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What Is Morality?

Morality is the behavior and beliefs that a society deems acceptable

Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

How Morals Are Established

Morals that transcend time and culture, examples of morals, morality vs. ethics, morality and laws.

Morality refers to the set of standards that enable people to live cooperatively in groups. It’s what societies determine to be “right” and “acceptable.”

Sometimes, acting in a moral manner means individuals must sacrifice their own short-term interests to benefit society. Individuals who go against these standards may be considered immoral.

It may be helpful to differentiate between related terms, such as immoral , nonmoral , and amoral . Each has a slightly different meaning:

• Immoral : Describes someone who purposely commits an offensive act, even though they know the difference between what is right and wrong
• Nonmoral : Describes situations in which morality is not a concern
• Amoral : Describes someone who acknowledges the difference between right and wrong, but who is not concerned with morality

Morality isn’t fixed. What’s considered acceptable in your culture might not be acceptable in another culture. Geographical regions, religion, family, and life experiences all influence morals. 

Scholars don’t agree on exactly how morals are developed. However, there are several theories that have gained attention over the years:

• Freud’s morality and the superego: Sigmund Freud suggested moral development occurred as a person’s ability to set aside their selfish needs were replaced by the values of important socializing agents (such as a person’s parents).
• Piaget’s theory of moral development: Jean Piaget focused on the social-cognitive and social-emotional perspective of development. Piaget theorized that moral development unfolds over time, in certain stages as children learn to adopt certain moral behaviors for their own sake—rather than just abide by moral codes because they don’t want to get into trouble.
• B.F. Skinner’s behavioral theory: B.F. Skinner focused on the power of external forces that shaped an individual’s development. For example, a child who receives praise for being kind may treat someone with kindness again out of a desire to receive more positive attention in the future.
• Kohlberg’s moral reasoning: Lawrence Kohlberg proposed six stages of moral development that went beyond Piaget’s theory. Through a series of questions, Kohlberg proposed that an adult’s stage of reasoning could be identified.

What Is the Basis of Morality?

There are different theories as to how morals are developed. However, most theories acknowledge the external factors (parents, community, etc.) that contribute to a child's moral development. These morals are intended to benefit the group that has created them.

Most morals aren’t fixed. They usually shift and change over time.

Ideas about whether certain behaviors are moral—such as engaging in pre-marital sex, entering into same-sex relationships, and using cannabis—have shifted over time. While the bulk of the population once viewed these behaviors as “wrong,” the vast majority of the population now finds these activities to be “acceptable.”

In some regions, cultures, and religions, using contraception is considered immoral. In other parts of the world, some people consider contraception the moral thing to do, as it reduces unplanned pregnancy, manages the population, and reduces the risk of STDs.

7 Universal Morals

Some morals seem to transcend across the globe and across time, however. Researchers have discovered that these seven morals seem somewhat universal:

• Defer to authority
• Help your group
• Love your family
• Return favors
• Respect others’ property

The following are common morality examples that you may have been taught growing up, and may have even passed on to younger generations:

• Have empathy
• Don't steal
• Tell the truth
• Treat others as you want to be treated

People might adhere to these principles by:

• Being an upstanding citizen
• Doing volunteer work
• Donating money to charity
• Forgiving someone
• Not gossiping about others
• Offering their help to others

To get a sense of the types of morality you were raised with, think about what your parents, community and/or religious leaders told you that you "should" or "ought" to do.

Some scholars don’t distinguish between morals and ethics. Both have to do with “right and wrong.”

However, some people believe morality is personal while ethics refer to the standards of a community.

For example, your community may not view premarital sex as a problem. But on a personal level, you might consider it immoral. By this definition, your morality would contradict the ethics of your community.

Both laws and morals are meant to regulate behavior in a community to allow people to live in harmony. Both have firm foundations in the concept that everyone should have autonomy and show respect to one another.

Legal thinkers interpret the relationship between laws and morality differently. Some argue that laws and morality are independent. This means that laws can’t be disregarded simply because they’re morally indefensible.

Others believe law and morality are interdependent. These thinkers believe that laws that claim to regulate behavioral expectations must be in harmony with moral norms. Therefore, all laws must secure the welfare of the individual and be in place for the good of the community.

Something like adultery may be considered immoral by some, but it’s legal in most states. Additionally, it’s illegal to drive slightly over the speed limit but it isn’t necessarily considered immoral to do so.

There may be times when some people argue that breaking the law is the “moral” thing to do. Stealing food to feed a starving person, for example, might be illegal but it also might be considered the “right thing” to do if it’s the only way to prevent someone from suffering or dying.

A Word From Verywell

It can be helpful to spend some time thinking about the morals that guide your decisions about things like friendship, money, education, and family. Understanding what’s really important to you can help you understand yourself better and it may make decision making easier.

Merriam-Webster. A lesson on 'unmoral,' 'immoral,' 'nonmoral,' and 'amoral.'

Ellemers N, van der Toorn J, Paunov Y, van Leeuwen T. The psychology of morality: A review and analysis of empirical studies published from 1940 through 2017 . Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2019;23(4):332-366. doi:10.1177/1088868318811759

Curry OS, Mullins DA, Whitehouse H. Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies . Current Anthropology. 2019;60(1):47-69. doi:10.1086/701478

What's the difference between morality and ethics? Encyclopædia Britannica. 

Moka-Mubelo W. Law and morality . Reconciling Law and Morality in Human Rights Discourse. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations . 2017;3. Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49496-8_3

By Amy Morin, LCSW Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

Ethics and Morality Relationship Essay

Introduction, relationship between ethics and morality, ethical choices available to hr managers.

Bibliography

Over the years, ethics and morality have often been used synonymously. Although the two terms are closely related both in conceptual and ideal meaning, they have both differences and similarities. This paper, therefore, discusses the relationship between ethics and morality, giving examples of each, and also explores the ethical choices available for human resources managers.

Ethics is a term used to refer to the body of doctrines that guide individuals to behave in a way that is ideologically right, fine, and appropriate. Guidelines or principles that constitute do not at all times lead an individual towards just a solitary moral but act as a way to direct the individual to follow a set of codes of conducts whose objective is to foster overall desirable behaviors in an individual or a group of people (George, 2006).

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ethics are regulations that are clearly stipulated and that guide individuals in determining what to do and what not to. In many organizations, ethics are guided by sets of written laws and regulations that guide the way individuals within them should behave (Conroy & Emerson, 2004).

For example, there could be written principles that guide the way customer service should be undertaken in the organization, rules guarding salespeople against selling inappropriate products to the customers, rules guarding against corruption or undue extortion of money from the customers, principles that direct employees to behave in the highest level of professionalism, integrity, honesty, and humility while serving customers and which are well written down in the organization’s code of conduct.

According to Peterson et al (2005), ethics are a set of rules that direct individuals to decide to act in a correct way. The latter asserts that ethics are embedded in and guided by laws that redirect individuals from doing what their conscience directs them to do and do what is morally correct i.e. they help an individual to avoid doing what he or she wants to but rather do what is correct in moral standards. For instance, someone’s conscience tells him to climb up a neighbor’s apple tree to eat his apples without the latter’s consent, but he shrugs off his personal selfish feelings and abstains from doing such a thing and which he has the power to do due to the respect for the neighbor and his property. The person will make a decision not to eat the neighbor’s apples hence he will have acted in an ethical way.

Ethics leads to honesty, a show of respect for others, and behavior that is consistent with one’s obligation as a member of the organization or a citizen to a country (Conroy & Emerson, 2004). According to the latter, ethics are not innate in an individual but are mainly exotically controlled by laws and regulations are set and enforced by human beings or authority. For example, ethics in marketing are controlled by laws that restrict marketers from engaging in business malpractices such as unhealthy competition, poor product prices, overpricing, and hoarding among other business vices.

George (2006) defines morality from two main perspectives. From an individuals’ perspective, morality is a set of individual’s standards, principles, or customs that greatly shapes an individual’s character trait and way of behavior or the level of which an individual is able to willingly uphold the generally accepted standards of behaviors within a society that he lives in at a specific instance in time. On the other hand, George asserts that societal morals are the universally acceptable code of conduct in a certain society at a specific point of time, and which autonomously guides the behavior of its members.

For instance, stealing is generally not acceptable in society at any one time. As such, it is immoral to steal. In the same way, if the society holds that it is moral to belong to a religion in the 21 st century, it would be immoral according to such a society for a member to be without religion. Similarly, in a society that prostitution is rebuked, it would be immoral for an individual within it to engage in prostitution. Societal standards/ principles change rapidly over time. Similarly, moral standards within a society will vary with time. For example, it was moral to hold slaves in the past. However, this is no longer acceptable in modern society hence it would be immoral for an individual to hold a slave today.

Ethics are guidelines for proper behavior or conduct and they are absolutely not pegged to the specified period in time. As a result, they usually have limited variations overtimes. On the other hand, morality is the acceptable standard within a society at a given point in time (Peterson et al, 2005).

As a result, they change over time. Ethics are more basic and permanent than morality; hence morality is a subset of ethics. Similarly, ethics lead to morality whereas vice versa is not applicable. Moreover, a change in ethics is likely to generate a change in morality. In circumstances where a society or institution amends its code of ethics, the moral standards will obviously be altered (Peterson et al, 2005).

For example, the ethical code of conduct led to the alteration of the slavery law in the eighteenth century which led to slavery being regarded as immoral since then. Unlike the ethical code of conduct which is entrenched in the written artificial laws, morality is more or less entrenched in and controlled by the individual’s personality. As a result, a change in a person’s character trait for the better will make him or her more moral and vice versa. However, the similarity between ethics and morality is that they are all geared towards enhancing the desirable relationship between individuals in the organization, institutions, or society in which they live (Peterson et al, 2005).

There are several ethical choices that are available to human resource managers. These include:

Equity in opportunities and neutrality

Employment takes place in a multifaceted environment. As a result it is ethical for the human resource managers involved in the employment or appointment of personnel in the organization to give equal opportunity for various individual interested in the job to compete on a level ground and pick the most suitable for the job without any discrimination whatsoever(University of Western Australia, 2007). For instance, the recruitment process should be devoid of nepotism, corruption, undue charges to the candidates, bias and prejudices. Employment should be carried out via an open, fair and due process. In addition, HR managers should desist from taking positions that appears to favor one side during dissolution of employees disputes (Lowry , 2006).

Fairness in the treatment of employees and quietism

HR manager will be ethical if they establish an organizational environment in which all employees are treated in a just manner. For instance, the managers should ensure equitable reward system for all employees, just promotions and a system that is without favoritism based on any aspects. In addition, employees need to be treated like people with rights to be honored and defended by the HR manager (Lowry , 2006).

Sexual harassment of employees

The human resources managers will be ethical if they desist from gender stereotypes and sexual harassment of employees. Cases of sexually mistreating of employees by human resources managers are not only unethical but absolutely unacceptable and illegal (University of Western Australia, 2007). For instance, some manager demand for sexual relations with female employees as a leeway to giving them a favor, promotion, salary increment or even initial employment which is against the HR ethical code of conduct (Lowry , 2006).

Privacy and Confidentiality

Human resources code of ethics requires that employee privacy and personal life be respected at all times. For instance, it will be in breach of the ethical code of HR to force the employee to reveal his sexual life information (University of Western Australia, 2007). In addition it is the duty of the manager to safeguard the information given to him by the employees, by treating it with the highest level of confidentiality (Lowry , 2006). For example, if the HR has the information of the employee’s health profile, such information must not be released to the outside without the consent of the employee.

Poaching of employees

In industry HR managers may tend to poach competitors employees so as to lessen their competitive power. In doing this they entice the competitors employees in order to gain undue advantage over rivals which is unethical (University of Western Australia, 2007). In addition ethical human resource managers should be ethically assertive. Remain neutral in resolving employee’s disputes, ethical in dealing with errant employees and should be ethically reactive.

Ethics and morality are two terms that are closely related and which individuals often tend to refer to synonymously. However, the two are different in that while ethics are sets of principles that guide desirable behavior or conducts, morality is the generally acceptable behavior within a society at a given period of time. In addition, morality unlike ethics keeps on changing from time to time as societal values change (Peterson et al, 2005).

Conclusively, it can be held that morality is a subset of ethics since ethics shapes morality while ethics is bigger than morality. Finally, the ethical choices available for HR managers includes, offering equal opportunities in employment, treating all employees fairly, respecting the employees, avoiding ill-led poaching of competitors employees to gain undue advantage over them, respecting employees privacy and confidentiality of information and not sexually mistreating employees. Breaching any of these will be unethical on the part of the HR manger.

Conroy, S.J. and Emerson, (2004) “Business Ethics and Religion: Religiosity as a Predictor of Ethical Awareness among Student Inc Journal of Business Ethics 50 (4):247-258.

George Desnoyers (2006), the relationship between ethics and morality: Inc the Journal of behavioral psychology. Vol. 11 167-186.

Lowry , 2006, Ethical Choices for HR Managers Inc Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources; 44; p.171.

Peterson, et al (2005) Ethics vs. Morality – The Distinction between Ethics and Morals. Web.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy- The Definition of Morality. Web.

University of Western Australia (2007), code of ethics and code of conduct for human resources. Web.

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15 great articles and essays about ethics and morality, on morality by joan didion, the moral instinct by stephen pinker, the greatest good by derek thompson, stop trying to save the world by michael hobbes, army of altruists by david graeber, the myth of the ethical shopper by michael hobbes, tragedy. call. compassion. response. by roxane gay, the business of voluntourism by tina rosenberg, the backfire effect by david mcraney, see also..., 50 great psychology articles, 100 great articles about science and technology, articles cont., in defense of prejudice by jonathan rauch, not nothing by stephen cave, what's so bad about hate by andrew sullivan, the ethics paradox by chuck klosterman.

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Identity, Character, and Morality : Essays in Moral Psychology

Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is the author of Consciousness Reconsidered and The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World , both published by the MIT Press, and other books.

Many philosophers believe that normative ethics is in principle independent of psychology. By contrast, the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory. They investigate the psychological constraints on realizable ethical ideals and articulate the psychological assumptions behind traditional ethics. They also examine the ways in which the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of individual development, social psychology, and the limits on human capacities for rational deliberation affect morality.

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Identity, Character, and Morality : Essays in Moral Psychology Edited by: Owen Flanagan, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.001.0001 ISBN (electronic): 9780262272766 Publisher: The MIT Press Published: 1990

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• [ Front Matter ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0029 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Front Matter ] in another window
• Acknowledgments Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0001 Open the PDF Link PDF for Acknowledgments in another window
• Introduction By Owen Flanagan , Owen Flanagan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Amélie Oksenberg Rorty Amélie Oksenberg Rorty Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0002 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 1: Aspects of Identity and Agency By Amélie Oksenberg Rorty , Amélie Oksenberg Rorty Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar David Wong David Wong Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0004 Open the PDF Link PDF for 1: Aspects of Identity and Agency in another window
• 2: Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation By Owen Flanagan Owen Flanagan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0005 Open the PDF Link PDF for 2: Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation in another window
• 3: The Moral Life of a Pragmatist By Ruth Anna Putnam Ruth Anna Putnam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0006 Open the PDF Link PDF for 3: The Moral Life of a Pragmatist in another window
• 4: Natural Affection and Responsibility for Character: A Critique of Kantian Views of the Virtues By Gregory Trianosky Gregory Trianosky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0008 Open the PDF Link PDF for 4: Natural Affection and Responsibility for Character: A Critique of Kantian Views of the Virtues in another window
• 5: On the Old Saw That Character Is Destiny By Michele Moody-Adams Michele Moody-Adams Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0009 Open the PDF Link PDF for 5: On the Old Saw That Character Is Destiny in another window
• 6: Hume and Moral Emotions By Marcia Lind Marcia Lind Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0010 Open the PDF Link PDF for 6: Hume and Moral Emotions in another window
• 7: The Place of Emotions in Kantian Morality By Nancy Sherman Nancy Sherman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0011 Open the PDF Link PDF for 7: The Place of Emotions in Kantian Morality in another window
• 8: Vocation, Friendship, and Community: Limitations of the Personal-Impersonal Framework By Lawrence A. Blum Lawrence A. Blum Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0013 Open the PDF Link PDF for 8: Vocation, Friendship, and Community: Limitations of the Personal-Impersonal Framework in another window
• 9: Gender and Moral Luck By Claudia Card Claudia Card Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0014 Open the PDF Link PDF for 9: Gender and Moral Luck in another window
• 10: Friendship and Duty: Some Difficult Relations By Michael Stocker Michael Stocker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0015 Open the PDF Link PDF for 10: Friendship and Duty: Some Difficult Relations in another window
• 11: Trust, Affirmation, and Moral Character: A Critique of Kantian Morality By Laurence Thomas Laurence Thomas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0016 Open the PDF Link PDF for 11: Trust, Affirmation, and Moral Character: A Critique of Kantian Morality in another window
• 12: Why Honesty Is a Hard Virtue By Annette C. Baier Annette C. Baier Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0017 Open the PDF Link PDF for 12: Why Honesty Is a Hard Virtue in another window
• 13: Higher-Order Discrimination By Adrian M. S. Piper Adrian M. S. Piper Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0019 Open the PDF Link PDF for 13: Higher-Order Discrimination in another window
• 14: Obligation and Performance: A Kantian Account of Moral Conflict By Barbara Herman Barbara Herman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0020 Open the PDF Link PDF for 14: Obligation and Performance: A Kantian Account of Moral Conflict in another window
• 15: Rational Egoism, Self, and Others By David O. Brink David O. Brink Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0021 Open the PDF Link PDF for 15: Rational Egoism, Self, and Others in another window
• 16: Is Akratic Action Always Irrational? By Alison McIntyre Alison McIntyre Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0022 Open the PDF Link PDF for 16: Is Akratic Action Always Irrational? in another window
• 17: Rationality, Responsibility, and Pathological Indifference By Stephen L. White Stephen L. White Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0023 Open the PDF Link PDF for 17: Rationality, Responsibility, and Pathological Indifference in another window
• 18: Some Advantages of Virtue Ethics By Michael Slote Michael Slote Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0025 Open the PDF Link PDF for 18: Some Advantages of Virtue Ethics in another window
• 19: On the Primacy of Character By Gary Watson Gary Watson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0026 Open the PDF Link PDF for 19: On the Primacy of Character in another window
• Bibliography Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0027 Open the PDF Link PDF for Bibliography in another window
• Contributors Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3645.003.0028 Open the PDF Link PDF for Contributors in another window
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Ethics and Morality

Morality, Ethics, Evil, Greed

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

To put it simply, ethics represents the moral code that guides a person’s choices and behaviors throughout their life. The idea of a moral code extends beyond the individual to include what is determined to be right, and wrong, for a community or society at large.

Ethics is concerned with rights, responsibilities, use of language, what it means to live an ethical life, and how people make moral decisions. We may think of moralizing as an intellectual exercise, but more frequently it's an attempt to make sense of our gut instincts and reactions. It's a subjective concept, and many people have strong and stubborn beliefs about what's right and wrong that can place them in direct contrast to the moral beliefs of others. Yet even though morals may vary from person to person, religion to religion, and culture to culture, many have been found to be universal, stemming from basic human emotions.

• The Science of Being Virtuous
• Understanding Amorality
• The Stages of Moral Development

Those who are considered morally good are said to be virtuous, holding themselves to high ethical standards, while those viewed as morally bad are thought of as wicked, sinful, or even criminal. Morality was a key concern of Aristotle, who first studied questions such as “What is moral responsibility?” and “What does it take for a human being to be virtuous?”

We used to think that people are born with a blank slate, but research has shown that people have an innate sense of morality . Of course, parents and the greater society can certainly nurture and develop morality and ethics in children.

Humans are ethical and moral regardless of religion and God. People are not fundamentally good nor are they fundamentally evil. However, a Pew study found that atheists are much less likely than theists to believe that there are "absolute standards of right and wrong." In effect, atheism does not undermine morality, but the atheist’s conception of morality may depart from that of the traditional theist.

Animals are like humans—and humans are animals, after all. Many studies have been conducted across animal species, and more than 90 percent of their behavior is what can be identified as “prosocial” or positive. Plus, you won’t find mass warfare in animals as you do in humans. Hence, in a way, you can say that animals are more moral than humans.

The examination of moral psychology involves the study of moral philosophy but the field is more concerned with how a person comes to make a right or wrong decision, rather than what sort of decisions he or she should have made. Character, reasoning, responsibility, and altruism , among other areas, also come into play, as does the development of morality.

The seven deadly sins were first enumerated in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I, and represent the sweep of immoral behavior. Also known as the cardinal sins or seven deadly vices, they are vanity, jealousy , anger , laziness, greed, gluttony, and lust. People who demonstrate these immoral behaviors are often said to be flawed in character. Some modern thinkers suggest that virtue often disguises a hidden vice; it just depends on where we tip the scale .

