Ethics map
a map of some main ideas and thinkers in morals and ethics
Major arguments in morals and ethics
Overarching questions include: what should I do? What sort of person should I be? How do I respond to others? What is the good life? What is the good? What is virtue? What is the difference between moral and ethics? (Adorno)
- Some short books introducing issues in ethics (with my comments):
- Blackburn, Simon. Ethics : A Very Short Introduction. University Press, 2003. (topically organized; starts with challenges to ethics-including relativism-, then moves to some issues in applied ethics, and finishes with ethical theories. Little engagement with continental philosophy. Not a comprehensive mapping of the field)
- Bowie, Andrew. German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2010. (confined to thinkers from Germany, but includes some heavyweight ethical thinkers. Does justice to the analytic/continental split. Excellent summaries of the philosophers included)
- Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.(You can also listen to the CBC Massey lectures called ‘The Malaise of Modernity’ that led to the book. Looks at some contemporary worries and traces them to the ethical implications of individualism and authenticity)
- MacIntyre, Alasdair C. A Short History of Ethics : A History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. 2nd ed. ed., Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. (takes a historical approach to ethical ideas. Less emphasis on 20th C and continental views)
See where some of these ideas fit on an arts and ideas timeline.
Normative ethics
There is some sort of ‘moral standard’
Consequentialism
Teleological; moral status determines by consequences; reason usually the instrument; video introduction about Consequentialism
- Virtue: ‘Proper function’ of humans to be fully human; Virtues makes us fully human; Plato (Meno, Republic); Aristotle; McIntyre; Ethics of ‘being’ rather than simply doing; Arete - everything has a proper function, and doing that function is virtuous.
- Aristotle: Nicomachaen ethics (350 BCE); selections; Video summary
- Virtue ethics in the 20th C: Nussbaum, McIntyre
- Situational Ethics: The good depends upon the context of the situation (Tillich, Bonhoeffer)
- Egoism: Do only what is in your self interest
- Plato’s Ring of Gyges in the Republic (further discussion of the text)
- Ayn Rand: ‘the virtue of selfishness’
- Machiavelli; Nietzsche; Phillippa Foot
- Utilitarian: Do the best for the happiness of all by quantifying consequences. A response to 18th-19th C law, where acts of great human suffering had little penalty, but small suffering (e.g. prostitution) had huge penalty. Applies Enlightenment science ideal to quantify happiness, which leads to problems. A video introduction to utilitarianism
- Act: act in a way to maximize the intrinsically valuable. Can lead to justification of slavery and other problems. (supported by R. M. Hare)
- Rule: A set of rules to maximize the intrinsically valuable. Can lead to rule worship.
- Bentham initiator of utilitarianism (perhaps hints of it in Aristotle). Hedonistic: pleasure = good. Asks us to imagine all the actions possible, predict consequences for everyone, select the ‘most good’.
- Mill: Utilitarianism (1861). Not all pleasure is equal. Virtue, not pleasure, is good.
Non-consequentialism / De-ontological
‘Duty’ of finding and doing the right act regardless of consequences; for example, in Plato’s Crito consequences were not justification for Socrates escaping prison.
- Divine command: Conformity to rules set down by on high; discovered through revelation; Good = what god commands
- Issues of this view raised in Plato: Euthyphro (399-380 BCE)
- Exodus 20: The ten commandments, Luke 10:25-37: The good Samaritan
- Continued in contemporary discourse
- Natural law: Ethical good found in the laws of nature. A related view is moral realism.
- Genesis 1-3
- Rousseau: Discourse on inequality
- Aquinas
- Principle deontology: the only things good is a good intention
- Contractarianism: Agree for all to do the right thing. One version is a systems of laws
- Hobbes Leviathan: morality is a system of rules that restrains people but guarantees minimum of peace and security.
- Rousseau:The Social Contract (1762)
- Rawls: A theory of Justice (1971): ‘veil of ignorance’; ‘justice as fairness’ (has been called Kantian contractarianism)
- Read the highlighted sections from this Rawls excerpt
- Discuss:
- Are you convinced by the ‘justice as fairness’ argument? Why are why not?
- What are the advantages of the ‘veil of ignorance’? Disadvantages?
- To what challenges is this argument susceptible to?
- Discourse ethics: Habermas - Remarks on Discourse Ethics and Communicative Ethics
- Marx and Engels: The communist manifesto (1848)
- Caring, Kindness, Alterity
- Noddings: “Why Care about Caring?”
- Buber: Selections from I and Thou
- Munyaka and Motlhabi: “Ubuntu and Its Socio-Moral Significance”
Meta-Ethics
Exploring the meaning, ontological commitments, and justification of ethical discourse; a moral epistemology. It studies systems of moral standards, not specific behaviours; a level of abstraction above normative ethics.
Cognitivism
Ethical discourse has cognitive content. Often based on ideas attainable moral knowledge based on facts that have truth values.
- Subjectivism: Normativity/fact based upon choice/preferences
- Individual
- relativism (Harman; WT Stace)
- Existentialism
- Sartre: “Existentialism is a Humanism”
- Beauvoir: Selections from The Ethics of Ambiguity
- Cultural
- Coherentist argument that beliefs justified if they cohere with the beliefs of others (Geoffrey Sayre-McCord)
- Sumner: Selections from Folkways
- Rachels: “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism”
- Discussion questions:
- What are the challenges of moral relativism?
