Ich springe durch die Pendeltür, habe alles sofort im Blick;
nur eben nicht die Pendeltür, die schlägt mir ins Genick.

(German Saying. Use google translator to understand it.)

 

In contrast with most people I do not think that ethics is about finding out what is morally good and to do it.

I believe that ethics is the practice of increasing a persons capability to act.

Traditionally, ethics offers one central means or instrument to achieve this goal: virtues.

Virtues are nothing else than habits which increase a persons capability to act while vices are addictions which decrease a persons capability to act.

E.g. in order to be able to act you have to stay healthy, keep your body in good shape, keep it clean, eat healthy food and sleep enough. All these activities are virtuous.

But there is much more about it: E.g. storing your keys all the time in the same place in order not to have to search for them is a virtue too. The reason for that is the narrow bandwith of the human consciousness. The human brain is like a computer with much to little RAM. Therefore, everything you have to think about consciously keeps you from action. E.g., if you want to write something, and you think to yourself: But in order to write I first have to clean my desk and then I will have to look for my notebook, and finally I will have to find a ball-point, most probably you will not arrive at writing. If you want to write somethink, everything has to lay there, prepared, in order to facilitate writing.

Hence virtues are generally about order, and ethics is generally about cleaning, repairing and organising your things.

Vices, on the contrary, are about disorder. They promise immediate happiness, but make you fall off your track and, ultimately lead to pain and misery. I tend to think about vices like they are presented in Western movies: for the cowboy vices are represented by the city and the saloon. His vices are 1. alcohol, 2. gambling, 3. women. All three of them he finds in the saloon. He will enter the saloon, get drunk on whiskey, lose all his money – and finally he will get kicked out through the swing door onto the dusty main street of the village.

Outside of the village the cowboy is virtuous because of the sheer abscence of vice and distractions. Nature forces him to watch his step and that of his horse and to watch out for scorpions, rattle-snakes and other wild animals. Nature forces him to keep his things together. But in the saloon promises of immediate heavenly happiness convince him to let himself go. And this is ultimately the essential difference between virtues and vices: virtues are about grabbing the steering wheel of your life, vices are about letting it go.

There are basically two groups of people who do not believe that ethics consists in the practice of preparing and facilitating human action as I have described it here:

1. There are those people who think that a human individual is able to do anything he decides to the moment he decides to do it. These people believe that action for a human being is always immediately available, that it does not need any preparation, and that, therefore, human beings do not require any practice of self management.
2. There are those people who think that ethics is just about finding out which actions are morally good and required. They confound morals (=what other people expect from us) with ethics (=what we expect from ourselves), and from this starting point they conclude that a good human life is a life where we just live for others and do not have a life of our own.

If you look at those two group of people you may find out that they well may belong to the same tribe: to the group of people who thinks that ethics is about doing what is morally required and that doing what is morally required is easy because it just requires a decision by the person that wants to act ethically, i.e. by the ethical person.

These are the persons who will claim that it is ethically required to save a person from drowning in a lake without even asking if the possible saviour can swim. In other words: they do not know that human action is difficult and needs a lot of preparation. E.g. saving a person who is drowning in a lake does not only require a person who has learned how to swim but also a person who keeps herself healthy and in continuous training.

To say that a human being is able to do anything anytime he takes the decision to to it basically equals to the attitude that ethics is not necessary at all, because ethics equals to all those preparatory works that make it easier to start doing something and to keep it going when your are already involved in action.

Actually, what virtues ultimately are about is that for human beings starting to do something is very hard, and that, therefore, the best way to live is by not stopping doing the things you do.

In order to make yourself an idea of what ethics is about you have to thing about the human being as a heavy train. I costs immense strength and will power to put it in motion; and if the way goes uphill or if there are problems lurking ahead, it will be impossible to actuate the train. However, it will be possible to overcome most problems and hindrances if the train is already in motion and running at speed.

Ethics is that kind of self management where the human individual asks himself whether he is still in motion, whether he has his act together and whether he is doing all regular maintenance work on his machine in order to stay in motion. (That does not mean that it is not good sometimes to stop, look around and find new orientation in life; it just means that it is necessary to understand how difficult it is for a human being to get going and get traction.)

If you have read my text till the end and if you agree with it, you will now be unable to discuss ethics with any academic or professional ethicist. Neither will you be able to make yourself understandable to any non-philosopher or lay-person who just has a general idea of ethics which is mostly originated by what professional ethicists define as ethics.

Professional ethicists have made it impossible to discuss human action because they thing human action is easy (it justs depends on human decisions); therefore they believe it suffices to find out what should be done in order for people to do it (if they only want to be ethical persons).

Meanwhile consultants earn a lot of money by offering people services to help them e.g. to stop smoking. They make profits because the academic “decisionists” (=those who believe that a decision suffices and that actions do not require preparations) have made people believe that understanding that smoking is hazadous for health is enough to be able to stop smoking. Smokers who are unable to stop smoking will then think that they are weak while, in reality, they just do not know that human action is difficult. For intelligent people doing things seems to be so easy while they are struggling.

Take away the instruments for doing things from people (=ethics), and they will fail. And they will think that others who are able to get things done possess superpowers while they, in reality, just do possess virtues.