An amoral person has no sense of, or care for, what is right or wrong. There is no regard for either morality or immorality. Conversely, an immoral person knows the difference, yet he does the wrong thing, regardless. The amoral politician, for example, has no conscience and makes choices based on his own personal needs; he is oblivious to whether his actions are right or wrong.

One could argue that the actions of Wells Fargo, for example, were amoral if the bank had no sense of right or wrong. In the 2016 fraud scandal, the bank created fraudulent savings and checking accounts for millions of clients, unbeknownst to them. Of course, if the bank knew what it was doing all along, then the scandal would be labeled immoral.

Everyone tells white lies to a degree, and often the lie is done for the greater good. But the idea that a small percentage of people tell the lion’s share of lies is the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few. It is 20 percent of the population that accounts for 80 percent of a behavior.

We do know what is right from wrong . If you harm and injure another person, that is wrong. However, what is right for one person, may well be wrong for another. A good example of this dichotomy is the religious conservative who thinks that a woman’s right to her body is morally wrong. In this case, one’s ethics are based on one’s values; and the moral divide between values can be vast.

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg established his stages of moral development in 1958. This framework has led to current research into moral psychology. Kohlberg's work addresses the process of how we think of right and wrong and is based on Jean Piaget's theory of moral judgment for children. His stages include pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional, and what we learn in one stage is integrated into the subsequent stages.

The pre-conventional stage is driven by obedience and punishment . This is a child's view of what is right or wrong. Examples of this thinking: “I hit my brother and I received a time-out.” “How can I avoid punishment?” “What's in it for me?” 

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Hume’s Moral Philosophy

Hume’s position in ethics, which is based on his empiricist theory of the mind , is best known for asserting four theses: (1) Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the “slave of the passions” (see Section 3 ) (2) Moral distinctions are not derived from reason (see Section 4 ). (3) Moral distinctions are derived from the moral sentiments: feelings of approval (esteem, praise) and disapproval (blame) felt by spectators who contemplate a character trait or action (see Section 7 ). (4) While some virtues and vices are natural (see Section 13 ), others, including justice, are artificial (see Section 9 ). There is heated debate about what Hume intends by each of these theses and how he argues for them. He articulates and defends them within the broader context of his metaethics and his ethic of virtue and vice.

Hume’s main ethical writings are Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature , “Of Morals” (which builds on Book 2, “Of the Passions”), his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals , and some of his Essays . In part the moral Enquiry simply recasts central ideas from the moral part of the Treatise in a more accessible style; but there are important differences. The ethical positions and arguments of the Treatise are set out below, noting where the moral Enquiry agrees; differences between the Enquiry and the Treatise are discussed afterwards.

1. Issues from Hume’s Predecessors

2. the passions and the will, 3. the influencing motives of the will, 4. ethical anti-rationalism.

• 5. Is and Ought

6. The Nature of Moral Judgment

7. sympathy, and the nature and origin of the moral sentiments, 8. the common point of view, 9. artificial and natural virtues, 10.1 the circle, 10.2 the origin of material honesty, 10.3 the motive of honest actions, 11. fidelity to promises, 12. allegiance to government, 13. the natural virtues, 14. differences between the treatise and the moral enquiry, other internet resources, related entries.

Hume inherits from his predecessors several controversies about ethics and political philosophy.

One is a question of moral epistemology: how do human beings become aware of, or acquire knowledge or belief about, moral good and evil, right and wrong, duty and obligation? Ethical theorists and theologians of the day held, variously, that moral good and evil are discovered: (a) by reason in some of its uses (Hobbes, Locke, Clarke), (b) by divine revelation (Filmer), (c) by conscience or reflection on one’s (other) impulses (Butler), or (d) by a moral sense: an emotional responsiveness manifesting itself in approval or disapproval (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson). Hume sides with the moral sense theorists: we gain awareness of moral good and evil by experiencing the pleasure of approval and the uneasiness of disapproval when we contemplate a character trait or action from an imaginatively sensitive and unbiased point of view. Hume maintains against the rationalists that, although reason is needed to discover the facts of any concrete situation and the general social impact of a trait of character or a practice over time, reason alone is insufficient to yield a judgment that something is virtuous or vicious. In the last analysis, the facts as known must trigger a response by sentiment or “taste.”

A related but more metaphysical controversy would be stated thus today: what is the source or foundation of moral norms? In Hume’s day this is the question what is the ground of moral obligation (as distinct from what is the faculty for acquiring moral knowledge or belief). Moral rationalists of the period such as Clarke (and in some moods, Hobbes and Locke) argue that moral standards or principles are requirements of reason — that is, that the very rationality of right actions is the ground of our obligation to perform them. Divine voluntarists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Samuel Pufendorf claim that moral obligation or requirement, if not every sort of moral standard, is the product of God’s will. The moral sense theorists (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) and Butler see all requirements to pursue goodness and avoid evil as consequent upon human nature, which is so structured that a particular feature of our consciousness (whether moral sense or conscience) evaluates the rest. Hume sides with the moral sense theorists on this question: it is because we are the kinds of creatures we are, with the dispositions we have for pain and pleasure, the kinds of familial and friendly interdependence that make up our life together, and our approvals and disapprovals of these, that we are bound by moral requirements at all.

Closely connected with the issue of the foundations of moral norms is the question whether moral requirements are natural or conventional. Hobbes and Mandeville see them as conventional, and Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Locke, and others see them as natural. Hume mocks Mandeville’s contention that the very concepts of vice and virtue are foisted on us by scheming politicians trying to manage us more easily. If there were nothing in our experience and no sentiments in our minds to produce the concept of virtue, Hume says, no lavish praise of heroes could generate it. So to a degree moral requirements have a natural origin. Nonetheless,Hume thinks natural impulses of humanity and dispositions to approve cannot entirely account for our virtue of justice; a correct analysis of that virtue reveals that mankind, an “inventive species,” has cooperatively constructed rules of property and promise. Thus he takes an intermediate position: some virtues are natural, and some are the products of convention.

Linked with these meta-ethical controversies is the dilemma of understanding the ethical life either as the “ancients” do, in terms of virtues and vices of character, or as the “moderns” do, primarily in terms of principles of duty or natural law. While even so law-oriented a thinker as Hobbes has a good deal to say about virtue, the ethical writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries predominantly favor a rule- or law-governed understanding of morals, giving priority to laws of nature or principles of duty. The chief exception here is the moral sense school, which advocates an analysis of the moral life more like that of the Greek and Hellenistic thinkers, in terms of settled traits of character — although they too find a place for principles in their ethics. Hume explicitly favors an ethic of character along “ancient” lines. Yet he insists on a role for rules of duty within the domain of what he calls the artificial virtues.

Hume’s predecessors famously took opposing positions on whether human nature was essentially selfish or benevolent, some arguing that man was so dominated by self-interested motives that for moral requirements to govern us at all they must serve our interests in some way, and others arguing that uncorrupted human beings naturally care about the weal and woe of others and here morality gets its hold. Hume roundly criticizes Hobbes for his insistence on psychological egoism or something close to it, and for his dismal, violent picture of a state of nature. Yet Hume resists the view of Hutcheson that all moral principles can be reduced to our benevolence, in part because he doubts that benevolence can sufficiently overcome our perfectly normal acquisitiveness. According to Hume’s observation, we are both selfish and humane. We possess greed, and also “limited generosity” — dispositions to kindness and liberality which are more powerfully directed toward kin and friends and less aroused by strangers. While for Hume the condition of humankind in the absence of organized society is not a war of all against all, neither is it the law-governed and highly cooperative domain imagined by Locke. It is a hypothetical condition in which we would care for our friends and cooperate with them, but in which self-interest and preference for friends over strangers would make any wider cooperation impossible. Hume’s empirically-based thesis that we are fundamentally loving, parochial, and also selfish creatures underlies his political philosophy.

In the realm of politics, Hume again takes up an intermediate position. He objects both to the doctrine that a subject must passively obey his government no matter how tyrannical it is and to the Lockean thesis that citizens have a natural right to revolution whenever their rulers violate their contractual commitments to the people. He famously criticizes the notion that all political duties arise from an implicit contract that binds later generations who were not party to the original explicit agreement. Hume maintains that the duty to obey one’s government has an independent origin that parallels that of promissory obligation: both are invented to enable people to live together successfully. On his view, human beings can create a society without government, ordered by conventional rules of ownership, transfer of property by consent, and promise-keeping. We superimpose government on such a pre-civil society when it grows large and prosperous; only then do we need to use political power to enforce these rules of justice in order to preserve social cooperation. So the duty of allegiance to government, far from depending on the duty to fulfill promises, provides needed assurance that promises of all sorts will be kept. The duty to submit to our rulers comes into being because reliable submission is necessary to preserve order. Particular governments are legitimate because of their usefulness in preserving society, not because those who wield power were chosen by God or received promises of obedience from the people. In a long-established civil society, whatever ruler or type of government happens to be in place and successfully maintaining order and justice is legitimate, and is owed allegiance. However, there is some legitimate recourse for victims of tyranny: the people may rightly overthrow any government that is so oppressive as not to provide the benefits (peace and security from injustice) for which governments are formed. In his political essays Hume certainly advocates the sort of constitution that protects the people’s liberties, but he justifies it not based on individual natural rights or contractual obligations but based on the greater long-range good of society.

According to Hume’s theory of the mind, the passions (what we today would call emotions, feelings, and desires) are impressions rather than ideas (original, vivid and lively perceptions that are not copied from other perceptions). The direct passions, which include desire, aversion, hope, fear, grief, and joy, are those that “arise immediately from good or evil, from pain or pleasure” that we experience or think about in prospect (T 2.1.1.4, T 2.3.9.2); however he also groups with them some instincts of unknown origin, such as the bodily appetites and the desires that good come to those we love and harm to those we hate, which do not proceed from pain and pleasure but produce them (T 2.3.9.7). The indirect passions, primarily pride, humility (shame), love and hatred, are generated in a more complex way, but still one involving either the thought or experience of pain or pleasure. Intentional actions are caused by the direct passions (including the instincts). Of the indirect passions Hume says that pride, humility, love and hatred do not directly cause action; it is not clear whether he thinks this true of all the indirect passions.

Hume is traditionally regarded as a compatibilist about freedom and determinism, because in his discussion in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he argues that if we understand the doctrines of liberty and necessity properly, all mankind consistently believe both that human actions are the products of causal necessity and that they are free. In the Treatise , however, he explicitly repudiates the doctrine of liberty as “absurd... in one sense, and unintelligible in any other” (T 2.3.2.1). The two treatments, however, surprisingly enough, are entirely consistent. Hume construes causal necessity to mean the same as causal connection (or rather, intelligible causal connection), as he himself analyzes this notion in his own theory of causation: either the “constant union and conjunction of like objects,” or that together with “the inference of the mind from the one to the other” (ibid.). In both works he argues that just as we discover necessity (in this sense) to hold between the movements of material bodies, we discover just as much necessity to hold between human motives, character traits, and circumstances of action, on the one hand, and human behavior on the other. He says in the Treatise that the liberty of indifference is the negation of necessity in this sense; this is the notion of liberty that he there labels absurd, and identifies with chance or randomness (which can be no real power in nature) both in the Treatise and the first (epistemological) Enquiry . Human actions are not free in this sense. However, Hume allows in the Treatise that they are sometimes free in the sense of ‘liberty’ which is opposed to violence or constraint. This is the sense on which Hume focuses in EcHU: “ a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; ” which everyone has “who is not a prisoner and in chains” (EcHU 8.1.23, Hume’s emphasis). It is this that is entirely compatible with necessity in Hume’s sense. So the positions in the two works are the same, although the polemical emphasis is so different — iconoclastic toward the libertarian view in the Treatise , and conciliatory toward “all mankind” in the first Enquiry .

Hume argues, as well, that the causal necessity of human actions is not only compatible with moral responsibility but requisite to it. To hold an agent morally responsible for a bad action, it is not enough that the action be morally reprehensible; we must impute the badness of the fleeting act to the enduring agent. Not all harmful or forbidden actions incur blame for the agent; those done by accident, for example, do not. It is only when, and because, the action’s cause is some enduring passion or trait of character in the agent that she is to blame for it.

According to Hume, intentional actions are the immediate product of passions, in particular the direct passions, including the instincts. He does not appear to allow that any other sort of mental state could, on its own, give rise to an intentional action except by producing a passion, though he does not argue for this. The motivating passions, in their turn, are produced in the mind by specific causes, as we see early in the Treatise where he first explains the distinction between impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection:

An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflection, because derived from it. (T 1.1.2.2)

Thus ideas of pleasure or pain are the causes of these motivating passions. Not just any ideas of pleasure or pain give rise to motivating passions, however, but only ideas of those pleasures or pains we believe exist or will exist (T 1.3.10.3). More generally, the motivating passions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, joy and grief, and a few others are impressions produced by the occurrence in the mind either of a feeling of pleasure or pain, whether physical or psychological, or of a believed idea of pleasure or pain to come (T 2.1.1.4, T 2.3.9.2). These passions, together with the instincts (hunger, lust, and so on), are all the motivating passions that Hume discusses.

The will, Hume claims, is an immediate effect of pain or pleasure (T 2.3.1.2) and “exerts itself” when either pleasure or the absence of pain can be attained by any action of the mind or body (T 2.3.9.7). The will, however, is merely that impression we feel when we knowingly give rise to an action (T 2.3.1.2); so while Hume is not explicit (and perhaps not consistent) on this matter, he seems not to regard the will as itself a (separate) cause of action. The causes of action he describes are those he has already identified: the instincts and the other direct passions.

Hume famously sets himself in opposition to most moral philosophers, ancient and modern, who talk of the combat of passion and reason, and who urge human beings to regulate their actions by reason and to grant it dominion over their contrary passions. He claims to prove that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will,” and that reason alone “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will” (T 413). His view is not, of course, that reason plays no role in the generation of action; he grants that reason provides information, in particular about means to our ends, which makes a difference to the direction of the will. His thesis is that reason alone cannot move us to action; the impulse to act itself must come from passion. The doctrine that reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., that reason pursues knowledge of abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and provides no impulse of its own, is defended in the Treatise , but not in the second Enquiry , although in the latter he briefly asserts the doctrine without argument. Hume gives three arguments in the Treatise for the motivational “inertia” of reason alone.

The first is a largely empirical argument based on the two rational functions of the understanding. The understanding discovers the abstract relations of ideas by demonstration (a process of comparing ideas and finding congruencies and incongruencies); and it also discovers the causal (and other probabilistic) relations of objects that are revealed in experience. Demonstrative reasoning is never the cause of any action by itself: it deals in ideas rather than realities, and we only find it useful in action when we have some purpose in view and intend to use its discoveries to inform our inferences about (and so enable us to manipulate) causes and effects. Probable or cause-and-effect reasoning does play a role in deciding what to do, but we see that it only functions as an auxiliary, and not on its own. When we anticipate pain or pleasure from some source, we feel aversion or propensity to that object and “are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us” the pain or pleasure (T 2.3.3.3). Our aversion or propensity makes us seek the causes of the expected source of pain or pleasure, and we use causal reasoning to discover what they are. Once we do, our impulse naturally extends itself to those causes, and we act to avoid or embrace them. Plainly the impulse to act does not arise from the reasoning but is only directed by it. “’Tis from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises...” (ibid.). Probable reasoning is merely the discovering of causal connections, and knowledge that A causes B never concerns us if we are indifferent to A and to B. Thus, neither demonstrative nor probable reasoning alone causes action.

The second argument is a corollary of the first. It takes as a premise the conclusion just reached, that reason alone cannot produce an impulse to act. Given that, can reason prevent action or resist passion in controlling the will? To stop a volition or retard the impulse of an existing passion would require a contrary impulse. If reason alone could give rise to such a contrary impulse, it would have an original influence on the will (a capacity to cause intentional action, when unopposed); which, according to the previous argument, it lacks. Therefore reason alone cannot resist any impulse to act. Therefore, what offers resistance to our passions cannot be reason of itself. Hume later proposes that when we restrain imprudent or immoral impulses, the contrary impulse comes also from passion, but often from a passion so “calm” that we confuse it with reason.

The third or Representation argument is different in kind. Hume offers it initially only to show that a passion cannot be opposed by or be contradictory to “truth and reason”; later (T 3.1.1.9), he repeats and expands it to argue that volitions and actions as well cannot be so. One might suppose he means to give another argument to show that reason alone cannot provide a force to resist passion. Yet the Representation Argument is not empirical, and does not talk of forces or impulses. Passions (and volitions and actions), Hume says, do not refer to other entities; they are “original existence[s],” (T 2.3.3.5), “original facts and realities” (T3.1.1.9), not mental representations of other things. Since Hume here understands representation in terms of copying, he says a passion has no “representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification” (T 2.3.3.5). Contradiction to truth and reason, however, consists in “the disagreement of ideas, consider’d as copies, with those objects, which they represent” (ibid.). Therefore, a passion (or volition or action), not having this feature, cannot be opposed by truth and reason. The argument allegedly proves two points: first, that actions cannot be reasonable or unreasonable; second, that “reason cannot immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it” (T3.1.1.10). The point here is not merely the earlier, empirical observation that the rational activity of the understanding does not generate an impulse in the absence of an expectation of pain or pleasure. The main point is that, because passions, volitions, and actions have no content suitable for assessment by reason, reason cannot assess prospective motives or actions as rational or irrational; and therefore reason cannot, by so assessing them, create or obstruct them. By contrast, reason can assess a potential opinion as rational or irrational; and by endorsing the opinion, reason will (that is, we will) adopt it, while by contradicting the opinion, reason will destroy our credence in it. The Representation Argument, then, makes a point a priori about the relevance of the functions of the understanding to the generation of actions. Interpreters disagree about exactly how to parse this argument, whether it is sound, and its importance to Hume’s project.

Hume allows that, speaking imprecisely, we often say a passion is unreasonable because it arises in response to a mistaken judgment or opinion, either that something (a source of pleasure or uneasiness) exists, or that it may be obtained or avoided by a certain means. In just these two cases a passion may be called unreasonable, but strictly speaking even here it is not the passion but the judgment that is so. Once we correct the mistaken judgment, “our passions yield to our reason without any opposition,” so there is still no combat of passion and reason (T 2.3.3.7). And there is no other instance of passion contrary to reason. Hume famously declaims, “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than for the latter.” (2.3.3.6)

Interpreters disagree as to whether Hume is an instrumentalist or a skeptic about practical reason. Either way, Hume denies that reason can evaluate the ends people set themselves; only passions can select ends, and reason cannot evaluate passions. Instrumentalists understand the claim that reason is the slave of the passions to allow that reason not only discovers the causally efficacious means to our ends (a task of theoretical causal reasoning) but also requires us to take them. If Hume regards the failure to take the known means to one’s end as contrary to reason, then on Hume’s view reason has a genuinely practical aspect: it can classify some actions as unreasonable. Skeptical interpreters read Hume, instead, as denying that reason imposes any requirements on action, even the requirement to take the known, available means to one’s end. They point to the list of extreme actions that are not contrary to reason (such as preferring one’s own lesser good to one’s greater), and to the Representation Argument, which denies that any passions, volitions, or actions are of such a nature as to be contrary to reason. Hume never says explicitly that failing to take the known means to one’s end is either contrary to reason or not contrary to reason (it is not one of the extreme cases in his list). The classificatory point in the Representation Argument favors the reading of Hume as a skeptic about practical reason; but that argument is absent from the moral Enquiry .

Hume claims that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but rather from sentiment. His rejection of ethical rationalism is at least two-fold. Moral rationalists tend to say, first, that moral properties are discovered by reason, and also that what is morally good is in accord with reason (even that goodness consists in reasonableness) and what is morally evil is unreasonable. Hume rejects both theses. Some of his arguments are directed to one and some to the other thesis, and in places it is unclear which he means to attack.

In the Treatise he argues against the epistemic thesis (that we discover good and evil by reasoning) by showing that neither demonstrative nor probable/causal reasoning has vice and virtue as its proper objects. Demonstrative reasoning discovers relations of ideas, and vice and virtue are not identical with any of the four philosophical relations (resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, or proportions in quantity and number) whose presence can be demonstrated. Nor could they be identical with any other abstract relation; for such relations can also obtain between items such as trees that are incapable of moral good or evil. Furthermore, were moral vice and virtue discerned by demonstrative reasoning, such reasoning would reveal their inherent power to produce motives in all who discern them; but no causal connections can be discovered a priori . Causal reasoning, by contrast, does infer matters of fact pertaining to actions, in particular their causes and effects; but the vice of an action (its wickedness) is not found in its causes or effects, but is only apparent when we consult the sentiments of the observer. Therefore moral good and evil are not discovered by reason alone.

