Midterm 1 notes PDF

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lecture notes for midterm 1. cosists of extra readings and textbook notes...

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Vaughn Moral norms ● Normative dominance ○ When diving reason to one course of action rather than another, the normative dominance is the reasoning that takes precedence over another ■ I.e. the moral concern of displacing homeless people camped in front of a mural vs the aesthetic concern ● The moral concern holds normative dominance ○ Moral reasoning holds more weight than other reasoning ■ Slide 5 of relevant PowerPoint ○ This doesn’t tell us what we ought to do, but it sets the “guardrails” for our reasoning ● Universality ○ Used to base our judgements on ○ The more you observe a phenomenon of causation, the more certain you become of the outcome of similar situations ■ I.e. the rules of mathematics, in all cases 2+2=4 ● Any instance of this (or the like) will always have the same or similar outcomes ● Impartiality ○ Deciding who counts ■ Fact: everyone counts ● *All interests of affected parties count ■ We treat all like causes alike ● Reasonableness ○ What we are doing provides reasons of what we ought to do ■ Accountability Additional criteria ● Autonomy ○ Consists of (non extensively): ■ Consent ■ Informed consent ■ Incapacitated individuals ■ Individuals with limited rational capacities ● Why our reasoning is the way it is ○ Provides the justification for the motives of our actions ● If any of these principles are violated, then the subject could be deemed morally impermissible ■ ■ Children (or youth under the legal age of majority)

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■ Paternalism ● One overriding an individual's autonomy ■ Relevant video; “Principles of life” watched on Feb 8th Nonmaleficence ○ To do no harm Beneficence ○ To do good/help people Utility ○ To do the most good for the most people ■ I.e. prioritizing patience or research Justice ○ Individuals getting what is fair/what they are due

Textbook notes Chapter 1 Ethical reasoning ● “Everyone” has and uses the unconscious ability to act ethically Ethical decision making ● Code words ○ Ought, should, good, duty, and/or fair ○ Ought vs is ■ Ought: aspirational; “What should be the case?” ● Implies can ○ We have to consider what is possible to be able to consider what ought to be done ■ Is: “what is the case?” Ethical principles ● Other people’s ideals and emotions put constraints on your actions ○ Coming into contact with people constrains our “horizon of possibilities” because we take others into account when motivating our actions ■ If not it breeds conflict Pro-social behavior ● Reasoning vs emotion ○ You need both when evaluating/using moral reasoning ● The “human” condition causes us to live in uncertainty ○ It imposes limits to our knowledge

■ We are unaware of the outcomes of our actions ● Can cause the dilemma of “precaution vs efficiency” Comparison of CH1 to Vaughn ● Ethical reasoning guide and motivate action ○ It embraces the ambiguity of the concept of reason ○ It motivates us because it convinces our pre-social reasoning/emotions ■ I.e. guilt ● Ethical reasoning provides justification for our actions ○ We present our justifications to be scrutinized by others and result ideally in their agreement ■ These justifications must be based in convincing others to agree rather than to coerce them. ● Paragraph 25 of the text ● Ought implies can: follow-up ○ If we use ought to guide actions, we must actually be able to accomplish them ■ “You must understand what can looks like and can be to claim that you ought to act a certain way ● Ethical theory ○ Virtue vs vice ○ Moral right consideration ■ I.e. autonomy ○ Net benefit considerations ● Dominant strategy: is a strategy in game theory that yields a higher payoff regardless of the strategy chosen by the other player Chapter 2: Being a Good Person ● Character of moral agent - Identity-based Theories > motivations and intentions in decision-making - Principle-based theories > results for those with moral standing consequence-based theories - Types of ethical reasoning ● Types of moral reasoning: character, principle, or consequence ● Virtue and care ethics: Ethical theories - identity - virtual & care ethics - community membership - principle - consequence ● Theory of justice: people get rewards based on moral virtue (social cooperation) and punishments based on their vice (self-centred) - vices and virtues are skills or traits ● No distinction between virtues and vices, but certain qualities will have high or less

