Adam Oliver's Reviews > Ethics: A Very Short Introduction

I love these short introductions, but their space limitations are obvious, so that take that into account in this review. I am particularly educated in the Christian ethical tradition, so I was somewhat frustrated that Blackburn rejected religiously founded ethics quite glibly in the first section, with largely straw-man critique, but this is forgivable as it is not the author's perspective. With deity based ethics dismissed, he leads readers through possible retorts that this undermines ethical foundations thus allowing all ethical perspectives to stand equally valid; his format that took these concerns on straightforwardly were the principle reason I was interested in this work, even more so than his thoughts on nihilism. He dismissed the relativism critique rather shorthandly since he has an entire section on foundations to close the book. This was where I was expecting to find some meat to justify the dismissal of religious ethics and its accompanying concerns of moral relativism, but I was a bit disappointed. His short summaries of Kant and Rawls' attempts to ground ethics rationally are commendable, though he acknowledges that they still seem to come up short. In the end, he seems to argue that there is enough in common humanity to ground ethics reasonably, if not Reasonably. I struggled to get an answer for how ethical disputes might be settled reasonably if different groups have competing conceptions of what is "good." This to me is a key question of ethics, how can we make judgments about what is right or good that can be backed by more than our social or violent power to enforce them? Blackburn argues that humanity largely agrees on such "unpretentious things" as "Happiness is preferable to misery, and dignity is better than humiliation. It is bad that people suffer, and worse if a culture turns a blind eye to their suffering. Death is worse than life; the attempt to find a common point of view is better than manipulative contempt for it." I think only recently of popular American debates about torture, and it does not seem at all clear that American humans (much less a wider sampling of human cultures) can agree on several of these things. And if humanity did have some kind of mysterious common moral center as Blackburn seems to believe, wouldn't that open up a whole other set of metaphysical questions about how/why this came to be or what it might be in the future? Overall, not a bad "short introduction," he does hit several hot button ethical issues like abortion and violence, and covers a number of important names in ethics such as Aristotle, Hume, Locke, and Rawls. As Christian and a historian, I'd like to have seen some engagement with folks like Augustine and Aquinas, who have profound influence in the Western tradition whether one agrees or not, but again, it's a short introduction so cuts must be made.