Hume also attempts in the Treatise to establish the other anti-rationalist thesis, that virtue is not the same as reasonableness and vice is not contrary to reason. He gives two arguments for this. The first, very short, argument he claims follows directly from the Representation Argument, whose conclusion was that passions, volitions, and actions can be neither reasonable nor unreasonable. Actions, he observes, can be laudable or blamable. Since actions cannot be reasonable or against reason, it follows that “[l]audable and blameable are not the same with reasonable or unreasonable” (T 458). The properties are not identical.

The second and more famous argument makes use of the conclusion defended earlier that reason alone cannot move us to act. As we have seen, reason alone “can never immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it” (T 458). Morality — this argument goes on — influences our passions and actions: we are often impelled to or deterred from action by our opinions of obligation or injustice. Therefore morals cannot be derived from reason alone. This argument is first introduced as showing it impossible “from reason alone... to distinguish betwixt moral good and evil” (T 457) — that is, it is billed as establishing the epistemic thesis. But Hume also says that, like the little direct argument above, it proves that “actions do not derive their merit from a conformity to reason, nor their blame from a contrariety to it” (T458): it is not the reasonableness of an action that makes it good, or its unreasonableness that makes it evil.

This argument about motives concludes that moral judgments or evaluations are not the products of reason alone. From this many draw the sweeping conclusion that for Hume moral evaluations are not beliefs or opinions of any kind, but lack all cognitive content. That is, they take the argument to show that Hume holds a non-propositional view of moral evaluations — and indeed, given his sentimentalism, that he is an emotivist: one who holds that moral judgments are meaningless ventings of emotion that can be neither true nor false. Such a reading should be met with caution, however. For Hume, to say that something is not a product of reason alone is not equivalent to saying it is not a truth-evaluable judgment or belief. Hume does not consider all our (propositional) beliefs and opinions to be products of reason; some arise directly from sense perception, for example, and some from sympathy. Also, perhaps there are (propositional) beliefs we acquire via probable reasoning but not by such reasoning alone . One possible example is the belief that some object is a cause of pleasure, a belief that depends upon prior impressions as well as probable reasoning.

Another concern about the famous argument about motives is how it could be sound. In order for it to yield its conclusion, it seems that its premise that morality (or a moral judgment) influences the will must be construed to say that moral evaluations alone move us to action, without the help of some (further) passion. This is a controversial claim and not one for which Hume offers any support. The premise that reason alone cannot influence action is also difficult to interpret. It would seem, given his prior arguments for this claim (e.g. that the mere discovery of a causal relation does not produce an impulse to act), that Hume means by it not only that the faculty of reason or the activity of reasoning alone cannot move us, but also that the conclusions of such activity alone (such as recognition of a relation of ideas or belief in a causal connection) cannot produce a motive. Yet it is hard to see how Hume, given his theory of causation, can argue that no mental item of a certain type (such as a causal belief) can possibly cause motivating passion or action. Such a claim could not be supported a priori . And in Treatise 1.3.10, “Of the influence of belief,” he seems to assert very plainly that some causal beliefs do cause motivating passions, specifically beliefs about pleasure and pain in prospect. It is possible that Hume only means to say, in the premise that reason alone cannot influence action, that reasoning processes cannot generate actions as their logical conclusions; but that would introduce an equivocation, since he surely does not mean to say, in the other premise, that moral evaluations generate actions as their logical conclusions. The transition from premises to conclusion also seems to rely on a principle of transitivity (If A alone cannot produce X and B produces X, then A alone cannot produce B), which is doubtful but receives no defense.

Commentators have proposed various interpretations to avoid these difficulties. One approach is to construe ‘reason’ as the name of a process or activity, the comparing of ideas (reasoning), and to construe ‘morals’ as Hume uses it in this argument to mean the activity of moral discrimination (making a moral distinction). If we understand the terms this way, the argument can be read not as showing that the faculty of reason (or the beliefs it generates) cannot cause us to make moral judgments, but rather as showing that the reasoning process (comparing ideas) is distinct from the process of moral discrimination. This interpretation does not rely on an assumption about the transitivity of causation and is consistent with Hume’s theory of causation.

5. Is and ought

Hume famously closes the section of the Treatise that argues against moral rationalism by observing that other systems of moral philosophy, proceeding in the ordinary way of reasoning, at some point make an unremarked transition from premises whose parts are linked only by “is” to conclusions whose parts are linked by “ought” (expressing a new relation) — a deduction that seems to Hume “altogether inconceivable” (T3.1.1.27). Attention to this transition would “subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” (ibid.).

Few passages in Hume’s work have generated more interpretive controversy.

According to the dominant twentieth-century interpretation, Hume says here that no ought-judgment may be correctly inferred from a set of premises expressed only in terms of ‘is,’ and the vulgar systems of morality commit this logical fallacy. This is usually thought to mean something much more general: that no ethical or indeed evaluative conclusion whatsoever may be validly inferred from any set of purely factual premises. A number of present-day philosophers, including R. M. Hare, endorse this putative thesis of logic, calling it “Hume’s Law.” (As Francis Snare observes, on this reading Hume must simply assume that no purely factual propositions are themselves evaluative, as he does not argue for this.) Some interpreters think Hume commits himself here to a non-propositional or noncognitivist view of moral judgment — the view that moral judgments do not state facts and are not truth-evaluable. (If Hume has already used the famous argument about the motivational influence of morals to establish noncognitivism, then the is/ought paragraph may merely draw out a trivial consequence of it. If moral evaluations are merely expressions of feeling without propositional content, then of course they cannot be inferred from any propositional premises.) Some see the paragraph as denying ethical realism, excluding values from the domain of facts.

Other interpreters — the more cognitivist ones — see the paragraph about ‘is’ and ‘ought’ as doing none of the above. Some read it as simply providing further support for Hume’s extensive argument that moral properties are not discernible by demonstrative reason, leaving open whether ethical evaluations may be conclusions of cogent probable arguments. Others interpret it as making a point about the original discovery of virtue and vice, which must involve the use of sentiment. On this view, one cannot make the initial discovery of moral properties by inference from nonmoral premises using reason alone; rather, one requires some input from sentiment. It is not simply by reasoning from the abstract and causal relations one has discovered that one comes to have the ideas of virtue and vice; one must respond to such information with feelings of approval and disapproval. Note that on this reading it is compatible with the is/ought paragraph that once a person has the moral concepts as the result of prior experience of the moral sentiments, he or she may reach some particular moral conclusions by inference from causal, factual premises (stated in terms of ‘is’) about the effects of character traits on the sentiments of observers. They point out that Hume himself makes such inferences frequently in his writings.

On Hume’s view, what is a moral evaluation? Four main interpretations have significant textual support. First, as we have seen, the nonpropositional view says that for Hume a moral evaluation does not express any proposition or state any fact; either it gives vent to a feeling, or it is itself a feeling (Flew, Blackburn, Snare, Bricke). (A more refined form of this interpretation allows that moral evaluations have some propositional content, but claims that for Hume their essential feature, as evaluations, is non-propositional.) The subjective description view, by contrast, says that for Hume moral evaluations describe the feelings of the spectator, or the feelings a spectator would have were she to contemplate the trait or action from the common point of view. Often grouped with the latter view is the third, dispositional interpretation, which understands moral evaluations as factual judgments to the effect that the evaluated trait or action is so constituted as to cause feelings of approval or disapproval in a (suitably characterized) spectator (Mackie, in one of his proposals). On the dispositional view, in saying some trait is good we attribute to the trait the dispositional property of being such as to elicit approval. A fourth interpretation distinguishes two psychological states that might be called a moral evaluation: an occurrent feeling of approval or disapproval (which is not truth-apt), and a moral belief or judgment that is propositional. Versions of this fourth interpretation differ in what they take to be the content of that latter mental state. One version says that the moral judgments, as distinct from the moral feelings, are factual judgments about the moral sentiments (Capaldi). A distinct version, the moral sensing view, treats the moral beliefs as ideas copied from the impressions of approval or disapproval that represent a trait of character or an action as having whatever quality it is that one experiences in feeling the moral sentiment (Cohon). This last view emphasizes Hume’s claim that moral good and evil are like heat, cold, and colors as understood in “modern philosophy,” which are experienced directly by sensation, but about which we form beliefs.

Our moral evaluations of persons and their character traits, on Hume’s positive view, arise from our sentiments. The virtues and vices are those traits the disinterested contemplation of which produces approval and disapproval, respectively, in whoever contemplates the trait, whether the trait’s possessor or another. These moral sentiments are emotions (in the present-day sense of that term) with a unique phenomenological quality, and also with a special set of causes. They are caused by contemplating the person or action to be evaluated without regard to our self-interest, and from a common or general perspective that compensates for certain likely distortions in the observer’s sympathies, as explained in Section 8 . Approval (approbation) is a pleasure, and disapproval (disapprobation) a pain or uneasiness. The moral sentiments are typically calm rather than violent, although they can be intensified by our awareness of the moral responses of others. They are types of pleasure and uneasiness that are associated with the passions of pride and humility, love and hatred: when we feel moral approval of another we tend to love or esteem her, and when we approve a trait of our own we are proud of it. Some interpreters analyze the moral sentiments as themselves forms of these four passions; others argue that Hume’s moral sentiments tend to cause the latter passions. We distinguish which traits are virtuous and which are vicious by means of our feelings of approval and disapproval toward the traits; our approval of actions is derived from approval of the traits we suppose to have given rise to them. We can determine, by observing the various sorts of traits toward which we feel approval, that every such trait — every virtue — has at least one of the following four characteristics: it is either immediately agreeable to the person who has it or to others, or it is useful (advantageous over the longer term) to its possessor or to others. Vices prove to have the parallel features: they are either immediately disagreeable or disadvantageous either to the person who has them or to others. These are not definitions of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ but empirical generalizations about the traits as first identified by their effects on the moral sentiments.

In the Treatise Hume details the causes of the moral sentiments, in doing so explaining why agreeable and advantageous traits prove to be the ones that generate approval. He claims that the sentiments of moral approval and disapproval are caused by some of the operations of sympathy, which is not a feeling but rather a psychological mechanism that enables one person to receive by communication the sentiments of another (more or less what we would call empathy today).

Sympathy in general operates as follows. First, observation of the outward expression of another person’s “affection” (feeling or sentiment) in his “countenance and conversation” conveys the idea of his passion into my mind. So does observing the typical cause of a passion: for example, viewing the instruments laid out for another’s surgery will evoke ideas in me of fear and pain. We at all times possess a maximally vivid and forceful impression of ourselves. According to Hume’s associationism, vivacity of one perception is automatically transferred to those others that are related to it by resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Here resemblance and contiguity are primary. All human beings, regardless of their differences, are similar in bodily structure and in the types and causes of their passions. The person I observe or consider may further resemble me in more specific shared features such as character or nationality. Because of the resemblance and my contiguity to the observed person, the idea of his passion is associated in my mind with my impression of myself, and acquires great vivacity from it. The sole difference between an idea and an impression is the degree of liveliness or vivacity each possesses. So great is this acquired vivacity that the idea of his passion in my mind becomes an impression, and I actually experience the passion. When I come to share in the affections of strangers, and feel pleasure because they are pleased, as I do when I experience an aesthetic enjoyment of a well-designed ship or fertile field that is not my own, my pleasure can only be caused by sympathy (T 2.2.2–8, 3.3.1.7–8). Similarly, Hume observes, when we reflect upon a character or mental quality knowing its tendency either to the benefit or enjoyment of strangers or to their harm or uneasiness, we come to feel enjoyment when the trait is beneficial or agreeable to those strangers, and uneasiness when the trait is harmful or disagreeable to them. This reaction of ours to the tendency of a character trait to affect the sentiments of those with whom we have no special affectionate ties can only be explained by sympathy.

We greatly approve the artificial virtues (justice with respect to property, allegiance to government, and dispositions to obey the laws of nations and the rules of modesty and good manners), which (Hume argues) are inventions contrived solely for the interest of society. We approve them in all times and places, even where our own interest is not at stake, solely for their tendency to benefit the whole society of that time or place. This instance confirms that “the reflecting on the tendency of characters and mental qualities, is sufficient to give us the sentiments of approbation and blame” (T 3.3.1.9). The sympathy-generated pleasure, then, is the moral approbation we feel toward these traits of character. We find the character traits — the causes — agreeable because they are the means to ends we find agreeable as a result of sympathy. Hume extends this analysis to the approval of most of the natural virtues. Those traits of which we approve naturally (without any social contrivance), such as beneficence, clemency, and moderation, also tend to the good of individuals or all of society. So our approval of those can be explained in precisely the same way, via sympathy with the pleasure of those who receive benefit. And since the imagination is more struck by what is particular than by what is general, manifestations of the natural virtues, which directly benefit any individual to whom they are directed, are even more apt to give pleasure via sympathy than are the manifestations of justice, which may harm identifiable individuals in some cases though they contribute to a pattern of action beneficial to society as a whole (T 3.3.1.13).

As we saw, the moral sentiments are produced by sympathy with those affected by a trait or action. Such sympathetically-acquired feelings are distinct from our self-interested responses, and an individual of discernment learns to distinguish her moral sentiments (which are triggered by contemplating another’s character trait “in general”) from the pleasure or uneasiness she may feel when responding to a trait with reference to her “particular interest,” for example when another’s strength of character makes him a formidable opponent (T 3.1.2.4).

However, the sympathetic transmission of sentiments can vary in effectiveness depending upon the degree of resemblance and contiguity between the observer and the person with whom he sympathizes. I receive the sentiments of someone very much like me or very close to me in time or place far more strongly than I do those of someone unlike me or more remote from me in location or in history. Yet the moral assessments we make do not vary depending upon whether the person we evaluate resembles us in language, sex, or temperament, or is near or far. Indeed, our moral assessments of people remain stable even though our position with respect to them changes over time. Furthermore, sympathy only brings us people’s actual sentiments or what we believe to be their actual sentiments; yet we feel moral approval of character traits that we know produce no real happiness for anyone, because, for example, their possessor is isolated in a prison. To handle these objections to the sympathy theory, and to explain more generally how, on a sentiment-based ethical theory, moral evaluations made by one individual at different times and many individuals in a community tend to be fairly uniform, Hume claims that people do not make their moral judgments from their own individual points of view, but instead select “some common point of view, from which they might survey their object, and which might cause it to appear the same to all of them” (T 3.3.1.30). At least with respect to natural virtues and vices, this common point of view is composed of the intimate perspectives of the various individuals who have direct interactions with the person being evaluated. To make a moral evaluation I must sympathize with each of these persons in their dealings with the subject of my evaluation; the blame or praise I give as a result of this imaginative exercise is my genuine moral assessment of the subject’s character. In that assessment I also overlook the small external accidents of fortune that might render an individual’s trait ineffectual, and respond to traits that render a character typically “fitted to be beneficial to society,” even if circumstances do not permit it to cause that benefit (T 3.3.1.20). Thus I acquire by sympathy the pleasure or uneasiness that I imagine people would feel were the trait able to operate as it ordinarily does. “Experience soon teaches us this method of correcting our sentiments, or at least, of correcting our language, where the sentiments are more stubborn and inalterable” (T 3.3.1.16).

The standard object of moral evaluation is a “quality of mind,” a character trait. (As we have seen, for Hume evaluation of an action is derived from evaluation of the inner quality we suppose to have given rise to it.) The typical moral judgment is that some trait, such as a particular person’s benevolence or laziness, is a virtue or a vice. A character trait, for Hume, is a psychological disposition consisting of a tendency to feel a certain sentiment or combination of sentiments, ones that often move their possessor to action. We reach a moral judgment by feeling approval or disapproval upon contemplating someone’s trait in a disinterested way from the common point of view. So moral approval is a favorable sentiment in the observer elicited by the observed person’s disposition to have certain motivating sentiments. Thus moral approval is a sentiment that is directed toward sentiments, or the dispositions to have them.

In the Treatise Hume emphasizes that “our sense of every kind of virtue is not natural; but … there are some virtues, that produce pleasure and approbation by means of an artifice or contrivance, which arises from the circumstances and necessities of mankind” (T 3.2.1.1). He divides the virtues into those that are natural — in that our approval of them does not depend upon any cultural inventions or jointly-made social rules — and those that are artificial (dependent both for their existence as character traits and for their ethical merit on the presence of conventional rules for the common good), and he gives separate accounts of the two kinds. The traits he calls natural virtues are more refined and completed forms of those human sentiments we could expect to find even in people who belonged to no society but cooperated only within small familial groups. The traits he calls artificial virtues are the ones we need for successful im personal cooperation; our natural sentiments are too partial to give rise to these without intervention. In the Treatise Hume includes among the artificial virtues honesty with respect to property (which he often calls equity or “justice,” though it is a strangely narrow use of the term), fidelity to promises (sometimes also listed under “justice”), allegiance to one’s government, conformity to the laws of nations (for princes), chastity (refraining from non-marital sex) and modesty (both primarily for women and girls), and good manners. A great number of individual character traits are listed as natural virtues, but the main types discussed in detail are greatness of mind (“a hearty pride, or self-esteem, if well-concealed and well-founded,” T 3.2.2.11), goodness or benevolence (an umbrella category covering generosity, gratitude, friendship, and more), and such natural abilities as prudence and wit, which, Hume argues, have a reasonably good claim to be included under the title moral virtue, though traditionally they are not. Hume does not explicitly draw a distinction between artificial and natural virtues in the moral Enquiry .

In the Treatise Hume argues in turn that the virtues of material honesty and of faithfulness to promises and contracts are artificial, not natural virtues. Both arguments fall into at least two stages: one to show that if we suppose the given character trait to exist and to win our approval without help from any cooperative social arrangement, paradoxes arise; and another, longer stage to explain how the relevant convention might have come into being and to refute those with a different genetic story. He also explains the social construction of the other artificial virtues and what social good they serve.

10. Honesty with respect to Property

Hume offers a rather cryptic argument to show that our approval of material honesty must be the product of collaborative human effort (convention). When we approve an action, he says, we regard it merely as the sign of the motivating passion in the agent’s “mind and temper” that produced it; our evaluation of the action is derived from our assessment of this inner motive. Therefore all actions deemed virtuous derive their goodness only from virtuous motives — motives we approve. It follows from this that the motive that originally “bestows a merit on any action” can never be moral approval of that action (awareness of its virtue), but must be a non-moral, motivating psychological state — that is, a state distinct from the “regard to the virtue” of an action (moral approval or disapproval) (T 3.2.1.4). For if the virtue-bestowing motive of the action were the agent’s sense that the act would be virtuous to do — if that were why he did it, and why we approved it — then we would be reasoning in a vicious circle: we would approve of the action derivatively, because we approve of the agent’s motive, and this motive would consist of approval of the action, which can only be based on approval of a motive... The basis of our approval could not be specified. For every virtue, therefore, there must be some non-moral motive that characteristically motivates actions expressive of that virtue, which motive, by eliciting our approval, makes the actions so motivated virtuous. The virtue of an action of this species would be established by its being done from this non-moral motive, and only then could an agent also or alternatively be moved so to act by her derivative concern for the virtue of the act. However, Hume observes that there is no morally approved (and so virtue-bestowing), non-moral motive of honest action. The only approved, reliable motive that we can find for acts of “equity” is a moral one, the sense of virtue or “regard to the honesty” of the actions. The honest individual repays a loan not (merely) out of self-interest or concern for the well-being of the lender (who may be a “profligate debauchee” who will reap only harm from his possessions), but from a “regard to justice, and abhorrence of villainy and knavery” (T 3.2.1.9, 13). This, however, is “evident sophistry and reasoning in a circle…” Now nature cannot have “establish’d a sophistry, and render’d it necessary and unavoidable…”; therefore, “the sense of justice and injustice is not deriv’d from nature, but arises artificially… from education, and human conventions” (T 3.2.1.17). Whatever, exactly, the logic of this argument is supposed to be, Hume’s intent is to show that if we imagine equity to be a natural virtue we commit ourselves to a sophistry, and therefore honesty is instead man-made.

Hume offers an account of the genesis of the social convention that creates honesty with respect to property, and this is meant to cope in some way with the circularity he identifies. How it does so is a matter of interpretive controversy, as we will see.

Hume next poses two questions about the rules of ownership of property and the associated virtue of material honesty: what is the artifice by which human beings create them, and why do we attribute moral goodness and evil to the observance and neglect of these rules?

