Week I Flashcards
IN ethics you have two separate attitudes
1) towards others who disagree 2) attitudes towards your own beliefs
Attitudes towards others who disagree
- Intolerance: interfering with a view one finds objectionable
- Toleration: objecting to a view and yet refraining from interfering with it
- 1.Resigned toleration - Objecting, not interfering, ignoring
- 2.Deliberative toleration - Objecting, not interfering but engaging
- Pluralism: valuing views that differ from one’s own
Attitudes towards your own beliefs
- Being fallibilist: remaining skeptical about one’s own beliefs
- Being relativist: assuming that beliefs are relative to different time/space/systems of thought (ideology, culture, religions) and cannot be judged with our own standard
- Being conciliatory: being willing to revise one’s view in face of disagreement
- Being steadfast: Holding firm to one’s position in face of disagreement
Ethical deliberation & meta-ethics
Metaethics is the study of moral thought and moral language.
- ) In any case that’s one big area the status of morality and whether it’s objective, whether it’s subjective and what these terms mean. That’s one category of moral philosophy. Status of morality: objective/subjective and what does terms mean.
- )But morality is dependent on human beings. There is no sense that there could be morality if there were no human beings or at least sentient creatures. We could make no sense of morality without any humans on the planet.
- ) it makes no sense to have a heated debate about morality unless you take it seriously, unless you think that you are wright and somebody else is wrong (the way it’s about politics and so also to the topic). People actually believe that there is a right answer and that somebody else who disagrees with them is wrong in some kind of important sense and it’s not just an opinion.
Normative ethics
- )How should we live: we should act how good people act; we should act according to moral rules; we should act how everyone should act (if you do it maybe okay, but what if all)
- *) Acting according to moral rules and how good people act
- *) Utilitarianism
- *) Consequentialism
Applied ethics
Applied ethics refers to the practical application of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in the areas of private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership.
Responsibilities:
responsibility to speak up (freedom of speech, science as public speech)
- responsibility to include (gender, disability)
- responsibility to protect (digital ethics, environmental ethics)
- responsibility to repair (historical injustice, prisons)
The main aim of philosophy
not to inform or to inspire but to help us explore competing ideas and the reasons behind them
2 types of questions
Discriptive:
Normative:Ethics is busy with normative questions, about how we ought to live
Rather than addressing questions about what practices are right and wrong, and what our obligations to other people or future generations are – questions of so-called ‘normative’ ethics – metaethics asks what morality actually is.
Acting according to moral rules and how good people act
- There is a tradition going back all the way to Aristotle, to a half thousand years, which is that what’s important is character and one should act in a way that a good person would act and one should be generous in a way generous person would act and we should exhibit the virtues of a virtuous person.
- Kant believes that we should act according to a certain set of moral rules and we shouldn’t transgress those rules, we should act in accordance with how everybody else would act. You shouldn’t lie because you should act in a way that everybody else should act and you can’t possibly wish that everybody lies, you should keep your promises and so on.And I guess, the tradition of human rights that we have in the world at that moment owes a lot to Immanuel Kant and to what is called deontological ethics as they are understood by a set of norms that shouldn’t be transgressed. Torture is an example. You shouldn’t torture people no matter what the consequences are.
Utilitarianism
- )John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham
- )we should act according to that which maximizes happiness.
- )E.g.So that sometimes it’s the right thing to do to lie, sometimes it’s the right thing to do to fail to keep your promise.
Consequentialism
Consequentialism, as its name suggests, is simply the view that normative properties depend only on consequences. This historically important and still popular theory embodies the basic intuition that what is best or right is whatever makes the world best in the future, because we cannot change the past, so worrying about the past is no more useful than crying over spilled milk. This general approach can be applied at different levels to different normative properties of different kinds of things, but the most prominent example is probably consequentialism about the moral rightness of acts, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act or of something related to that act, such as the motive behind the act or a general rule requiring acts of the same kind.
deontology
In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action.
