Because I favor the unconditional autonomy of reason I generally dislike any reduction of ethics to rules that would supposedly tell us what to do in all cases, but the so-called golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you; or, do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you) seems like a variant of Kant’s categorical imperative, which is a higher-order rule that rather obviously leaves a place to be filled in by judgment.

Some prefer the negative version of the golden rule, as avoiding possible arrogance or presumption. I like the Leibnizian idea that to be truly ethical is to do more than what is merely required of us, so I actually like the positive version.

The golden rule could also be considered a nice popularization of the ethical import of Hegelian mutual recognition.

To be honest or sincere is first of all to be intellectually honest with oneself, which is a commitment to what Kant called unity of apperception, whether one thinks of it in such terms or not. As Brandom would remind us, this means to the best of our ability honoring an implicit higher-order commitment — to the consequences of our commitments, and to avoiding incompatible commitments — that we have necessarily made in being committed to anything at all.

We could refer to this as integrity, or a commitment to commitment. Recall Aristotle’s indignation in the Metaphysics against the sophist who refused to honor the principle of noncontradiction.

This is obviously a high standard, if we intend to apply it to people’s emotional responses in ordinary life. We need to be forgiving of the fallibility of others, as well as of ourselves. Honesty to others needs to be tempered with kindness (or wise charity, as Leibniz would say). But we should strive to be integral beings in our emotional responses.

Kindness has no set formula; sometimes something like tough love is appropriate. These things are always matters of judgment. I would go beyond Kant and say we should be kind to all beings, period, but the mode of that kindness should be appropriate to the situation. I am kind to inanimate objects by not engaging in senseless destruction or waste. I may kindly question your conclusion, or tell you what you don’t want to hear. I may even kindly revolt against your oppressive regime. That just means there is no spite or ressentiment in my heart as I take a stand for justice. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; Things Said; Interpretive Charity; Affirmation; Genealogy.)

Part of my issue with the deontological approach to ethics is that by putting rules first (above both intentions and consequences), it seems to suggest that an action has the normative status it does intrinsically — that is to say, independent of intentions and consequences. I don’t think the notion of value is even intelligible apart from some context of evaluation. It seems to me that intentions and consequences together form the relevant context in which actions occur and should be evaluated.

I believe any putatively intrinsic value of an action is just a reification. We might be inclined to say, e.g., that killing is intrinsically bad, but I would say instead that it is bad because by definition it has a bad consequence. The difference is that consequences can be weighed against other consequences, so we can say killing is bad but might nonetheless be justified in some particular case, if that bad thing would prevent what would truly be a worse evil.

We should put interpretive charity first. No one should be blamed or penalized for an action that was sincerely and responsibly well-intentioned, or the consequences of which were in balance good.

I agree with Aristotle that ethics cannot be an exact science. I also hold with Leibniz that all necessity whatsoever is conditional.

Practical judgment or phronesis discerns differences and gradients, not “things as they are”. Questions of the form “What is to be done in circumstance c” do not in general have a single, necessary answer.

Ground-level ethical rules, I want to say, have no value apart from such always somewhat open judgment of situations. If all I were doing were conforming to a rule, I would be showing no sign of reason or intelligence. (Kant at least partially makes a similar point by distinguishing between rules and concepts of rules, though it it is a bit unclear what this means.) Only if I can be said to have reasonably judged that following rule r in circumstance c was situationally appropriate, was my rule-following rational. Judgment could not be reducible to simply applying a pre-existing formula.

Needless to say, I don’t really like deontology. Necessity in first-order ethics smells to me of subrational compulsion.

On the other hand, it would be absurd to say that because there is no hard necessity in first-order ethics, anything goes. An ought that we positively assert about anything in particular is based on differences and gradients, not binary necessity. Binary necessity could at best apply only to prohibitions, not to any positive injunction to do x. I don’t even believe it applies in the negative case. But in any event, what we ought positively to do is the real concern of ethics, and that is a weaker sort of ought.

Still, we “ought” (in some different, stronger sense that applies only to meta-level generalities like the categorical imperative) to be faithful to our best judgment of those differences and gradients. I would also agree that we “ought” in this stronger sense to practice mutual recognition as described by Hegel, and we “ought” to practice wise charity as described by Leibniz. Brandom points out two more things that I agree “ought” in this stronger sense not to be done: affirming contradictory things, and affirming something while denying a consequence of it. I have no issue with speaking of necessity in these meta-level cases.

In line with a practice of interpretive charity, I want to resolve the ambiguity in Kant’s (and Hegel’s) talk about moral “necessity” by saying that any true necessity must refer to meta-level principles in themselves, not their application.

In chapter 1 of Making It Explicit, Brandom talks about the desirability avoiding “regulism”, or the attempt to rely on explicit rules all the way down. Wittgenstein’s infinite regress of rules-to-interpret-rules is said to show that the conception of norms as rules “is not an autonomous one, and so does not describe the fundamental form of norm”. This seems promising. He both invokes Kant’s distinction between rules and concepts of rules, and suggests a move from rules to practices, attitudes, and construals. Mere conformity to a norm is not even a candidate for a construal in accordance with a normative attitude.

I also want to say, as Aristotle would, that the correctness of such construals, though emergently relatively objective in terms of something like multidimensional gradients of “should”, is not in general decidable in Boolean yes/no terms. Brandom seems more worried about avoiding collapse of moral necessity into causal necessity or mere factual regularity. While I thoroughly agree that normative conclusions cannot be derived from non-normative premises, I take overly rigid prescription to be still the more practically important concern. Pufendorf’s doctrine of imposition of norms by a sovereign will is huge step backward from Aristotle.

What is needed is ground-level, broadly rational interpretation of real-world situational particulars, complexities, and ambiguities that is not strict rule application; i.,e., phronesis.

The objectivity of ethics does not consist in strictly univocal determinations, but in shareable reasonableness. The interesting cases are not like “It’s raining and I don’t want to be wet, so I should open my umbrella.” There could be no precise formula for how to balance independent concerns when they are in partial conflict. (See also Kantian Maxims; Categorical Imperative; Kantian Obligation; Binding; Varieties of Ethics.)