By nature human beings have many desires but are individually ill-equipped with strength, natural weapons, or natural skills to satisfy them. We can remedy these natural defects by means of social cooperation: shared strength, division of labor, and mutual aid in times of individual weakness. It occurs to people to form a society as a consequence of their experience with the small family groups into which they are born, groups united initially by sexual attraction and familial love, but in time demonstrating the many practical advantages of working together with others. However, in the conditions of moderate scarcity in which we find ourselves, and given the portable nature of the goods we desire, our untrammeled greed and naturally “confined generosity” (generosity to those dear to us in preference to others) tends to create conflict or undermine cooperation, destroying collaborative arrangements among people who are not united by ties of affection, and leaving us all materially poor. No remedy for this natural partiality is to be found in “our natural uncultivated ideas of morality” (T 3.2.2.8); an invention is needed.

Hume argues that we create the rules of ownership of property originally in order to satisfy our avidity for possessions for ourselves and our loved ones, by linking material goods more securely to particular individuals so as to avoid conflict. Within small groups of cooperators, individuals signal to one another a willingness to conform to a simple rule: to refrain from the material goods others come to possess by labor or good fortune, provided those others will observe the same restraint toward them. (This rule will in time require more detail: specific rules determining who may enjoy which goods initially and how goods may be transferred.) This signalling is not a promise (which cannot occur without another, similar convention), but an expression of conditional intention. The usefulness of such a custom is so obvious that others will soon catch on and express a similar intention, and the rest will fall in line. The convention develops tacitly, as do conventions of language and money. When an individual within such a small society violates this rule, the others are aware of it and exclude the offender from their cooperative activities. Once the convention is in place, justice (of this sort) is defined as conformity with the convention, injustice as violation of it; indeed, the convention defines property rights, ownership, financial obligation, theft, and related concepts, which had no application before the convention was introduced. So useful and obvious is this invention that human beings would not live for long in isolated family groups or in fluctuating larger groups with unstable possession of goods; their ingenuity would quickly enable them to invent property, so as to reap the substantial economic benefits of cooperation in larger groups in which there would be reliable possession of the product, and they would thus better satisfy their powerful natural greed by regulating it with rules of justice.

Greed, and more broadly, self-interest, is the motive for inventing property; but we need a further explanation why we think of justice (adherence to the rules of ownership) as virtuous, and injustice (their violation) as vicious. Hume accounts for the moralization of property as follows. As our society grows larger, we may cease to see our own property violations as a threat to the continued existence of a stable economic community, and this reduces our incentive to conform. But when we consider violations by others, we partake by sympathy in the uneasiness these violations cause to their victims and all of society. Such disinterested uneasiness, and the concomitant pleasure we feel on contemplating the public benefits of adherence, are instances of moral disapproval and approval. We extend these feelings to our own behavior as a result of general rules. This process is “forwarded by the artifice of politicians” (T 3.2.2.25), who assist nature by cultivating widespread esteem for justice and abhorrence of injustice in order to govern more easily. Private education assists in this further artifice. Thus material honesty becomes a virtue.

Does this account resolve the circularity problem? Is there any non-moral motive of honest action? Some interpreters say yes, it is greed redirected, which removes the circle. But this presents two difficulties: first, our greed is not in fact best satisfied by just action in every case, and second, Hume denies that this motive is approved. Some interpret Hume as coping with the first difficulty by supposing that politicians and parents deceive us into thinking, falsely, that every individual just act advances the interests of the agent; or they claim that Hume himself mistakenly thought so, at least in the Treatise (see Baron, Haakonssen, and Gauthier). Others claim that Hume identifies a non-moral motive of honest action (albeit an artificial one) other than redirected greed, such as a disposition to treat the rules of justice as themselves reason-giving (Darwall) or having a policy of conforming to the rules of justice as a system (Garrett). Still others say there is no non-moral motive of honest action, and Hume escapes from the circle by relaxing this ostensibly universal requirement on virtuous types of behavior, limiting it to the naturally virtuous kinds. These interpreters either claim that there is no particular motive needed to evoke approval for conformity to the rules of property — mere behavior is enough (Mackie) — or that we approve of a motivating form of the moral sentiment itself, the sense of duty (Cohon).

Hume’s genetic account of property is striking for its lack of patriarchal assumptions about the family, its explicit denial that the creation of ownership does or can depend on any promise or contract, and its concept of convention as an informal practice of mutual compromise for mutual advantage that arises incrementally and entirely informally, without the use of central authority or force.

Fidelity is the virtue of being disposed to fulfill promises and contracts. Hume has in mind promises made “at arm’s length” that parties undertake to promote their own interest, not affectionate exchanges of favors between friends. While he identifies the same circularity puzzle about the approved motive of fidelity that he tackles at length in connection with honesty, in the case of fidelity he concentrates on a different conundrum that arises with the misguided attempt to analyze fidelity as a non-conventional (natural) virtue. Unlike Hobbes and Locke, who help themselves to the concept of a promise or contract in their imagined state of nature, Hume argues that the performative utterance “I promise” would be unintelligible in the absence of background social conventions, and that the moral obligation of a promise is dependent upon such conventions as well.

Suppose the practice of giving and receiving promises did not depend on a socially-defined convention. In that case, what could we mean by the utterances we use to make them, and what would be the origin of our obligation to fulfill them? Where the words are used (uncharacteristically) in a way that does not purport to reveal the agent’s will (as when the person is joking or play-acting), we do not think a promise is really being made; we only take a speaker to have promised, and so to be bound to perform, if he understands the words he uses, in particular as purporting to obligate him. Thus for effective use there must be some act of the speaker’s mind expressed by the special phrase “I promise” and its synonyms, and our moral obligation results from this act of the mind. (This seems to be Hobbes’s assumption in Leviathan , where the implicit signs of covenant — as distinct from the explicit ones — are clear signs of the person’s will.) The requisite mental act or mental state, though, could not be one of mere desire or resolution to act, since it does not follow from our desiring or resolving to act that we are morally obligated to do so; nor could it be the volition to act, since that does not come into being ahead of time when we promise, but only when the time comes to act. And of course, one can promise successfully (incur obligation by promising) even though one has no intention to perform; so the mental act requisite to obligation is not the intention to perform. The only likely act of mind that might be expressed in a promise is a mental act of willing to be obligated to perform the promised action, as this conforms to our common view that we bind ourselves by choosing to be bound.

But, Hume argues, it is absurd to think that one can actually bring an obligation into existence by willing to be obligated. What makes an action obligatory is that its omission is disapproved by unbiased observers. But no act of will within an agent can directly change a previously neutral act into one that provokes moral disapproval in observers (even in the agent herself). Sentiments are not subject to such voluntary control. Even on a moral rationalist view the thesis would be absurd: to create a new obligation would be to change the abstract relations in which actions and persons stand to one another, and one cannot do this by performing in one’s own mind an act of willing such a relation to exist. Thus, there is no such act of the mind. Even if people in their natural (pre-conventional) condition “cou’d perceive each other’s thoughts by intuition,” they could not understand one another to bind themselves by any act of promising, and could not be obligated thereby. Since the necessary condition for a natural obligation of promises cannot be fulfilled, we may conclude that this obligation is instead the product of group invention to serve the interests of society.

Promises are invented in order to build upon the advantages afforded by property. The invention of mere ownership suffices to make possession stable. The introduction of transfer by consent permits some trade, but so far only simultaneous swapping of visible commodities. Great advantages could be gained by all if people could be counted on to provide goods or services later for benefits given now, or exchange goods that are distant or described generically. But for people without the capacity to obligate themselves to future action, such exchanges would depend upon the party who performs second doing so out of gratitude alone; and that motive cannot generally be relied on in self-interested transactions. However, we can devise better ways to satisfy our appetites “in an oblique and artificial manner...” (T 3.2.5.9). First, people can easily recognize that additional kinds of mutual exchanges would serve their interests. They need only express this interest to one another in order to encourage everyone to invent and to keep such agreements. They devise a form of words to mark these new sorts of exchanges (and distinguish them from the generous reciprocal acts of friendship and gratitude). When someone utters this form of words, he is understood to express a resolution to do the action in question, and he “subjects himself to the penalty of never being trusted again in case of failure” (T 3.2.5.10), a penalty made possible by the practice of the group, who enforce the requirement to keep promises by the simple expedient of refusing to contract with those whose word cannot be trusted . This “concert or convention” (ibid.) alters human motives to act. One is moved by self-interest to give the promising sign (in order to obtain the other party’s cooperation), and once one has given it, self-interest demands that one do what one promised to do so as to insure that people will exchange promises with one in the future. Some interpreters say that this enlightened self-interest remains the only motive for keeping one’s promise, once the practice of promising has been created. But Hume says the sentiment of morals comes to play the same role in promise-keeping that it does in the development of honesty with respect to property (T 3.2.5.12); so there is evidence he thinks the moral sentiment not only becomes “annex’d” to promise-keeping but further motivates it. In larger, more anonymous communities, a further incentive is needed besides the fear of exclusion; and a sentiment of moral approval of promise-keeping arises as the result of sympathy with all who benefit from the practice, aided by a “second artifice,” the well-meaning psychological manipulation of the people by parents and politicians, which yields a near-universal admiration of fidelity and shame at breaking one’s word (T 3.2.5.12). This may provide a moral motive for promise-keeping even in anonymous transactions.

A small society can maintain a subsistence-level economy without any dominion of some people over others, relying entirely on voluntary compliance with conventions of ownership, transfer of goods, and keeping of agreements, and relying on exclusion as the sole means of enforcement. But an increase in population and/or material productivity, Hume thinks, tends to stimulate a destabilizing rate of defection from the rules: more luxury goods greatly increase the temptation to act unjustly, and more anonymous transactions make it seem likely that one will get away with it. Though people are aware that injustice is destructive of social cooperation and so ultimately detrimental to their own interests, this knowledge will not enable them to resist such strong temptation, because of an inherent human weakness: we are more powerfully drawn to a near-term good even when we know we will pay for it with the loss of a greater long-term good. This creates the need for government to enforce the rules of property and promise (the “laws of nature,” as Hume sometimes rather ironically calls them, since on his view they are not natural). This is the reason for the invention of government. Once in power, rulers can also make legitimate use of their authority to resolve disputes over just what the rules of justice require in particular cases, and to carry out projects for the common good such as building roads and dredging harbors.

Hume thinks it unnecessary to prove that allegiance to government is the product of convention and not mere nature, since governments are obviously social creations. But he does need to explain the creation of governments and how they solve the problem he describes. He speculates that people who are unaccustomed to subordination in daily life might draw the idea for government from their experience of wars with other societies, when they must appoint a temporary commander. To overcome the preference for immediate gain over long-term security, the people will need to arrange social circumstances so that the conformity to justice is in people’s immediate interest. This cannot be done with respect to all the people, but it can be done for a few. So the people select magistrates (judges, kings, and the like) and so position them (presumably with respect to rank and wealth) that it will be in those magistrates’ immediate interest not only to obey but to enforce the rules of justice throughout society. Hume is vague about the incentives of the magistrates, but apparently they are so pleased with their own share of wealth and status that they are not tempted by the possessions of others; and since they are “indifferent… to the greatest part of the state,” they have no incentive to assist anyone in any crimes (T3.2.7.6). Thus the magistrates’ most immediate interest lies in preserving their own status and wealth by protecting society. (Perhaps more directly, they stand to lose their favored status if they are found by the people not to enforce the rules of justice.)

It is possible for the people to agree to appoint magistrates in spite of the incurable human attraction to the proximal good even when smaller than a remote good, because this predilection only takes effect when the lesser good is immediately at hand. When considering two future goods, people always prefer the greater, and make decisions accordingly. So looking to the future, people can decide now to empower magistrates to force them to conform to the rules of justice in the time to come so as to preserve society. When the time comes to obey and individuals are tempted to violate the rules, the long-range threat this poses to society may not move them to desist, but the immediate threat of punishment by the magistrates will.

We initially obey our magistrates from self-interest. But once government is instituted, we come to have a moral obligation to obey our governors; this is another artificial duty that needs to be explained. On Hume’s view it is independent of the obligation of promises. We are bound to our promises and to obey the magistrates’ commands on parallel grounds: because both kinds of conformity are so manifestly beneficial for all. Governors merely insure that the rules of justice are generally obeyed in the sort of society where purely voluntary conventions would otherwise break down. As in the case of fidelity to promises, the character trait of allegiance to our governors generates sympathy with its beneficiaries throughout society, making us approve the trait as a virtue.

The duty of allegiance to our present governors does not depend upon their or their ancestors’ divine right to govern, Hume says, nor on any promise we have made to them or any contract that transfers rights to them, but rather on the general social value of having a government. Rulers thus need not be chosen by the people in order to be legitimate. Consequently, who is the ruler will often be a matter of salience and imaginative association; and it will be no ground for legitimate rebellion that a ruler was selected arbitrarily. Rulers identified by long possession of authority, present possession, conquest, succession, or positive law will be suitably salient and so legitimate, provided their rule tends to the common good. Although governments exist to serve the interests of their people, changing magistrates and forms of government for the sake of small advantages to the public would yield disorder and upheaval, defeating the purpose of government; so our duty of allegiance forbids this. A government that maintains conditions preferable to what they would be without it retains its legitimacy and may not rightly be overthrown. But rebellion against a cruel tyranny is no violation of our duty of allegiance, and may rightly be undertaken.

Hume does advocate some forms of government as being preferable to others, particularly in his Essays . Governments structured by laws are superior to those controlled by the edicts of rulers or ruling bodies (“That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”). Representative democracy is superior to direct democracy, and “free” (popular) governments are more hospitable to trade than “absolute” governments (ibid.). Hume speculates that a perfect government would be a representative democracy of property-holders with division of powers and some features of federalism (“Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”). He defends his preferences by arguing that certain forms of government are less prone to corruption, faction (with the concomitant threat of civil war), and oppressive treatment of the people than others; that is, they are more likely to enforce the rules of justice, adjudicate fairly, and encourage peace and prosperity.

Hume famously criticizes the social contract theory of political obligation. According to his own theory, our duty to obey our governors is not reducible to an instance of our duty to fulfill promises, but arises separately though in a way parallel to the genesis of that duty. Hume denies that any native citizen or subject in his own day has made even a tacit promise to obey the government, given that citizens do not think they did any such thing, but rather think they are born to obey it. Even a tacit contract requires that the will be engaged, and we have no memory of this; nor do governments refrain from punishing disloyalty in citizens who have given no tacit promise.

In the Treatise Hume’s principle interest in the natural virtues lies in explaining the causes that make us approve them. The mechanism of sympathy ultimately accounts for this approval and the corresponding disapproval of the natural vices. Sympathy also explains our approval of the artificial virtues; the difference is that we approve of those as a result of sympathy with the cumulative effects produced by the general practice of the artificial virtues on the whole of society (individual acts of justice not always producing pleasure for anyone); whereas we approve each individual exercise of such natural virtues as gratitude and friendship because we sympathize with those who are affected by each such action when we consider it from the common point of view. As we saw, he argues that the traits of which we approve fall into four groups: traits immediately agreeable to their possessor or to others, and traits advantageous to their possessor or to others. In these four groups of approved traits, our approval arises as the result of sympathy bringing into our minds the pleasure that the trait produces for its possessor or for others (with one minor exception). This is especially clear with such self-regarding virtues as prudence and industry, which we approve even when they occur in individuals who provide no benefit to us observers; this can only be explained by our sympathy with the benefits that prudence and industry bring to their possessors.

According to Hume, different levels and manifestations of the passions of pride and humility make for virtue or for vice. An obvious and “over-weaning conceit” is disapproved by any observer (is a vice) (T 3.3.2.1); while a well-founded but concealed self-esteem is approved (is a virtue). Hume explains these opposite reactions to such closely related character traits by means of the interplay of the observer’s sympathy with a distinct psychological mechanism he calls comparison. The mechanism of comparison juxtaposes a sympathetically-communicated sentiment with the observer’s own inherent feeling, causing the observer to feel a sentiment opposite to the one she observes in another (pleasure if the other is suffering, pain if the other is pleased) when the sympathetically-communicated sentiment is not too strong. A person who displays excessive pride irritates others because, while others come to feel this person’s pleasant sentiment of pride (to some degree) via sympathy, they also feel a greater uneasiness as a result of comparing that great pride (in whose objects they do not believe) with their own lesser pride in themselves; this is why conceit is a vice. Self-esteem founded on an accurate assessment of one’s strengths and politely concealed from others, though, is both agreeable and advantageous to its possessor without being distressing to others, and so is generally approved. (Thus the professed preference of Christians for humility over self-esteem does not accord with the judgments of most observers.) Although excessive pride is a natural vice and self-esteem a natural virtue, human beings in society create the artificial virtue of good breeding (adherence to customs of slightly exaggerated mutual deference in accordance with social rank) to enable us each to conceal our own pride easily so that it does not shock the pride of others.

Courage and military heroism are also forms of pride. Though the student of history can see that military ambition has mostly been disadvantageous to human society, when we contemplate the “dazling” character of the hero, immediate sympathy irresistibly leads us to approve it (T 3.3.2.15).

Our approval of those traits that may be grouped together under the heading of goodness and benevolence, such as generosity, humanity, compassion, and gratitude, arises from sympathy with people in the individual’s “narrow circle” of friends and associates, since, given natural human selfishness, we cannot expect people’s concerns to extend farther (T 3.3.3.2). By adopting the common point of view we correct for the distortions of sympathy by entering into the feelings of those close to the person being evaluated even if they are remote from us. The vice of cruelty is most loathed because the suffering of the person’s victims that reaches us via sympathy readily becomes hatred of the perpetrator.

Although natural abilities of the mind are not traditionally classified as moral virtues and vices, the difference between these types of traits is unimportant, Hume argues. Intelligence, good judgment, application, eloquence, and wit are also mental qualities that bring individuals the approbation of others, and their absence is disapproved. As is the case with many of the traditionally-recognized virtues, the various natural abilities are approved either because they are useful to their possessor or because they are immediately agreeable to others. It is sometimes argued that moral virtues are unlike natural abilities in that the latter are involuntary, but Hume argues that many traditional moral virtues are involuntary as well. The sole difference is that the prospect of reward or punishment can induce people to act as the morally virtuous would (as justice requires, for example), but cannot induce them to act as if they had the natural abilities.

Late in his life Hume deemed the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals his best work, and in style it is a model of elegance and subtlety. His method in that work differs from that of the Treatise : instead of explicating the nature of virtue and vice and our knowledge of them in terms of underlying features of the human mind, he proposes to collect all the traits we know from common sense to be virtues and vices, observe what those in each group have in common, and from that observation discover the “foundation of ethics” (EPM 1.10). The conclusions largely coincide with those of the Treatise . Some topics in the Treatise are handled more fully in the moral Enquiry ; for example Hume’s account of the motive to just action is enriched by his discussion of a challenge from a “sensible knave.” However, without the detailed background theories of the mind, the passions, motivation to action, and social convention presented in the Treatise , and without any substitute for them, some of the conclusions of the moral Enquiry stand unsupported.

In the latter work, Hume’s main argument that reason alone is not adequate to yield moral evaluations (in Appendix 1) depends on his having demonstrated throughout the book that at least one foundation of moral praise lies in the usefulness to society of the praised character trait. We use reason extensively to learn the effects of various traits and to identify the useful and pernicious ones. But utility and disutility are merely means; were we indifferent to the weal and woe of mankind, we would feel equally indifferent to the traits that promote those ends. Therefore there must be some sentiment that makes us favor the one over the other. This could only be humanity, “a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and resentment of their misery” (EPM App. 1.3). This argument presupposes that the moral evaluations we make are themselves the expression of sentiment rather than reason alone. (The alternative position would be that while of course we do feel approval and disapproval for vice and virtue, the judgment as to which is which is itself the deliverance of reason.) So Hume appends some arguments directed against the hypothesis of moral rationalism. One of these is an enriched version of the argument of Treatise 3.1.1 that neither demonstrative nor causal reasoning has moral distinctions as its proper object, since moral vice and virtue cannot plausibly be analyzed as either facts or relations. He adds that while in our reasonings we start from the knowledge of relations or facts and infer some previously-unknown relation or fact, moral evaluation cannot proceed until all the relevant facts and relations are already known. At that point, there is nothing further for reason to do; therefore moral evaluation is not the work of reason alone but of another faculty. He bolsters this line of argument by expanding his Treatise analogy between moral and aesthetic judgment, arguing that just as our appreciation of beauty awaits full information about the object but requires the further contribution of taste, so in moral evaluation our assessment of merit or villainy awaits full knowledge of the person and situation but requires the further contribution of approbation or disapprobation. He also offers the argument that since the chain of reasons why one acts must finally stop at something that is “desirable on its own account… because of its immediate accord or agreement with sentiment…” (EPM App.1.19), sentiment is needed to account for ultimate human ends; and since virtue is an end, sentiment and not reason alone must distinguish moral good and evil.

