Aristotle: virtue and personal character; defines and explains basic notions such as goodness, truth, justice, and rightness as principles for guiding our conduct.
Kant: duty to do what is right, regardless of its costs
Utilitarianism: weighs the consequences of costs of an action against benefits to calculate the most socially desirable course of action.
- Ethics, Aristotle says, is the study of what is involved in good actions.
- Ethics is what is sought for its own sake, goodness itself
- Ethical behavior must be reasoned behavior
- For Aristotle "the object of our inquiry is not to know what virtue is, but to become good men"
- Ethics often requires facing difficulties
- We must be ethical even if it means not necessarily pleasing an employer, whistle-blowing, like the Challenger
- According to Kant, all humans are endowed with a sense of moral reason.
- Categorical imperative- act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universally binding law that everyone must act in accordance with, applying to everyone, everywhere, and always, without exception.
- Conscious recognition of one's obligation
- do what is right, regardless of competing interests or eventual outcomes
- ethics is both an individual and social matter
- whether a merchant should take advantage of an inexperienced customer
- every person must be taken as an end in itself and never as a means to an end
- Utilitarianism- ethical theories that emphasize usefulness
- do benefits outweigh cost?
- Any new drug for FDA approval must prove itself safe and effective. All drugs have side effects. The FDA has to decide if the benefits of the drug outweighs the cost.
Feminist perspectives...
- avoid sex-related terminology
- avoid stereotyping
- avoid discrimination
- complain that women's voices have been silenced
- ethics of care- focus on women's unique way of knowing and making moral judgements
Confucian ethics-- grounded in immediate realities rather than immutable, timeless absolutes
- human responsibilities are constituted in relationships, not in the isolation of a radical individual
- one's behavior in relation to immediate circumstances is valued more than adherence to abstract absolute principles
- study particular cases/examples that exemplify virtue
- each member of society has many duties and obligations defined by his or her relationships
Levinas- root of ethics is in the particularity and uniqueness of our encounters with other people, which he refers to as "the other"
makes us aware that some other thinking and feeling human exists, whose wants, values, feelings, thoughts, and responses are radically unknown to us and can never be fully anticipated
Vietnam memorial-- see one's own reflection amidst the names of the dead; person feels both attached to and ethically responsible to that other person and for that death
Gert- Morality is a public system applying to all rational persons governing behavior which affects others and which has the minimization of evil as its end, and which includes what are commonly known as the moral rules at its core.
action rather than feelings, social relations with others rather than absolute relations with god or to abstract principles
5 primary moral rules:
don't kill
don't cause pain
don't disable
don't deprive of freedom
don't deprive of pleasure
don't lie
keep your promises
don't cheat
don't commit adultery
don't steal
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