Ethics Can Only be Described by Moral Understanding

A still effective argument against a biological understanding of ethics has been made by Thomas Nagel (cf. Nagel, 2008 201-206). From a point of view that holds on to the evaluative aspect of moral behavior, biology – in whichever form – must lead to a defective understanding of reality. By describing ethical action as any other socially observable behavior ethics must be tied to a biological sense. If this were the case, there could be no way to tell in which way any action was morally good or bad (or was even simply moral), but there could be only explanations whether the actions conformed to the biological sense or not. The evaluative level would be irretrievably destroyed. Human action would then have to be understood as a method of decision rather than a critical conscious process (cf. ibid. 201). Even though (regardless of the fact that biology is just one more product of the human mind) the origins of the world of meaning created and inhabited by human beings may lie in biological processes and though the satisfaction of elementary needs (such as food) is necessary to be in this human world, the actual being part of this world, acting, thinking, arguing, and so forth in it are no longer part of the biological sense that might underlie human existance (cf. ibid. 206).

From another argument Nagel made against the reductionist tendencies in psychological explanations of consciousness one could deduce the following statement: All biological approaches to ethics are compatible with the total lack of the ethical level of meaning in human behavior (cf. ibid. 230,f). With regard to them, the special sort of evaluation, which differentiates the judgment on bad piano playing from the judgment on a bad moral action, does not exist. Yet, it nevertheless exists in human reality and communication. The mere existance and resonance of disciplinary fields such as peace education show, that there is a human concern with the question of “what human society should be” (Page, 2008 12). It is an ethical question that has accompanied mankind throughout the centuries – the Golden Rule (today usually associated with the Gospel according to Matthew) as one of the oldest moral rules (in the systematized form of a rule) for example has a history that dates back approximately five thousand years (cf. Rentsch, 1990 259).

The humane treatment of others rests on other criteria than biological ones (cf. also ibid. 255). Therefore, a theory trying to describe the way ethics functions must distance itself from natural scientific explanations. Fritz Wallner’s constructivist definition of natural sciences points out the same factors.

„[D]ie Naturwissenschaften [stellen] zumindest den Anspruch …, den Menschen wegdenken zu können, die Welt in einer sozusagen unversehrten Weise zu haben. Das ist eine negative Konsequenz aus der Voraussetzung der menschlichen Freiheit. Die menschliche Freiheit, also die individuelle Freiheit, hat zur Folge, dass sich prinzipiell jeder von uns eine gewisse Eigenwelt schaffen kann. Wenn man nun alle Eigenwelten subtrahiert, so gelangt man nach dieser Ideologie zu einer besonders sicheren Erkenntnis der Welt. Der Anspruch der Gewissheit ersetzt den der Wahrheit. […] Wahrheit ist immer etwas, was in Relation steht. Gewissheit ist etwas, das ohne Relation auskommt. Beides ist im Extremfall unmöglich. […] Wenn ich den Beobachter-Standpunkt entferne und durch eine technische Vorrichtung ersetze, die selbst die Natur ersetzt, so habe ich in einem bestimmten Sinn Gewissheit erreicht. Gewissheit in diesem extremen Sinn bedeutet nicht zu beschreiben, sondern zu ersetzen. Gewissheit ist ein Prädikat einer technischen, keiner wissenschaftlichen Haltung“ (Wallner, 2002 238).

The world does not exist without mediation by human beings – that is, the world which is inhabited by human beings. The postmodern critique has shown that there is no possible access to any other world for human beings. Therefore, the truth that lies in human mediation cannot be found in a concept of reality that tries to factor out human communication or evaluation. When ethics is supposed to be described without missing its evaluative nature, the theory developed to describe it has to comprehend moral elements.

Sources
Nagel, Thomas. Letzte Fragen – Mortal Questions (ed. Michael Gebauer). Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2008.

Page, James. Peace Education – Exploring Ethical and Philosophical Foundations. Charlotte NC: Information Age, 2008.

Rentsch, Thomas. Die Konstitution der Moralität – Transzendentale Anthropologie und praktische Philosophie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990.

Wallner, Fritz. Die Verwandlung der Wissenschaft – Vorlesungen zur Jahrtausendwende (ed. Martin Jandl). Constructiviana – Interdisziplinäre und interkulturelle Wissenschaftstheorie 1. Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 2002.