In the moral Enquiry Hume omits all arguments to show that reason alone does not move us to act; so the Representation Argument about the irrelevance of reason to passions and actions is absent. Without it he has no support for his direct argument that moral goodness and evil are not identical with reasonableness and unreasonableness, which relies on it for its key premise; and that too is absent from EPM. On the whole in EPM Hume does not appeal to the thesis that reason cannot produce motives in order to show that morals are not derived from reason alone, but limits himself to the epistemic and descriptive arguments showing that reason alone cannot discern virtue and vice in order to reject ethical rationalism in favor of sentimentalism. However, at Appendix I.21 he does assert (without support) that “Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action,” and perhaps this is intended to be a premise in a revised version of the famous argument that reason cannot produce motives but morals can, though what he writes here is tantalizingly different from that argument as it appears repeatedly in the Treatise .

Why did Hume omit the more fundamental arguments for the motivational inertia of reason? He may have reconsidered and rejected them. For example, he may have given up his undefended claim that passions have no representative character, a premise of the Representation Argument on which, as we saw, some of his fundamental anti-rationalist arguments depend. Or he may have retained these views but opted not to appeal to anything so arcane in a work aimed at a broader audience and intended to be as accessible as possible. The moral Enquiry makes no use of ideas and impressions, and so no arguments that depend on that distinction can be offered there, including the Representation Argument. Apparently Hume thought he could show that reason and sentiment rule different domains without using those arguments.

Thus, not surprisingly, the causal analysis of sympathy as a mechanism of vivacity-transferal from the impression of the self to the ideas of the sentiments of others is entirely omitted from the moral Enquiry . Hume still appeals to sympathy there to explain the origin of all moral approval and disapproval, but he explains our sympathy with others simply as a manifestation of the sentiment of humanity, which is given more prominence. He is still concerned about the objection that sympathetically-acquired sentiments vary with spatial and temporal distance from the object of evaluation while moral assessments do not; so he addresses it in the moral Enquiry as well, and resolves it by appealing once again to the common point of view. In the Enquiry he places more emphasis on sympathy with the interests of the whole of society, in part achieved by conversation using shared moral vocabulary, as a way to correct our initial sentiments to make them genuinely moral (Taylor 2002). He also attends more explicitly to the role of reason and reflection in moral evaluation. Some interpreters see him as offering an account of how to arrive at reliable moral judgment superior to that in the Treatise (Taylor 2015).

The distinction between artificial and natural virtues that dominates the virtue ethics of the Treatise is almost entirely absent from the moral Enquiry ; the term ‘artificial’ occurs in the latter only once in a footnote. Gone are the paradoxes of property and promises intended to prove that particular virtues are devised on purpose; also missing is what some commentators think Hume’s most original contribution to the theory of justice, his account of convention. Yet Hume briefly sketches part of the same quasi-historical account of the origin of justice that he gives in the Treatise ; and while the emphasis has shifted, Hume not only tries to show that justice has merit only because of its beneficial consequences, but that “public utility is the sole origin of justice” — were we not to find it useful (and in some conditions we might not) we would not even have such a thing (EPM 3.1.1). While any explanation of this shift and these omissions is merely speculative, here it seems that Hume does not change his mind about the arguments of the Treatise but chooses to lead the reader to the same conclusions by more subtle and indirect means while avoiding provocative claims.

In the moral Enquiry Hume is more explicit about what he takes to be the errors of Christian (or, more cautiously, Roman Catholic) moralists. Not only have they elevated craven humility to the status of a virtue, which he hints in the Treatise is a mistake, but they also favor penance, fasting, and other “monkish virtues” that are in fact disapproved by all reasonable folk for their uselessness and disagreeableness, and so are in fact vices.

Primary Sources: Works by Hume

• A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition , David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2007. (References to this work start with T and are followed by Book, Part, Section and paragraph number, in parentheses in the text.)
• A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford Philosophical Texts), David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000.
• A Treatise of Human Nature , L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), 2nd ed. revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.) (The Claredon Edition of the Works of David Hume), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. (References to this work start with EPM and are followed by Part, Section (if any), and paragraph number, in parentheses within the text.)
• Enquiry concerning Human Understanding , in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals , L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), 3rd ed revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975
• Essays Moral, Political, and Literary , Eugene Miller (ed.), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985.

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• –––, 1977a, “Another Look at Hume’s Account of Moral Evaluation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 15: 405–421.
• –––, 1977b, “Convention and Value,” in David Hume: Bicentenary Papers , G.P. Morice (ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 51–68.
• Baier, Annette C., 1988, “Hume’s Account of Social Artifice — Its Origins and Originality,” Ethics , 98: 757–778.
• –––, 1991, A Progress of Sentiments , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• –––, 1989, Hume’s Place in Moral Philosophy , New York: Peter Lang.
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• –––, 1997b, “Hume’s Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty,” Hume Studies , 23 (1): 91–112.
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• ––– (ed.), 2001b, Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy , Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont: Dartmouth/Ashgate.
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• Darwall, Stephen, 1995, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dees, Richard H., 1997, “Hume on the Characters of Virtue,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 35 (1): 45–65.
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• Foot, Philippa, 1963, “Hume on Moral Judgment,” in D. Pears (ed.), David Hume: A Symposium , London: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 74–80.
• Forbes, Duncan, 1975, Hume’s Philosophical Politics , Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1977, “Hume’s Science of Politics” in David Hume: Bicentenary Papers , G.P. Morice (ed.), Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 39–50.
• Garrett, Don, 1997, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2007, “The First Motive to Justice: Hume’s Circle Argument Squared,” Hume Studies , 33 (2): 257–288.
• Gauthier, David, 1979, “David Hume, Contractarian,” The Philosophical Review , 88: 3–38.
• –––, 1992, “Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave,” Hume Studies , 18 (2): 401–427.
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• –––, 2006, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Haakonssen, Knud, 1981, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Harris, James A., 2015, Hume: An Intellectual Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Livingston, Donald W., 1984, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Loeb, Louis, 1977, “Hume’s Moral Sentiments and the Structure of the Treatise,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 15: 395–403.
• MacIntyre, A.C., 1959, “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’,” Philosophical Review , 68: 451–468.
• Mackie, J.L., 1980, Hume’s Moral Theory , London: Routledge.
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• McIntyre, Jane, 1990, “Character: A Humean Account,” History of Philosophy Quarterly , 7: 193–206.
• Miller, David, 1981, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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• Norton, David Fate, 1982, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Reason, Morality, and Beauty: Essays on the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant

Bindu Puri and Heiko Sievers (eds.), Reason, Morality, and Beauty: Essays on the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant , Oxford University Press, 2007, 191pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195683935.

Reviewed by Charles Goodman, Binghamton University

This volume, a commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Kant's death, is an ambitious attempt to explore the global significance of Kant's thought and investigate the historical influence and continuing relevance of his ideas in relation to both analytic and continental philosophical projects and both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions.   It contains contributions from authors representing many regions of the globe, including India, China, Germany, Turkey, Indonesia, and the United States.   Given the significance of the tasks which the volume undertakes, and the commendable broadness of its outlook, it is unfortunate that its level of quality is so uneven.   Although some of the essays are quite interesting, others have little to offer readers with even a basic familiarity with the literature on Kant.

The quality of editing on display in this book is not up to the usual high standards of Oxford University Press.   A number of the essays suffer from deficiencies in style and errors in grammar.   The chapter by Bindu Puri has particularly severe problems of this kind, including the unintentionally humorous misplacement of commas (p. 60), grammatical problems which lead to a lack of clarity (as at p. 63), and an incorrect reference to the title of a well-known work (p. 70).   Even those essays in the volume which are well-written could still benefit from a bit more proofreading.

By far the most impressive article in the volume is the contribution of Jonathan Dancy.   Dancy's other work can often be so technical and difficult as to be almost impenetrable, but this essay is commendably clear.   In it, he confronts one of the strongest objections against his particularist view of ethics, and does so in a careful, frank and stimulating way.   The objection starts from the observation that moral claims don't seem to be a posteriori , since they aren't confirmed in the same straightforwardly empirical way as scientific assertions or everyday reports about perceptible objects.   Since the division between a priori and a posteriori exhausts the domain of assertions, moral claims must be a priori .   This conclusion would make sense on a view where morality derives from one general principle such as Kant's Categorical Imperative.   But particularists such as Dancy deny that morality depends on principles in this way; they affirm that morality is a vast field of independent, specific truths that depend sensitively on the details of the contexts in which they apply.   So, as Dancy puts it, "the particularist is left in the uncomfortable position of holding that some contingent and particular truths can be known a priori " (p. 43).

Dancy's main response to the objection is to assert that certain judgments of similarity, such as the assertion that "Mozart's music is more like Haydn's than Beethoven's is like Bach's," are synthetic, a priori , particular, and contingent.   Thus, moral judgments are not the only ones that possess all four of these seemingly incompatible types of status (pp. 50-51).   The most difficult part of this case to make is that the judgments of similarity, while being known a priori , are also contingent.   For as Dancy points out, it seems that there are two different, closely related types of propositions involved in these judgments.   We might say that any music exactly like Haydn's, whoever happened to have written it, would be very similar to any music exactly like Mozart's; and this would be a necessary truth.   Or we might say that the music Haydn in fact happened to write was quite similar to the music Mozart in fact wrote, and this claim would clearly be contingent.   It seems that if one of these assertions is known a priori , it will be the first, not the second.

Dancy responds to this difficulty with another example:

I don't think this challenge is sound.   It is a necessary truth that Mark, given his actual height, is taller than Jonathan, given his actual height.   But the necessity of that truth is compatible with its being a stubbornly contingent truth that Mark is taller than Jonathan.   The necessary truth is a consequence of the contingent one, and, I would say, known only by knowing the contingent one.   (p. 51)

This example is an unfortunate one for Dancy's case, since there are principles that apply to heights: namely, the principles of arithmetic.   If Mark is six feet tall and Jonathan is five feet tall, then the relation between their heights is a consequence of the universal and necessary truth that anyone who is six feet tall is taller than anyone who is five feet tall.   In some cases, our knowledge of both the particular necessary truth and the particular contingent truth that Dancy cites in the quote could be dependent on our knowledge of this universal necessary truth.

The example of similarities between entire lifetimes of musical compositions is obviously vastly more complex.   But Kant, if we imagine him as Dancy's opponent, could certainly claim that we judge Mozart and Haydn to be similar by noting certain specific respects in which they are similar, and that we are therefore applying a complex body of universal a priori knowledge.   Dancy would reply that judgments about similarity are too inherently contextual to be reduced to any set of principles, no matter how complex.   But surely at least some of the claims we could make about the similarities between Mozart and Haydn are instances of true universal principles.   Perhaps whatever is objectively true about these similarities can be captured in such principles; whatever cannot be so captured may be traceable to the subjective tastes of each individual.   And if so, then Dancy cannot use the example of similarity to illuminate the moral case.   He will not have dispelled the sheer strangeness of imagining that a vast, messy, uncodifiable body of particular judgments could nevertheless be known a priori .

For these reasons, I am doubtful that Dancy's main argument succeeds.   Along with this important argument, however, he also presents a number of other highly interesting remarks.   For example, he deftly refutes the argument that since moral judgments must govern the behavior of all rational beings, they must therefore be universal in form.   He does this by pointing out that a conditional rule can apply over a large domain of quantification, even though only a small subset of the domain satisfies the antecedent of the conditional.   He also strikes at the heart of many recent reconstructions of Kant through his bold claim that "Kant was not trying to capture the idea of a moral reason" (p. 41).   Dancy's essay by itself is almost sufficient to justify the purchase of the entire book.

Reason, Morality, and Beauty contains several historical essays that do a good job of expounding the views of Kant and other thinkers, but make little original contribution.   This is true of the first chapter, by Sharad Deshpande, on the relation between Kant and the tradition of virtue ethics.   Deshpande does attempt a reconciliation between Kant and Aristotle, but recognizes that although the issues that concern them are often similar, they differ in their conceptions of the role of reason in the moral life.   The second chapter, by Goutam Biswas, is especially poorly written with little critical bite, juxtaposing Kant with various Continental figures, but without much of a philosophical payoff.   The essay by Xie Dikun is greatly superior in the quality of its writing style.   It expounds various neo-Kantian positions and discusses a large number of philosophers, but without doing much intellectual work with them or improving our understanding of Kant in any significant way.

Bindu Puri, one of the editors of the volume, contributes an article which seeks to criticize Kant's views about happiness and friendship from an Aristotelian perspective.   Although I sympathize with the general thrust of his remarks, I fear that the essay has significant defects both in organization and in argumentation.   On p. 59, Puri offers some expressions of disagreement with Kant's critique of pathological love that don't engage with the motivations behind that critique, as they are expounded by such recent interpreters as Allen Wood.   One particularly flawed argument appears on p. 56, where we read: "Also, if happiness has no role to play in making men good, it is difficult to say that friendship, which has certain complex but decisive influences on happiness, can be constitutive of that human good."   On p. 70, Puri makes a valuable point about the potential importance of moral correction that friends can offer us; but this point is intended as a criticism of Kant, and it is unclear whether Kant would have any reason to disagree with it.

Bijoy Boruah's essay, "Autonomy and the Virtue of Self-Legislation," is the best of the purely historical essays.   Boruah offers a thoughtful and well-written examination of the relation, in Kant's philosophy, between causality and freedom, and between sensual impulse and rational will.   The chapter sets out these extremely difficult issues in a clear and interesting way.

Several essays in the volume attempt to do comparative philosophy, bringing Kant into dialogue with non-Western traditions.   Goenawan Mohamad, in his essay on "The Difficulty of the Subject," discusses a wide variety of themes, including Kant's views on freedom and on the Enlightenment, Adorno's response to them, and the work of the Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar.   In the process, he makes an intriguing suggestion: "As I will argue in the later part of this essay, strangely the Muslim revivalist's challenge to the Enlightenment project, like the one proclaimed by Sayyed Qutb, ends up creating a problem just like the Kantian Enlightenment did" (p. 105).   But this bold promise is only partly kept, and these themes deserve a fuller development than they can receive in an essay that attempts so much.

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann's paper is entitled "'Religion and Public Reasoning': Enlightenment and Critical Deliberation on Religion in Western and Islamic Societies Today."   Lutz-Bachmann makes some suggestions about the proper role of religion in public life that are well worth discussing, and which are highly relevant to dialogue between Western and Islamic philosophers and to the dilemmas posed by Muslim minorities in secular European countries.   However, he says much less about Islam in particular than his title seems to promise.   Moreover, this article might have benefited from a discussion of the extensive reflections on the issue of public reason developed by Rawls and his followers.   But it is nevertheless a helpful contribution to an urgent issue of our times.

Hülya Yetisken presents some interesting remarks about the relation between certain of Kant's views about education and the actual system of education implemented by Ioanna Kuçuradi at the Hacettepe University.   Yetisken's essay succeeds in showing that the distinctive approach of this university can indeed be seen as a realization of certain Kantian ideas.   But she makes claims to uniqueness which are a bit too strong.   As Yetisken writes on p. 81, "So far as I know and I was able to inquire, Kuçuradi's view is the first, and perhaps the only one, which puts in connection philosophical knowledge related to ethical value problems with concrete examples of the same problems that we find in works of art."   However, the Confucian system of education in premodern China stressed the importance of poetic and historical texts in developing the character of students and providing them with examples for emulation.   The role of literary and historical examples in moral education is prominently on display, for instance, in the writings of Mencius.

The article by A. Raghuramaraju sets out to discuss the problem of the unknowability of the self in Kantian philosophy and to critique the approach to that problem offered by Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya.   Bhattacharyya had attempted to resolve Kant's difficulty by drawing on the tradition of Advaita Vedanta.   In view of the fact that the classical Indian philosophical tradition came to focus intensely on the questions of whether a self exists and how we can know about it, the topic Raghuramaraju chooses to discuss would seem to have a great deal of potential.   Unfortunately, this author ends up accomplishing little more than offering an example of how not to do comparative philosophy.

The problems that beset this article are considerably deeper than its defects of style.   They go beyond Raghuramaraju's references to "the somnolentness of modernity" (p. 141) and to Descartes' views about the "penal gland" (p. 135).   In particular, Raghuramaraju's explanation of Bhattacharyya's views is unclear, inelegant and poorly written.   At p. 143, moreover, he makes some sweeping claims about the role of the self in ancient thought.   Though his claims may be correct, the argument offered for them is very weak, as it depends on a nearly irrelevant quote from Aristotle and the bizarre assertion that, for Aristotle, "pair is prior to the individual."   Raghuramaraju also cites Aquinas' presentation of the cosmological argument, and puts great weight on an analogy between Aquinas' God, who is an unmoved mover, and Kant's self, which is an unknown knower.   But this analogy, as he articulates it, is both tenuous and forced.   Moreover, he entirely ignores Kant's critique of the cosmological argument.

On pages 146 and 147, Raghuramaraju quotes a large amount of material from primary and secondary sources about classical Indian philosophy.   Some of this material is interesting and could have been used to make a real contribution to the issue, while some is of quite dubious relevance.   But Raghuramaraju makes virtually no effort to discuss the implications of any of the quotations, or to develop any conclusions that might be of philosophical interest.   Comparative philosophy both can, and must, be done in a more professional and intellectually serious manner.

The volume concludes with two valuable chapters the starting points of which are Kant's aesthetics.   Martin Seel's essay does much to clarify and challenge some recent ideas in the philosophy of art, which he juxtaposes with Kant's views.   The essay tests these ideas in relation to several works of modern art which are quite clearly and vividly described.   Andrea Esser's chapter boldly argues for a much closer similarity than one would have expected between the aesthetic views of Kant and Marcel Duchamp.   She seeks to illuminate both the surprising relevance and the limitations of Kant's aesthetic theory as applied to the world of modern art.

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Identity, character, and morality.

Essays in Moral Psychology

Edited by Owen Flanagan and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

ISBN: 9780262560740

Pub date: August 26, 1993

• Publisher: The MIT Press

500 pp. , 6 x 9 in ,

ISBN: 9780262061155

Pub date: December 11, 1990

• 9780262560740
• Published: August 1993
• 9780262061155
• Published: December 1990
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• Description

Many philosophers believe that normative ethics is in principle independent of psychology. By contrast, the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory. They investigate the psychological constraints on realizable ethical ideals and articulate the psychological assumptions behind traditional ethics. They also examine the ways in which the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of individual development, social psychology, and the limits on human capacities for rational deliberation affect morality.

Bradford Books imprint

Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is the author of Consciousness Reconsidered and The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World , both published by the MIT Press, and other books.

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Why Is Morality Important? (17 Reasons)

Morality permeates the very essence of our interactions, shaping judgments and directing our hand as we pen the story of our existence. These are the unwritten rules that govern our collective behavior, a silent agreement to do no harm and to consider the welfare of others.

But as we journey through this article, consider the idea that morality is not just about adherence to a set of rules—it’s about the pursuit of a good life. Let’s explore together the profound influence of morality and why, at its core, it remains the guiding star for our shared human experience.

Table of Contents

Morality Fosters a Sense of Right and Wrong

Morality acts as an internal compass that guides individuals in decision-making processes throughout their daily lives. From childhood, people learn moral values that help distinguish beneficial actions, such as sharing and kindness, from harmful ones, like stealing or lying.

These moral judgments are not just personal preferences but are shaped by the collective conscience of a society, which instills in us what is considered acceptable or unacceptable behavior.

This internalized understanding of right and wrong helps create a cohesive community where trust can flourish. When individuals share a common set of moral values, there is a mutual expectation of right behavior, leading to societal stability.

Morality Underpins Legal Systems

The legal system of any society is a codification of moral values into rules and regulations that govern behavior. These laws are designed not only to maintain order but to protect citizens from harm and ensure a balance of interests amongst various community members.

Foundational concepts inherent in law, such as justice, equity, and the protection of rights , are derived from the broader moral values collectively held by society.

Key elements of legal systems influenced by morality include:

• Criminal law: Distinguishes between ethical and unethical behaviors, setting consequences for actions deemed harmful.
• Civil law: Reflects moral expectations in agreements and personal conduct; it governs interactions between individuals and organizations.

While laws can be seen as practical tools for achieving a moral order, they need the undercurrent of public moral sentiment for legitimacy and efficacy. At times, the law may even serve as an agent of moral change, shaping the collective conscience by formally prohibiting practices once deemed acceptable.

