Appiah vs. Gazzaniga on virtue ethics and morality

In "The Case against Character", by Kwame Anthony Appiah, and "Toward a Universal Ethics", by Michael Gazzaniga, two twenty-first century thinkers analyze ethics from their own perspectives.  Though Appiah rejects moral absolutism, Gazzaniga argues that a large portion of our ethical decision making is instinctive, coming from an innately human compulsion toward certain actions.  Appiah cites empirical research on behavior, whereas Gazzaniga relies heavily on study of the human brain.

Appiah adopts Aristotle's definition of ethics as anything concerning human flourishing.  He takes issue, however, with Aristotle's idea of virtue ethics.  He argues, instead, for situational ethics, pointing to studies about correlations between environmental factors and moral actions.  Such studies found, for example, that people were more likely to help pick up scattered papers after finding a dime in a payphone's coin slot, and less likely to help someone slouched in a doorway if they had been told they were late for an appointment.  Virtue ethics would hold that people do things because of a certain disposition, such as helpfulness, whereas Appiah holds that people do things largely because of their situation in that moment.

Gazzaniga, by contrast, believes that all people are inclined to certain positive behaviors.  He says, "It is not a good idea to kill because it is not a good idea to kill, not because God or Allah or Buddha said it was not a good idea to kill."  Gazzaniga contends that moral philosophers and religious men, though generally well-meaning and reasonable, were working with incomplete information, and so could only speculate about the origins of human nature.  Thus, he argues, they came up with stories to explain what evolved naturally as a sort of socialization adaptation.  Supporting this idea of universal, instinctive ethics is the fact that, "all societies believe that murder and incest are wrong, that children are to be cared for and not abandoned, that we should not tell lies or break promises, and that we should be loyal to family."  This is in keeping with the social evolution hypothesis, since these behaviors contribute to the functioning of society.  Finally, Gazzaniga argues that "Moral emotions--those that motivate behavior--are driven mostly by the brain stem and limbic axis, which regulate basic human drives such as sex, food, thirst, and so on."  Thus, moral behaviors are not generally rational decisions, but base compulsions that we do without much thought.

Though Gazzaniga and Appiah view morality from largely different perspectives, they agree in a few ways.  Though Gazzaniga believes moral behaviors are largely unconscious, he contends that higher level thought becomes necessary for certain moral questions, such as the classic question, "would you push one person in front of a train to save five others?"  In spite of his belief that humans act situationally, rather than consistently morally, Appiah admits that virtuous people may exist, though rarely, and that virtue ethics would be ideal, but simply isn't how humans act.

Appiah and Gazzaniga differ greatly in their analysis of human morality, ethics, and motivations.  However, there exists some common ground between the two.