares they do or do not have.

        Some think that what distinguishes morality from other judgments is that moral judgments are universalizable. What that means is that a moral judgment always implies some universal version of itself. One cannot make a moral judgment about one thing and a differing moral judgment about something else unless one recognizes some other relevant difference between them. One cannot claim that killing is wrong in one situation, but permissible in another unless one admits some other difference between the two cases. While this seems right to me--that moral judgments are universalizable--this seems to apply to all evaluative judgments, so this characteristic, while necessary to moral judgments, is not sufficient to mark off the realm of the moral from other evaluative realms.

        How to distinguish moral from other considerations is thus a question many have tried to answer in varying ways. While I will not presume to settle the issue here, my own tentative view is that morality is a set of behavioral norms demanded by rationality to benefit persons.

The Moral Spectrum

        When we are judging an action on moral grounds, into what categories can we place the action? I suggest that any action can be placed in one of three bins: the morally obligatory, the morally prohibited, and a middle category for those actions that do not fall in either of the others, the morally merely permissible.¹¹ An example of an action most people would regard as morally prohibited, or impermissible, is the killing of an innocent adult human being who does not want to die.¹² It may be harder to find an example of a positive action which most people would regard as morally obligatory, or required. Suppose your healthy one-year-old daughter is playing in a shallow pool in your backyard and stumbles, bumps her head on the side, and ends up lying apparently unconscious, face down in the pool. You see all this while you are sitting beside the pool. Most people, I suspect, would feel you have a moral duty to come to the aid of the child. There appear also to be other actions which are neither morally prohibited nor morally required. This middle category, that of the morally merely permissible, is broad. It includes actions which, while morally significant, do not quite count as obligatory or prohibited, but it also includes actions which are as completely neutral morally as actions can be. For example, your wearing the particular clothes from your wardrobe which you are wearing, instead of others from your wardrobe, is probably morally neutral. It is not morally required that you wear those particular clothes. Nor, of course, is it morally prohibited. It is therefore, morally speaking, merely permissible. By "merely permissible" I mean to indicate that it is permissible, but it is not also morally required. (After all, actions which are obligatory are also, typically, permissible as well.)

        Now within the category of the merely permissible not all actions are morally equal. Some are better than others. Suppose you see a hitchhiker as you are driving along. While there are many factors to take into account, it might be felt by many that picking up the hitchhiker is something that is neither morally required nor morally prohibited, that it is, therefore, in the zone of the morally permissible. But, while it is not morally required, many would probably think that such an action would not be entirely morally neutral, that it would be a good thing to do. So within the class of the morally merely permissible, we can distinguish between good and bad actions (and neutral actions). This distinction, unlike the previous one, I want to suggest, is one of degree. How good or bad an action is is a matter of degree. Whether an action is morally obligatory or morally prohibited, on the other hand, seems to be a discrete classification, not a matter of more or less.¹³

The Two-Tiered Spectrum of Moral Evaluation of Actions

        This diagram should help to illustrate the ideas I have just presented. Each action falls into one of the three bins. Those in the middle bin can also be evaluated along a scale from bad to good. I cannot find ideal names for each of the categories. The "prohibited" we might also call the "impermissible." The "required" we might also call the "obligatory." The permitted I have called the "morally merely permissible." We may speak of the categorizing actions into those we must not do, those we must do, and those we may do (and may not do). Some may find the terms "wrong," "right," and "neither" simpler, although possibly misleading.

        Some thinkers may object to my proposed approach for evaluating actions by suggesting that instead of my three main categories, there are only two: right and wrong. After all, we often talk of knowing right from wrong. But to such a suggestion I respond by asking what "right" in this scheme of things encompasses. Is tying your shoe in the morning morally right or wrong? I am inclined to say it is neither. If it is neither, then the categories of right and wrong are not exhaustive and some third category is needed, namely my category of the merely permissible. If, however, it is said that tying one's shoe is morally right, meaning that is "okay" morally, then the word "right" is being used in a way that encompasses two of my categories, both the obligatory and the merely permissible. That is unobjectionable, but if it is also admitted that not everything that is "right" in that sense is something we morally have to do, and yet that there are things that we morally have to do, then again it is being admitted that there is an additional category necessary, and the simple distinction between right and wrong will not suffice to categorize actions from the moral perspective.

        Some ethicists delineate a category of supererogatory actions. Those are actions which are, in common parlance, above and beyond the call of duty. These are actions we sometimes attribute to saints and heroes.¹⁴ There is a temptation to put such actions out to the right of the obligatory category in the chart of the moral spectrum as a fourth category. But this would, to my way of thinking, be a mistake. After all, these supererogatory actions are precisely actions which are not obligatory, although certainly not impermissible either. They thus clearly fall within the category of merely permissible actions. But, also obviously, they are among the very good samples of those actions. So there is no new category necessary, and no adjustment necessary to the two-tiered evaluation of actions, in order to account for supererogatory actions. Supererogatory actions are simply very good morally permissible actions.¹⁵

        Of course not all philosophers agree with this two-tiered approach to the evaluation of actions. Some may think all actions are judged on some continuous good-to-bad scale, for example. Others may feel that some actions may be in both the "required" and the "impermissible" "bins."¹⁶

        Even apart from this structural disagreement there is plenty of disagreement about which actions fall into what category, e.g., about whether early abortion is morally prohibited or morally permissible. But there may be agreement about the structure of moral evaluation (about this two-tiered approach, for instance) without agreement about what actions belong in which categories.