positive moral significance 2.1 Virtual Ethics ● Virtues (doing the right thing intuitively - we work with this by imagining someone who we admire would do) : - Serves purposes of other principle- or consequence- ethical theories - Derivative virtues: justified character traits because they help fulfill other ethical theories - Character traits: acquired habits from nurture - The mean between 2 vices - criticized because not everything is like that. However, in ethics it allows us to see it’s not always black and white ● Virtues allow us to achieve objective happiness, the combination of virtues helps everyone in the society — human flourishing. Instead of subjective happiness. ● Virtue requires practical wisdom — seeing ethical issues and how to respond (involves understanding of virtues and vices) ● Vices - Stable character traits with negative moral significance ● Virutes- Stable character traits with positive moral significance 2.2 Virtue, Cooperation, and Community Membership Stoics: perfectly virtuous is what’s needed to be well-lived Aristotelians: even if you are perfectly virtuous, your life could be bad because of unfortunate circumstances Two social circumstances are relevant for flourishing: - Social conditions: social practices, institutions, and communities that value virtues. - Material conditions: education, healthcare, insurance, economic goods and services ● Virtues will help you trust each other as a community, so you’d never have to worry if the other person has any self-centred motives (easy cooperation) ● Even virtuous people may have to deal with unfair division of gains, so they need a sense of justice - propose and accept fair divisions ● Some people will still take advantage of the virtues of others and snag something for themselves without compromising the cooperative behaviour of others — call them out and discourage any vices ● Virtue ethics: - Emphasizes the social context of someone’s life - 2 foundations: Individuals are cooperating in society and their flourishment depends if they can cooperate with others ● Moral virtues: - Allows the community to work together - However, this is not always the case. You can live in a nasty society where you have to have more vices than virtues in order to survive

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Childhood moral training creates the foundation for adult moral excellence ● Usually teach by punishing vices and rewarding virtues Social cooperation -> community -> sustains -> virtue Social cooperation: provides economic gains, allows for people to exercise virtues = flourishment = good life - good circumstances and character Obligations of community membership are non-voluntary, you’re born into it, so they’re specific to yourself Virtuous people understand loyalty and solidarity Obligations of community membership don’t always override ex. You shouldn’t promote your cousin over the better employee Using virtue ethics to solve situations, context is super important and the specific moral obligations of the occupation Nobody is perfect, so to evaluate character of the decision-maker their vices may be evaluated

2.3 Wisdom and Virtue ● Virtues are prosocial traits that allow for social cooperation between people of similar traits —-- prosocial emotions (allows people to cooperate, but not the system of morality) ● Wisdom is seen as the highest virtue because it’s required to make a system cooperate that’s fair ● Virtue ethics doesn’t account for the diversity of character traits in other communities ● Virtues and vices are relative to the community, not all communities have a good expectation of them (even definitions of virtues may be different depending on the community or culture) ● If a community’s standards are low, they can’t develop virtuously — a critical, skeptical community allowing for debate about virtues can develop from within ● Virtues aren’t conscious decisions, you do it automatically ● Some philosophers have criticized virtue ethics because it decreases liberty and autonomy if you’re just following the group (plus they’re also worried that you’d sacrifice yourself for the greater good) ● Virtues can also be vague — if other ethical approaches required specific derivative virtues then none can be any more precise than those virtues given. ● People are apart of different communities;; thus, they each may have overlapping virtues depending on the community. However, the danger with this is that the “same” virtue may have a different interpretation depending on the community Ex. salesperson honesty vs. life partner honesty ● Aristotle believed that animals could not have moral reasoning because he believed that they did not have the psychological capacity - He believed that women, non-speaking greekers, and non-speaking animals did not have rational capacity for anything

