Bernard Gert

Bernard Gert (October 16, 1934 – December 24, 2011) was a moral philosopher known primarily for his work in normative ethics, as well as in medical ethics, especially pertaining to psychology.

His work has been called "among the clearest and most comprehensive on the contemporary scene", "far more detailed and more concretely worked out" and "systematic" than competing comprehensive ethical theories.

Because it avoids pitfalls associated with other dominant ethical theoretical approaches (such as deontology, utilitarianism, contractarianism, and virtue ethics), Gert's moral theory "provides what many people are looking for".

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Gert studied philosophy at Cornell University.

He was a professor at Dartmouth College for fifty years, from 1959 to 2009.

He also had other adjunct and visiting appointments, including the University of Edinburgh 1974-5 and being a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

At the time of his death in 2011, he was the Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, emeritus at Dartmouth.

He died in 2011 in North Carolina.

A source of notoriety among his contemporaries was that his family became a family of philosophers: his two children, Joshua and Heather, both became philosophers, and both married two other philosophers.

Gert advocates the following definition of morality:

According to Gert, his theory counts as a natural law theory because he holds that all moral agents must be able to understand morality in order to count as moral agents.

In other words, "moral judgments can only be made about those who know what kind of behavior morality prohibits, requires, discourages, encourages, and allows."

According to Gert, harm (or "evil") is the central moral concept.

Gert believes harm is what all rational creatures seek to avoid.

He advances the following five-concept account of harm:

He maintains that commonsense morality is far more concerned with prohibiting (and discouraging) evil than with requiring (or encouraging) people to enhance goods or benefits.

On Gert's view, the bases for morality are rationality and impartiality.

On Gert's conception of rationality, it is irrational to fail to be averse to harm.

Everyone avoids harm insofar as they are rational.

Rationality does require that we avoid harming ourselves without an adequate reason.

A rational person would not cause his own pain unless it were for an adequate reason, for example, to cure a disease.

Even a masochist causes pain in himself for a reason, presumably for pleasure.

This helps show that no rational being seeks to harm himself for its own sake.

The sort of adequate reason in question involves avoiding any of the five basic evils or obtaining of any of the following basic goods:

According to Gert, acting rationally does not always require acting morally.

For example, it is not irrational to set a trap for someone who is wearing an Armani suit so that they fall into a swimming pool in front of a video camera, since the pleasure one can get out of watching the video constitutes an adequate reason for harming the other person.

It would also be rational for a sadist to torture other people for fun provided the sadist could get away with it.

There are five sorts of irrational desire according to Gert: seeking death, pain, disability, loss of freedom, or loss of pleasure.

We arrive at moral rules by extending these objects of irrational desire to others.

Rationality, alone, does not require this.

However, if we adopt the principle of impartiality, whereby we apply the rules without regard to who gains or loses, we extend these prohibitions to others.

This results in rules such as do not kill, do not cause pain, do not disable, and so forth.

On Gert's view, there are several reasons to act morally.

The primary one is i) that if you don't, someone else will be harmed. While it is rational not to care about others, the fact that they will be harmed is enough of a reason itself.

Other reasons to act morally include ii) that acting immorally will corrupt one's own character, and iii) that some forms of immoral action can make the world inhospitable to oneself, such that in some cases it is irrational to act immorally toward others.

In his book Common Morality: Deciding What to Do, Gert proposes ten moral rules which, if followed, create a moral system.

The rules are as follows:

The first five of these rules directly prohibit harming other people.

Thus, they can be summarized with the slogan, 'do not harm'.

The second five rules get their force from the fact that if it were generally allowed that those rules be broken, many harms (and losses of benefits) would result.