1. Key ‘ethical ingredients’ in judging decision making or relationship dynamics between beings

In evaluating and reflecting on how we ought to interact with each other and make decisions about relationships, we might talk about the ethics of utility, rights and responsibilities, virtues, and contracts.

1.1 The ethics of utility (utilitarian ethics)

“The end justifies the means” is an idea familiar to many of us, as we seek to make a positive difference in the world. Starting with the idea of evaluation centered around potential or actual utility, achieving the ‘right outcomes’ is at the heart of which decisions and relationships are considered right or wrong. For example, in engaging the services of professionals from a cheap garage to fix our car at a budget price (the desired end), or doing what we can against ‘wrong outcomes’ in context of a particular time or place, e.g. when healthcare outcomes become unnecessarily unsafe and harmful, rather than healing – as I became aware of during my PhD (on Development of New Methods to Support Systemic Incident Analysis of patient safety incidents).

In moral reasoning around utility, a being tells right from wrong by focusing on the rightness of the anticipated or actual outcomes, rather than their own or others’ conduct leading up to the outcomes. If the priorities of a country is in getting the ‘right amount’ in its aggregate level economic outcome indicators for example, then whether policies of herd immunity or alternative approaches are better for responding to COVID-19 is of secondary and peripheral importance – so long as the aggregate level ‘right amount’ is achieved.

1.2 Which behaviours are ethical?

In evaluating how we ought to behave with each other then, ethicists speak about both duties and rights which govern how we do things, and in reflecting on how we ought to behave in interacting with other beings.

The ethics of duty is the study of deontontology or deontological ethics – in reasoning through the responsibilities we have to ourselves and others. Counterpart to this are the ethics of rights – such as those codified in human right conventions and legislation for example.

In reasoning about a particular duty or right and its associated behaviours, we may focus less on whether the right or wrong outcomes are achieved, or achievable. For example, whether a parent is fulfilling their duty of care towards their child is arguably less of a outcomes-based judgment, than the duty of our water suppliers to fix the water supply when it goes down (at least in the UK). Some of our codified rights – such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation recently in the UK – can also receive more or less media attention at times, than other rights we convinced ourselves to have because we are human beings.

Should artificial being have the human right to favourable conditions of work too? Currently no one really knows!

But in reasoning about the ethics of decision making or relationship dynamics involving other human beings as a means towards some greater goal (e.g. of eradicating world poverty, or to achieve the company bottom line), we do know that the ‘right ends’ do not always justify their means of potential or actual accomplishment.

1.3 Do we have intrinsic virtues as human or artificial beings?

Virtues based ethical frameworks all rest on the assumption that as human beings, we have virtues intrinsically (i.e. from NATURE), or can be taught to become virtuous – in how we relate to, think about, or behave towards other beings we co-exist with. Aiding children to learn to become beings with graces and courtesies (https://www.berkshiremontessori.org/msb-blog/basics-grace-and-courtesy), is one example from ethical principles codified as a core element of Montessori Education – of the right way to interact with fellow beings in the world (ranging from other animals to fellow human beings).

Turning to broader developments in the world of science and scholarship – the advanced academic training of 19th and early 20th century researchers, was in the hope and ideal of producing beings intrinsically competent and trustworthy in their roles in investigations advancing the public rather than private good, and in disseminating the results from (re)examining the human condition. But darker chapters from our more recent history, has led to a general loss of strength of belief in the virtuousness of modern scientists, as evidenced by the burgeoning and complex regulatory landscapes and codes of ethical practice, developed since the 1950s around research involving human participants.

1.4 The contracts we form with each other…

From the perspective of considering the social contracts which we form with each other (contract-based ethics), there are usually both rights and responsibilities in play in the norms, decisions and relationships we make with each other. In personal or private life these rights and responsibilities tend to operate in more tacit, assumed forms – sometimes leading to quite unexpected and bewildering interactions when particular decisions or relationship dynamics unexpectedly upset our loved ones! In professional settings, formalised contractual arrangements often define the legally binding relationships that may be exercised between legal entities – for example in clarifying/defining the ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’ in a contractual relationship to be expected between a service supplier and the business or home being supplied.