Milton Fisk

Ethics and Survival
Milton Fisk
Part One
Basics
Chapter One

Social Viability as the Goal of Ethical Life

It is hard to escape being part of ethical life. Most of us humans begin to enter ethical life early on. By the time we learn to talk, we can recognize approval and disapproval by those who raise us. This recognition has an emotional side that is inseparable from it. There is the contentment of receiving approval and the frustration of getting disapproval. Soon thereafter, we take a further important step into ethical life: We learn to evaluate what others do and even what we do ourselves. These activities introduce still further emotional content, ranging from compassion for victims of bad behavior to outrage at those responsible for bad behavior. The ability to generalize comes next. Going beyond the disapproval of a specific act, we consider that any act of its kind would be equally offensive. This readies us for stating rules that we suppose all of us are to follow. We treat widespread adherence to those rules as a test of whether our community is a good or a bad one. Advancing to generality puts us close to full entry into ethical life. For us moderns at least, what remains is developing the further skill of questioning familiar evaluations and trying out novel ones. To be a part of ethical life, it is then necessary to be more than a follower of norms. One must be autonomous and show it through questioning and possibly innovation.

As far as we know, only humans belong to ethical life. However, those who belong to ethical life are not necessarily good persons. What distinguishes those in ethical life is that they have at least a sense of what is good or bad to do. They can use their sense of good and bad to warn others away from certain courses and to encourage them toward others. Still, they may act in ways they can recognize as bad. There are, though, humans who are not part of ethical life. They may be aware of the approval or disapproval of others. Yet they lack either the interest or the capacity needed for entry into ethical life. Some of them have no interest in governing their behavior in any way. Others with severe forms of mental incapacity cannot reflect on the rightness or wrongness of their behavior. Infants have yet to enter ethical life and those suffering extreme dementia may already have already left it.

1 The ultimate arbiter I want to explain why I choose to talk about ethical life. Is it that my talking about “ethical life” introduces a strange name from which I am at liberty to draw any kind of point about ethics that I want to make? Am I trying to create the appearance of giving a foundation for ethics when in fact I am only making up a name? To dispel these suspicions, it is sufficient to say how, in fact, I do rely on the idea of ethical life.
Talking about ethical life orients us toward the multitude of things that happen and of distinctions we make which have ethical relevance. Instead of starting with a selected range of concepts from which one tries to spin out the main issues of ethics, I want to start with an openness to all that might take place within this important dimension of human life. Instead of narrowing the discussion to the triad of goodness, justice, and duty, one must not neglect greed, compassion, divisiveness, loyalty, humanity, and alienation. Including them, pushes us to ask what kind of project could possibly encompass such a variety of traits and values. Just what is the project in which being a part of ethical life enlists us? By saying that this work is a reflection on ethical life, the intent is to cast a large net in order to catch all the relevant principles and projects. Enriching the empirical base for ethical reflection by considering ethical life will reduce reliance on abstract models that have a tendency to conceal important aspects of ethical life.

Ethical life is important here for an additional reason, one that relates to justifying ethical beliefs. If one wants to criticize ethical beliefs or establish novel ethical beliefs, one does so within ethical life and not by going outside it. Other forms of life cannot dictate to ethical life, though they may influence it for better or worse. The aims of criminal life or entrepreneurial life have no authority to bend the norms of ethical life. In fact, ethical life serves as a framework for other forms of life, containing as it does the norms by which to judge them. Surrendering to expediency means allowing what may advance criminal life, entrepreneurial life, religious life, or intellectual life to override the demands of ethical life. Ethical life is not beyond criticism, but its criticism comes from within and not directly from the exigencies of other forms of life.
Though its distinctive role is to be an ultimate arbiter, ethical life undergoes changes and divisions resulting from its existence alongside other forms of life. This is because changes in other forms of life lead repeatedly to contests within ethical life over what the content of ethics is to be. These contests involve clashes between conflicting ethical norms with the aim of making some of them hegemonic. The power of the contestants has, to be sure, an important influence on the outcome. Nonetheless, the issue that serves as the framework for these contests is always how best to realize the projects of ethical life. In that way, the changes take place inside ethical life.

