morality

Question 1

Jeremy Bentham

1748 – 1832 UK

Answer 1

He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism
Bentham’s students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter’s son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as Robert Owen, one of the founders of utopian socialism. Bentham has been described as the “spiritual founder” of University College London, though he played little direct part in its foundation.
Notable ideas Greatest happiness principle

Question 2

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

1844 – 1900 Germany

Answer 2

a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.

Question 3

Utilitarianism

Answer 3

Utilitarianism is a theory in normative ethics holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes utility, usually defined as maximizing happiness and reducing suffering. Classic utilitarianism’s two most influential contributors are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Question 4

Ethics/moral philosophy

Answer 4

Ethics seeks to resolve questions dealing with human morality—concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime.
The term comes from the Greek word ethos, which means “character”

Question 5

meta-ethics

Answer 5

the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the four branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being descriptive ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.

Question 6

normative ethics

Answer 6

Normative ethics is the study of ethical action. It is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking. Most traditional moral theories rest on principles that determine whether an action is right or wrong. Classical theories in this vein include utilitarianism, Kantianism, and some forms of contractarianism. These theories mainly offered overarching moral principles to use to resolve difficult moral decisions

Question 7

Moral realism

Answer 7

Moral realism is a non-nihilist form of cognitivism. In summary, it claims:

Ethical sentences express propositions.
Some such propositions are true.
Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion.

Question 8

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

1821 – 9 February 1881 Russia

Answer 8

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Question 9

Euthyphro dilemma

Answer 9

The Euthyphro dilemma is found in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, in which Socrates asks Euthyphro, “Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (10a)
“Is what is morally good commanded by God because it is morally good, or is it morally good because it is commanded by God?”

Question 10

categorical imperative

Answer 10

the central philosophical concept in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law

Question 11

John Stuart Mill

1806 – 1873 England

Answer 11

He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham.
Notable ideas Public/private sphere, hierarchy of pleasures in Utilitarianism, liberalism, early liberal feminism, harm principle, Mill’s Methods

Question 12

Epicurus

341–270 BC Greece

Answer 12

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil; death is the end of both body and soul and should therefore not be feared; the gods neither reward nor punish humans; the universe is infinite and eternal; and events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.

Question 13

John Locke

1632 – 1704 England

Answer 13

an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and known as the “Father of Classical Liberalism”, Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

Locke’s theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.

Notable ideas Tabula rasa, “government with the consent of the governed”, state of nature; rights of life, liberty and property

Question 14

fideism

Answer 14

reliance on faith rather than reason in pursuit of religious truth
“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (246) This question of the relation between reason—here represented by Athens—and faith—represented by Jerusalem—was posed by the church father Tertullian (c.160–230 CE), and it remains a central preoccupation among contemporary philosophers of religion.
The term itself derives from fides, the Latin word for faith, and can be rendered literally as faith-ism.

Question 15

Protagoras

c. 490 BC – c. 420 BC Greece

Answer 15

a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato credits him with having invented the role of the professional sophist. He is also believed to have created a major controversy during ancient times through his statement that “man is the measure of all things”, meaning that there is no truth but that which individuals deem to be the truth. This idea was revolutionary for the time and contrasted with other philosophical doctrines that claimed the universe was based on something objective, outside the human influence.

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Question 16

Robert Nozick

1938 – 2002 America

Answer 16

an American philosopher[2] who was most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). His other work involved decision theory and epistemology.
Notable ideas Utility monster, experience machine, justice as property rights, paradox of deontology, entitlement theory, deductive closure

Question 17

The Experience Machine

Answer 17

The Experience Machine or Pleasure Machine is a thought experiment put forward by philosopher Robert Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It is one of the best known attempts to refute ethical hedonism, and does so by imagining a choice between everyday reality and an apparently preferable simulated reality.

If the primary thesis of hedonism is that “pleasure is the good”, then any component of life that is not pleasurable does nothing directly to increase one’s well-being. This is a view held by many value theorists, but most famously by some classical utilitarians. Nozick attacks the thesis by means of a thought experiment. If he can show that there is something other than pleasure that has value and thereby increases our well-being, then hedonism is defeated.