        It might also be that some non-moral domains, e.g., perhaps the domain of religious considerations, have this structure as well, while other non-moral domains may not have this structure. Perhaps prudential considerations do not place actions into categories of required and impermissible, but that all actions are evaluated from the point of view of prudence on a continuous scale analogous to the "good" to "bad" moral scale. On the other hand, the legal domain may only reflect the top kind of tier. That is, legal considerations may designate actions as impermissible, merely permissible, or obligatory, without any further breakdown of the middle category into legally good and bad actions. Taking a tax loophole, if legal, i.e., legally permissible, is not then legally bad or good, although it may be morally or prudentially bad or good.

Descriptive Morality and Normative Morality

        It is important to distinguish between descriptive claims about people's moral views from normative claims expressing those views. This distinction is often overlooked by people who are new to the philosophical study of morality. It is one thing to claim that some person or culture believes that infanticide is morally wrong. It is another thing to claim that it is wrong. The former is a descriptive judgment about moral views. The latter is a normative moral judgment.

        It is the business of sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists to make descriptive judgments about the moral views of people and societies. It is the business of all of us to make normative moral judgments.¹⁷ It is the ethicist who is supposedly an expert in such matters. Some religious preachers, for example, may claim to be expert on what is really the right or wrong thing to do.

        Applied ethics is an attempt to explore normative ethics in relation to particular issues of behavior. Medical ethics, business ethics, and ethics in the professions are examples of pursuits in the area of applied ethics.

Moral Theory

        We may also distinguish moral theory, or philosophical ethics. This involves two things, as I see it: First, it attempts to find the basic moral truths. It attempts to provide the basic normative moral judgments on which all others rest. Second, it tries to provide an account of what morality is. This is a conceptual exploration. This latter task involves, for example, providing accounts of what moral reasons are. This second task is known as metaethics. Most of what has been done so far in this paper has been metaethics.

        This tri-partite distinction among descriptive concerns, normative concerns, and conceptual concerns can apply to other fields as well. Consider, for example, science. Historians might study the scientific views of various cultures, scientists proper might seek scientific truths, and philosophers of science might look into the question of what scientific reasoning is. Consider also aesthetics. Anthropologists or sociologists may tell us that middle eastern men find large women beautiful or that Americans in the 1980's by and large considered only slender woman beautiful. Philosophers of aesthetics may attempt to determine the nature of beauty. An art critic may make normative judgments, declaring some work of art to be beautiful.

        Moral theory provides the foundation of normative ethics. While the vast majority of humankind may have countless moral views without giving any thought to moral theory, a philosophical exploration of morality must seek not only to understand which actions are right and which are wrong, but to understand what morality is and how moral judgments might be justified.

Basic Moral Concepts

        Moral theories that offer a conceptual account of morality differ from one another in what they take to be the basic moral concept. Most moral theories talk about right and wrong action, good and bad people, morally good and bad states of affairs, and moral rights, but they differ among themselves on which concepts are the more basic ones and which the more derivative ones, i.e. ones to be understood in terms of the basic concept.

        Some theories, called teleological theories, take good and bad states of affairs, good or bad ways the world may be, as the basic notion. Death, they may say, is bad. Or pleasure, perhaps, is the only ultimate good. These teleological theories then attempt to analyze what a right or wrong action is in terms of these good or bad states of affairs. For example, a utilitarian would say that an action is right to the extent that it tends to bring about states of affairs that are better than alternative possible actions. (See "Consequentialist Ethical Theories" for examples of ethical theories of this genus.)

        But deontological ethical theories take right or wrong action, or moral duty, to be the more basic concept. Whether these right actions lead to good results is presumed to be beside the point. (See "Kantian Ethical Theory" for an example of a theory of this sort.)

        Still other ethical theories consider a person's moral character to be the more basic notion. Whether an action is right or wrong is not as central, according to these theories--called "virtue theories"--as what moral qualities a person should have. Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, generally held views of this sort. The issue, for them, was what virtue was, whether courage or honesty was a virtue, for example, and what kinds of character people should have. Whether one should steal when hungry, or whether euthanasia was morally permissible were considered less central. And the answer to those "is this the right thing to do?" questions was often: Do as the virtuous person would do.

        Finally some moral theories take moral rights to be the central notion, and then analyze right and wrong action in terms of rights. An action is morally wrong when it violates someone's rights.

        These theories approach the realm of morality from different directions, but there is a good deal of overlap in their concerns, so that it is reasonable to think of them as all attempting to offer conceptual foundations for this one moral realm.