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ETHICS
Living the good life, with good people doing
the right thing
What does it mean to live a “good” life?
Pearls of wisdom from:
• OneRepublic
• Kanye West
• Miley Cyrus
Buddhist approach
• All life is suffering which arises from desire, desire can be
eliminated by following Eightfold Path
• Virtues play an important role; cultivating virtues like nonviolence can help an individual attain nirvana
• Inclusive and egalitarian
• Everyone is responsible for their own actions
Confucianist and Taoist approach
• Confucianists see people as a part of a whole
(community)
• Relationships within the family and community are
important
• Taoism (Lao-Tzu)
• Emphasize harmony with nature
Stoic approach
• Zeno (4th century BCE philosopher)
• Happiness achieved through wisdom
• Saw universe as ordered guided by underlying reason or
logic
• Seek to eliminate desires and accepting things that
cannot be controlled
Hedonist approach
• Good life is devoted to seeking pleasure
• Can be pleasures of the body or, as Epicurus advocated,
pleasure of wisdom (ataraxia)
What makes a “good” person?
• Virtue ethics
• Although Plato wrote of virtues, Aristotle is credited with
formulating theory
• Eudaimonia (happiness in wisdom and satisfaction in
one’s character)
• People can be taught to be virtuous – must know and
choose “good” over “evil)
Ross’ virtue ethics
• Fidelity
• Reparation
• Gratitude
• Justice
• Beneficience
• Self-improvement
• Non-maleficence
Duties that one had in order to strive to be a good person.
“Goodness” is defined by one’s actions.
Existentialist answer
• Soren Kierkegaard (19th century Danish philosopher)
• People make their own moral choices and are
accountable only to God.
• Authentic choices – consistent in perception, thought and
action
• Nietzsche – Rejected concept of a god. People
determined their own values
• Jean-Paul Sartre – people are “condemned to be free”
• Responsible for own moral choices…. Actions, beliefs and
attitudes are a matter of choice.
Sartre
• “For most, adolescence brings an unsettling awareness
that the comforting framework of values taken for granted
as children is not fixed and unchanging… This moment is
crucial. If, on realizing this, people refuse to accept their
freedom in the face of the collapse of their childhood faith,
they choose a life of self-deception. They choose to deny
their freedom”
Do the right thing….
Because a supreme being(s) told us to is the:
• Divine command ethicist response
• That which we call God defines right and wrong
Euthypthro Dilemma
Do the right thing….
Because it brings about the maximum benefit for the most
people
Utilitarian response
Morally right choices are those whose consequences will
bring the greatest pleasure for the most people
Jeremy Bentham
• Father of utilitarianism, a cosequentialist theory (focuses
on consequences of moral acts)
• Drew on ideas from Maimonedes and Francis Hutcheson
• Moral ledger
John Stuart Mill
• Also a utilitarian but believed Bentham’s approach was
too simplistic
• Emphasized pleasures of the mind (intellectual and
aesthetic) over physical pleasures
• Utilitarianism of Mill and Bentham are sometimes called
act utilitarianism because their theories focus on a single
act.
Three minute philosophy
Criticism of Utilitarianism
• Is pleasure always good? Can other things like
knowledge, friendship be good? If you take pleasure in
drowning kittens is that “good”?
• Tyranny of the majority
• Can pleasure be measured accurately?
Three minute philosophy - Kant
The Kantian response
• Having good will and acting on moral principles justified
by reason are the same
• We are responsible for being our own moral agent
• Categorical imperative – choose the same course of
action in all situations that you would want everyone else
to do all of the time
Act only according to that maxim [principle or general rule]
whereby you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law of nature
Kant touch this!
• Respect one another
• Cannot use a person as a means to an end
• Lying is morally wrong because it denies another’s
autonomy and uses a person as a means to a liar’s end
• Emphasis also placed on intent of moral agent
• Categorical imperative ignores consequences and
focuses on duty
• Also called deontological theory ( deon – duty; logos –
reason)
a person is a person,no matter how small
Critics of Kantian ethics
• Criticized the notion that consequences of actions are
unimportant
• Contemporary philosophers have criticized Kant’s
theories for not taking into account ideas of responsibility
to the community or care of others.
Egoism and Intitutionism
EGOISM
• Consequentialist school of thought that posits that the
people act on moral dilemmas based on whatever serves
their own interests
• Ayn Rand “there is no such thing as society… only
individual men”
INTUITIONISM
• Moral truths are understood through intuition
(independent of reason
• G.E. Moore, Richard Taylor
Ethical Nihilism
• No action is instrinsically moral or amoral
• Morality, social, political and religious rules are constructs
and have no validity
• Actions, no matter what, cannot be judged as good or
bad. They simply are.
• For example, killing a person is neither immoral or moral
because nothing is inherently right or wrong
Was Nietzsche a nihilist?
• Not really
• Nietzsche wrote on nihilism as well as a number of other
topics. His ideas were not always consistent.
• Nietzsche can be seen as nihilistic in the descriptive
sense in that he wrote religious, social, political and
ethical rules were all merely concepts which he rejected.
• However, this rejection of prevailing ethical norms at them
time left room to build new ideas.
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto
always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen,
the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was
accepted, the predicate gradually changed.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thoughts on Prejudices of Morality
Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can
make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a
superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long
periods of time — in the form of legislation and customs.
Will to Power
Nihilist or not?
Nihilist or not?
Nihilist or not?
Nihilist or not?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
When watching the film
try to consider:
How do the actions of
the characters
represent philosophical
responses to:
-Living the good life
-Being a good person
-Doing the right thing