Although the example might seem bizarre, analogous situations occur quite frequently on a larger scale. Consider the dilemma of the commuter. Suppose that each commuter finds his private car a little more convenient than the bus, but when each commuter drives a car, the traffic becomes extremely congested. So everyone is better off in the situation where everyone takes the bus than in the situation where everyone drives a car. Because private cars are somewhat more convenient than buses, however, and because the overall volume of traffic is not appreciably affected by one more car on the road, it is in the interests of each commuter to continue driving. At least on the collective level, therefore, egoism is self-defeating—a conclusion well brought out by the English philosopher Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984).
The fact that ethical egoism is collectively self-defeating does not mean that it is wrong. An ethical egoist might still maintain that it is right for each person to pursue his own interests, even if this would bring about worse consequences for everyone. His position would not be self-contradictory, though it would be “self-effacing,” since it would require him to avoid promoting egoism in public and to keep his true ethical beliefs a secret. Applied ethics
The most striking development in the study of ethics since the mid-1960s was the growth of interest among philosophers in practical, or applied, ethics—i.e., the application of normative ethical theories to practical problems. This is not, admittedly, a totally new departure. From Plato onward, moral philosophers have concerned themselves with practical questions, including suicide, the exposure of infants, the treatment of women, and the proper behaviour of public officials. Christian philosophers, notably Augustine and Aquinas, examined with great care such matters as when a war is just, whether it is ever right to tell a lie, and whether a Christian woman does wrong by committing suicide to save herself from rape. Hobbes had an eminently practical purpose in writing his Leviathan, and Hume wrote about the ethics of suicide. The British utilitarians were very much concerned with practical problems; indeed, they considered social reform to be the aim of their philosophy. Thus, Bentham wrote on electoral and prison reform and animal rights, and Mill discussed the power of the state to interfere with the liberty of its citizens, the status of women, capital punishment, and the right of one state to invade another to prevent it from committing atrocities against its own people.
Nevertheless, during the first six decades of the 20th century, moral philosophers largely neglected applied ethics—something that now seems all but incredible, considering the traumatic events through which most of them lived. The most notable exception, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), seems to have regarded his writings on ethical topics as largely separate from his philosophical work and did not attempt to develop his ethical views in any systematic or rigorous fashion.
The prevailing view of this period was that moral philosophy is quite separate from “moralizing,” a task best left to preachers. What was not generally considered was whether moral philosophers could, without merely preaching, make an effective contribution to discussions of practical issues involving difficult ethical questions. The value of such work began to be widely recognized only during the 1960s, when first the U.S. civil rights movement and subsequently the Vietnam War and the growth of student political activism started to draw philosophers into discussions of the ethical issues of equality, justice, war, and civil disobedience.
Applied ethics soon became part of the philosophy curriculum of most universities in many different countries. Here it is not possible to do more than briefly mention some of the major areas of applied ethics and point to the issues that they raise. Equality
Since much of the early impetus for the 20th-century revival of applied ethics came from the U.S. civil rights movement, topics such as equality, human rights, and justice were prominent from the beginning. The initial focus, especially in the United States, was on racial and sexual equality. Since there was a consensus that outright discrimination against women and members of racial minority groups (notably African Americans) is wrong, the centre of attention soon shifted to reverse discrimination: is it acceptable to favour women and members of racial minority groups for jobs and enrollment in universities and colleges because they have been discriminated against in the past? (See affirmative action.)
Inequality between the sexes was another early focus of discussion. Does equality here mean ending as far as possible all differences in the sex roles, or could there be equal status for different roles? There was a lively debate—both between feminists and their opponents and, on a different level, between feminists themselves—about what a society without sexual inequality would be like. Feminist philosophers were also involved in debates about abortion and about new methods of reproduction. These topics will be covered separately below.
Until the late 20th century, most philosophical discussions of justice and equality were limited in scope to a single society. Even Rawls’s theory of justice, for example, had nothing to say about the distribution of wealth between societies, an issue that could have made acceptance of his maximin principle much more difficult. In the 1990s philosophers began to think about the moral implications of the vast inequality in wealth between the leading industrialized countries and the countries of the developing world, some of which were afflicted with widespread famine and disease. What obligations, if any, do the citizens of affluent countries have to those who are starving? In Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (1996), the American philosopher Peter Unger made a strong case for the view that any person of reasonable means who neglects to send money to organizations that work to reduce global poverty is thereby doing something very seriously wrong. The German-born philosopher Thomas Pogge, in World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (2002), argued that affluent countries are responsible for increasing the poverty of developing countries and thus for causing millions of deaths annually. In one of his late works, The Law of Peoples (1999), Rawls himself turned to the relations between societies, though his conclusions were more conservative than those of Unger and Pogge. Animals
There is one issue related to equality in which philosophers have led, rather than followed, a social movement. In the early 1970s, a group of young Oxford-based philosophers began to question the assumption that the moral status of nonhuman animals is automatically inferior to that of humans—as well as the conclusion usually drawn from it, that it is morally permissible for humans to use nonhuman animals as food, even in circumstances where they could nourish themselves well and efficiently without doing so. The publication in 1972 of Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans, edited by Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch and John Harris, was followed three years later by Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and then by a flood of articles and books that established the issue as a part of applied ethics. At the same time, these writings provided a philosophical basis for the animal rights movement, which had a considerable effect on attitudes and practices toward animals in many countries.
Peter Singer, 2004.