On ethics

The question of whether or not a diasporic Nigerian has ethical obligations towards Nigeria (or whether the carbon guzzling Westerners are obliged to reduce their footprint) is ultimately a question about what it is to actually be ethical. The question of ethics is a deep philosophical issue which can quickly lead to confusion. A failure to think through these issues can often result in a confused relationship to ethics itself.

There are some simple ways into the forest however. One age-old question in ethical philosophy is whether one can derive an ought from an is. That is, can one derive ethical obligations - what one ought to do - from descriptions of the world. A large chunk of Anglo-Saxon philosophy in the past century has argued that you cannot derive oughts from ises. The argument is that ethical propositions are of a different order to descriptive propositions, and that therefore the two should not and cannot be confused.

I fundamentally disagree. If we cannot derive ethical propositions from descriptive ones, where are we to place the origin of ethics? Where does an ethical response come from, if not in relation to the world? Put it like this: someone who believes that ethical propositions must be divorced from descriptions would say that there is no ethical obligation implied by the reality that genocide is taking place in Darfur. Genocide in Darfur is simply a description about the world. Whether one relates ethically to this description is, on this basis, neither here nor there.

In other words, maintaining a strict split between description and obligation leads to absurdities, where what are clear unjust situations cannot be described as such. The basic error is to assume that injustice and unethical behaviour has an origin outside of the world - presumably inside someone's head. Ethics therefore becomes a mental state or intention towards the world. This is confused cart-before-horse thinking which reduces ethics to pyschology and whim.

Ethics, and ethical relations, inhere in the world, prior to anything we might think about them. We face an obligation before we can articulate it in language. Ethics is not about what we think, or about how we might decide to act: the origin of ethics - where the ethical obligation arises - lies in tensions in the world not in ourselves. There are imbalances, forms of injustice, to which we are obliged to respond, if we are to remain human.

Much of the time, we blinker ourselves off from these realities. We deny the ethical relation, explain it away as someone else's problem in a somewhere elsewhere world. We insulate ourselves in worlds of immediate concern, feed ourselves excuses about how busy our lives already are. Most of the time, we fall short of being ethical.

In part, this is why we have laws. If we were ethical all the time in each and every situation, there would be little need for the law. Aside from a structured mechanism for contractual negotiation, the law functions for the most part as the formal mirror of ethical obligation, society's fall-back. The trouble is, the law deals with issues of what should not be done (or should not have been done), rather than with what should or should have been done. The law is to ethics what a fossil is to the flesh and blood of animal life.

So, we can and must derive obligations from descriptions. In fact, one can even say that we are obliged to describe in such a way that we can derive an obligatory response - in other words, we must continually work to refine our ethical sensibilities - complacency is the usual curse. Ethics is a call from the world, for us to wake up to its immiserations.

How we respond ethically is an altogether different question: do we act to create the greatest good for the greatest number (utilitarianism), or do we dedicate ourselves to virtuous behaviour - asking first what the virtues reallly are...

The question of ethical response should be clearly separated from the question of ethical obligation. Only then can we be clear that we continually owe the world a form of response that reduces suffering. It is a test of our humanity, how far we can push ourselves in this direction.

Given that we cannot do everything to reduce suffering and increase happiness everywhere, all at once, it makes sense for us to focus on what little we can do in our spheres of interest and involvement. In which case, Nigerians in the diaspora can be said to face ethical obligations towards Nigeria, whether or not they consider this to be the case.