It’s been quite a while since I taught ethics to the officers of the British army. Most of them were newly promoted majors about to take up command responsibility in Iraq or Afghanistan, acutely aware that moral decision-making was going to play a life or death role in their immediate future. They sat up straight in the lecture theatre at Shrivenham, all sharp as a pin in their uniforms; the most attentive students I’d ever had. They thought about ethics like it seriously mattered. But I think I learnt the most during those sessions. The challenges of doing the right thing on such a complex environment as the modern battlefield provided a very engrossing stress test for the sort of theoretical moral theories that I had had been teaching at university. The lessons I learnt have stayed with me, and have application, I believe, to our current predicament.
It is not just culture that is upstream of politics, so too are the basic moral/ethical theories that feed into our political decision making. Broadly speaking, there are three very different moral systems of thought — rule-based ethics, or deontological ethics; utilitarianism; and so-called Virtue ethics or character based ethics — and it struck me that they would lead to three very different approaches to a crisis like Covid. So how have these different systems fared when confronted with the complex moral questions that a pandemic presents?
Rule-based ethics is, on the surface at least, the easiest to understand. It is the “thou shalt not” approach: ethics that can be codified in law as a set of rules or instructions. This is what most people expect moral instruction to look like. But though apparently easy to understand, this approach finds it hard to keep up with a fast-moving situation. As Covid spreads, affecting different areas differently, expanding and contracting over weeks, the idea that such a complex environment can be covered by some very basic rules feels extremely naive. Hence Matt Lucas’s fabulous impersonation of Boris Johnson’s bumbling confusion.
“So we are saying don’t go to work, go to work. Don’t take public transport, go to work, don’t go to work. Stay indoors. If you can work from home, go to work. Don’t go to work. Go outside, don’t go outside. And then we will or wont .. er .. something or other.”
The fact that BJ has just had to apologise for not correctly remembering the rules is a stunning indictment of this whole approach. I have no idea what the rules are now, and I don’t suppose many of the rest of us have either. And that is because rule-based approaches are very clumsy moral instruments for such capricious circumstances.
On the battlefield, soldiers are asked to abide by a voluminous amount of legislation covering their behaviour. But the idea that they might look things up as they prepare to pull the trigger, as bullets are pinging about all over the place, and when they haven’t slept for a few days, is simply preposterous. Real-time moral decision making just doesn’t look like that. And it doesn’t look like that with Covid either because the rules necessarily multiply when faced with complexity. There are not 10 commandments in the Hebrew Bible, there are 613. And most of us can’t remember all of them either.
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