Ethics Begins Before We Choose

Most people assume that ethical failure stems from flawed reasoning, that if only our moral calculus were properly refined, most of our ethical difficulties would disappear. But the idea that ethical decision-making is primarily a matter of reasoning with moral concepts obscures a deeper issue. Many ethical failures occur earlier in our sense-making process. Key aspects of a situation are often omitted “upstream” from a decision, and these omissions cannot be corrected by reflecting on the merits of different courses of action later on. What contributes to this loss of perspective? How can we pay closer attention to the morally significant aspects of our world? In this essay, I explore how expressive form dictates our initial awareness of ethical reality. I argue that practices of careful, morally alert attention, especially those found in literature, can expand the range of ethical considerations.

A fast-growing strand of contemporary philosophy grapples with the practical paralysis that occurs when conflicting moral perspectives all claim authority over a single decision. In Moral Uncertainty, effective altruists William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord reject the simplistic rule of “following the theory you find most likely.” For example, suppose an agent’s preferred theory slightly favors one option, while another theory you take seriously regards that option as gravely wrong. The magnitude of the disagreement matters, as does the agent’s confidence in each theory. Where meaningful comparisons can be made between theories, the authors advocate maximizing expected choiceworthiness, which involves weighting each theory’s assessment of an option by the confidence assigned to that theory. Where theories offer only rankings or cannot be directly compared, the authors propose alternative methods inspired by social-choice theory. The project’s achievement is to make moral humility practical. It encourages us to act without assuming that our preferred theory is undoubtedly correct. The book even considers the value of acquiring further moral information. However, the process must begin with a clearly defined decision-making situation involving a set of options and evaluations of those options under various theories, alongside the levels of confidence associated with them. Once a neglected consideration has been provided, the framework can accommodate it. Nevertheless, it cannot guarantee that the consideration will be discovered, that a silenced experience will find a voice in the public sphere or that an object classified as a resource will come to be seen as a relation. While I endorse the framework of moral uncertainty, I argue that the process leading to aggregation deserves closer scrutiny. How did this become a decision problem in the first place? There is a difference between accommodation and discovery.

Iris Murdoch challenged the idea that the world is a set of neutral facts and that ethics only enter into play at the moment of choice. For Murdoch, the ego and habit are already at work in what appears obvious. Thus, moral improvement requires attention, a term she borrowed from Simone Weil and defined as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” Her famous example concerns M, a mother-in-law who privately despises her daughter-in-law, D. M considers D to be an insufferably coarse upstart. However, her outward behavior toward D remains exemplary. Because M is capable of self-criticism, she begins to suspect that her judgment rests on ingrained social condescension. Gradually, traits M once dismissed as crude flaws reveal themselves as unstudied warmth and vibrant authenticity. Nothing in the observable sequence of events need change. Yet, Murdoch insists that genuine moral work has occurred. My assertion is not that the concept of morality is contingent upon flattering descriptions. M’s second vision is only better if it is more truthful and less arranged around her vanity and social prejudices. Attention can reveal both cruelty and charm. In this case, Murdoch’s suggestion is not for us to become nicer fantasists. Rather, she calls for a reduction in dishonesty. This is why the example extends beyond private feelings. Words such as “vulgar,” “simple,” “rude,” and “spontaneous” are descriptive and evaluative at once. They dictate our complete psychological stance, framing every nuance of how we relate to another person over time. By the moment a conscious choice presents itself, the surrounding moral reality is already fully formed.

Notwithstanding, Murdoch’s example has one limitation: D never speaks. Her reality is entirely reconsidered within M’s consciousness. M may learn to see D more fairly, but D remains the object of another person’s improved vision. Audre Lorde brings the missing element into view. Sometimes, the moral task is not only to look more carefully at another person but also to listen to how they describe the world. In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Lorde specifically addresses women and forms of knowledge that are devalued by racial and patriarchal cultures. Poetry matters because experience can be urgent and real before it takes on an accepted public form. Experience may persist in a visceral, pre-conceptual state—“nameless and formless,” as Lorde puts it—but it is already felt. Poetry helps “give name to the nameless so it can be thought”. The unnamed is not unreal or powerless, as it can profoundly shape a life. Even so, without a shareable form, it cannot easily enter collective deliberation as a legitimate basis for decision-making. According to Lorde, poetry is one route from felt experience to language, from language to idea, and from idea to action.

One counterargument to consider is that naming something is not automatically liberating. Names can be imposed from above, and official vocabularies often mask systematic violence as personal shortcomings. I propose that the more important issue is whether people have the means to make sense of their own experience, both to themselves and to others. This alters the concept of “expanding the moral circle,” which was popularized by Peter Singer, among effective altruists. Inclusion is not simply adding more recipients of concern to an existing list. Those who were excluded are also sources of moral knowledge. Their accounts expose the blind spots built into the foundation of prevailing ethical language. A committee, for example, can add a new seat while preserving a language that leaves the newcomer’s knowledge unintelligible. This shows representation without redefinition can leave the framework intact. Therefore, Lorde advances Murdoch’s ethics by establishing that people own the epistemic power to rewrite the frameworks used to perceive them.