Morality Supports Fairness and Justice

The concepts of fairness and justice are deeply interwoven with morality. They are about ensuring that individuals receive equitable treatment and that resolution mechanisms are in place to address grievances in accordance with moral standards. Through these principles, morality upholds human dignity and fosters conditions where every individual can thrive.

Fairness and justice pertain to:

• Distributive justice: Ensuring resources are allocated in society equally or according to need.
• Procedural justice: Ensuring processes and procedures are transparent and applied consistently.
• Retributive justice: Involving fair punishment proportionate to wrongdoing, deterring harm, and promoting moral behavior.

For example, a court trial that is perceived as fair and untainted by bias can uphold public trust in the judicial system, contributing to a greater sense of social stability and order.

Moreover, when justice serves not purely to punish but also to rehabilitate and educate, it reflects a more profound understanding of morality that values human potential for change and growth.

However, it’s essential to recognize that the pursuit of fairness and justice is an ongoing process, reflective of a society’s moral maturity. Challenges arise when societal moral standards are unevenly applied or when systemic issues undermine equitable treatment.

Therefore, remaining vigilant in the promotion of fairness and justice is an active, dynamic endeavor that requires constant moral reflection and action. By striving to minimize disparities and correct injustices, morality propels society toward a more harmonious and inclusive future.

Morality Promotes Social Harmony

When people adhere to a shared moral code, it reduces conflicts and allows for more cohesive and supportive communities. This shared understanding ensures that actions are predictable and members are accountable, building a peaceful environment where everyone can coexist.

Social harmony is facilitated through:

• Cooperative efforts, such as community volunteering, are inspired by moral drives toward generosity.
• Dialogue and reconciliation processes that are founded on mutual respect and the desire for peace.

A society without an underlying moral foundation often finds itself in turmoil, with individuals pursuing their interests at the expense of others, leading to discord and fragmentation.

In contrast, social harmony, derived from shared moral values, will enable different groups to overcome their variations in opinion and background, focusing instead on the common good. This collective effort towards amicable living can even extend beyond local communities to international relationships, highlighting the global impact of morality.

Morality Guides Societal Behavior

As individuals, the need to conform to societal standards often directs our actions. These standards are dictated by the moral codes prevalent within a community.

Morality serves as the guiding light for behavior, indicating the paths that are more likely to be accepted and those that might be rejected by society. This guidance shapes every aspect of social life, from etiquette and politeness to laws and decrees.

Consider the following points where morality guides behavior:

• Personal interactions, where civility and kindness are valued
• Business conduct, steering companies toward corporate social responsibility
• Public service, directing leaders to act in the best interest of their community

Without such guidance, societal behavior would lack cohesion and could potentially become destructive. It offers a blueprint for living harmoniously with others and sets expectations for individual conduct that align with the public good. Such direction not only simplifies decision-making but also helps communities to flourish by fostering environments of care and mutual assistance.

Morality Is Intrinsic to Evaluating Character

Judgments about an individual’s character are often grounded in an assessment of their moral conduct. Indeed, moral virtues such as honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness are highly prized attributes in individuals, frequently shaping others’ perceptions and evaluations.

Here’s how morality interplays with character assessment:

• In personal relationships, traits like loyalty and empathy are highly valued, cementing bonds between friends and family members.
• Professional reputations are built not only on expertise but also on ethical behavior, with corrupt acts leading to a loss of respect and trust.
• Public figures are often scrutinized for their moral actions; a politician’s career can flourish or flounder based on their moral choices.

The link between morality and character is underscored by the importance we place on moral education. Parents and teachers strive to instill moral virtues in children, knowing that these traits are crucial for their future social interactions and relationships.

Morality as the lens through which we view character ensures that ethical behavior remains integral to social expectations and personal advancement.

Morality Is the Foundation for Trust

When individuals exhibit moral behavior—keeping promises, telling the truth, and acting with fairness—trust naturally develops among community members. Conversely, a lack of moral conduct can erode trust, leading to suspicion and conflict.

Expanding on the influence of morality on trust, consider the following:

• In Relationships:  Personal relationships rely on the integrity and honesty of those involved.
• In Commerce:  Business transactions hinge on the mutual trust that agreements will be honored.
• In Governance:  Citizens’ trust in their leaders depends on the moral actions of those in power.

This mutual reliance based on moral behavior is not only foundational but has quantifiable benefits. In economies, for instance, higher levels of trust correlate with increased trade and economic growth.

In the legal system, trust in the justice of the process is paramount for societal adherence to the rule of law. It is morality that fuels these aspects of trust binding societies together in mutually beneficial ways.

Morality Enhances Personal Responsibility

Personal responsibility is a fundamental moral virtue crucial to individual development and societal role fulfillment. It encompasses recognizing one’s duty to oneself and to others, honoring commitments, and taking ownership of one’s actions and their consequences.

Through morality, individuals come to understand their obligation to:

• Engage in self-reflection and self-improvement.
• Act with integrity and accountability.
• Contribute positively to the community.

An individual’s sense of personal responsibility can be seen in various aspects of life, such as environmental stewardship—recycling, conserving water, reducing carbon footprints—or in professional accountability, where employees fulfill their roles diligently and with ethical consideration.

Morality Aids in Conflict Resolution

Morality provides a framework through which disputes can be approached and settled in a fair and equitable manner. Whether between individuals, groups, or nations, moral guidelines aid in finding common ground and forging peaceful solutions.

In navigating conflict, parties rely on several key moral concepts:

• Justice : Ensuring that each party receives fair treatment.
• Forgiveness : Offering and accepting apologies to move beyond past grievances.
• Honesty : Communicating transparently to address the root causes of the conflict.

Through these principles, conflicting sides can engage in constructive dialogue and come to mutually acceptable agreements. The role of international laws in mediating conflicts between nations exemplifies the application of morality to larger-scale resolutions.

By adhering to moral norms, parties in conflict prioritize restorative over retributive solutions, paving the way for reconciliation and the maintenance of long-term relationships.

Morality Nurtures Compassion

Compassion is a powerful force generated by moral emotion, prompting individuals to empathize with others and take action to alleviate suffering. The role of morality in nurturing compassion is paramount—it’s through our sense of right and wrong that we feel compelled to help those in need.

Here’s how morality is intertwined with compassion:

• Individuals volunteer and provide support, guided by a moral duty to assist.
• Societies establish welfare systems to care for the less fortunate, reflecting a collective commitment to compassion.
• Global relief efforts in response to crises demonstrate the universal moral imperative to help regardless of borders.

Compassion, fueled by morality, not only benefits recipients but also enriches the lives of those who give. Acts of kindness and concern have been shown to improve individuals’ sense of well-being and can even bolster the health of communities. In this way, morality is a crucial element in the fostering of empathy and the active relief of pain and hardship.

Morality Motivates Altruism

Altruism—the selfless concern for the well-being of others—finds its roots in moral values. It drives people to act for the benefit of others, often at a personal cost or without expectation of reward. This moral behavior is essential for societal welfare, as it encapsulates the idea of giving without receiving.

The manifestations of altruism influenced by morality are evident in the following:

• Charitable giving and humanitarian work, where individuals and organizations provide resources and aid to those in need.
• Heroic actions, where everyday citizens risk their own safety to save others from harm.
• Organ and blood donation, where donors give a part of themselves to save or improve the lives of strangers.

These actions, grounded in moral conviction, contribute to the social good and are laudable examples of how individuals can make a significant impact. Altruism reflects the ideal of benevolence and generosity, showing that morality is not just about avoiding harm but actively doing good.

Morality Shapes Moral Development in Children

Moral development in children is a process during which they learn and internalize the values and behaviors considered acceptable within their culture. It’s a crucial aspect of their overall growth, preparing them for the roles and responsibilities they will assume as adults.

Morality’s presence in a child’s early years shapes their future interactions and the ethical decisions they will make throughout their lives.

• The stages of moral development, from understanding fairness to grasping societal rules, are fundamentally guided by the moral teachings they receive.
• Role models such as parents and teachers play a significant role in imparting moral values through their actions and words. Children learn by observing the behaviors that are praised or discouraged by these influential figures.
• Storytelling often serves as a medium to pass on moral lessons, with characters embodying virtues and vices, providing children with clear examples of moral and immoral conduct.

This development is not just about telling children what is right or wrong; it’s about creating an environment where moral reasoning can flourish. Children’s participation in discussions about fairness, justice, and compassion allows for a deeper understanding of moral concepts rather than superficial compliance.

Morality Drives Ethical Behavior in Business

Corporations and entrepreneurs alike are increasingly held to high moral standards by consumers, employees, and society at large. An ethical business approach creates a ripple effect of positive outcomes that extend beyond the company’s profit margins.

Consider the following business ethics pillars and their moral bases:

• Honesty : Customers expect truthful advertising and transparency about products or services.
• Integrity : Trust is gained when businesses act consistently and fairly, even when it may not be legally required.
• Social Responsibility : There is a growing demand for businesses to operate sustainably and consider the broader impact of their actions on the community and environment.

When morality drives business practices, there can be a symbiotic relationship between profitability and societal well-being. Ethical companies often see long-term success and loyalty among their customers and employees, proving that good ethics is good business.

Morality Influences Educational Curricula

The influence of morality on curricula is profound; it molds young minds to form a sense of societal duty and personal ethics. Educational systems around the world incorporate moral education to various degrees, promoting values that are deemed important by society.

Key Points:

• Curricula designed to foster critical thinking often encourage students to consider the ethical dimensions of various issues.
• Subjects like history and literature, replete with moral dilemmas and stories of ethical heroism, challenge students to form their own moral judgments.
• Schools promote moral behavior through codes of conduct, honor codes, and community service requirements.

An interactive approach towards embedding morality in education does not merely inform students about ethics but also engages them in activities that require moral decisions. Debates, ethical problem-solving tasks, and the analysis of moral questions prepare students to confront real-world issues with a developed moral compass.

Morality Refines Individual Conscience

The individual conscience is often viewed as the inner voice that guides a person’s moral decisions. It is through the continual process of self-reflection and moral reasoning that one’s conscience is refined. This personal moral compass is essential in daily decision-making, where one must navigate the complexities of right and wrong.

Consider how an individual’s morality shapes their conscience:

• Personal experiences and the internalization of societal values contribute to one’s moral judgments.
• Ethical dilemmas, when confronted, provide opportunities for individuals to reflect upon and strengthen their moral convictions.
• The ongoing development of conscience is influenced by dialogue with others, reading, and education, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of morality.

An individual with a well-developed conscience is more likely to make decisions that are consistent with ethical values, benefiting both themselves and society. The refinement of conscience is a lifelong pursuit, which is crucial for personal integrity and moral conduct.

Morality Informs Religious Teachings

Religious teachings often provide a detailed framework for understanding and practicing moral values. Although the specifics can vary greatly from one religion to another, many share common themes such as compassion, honesty, and the sanctity of life.

• Moral precepts present in religious texts influence behavior and decision-making.
• The practice of values like charity, non-violence, and humility is often promoted as pathways to spiritual growth.
• Rituals and ceremonies reinforce a community’s moral standards, acting as reminders and public affirmations of shared values.

Religious institutions and leaders play a pivotal role in interpreting moral concepts and guiding adherents in how these principles apply to contemporary issues and individual circumstances. Through religious teachings, morality gains a dimension of transcendence, linking ethical conduct with spiritual well-being.

Morality Governs Environmental Stewardship

The modern concept of environmental stewardship is steeped in moral responsibility towards the planet and its ecosystems. The choices individuals and societies make regarding the environment are deeply moral decisions, reflecting their respect for the interdependence of life and their duty to future generations.

• Sustainability practices and conservation efforts are expressions of the moral imperative to preserve natural resources.
• Policies addressing climate change and habitat protection are underpinned by an ethical understanding of humanity’s role in the biosphere.
• Ethical debates about animal rights, biodiversity loss, and ecological justice are fueled by moral considerations.

Activism and global agreements on environmental issues are further evidence of morality’s guiding influence on stewardship. Morality compels individuals, communities, and nations to look beyond immediate interests, envisioning a global ethic of care and respect for the shared home of all living beings.

Final Thoughts

Morality is the unseen yet deeply felt force that shapes how we interact with our neighbors, build our communities, and, ultimately, how we view ourselves. It’s an ongoing dialogue between our inner values and the outer world, a delicate balance between self and the collective good.

So as we move forward beyond these words, let us carry the essence of morality in our actions and thoughts. It’s our shared responsibility, our common thread in a diverse tapestry.

By honoring the principles of morality, we not only enrich our own lives but also contribute positively to the wider world.

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Morality — Morality In Lord Of The Flies

Morality in Lord of The Flies

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Essay on Morality

Students are often asked to write an essay on Morality in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Morality

What is morality.

Morality is about knowing right from wrong. It’s like an invisible rule book that guides us to be good people. Everyone has different ideas about what is moral because we grow up in different places with different beliefs.

Morals in Our Lives

We use morals every day. When we share our toys, tell the truth, or help someone who is hurt, we are showing good morals. Our family, friends, and teachers help us learn these good actions.

Morals and Society

Morals keep society running smoothly. They are like the glue that holds people together. Without morals, there would be more fighting and unhappiness.

Learning Morals

We learn morals from the people around us. Books, stories, and even movies can teach us what is right and wrong. It’s important to keep learning about morals to become better people.

250 Words Essay on Morality

Morality is about knowing the difference between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. It is like a set of rules that people agree on to live together peacefully. Imagine if no one knew not to steal or hurt others; the world would be very chaotic! Morality helps us live in a way that is fair to everyone.

Why is Morality Important?

Morality is important because it guides us in making choices that are good for everyone. It teaches us to treat others kindly and to be honest. When we follow moral rules, we make our families, schools, and communities better places. It’s like playing a game where everyone knows the rules and plays fairly – the game is more fun that way.

Where Does Morality Come From?

People learn about what is right and wrong from their families, schools, and the society they live in. Some moral rules are written in laws, and others are things we just know in our hearts. For example, sharing with others is not a law, but it is a kind thing to do.

Challenges with Morality

Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is. Different people or cultures might have different ideas about morality. The key is to think about how your actions affect others and to choose to be kind and fair.

Morality is like the glue that holds people together. It helps us know how to act so that we can all get along and be happy. It’s important for everyone to try their best to be moral and do the right thing.

500 Words Essay on Morality

Morality is about knowing the difference between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. It is a set of rules that we live by. These rules can come from our family, religion, or society. They guide us to be good people and to treat others well.

Why Morality is Important

Morality is important because it helps us live together in peace. When we follow moral rules, we can trust each other. We know that others won’t hurt us or take our things. This trust lets us make friends, work together, and build a happy community.

Different Kinds of Morals

There are many kinds of morals because people come from different places and have different beliefs. Some people think it’s very important to be honest, while others think being kind is the most important. But most people agree on some basic things, like not hurting others, not stealing, and treating others as we want to be treated.

Learning About Morality

We learn about morality from when we are very young. Our parents teach us to share and to say “sorry” when we do something wrong. At school, teachers tell us about being fair and not cheating. We also learn from stories and movies that show heroes being brave and doing the right thing.

Morality and Choices

Every day, we have to make choices. Some choices are about morality. For example, if you find a lost wallet, you have to choose to return it or keep it. Morality helps us make the right choice. Even when no one is watching, being moral means doing the right thing.

Morality and Feelings

Morality is not just about rules; it’s also about feelings. When we do something good, we feel happy and proud. When we do something bad, we might feel sad or guilty. These feelings help us know if our choices match our morals.

Challenges to Morality

Sometimes, it’s hard to be moral. Maybe we are tempted to do something wrong because it seems easier or because we might get something we want. It can also be hard when people around us are not being moral. But sticking to our morals, even when it’s tough, makes us strong and respected.

Morality in the Future

As we grow up, our understanding of morality can change. We start to see the bigger picture and understand why morals are important for everyone. We learn to think about how our actions affect other people, animals, and even the whole planet. Morality helps us become better people and make the world a better place.

In conclusion, morality is like a compass that guides us through life. It helps us know which way is right and which way is wrong. By following our moral compass, we can live in a way that is good for us and for everyone around us. Remember, being moral is not always easy, but it is always worth it.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Turkey
• Essay on Moral Responsibility
• Essay on Moral Relativism

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature

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Morality's Progress is the summation of nearly three decades of work by a leading figure in environmental ethics and bioethics. The twenty-two papers here are invigoratingly diverse, but together tell a unified story about various aspects of the morality of our relationships to animals and to nature. Jamieson's direct and accessible essays will convince sceptics that thinking about these relations offers great intellectual reward, and his work here sets a challenging, controversial agenda for the future.

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Autonomy and Its Limits A Discussion of the Shortcomings of Informed Consent

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INTRODUCTION

Medicine is intertwined with promotion of positive health while prioritizing a patient’s diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. The prioritization of a patient’s needs stems from a branch of morality called biomedical ethics, which focuses on moral principles that arise in healthcare, medical research. [1] Biomedical ethics serves to provide a framework for addressing complex medical questions while safeguarding the rights, dignity, and well-being of individuals. 1 Often times in healthcare, decisions made by physicians and patients result in beneficence and/or maleficence. Beneficence implies that healthcare professionals and institutions have a moral duty to act in a patient’s best interest by providing positive health outcomes while minimizing harm (maleficence). 1 As a result of biomedical ethics’ emphasis on beneficence and maleficence, healthcare is designed to respect a patient’s needs, beliefs, and decisions. The practice of allowing patients to make their own medical decisions is called autonomy, and it is vital to biomedical ethics because it emphasizes the concerns of the patient. [2] However, it is difficult to ensure that a person has autonomy over their medical decision-making if they are not fully informed about the circumstances of their health or treatment options.

Thus, an important aspect of biomedical ethics is informed consent. Informed consent is a practice in healthcare and research where individuals must voluntarily agree to or decline medical care after being educated about their medical condition. [3] Informed consent protects an individual’s right to express their beliefs and make educated decisions about their health. Furthermore, there is an important distinction to be made between voluntary consent and informed consent. While informed consent emphasizes that individuals are fully educated and comprehend information about a procedure, voluntary consent maintains that a person must freely and willingly make decisions without any form of pressure or coercion. 3 While a patient might be educated or informed about their health, they might not have the power to voluntarily make medical choices. Thus, consent must be both informed and voluntary to ensure that a patient is fully educated while preserving the right to make medical decisions. Without autonomy and (voluntary) informed consent, individuals would be deprived of their freedom to make educated medical choices, leading to interventions that do not align with their wishes or desires. However, autonomy and informed consent also have severe limitations and barriers, specifically when it comes to the informedness gap, cognitive capacity, and underestimation or overestimation of treatment risks.

According to author Onora O’Neill, the informedness gap occurs when patients may not fully understand the complex medical information provided to them by their physician. [4] The informedness gap is especially prevalent when medical professionals discuss complex procedures or treatments, as the patients may feel overwhelmed by the information and not make truly informed decisions. In addition to the informedness gap, limited cognitive capacity and mental health can hinder effective communication and informed consent. [5] When patients are unable to provide informed consent due to factors like dementia, mental illness, or unconsciousness, ensuring thorough communication and education becomes extremely challenging. 4

Additionally, it is important to consider how informed consent is limited by underestimation or overestimation of treatment risks. Patients may be overly optimistic about the success of a treatment or procedure, thereby underestimating the likelihood of complications or adverse outcomes. On the other hand, patients may possess fear and anxiety, causing them to overestimate the effects of treatment. Anxiety can cause a heightened perception of risk, which can lead to refusal of beneficial treatments, despite the presence of objective medical evidence. [6] Overall, these limitations of informed consent demonstrate that even when a patient is educated about their health, they still might not be fully knowledgeable when making medical decisions. In fact, while patients have the power of autonomy to make medical choices, the limitations of informed consent can have fatal effects. This becomes abundantly clear when looking at the case study of the world-famous musician, Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson’s death was the result of acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication. Propofol and benzodiazepine are extremely powerful medications commonly used for ICU sedation. [7] Dr. Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson's personal physician, was involved in Jackson’s care leading up to his death and played a central role in the events surrounding it. To briefly summarize the case, Michael Jackson was experiencing chronic insomnia and sought medical treatment after struggling to sleep for months. [8] Initially, Dr. Murray prescribed conventional anti-anxiety medications to help the artist sleep, but he was unsuccessful in resolving Jackson’s symptoms. 7 Without coercing the artist, Dr. Murray offered to administer the powerful anesthetics, propofol and benzodiazepine. After Dr. Murray’s brief description of the effects of propofol and benzodiazepine, Jackson voluntarily agreed to this treatment. 7 Initially, the treatment was a success, but Jackson was unaware of the significant toll these sedatives had on his health. On June 25th, 2009, after 2 and a half months of treatment, Jackson experienced severe propofol intoxication, causing him to die from cardiac arrest. [9]

Clearly, this case highlights how limitations of informed consent, specifically the informedness gap and underestimation of treatment risks, can have fatal consequences. Michael Jackson was granted the autonomy to make medical decisions about treatments for his insomnia, and he was briefly informed that propofol and benzodiazepine are potent sedatives. 7 However, according to the artist’s family, Jackson wasn’t fully educated about the level of addictivity and long-term ramifications of the drugs he was administered. 8 The Jackson family cited that while the artist voluntarily agreed to treatment, his chronic sleep deprivation caused him to underestimate the effects of his medication. The family explained that Jackson lacked the mental capacity to make informed decisions about his health. 8 Perhaps the outcome of this case may have been different if Dr. Murray had fully explored alternatives for treatment or made a thorough effort to fully educate Jackson about the effects of propofol. Additionally, it is difficult to discredit how sleep deprivation hindered Jackson’s ability to make rational decisions about his health. 8 While it is true that Dr. Murray informed Michael Jackson about the strength of the sedatives he was administered, that doesn’t mean Jackson fully understood the treatment’s consequences or the weight of his decision.