Contemporary contests over reproductive practice in the United States illustrate the way ethical life interacts with other areas of life, such as the religious and the legal. Featuring in the controversy over abortion are both appeals to religion and efforts to pass laws. Mixed in with the religious and legal dimensions of the controversy are psychological claims about the effect an abortion has on a woman. The facts drawn from these other areas of life do not seem to generate ethical conclusions. The legal effort to outlaw abortion must first confront the issue of tolerance. Can we make a widely contested view into a law where tolerance is the norm? Or can one ignore tolerance if some believe abortion is murder? However, with questions like these still pending, ethical life lacks the clarity to be an ultimate arbiter.

There are also doubts coming from competing areas about assigning ethical life the role of ultimate arbiter. Does economic life not become the ultimate arbiter if it makes market freedom an unconditional imperative? And will religious life not become the ultimate arbiter if it makes respect and love for what it treats as sacred and holy an unconditional imperative? Something is still missing from our discussion that can help illuminate the role ethical life plays as arbiter. It is that each form of life – including ethical life – has a distinctive goal or goals.

Our economic textbooks tell us that the goal of economic activity is efficiency in production. Anything that undercuts efficiency may repel economists in view of their dedication to it as a goal. But if they take the step of saying that we should have efficient production, they move onto the terrain of moral economy, where the goal or goals of ethical life become decisive. For many religious persons, the goal of religious life is to deepen respect and love for certain beings, hence to sacralize or make them holy. Christians, for example, give preeminence to loving God and their neighbors. The deeply religious person gives love spontaneously; it is not something that duty imposes. Insisting on it as a duty called for by God takes us into the area of moral theology, where the goal or goals of ethical life become decisive.

In sum, the ethical impact of economics or of religion emerges once one connects the goals of these areas of life with the goal or goals of ethical life. This involves determining how the goals they serve in their areas can contribute to the goal or goals of ethical life. In this way, one “moralizes” the goals and certain activities in forms of life other than the ethical.

2 The goal of ethical life Does ethical life have one or more goals and if so what might they be? I wish here to hazard a claim about the teleology of ethical life that I shall be testing in different ways in all that follows. The claim I shall be testing is that ethical life is a project that has as its predominant aim to serve social viability. At a minimum, ethical life serves social viability by reducing violent conflict, but it may also serve social viability by helping society develop positive features, such as democracy. Those in economic life act as members of ethical life as well when they propose that we have an obligation to pursue economic efficiency. In doing so, they express their view that pursuing it serves social viability. Likewise, those in religious life make a transition to ethical life when they propose that we have an obligation to respect and love the holy and order our lives accordingly. They can do this without undercutting ethical life as the ultimate arbiter since they believe that respecting and loving the holy serves to promote social viability.
When the norms in ethical life are inseparable from what is sacred, we can speak of a religious ethical life. The various religious forms of ethical life are, nonetheless, social since they are supposed to protect society. Christian ethics and Islamic ethics differ in multiple ways, but each sees its ethics as a vehicle for social tranquility rather than stress that might fracture society. For example, in southern Iraq, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, a senior official in the conservative Islamic movement, Sheik Bahadli, said that, “If Shariah [Koranic Law] exists everywhere in the world, everyone will be happy.” In 2005, the American evangelical, Jim Wallis wrote, “The prophets always begin in judgment, in a social critique of the status quo, but they end in hope – that these realities can and will be changed.” It is this hope that society can escape the crisis tendencies threatening its survival that motivates one to become an active member of ethical life.
Does this emphasis on the social as the goal of ethical life deny a role to personal inwardness? One needs this inwardness when conflicts call for reflection and decision. In fact, entering ethical life calls for accepting and testing norms, and these activities involve personal inwardness. Making social viability the goal of ethical life is no impediment to inwardness in this sense. One cannot even realize the goal of ethical life without reflecting on whether the norms that have become part of ethical life do in fact promote social viability. Unless we believe that only certain elites can know the route to social viability, we must treat ethical life as opposed to mechanically following commands. Autonomy, and hence promoting criticism and innovation, is the heart of ethical life. Social viability being the goal does not change this fact.
A common mistake looms up in talking about the role of personal inwardness in ethics. The mistake consists in thinking that because inwardness is important each person has his or her personal ethics. To correct this mistake, we need to note that personal reflection and innovation make up only one part of the ethical project. A personal ethics would reduce the rest of ethics to this reflective part. It would be like a private language, which has no use in communication. With such a narrow base, one could hardly speak of a personal ethics as an ethics. We might grant for the sake of argument that something could be an ethics without pursuing social viability. Still, as an ethics, it would be part of a project to allow people to expect some uniformity in others’ behavior. Where such a project is succeeding, I can walk the streets without having to wonder if the first man I meet has a personal ethics that allows him to kill me for my new shoes. I would also not have to wonder if the first woman I meet will have a personal ethics that allows her to extort money from me for a hoked up charge of sexual assault. Clearly, there is a need for parts beyond personal inwardness for even this minimal project of uniformity to count as ethical. If it is to promote this project, a norm that emerges from inward criticism and innovation has to be tied to a goal or an interest that goes beyond personal inwardness. What inwardness lacks is a means of getting adoption. Winning wide adoption can take place in a variety of ways – threats, propaganda, custom, rhetoric, and discussion. Therefore, the adoption and effectiveness of a norm are ultimately social matters, since all of these means are social. Inwardness assures each person only the basic capacities to enter the social process of adopting and then following norms. Yet, without actually entering the social process there is no ethics, not even a personal one.

