What Makes You the Kind of Ethicist You Are?

Most people seem to fall naturally into the two great ethical categories -- rules-based, or consequence-based. In other words, should you not lie because "you shall not lie"? Or should you not lie because of the negative consequences of your lie?

Both schools have powerful spokespersons: Immanuel Kant for the "categorical imperative" school and John Stuart Mill for the "greatest good" school.

I had never really thought about why someone would internalize one ethical school rather than the other, but new research seems to suggest that one's access (or lack thereof) to power is a crucial component.

A new post by Tom Jacobs on the Miller-McCune website reports that researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands found that "those who were pre-programmed to think in terms of having power 'had a stronger preference for the rule-based moral considerations, compared to participants in the low-power condition, who had a stronger preference for the outcome-based moral considerations.'" (An abstract of Joris Lammers and Diederik Stapel's article for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology can be found here.)

Lammers and Stapel note that "rule-based thinking is attractive to the powerful because stability is in their interest, and therefore, cognitively appealing." Jacobs reports that previous reseach suggests that powerful people "tend to focus on the big picture rather than small details." That big-picture focus may help them attain power, but it also means that they may lose sight of the effects their decisions have on people who don't have the power to change those decisions.

The research won't change the kind of ethicist I am (full disclosure: I admire rules-based ethics for its logical rigor, but I'll always be an "it depends" person), but it does make me think about what made me an outcome-based ethicist.

Sweeping generalization: women are more likely to be outcome-based ethicists, and men are more likely to be rules-based ethicists. Traditional ethics has been accused of favoring "'male' ways of moral reasoning that emphasize rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over 'female' ways of moral reasoning that emphasize relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality." (from "Feminist Ethics" in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) Lammers and Stapel's research could support "status-oriented" feminist approaches to ethics, which suggest that women's "second-sex" status is a primary reason for their "different" ethical approaches.

Whether you buy the very concept of feminist ethics or not, this research should make us all think more deeply about why we value the ethical truths we hold dear.