Furthermore, Michael Jackson didn’t suffer from the limitations of informed consent because of his unique status as a celebrity; Jackson is not an exception from the norm. Research suggests that factors such as limited interaction time between patients and physicians causes an informedness gap in about 1 out of every 3 people. [10] Michael Jackson had the wealth and resources to be informed about his health; he could have employed any doctor to provide his treatment. Yet, the average person does not have the resources to employ their own doctor or be thoroughly educated about their health. 10 If Michael Jackson wasn’t fully informed about his medical condition or treatment, it is likely that the average person is uninformed as well.

To put it simply, autonomy and informed consent ensure that individuals can express their personal beliefs while making educated decisions about their health. However, it is crucial to consider the limitations of informed consent such as the informedness gap, cognitive capacity, and misjudgment of treatment risks. How useful is autonomy and informed consent if patients lack the ability to think clearly, logically, and holistically about their health? [11] The tragic case of Michael Jackson exemplifies how limitations of informed consent have profound consequences. Although Jackson was informed about the risks associated with propofol and voluntarily agreed to his treatment, he was not fully aware of the drug’s long-term ramifications. If healthcare seeks to achieve positive health outcomes, there is an ongoing need for effective communication and patient education to address the limitations of autonomy and informed consent.

[1] Tom L. Beaucham, Standing on Principles: Collected Essay p, European Journal of Health Law 19, no. 5 (2012): 544–51.

[2] Daniel Callahan, “Autonomy: A Moral Good, Not a Moral Obsession,” The Hastings Center Report 14, no. 5 (1984): 40–42, https://doi.org/10.2307/3561098.

[3] Onora O’Neill, “Between Consenting Adults,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 252–77.

[4] Onora O’Neill, “Some Limits of Informed Consent,” Journal of Medical Ethics 29, no. 1 (February 1, 2003): 4–7, https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.1.4.

[5] Antoine Aoun, Sibelle Al Hayek, and Flora El Jabbour, “The Need for a New Model of the Physician–Patient Relationship: A Challenge for Modern Medical Practice,” Family Medicine & Primary Care Review 20, no. 4 (2018): 379–84, https://doi.org/10.5114/fmpcr.2018.79351.

[6] Rebecca Dresser. "Sunday Dialogue: Conversations Between Doctor and Patient,” The New York Times , August 25, 2012, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-conversations-between-doctor-and-patient.html.

[7] Katherine Harmon, “What Is Propofol--and How Could It Have Killed Michael Jackson?” Scientific American, accessed October 15, 2023, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/propofol-michael-jackson-doctor/.

[8] “Doctor Is Guilty in Michael Jackson’s Death - The New York Times,” accessed October 15, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/us/doctor-found-guilty-in-michael-jacksons-death.html.

[9] B. Lyons, “Medical Manslaughter,” Irish Medical Journal 106, no. 1 (January 2013): 26–27.

[10] D. R. Hansberry et al., “Are We Effectively Informing Patients? A Quantitative Analysis of On-Line Patient Education Resources from the American Society of Neuroradiology,” American Journal of Neuroradiology 35, no. 7 (July 1, 2014): 1270–75, https://doi.org/10.3174/ajnr.A3854.

[11] Rebecca Kukla, “How Do Patients Know?,” Hastings Center Report 37, no. 5 (2007): 27–35.

Maxwell Fry

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Disclaimer: These essays are submissions for the 2023 essay contest and have not undergone peer review or editing.

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Freedom of Sex

The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies..

One often hears today that gender is a social construct. The idea is sometimes credited to the book Gender Trouble, published in 1990 by a handsome young philosopher named Judith Butler. In fact, sociologists began thinking of gender as a social achievement distinct from sex as early as the 1960s. What Butler proposed was more radical: that the repeated citation of gender norms — things like wearing heels or drinking Scotch — produced the illusion of a biological sex just waiting to be infused with meaning. For Butler, gender was performative, a term they borrowed from the philosophy of language, where it referred to sentences that seem to do things: “I promise,” for instance, a phrase that literally makes a promise. Gender, too, was a kind of promise — “It’s a girl” — one that, because it was not anchored in biological sex, had to be constantly reaffirmed through performative acts, thus allowing the dominant norms to be renegotiated or even subverted. Butler’s example was drag performance, which, by exaggerating the normal rules of gender, acted as an allegory for the way everyone performed gender every day.

These ideas were tremendously influential in the formation of gender studies . But two principal criticisms of Butler soon arose. The first was that they had effectively denied the reality of biological sex; after all, there was a big difference between a drag queen and your average woman. The second was that Butler had made gender sound like something you could voluntarily opt into. Butler would spend the better part of their career trying to acknowledge the materiality of sex — even as they downplayed its relevance — while fending off the idea that gender could be assumed through a spontaneous act of will. It was not as if, they wrote, one simply “woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night.”

What Butler could not have anticipated is that, some 30 years later, people really would be waking up one morning and choosing a new gender. At least this is the impression one gets from the “debate” now raging in this country over the rights of transgender youth — a rapidly accelerating campaign that has united the far right, the liberal center, and certain feminists on the left. Last year — the worst so far — Republicans introduced hundreds of bills that would ban gender-affirming health care for minors, restrict the participation of trans kids in sports, and force schools to out students to their parents. (They are increasingly turning their sights on adults.) Around half of all transgender youth — some 140,000 kids and teens — now live in a state where minors have, or may soon have, no legal access to gender-affirming care . To whom should they turn? The New York Times regularly runs stories playing up the perils of youth gender medicine; the author of Harry Potter is anxiously projecting her fears of sexual assault onto them from across the sea. The public increasingly believes that what the kids call gender is really just trouble : depression, anxiety, autism, family dysfunction, peer pressure, or social media, any of which — not to mention the universal awkwardness of puberty itself — are better explanations for why a child might question their identity.

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The left must reckon with its part in this. It has hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity, a concept clumsily adapted from psychiatry and strongly influenced by both gender studies and the born-this-way tactics of the campaign for marriage equality. This has won us modest gains at the level of social acceptance. But we have largely failed to form a coherent moral account of why someone’s gender identity should justify the actual biological interventions that make up gender-affirming care. If gender really is an all-encompassing structure of social norms that produces the illusion of sex, critics ask, why would the affirmation of someone’s gender identity entail a change to their biology? As a result, advocates have fallen back on the clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria , known until about a decade ago as gender identity disorder, defined as the distress felt at the incongruence of gender identity and biological sex. The idea that trans people fundamentally suffer from a mental illness has long been used by psychiatrists to decide who “qualifies” for transition-related care and who does not. By insisting on the medical validity of the diagnosis , progressives have reduced the question of justice to a question of who has the appropriate disease. In so doing, they have given the anti-trans movement a powerful tool for systematically pathologizing trans kids.

How to respond to all this? Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? , is one attempt, and it promises to ignite another round of public conversation about trans rights when published later this month. They write well of the global panic over “gender ideology” and acknowledge that the theory of gender performativity seems “questionable” in light of subsequent criticisms. But they continue to treat gender as the more promising terrain for political struggle. One suspects that, even after all these years, Butler is still afraid of sex. They are not alone: Many trans advocates worry that if they concede the significance of biological sex — as opponents of trans rights demand they do — this will thwart their political claims. The focus on gender, given its substantial psychic and social components, appears to be a more plausible ground for self-determination. But this fear has left a vast swath of political territory open to the anti-trans movement, which now hides its repressive goals behind the rhetoric of neutral biological fact.

It seems to me that this is a fear we can no longer afford. To confront the reality of biological sex is not, by definition, to swear fealty to that reality; no one knows this better than a child who wishes to have their biological sex changed. We must be able to defend this desire clearly, directly, and — crucially — without depending on the idea of gender. Back in the 1970s, sociologists hypothesized that the withering away of gender roles in a liberal society would lead to a decline in the number of people who wanted to change their sex. We may now say this hypothesis was wrong: An increase in gender freedom has coincided with a rise in the number of people wishing to change their sex. For these people, sex itself is becoming a site of freedom. This freedom is not unprecedented: Many Americans, though they may not realize it, already enjoy a limited version of the freedom to alter their sexual biology. What is new is the idea that this freedom can be asserted as a universal right by a group as politically disenfranchised as the young. This is why the anti-trans movement is so desperate: It is afraid of what sex might become.

A decade ago, when Time magazine memorably declared the arrival of the “ transgender tipping point ,” the public was dimly prepared to accept that trans people were like gay people — that is, safe, legal, and rare. The successful corporate boycott of North Carolina over its 2016 law restricting trans people’s use of public restrooms seemed to bear this out; even candidate Trump considered bathroom bills a losing issue . But the nation’s first pangs of dutiful charity have rapidly subsided — in no small part because the focus has shifted from adults to children. In 2018, The Atlantic published a long cover story by the reporter Jesse Singal called “ When Children Say They’re Trans ,” focusing on the clinical disagreements over how to treat gender-questioning youth. The story provided a template for the coverage that would follow it. First, it took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights. This tactic has been successful: The political center has moved significantly on trans issues. The public now appears to favor protections for trans people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces in line with the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County . But a growing majority of Americans also believe gender is determined by sex at birth , and even more (almost 70 percent) oppose puberty blockers for trans kids.

Three main tendencies compose the anti-trans bloc in America today. The first, and most obvious, is the religious right, a principally Christian movement that holds that trans people are an abomination and that “gender ideology” is part of a broader leftist conspiracy to corrupt the youth. The second tendency is also obvious, if smaller: gender-critical feminists, better known as TERFs. This group has its roots in the lesbian feminism of the ’70s; today, the polemical acronym, which originally stood for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” is used to describe any feminist who justifies her anti-trans views by citing women’s rights. These views include the idea that gender must be smashed rather than affirmed; that women constitute a “sex class” on the basis of their shared biology; and that the trans-rights framework exposes natal women to sexual violence at the hands of trans women, who are imagined as predatory males. (Most TERFism in the U.S. is imported: TERFs have their strongest foothold in the U.K. )

But the most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this country is, quite simply, liberals. Butler, in their survey of the political landscape, misses the liberal faction altogether. I suspect this is because the anti-trans liberal sees himself as a concerned citizen, not an ideologue. He is neither radical nor a feminist; he is not so much trans-exclusionary as he is broadly skeptical of all social-justice movements. He is a trans-agnostic reactionary liberal — a TARL. The TARL’s primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left , which, by forcing the orthodoxy of gender down the public’s throat and viciously attacking anyone who dares to ask questions, is trafficking in censorship, intimidation, and quasi-religious fanaticism. On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.

The leading voice for such ideas in the United States is the Times. In the past several years, the paper has vigorously normalized the idea that sustained public debate over the rights of trans kids is not only justified but urgent. In 2022 alone, it devoted more than 28,000 words to the topic of trans youth, including a lengthy New York Times Magazine piece by staff writer Emily Bazelon on the “ unexplained rise in trans-identified teenagers .” The paper paints a consistent picture. Genuine transgender people, its reporters suggest, are a very small clinical population of adults with a verified mental illness whose persistent distress entitles them to gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and transition-related surgeries. Trans-identified youth — whose numbers, we are told, are “ small but growing ” — are beset by comorbidities like depression or autism spectrum disorder that stymie clear diagnosis, yet they are being rushed into life-changing treatments that many of them may later regret, as evidenced by the cautionary tales of people who detransition later in life . To make matters worse, the “overheated political moment,” inflamed by both right-wing backlash and the strident tactics of trans activists, is preventing the medical Establishment, which is trusted implicitly, from coming to a sober consensus.

At the same time, the paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter. Last year, the Times ran a story on a small Missouri gender clinic that had been overwhelmed by an “unrelenting surge in demand.” But the paper did not present this as an issue of access, as it has done with the national shortage in affordable home care or the inundation of abortion clinics with out-of-state patients post- Dobbs. Rather, the demand itself was suspect, a result of poorly explained psychological and social forces that had “bewildered” experts, whose warnings were as usual being drowned out by activists. Indeed, the average Times -reading liberal is left with the impression that, because politics obstructs the slow work of scientific consensus-building, trans people’s best shot at receiving health care is to stop asking for it.

The Times is not alone; it is one of many respectable publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist , engaged in sanitizing the ideas promoted by TARLs in the more reactionary corners of the media landscape . Here one finds journalists like Singal, Matthew Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Helen Lewis, Meghan Daum, and, of course, former Times staffer Bari Weiss. Many of these writers live in self-imposed exile on Substack, the newsletter platform, where they present themselves as brave survivors of cancellation by the woke elites. But they are not a marginal force. (It was Weiss’s media company that first broke the story about the clinic in Missouri .) These writers are far more likely to be militants than their counterparts at the Times ; they are especially preoccupied with the “science denial” of radical activists, who have put wokeness before rational standards of care. In the words of one TARL, “Biology has been canceled. ” Of particular note here is Singal, who has often accused trans activists of mounting an Orwellian campaign to discount “ the relevance of biological sex .” It would be “profoundly unfair,” he wrote last year, if a “large male” like himself were to suddenly demand that others see him as a woman. (It did not occur to him that this is precisely why trans girls, who are well aware of their biology, are asking for puberty blockers: so that they do not grow up to look like Jesse Singal.)

Trans skeptics have seized on the idea of “ rapid-onset gender dysphoria ,” a term proposed by the public-health researcher Lisa Littman in 2018 to describe children with no history of gender variance who suddenly developed gender dysphoria as a result of “social influences and maladaptive coping mechanisms.” The study was a sham. It surveyed parents, not kids, whom it recruited from trans-skeptical communities online , and it assumed that clusters of trans kids were proof of social contagion as opposed to, say, self-selection. The idea that children were being unduly influenced by the internet was especially rich coming from participants harvested from a private Facebook group. But the general notion that trans kids have confounding diagnoses and high rates of desistance (the natural fading of symptoms with age) has proliferated throughout the anti-trans movement.

Now, to be clear, the TARL will typically acknowledge the existence of a group of fully developed adults whose medically verified gender dysphoria is so persistent and distressing that the argument for compassionate care outweighs the Hippocratic prohibition on harming a perfectly healthy body. The basic strategy here is to create a kind of intake form with exactly two boxes on it. Every trans-identified person is either a participant in a craze or certifiably crazy. (Checking both boxes is permitted.) There is a touch of genius to this approach. It draws a bright line between the kids who say they are trans and the kids who really are while pathologizing all of them as either delusional or dysphoric. This line is as old as gender medicine itself, which for decades was careful to distinguish impersonators and fetishists from the “true transsexual.” So in most cases of gender variance, the TARL informs parents that it is perfectly healthy for boys to wear dresses and for girls to climb trees regardless of their biological sex, which need not be altered after all. He reassures them that the risk of suicide among trans-identified youth has been inflated by cynical activists trying to blackmail the public ; what he means by this is that he does not think most kids are suicidal enough to be trans. In those rare instances of true misery, he advises the practice of “ watchful waiting ,” preferring to see the patient through the often-irreversible changes of puberty to adulthood, when her childhood experience of gender incongruence will finally acquire the weight of medical evidence. If only she had said something sooner!

This is obviously not a vision of justice; it is a response plan for an epidemic. This should not surprise us. The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be. The anti-trans bloc has in general targeted children because Americans tend to imagine children both as a font of pure, unadulterated humanity and as ignorant dependents incapable of rational thought or political agency. This has allowed the movement to infantilize not just kids but all trans people, whom it only wishes to shepherd through the ravages of mental illness and the recklessness of youth. If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more. It is quite possible, for instance, to believe that cancer patients should have access to aggressive treatments with potentially life-altering effects while also sincerely believing that, in a perfect world, no one would have cancer.

We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. When the TARL insinuates again and again that the sudden increase of trans-identified youth is “unexplained,” he is trying to bait us into thinking trans rights lie just on the other side of a good explanation. But any model of where trans people “come from” — any at all — is a model that by default calls into question the care of anyone who does not meet its etiological profile. This is as true of the old psychiatric hypothesis that transsexuality resulted from in utero exposure to maternal sex hormones as it is of the well-meaning but misguided search for the genes that “cause” gender incongruence . It is most certainly true of the current model of gender identity as “ consistent, insistent, and persistent ,” as LGBTQ+ advocates like to say. At best, these theories give us a brief respite from the hail of delegitimizing attacks; they will never save us. We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history. This may strike you as a vertiginous task. The good news is that millions of people already believe it.

In October 1958, a young woman appeared at the UCLA department of psychiatry with an unusual complaint. Agnes, as she is known today, had supple breasts, smooth skin, and a narrow waist. She also had, much to the consternation of her boyfriend, a typical set of male genitalia. In interviews with the psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller, Agnes related how she had been raised as a boy but had always believed she was a girl — a belief confirmed at puberty, when she naturally began developing breasts. Testing showed that Agnes lacked a uterus or ovaries but that her testes were producing high levels of estrogen. Satisfied, the doctors surgically replaced her genitals with a vagina constructed from penile and scrotal tissue. Stoller, who had become quite fond of Agnes, saw evidence for his theory that the endocrine system had a strong determining role in a person’s conscious or unconscious awareness of their biological sex. (He and his colleagues in Los Angeles had taken to calling this “gender identity.”) Years later, Agnes casually divulged the truth: At age 12, disturbed by the onset of perfectly typical male puberty, she had begun taking her mother’s estrogen pills. “She is not an example of a ‘biological force’ that subtly and inevitably influences gender identity, as I had reported,” Stoller admitted in his 1967 book, Sex and Gender. “She is a transsexual.”

Agnes had simply told the doctors what they wanted to hear . But why did her mother have estrogen pills in the first place? In passing, Stoller noted that the latter had been prescribed a synthetic estrogen following a total hysterectomy that included her ovaries; in other words, she was one of the millions of 20th-century women who would be prescribed estrogen for treating symptoms of menopause. In his 1966 best seller Feminine Forever, the gynecologist Robert A. Wilson argued that menopause was basically a hormone deficiency, like diabetes, that could safely be treated through estrogen therapy. He claimed his patients were part of a new sexual revolution: They had supple breasts, smooth skin, and legs that looked good in a tennis skirt. After Wilson’s death, it would come out that he had been receiving payments from the makers of Premarin , an estrogen medication derived from the urine of pregnant mares. Nevertheless, many women really did find hormone therapy effective for a wide range of menopausal symptoms, from hot flashes to vaginal atrophy, and in 1992, Premarin was the most prescribed drug in America . “Women, after all, have the right to remain women,” Wilson had written. “They should not have to live as sexual neuters for half their lives.”

So when Agnes visited UCLA, she did not need to prove that a right to female biology existed. She was simply trying to convince the doctors that this right also applied to her. In fact, the vast majority of Americans have long believed everyone has a right to keep their biological sex. The prospect of forcible sex change is the stuff of horror movies. In 1997, the Times ran a front-page story about an anonymous man, later identified as David Reimer, who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision destroyed his genitals . His care was overseen by controversial psychologist John Money, Stoller’s colleague, who gave Reimer estrogen to induce breast growth and allegedly had him perform sex acts with his twin brother. After learning the truth as a teenager, Reimer started testosterone, had his breasts removed, and received phalloplasty. That this was something of a small national tragedy went without saying. The Times compared his struggle to the travails of Oedipus or King Lear ; when he committed suicide in 2004, the paper ran his obituary . Reimer’s story is popular in the anti-trans literature because, alongside the general depravity of the affair, it appears to prove that gender has an inescapable basis in biological sex: Reimer knew he wasn’t a girl, no matter what the doctors did to him. He told Oprah Winfrey he had never fit in as a girl , preferring to climb trees and play with trucks even as his mother tried to convince him that he was simply a “tomboy.”