Since social viability is crucial in understanding why we are part of ethical life, we need to say what counts as a society. Societies have both a material and a cultural dimension. Many groups are not societies since they fail on one or both of these counts. A medical association fails on the material count. Though we may speak of doctors as part of a medical society, they compose an association that does not perform the wide range of activities that would make them a relatively self-sufficient unit. A society in the sense adopted here has as members people with the skills to perform the wide variety of tasks that make it a relatively self-sufficient unit. Doctors, as an association, do not educate children at the primary level, they do not set building codes to protect against fire and earthquake, and they lack tribunals that deal with criminal charges as opposed to charges of professional malpractice. Since no groups are completely self-sufficient, we should not be surprised that societies depend on one another in various ways. An example would be the way Canadian and US society depend on one another. Still, a society will have within it a wide range of means for the people in it to carry on life together. The means for living together will develop differently in different societies. The differences in development of these means will both lead to cultural and economic differences and reflect the ones already there.

When we turn to the cultural count, we are looking for bonds between people. These are bonds leading them to rely on others in their society when they need help. They lead them to seek out others in their society for companionship. And they make them feel they do not have to pass a test of earning respect from those in their society. Bonds like these are vulnerable to shocks of various sorts. One can destroy these bonds by destroying the material aspect of society through military aggression or natural disaster. With the institutional structure gone, one depends on one’s own or at best on a fragment of the comity to which one had belonged. The bonds also disappear when a people is forcibly displaced and finds itself dispersed among refugee camps. Strangers surround one, each of them bent on individual survival.

Societies thought of in this way have a variety of relations to one another. One society may include others, in the way Spanish society includes Basque society. The ability of a society with sub-societies to carry out most functions for its people will depend both on the diverse capacities of the societies included within it and on the capacities jointly developed by the included societies. The ultimate in inclusion would be global society, whose viability would depend, among other things, on heading off the environmental death of the planet Earth and ending the threat of its nuclear destruction. The focus here is on societies and not on states, which are entities that societies create and that elsewhere create societies. In the 20th Century, Jewish society in Palestine brought about the state of Israel. However, in the 19th Century, the young Swiss state brought into being the multilingual Swiss society.

3 Formal ethics Part of the attraction of approaching ethics from the perspective of ethical life is that it forces us to deal with ethical issues in the real life setting of a society. As a segment of our lives, ethical life includes our motives, our needs, and our social dependency. Many discussions of ethics are too formal to help answer the question of why be ethical. They restrict themselves to the forms of ethical norms, derivations from these forms, and the relations they have to one another. This gives rise to questions like the following. Can the norm I act on be acceptable if applying it to all leads to a contradiction? Can a distribution be just if it is not an equal division? Moralists who focus on these questions of the structural design of ethical life leave little room in which to consider what it is about ethical life that makes it important for people. They are interested in the differences between and the criteria for right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, rights and prohibitions, and obligations and permissions. They treat the difference these differences make to us as extraneous to ethics. One inserts interests into the discussion when one talks of the difference something makes to us. Yet being formal, ethics is supposed to transcend interests. Behind the discussions of structural design, lies an unwillingness to face the basic motivational question: Why do some people choose not to be part of ethical life, while others want to be part of it?
Specialist Joseph M. Darby, who was a military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad, while it was operating as a US prison, supplied pictures of the abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners taking place there in 2003 to his superior officers along with the comment that such treatment was “very wrong”. Some military personnel involved thought he was a “snitch”, but that charge was a defensive posture taken to turn criticism away from their complicity. It lacked any ethical weight. By contrast, Specialist Darby’s charges were serious ethical ones. He did not attempt to conceal or minimize the abuses by appealing to military solidarity. Instead, for him ethical life was the arbiter in relation to military life. What, though, was the point of his making an ethical judgment?

