Resume Case

Philosophy, in general, can be very frustrating, as you have probably already discovered. Philosophers are particularly good at coming up with ways to make people confused: Perhaps you are certain that you know something, and then the philosopher comes along and convinces you that you shouldn't be so certain, or even that you are wrong! But ethics may be worse: We may not care so much about whether what we claim to know we really do know. But ethical challenges grip us in a way that is different. Would it be wrong to take food from a grocery store in order to feed my family? Should I lie to the police in order to protect my boss, and thus save my job? I think my next-door neighbor is selling crack; should I tell someone about it? The only pharmacist in town has a drug that will save my spouse's life, but I can't afford it; would it be moral to steal it?

It would be nice if we had a "moral calculator" that we could ask these kinds of questions to: Then, if it is operating correctly, it would always tell us the correct moral answer (and the moral answer everyone else will agree on!). Unfortunately, there isn't any better chance of finding a "moral calculator" than there is for getting such a calculator to answer any number of questions that are important yet difficult to answer. We will see questions of this type not just in ethics, but in the following chapters on what we can know (epistemology) and on faith and God (the philosophy of religion). To use the language we introduced earlier, we generally don't have "effective decision procedures" we can use to solve problems in philosophy.