Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Entanglements and the claims of mere humanity
- Chapter 3 Duties and rights, charity and justice
- Chapter 4 “Negative” and “positive” duties
- Chapter 5 Oughts and cans
- Chapter 6 Why people do what others do – and why that’s not so bad
- Chapter 7 Whose poor?/who’s poor?: deprivation within and across borders
- Chapter 8 Hopefully helping: the perils of giving
- Chapter 9 On motives and morality
- Chapter 10 Conclusion: morality for mere mortals
- Works cited
- Index
Chapter 5 - Oughts and cans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Entanglements and the claims of mere humanity
- Chapter 3 Duties and rights, charity and justice
- Chapter 4 “Negative” and “positive” duties
- Chapter 5 Oughts and cans
- Chapter 6 Why people do what others do – and why that’s not so bad
- Chapter 7 Whose poor?/who’s poor?: deprivation within and across borders
- Chapter 8 Hopefully helping: the perils of giving
- Chapter 9 On motives and morality
- Chapter 10 Conclusion: morality for mere mortals
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
Leading an ethical life is demanding. It means that we must sometimes act in ways we would not otherwise choose to act – sometimes do what we would rather not do or refrain from doing what we would prefer to do. This much seems unsurprising. If leading an ethical life demanded nothing of us over and above what we would normally or naturally do, “ethics” would have no point. It would be merely descriptive – telling us how people behave, and how they judge each other – rather than prescriptive or normative. And in that case it would lack a central feature – perhaps the central feature – of ethics or morality. As philosophers like to put it, morality is “action-guiding.”
This is not to deny that description has its place. Anthropologists and journalists may describe how members of a group behave and what rules guide them without making any moral judgments, and such accounts can be interesting and informative. But if we want to know what to do, either because we are agents who have to act, or because we need to judge what standards of behavior are appropriate and right for other people as well as ourselves, we are in the realm of prescription rather than description, the normative and not simply the empirical.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Distant StrangersEthics, Psychology, and Global Poverty, pp. 97 - 121Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013