Specialist Darby could have abstained from making an ethical judgment about the treatment. Having informed the military with his pictures, he could have deferred making any type of judgment to the chain of command. Or he could have waited for a judgment of some sort from an international court that would look at his pictures from the perspective of the Geneva conventions on the treatment of war prisoners. Instead, from within ethical life, he made his own judgment that the treatment was very wrong. That he did so is at least an indication of the seriousness with which he regarded the treatment at Abu Ghraib. In the legal world in general or in that of ratified Geneva conventions on prisoners, there is a goal just as there is in ethical life. It is an important goal, one of protecting the vulnerable and limiting damage when large forces collide. This goal is different from the goal in ethical life, which is that of protecting society. By emphasizing the legal without the ethical, one insists on sanctions designed to reduce damage to persons, corporations, and institutions. Of course, the legal can have ethical backing when the damage it is successful in avoiding would tend to weaken the society. There is, though, no assurance that the damage the law hopes to avoid will be damage of a kind that weakens the society. One can interpret Darby’s claim that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were very wrong as telling the world that permitting these abuses threatened a spread of all forms of brutishness that would break down the solidarity among humans needed for viable social existence.

4 Goals and reasons To some it will seem absurd to assign a goal to ethical life. How, they will ask, can one evaluate such a goal? Ethical life would have to provide such an evaluation, since it serves as ultimate arbiter for any other form of life. Yet the evaluation of the goal of ethical life would be circular when made by norms justified by that very goal. To avoid this circularity the evaluation would have to take place by means of ethical norms that are independent of this goal. The ethical ideas used in evaluating the goal of ethical life would need to get their legitimacy on a basis other than advancing this goal. Thus, avoiding the circularity exacts a high price, since ethical life would no longer be important because of its goal. One would have to seek its importance in the ethical norms it contains. Since these norms cannot tell us of their own importance, we would have to abandon the search for a rationale for being ethical.

This criticism of the view that ethical norms depend for their validity on the goal of ethical life might seem to lend support to the current fascination in the study of ethics with appeals to reasons. For those who accept this approach, one does not ask whether a certain norm would tend to frustrate progress toward a specific goal, such as social viability. Instead, one asks whether the norm is reasonable independently of what goal it might serve. This amounts to stripping away the relevance of goals in justifying ethical norms. The motive for this strong measure is precisely to avoid the kind of circularity just discussed. For, it would be futile to start by having ethics depend on reasonableness and then proceed to treat reasonableness as dependent on the facilitation of goals. This would lead straight back to the source of the circularity we wished to avoid. It does this since one could evaluate those goals only by relying in the end on the reasonableness that those goals would generate. Avoiding the circularity calls for the criterion for the validity of a norm to be that no one can reasonably reject it independently of appeal to the goals it might serve or block. If someone can reasonably reject it independently of goals, it is not a valid norm.
If being reasonable is detached from goals we seek, can there still be any importance to being reasonable? It does not seem that reasonableness is a goal we strive for except as it serves some other goal. We all know someone who is a caricature of the reasonable person, someone who avoids commitment yet never says anything we would call unreasonable. Such a person is afraid of being thought unreasonable by any side in a controversy, and hence avoids saying anything beyond reasonable platitudes. We cannot find the importance of being reasonable in such a caricature of the reasonable person. We can find it, though, where there is a purpose for which reasonableness is a prerequisite. If we adopt unreasonable assumptions in trying to find a criminal, we end up far off his or her trail. If we make unreasonable demands on colleagues, we fail to get their cooperation. When we turn to ethical life, the same pattern holds, since reasonableness helps us separate the norms that are going to be useful in keeping society going from those that are not. This goes against the view that ethics is all about purposeless reasonableness. Only a purposeful reasonableness can give ethics enough importance for us to be ethical. An appeal to a reasonableness that is independent of goals is ineffective in countering a goal-based ethics.

