Ethical decision-making in professional bodies

Abstract

In the preface to the Fundamental principles of the metaphysic of morals, 1 Immanuel Kant reminds us that Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics and logic. All rational knowledge is material or formal. The material is about some object, while the formal is concerned only with understanding itself and the universal laws of thought. Formal philosophy is logic. Material philosophy has to do with objects and the laws to which they are subject. These are two-fold: either laws of nature or laws of freedom. Physics (or in Kantian language, natural philosophy, and hence the PhD degree) is a material philosophy. Ethics (or moral philosophy) is the second branch of material philosophy. To express this differently, natural philosophy is concerned with what is, whereas moral philosophy is concerned with what ought to be. Both physics and ethics have doctrines which are a priori, ie not based on what is observed in experience. Both require concepts and principles ‐ hence a metaphysic of nature and a metaphysic of morals. Mainly, however, they are empirical. Thus physics determines the laws of nature as an object of experience; while ethics determines the laws of the human will, so far as it is affected by nature. We can express this simply by saying that physics is concerned with facts, and morals (or ethics) with values. And it is a truism to point out ‐ as David Hume did so memorably 2 ‐ that one cannot derive the one from the other. As the slogan says, you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Against this simple classification, we might con