Philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard didn’t just question ethics—they fundamentally challenged its role in human flourishing, sparking debates that still influence ethics courses today.
This lesson first looks at what issues these critics have with ethics. We then survey three of the more popular arguments outlining how ethics can actually threaten your integrity.
As you’ll see, each philosopher has a different understanding of integrity. Nietzsche argues that integrity requires a strong commitment to self-creation. Kierkegaard thinks that integrity demands a unique relationship with God. Taoists think that integrity requires a way of harmonizing with nature. In each case, you see that each of the three philosophers suggests that wielding the sorts of impersonal principles and rules promoted by traditional ethics means living life in a way that dangerously threatens your capacity to embody the integrity seen as important by each one.
An approach to ethics that relies on codes, rules, and principles thought to be impartial and universal.
The quality of being true to one’s own values or nature, even when facing external pressures.
Have you ever felt that following a rule made you act against your own beliefs or instincts?
Understanding the Challenges to Ethics
Not everyone is a fan of the traditional understanding of ethics. The criticism focused on here suggests that traditional ethics—by which we mean an ethics with a focus on impersonal codes, rules, and formulas—prevents a person from living a life that expresses integrity.
In workplaces today, policies and codes of conduct are intended to ensure fairness but can sometimes feel restrictive or disconnected from employees’ real values and challenges.
To begin, you may wonder why anyone—except for maybe an immoral person who wants to do bad things—would want to attack ethics. As it turns out, some critics simply want to draw attention to possible concerns about ethics that people may want to keep in mind. After all, if ethics is biased instead of impartial, you want to know that, right? If it doesn’t have the universal authority it claims to have, you may want to be informed of that too. Lastly, if traditional ethics prevents a person from living in a way that expresses integrity, that’s important to point out for lots of folks. As you can see from these points, criticisms of ethics can be roughly reduced to three general types:
- Criticisms based on concerns about bias
- Criticisms based on worries about status or authority
- Criticisms based on threats to integrity
The following sections take a look at these three types of criticisms that usually are advanced against ethics. Because we examine versions of the first two types of criticism in other modules, the following sections only briefly review the first two types. We then delve deep into the third type of objection—highlighting threats to integrity—setting you up for the discussion in the rest of the lesson, which highlights three different philosophers’ versions of that objection.
Want to go deeper? The science behind bias in ethics
Researchers in moral psychology have found that our ethical intuitions often reflect the norms of our communities and cultures. This means what we consider “universal” ethical truths are frequently shaped by history, power, and social identity.
Why do you think people might distrust ethical systems that claim to be universal?
Bias-Based Arguments
Some critics argue that ethics isn’t as impartial as it suggests. Instead, they argue that it’s actually fairly biased. In other words, some critics feel that instead of even-handedly representing what all humans ought to do from a disinterested perspective, ethics reflects what certain powerful groups would like others to do while at the same time masquerading as disinterested. According to this objection, because ethics springs from and promotes the interests of certain groups, it simultaneously marginalizes the interests of less powerful groups.
Practitioners note that ethical codes in organizations sometimes unintentionally reflect the values of those in charge—often overlooking the experiences of minorities or less powerful stakeholders.
Bias-based arguments are typically divided into three types:
- Race: To call something a race-based argument is to suggest that it’s rooted in the viewpoint of Caucasians, African Americans, Asians, or any other race. To say that an ethical system is race-based would argue that it actually reflects the beliefs of a particular race while marginalizing the experiences or beliefs of other races by presenting its own moral system as universal.
- Class: Class-based arguments focus on whether ethics serves the interests of those with more power, property, and money. For example, Karl Marx argues that standard ethical theories privilege ways of thinking that maintain the economic status quo.
- Gender: Gender-based arguments state that traditional ethics is biased in favor of men, reflecting masculine ways of thinking and goals and interests.
For example, Native Americans may ask whether ethics as it has traditionally been understood is really just a reflection of the life experiences—and interests and goals—of Caucasians of European descent. Native Americans had their own system of ethics for thousands of years, but now the only thing that passes as “ethics” is the European tradition’s version. Seems fishy.
Karl Marx argues that standard ethical theories privilege ways of thinking that help to keep the rich wealthy and keep the poor destitute. Furthermore, Marx argues that this bias in traditional ethics shouldn’t be surprising. After all, it does take leisure time to develop an ethical theory, right? Well, poor folks don’t have a whole lot of leisure time. The poor were out working in the fields while the rich got together over tea and biscuits, leisurely talking about what ethics means.
Ethics may present itself as disinterestedly commenting on how humans should be or act, but it may in fact just represent the beliefs of a bunch of men who have mistaken what seems right to them with what’s right for humans in general.
Bias-Based Arguments
Tap to revealCriticisms that argue ethics actually reflects the interests of certain groups—by race, class, or gender—rather than being truly impartial.
Class-Based Argument Example
Tap to revealKarl Marx argues that traditional ethics maintain the economic status quo and serve the interests of the wealthy.
Gender-Based Argument
Tap to revealCritics claim traditional ethics is biased toward masculine perspectives, often marginalizing women’s experiences.
How might your own background shape the way you view ethical issues?
Status-Based Arguments
Another type of criticism against ethics focuses on issues of status and authority. If ethics has objective status, then the claims that it makes will be true for everyone. As a result, an objective ethics has a pretty strong set of credentials, and thus powerful authority.
If, on the other hand, ethics has relativistic status, then its claims will be true only for certain groups of people, and its authority is thus weakened. If you were to criticize ethics from this angle, you may find yourself asking whether ethics is really all just relative.
Specifically, some folks who attack the status of ethics by calling it relative argue that ethical truths are really subjective, which means that it’s possible that each individual person has his own ethical truths. Other relativist-minded folks argue that ethics is conventional, which would mean that ethical truths are really just true for this or that society. Both arguments suggest that although ethical truths exist, the status of those truths is relativistic, and thus the authority of the claims ethics makes is restricted to those ethics is relative to.
Ethics always expresses universal truths that apply to everyone, everywhere.
Many philosophers argue that ethical truths may be relative to individuals or cultures, challenging the universality of traditional ethics.
- Learned the three main types of criticisms leveled at traditional ethics: bias, status, and integrity.
- Explored how ethics can be shaped by power, background, and societal context.
Do you think ethical rules should be the same for everyone? Why or why not?
Integrity-Based Arguments
The third kind of criticism is based on what we call integrity. This criticism focuses on the way in which traditional ethics is supposed to be carried out. To start, recall that typically the greatest asset of many forms of traditional ethics is claimed to be its focus on following impartial and universal codes, rules, or principles. In fact, if you think about it, it’s this very feature that gets ethics past the bias and status arguments. If ethics is impartial, it’s not biased. If ethics contains truly universal codes, rules, or principles, it’s not relativist.
However, folks who argue against traditional ethics from an integrity perspective suggest that following impersonal rules could actually force you to suppress essential aspects of yourself, threatening your basic integrity. This sets the stage for the deeper explorations of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Taoist critiques introduced later in the module.