Question 18

Supererogation

Answer 18

the technical term for the class of actions that go “beyond the call of duty.”

Question 19

Descriptive ethics/comparative ethics

Answer 19

the study of people’s beliefs about morality.

Question 20

Applied ethics

Answer 20

How do we take moral knowledge and put it into practice?
the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment. It is thus the attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life. Bioethics, for example, is concerned with identifying the correct approach to matters such as euthanasia, or the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with questions such as the duties or duty of ‘whistleblowers’ to the general public as opposed to their loyalty to their employers. As such, it is an area of professional philosophy that is relatively well paid and highly valued both within and outside of academia.

Question 21

Aristotle

384 – 322 BCE Greece

Answer 21

Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip of Macedonia, tutored Alexander the Great between 356 and 323 BCE.
The fact that Aristotle was a pupil of Plato contributed to his former views of Platonism, but, following Plato’s death, Aristotle immersed himself in empirical studies and shifted from Platonism to empiricism.[3] He believed all peoples’ concepts and all of their knowledge was ultimately based on perception. Aristotle’s views on natural sciences represent the groundwork underlying many of his works.

Aristotle’s views on physical science profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. Their influence extended into the Renaissance and were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics. Some of Aristotle’s zoological observations were not confirmed or refuted until the 19th century.[examples needed] His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic.
Notable ideas

    Golden mean
    Aristotelian logic
    Syllogism
    Hexis
    Hylomorphism
    Theory of the soul

Question 22

Eudaimonia

Answer 22

a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, “human flourishing” has been proposed as a more accurate translation.Discussion of the links between virtue of character (ethikē aretē) and happiness (eudaimonia) is one of the central preoccupations of ancient ethics, and a subject of much disagreement. As a result there are many varieties of eudaimonism. Two of the most influential forms are those of Aristotle[3] and the Stoics. Aristotle takes virtue and its exercise to be the most important constituent in eudaimonia but acknowledges also the importance of external goods such as health, wealth, and beauty. By contrast, the Stoics make virtue necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia and thus deny the necessity of external goods

Question 23

telos

Answer 23

an end or purpose, in a fairly constrained sense used by philosophers such as Aristotle. It is the root of the term “teleology,” roughly the study of purposiveness, or the study of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. Teleology figures centrally in Aristotle’s biology and in his theory of causes.

Question 24

naturalistic fallacy

Answer 24

introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.[1] Moore argues it would be fallacious to explain that which is good reductively, in terms of natural properties such as “pleasant” or “desirable”.

The naturalistic fallacy is closely related to the fallacious appeal to nature, the claim that what is natural is inherently good or right, and that what is unnatural is inherently bad or wrong.

Furthermore, Moore’s naturalistic fallacy is closely related to the is–ought problem, which comes from Hume’s Treatise. However, unlike Hume’s view of the is–ought problem, Moore (and other proponents of ethical non-naturalism) did not consider the naturalistic fallacy to be at odds with moral realism.

Question 25

Hume’s law

Answer 25

Hume’s law (sometimes called “Hume’s Guillotine”[1]), addressing what is referred to as the “is-ought” problem, states that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”. The law is also a rebuttal of the naturalistic fallacy, or inferring how the world ought to be from the way it is or was in the past.

Question 26

open-question argument

Answer 26

open-question argument is a philosophical argument put forward by British philosopher G. E. Moore in §13 of Principia Ethica (1903). Moore’s argument attempts to show that no moral property is identical to a natural property.

Question 27

naturalism

Answer 27

the view that ethical judgements are made based on their relation to nature and scientific facts. Kind of related to utilitarianism, not so much to kantian ethics

Question 28

jean-paul sartre

Answer 28

existentialist who claimed there is no human nature and refuted naturalism and virtue theory based on that assumption. claimed naturalism is a way to refute the self’s ability to make moral value judgements

Question 29

emotivism

Answer 29

posited by AJ Ayer: ethical judgements are meaningless, they only reveal individuals’ emotions