Grammar can bias what demands moral attention. Instead of judging entire languages as good or evil, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation examines this through the more-than-human world. In Braiding Sweetgrass, while discussing her effort to recover the language taken from her grandfather, she recalls working with an Ojibwe, or Anishinaabemowin, dictionary. There she encounters wiikwegamaa: “to be a bay.” Her realization: “A bay is a noun only if water is dead,” a statement that combines poetic resonance with linguistic precision, treating grammar as a nuanced mechanism that conditions perceptual habits rather than enforcing rigid determinism. Ordinary English effortlessly reduces the living landscape to an inanimate item. Kimmerer demands that we confront how verb-centric syntax foregrounds the world’s inherent vitality. Naming a bay as a static noun frames it as a resource subject to human extraction. “To be a bay” redefines water as continuous, generative action.

Her strawberry example is also interesting because it borrows economic language. A wild strawberry received as a gift from the land and a strawberry bought as a commodity may be botanically similar, but they place the receiver in different relations. Commodity exchange terminates obligation upon payment, whereas a gift instigates an enduring posture of relational accountability. This relational stance drives the Honorable Harvest—a rigorous ethos of non-extractive ecological stewardship. These inherited cultural disciplines attune human perception to our ongoing duties to the living world. Alternatively, by the time we use a cost-benefit analysis to find out how much may be extracted, the world may already have been reduced to a financial market.

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 details the inverse dynamic where institutional logic forecloses human relation. Doc Daneeka explains that an airman can be grounded if he is insane. Yet an airman who asks to be grounded demonstrates a rational concern for his safety and is therefore sane. The only person eligible to stop flying is the person who cannot rationally request it. The rule’s ethical violence lies in its self-sealing structure, converting every possible response into institutional validation. The system reduces the airman’s terror to diagnostic data, stripping its weight as testimony against enforced mortality. Such malicious framing yields internal logic that is impeccably coherent yet ethically bankrupt, which shows formal consistency cannot redeem a vocabulary engineered to erase human suffering.

We can now distinguish two uncertainties that are often run together. The first concerns normative uncertainty, which is to determine which ethical frameworks command authority and how to resolve conflicting moral claims. Effective altruists excel at addressing this problem. The second concerns perceptual uncertainty, which is to determine whether the initial problem frame captures every ethically significant element and power dynamic. Murdoch, Lorde, and Kimmerer tackle this problem from different directions. These two dimensions complement each other. Beyond evaluating claims, moral theories filter perception: utilitarianism spotlights outcomes, Kantian ethics demands respect for agency, and care ethics centers relational obligation. But if every theory under consideration is applied to the same impoverished description, theoretical pluralism will simply aggregate a shared blind spot. Conversely, disclosure alone does not decide what to do. For example, a poem can bring attention to a harm without telling us how it should be weighed against every other consideration, and a grammar can disclose relation yet leaving competing duties unadjudicated.

An important reservation, however, is that demanding perceptual depth does not license emotionalism, and it’s easy to see how unexamined perception easily absorbs prejudice. By way of illustration, poetry can romanticize, metaphors can manipulate, testimony can be mistaken, and inherited traditions can conceal injustice. That is why moral attention requires rigorous calibration over deference. Treat testimony as evidence, not as an oracle. Treat people as knowers, not as infallible authorities. Read literature as a practice of disclosure, not as a substitute for judgement. Learn from another language without pretending that its grammar settles metaphysics. Striving for total coverage breeds paralysis, turning the pursuit of absolute description into ethical evasion. Genuine deliberation demands corrigibility—the capacity to question foundational premises rather than select from pre-packaged options.

In practice, that means pausing before comparison. Who described the problem? Whose vocabulary governs it? Who appears as an object of policy rather than an interpreter of the situation? Technocratic jargon—terms like efficiency and resource—obscures non-quantifiable reality. Irreversible choices deserve special scrutiny because they can destroy the conditions of later correction. The extinction of a species, the destruction of an ecosystem, or the severing of a language’s transmission may erase not only something valuable but a source of knowledge about value. Irreversibility imposes a heavy burden of proof, forcing decisions to account for values our current metrics ignore.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the prisoners can describe the shadows before them and learn their patterns. Their intelligence is confined to a space defined by chains, a fire and a wall. Better inferences about the shadows do not free them. According to Plato, education requires a turning of the whole soul towards what the original position concealed. This concept can be applied to ethical life. The first question is not simply, “What should I do?” but also: What world has this description allowed me to see? Who emerges as a speaker and who merely as an object? What seems morally irrelevant only because it has been placed in the background by habit? Reason tells us what follows from a description. Moral attention seeks to establish whether the description has done justice to reality. Ethics requires both. When confronted with a suffocating external environment, the highest ethical act begins with turning the soul inwards towards what was previously concealed.