5 Kinds of evaluation We can now return to the charge of circularity. Social viability as a test of ethical norms allegedly leads to circularity since one ends up evaluating social viability by using norms that need evaluation by social viability. Now we are in a better position to deal with that charge. The charge of circularity comes from what seems to be the commonsense view that goals need evaluation. However, it is worth raising a question about the kind of evaluation goals need. I shall try to show that several kinds of evaluation are relevant here. It turns out that some goals may need an evaluation for reasonableness without needing one for ethical validity. So we have a distinction between evaluating norms for validity and goals for reasonableness.
Western ethical theories are dogged by the problem this distinction addresses. In these theories it is common to find an appeal to something transcending the realm of norms. While not being a norm, it makes what one could consider a reasonable basis for norms. It answers in different ways the question: Why be moral? In Plato, the Good is beyond all Forms including the moral ones, serving as a goal to which knowledge of, and hence action on, the Forms tend. In Aristotle, the well-functioning political community is the goal to which those with virtuous capacities contribute. In Hume, benefitting society becomes the standard for good habits. And in Kant, the autonomy of humans in the act of making an ethical rule becomes the test of the validity of that rule.
To clarify the transcendent role of goals in the ethical project, consider some commonly recognized goals. Chemistry serves the goal of better living. With this as the assumed goal of chemistry, should we evaluate it in terms of the principles of chemistry? Of course not! Nonetheless, we could ask if better living is a reasonable goal in relation to the resources available for staying alive in our society. The criminal justice system serves the goal of reducing people’s vulnerability. Should we evaluate that goal in terms of standard practices for police and judges? Again, of course not! Yet, we could ask if less vulnerability is a reasonable goal. With arms widely available, poverty seemingly intractable, and ethnic strife intense, some might not want to commit themselves to the goal if the criminal justice system is to be the only means used.
The analogy between these cases and ethical life seems compelling. For, we should not evaluate the goal which ethics serves in terms of ethical norms. However, someone could ask what makes that goal reasonable. If as the goal served by ethical norms one cannot evaluate it by those norms, can one find some non-ethical standard of reasonableness that applies to it? The best reply is to have a look at what life is like where there is social collapse, whether from famine, occupation, civil war, expulsion, or bombing. The disruption of everyday life we see after social collapse makes it reasonable to have a goal of social viability. Having these two kinds of evaluation – in terms of ethical norms and in terms of reasonableness – keeps a teleological ethics from having to say that the goal of ethics is purely arbitrary. We can say that the goal of ethics is reasonable without being able to say it is ethically valid. What is ethically valid is determined within ethics, and the goal of ethics is not within ethics. Not everything in daily life belongs to ethical life. That would turn daily life into a moralistic nightmare. The reasonableness of some goals can be determined outside ethics in terms of some further goal thereby allowing one to evaluate the goal of ethics in terms of reasonableness. In general, one can evaluate the goals of the various parts of life in terms of reasonableness, but one cannot evaluate those goals within the parts of life to which they pertain. This does not mean that reasonableness is independent of goals. When one evaluates a goal of a particular part of life as reasonable, that goal is reasonable in the light of some further goals.
With reasonableness as the criterion for an appropriate goal for a project, why make survival rather than progress the goal of the ethical project? After all, survival is a negative goal, while progress is positive. The reason for choosing survival is that it is not obvious that progress is always a reasonable goal for ethics to pursue. The consequences of avoiding progress need not be as horrifying as those of avoiding social survival. When progress is a reasonable goal for ethics, this is because progress becomes essential for survival. In general though, the project of ethics requires neither personal nor social progress. Personal enrichment through education or meditation may be a good that I choose to strive for, but neither is essential for my being part of the project of ethics. A nation may choose to out-compete all others in economic trade, but this is not essential for its participation in the ethical project. Indeed, it may instead choose greater internal equality and environmental sustainability without incurring moral sanction. In short, reflecting on social collapse is enough to make the goal of survival reasonable, but reflecting on avoiding progress makes the goal of progress reasonable only when needed for social survival.