● We must reflect critically on character traits that we want as moral virtues, we can’t accept society as it is. ● Cultural conservatism: preserving the culture of a state 2.4 Care Ethics ● Women have a different moral-decision making than men do — moral problems arise from conflicting responses and not competing rights — shows fairness, involving relationships (care ethics) ● Based on special relationships ex. Mother and child — focuses on relationships that makes attachment possible (emotional mechanism) (difference between men and women reasoning) ● There’s unequal power, but doesn't mean we should take advantage of that ● Teaches virtues to nurture relationships ● 3 components: 1. Emphasizes moral perception (empathy) ● Practitioners of this type of care ethics will analyze every part of the situation including the differences and look at abstract ethical principles instead of looking at the small picture and ignore certain parts of the ethical situation and just “fall under a category” 2. Concern for others responsibilities and relationships - Nurture their relationships and the ones of others - They will see life about cooperation and reciprocity instead of competition and conflict (unlike men) - Maximize happiness - Principles of justice - Respecting rights 3. No dismissing of special relationships (show that you care) ● Conflicts between care and traditional ethics: - Traditional: you recommend to everyone so you aren’t impartial, but care ethics does the opposite of this —- balance of special responsibilities against impartiality ex. 2 kids drowning and the woman decides to save her son over the other child —- her special relationship to her son gives her moral reasoning to save her son over the other child. - Can’t always give special treatment to special relationships ex. Trying to get a teacher to raise your child’s grade - Traditional ethics can more guard the interest of future generations or people in distant countries than special relationships (care ethics) because they don’t know them - Can’t define how much care we owe to other people —- use the justice approach (make it even, care for themselves and others)

● Can also use care ethics parallel to virtue ethics (remember a virtue is a mean between two vices) ● In virtue ethics we need wisdom to know when courage becomes foolish and when it’s weak fearfulness —- care is the mean between selfishness and self-sacrifice. Care ethics requires wisdom and justice to determine boundaries between care and selfishness and care and self-sacrifice - We allow care ethics to care for less powerful people and nurturing relationships for ethical decision making and supplement other ethical approaches with this 2.5 Justice and Virtue ● Moral suasion —- praise and blame for actions ● Good virtues can help avoid any non-optimal outcomes with cooperation ex. Prisoner’s Dilemma ● Although 2 people could be equally satisfied, one could be more satisfied than the other and this is a problem ● Important to distinguish between moral arbituitary and morally relevant ex. Reserving parking spaces for wheelchairs vs. white people ● Virtues and vices are morally relevant reasons for treating people differently ex. Rapist vs. honest people ● Society shapes virtues and vices but reward and punishment ● Someone is not virtuous if they believe they’ll get rewarded for something ● Theory that justice is desert: people get what they deserve - Criticisms: rewards and punishments are distributed differently across cultures ● Must evaluate character traits of the culture ● Virtues of a society are one’s that promote social cooperation —- yet there’s still better ways to reward ● Think critically about how a society selects virtues, how do they select what is valued? ● Don’t know how much of a reward or punishment to give — should be proportional to their contribution (however, that isn’t easy to measure) ● Contributions between 2 people aren’t always the same, so it’s impossible to measure an equivalent reward for each. ● You want to reward enough that the person feels honoured and you want to punish enough that the person doesn’t keep the vice. Chapter 3: Acting on Principle

● Ethical reasoning can evaluate ○ The character of the decision-maker ○ The motivation of the decision-maker

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○ The consequences of a decision Ethical decision-makers have good motives when they intend to act on good moral principles. ○ People with bad intentions can sometimes also cause good outcomes ○ Good intentions can also sometimes result in bad outcomes Ethical reasoning that has the intention of having good consequences and motivations will be praised even if things go wrong Motivation by ethical principles consists of the decision-maker fulfilling their ethical duties regardless of the consequences ○ Duties are ethical obligations to act in certain ways. ■ An ethical duty is an ethical obligation that overrides considerations of maximizing good consequences or of personal virtues. Ethical principle: what you should do no matter what. ○ A principle that should be acted on whether or not of the results are caused by the consequences ○ Ethical principle: can be derived from character-based or consequence-based ethical theories. It is possible to derive a type of ethical principle based on character —-- consequencebased theory Commands of God create people’s duties (one view) ○ Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God of the Hebrews or the Golden Rule in the Christian New Testament. Basic ethical duties are from reason (second view) ○ Immanuel Kant thought we have a duty not to do an action unless we can consistently calin that everyone can do that action without leading to the downfall of the very institution within which the action makes sense. List our ethical duties based on intuition about our obligations (third view) ○ prima facie duties, duties we have, but which stronger obligations can override. Duties are here because people have moral rights (fourth principle) ○ don’t interfere with other people ○ A right is a justified claim by one person that other persons own duties to her The harm principle: limits on our freedom, so we don’t harm other people ○ Puts limits on the freedom of action of both individuals and organizations Ethical principal ○ Identity-based ○ Principal based ■ Absolute Kantian duties ■ Prima Facie duties ■ Rights- Harm Principle ■ Distributive Justice ○ Consequences