- What solutions does Rachels provide? Are these solutions adequate?
- Are there other solutions to moral relativism we’ve encountered in this course?
- Do moral relativists really exist? If not, then why is the idea so pervasive?
- Discussion questions:
- Rorty’s pragmatic morality: Kant vs Dewey: the current situation of moral philosophy
- Individual
- Objectivism: There are normative standards that are bigger than preferences; Moral Realism
- Naturalism: Normativity found in natural facts
- Spinoza: The Ethics
- Dewey’s pragmatic stance in Theory of Values: values can be tested, but can change depending on societal changes.
- Non-naturalism: Moral discourse cannot be reduced to natural facts. Ethical terms are primitive and cannot be reduced.
- GE Moore: Principia Ethica (1903). ‘good is good’ and ‘good cannot be defined’. Ethical terms cannot be translated into other term.
- Supernaturalism: Normativity from a God. The good is what god commands or what he would command
- Intuitionism: Ethical judgements are found within intuition (Richard Price; Robert Audi)
- Naturalism: Normativity found in natural facts
Noncognitivism
There can be no moral knowledge. There is no cognitive element in ethics. With non-cognitivism there is no normative ethics.
- Emotivism: Ethics is expression of emotion or desire; ‘x is good’ cannot be true or false, just can be described as an emotion or desire; not a proposition but an expression of emotion (AJ Ayer; JL Mackie - error theory to combat cognitivism); Hume
- Imperativism: command based system
- Power/Will/Decisionism: moral values are an arbitrary expression of the will or power.
- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
- Foucault: Power/Knowledge and “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress
- Deleuze and Guttari: Desiring Machines
- Factors beyond human control
- Biological determinism (Dawkins)
- Moral Luck: Video on moral luck; Nagel: “Moral Luck”;
- Discuss: how does the argument about moral luck relate to the theories we’ve discussed thus far in the course? How might these other approaches (for example, Kantian deontology) respond to the problem of moral luck? How might you apply moral luck to the ethical problem of poverty? (or to an applied ethical problem of your choosing?)
- Nihilism: There are no values, morals or ethics. Anything is permitted and all actions equal (As explored in Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor)
- Ethics beyond or before knowledge
- Wittgenstein: ethics cannot be spoken of. A Lecture on Ethics
- Levinasian Ethics: Ethics comes from an encounter with another person; (See Levinas’s obituary). Ethics and Infinity: the face and responsibility
- Event Ethics: events create truths that require one to be responsible to. Badiou: Ethics : An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
- The problems: individual rights, even human rights, ‘identity politics’ (the problem of Lévinas turning into the issues of ‘difference’ but what is really interesting is when we come together).
- These all assume a standard way of the way the world works (job, private property, ‘growth’, etc), thus placing those things as normal with an unspoken power. They don’t allow the possibility for another possible world (which might be better).
- His solution: ‘The Event’ (love, art, math, politics) that creates a new truth.
- Ethics is living in constant response to that truth.
- We are part of the creation and maintenance of truth.
- video summary of Badiou’s book
Applied ethics
- Moral standing: Who counts?
- UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
- The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).
- Questions to consider for these texts:
- Are they deontological? Consequentialist? Virtue? Divine command? Social contract? None of the above? A combination?
- Rights are very important in contemporary politics and morals. Should they be? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the idea of ‘human rights’?
- how can we found universal human rights? Can we justify them?
- what assumptions are made with human rights arguments?
- Do a debate on this topic: human rights are key to morality.
- what are the problems with human rights? See Badiou’s problem with ideas of human rights above.
- Questions to consider for these texts:
- Abortion
- Don Marquis, “An Argument that Abortion is Wrong”
- “A Defense of Abortion” by Judith Jarvis Thomson
- Comparison of Marquis and Thomson
- Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect”
- “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” by Mary Anne Warren
- Michael Tooley
- Race
- Famine, poverty, inequality
- Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (utilitarian); An interview with Singer on this article
- Onora O’Neill applies Kantian ethics to famine
- Read Singer and O’Neill. Discuss each article. What’s the main argument? What’s convincing? What’s missing?
- Then move to the arguments below that examine more radical responses to other issues of survival:
- Harris, “The Survival Lottery”
- Swift: a modest proposal
- Discuss: does you moral intuition reject these responses? If so, why? How do these solutions relate to deontological or utilitarian views?
- Women and gender
- Animals
- Kant, “We Have No Duties to Animals”
- Singer, “All Animals Are Equal”
- Feinberg, “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations”
- Eating animals video
- bioethics
- Euthanasia / doctor assisted suicide
- Canada Feb 2016
- watch
- What are the assumptions/bases of the argument?
- Where are the weak points in the position?
- Discuss killing vs letting die (back to the trolley problem)
- The Ethics of Having Kids in a Climate Crisis
- Euthanasia / doctor assisted suicide
- Environmental issues including climate change
- Democracy, capitalism, the commons, freedom, and the good
- War (is there ‘just war’ or just war?)
- Drone warfare: Nagel on drone warfare
- religious freedom/rights
- Historical studies in ethics and morals
- Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics : May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.