Practicalethics Handouts Handout Week1

Week 1 Topic 1: The Nature of Ethics

� Is there a difference? � “Ethics” used to be used as a term for the

study of morality, or for a professional code, for instance, “Medical Ethics.”

� “Morality” meant something more popular.

� In current usage, it is doubtful if there is a clear distinction to be drawn.

“Morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason – that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing – while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected by one’s decision.”

James Rachels, Elements of Moral Philosophy, p.13 (my italics).

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 1984, p. 454.

“Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.”

Various labels and variations: Subjectivism, Non-cognitivism, Emotivism, Expressivism, Anti-realism.

Are differences in ethical views like differences in taste?

Can such views account for the fact that we argue about ethics?

Descriptive Cultural Relativism “Different cultures have different

moralities” True or false? Normative Cultural Relativism “Everyone ought to do what her or his

culture judges right.” Defensible or not?

“This burning of widows is your custom… But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them. Let us all act according to national customs."

"Act only on a maxim that you can will to be a universal law." I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785

To make a moral judgment implies that the judgment we have made holds for any situation, real or hypothetical, that is identical in its universal properties to the situation in which we are now making the judgment.

R.M. Hare, “Universal Prescriptivism,”

Universal Properties… Exclude singular terms like proper names, and terms like “I”, “my” etc.

“If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

President John F. Kennedy, Address to the Nation, June 11, 1963

� 1. How much can universalizability do?

� 2. Do we have some reason for acting only in ways that we can universalize?

”Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.”

So if you have no passion, or desire, to act only on universalizable principles, you have no reason to do so.

Imagine a person who, like all the rest of us, dreads the prospect of future agony, but with this difference: if it will happen on some future Tuesday, he is indifferent to it.

� What’s the point of such a bizarre example?

� FTI is a possible set of desires. What should we say about such a person?

� If the man with FTI is irrational, then Hume was wrong: some choices are irrational, no matter what we desire.

� If the desire-based view of rationality is wrong, other choices may be irrational too, irrespective of our desires.

� Perhaps acting contrary to universalizability is also irrational.

� Plato’s Euthyphro contains a philosophical argument for the independence of ethics from religion:

Socrates asks: Is something good because the gods approve of it?

Or do the gods approve of it because it is good?

Even if we are religious believers, we exercise our own judgment, selecting among the precepts in scripture, and interpreting them - as indicated by the “Dear Dr Laura” letter.

“How do we know what is good” remains a

problem for everyone, religious and non-religious.

� Given deep disagreement about whether

any religion is true, and if so, which one, we may support the separation of church and state.

� We need “public reason” if we are to be able to talk to each other across religious divides.