Making Good Decisions: Theory, Reflection, and Practice in Ethics

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Making Good Decisions: Summary of Proposed ResearchWhat makes a good decision? Intuitively this is a very obvious question. And its practical importance is obvious. We need to know how to make good decisions in politics, in medicine, in business, in career choice, about whether to go to war or not, about the environment, about where to cut or increase spending, about whom to marry (if anyone) and how else to live our personal lives, and in all sorts of other ways too. So if there is a simple answer to the question 'What makes a good decision?', we need to hear it. And if there isn't a simple answer to the question-either because there are different simple answers for different areas, or because there is no simple answer-we need to hear that too. The question is also one that ethicists might be expected to focus on. Ethics is a practical study, with wide-ranging applications in human action. 'If philosophical ethics can't tell us how to make good decisions,' someone might rhetorically inquire, 'what can it tell us?'Such an inquirer might be surprised by the marginality in most academic ethics of the question 'What makes a good decision?'. Not that ethicists have nothing to say about it; but they don't usually focus on it. This seems a missed opportunity, and in the research proposed I aim to put this right. I propose to take 'What makes a good decision?' as my focal question. To do so is to look at ethics from an unusual angle, and I believe a revealing one, which can be of interest not only to professional philosophers but also to decision-makers in, e.g., medical, business, environmental, and political contexts. When we think about the question 'What makes a good decision?', we find ourselves facing two opposite alternatives. One is to take a systematic view of ethics: to think that good decision-making is so central to life that there simply has to be a formula for making good decisions, otherwise we will be completely lost in life. The other is to take an anti-systematic view of ethics: to think that there cannot possibly be a formula for making good decisions, because life is too complicated and circumstances are too various. So, it is a waste of time to try and find one. In my book I shall explore both possibilities. My own approach is to take an anti-systematic view of ethics, which I shall develop on the basis of a historical survey running from Plato, via Aristotle, Jesus, Kant, and Mill, to the present day. The upshot of my overall argument will be that we can't expect any simple formula to tell us how to make good decisions in any way which can hope to be quite generally applicable. In particular, we can't expect the kind of simple formulas that modern numerical systems like 'decision theory', or systematic moral theories like utilitarianism, Kantianism, and (some forms of) virtue ethics, try to offer us. The result is one foreseen very clearly in Plato's Republic. It is that, to answer the question 'What makes a good decision?' adequately, we need to go a surprisingly long way round-all the way round to a theory of internal transformation, in fact. Instead of looking for a simple all-purpose rule to govern our decision-making, we need to look to ourselves, and in particular to our own capacity for good judgement. For even if a simple all-purpose rule for making good decisions were available-and none is, nor ever looks likely to be-its application would still depend on good judgement about how and when and where to apply it. This good judgement cannot itself, on pain of regress, be taught by any rule. As stressed by Aristotle and Plato-and in a different way, by the ethics of the New Testament-it simply has to be internalised from the right sort of moral education, the right sort of reflection on and contemplative engagement with whatever is truly of value.