Laughing is part of human life. We start laughing quite early in life and we continue
to do so. It can help us to cope with life, to better communicate with adolescents, or
to create atmosphere among friends. It also helps to connect to people you like, and
to disconnect with what you dislike. We can laugh about our own failures, as well
as about what others do wrong. We can laugh to criticize as well as to express our
sympathy, or both. Laughing can carry ambiguity, and so does joking. Maybe this
ambiguity explains why jokes have been very absent in research methods.
The study of ethics is one of the domains of philosophy. While philosophy is
considered the mother of science, with links to all scientific disciplines, it has no own
empirical research tradition. It can reflect on empirical science, but mainly builds on
ideas. While this makes philosophy rather detached from empirics, it still aims to be
relevant to life, and this applies to ethics in particular. While logic, deduction, and
theorizing might be the preferred methods in philosophy, when it comes to ethics or
aesthetics generic logics meet their limits. General moral rules never always apply.
We should not kill. But there are still cases where we feel it is justified to do so. We
often make exceptions to moral rules, based on ethical deliberation, because we feel
these should not apply in some cases. That is also why we need judges next to laws,
and why ethics cannot be a rule book. It is why ethical norms are debated and also
change over time, and, why sometimes, violating moral rules or expectations can be
funny.
Jokes do exactly this: they play with violating norms. Rule-based expectations
can be linked to ethics as well as to aesthetics and more. 'What is worse than one
soprano? Two sopranos'. Or 'how do you recognize a consultant? He first borrows
your watch and then tells you the time'. Reasonable moral or aesthetic expectations
are broken in these cases. We expect the consultant to have knowledge and expertise,
and the soprano to have skill and splendour, but we recognize they do not always
have. As ethics should be able to study both the ethical rules, principles and virtues
as well as exceptions and violations, its method cannot be only theoretical. It needs
case based, empirical inquiry as well, and good empirical methods are currently
underdeveloped in ethics.
