Download Other Moral Theories

OTHER MORAL
THEORIES
Origin of Ethics
Angelica Gonzales
History of Ethnics
• Socrates, as recorded in Plato's dialogues, is
regarded as the father of Western ethnics.
• Mostly the influence of Enlightenment moral
thought that continues to shape ethics today.
• Philosophical ethics could be called the study of
what is good and bad, right and wrong.
3
Locating Ethics Within Philosophy
Meta-ethics
(philosophical
questions)
“What is goodness?”
How are good and bad
determined?
Normative ethics
“What should we do?”
(“moral” questions) Deontology
Ethical theory Utility, Virtue,
(Teleological=+goals)
Applied ethics What is right and
wrong in specific
situations
Adapted from “Metaethics”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaEthics accessed 3/3/10
4
MORAL THEORIES
Different approaches played an important role in
defining “the good” shaping various branches of
moral theory.
Virtue Ethics, Deontology, and Consequentialism.
Moral
Deontological
Consequential
that “right”
exists
theories:Theories
(of the “Right”)
(of the “Good”)
Virtue,
Character
Basis:
Absolutes
Consequence
Character
Activity:
Obeying
Weighing
Being
Example:
Universal
prescriptivism Utilitarianism
(Kant)
Natural law
Greek (Plato)
Aquinas
Egoism Humanistic
Franklin
Hedonism
Naturalism
Biblical
6
MORAL THEORIES & ETHICAL STANDING
What has ethical standing?
-individuals?
-communities?
-non-human animals?
-plants?
-the non-living environment?
MORAL THEORIES &
ETHICAL STANDING
 Virtue: Moral virtues don’t give us the resources to
resolve our moral dilemmas.
 Kantianism: rational agents only (cruelty to animals
bad only because it tends to make you the sort of person
who’ll be cruel to people).
 Utilitarianism: those beings who can feel pleasure or
pain (“The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But,
Can they suffer?” –Jeremy Bentham)
Based on rules of moral
principles.
There is no ultimate rank
order of the rules.
Judgment of which rules apply
to a situation.
W.D. Ross proposed a moral theory
referred to as moral pluralism.
Set amount of prima facie duties
that are non-absolute
responsibilities.
This view is deontological; nature of duty
and obligation.
Deontology is a view based on intuitionism.
The view holds that moral values are basic
(they cannot be defined by other concepts)
Moral values are in not always immediately
apparent. Arguments and discussions are
necessary to make moral intuitions
noticeable.
 Ross lists the following seven foundational prima facie duties
(he claims as incomplete)
 Duties are intuitively obvious and ought to be accepted as an objective
basis for ethics:
Fidelity
Reparation
Non-Maleficence
Justice
Beneficence
Self-Improvement
 These duties are impossible to rank and none are absolute.
Moral duties are non-absolute.
Pluralism is a framework of prima facie
duties designed, with judgment, to apply
towards ethical issues or dilemmas.
Override any specific duty by providing
adequate justification.
All moral actions require justification.
Moral
Particularism
 Rejection
moral rules.
of
general
 Holds that reasons for
acting morally in one
situation are no reason
at all for acting morally
in another.
 Moral particularism claims that there
are no moral principles at all.
 Moral principles are not necessary for
moral reasoning.
 What the particularist resists is that
there are some general principles or
rules that good judgment uses to
determine moral actions.
Generalism vs. Particularism
What the Particularist
Believes
 The Holism of Reasons or the variability
of reasons for belief is a particularist
doctrine:
 which says that a feature that makes
one action better can make another
one worse, and make no difference at
all to a third.
 Instead, it holds that these reasons are
variable: what counts as a reason in
one circumstance is no reason at all in
another.
Case
Example
Just
because
taking
property that does not
belong to you constitutes
stealing (and is therefore
wrong) in one case, it
may
not
constitute
stealing in another case
(and, therefore, may not
be wrong).
Dancy, “Ethical Particularism
and Morally Relevant Properties”
•W.D. Ross is introduced to access
the position of Broads that we can
generalize prima facia duties from
particular cases.
•The conclusion is a thorough
particularism, to which our ethical
decisions are made case by case,
without the comforting support or
awkward
demands
of
moral
principles.
Overview of Feminist Transformations of Moral
Theory







Feminist Ethics is an attempt to revise, reformulate, or rethink traditional
ethics to the extent it depreciates or devalues women's moral experience.
Among others, feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar faults traditional ethics for
letting women down in five related ways.
First, it shows less concern for women's as opposed to men's issues and
interests.
Second, traditional ethics views as trivial the moral issues that arise in the socalled private world, the realm in which women do housework and take care of
children, the infirm, and the elderly.
Third, it implies that, in general, women are not as morally mature or deep as
men.
Fourth, traditional ethics overrates culturally masculine traits like
“independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domination,
culture, transcendence, product, asceticism, war, and death,” while it
underrates culturally feminine traits like “interdependence, community,
connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature,
immanence, process, joy, peace, and life.”
Fifth, and finally, it favors “male” ways of moral reasoning that emphasize
rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over “female” ways of moral
reasoning that emphasize relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and
partiality (Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics,” 1992).
Are women's “feminine” traits the product of
nature/biology or are they instead the outcome of
social conditioning?
 Are moral virtues as well as gender traits
connected with one's affective as well as cognitive
capacities, indeed with one's physiology and
psychology?
 And if so, should we simply accept the fact that
men and women have different moral virtues as
well as different gender traits and proceed
accordingly?
 If not, should we strive to get men and women to
adhere to the same morality: a one-size-fits-all
human morality?





