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Lecture summary Lecture 2: Theoretical Underpinnings of Ethics! This lecture, brought by Stephen Cohen. concerns about two question lying behind ethics - “what should I do (when something happens to me)” and “what kind of person should I be”! The professor introduces approaches to ethical thinking and ethical behaviour, which can be divided into three categories: teleological consequential(Consequences), deontological Non-consequential(Rules) and Virtue (characteristics of the agent). The former two represents the question - “what should I do” and when we talking about Virtue we are actually talking about “what kind of person should I be”.! We first talked about Deontological Ethics(rules) which is one of Kant’s thoughts introduced by professor Stephen, he stressed that ethic are not characteristics of a person, but rather a willing will of human. Thus it is not born with someone with luck or accident, it is more like a willpower. However, Mill criticised that Kant is trying to show people that something could be the foundation of morality other than consequences. ! Then we discussed the second theory, teleological consequential (consequences). Mill is a staunch advocate of this theory. He stresses consequences are the kernel of the ethics and action taken by people is depending on how much utility produced when doing the action based on utilitarian. Happiness, satisfaction,… leads to the consequences of the action, which is against Kant’s theory. Virtuous Ethics concerns about “what kind of person should I be”, which are characteristics of human like courage, wisdom, temperance, justice… All virtues are concerned with feelings: the virtue of felling too much and feeling too little, the right amount of felling is significant. ! It is different from the other two theories above, when doing things, one doesn’t calculate the consequences of doing things (neither deontology nor teleological ). For instance, when something happens, if I’m a courageous person, i won’t need to ask myself about my thoughts and just do it since it is the second nature with me (not first nature as I was not born with it). The idea of this cultivated virtue is that people have to practice that and it will become their habits.! i.e. from lecture, the lecturer set an example, a situation of giving seat to the elder people, virtuous person won’t calculate the happiness of giving the seat or not giving the seat, he will just do it due to his characteristics, this is just a direct way of showing his compassion or integrity, which also shows that he is just this kind of person.! ! Moral Pluralism is then introduced, I realised that we have to admit that there is no one single ethic theory that is favoured by everyone in the world. Professor Stephen said in lecture that we should respect and accept there are diverse ethical positions among different people.! In my opinion, contractarianisam concept is also important. According to Thomas Hobbes, without society, there will be no more ethics. A vital difference between human

and animals is that we have contracts, which is the prior requirement for ethics. This also reveals difference between ethics and morality. Ethic actually is reliant on the social system while morality stems from individuals. ! To sum up, this lecture introduced the ethical problems, which always happen when the interests of different parties cannot be made into coincide and discussed mainly two question behind ethics, “what should I do” and “what kind of person should I be”, then talked about concepts of descriptive ethics that concerns about behaviour and prescriptive ethics focused on principles.!

Lecture 4: Professional Ethics# This lecture continues and further extends Kant’s duty based ethics, known as deontological and classical utilitarianism, consequentialism. The famous case Ford Pinto is introduced first. With the equipment of the ethical theories learnt from lecture, we can condemn this is highly unethical based on the consequentialism and utilitarian way. The company made the decision of not recalling the problem cars with built-in fatal flaw from the perspective of lowing the cost of the company. However it harmed many people’s utility and benefits which can’t be measured by money and cost. The consequences it caused (reputation, hatred from people…) is unquantifiable, far more than realistic money the company spent.!

This alerts me, before doing something, not just looking at the cost happening now, but need to calculate the consequences brought by the action I take. Then lecturer raised some dilemmas for instance. “You happened to hear someone reveal some confidential and sensitive information to someone else, just as you were walking by the office. It is morally permissible for you to make use of this information ?”. It depends whether I have the duty not to disclose, whether information is vital and etc. For me to make moral judgement like this, I deemed that, combined what I have learned from lecture, it rests with how you see things and what is your position now. To make it further, if I am an irrelevant staff with no connection with him, and the thing he revealed is to blow up a building with thousands of people in it, without hesitation I make use of this information and will turn him in to the police. However, it is another story if this thing doesn’t involved with horrible information but just some secrets of himself which could be harmful to him if other people know, then you shouldn’t make use of that. This case solid my comprehension of doing thing base on utility and consequentialism.!

Besides codes of ethics, codes of conduct is crucial as well. Before the lecture, I thought these two things were identical. Then I realised it is not the case, code of ethics concerns about responsibility that require judgements of values while code of conduct is different, which is a living document from the perspective of professor Stephen concerning about accountability. Code of conduct focus on tackling specific problems with the requirement of the organisation to be uniform, in a more uniform way so to speak. And also it will send messages to the outside of the organisation. !

The last part professor Stephen told us is dirty hands concept, which intrigued me a lot, started by a hierarchy listed. No one would want to go through this torturing situation. In

this scenario, even someone does the right thing objectively, one would not be off the hook with dirty hands. The famous example of this is track case, having B, C, and D three situations (A is straightforward). After training of these lectures, when I am in C situation, I would choose to pull the trigger to save more people based on consequentialism to gain maximal utility from utilitarianism perspective and also I will carry out this action base on my willpower from Kant’s deontological perspective. However, when I situated in C, does these theories can still assure my action not to break the ethics when individual emotion is involved? !...