THE QUESTION(S) OF ETHICS: Read recently, but lost the reference.: “the key question of ethics is not ‘what ought I to do?’ but ‘what’s going on’?” I like this, at least when I first read it, because it appears to shift the focus of the ethical question from what I need to do to correctly assessing the question. It puts a priority on perception, as opposed to action. That’s probably a healthy corrective. The first ethical duty one may have in any given situation is not to do anything, but to perceive correctly.

But it is only a corrective. For one has to do something in response to a situation, even if that something is not to do anything at all, or to disengage (wisdom may be realizing those situations where one can actually do something and distinguishing them from those situations where perhaps someone could help, but not you).

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that there is another ethical question we should be asking, which goes along the lines of, “how can I make this bad thing I did better?” That’s a rough way of phrasing it. We could also ask, “what are my duties of repair to this person or in this situation?” What I mean to be getting at by these questions is the fact that much of our moral lives isn’t in figuring out the right thing to do, but fixing things when we’ve done the wrong thing, as we will invariably do most of the time (in ethics, as Aristotle famously said, there are more ways to miss the target than to hit it).

Now, the question of duties of repair can’t be the primary question, for we have to know what counts as a wrong to know that we’ve done it. Of course, there is a great importance to getting things right the first time. But practically speaking, duties of repair figure much more prominently in ethical life than ethical theory would suggest. We have to apologize for the things we have done, or in other ways try to make “good” on a bad we have done. Things go wrong and situations are complicated, as Strawson said. But we will not have an excuse or justification when things go wrong. So we will have to say we are sorry.

And it is not merely saying one is sorry, there is an art to it, saying that one is sorry in the right way and at the right time. One can easily spot insincere apologies, which only make things worse and lead one to incur additional duties of repair.
- posted by Chad @ Monday, June 06, 2005