An Interview with Daniel Maguire

Fortress Press: Is the study of ethics more crucial now than at other times in history?

Dan Maguire: Humanity--along with the planet we now dominate--is caught in the crosshairs of twinned threats: ecocide and militaristic binging. We are double-basting the planet in carbon dioxide, killing off other species at a pell-mell pace, reproducing beyond the limits of the earth’s resources, all this while armed to the teeth with more kill-power than there are people to kill.

News of melting polar ice has led to competition to mine for more fossil fuels in the newly open waters of the poles--fuels that will bring more melting, swell the oceans, swallow islands, and rearrange the earth's geography. By any definition, that is a crisis. Unlike other species we are not genetically encoded toward survival. For us, ethics is our only hope.

FP: So what is ethics?

DM: Ethics is the systematic effort to figure out what is good for us and our generous but fragile little planet. How is ethics doing?

Not well. Most ethics texts bore and befuddle their students by rehearsing the thoughts of dead men (and few women) without applying old thoughts and thinking new ones that apply to here, now, and tomorrow. Ethics is about life, and life is not dry. The unfolding of life is not boring.

FP: What does your book--Ethics: A Complete Method for Moral Choice--offer that other ethics books do not?

DM: Ethics neglects none of the classics of ethics but sets out to fill a gap by offering a complete method for doing ethics. A method is not a straightjacket. As I tell my students, they can use this method to argue against my conclusions on particular issues—and they do. The students see this as a challenge. They get into it, and in the process, they learn ethics.

The method developed in this book serves to stimulate all of the dimensions of our pluriform moral intelligence. It fights the bane of unasked questions and it taps the wisdom of the heart, probes the linkage of beauty and goodness, and meets the demands of reason, logic, and analysis.

There are many mental routes to moral truth, including the too-neglected faculty of creative imagination. Society’s ethical IQ is elevated by many things, including tragedy. Suffering can either warp or sharpen the mind, and no system of ethics should ignore it any more than we should ignore the wisdom of the jester that plays an ethical role in every society in one form or another. Ethics must look to the arts as well as to the sciences in its quest to help a species that is thus far more clever than wise.

FP: How does ethics relate to the social sciences and to religion?

DM: The social sciences like economics and political science were birthed as siblings of ethics. They sued for divorce and lost a lot as unexplored moral assumptions roamed free and untested. This book attends to that.

Most ethics texts ignore religion or treat it skittishly. There is more than a bit of pseudo-sophistication in that. All the world’s religions are moralcentric in their concerns. They are powerful shapers of cultures for good or for ill, even cultures that deem themselves secular and post-religious. Religion, by definition, is a response to the sacred, whether that sacred is interpreted theistically or non-theistically, and there is no one who finds nothing sacred. Religion in one form or another is ubiquitous.

National constitutions and laws are chock full of insights born in the religious traditions. It is sociologically naive and ethically impoverishing to ignore these symbolic powerhouses. Nothing so moves the human will as the tincture of the sacred. Ethics must take note of that. This book offers a theory of religion and its place in philosophical ethics and its appearance in cryptic forms in the supposedly neutral social sciences.

Daniel C. Maguire is the author of Fortress Press's 2009 textbook, Ethics: A Complete Method for Moral Choice.