I.  Introduction
I can easily imagine that some readers find the question posed above provoking. Unlike most systems of thought in the normative realm of affairs, it seems to put doubt on the usefulness of any ethics - a viewpoint at which the mind boggles. Let me assert, at the outset, that I think there might be a role for ethics, but if there is, I consider it to be rather different from the role assigned to it by most other thinkers. In this regard, I have come to change my mind over time - and so might you, presently.

In brief, what I propose to argue is that ethics can be useful for delineating which states of affairs, or changes thereof, are good and which are bad. However, it cannot be used for assessing the moral status of an actor influencing some state of affairs. That is, it is possible to say that a certain action is good or bad but not whether the actor bringing it about thereby is good or bad. My argument is about depersonalizing ethics, about confining ethical assessments to actual or hypothetical situations.

Now, this clearly leaves room for ethics, in the sense of providing normative benchmarks against which states of affairs, or changes thereof, can be appraised. But it is hardly possible to characterize matters or persons as moral or immoral, since these terms imply a scope for moral accountability that I view as illusory. I shall try to convince you that I am right.

II.  Free Will
At the root of this inquiry is the realization that man’s existence is determined and that, as a consequence, he has no free will (on this, see Professor Ted Honderich’s useful book How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, and Professor Galen Strawson’s fine article "Luck Swallows Everything: Can Our Sense of Free Will Be True?", The Times Literary Supplement, 26 June, 1998). That is to say, no person is capable of acting, thinking, or behaving in any other way than the way in which he actually does act, think, or behave. A person is not causa sui, the cause of himself, but rather, in all relevant respects, the result of external influences in the form of genes and social milieus of various sorts. There is no independent "self" which can freely choose between various courses of action - thinking that there is constitutes an illusion that, admittedly, is appealing but nonetheless nothing but an illusion. (For those into the jargon of philosophy, this is a position of incompatiblism.)

If this is so, then it implies that no man can be held accountable for any action he undertakes. Doing x, which is bad, or omitting to do y, which is good, is not something for which a person can be blamed; and doing y, which is good, or omitting to do x, which is bad, is not something for which a person can be lauded.

What does "good" or "bad" here mean? Merely that states of affairs x and y are being viewed, by some evaluator, as in or out of line with what he considers desirable.

But can this really be correct? Yes, I believe it is, but I realize that this line of reasoning goes against how we usually think of moral matters and ourselves. It seems as if we cannot cease to believe that we are ultimate masters of our thoughts, inclinations, and actions, perhaps because life otherwise would seem to us bland and meaningless. But here, I think it important to note the distinction between what is and what one would want to be. That is to say, someone might dislike a certain thing being the way it is, but this sentiment does not, per se, render the thing incorrect. Next, I will try to elaborate somewhat on what can be said about the role of ethics and the meaning of life, given the character of the world as it is.
 

III. The Best Possible Use of Ethics
If no person can be held accountable for his actions, then ethics may seem superfluous. This, I submit, is too hasty a conclusion. On a pragmatic and essentially consequentialist basis, it could be deemed expedient to use moral language as if it was true, in cases where doing so influences people to act in a way that renders the outcome of actions sufficiently better. Two tings need to be spelled out a little more clearly.

First, evaluating the usage of moral language (e.g., saying that a person acted morally wrong when performing act x) entails balancing costs and benefits. The benefit refers to people acting better when contemplating the negative effects of being considered immoral for bringing about a state of affairs viewed as worse than could be by those uttering condemning statements. This argument rests on the idea that people respond to incentives. If people notice a higher cost of performing an act, they will become less inclined to perform it. The demand curve does, as economic theory teaches us, indeed slope downwards. The cost refers to using terms which one knows are incorrect (as the person performing act x could not have acted morally wrong) - possibly a somewhat corrupting activity. When the benefit is thought to outweigh the cost, using moral language is thought to make the world better. This is probably often de facto the case.

Second, it might seem puzzling to refer to expressions such as "good" or "bad" if ethics is depersonalized and thereby emptied of much of its content. Still, I do not think it strange. Whatever one’s metaethical position on the nature of ethics, most people agree that there are values of some sort. Whether thought to be subjective, based in emotions, or whether thought to be objective, independent of human beings, values exist. And that is all it takes to enable us to utter normative categorizations of outcomes. We cannot say that a person is immoral, but we can say that what results from his actions is good or bad. Hence, this is not an exercise in value nihilism.

An implication of this reasoning is that punishment can never be justified on retributive grounds. It can be justified, however, but solely if it is thought to improve matters in the world, perhaps by reforming the offender, by keeping him detained, unable to bring harm to others, or by making him less inclined to hurt others in the first place.

IV.  Conclusions
My main argument can be stated as follows. Since man does not possess a free will, he cannot be held responsible for any action he undertakes. This makes it impossible to ever term a person immoral, or to say that he acted morally wrong. Ethics can, in spite of this and in a certain restricted sense, be useful: it is possible for us to evaluate the normative status of outcomes, based on the values we hold. In realizing that people respond to incentives, better outcomes may be achieved by using moral language as if it was true. But clearly, it is not.

Lastly, most people probably intuitively react against my argument. For this they cannot, of course, be blamed. In fact, holding the belief that what I argue is untrue may be considered good, in accordance with the pragmatic reasoning explicated above. That is, the odd conclusion emerges that it may be better, from my point of view (being the preference utilitarian that I am), if people do not believe what I am saying in this essay. Nevertheless, I think what I am saying is true.