This is, of course, the exact conversation many trans kids are having with their parents today. What Reimer’s story actually illustrates is that we are perfectly comfortable with sex changing when we understand it as changing back. This happens more often than one might think. The historian Jules Gill-Peterson has shown that the earliest treatments in the field of gender medicine were developed to “correct” intersex children by bringing their ambiguous biology within the range of what society considered normal. Even when these treatments were later charily extended to “transsexuals,” it was often on the assumption that some original biological sex, perhaps endocrine in nature, was being excavated. (This was why Stoller was so excited by the idea that Agnes’s testes were producing so much estrogen.) But as the medical understanding of sex ballooned to include things like gonad development and hormone activity, so did the risk of losing one’s sex as a result of age, heredity, disease, physical trauma, or the side effects of medical treatment. This was the cleverness of Agnes’s plan. She presented herself as a person who, just like her mother, needed to become female again. In fact, following the removal of her testes, she cannily discontinued her secret estrogen pills, leading to mood swings and hot flashes. The doctors promptly diagnosed her with — what else? — menopause and placed her on the same estrogen therapy that would be enjoyed by millions.

So what we today call gender-affirming care is part of a larger history of sex-affirming care governed by strong normative ideas of health, productivity, and moral worth. Many of the treatments in this field are broadly uncontroversial today: breast reconstruction following cancer, vasodilators for erectile dysfunction, antiandrogens for hair loss and hirsutism. In 2023, The New York Times Magazine ran a long, sympathetic essay on the “reassuring” evidence base for menopausal hormone therapy , which the writer called “a lost opportunity to improve women’s lives.” A few years earlier, the Times hailed the first successful transplant of a penis, scrotum, and the surrounding abdominal wall — the result of Pentagon-funded research aimed at restoring the dignity of soldiers whose genitals were damaged or destroyed by improvised explosives . (The donor’s family sent the patient a message: “We are all very proud that our loved one was able to help a young man that served this country.”) Even the recent rush on the part of the Alabama GOP to enshrine the legality of IVF treatments endangered by a surprise state supreme court ruling is an excellent reminder that many religious conservatives support significant medical interventions in biological sex — gonadotropins to stimulate follicle production, GnRH agonists to prevent the unplanned release of eggs, not to mention the whole business with the test tube — when the payoff is a human infant.

The real question is which sex can be affirmed — and why. It so happens, for instance, that GnRH agonists like those used in fertility treatments are also used to delay puberty in trans kids . This means your average Alabama Republican now ostensibly believes it should be a felony to give a child the same hormone blockers his mother may have used to conceive him . Our politician may rightly protest that the same drug is being used for very different purposes. But this is the point: It is the purpose of sex change, and not the change itself, which determines its acceptability. This is why sex-affirming care has historically entailed both the withholding of sex change from some and enforcement of it for others. Like most fields of medicine, it has a bloody underbelly of coercion: the vaginal surgeries tested on enslaved women in 1840s Alabama; the testicular transplants performed on gay men in Nazi Germany; and the surgical modification of infants with atypical genitalia , which continues today. Even Wilson was clearly preoccupied with keeping women perky and lubricated for their husbands. In Feminine Forever, he drolly recalled a man who laid his .32 automatic on the desk and declared that if the doctor could not “cure” his wife of her harridan ways, he would surely kill her himself.

Most people are not being made to change their sex at gunpoint. But it should be clear by now that when members of the anti-trans movement argue that sex cannot change, what they really mean is that sex shouldn’t change except in accordance with social norms. Butler has written a great deal on this subject; a robust theory of normativity is arguably their life’s work. For Butler, a social norm is not a belief or a cultural attitude. It is a deep structure of power that makes one’s sense of self possible. Norms precede us, form us, and act as our “constitutive constraints”; at the same time, since they depend on being constantly reiterated, they never capture us fully and can be reinterpreted. (They have called this “working the weakness in the norm.”) Butler tends to think of gender norms in terms of meaning; in fact, they often assume that gender itself is the symbolic structure through which sex comes to matter at all. This is part of their broader political strategy: to show first that something is saturated with social meaning in order to make it politically questionable.

But it is not enough to know what sex means ; we will have to understand what it does. Obviously, gender norms do not issue directly from the organs. One imagines that, even after her hysterectomy, Agnes’s mother was still expected to be nurturing and emotionally available. Yet to speak only of norms is to lose sight of the role of biological sex within a larger system of material relations. It is difficult to explain why the above gender norm would exist in the first place if it were not for the actual fact of reproduction, which at this point in the descent of man still requires very specific biological conditions in order to occur, including the presence of at least one of each gamete type (sperm and ova), a well-functioning uterus, and a reasonably sound endocrine system. This is sex as biological capacity ; in this sense, it is no less of a material resource than water or wheat. Every human society invested in perpetuating itself — which is to say, every society — has regulated the production, distribution, and use of biological sex. This is more than the sex-based division of labor (hunter-gatherers and all that). It is the actual division of sex.

It may sound as if I am saying sex is more real than gender — a proposition gender studies has abhorred since its inception. I do not think that sex is more real. But I am not terribly bothered by saying that the division of sex determines gender norms, so long as we remember that it never remotely finishes determining them. There is always a wide, shifting, and irregular gap between the two. One finds a brutal example of this in the antebellum South. As Hortense Spillers has written, the genteel system of southern patrimony was bluntly waived when it came to the rape of enslaved Black women by white slave owners, who could effectively produce new assets — that is, new enslaved people — in the form of their own disavowed children. Gender alone cannot explain such an arrangement; it cannot speak to how sex functions as a kind of material base, as the Marxist feminists might put it: a source of labor, wealth, and power from which the elaborate superstructure of gender continually emerges, breaks off, and reforms in unintended ways. (An old-fashioned name for such an arrangement is sex-gender system, coined by the anthropologist Gayle Rubin in 1975.)

No wonder “gender identity,” understood by well-meaning LGBTQ+ advocates as an abstract feeling, has done such a poor job of justifying sex change. If biological sex is part of a material structure of value, then society has a concrete interest in any potential gains or losses that may result, feelings be damned. Gill-Peterson tells the story of Robert Stonestreet, a 10-year-old boy who was brought to the Johns Hopkins Hospital for a rare urethral defect in 1915. When the doctors informed his father that the boy had ovaries and should be reassigned as a girl, the man refused, explaining that he already had six girls at home and his son was a great help around the family farm. Of course, Stonestreet was prepubescent. Whatever biological advantage he had over his sisters was the natural spoils of working daily on a farm. The point is that his father’s social validation of his gender was the basically incidental result of an economic calculation about his sex. Twenty-one years later, Stonestreet asked the same doctors to certify him as male so he could wed his fiancée. They refused — one suspects because a marriage with no reproductive potential struck them as dead in the water, especially with the national birth rate at an all-time low. Three days later, Stonestreet committed suicide — the victim of a society that could not make up its mind on how best to make sense of his gender while also extracting value from his sex.

This is the larger historical reason why the anti-trans movement does not want transgender people to receive sex-altering care. It is not clear how, if at all , such people will fit into the division of sex in America. The TERF does not, after all, fear being assaulted by a Y chromosome in a women’s restroom. Her paranoid fantasy is of a large testosterone-fueled body wielding a penis — an organ to which, as Butler points out, the TERF attributes almost magical powers of violence. (TERFs often seem to reject the idea that trans women are women on the basis that they are not sufficiently rapeable, when in fact trans women face much higher rates of sexual assault .) Liberals, meanwhile, object to trans girls’ participation in sports not because sperm swim faster than eggs but because trans girls, they suppose, will swim faster than their own little girls, who may then be deprived of athletic scholarships or other opportunities . Even Singal admits this is ultimately an issue of “ competing rights claims ,” not biological fact. Widespread discomfort at the largely fantastical idea that trans girls will always dominate in their chosen sports reflects a basic patriarchal belief that the physical advantages of being male are perfectly acceptable so long as they are possessed by men. (In this sense, sex division in sport is meant to enshrine inequality, not to mitigate it.)

The anti-trans bloc does not care about what sex is in some bloodless, positivistic sense. It cares about what sex does — or what it might not do, in the event that transition-related care becomes widely available. One of the greatest fears of the anti-trans movement concerns a shift in the population of trans kids seeking care, who by some counts are now predominantly female-assigned. (The accuracy of this claim has been disputed .) This idea was popularized by Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which hysterically claimed that an epidemic of anxiety and depression is leading “a generation of girls” to confuse the tribulations of female puberty with true gender dysphoria. Shrier wrote that the cost of this epidemic was “a pound of flesh,” and it was no secret which pound she meant. The book’s cover features an illustration of a girl with a physical hole — you can put your finger through it — where her uterus should be. The specter of mass infertility cannot be underestimated. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the anti-trans movement is driven by a deep, unconscious dread that society will not have enough working female biology to support the deteriorating nuclear family — and, with it, the entire division of sex itself.

This probably will not happen. Sex-altering care can indeed affect one’s fertility but not always irreversibly, and the trans population is still far too small to bring about that sort of demographic apocalypse. What we are witnessing is a potential reconfiguration of the division of sex — one that is highly disturbing to anyone with an instinctive loyalty to the status quo but that is no more inherently revolutionary than, say, the contraceptive Pill. The Pill was, after all, one of the most important advancements in sex-changing medicine of the 20th century. It had a dramatic effect on women’s sexual freedom and economic independence, but it did not bring about women’s liberation. On the contrary, it became an essential part of a new regime of rational management within the division of sex known as “family planning.” One can likewise imagine a marginally more benevolent society integrating hormone therapy and puberty blockers into its own division of sex without accidentally abolishing the family or smashing the patriarchy. True political change we must bring about ourselves. Sex-affirming care has always served someone’s moral vision for society. There is no reason it cannot serve ours.

What if we make freedom into the air we together breathe?” Butler asks at the end of Who’s Afraid of Gender? It is a beautiful thought. It would not mean the abolition of social norms — an impossible task — but rather a collective reimagining of them through alliances forged across our many differences. Butler argues that the struggle for trans rights cannot be merely cultural but instead must be connected to the fight for “the basic rights to housing, food, non-toxic environments, unpayable debt, and health care.” They are entirely right. But their principled commitment to coalition building can lead them toward a needlessly conciliatory position. It is hardly clear, for instance, that “trans rights to self-determination take no one else’s rights away.” This may be technically true, if one means trans people can be granted social recognition and legal equality without spoiling anyone else’s claim to the same. But if sex really is a biological resource, then there can be no remaking of the division of sex without real material losses — this would be like saying that socialism does not take away the rights of the wealthy. Such is the limitation of a social analysis like Butler’s. It imagines the anti-trans movement as consisting primarily of religious zealots and scheming politicians, and it does not consider that many might have a material interest in opposing what we should rightly call the redistribution of sex.

We need a stronger demand. Butler argues that it would be “counterproductive and wrong” to chalk up the existence of oppressive systems to biology. But why? I am of the opinion that any comprehensive movement for trans rights must be able to make political demands at the level of biology itself. This is an old radical-feminist idea, most famously found in Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 classic The Dialectic of Sex. Suppose women’s oppression really is a product of their biology, Firestone wrote. What follows? Only that feminists must work to change biological reality. The genius of this gambit was to refuse the idea that biological facts had some kind of intrinsic moral value that social or cultural facts did not. Biology could not justify the exploitation of human beings; indeed, it could not even justify biology, which was just as capable of perpetuating injustice as any society. When Firestone wrote of women as a “sex class,” she — unlike the TERFs who followed her — had in mind the Marxist dream of a classless society, something that could be achieved only by freeing humanity from the “tyranny of its biology.” For her, this meant a “revolutionary ecological programme” of fertility control, artificial reproduction, and the full automation of labor. That may sound unrealistic. But this is the point: Justice is always an attempt to change reality.

Sex is real. So is global warming. To believe in their reality is an indispensable precondition for making normative claims about them, as we know from climate activism. But the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism. What trans kids are saying is this: The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too. We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care.

I am speaking here of a universal birthright: the freedom of sex. This freedom consists of two principal rights: the right to change one’s biological sex without appealing to gender and the right to assume a gender that is not determined by one’s sexual biology. One might exercise both of these rights toward a common goal — transition, for instance — but neither can be collapsed into the other. I am put in mind of a bicameral system. Each chamber has its own prerogatives, but neither the exclusive upper chamber (sex) nor the boisterous lower one (gender) has the ultimate power to overrule the other. (Not all trans people wish to change their sex; some trans people are also gender-nonconforming.) By asserting the freedom of sex, we may stop relying on the increasingly metaphysical concept of gender identity to justify sex-changing care, as if such care were only permissible when one’s biological sex does not match the serial number engraved on one’s soul. The same goes for “sex assigned at birth,” which unhelpfully obscures the very biological processes that many people have a right to change. In general, we must rid ourselves of the idea that any necessary relationship exists between sex and gender; this prepares us to claim that the freedom to bring sex and gender into whatever relation one chooses is a basic human right.

What does this freedom look like in practice? Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others. Let people use the gender-segregated facilities of their choice; desegregate whenever possible. Do not out children to their parents. Do not force anyone to change their sex or their gender. Give everyone health care. The anti-trans movement has collected the public’s rising awareness of the staggering injustice of the American health-care system and directed it, like a syringe full of air, at a small population of children. The effect is to make it appear as if trans people do not want good health care or trustworthy providers, when the truth is that trans people face health disparities across the board, including higher reported rates of disability, asthma, and heart disease . No single federal program would benefit trans people more than Medicare for All. As for transition-related care itself, the right to change sex includes the right to receive counseling, to understand the risks, or to be treated for comorbidities; in fact, society has a duty to make these resources freely and widely accessible to trans kids. But these are practical options, not obligations. To make “thoughtfulness” a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.

The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right. Yet we let this happen every day — and not without casualties. I am not speaking of suicide; I am speaking of the many opponents of trans rights who observe with horror that they too might have transitioned given the chance, so intensely did they hate being teenage girls . I do not know if they regret their biology today. I do suspect they regret that they never got to choose it.

A choice! The thought is impossible. Yet we have no difficulty believing that 300,000 trans kids can choose to stop being trans. Freedom is easy to imagine when it is the freedom to do as you’re told. What we cannot conceive is why they are making all this gender trouble in the first place. They do not owe us an explanation. They are busy taking charge of their own creation. They may not change the world, but they will certainly change themselves. “Possibility,” Butler once wrote, “is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.” We have not yet begun to understand the courage of the child who says she is a girl for the first time without any biological “proof” to back this up. This is especially true if she lives in one of the many states that are working to ensure that saying so is all that trans kids like her will ever have. But still she speaks. The sentence “I am a girl” is performative speech in the classic sense: It performs an action. She is not only declaring her intent to exercise her freedom of sex in the future; she is, by uttering these words, already exercising it. She is working the weakness in the norm. She is not afraid of sex — she is against it. That is not nothing. There is, in fact, a very important population of Americans who do want trans kids to exist. I am told they are small but growing.

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Guest Essay

Moral Hazard Has No Place in Addiction Treatment

By Maia Szalavitz

Ms. Szalavitz is a contributing Opinion writer who covers addiction and public policy.

In 2016, Rachel Winograd began to see methadone patients who relapsed or left the treatment program where she worked start overdosing and dying at unprecedented rates. The culprit was illicitly manufactured fentanyl, which is generally 50 times as strong as heroin — with some variants an astonishing 5,000 times as potent. Fentanyl had begun to overtake heroin in Missouri.

“We were just seeing people drop like crazy,” said Dr. Winograd. But to her utter shock, staff members did not distribute naloxone, which is also known as Narcan, a nasal spray or injection that can reverse opioid overdose, to try to save their lives.

While fighting to change this policy, she discovered that many counselors, police officers, emergency medical technicians and even some doctors believed that handing out naloxone would do more harm than good. It would “enable” continued addiction and deter treatment, she was told. Or, others said, reducing fatalities would increase risk-taking among people who were already using drugs — and encourage children to try heroin.

Dr. Winograd, who is now the director of addiction science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s Missouri Institute of Mental Health, had encountered a concept known as moral hazard, the idea that reducing exposure to the negative consequences of a risk makes people more likely to take that risk.

While this phenomenon is a demonstrable concern for regulators of financial institutions — the 2008 crash is one infamous example — there’s little evidence it holds true in matters of health and safety. Here, moral hazard is far more of a political cudgel than a proven principle. As we face the worst overdose death crisis in American history, we can’t allow moral panic over moral hazard to drive out policies that have proved to save lives.

The University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman introduced the idea of moral hazard to health policy in 1975. His data, he claimed, showed that seatbelt laws backfire because when drivers feel safer they take more risks, canceling out any benefit. Also known as risk compensation, the concept rapidly caught on as an argument against regulation.

But later research (as well as a continued significant decline in fatalities per mile as safety improvements continued) poured cold water on his conclusions. Researchers occasionally find a small moral hazard effect that is rarely enough to outweigh benefits. However, in most studies in areas as diverse as the influence of bicycle helmets on rider speed and the human papillomavirus vaccine on teen sexual behavior , moral hazard simply isn’t observed.

Despite the evidence, this idea continues to haunt addiction debates — specifically over harm reduction policies like drug decriminalization, programs that provide clean needles to prevent infectious disease and naloxone distribution to reverse overdose.

Some economists claim to have evidence that moral hazard eliminates most positive effects of harm reduction and increases overdose deaths. They use a method called causal inference, which, when its measures are set appropriately, can show cause and effect, unlike the observational research typical in public health.

For example, a 2018 study led by the economist Jennifer Doleac reported that naloxone distribution led to a 14 percent increase in overdose deaths in the Midwest, leading the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle to endorse its claims of moral hazard . A 2022 study by the Vanderbilt University economist Analisa Packham used similar methods to claim that clean needle programs (which also distribute naloxone) caused a 25 percent increase in opioid-related fatalities.

These findings generated enormous controversy because they run contrary to the overwhelming majority of public health data — as well as to the recommendations of experts from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . More recent studies should bring humility to those who rely on data to make causal claims about behavior that they do not study directly — and to those who see moral hazard in harm reduction.

Researchers who dug into Ms. Doleac’s data found that it relied on erroneous assumptions about when naloxone availability increased in states that were studied. This is a crucial error, because if naloxone availability didn’t rise when the paper claimed that it had, it could not have caused subsequent overdose deaths. The study also had other flaws that rendered its conclusions unreliable. Ms. Packham’s research exhibited similar measurement problems and could not explain why small expansions of syringe exchange programs supposedly caused harm while massive expansions did not.

Moreover, a study of over 1,300 drug injectors published in 2023 found no changes in drug risk behavior after naloxone distribution and education started. A randomized trial of co-dispensing naloxone with opioid prescriptions in Colorado pharmacies also found no moral hazard effect.

Claims that harm reduction programs encourage teenage drug use by making it less dangerous do not hold up, either. As naloxone access has boomed, misuse of heroin and prescription opioids by high school seniors has plummeted . In 2007, 0.9 percent of 12th graders reported taking heroin and 9.2 percent reported misusing prescription opioids; those figures were 0.1 percent and 1 percent in 2023.

To further understand why moral hazard is especially unlikely to affect overdose, it’s critical to know how people with addiction actually behave.

For example, one methadone patient described his periods of active addiction to Dr. Winograd this way: “Look, all the money I have that day I’m going to spend on dope. All the dope I have I’m going to use.” Hansel Tookes, who founded Florida’s first legal syringe services program, shared the same sentiments. “My patients tell me they spend every dime that they have made that day. And then they wake up and they do it again,” Dr. Tookes said.

Stories like these typify the experience of addiction. And this means that even if naloxone did make addicted people more likely to take riskier amounts, it wouldn’t matter because it doesn’t provide the money needed to obtain them. (One would think economists would consider the role of economics.)

But there’s another compelling reason that naloxone doesn’t cause moral hazard, which is evident to anyone who understands the extremely unpleasant nature of having an overdose reversed. Naloxone immediately causes a distressing withdrawal syndrome — the experience people with addiction overwhelmingly seek to avoid.

Dr. Winograd has found that the more educated people are about addiction and the more closely they work with such patients, the less likely they are to endorse moral hazard arguments. The police are more likely to have these concerns than emergency medical technicians, who in turn are more likely to worry about moral hazard than addiction medicine doctors.

While it is possible that under some circumstances, reducing harm might increase risk-taking, this concern should not stand in the way of access to medications proven to save lives. It makes sense to apply the idea of moral hazard to banking — where the data shows that bailing out investors can make financiers more likely to gamble, especially with other people’s money. It does not follow that we should use the theoretical possibility that reducing harm might increase risk-taking in some settings to gamble with people’s lives.

Maia Szalavitz (@maiasz) is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction Is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction.”

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