Download Chapter One: Why Be Ethical

Chapter One: Why Be Ethical?
 Morality: any major decisions that affect others becomes a moral decision. How you act on your
beliefs.
 Immoral: Refers to the way people ought not to act. It negatively affects others
 Amoral: Refers to morally neutral actions (not good or bad), it can also describe attitudes,
behaviours that show no sensitivity to the question of right or wrong
 Principle: Fundamental law, rule or code of conduct
 Conscience: The human way to weight right or wrong
 Personal Integrity: The quality of showing moral principles by knowing what is right or wrong
and choosing the former.
 Ethics: As a discipline, ethics deals with the nature of the good and the human person and
criteria fro right judgement. Ethics always searchers for the higher good.
 Empiricism: a theory that says that knowledge comes from experience or from evidence that can
perceived by senses
 Teology: Everything's built with a purpose.
 Teological thinking: seeking to understand the ultimate goal/purpose
 Subjective: relating to a person’s own perception and understanding of reality
 Objective: relating to sensible experience that is independent of any one individual’s thought,
and that can be perceived by others.
 Obligation: bound by duty or contract to do so
 Responsibility: Being morally accountable for one’s actions. Responsibilities presumes
knowledge, freedom, and the ability to choose and to act
 Revelation: The way God makes himself known to humankind
 Autonomy: Independence of freedom, as of the will or one’s actions.
4 ethical experiences:
- The experience personal response (The Scream)
- The experience of the other (The Beggar)
- The experience of obligation (“I have to…”)
- The experience of contrast (“This is intolerable! This isn’t fair!”)
The Experience of Person Response: The Scream
- Forces you to be aware of the other person and your responsibility to them.
- Urges you not to think, but to act
- It is not a decision you make, it is almost an automatic response
The Experience of the Other: the Beggar
- Comes from Levinas because he believes all face-to-face encounters remind us of our
responsibility to the other
- When we see people begging we usually avert our eyes not to make contact because then its like
you don’t notice they exist.
The Experience of Obligation: “I have to…”
- Experience of feeling obligated to a rule or a law has everything to do with your ethical side
- You can not remain neutral to someone who you feel has authority over you, the order invades
your consciousness and demands a response.
The experience of Contrast: “This is intolerable! This isn’t fair!”
- We all have a healthy built-in capacity for seeing what the world ought to look like and how
situations ought to be
Aristotle:
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Developed Teleological ethics (discovering the finality (telos) of what we are intended to be)
First concern is not the individual, it is the community
Does not equate happiness with pleasure
Pleasure is only momentary
Happiness, is an enduring state of someone who does well the tasks that are typical of a human
being
Someone is only happy if they perform the most perfect of typically human tasks over a
considerable time
Above all else, we are intended to be rational
Our greatest capacity is our intelligence
To act ethically, therefore, is to engage our capacity to reason as we develop good character
When people develop habits that represent what it means to be human (what we’re intended to
be) we call these virtues.
We ought to avoid excess, but not necessarily avoid something completely.
Can be seen that excess in even courage and deficiency are preserved by the mean
IMMANUEL KANT
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Developed Deontological Ethics ( our duty )
One of his primary concerns was clarifying how it is that we come to know things. Can we
predict cause and effect?
This is theoretical reasoning. This is the area of reasoning by which we come to know how the
laws of nature, the laws of cause and effect, govern human behaviour. Area where freedom of
choice is not an issue
Practical Reasoning. Used to understand how people MAKE choices. Withen the realm of
knowledge, humans act not only on impulse as affected by the laws of nature, but also out of
conscious choice based on principles.
Using Theoretical reasoning, we know what people actually do. (we know drinking alcohol is
bad)
Using Practical reasoning,, we know what we ought to do. (don’t drink and drive)
Kant also held that the good is the aim of a moral life.
Ethics doesn’t present us with cognitive certainty (math and physics) but with practical certainty.
Has three ideas (God, Freedom, Immortality) to pursue the supreme good
God: Humans cannot achieve the supreme good therefore there must be God because he is the
Supreme good
Freedom: If the supreme good is to be, then what we ought to do, we can do. To have the duty
to do something, we must be able to do it. Therefore, humans are free by nature
Immortality: Achieving the supreme good is an immense task which means it is impossible to
complete in this life time. That is why there is immortality or an afterlife.
His ethics is to be discovered in the private life, in the inner convictions of the individual.
The “good will” is to do our duty for no other reason than it is our duty.
A human action is morally good when it is done for the sake of duty.
Duty is determined by the principles by which we act
Principles tell us how we ought to act, but reason determines how this duty is universally
applicable.
I should act in a way that I want everyone else to act”
Treat everyone as a means, not just as a means to an end
EMMANUEL LEVINAS
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Each person is incredibly unique
The good is interested in what is absolutely unique about each person or thing, not similarities
We see only “traces” of God in every tangible object.
Equates God with the Good, therefore we see only traces of the Good and it is always ahead of
us.
Face is the most naked part and hates make-up because it is an attempt to hide
When we have a face-to-face encounter, we see the person as superior.