The Paradox of Intrinsicality of Ethical Norms

People don’t lie, because they are afraid of the outcomes. But in the same time, we can’t trust people that don’t lie just because they are afraid of the negative outcomes. We want them to have a sense of duty instead. Though, the duty needs to have an explanation, which circular references to the original reason, not to have the bad outcomes. How is this possible? Well, bear with me, we will dive into that…

We are all behaving according to some norms, written/unwritten rules. As an example, it is not ok to behave people rudely. But what is behaving rude? “behaving rude” has lots of sub definitions, like “It is not ok to insult somebody”. And “to insult” also has lots of subsections, like “You can’t tell somebody that they have low intelligence”. Also there are some exceptions, if you are a doctor and you need to tell somebody that they literally have low intelligence after an IQ test that they requested, it is fine.

We are living our lives according to these norms that are widely accepted, in order to have keep our reputable place in the society. In case that we think the norm is not correct, or there should be a norm to regulate a behavior, we start a discussion to change it. To change or create a new norm, we need to find some legitimacy to base it on. For example, if you see that people are sneezing freely and you want them not to sneeze at peoples faces, you can tell them that this is how the germs are spread around. So you base your legitimacy on another norm, “spreading disease is not ok”.

It is not easy to find a legitimacy for all rules though, there are some very fundamental norms that people are living by. If you try to explain why they are there, it might take books to write and specialization on a profession, or multiple professions.

We will not get into detail with these kind of norms. In this article, we will discuss where should the norms come from.

What should we base our behaviors on?

There are two schools of ethics, utilitarians, who say that ethics take their guidance from the utility (good or bad outcome) of the result, and the deontologists who take their guidance from the set of rules that decide what is correct and wrong (well, some circular reference here).
And well… There is a long going discussion on who is right, but they are actually both right in the same time. Now let’s explain why we need both approaches, and why they are not mutually exclusive.

Let’s think of a very simple example, by asking “Why should we behave nice to a friend?”. Let’s start from the deontologist side. We should, because it is right to do so. It is a duty of a person with good quality of character. But we are missing the source of the norm right? Where did this rule/norm come from? Could it be the traditions? But well, how did that traditions form for the first time though? What if it was actually wrong? Or what if it was something that would lose its validity with time? Deontology has a big problem, it doesn’t have the notion of progress. It is frozen. You might continue living with the same values for thousand of years. Well, actually you can not, it will end up with collapse of the whole system since there is no way of recreating new norms according to changes in our way of living. The discrepancy between life and norms will grow to an unbearable point in time. This is how revolutions happen.

Let’s give a very simple example, not one that will cause a revolution. It is not as bad as before to come late to a pub crawl right? Everybody have cell phones nowadays, nobody will have to wait for you. What if you keep insisting on the grave importance of being punctual? You might create unnecessary crisis with people.

The humanity has a long history of trials and errors. Lots of different set of rules made human societies rise and fall. We are living in a society that is based on the mix of traditions that worked out good enough to survive for conditions of their time when they emerged. This means that every norm has a benefit for the individual or the society, so that it could survive. As an example, behaving nice to a person will create a reciprocal relation between these two people. And it will increase both peoples’ life quality. Also it will contribute to your reputation, which will end up making more people behave better to you. But why can’t we just follow the utilitarian way then?

As the deontology has its problem with circular reference and rigidness, there are several problems with utilitarianism. First of all, when it is used as the sole source of norms, it comes with a huge ego. It ends up with rejecting whatever the traditions came up with as a whole, undermining the huge number of problems that those set of rules were able to overcome in a long past. We can’t undermine experience of existing norms. Only taking oneself’s limited brain power, trying to simulate life and come up with rules that are ultimate solution for life will definitely not work.

This is how we had the age of ideologies and ended up with disasters all around the world while trying to replace all the norms at once, in the last century. Not having some sanity checks like “Taking human life is bad”, was nearly collapsing the human civilization. As an outcome of this, utilitarianism learned to be careful and take baby steps instead. Change things slightly, have some sanity checks, try for a while, see if it works, and proceed to the next iteration. While this is fixed, we have another problem that doesn’t seem much fixable, without using the idea that deontologists are coming with.

The second problem of utilitarianism is the paradox of intrinsicality of ethics, which is the subject of this article. There are two points that are failing each other. Let’s use our example to reveal the problem.

• There should be a benefit to individuals and the society for behaving nice to friends (taking care of each other), so that this norm can propagate and survive as a human cultural meme. We can’t blindly obey rules (Utilitarianism)
• If someone is behaving according to a rule which we can call as “being nice”, just to make some benefits out of it, why shouldn’t that person cheat time to time and stop being nice when it is not to his benefit anymore? Actions should come from rules telling what is right or wrong, not decisions for each event (Deontology)

Let’s investigate the latter, since the first one is clear.

The norms don’t only consist of “being good” and “being bad”, norms also include some checks that let us detecting if a behavior will repeat or not.

We generally try to see if the person is behaving nice because one wants to be nice, or because one has some benefit. For the latter, one will loss our trust. We do this subconsciously and we do it right, since there is a reason for that; we want people with stable behaviors, so that communities can last. We need trust in our lives. What if there is no benefit anymore? Think of people with absolute power, if nobody has power over them why should they behave nicely? Of course there are still many ways of explaining why it is still better, a functioning society progresses much better but that is not the idea with which the people wielding absolute power generally end up.

Another problem is, what the people with behavioral problems are generally suffering. Once you start behaving in a way that is looking for opportunities of cheating, you will always cheat. It is like breaking the wall of the dam. Learning how to behave in a stable way and coping up with its problems takes long years and suffering like building the dam takes a long time, as well as learning how to cheat takes a long time also.

There will be thousands of cases that you don’t know how to cope up with your new just behavior if you try to switch years later, and you will fail constantly till you learn. This causes people with behavioral problems to give up fast.

Deontology teaches us the way of caution and persistence, utilitarianism lets us to have the notion of progress. We need both.