In place of these presuppositions,decidely present in
most traditional ethics, they instead suggested the
ontological assumption that the more connected the
self is to others, the better the self is.
They also offered the epistemological presupposition
that the more particular, concrete, partial, and
emotional knowledge is, the more likely it represents
the way in which people actually experience the
world.
Thus, it is not surprising that “communal woman”
gradually began to replace “autonomous man” in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feminist
approaches to ethics (Tong, Feminine and Feminist
Ethics, 1993).
Unlike non-feminist care-focused approaches to
ethics, feminist ones are highly attune to gender
issues.
○ Unless privileged people give up
some of their advantages by
fostering certain economic, political,
and social changes, the charitable
contributions they make here and
there to alleviate human misery are
mostly about making themselves feel
good (Robinson, Globalizing Care:
Ethics,
Feminist
Theory,
and
International Relations, 1999).
The “dependency worker's” labor is characterized by
care, concern, and connection to the dependent, and she
typically suffers negative personal and/or professional
consequences as a result of doing the essential work
she does.
 According to Kittay, the dependency worker is
obligated to the dependent because she is best suited to
meet the dependent's needs.
 For example, the source of a mother's moral obligation
to her infant is not the rights of the dependent person
as a person, but rather the relationship that exists
between the one in need and the one who is situated to
meet the need.


Proponents of these schools of feminist
thought maintain that the destruction of
all systems, structures, institutions, and
practices that create or maintain
invidious power differentials between
men and women is the necessary
prerequisite for the creation of gender
equality. In some ways, they seem to
think that, contra Held, justice precedes
care.






Liberal feminists maintain that the primary cause of women's subordination to men is a set of
social norms and formal laws that make it hard for women to succeed in the public world.
Radical feminists think the liberal feminist agenda is wrongly focuse on weak “affirmativeaction” remedies like Equal-Pay-for-Equal (or comparable)-Work and Maternity Leave. Women
will remain the second-sex, in their estimation, until that day and time when women gain full
control over their reproductive powers and sexual desires.
Marxist/Socialist feminists disagree mainly with liberal feminists. They claim it is difficult,
perhaps even impossible, for oppressed persons, (especially women) to do well in a class
system.
Multicultural feminists affirm much of what other schools of feminist thought say about
women's status, but they fault them for not being fully attentive to the inseparability of
structures and systems of gender, race, and class. As they see it, feminists should not focus
exclusively on women's oppression as women or as workers or as members of a disadvantaged
racial or ethnic group.
Although global feminists and postcolonial feminists largely praise the work of multicultural
feminists, they nonetheless regard it as a somewhat incomplete discussion of women's
oppression. --- INFIBULATION
Ecofeminists agree with global and postcolonial feminists that it is important for women to
understand how women's interests diverge as well as converge. However, they fault them and
most other feminists for not paying attention to human beings' responsibilities to non-human
animals.



Departing from modes of feminist thought that stress the material
consequences of second-sex status, existentialist feminists focus on
the psychological consequences. In The Second Sex, Simone de
Beauvoir writes that, from the beginning, man has named himself
the Self and woman the Other. If the Other is a threat to the Self,
then women are a threat to men. If men wish to remain free, they
must not only subordinate women to themselves, but also convince
women they deserve no better treatment.
Like existentialist feminists, psychoanalytic feminists seek an
explanation of women's status in the inner recesses of women's
psyche.
Finally, as postmodern and third-wave feminists see it, all
attempts to provide a single explanation for women's oppression is
flawed. Moreover, any single explanation for “Woman's” status is
simply another instantiation of so-called “phallogocentric”
thought: that is, the kind of “male thinking” that insists on telling
as absolute truth one and only one story about reality.
Because feminist approaches to ethics tend to be
gynocentric as well as gender sensitive, nonfeminist
critics of them have complained that these approaches
are “female-biased.”
 Nonetheless, feminist ethicists remain committed to
the task of pulling all women towards the goal of
gender equity with men. The twenty-first century will,
no doubt, see new advances in feminist ethics as it
meets the challenge of living in a globalized world.
 Use this link to find more in depth material:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-ethics/

 “The
history of philosophy, including the
history of ethics, has been constructed
from male points of view, and has been
built on assumptions and concepts that
are by no means gender-neutral.”
“the man of reason” – has been constructed in
conjunction with a rejection of whatever has been
taken to be characteristic of the feminine
 … women “imitate the earth.” – Plato
 Maleness was aligned with active, determinate,
and defining form; femaleness with mere passive,
indeterminate, and inferior matter.
 Ethics, thus, has not been a search for universal,
or truly human guidance, but a gender-biased
enterprise.

I. Reason and Emotion
 II. The Public and the Private
 III. The Concept of Self

Traditionally an admiration for the rules of
reason to be appealed to in moral context, and
the denigration of emotional responses to moral
issues.
 Conversely, women often pay attention to
feelings of empathy and caring to suggest what
we ought to do rather than relying as fully as
possible on abstract rules of reason.

The private realm of the household is seen as the
natural region in which women merely reproduce
the species
 The public realm is seen as the distinctively
human realm in which man transcends his
animal nature
 The associations are extraordinarily pervasive in
standard concepts and theories, in art and
thought and cultural ideals, and especially in
polotics.

Relational self: real ties to others
 Individual self: unconnected to others

Neil DeGrasse Tyson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=035lOhkNbkM
 http://www.upworthy.com/a-woman-shares-herday-through-google-glass-it-seems-lovely-andordinary-until-the-end

An inside job. Offender focused instead of victim
focused.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvSfeCRxe8
