Ethics

Simon Blackburn offers a concise philosophical guide to ethics organized around three concerns: threats to ethical thinking, the foundations of ethics, and the application of ethical ideas to concrete problems.

Blackburn opens by defining the ethical environment as the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live, one that shapes what people find acceptable or contemptible. Drawing on the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, he suggests that identities form through consciousness of how we stand in others' eyes. He identifies a shift in modern life: Contemporary societies care more about rights than about the state of one's soul, and the Victorian ideal of duty has vanished. Human beings, he argues, are fundamentally ethical animals who turn preferences into demands on each other. Ethics is disturbing because exploitative attitudes always require a sustaining story.

The first part examines seven threats to ethical thinking. The first is the death of God. Blackburn argues that religious texts contain moral shortcomings and presents the Euthyphro dilemma from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato: The philosopher Socrates asks whether the holy is loved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is loved by the gods, concluding the former. The gods must recognize what is already right; their commands are not right simply because they are powerful. Drawing on the philosopher Immanuel Kant, Blackburn adds that obeying divine commands out of fear is servile rather than virtuous. The death of God is not a threat to ethics but a necessary clearing of the ground.

The second threat is relativism, the idea that since ethical rules differ across communities, there is no single truth in ethics. Blackburn acknowledges relativism's association with toleration but argues that transcultural norms exist: Every recognizably human society needs institutions of property, truth-telling, and restraints on violence. He responds that opposing oppression usually cooperates with the oppressed rather than imposing alien values, and that extreme relativism becomes a conversation-stopper rather than a genuine engagement with reasons.

The third threat is egoism, the claim that all concern for others is a sham. Blackburn argues that careful observation reveals genuine motivations, citing the moralist Joseph Butler's example of a person who pursues certain ruin to avenge an insult. He warns against redefining self-interest to encompass whatever someone happens to care about, which drains the term of explanatory power. The fourth threat comes from evolutionary theory. Blackburn identifies three confusions: inferring that concerns like mother-love are not real because they have evolutionary explanations; inferring that a trait cannot exist without one; and reading selfishness into genes and then back into persons, as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene inadvertently encourages.

The fifth threat is determinism. Blackburn responds that genetics programs us to be flexible: Beliefs, desires, and attitudes vary with surroundings, including the moral climate, elevating rather than diminishing the moral environment's importance. The sixth is unreasonable demands; Blackburn argues that ethics must be centered on things we can reasonably demand of each other, and that saintly sacrifice, while admirable, is not required. The seventh is false consciousness, the idea that sincere ethical practitioners may be part of a system whose real function differs from its appearance. Blackburn acknowledges partial truth in feminist, Marxist, Nietzschean, and Foucauldian critiques but argues they cannot encompass all of ethics, since there is no living without standards of living.

In Part 2, Blackburn turns to foundations. He distinguishes between capital-R Reason, which would bind all rational agents regardless of feeling, and lowercase reason, which can be rejected due to defects of the heart but not of rationality. The Scottish philosopher David Hume challenged the view that ethical principles have the certainty of logic, arguing that ethics belongs to the domain of sentiment: What we are motivated to pursue is determined by practical dispositions rather than reason alone.

Blackburn presents the sentimentalist alternative, which grounds ethics in shared human feeling rather than pure reason, as developed by Hume and the philosopher and economist Adam Smith. In Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, moral agreement consists in the consonance of sentiments. Smith proposes an internalized impartial spectator serving as a self-critical check on distorted feelings. For Hume and Smith, ethical consensus was achievable because they could rely on widely shared sentiments, bedrock elements of human nature.

Blackburn examines virtue ethics, the tradition derived from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle that links moral character with human flourishing, objecting that any correlation between virtue and flourishing is a political achievement rather than something written into nature. He then turns to Kant's categorical imperative: "I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law" (53). Blackburn finds this persuasive for institutions like promise-keeping but objects that if Kant must appeal to virtues like prudence, his difference from Hume and Smith vanishes.

Blackburn traces the emergence of ethics from the state of nature, an imagined pre-social condition. He presents the philosopher Thomas Hobbes's account of this condition as a war of all against all. He then introduces two game-theoretic models: the prisoner's dilemma, in which rational self-interest drives everyone toward the worst collective outcome, and the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's stag hunt, in which fear of defection collapses cooperation. Through repeated interactions, cooperative groups outcompete defectors, and conventions arise, producing property, law, and government. Blackburn credits Hume as the first to understand this process and draws on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to argue that once justice becomes an ideal, it extends beyond reciprocal exchange to ever wider circles.

Part 3 addresses concrete problems. Blackburn diagnoses pessimistic laments about life's futility as what the philosopher George Berkeley called the vice of abstraction, the error of mistaking generalities for lived experience. He examines utilitarianism through Hume's indirect version: Rules have a utilitarian justification, but they must not be bent case by case. On freedom, he argues it is easier to agree on what must be avoided than on what must be achieved, and he examines paternalism, the restriction of someone's freedom for that person's supposed good, acknowledging it is sometimes justified. On natural rights, meaning rights supposedly possessed by being human, he traces philosophical doubts from the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who characterized rights language as encouraging selfish passions, to the social theorist Karl Marx, who criticized rights as atomistic. Liberals counter that rights protect individuals against the tyranny of the majority.

On abortion, Blackburn argues the debate is not black-and-white: Biological development is gradual, and slippery-slope reasoning does not prevent drawing a reasonable line. On death, he presents the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus's argument that death is nothing to us while acknowledging that we fear annihilation. Blackburn argues that the distinction between killing and letting die, invoked against euthanasia, often condemns patients to painful, lingering deaths.

The book concludes with reflections on trust. Blackburn identifies digital media as an amplifier of threats to trust, using the anti-vaccination movement to show how false claims resist correction through confirmation bias, the tendency to favor evidence that fits existing beliefs. He identifies two defenses: trustworthy institutions such as the free press, and education cultivating aversion to carelessness with truth. Whether one shares the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s optimism that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it points towards justice" (97) or not, we are all implicated: If our ethics go badly, Blackburn affirms, it is because we ourselves do.