Reflection on ‘Maxim 3’ (No system of formal ethics)

“No system of formal ethics can properly account for the range of human experience.”
–Maxim 3

This is an interesting one to approach, because one has to understand the phrase “system of formal ethics”. I assume, as the ministry came through me, that it should be understood through the lens of my own understanding at the time. After all, I do not get the sense that ministry is literally words being put in our mouths (or at our hands); it is, rather, a sense of knowledge or the shape of an idea that makes use of our own faculties to be recorded. It is in this way that ministry also comes in the form of verse or visual artwork. This does not mean that the person through whom the ministry is delivered understands it fully, of course – rather that they have better context than others, perhaps, for discerning the meaning of specific terms. It’s important to know that sometimes that context gives little overall insight, but when it comes to what a phrase means, there are certainly times that it is helpful.

(There are also times when ministry comes in a way that adamantly insists on certain words being used without conscious understanding of why on the part of the person through which it comes. That is not the usual situation, in my experience, but it is not uncommon.)

What, then, did I understand at the time by a system of formal ethics? Not being an academic philosopher, I would not mean the work of Harry Gensler, a very specific symbolic formalism known as formal ethics. Nor precisely do I think it would mean the slightly more general ethical formalism, in which it is the logical form of moral judgements that determines their ‘rightness’. It is, really, most likely to be a use of those terms in what I see as their everyday meanings – a system of ethics being a structure or series of structures for determining rightness and wrongness, and it is formal if it has can be expressed formally. Doing more reading in preparation for this reflection, I suppose that what might be the closest fit in ‘proper’ philosophy would be normative ethics, or rather any particular set of normative ethics with its overarching principle(s) for determining goodness and all the consequences that are derived from that basis. Not that all normative ethical systems fit this idea of what I understand of “formal ethics”; intuitive ethics need not have that formal structure, though in some formulations it does. Hedonism, consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics tend to do so, from my perspective as an educated layman. They set out some basic principle or principles, some essence of goodness and wrongness from which acts might be judged. Hedonism values the maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain; consequentialism judges acts by their consequences, while deontology judges acts more as moral or immoral in themselves or based on duties or motives that led to the acts, divorced from their consequences. Virtue ethics relates good acts to virtues, patterns or thoughts or behaviour that are in themselves good. Ethics as a whole, whether normative, applied or meta-ethics, are a huge discipline within philosophy and I have barely scratched the surface in my own reading. If you are interested in these things, I encourage you to find some good resources to read – you’ll probably outstrip my understanding in no time, and then be able to tell me all the ways in which I’ve gotten these descriptions wrong. That’s fine; the details aren’t important, and the overarching idea is relevant only in terms of the meaning one can draw from this maxim, which as it was delivered in relative ignorance of ‘proper’ philosophy probably shouldn’t be understood in terms of such philosophy.

What is important in the context of this maxim is that these approaches to ethics seem to become formulaic. The formula in question may be terribly complex, but always of finite complexity. Yet the experience of the human condition, of being part of our various cultures and societies, may not be finite in complexity. We are always finding new ways to cause suffering, whether we intend to or not. We are always finding new questions, new ways of acting towards one another. We are always creating new contexts and situations that have not been considered before. Those systems that are represented by the phrase “systems of formal ethics” largely suggest that applying ethical principles to these new situations are simply (or not so simply) a case of applying the relevant overarching principle(s) to that situation, and working it through logically, formulaically, to get to the right answer as to what is morally right.

To me, what this maxim is saying is that every such system will break down in some situation or another. It will either be impossible to apply due to a lack of knowledge or a clear lack of relevance, or it will seem to be applicable but produce obviously, intuitively wrong answers. Even where a system of formal ethics is actually based on detailed and seemingly exhaustive guidance on many situations, as can be found in some sacred texts, or even where it is based on some ‘essential’ principle like love for all humanity, it will reach the end of its usefulness sometime – some more quickly than others.

What can we then do? Are we doomed to never know what actions are right and wrong? Well, yes and no. We cannot know with certainty; though we in western society are very good at feeling subjective certainty, real epistemological certainty, justified certainty, is hard to come by. As we cannot define in an exhaustive and universally applicable way what it means for an action to be ‘good’ or ‘right’, we cannot know whether any action is truly right. However, Quakers have another approach to such questions. It may not give us certainty, but it can give us guidance. We do not rely simply on trying to perceive the principles behind any given scripture and apply them to a new situation. For those who believe that some scripture is truly of divine origin, we might say that we turn to “the spirit that gave them forth”, as early Friends put it. Even for those who do not see any scripture in that way, we know there is something that we are open to in Meeting for Worship, and in Meeting for Worship for Business. We might see it as God, or a god, or many gods. We might view it as some beyond-material thing of ineffable nature, or as another part of our own minds. Whatever it is, whatever we call it and as whatever we see it, it is what unifies Quakers (even as we cannot unify around language for it). It underpins all our corporate practices, and it is there for us, accessible to us, on our own as well. Formulaic ethics will always reach limits, but the Spirit will not, and it will guide us through the strange situations to help us understand how to act in a way that is morally right. Understanding its leadings is not easy, and we can fool ourselves as to what it means; that is one reason for corporate discipline, and also a good reason to try to understand what we can of the principles of right action that our shared experience of centuries has revealed. Ultimately, though, it is the fact that we can return to that source that allows us to respond rightly in the end, rather than any set of rules or principles that we could write down or draw up in formulae. The letter kills, and the Spirit gives life – and up-to-date insights that people even a generation ago could not have imagined the need for.

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