Chapter 4 - Can Machines Act Ethically?

Summary

Introduction

One might presume that the job of an expert in ethics is to mark the line between what is right and what is wrong. And – one might add – the way the ethicist is supposed to achieve this goal is by drawing up a list of general principles of behaviour. In the celebrated essay ‘Virtue and Reason’ (1979), McDowell's central concern is precisely to delineate an alternative to this approach to the study of ethics. As we shall see in ‘Virtue and Uncodifiable Reasons’, in fact, McDowell claims that the task of ethics cannot be approached by identifying a set of rules of conduct to govern our actions. Any such endeavour is in fact condemned to failure for, he argues, our moral outlook is simply not susceptible to codification in a set of rules.

At first, the impossibility of encoding our moral outlook into a finite number of principles might even strike us as a plausible thesis. After all – it could be argued – anyone who has ever attempted the feat has certainly failed. However, upon reflection, we can detect a certain tension between such uncodifiability and our ordinary intuitions about rationality. Indeed, to accept an action as rational is to regard it as appropriate to an acknowledged goal, be it aiming at the truth or, in the case of morality, aiming at the good. For this reason, rationality requires consistency – acting rationally implies acting consistently towards a given end. But – we normally assume – one's consistent actions must be explicable in terms of their being guided by some general rule – how could one go on doing the same thing if not by following something like a rule; a universal principle? Therefore, since moral action is a form of rational action, we intuitively conclude that it too should be explicable in rule-following terms. Yet, McDowell insists, this conclusion is too quick. Indeed – as we shall see in ‘A Wittgesteinian Route to Aristotle?’ – he argues that it is Wittgenstein's great merit to have compellingly shown us that a rule-following conception of rationality is nothing but a deep-rooted prejudice.