Midterm Flashcards
Consequentialist theories
based on examining the consequence of actions, beliefs, or theories, and judge the rightness or wrongness on the basis of those consequences or results.
Nonconsequentialist theories
based not on consequences, but on whether the actions or beliefs or theories conform to some rule or principle
Utilitarianism
holds that what is good is what produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
Kantian Ethics
ethics is based on or primarily concerned with ethical rules or principles, which are derived from logic, from reasoning, or from human nature.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative
Always act so that you can consistently will that the maxim of your action become a universal law.
Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics focuses not on ethical rules or consequences, but on the moral status of the person or agent. The purpose of ethics is to develop the individual’s moral/ethical character, or virtues.
Moral Sense Theory
Holds that human have a moral sense (analogous to the physical senses) or intuition by which we can and do distinguish between right and wrong.
Ethics based on Human Rights
A huge problem here is that there are widely differing views of human rights, such as (for perhaps the most salient example) in today’s conflict between Western liberal and Muslim views of human rights, and between (for example) Singaporean and American notions of democracy and democratic rights. Thus there is no universally agreed-upon full content to a theory of human rights, although there is partial agreement. Also, there can be conflict between negative vs. positive rights.
Natural Law
Holds that humans are beings of nature and have a nature, that this nature can be know, and that ethics can be derived from laws or principles found in that nature.
Contractarian Ethics
Ethics is based on a hypothetical contract among members of society.
Collectivist Ethics
Claims that values and what is good or bad (as well as other things) are socially derived and determined.
Libertarian
Harm principle
Pragmatic ethics
Pragmatism rejects unchanging or transcendent principles and norms, holding instead that principles and views and norms both are and need to be changed in light of actual events or discoveries or situations.
Divine Command Theory
right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust are determined not by human wish, desire, or reason, or by human institutions, but by the will of a transcendent deity or deities
Ethical Egoism
identifies what is ethically right with the agent’s self-interest. Claims that something is ethically right iff it promotes the agent’s long-term self-interest.
Distinguish between Ethics and Law
While ethics and law can be interrelated (insofar as law reflects ethics or the legality or illegality of something has ethical implications), ethics ultimately transcends law (insofar as one can always ask of a law… is it good, just, ethical).
Descriptive Accounts
describes what a thing is or what people think it is without saying whether it is actually right or wrong, good or bad
Normative Accounts
attempts to say–usually on the basis of some normative ethical theory— whether something is actually good or bad, right or wrong
Descriptive Relativism
describes the fact that different people, groups, societies, cultures do have different ethical views relative to other people, groups, socieities, cultures.
Normative relativism
is the theory that people ought to accept the ethical views or norms that their culture actually hold and that no universal ethical standards or norms can or do exist beyond the ethical standards or norms that people actually hold.
Five Criteria for a good or adequate normative ethical theory
- Universality
- Consistency
- Culpability
- Importance
- Fairness
Universality
Ethical judgments and principles should apply to everyone everywhere.
Consistency
Ethical judgments should not conflict with one another.
Culpability
ethical judgments usually imply some form of punishment or sanction is justified for offesnse and offenders.
Importance
Ethical judgments usually have priority over other kinds of considerations
Fairness
ethical judgments should be fair, proportional, just.
Three Parts of an Ethical Argument
- Factual premise
- Premise stating an ethical principle or theory
- A conclusion that brings these two together
Four ways to Address an ethical argument you don’t agree with
- Attack the factual premise
- Attack the ethical principle
- say that the ethical principle is good, but does not apply to this case
- argue that there is a either a formal or inform fallacy in the logic of the argument
Criteria or Accounts of What Justice has been held to be
- fairness
- equality
- rights… having moral/ethical rights
- deserts… getting what one deserves
6 Possible Distribution Schemes and Examples
- To each an equal share - Cake, Super Bowl Rings
- To each according to individual need - Food stamps
- To each according to personal effort - Paralympics
- To each according to social contribution - Nobel prize
- To each according to merit - grades, promotion, gov. Jobs, hiring
- Winner take all - elections
Rawls’s Two Principles
Maximizing the minimum
- Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
- Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions. First, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest expected benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.
Nozick’s 3 Principles
- A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.
- A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of just in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding
- No one is entitled to a holding except by repeated applications of 1 and 2.
Rawls Theory of Justice
- rejects Utilitarianism… each person possesses an involability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot
- social contract
- justice as fairness, which requires that we hypothetically abandon our original position and instead approach things from behind the veil of ignorance
- contra-Nozick, the primary subject of justice is not transactions between individuals but the basic structure of society.
Libertarian Theory
- justice = liberty, which is rooted in the negative and natural rights of individual people
- these rights impose near-absolute restricitions on how we may act… cannot be violated for some supposed greater good
- property is a moral right
Definition of Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system in which the major portion of production and distribution is in private hands, operating under a profit or market system
Four Key Features of Capitalism
- Companies
- Profit motive
- Competition
- Private Property
Ethical Justifications of Capitalism
- Natural right to property (libertarian)
- Religious justifications of private property (e.g. “Thou shalt not steal”)
- Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand (while individual economic decisions in a capitalist society are motivated by self-interest, the result of these decisions is ultimately in the common interest)
- In practice, capitalism mostly works, but socialism mostly does not.
Ethical Arguments against Capitalism
- Capitalism leads to inequality
- Capitalism exploits and alienates workers.
- Capitalism assumes human beings are materialist/consumerist and leads to moral decay.
- Today’s capitalist system is, due to technology and other developments, essentially different from that presented by Smith.
Nozick’s Chamberlain Example
- Suppose things are distributed according to your favorite non-entitlement theory (D1)
- Chamberlain signs a contract that guarantees him $10 from each attendee to every game in which he plays. When people attend a game in which he plays they each, willingly and without coercion, give him $10.
- Lots of people attend Chamberlain’s games and he ends up with far more than the average income. The result is (D2), which upends the initial distribution.
- To preserve the original distribution, society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.
Definition of Corporation
A corporation is a thing that:
- can endure beyond the natural lives of its members
- has incorporators who may sue and be sued as a unit
- who are able to consign part of their property to the corporation for ventures of limited liability
Arguments for the Moral Agency of Corporations
The Corporate Internal Decision structure operates like an individual person in gathering information and making decisions. Thus, corporate decisions are analogous to an individual’s ethical decision and ethical responsibility.
Arguments against the Moral Agency of Corporations
A corporations CID structure causes it to be like a machine e.g. like a car.