● Duties arise from principles of justice (fifth view) ○ treating people fairly in the distribution of rights and duties 3.1 Duties ● Kant thought that only the motivations of the moral agent matter in the ethical evaluation of an action. ● A person’s action, which might appear to be right, was morally right if and only if: ○ The action conformed to a person’s duty ○ The person performed the action because it was his or her duty to act that way. ● Hypothetical Imperative: ○ a strategy to get someone what they want ○ strategy to formulate a conditional form ○ Ex: if you want people to trust you, don’t tell lies (a useful strategy but no a moral principle) ● Categorical Imperative: ○ moral principle independent of others’ desires, absolute duty ex. ○ “Don’t tell lie” — no strategy involved ● Kant’s theory has a theory of absolute ethical duties ○ Ethical duties stemmed from one main principle, which we now know as the categorical imperative ● Kant’s theory: our ethical duties by asking us to universalize what we think are our duties and then see if there are contradictions ○ Ex. Breaking promises —- failure of universalizability leading to an absolute duty never to break them (remember agreement seeking) ○ Weaknesses: creates implausible ethical duties in extreme cases ● Ex. don’t lie at convenience because if everyone did that then there would be no trust in conversations or telling the truth about where someone is hiding to a murderer —utilitarian ethical reasoning is better or virtue-based ethical reasoning — truth-teller suffers from the vices of being inflexible about actions ● Another way to discover ethical duties: consider moral judgements about moral obligations ○ list of duties that more powerful ones can override ■ Absolute duties: obligations you have no matter what ■ Prima Facie: ethical obligations lead to stronger obligations — meets ethical obligations that are our intuitions ■ Seven prime facie (by W.D Ross): ● Beneficence - help others ● Fidelity - keep promises ● Gratitude - thankful for kindnesses of others and return the favour ● Justice - fairness

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● non-Maleficence - avoid harm ● Reparation - compensation if harm is done ● Self-improvement - do your best In problematic cases where prima facie conflicts with another we have to see which is stronger ○ similar to ethical pluralism Causing unhappiness is a small worry because we doubt everyone will follow the trend anyways Failure of universalizability doesn’t lead to an absolute duty Moral duties = strong prima facie, but not absolute because they can’t override applicable moral reasons

3.2 Moral Rights ● Moral right: morally justified claims on others ● Possessing a moral right = creates a duty for others to respect the right (owing people) ● Specific right: two people in a contract create — imposes a correlative duty ● Correlative duty- is the duty we owe to another to complete. - May show up voluntarily like specific contracts or involuntarily using friendships, family, and community members ● General right: correlative duty falls on everyone ex. Jenna has a general right to her life, where everyone has a correlative duty to not kill me ● Moral rights are rights that are justified by moral theories ● Legal rights: legally enforceable rights ○ Some legal rights are not moral rights ■ Not all legal rights are moral rights ex. Legal slavery ○ Some moral rights may not be legal rights because they are not legally enforceable under the laws of the applicable legal authority. ● Positive right: imposes a duty on others to aid or assist the right-bearer in some way. ○ ex. Education, disaster relief, unemployment insurance ○ Problem: deciding who gives the assists, deciding on whom the correlative duties fall. ● Negative right: nobody interferes with the person’s activities ○ Ex. Right to live, freedom of expression ○ Less controversial because it’s easier to know who has the correlative duties ○ Enforcing negative rights create positive rights ● Negative moral rights stop societal interests from dominating the individual ones ex. Sending social critics to prison makes everyone happy, but they have a right to freedom of speech ● Negative rights, freedoms and liberties also protect people from interference by others, but rights and freedoms must have limits. ● Harm Principle: says that people or the government may interfere with other people’s

freedom, loberty or the exercise of their rights only to prevent harm to others. ○ This ...