Midterm Flashcards
What are ethics
Truth/virtue/morality
Individual to a person
Different ethics leads to different conflict/disagreement
Ethics are not
Feelings Religion law -legality does not equal ethicality Following culturally accepted norms Science
Ethics are
In pursuit of good Investigative Normative Theory driven Practical and applied
Ethics v Morals
There is no difference definitionally, but there is a difference in terms of use
Ethics v taste
Photo of falling man from 9/11 was taken down from newspapers because people thought it was distasteful but it was not unethical
Ethics and responsibility
- with power comes great responsibility
- If you have the power to move people, you have the responsibility to that action
- Ex: the man who took a photo of a starving girl and didn’t help her first
Ethics and intentionality
- Responsibility is tied to Intention
- People assign Intention motives to what people say/do
- the young men responsible for Columbine shooting wore black trench coats like Keanu’s in the Matrix
- You find a cause so we can have a solution; makes the world a lot easier to comprehend
Ethics and Symbolic Interactionism
reaction to something is based on your views and beliefs
Ethics and loyalty
- People do not act rational because their loyalty to perception
- Our loyalties change our perception
Communication is ephemeral
- comes/goes/fleeting/temporary
- Only some communication is ephemeral for example, conversations and snapchats
Rhetorical
- Rhetorical text is a persuasive text
- Weather channels are rhetorical because they persuade people
Transactional nature of communication
- Content + relational levels of a message
- Content: what is said
- Relational: how it is said
Constitutive
- Making relational worlds
- Having power to give or establish organized existence to something
Ethical reasoning
Experience
-Reliving experience
Interpretation
Analysis
-Articulate feelingsOur ethical worldview
Paradigms can shift but it takes work, we create healthy mechanisms (coping) or immature defense mechanisms (ignorance, avoidance, denial)
Stages of moral reasoning
1) Identifying the ethical issue
2) Get the facts
3) Evaluate alternatives
4) make/ test the decision
5) act/reflect on the outcome
assumptions of ethical debate
- Moral claims are either true or false
- Humans know the truth value of moral thought
Epistemology/Ontology
what is real
Moral Nihilism
- question very nature of reality
- We don’t know what reality is so we have no moral facts
- Believes there are no truth
Moral Skepticism
-epistemic ( what we can know about the world) objective truth may be possible, but can not be clear that we can or do know what they are
Truth
Can ethical assessment be proven true?
What is true to one, may not be true to another
Truth is often a function of what we know and how well we argue or story our point of view
Cognitivism
Moral request, most traditional ethics: assume a correct theory( one is right and the other is wrong)
Noncognitivism
-moral statements are not claims therefore they cannot know if they are true or false but are expressions of our likes and dislikes, highlights the problem of “truth” vs TRUTH
Error theory
- Scientific view
- Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey
- Morality is just a useful fiction, we think we are talking about something real, but moral claims are no different claims than claims about unicorns
norms
morals become norms
Rawls
- the duty to play fair by the rule
- social contract and tacit consent = moral obligation to obey the law, as long as the system is fair and agreed upon, citizens are obliged to obey
Mill
- personal interests and behavior are outside the purview of legal and social regulation but may not be moral
- an individual is justified in disobedience if a government oversteps its bounds (disobedience free of moral obligation, but not legal)
signs
- signs differentiate us from other things
- signs become symbols
- symbols provide understanding but you can always create new meaning for something
- meaning only matters if you share it with somebody else, for it to be useful
levels of meaning
1) Indexical Meaning
a) Meaning by association
b) Signs trigger meaning
2) Symbolic meaning
a) Meaning by agreement
b) Sign agreed upon by community
c) Connotative and denotative signs
3) Iconic meaning
a) Meaning by resemblance
b) Signs represent things
artifacts
Artifacts—-> ideology, relations, true vs real
ideology
- System of belief characteristics of a particular class or group
- An ideology or consciousness is an interrelated system of meanings by the system of artifacts that constitute a culture
textual experience of culture
When something is produced or reproduced it tells you something about that culture
Communication as a medium of experience/reflection of self
The medium is a message/metaphor
Implied audience
readers/listeners imagined by the writer before and during the creation of a text
what is Neil Postman’s primary argument (amusing ourselves to death)
The world is changing because media is changing
stages of media history (McLuhan)
1) oral
2) written
3) print
4) electronic
5) digital
the medium is the message/massage/metaphor
- different generations were trained on different mediums
- Technology in an era should tell you about people in that era
- Visual media changes who we are and how we process information
- We look for shortcuts
Orwell
- oppressive government
- what you can’t do
- culture of what we hate
- use Hunger games as an example
Huxley
- everything is ok
- we are all so happy that we are kept in our space
Soma
- We get sucked up in this world so we forget to live
- comfortable things keep us in check
Printed vs electronic media and the effect on society
- Print: rational, enlightenment (a hot medium)
- Television or electronics are emotional and temporal (operated on basis of shortcut)