6 Ethics as contingent The approach to ethics through purposeless reasonableness is an effort to escape contingency in ethics. This reasonableness involves being in accord with reasons whose legitimacy does not depend on their being means to any goals. In contrast, assigning a goal to ethical life makes its norms contingent on humans having that goal. On pain of circularity, one cannot eliminate the contingency by attempting to show that rejecting the goal would violate ethical norms. This urge to escape contingency has historical roots in a theological ethics that makes the authority of ethics depend on a divine reason that is ultimately the source of the moral law found in created human reason. A pared down version of this theological ethics appeared in enlightenment versions that lodged the moral law in human reason. Nonetheless, in both the earlier and later versions, there was the urge to escape contingency in ethics. The self-defeating character of the urge affected both. For, without a goal that tells us whether ethical life is going in the right direction, ethical norms, whatever their source, lose their importance for us, as we saw above.
Defenders of the escape from contingency will respond that the divine source or the rational source of the norms is what endows them with importance. That may indeed be so, but only if the divine source or the rational source give us those norms for achieving some goal. In fact, the biblical deity gave instructions as to how to behave to avoid social disruption. Even the enlightenment figure, Immanuel Kant, made advancing to the goal of a cooperative society – a Kingdom of Ends – a test of whether our maxims were ethically valid.
One aspect of the contingency of ethical life is its dependency on human sentiments. Social survival is important enough to be the goal of a dimension of human life because of the strength of the feelings that drive us to seek companionship, recognition, and cooperation. The continuous satisfaction of the social feelings requires the survival of a society geared to their satisfaction. People can create such a society by entering into, among other things, common projects of the kind that develop education, water supplies, and the police. These projects not only create a society in which the social feelings are satisfied but the projects are themselves motivated by those feelings. The contingency of the goal of ethical life is partly due to the changeableness of these feelings. We neglect the goal of ethical life when the social feelings become weaker than what we might call the selfish feelings – non-recognition of others, power grabbing, harming others to get ahead, and refusal to cooperate rather than to compete. We weaken the common projects on which we build society when the need for personal gain becomes stronger than the social feelings. The result may be social crisis, but so what, since après moi le déluge?
An important consequence of the triumph of selfish pursuits over ethical life is the displacement of ethical life as ultimate arbiter by economic life. The triumph is seldom longstanding; a demand for social viability reemerges as fragmentation by competitiveness, for example, leads to crises. Still, there are periods when economic arguments for low wages based on the need to compete successfully in a global system are commonly accepted. They replace ethical arguments for living wages based on the need for decent treatment as a condition of keeping a society together. Setting aside ethical arguments, Jack Welch, former General Electric chief executive, said that the ideal location for a corporation would be on a barge in international waters. Managers would be able to exercise total control over labor without governmental regulation. This “slave ship” fantasy of absolute exploitation avoids having to deal with the integration of labor and management into a cohesive social unit. In 2005, SeaCode Company converted Welch’s fantasy into a plan to put a software development factory on a cruise ship off California’s coast, out of the reach of US immigration and labor law.
There will be many objections to viewing ethics as aiming at social viability. One that needs comment here is that this view makes ethics a conservative enterprise. For, it seems that hoping for a better society would tend to undermine existing society. Thus social viability leads to the result that conservatives desire of entrenching existing inequalities in power. This objection misses an important way in which ethics is contingent. Due to its contingency, there is a constant need to respond to changes that turn some features of society into obstacles to its viability. Features that help keep society viable will come to exist alongside those that tear society apart. The dominant ethical views, which tend to be those of the more powerful, may support features of both the unifying and the destructive kinds. Obviously, this creates the need for criticism of the dominant ethics, since a valid ethics should not encourage the collapse of a society. The criticism would call for the elimination of the destructive elements as an ethical responsibility. In sum, the view that valid ethical norms promote social viability is compatible with the use of those valid norms in a critique of the existing society and its destructive norms. The changes necessary for a return to greater viability will differ with circumstances. For example, it may be necessary to change the economy to get a more cooperative society. Or if the society suffers from internal conflict between immigrants and the native born population, its survival may depend on projects to merge native and immigrant peoples into what would be a changed society. Or if it lacks a government that pursues its interests, a society may need to replace the governing structure with a more democratic one. An ethics of viability avoids conservatism through calling for change within a society without destroying it.