Download Frankena, Chapter 4

Dr. Frankena: Moral Value &
Responsibility

Need a normative theory
 Normative

meaning - standard or guide
Morally good or bad things are:
 persons,
groups of persons, traits of character,
dispositions, emotions, motives, and intentions

Nonmorally good or bad things are:
 physical
objects like cars, paintings,
knowledge, freedom, government, and so forth.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Historically, morality concerned
with:

Cultivation of certain disposition, or traits
of character.
 virtues
- not wholly innate: they must all be
acquired, at least in part, by teaching and
practice or perhaps by grace

honesty, kindness, conscientiousness.
 Morality
not rules or principles, but rather the
cultivation of such dispositions, i.e.., Plato and
Aristotle
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Leslie Stephen: Morality is
Internal
Moral law is truly a rule of character.
 Ethics of Virtue:

 Aretaic
Judgments
 Actions are secondary, what is important is the
motive or trait.

motives, intentions, and actions
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Hume
When we praise any actions, we regard only
the motives that produce them. The
external performance has no merit..all
virtuous actions derive their true merit only
from virtuous motives.
 In other words, what is important is
judgments about agents and their motives o

PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Hume: 3 kinds of ethics of duty

Trait Egoism
 Virtues
that are most conducive to one’s own
good or welfare

Trait Utilitarianism
 Virtues
are those traits that promote the greatest
amount of good, or


benevolence is the basic or cardinal moral virtue
Trait Deontological
 certain
traits are morally good simply as such
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Difference between obligation
and virtue...

Principles of Duty
 We
ought to promote good
 We ought to treat people equality
 We ought to tell the truth
 We ought to be responsible

Trait is a disposition, habit, quality, or trait,
which an individual either has or seeks to
have.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Values
Principles
Obligations
Actions
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
What are the moral virtues?
They cannot be derived from one another
 All other moral virtues can be derived from
or shown to be forms of them

 Plato
and Greeks though they were four
cardinal virtues:

wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice
 Christianity

has seven:
faith, hope, love, prudence, fortitude, temperance,
and justice - first three theological, last 4 human
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Cardinal Virtues - Frankena &
Schopenhauer
Benevolence
 Justice

 All
other virtues can be derived from these two.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Is morality primarily a following
of certain principles or as a
cultivation of certain traits.
Difficult to know what traits to
encourage if we did not subscribe
to principles
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
What then would be the
difference between a principle of
beneficence and the virtue of
benevolence.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Kant: That Principles without
traits are impotent and traits
without principles are blind.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
An Ethics of Virtue:

Point of acquiring these virtues
 not
further guidance or instruction
 not to tell us what to do
 but to ensure that we will do it willingly

Must not only move us to do what we do,
 They
must also tell us what to do
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Moral Ideal

Ways of being rather than doing
 wanting

to be a person of a certain sort
wanting to have a certain trait of character

Socrates, Jesus the Christ, Martin Luther King,
Mohammed Gandhi
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Dispositions to be Cultivated

Cardinal, First Order Virtues:
 Benevolence

Corollaries,


and Justice
Truth, honesty, keeping promises, fidelity, which are all
acquired and fostered.
Second Order Virtues
 Conscientiousness
 Intellectual Traits
Disposition to find and respect the relevant facts and
a disposition
Frankena,
Chapter 4 to think clearly

PEP 570:
Whole Point: ???
Values
Principles
Obligations
Actions
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Should an action be judged right
or wrong because of its results;
the principle it exemplifies, or
because of the motive, intention,
or trait of character is good or
bad?
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
What is moral? Reasonable
view..

is that one’s actions are morally good if it is
at least true that, whatever the actual
motives in acting, the sense of duty or
desire to do the right is so strong that it
keeps one trying to do one’s duty.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Moral Responsibility
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Three Kinds of cases for moral
responsibility
1) X is a responsible person, meaning to say
something morally favorable about his
character.
2) X is and was responsible for a past action
3) X is responsible for Y when Y still is to
be done.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Case 1: X is responsible
•
•
•
•
In this case, responsible is known to be
trustworthy or dependable with sound
judgment.
Meaning what morally?
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Case 2:
• X is and was responsible for a past action.
• Responsible is being the source or cause of
• something happening
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Case 3:
•
•
•
•
X is responsible for Y to be done.
Responsible is the condition of being
accountable to act without guidance or
personal authority
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Responsibility
• In Case 1 and 3, we are accountable for actions;
we have obligations because of previous
commitments...hence is a straight normative
judgment of obligation.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Responsibility
• Normative judgment: making a decision based
on a norm or standard. In this case, the
standard is based on an obligation to a certain
principle (to be responsible) from the value:
responsibility
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Related Issues
 Coercion
 Freedom
and Choice
 Determinism
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Coercion
 Absence of coercion
 not only direct by indirect, i.e., modeling,
manipulation, that affect alternatives
 Liberty
- choice between alternatives
 importance
of education enlarges the
capacity of choice and decisions.
Important precondition of existence of
freedom.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Free Will and Determinism
• Free will: you have choices that you
can make based on your values.
• Determinism: every event, including
human choices and volitions, is
caused by other events and happens
as an effect or result of these other
events.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Determinism

The general philosophical thesis which
states that for everything that ever happens
there are conditions that given them nothing
else.
 ethical
determinism
 logical determinism
 theological determinism
 physical determinism
 psychological determinism
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Ethical determinism


actions are determined by an apparent good..no
man can set as the object of his choice something
that seems evil or bad to him.
opponent:The evident fact of incontinence. A
man’s desires or appetites are in conflict with his
reason, precisely in the sense that he desires
something that is bad for him. Aristotle.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Logical Determinism
 Men’s
wills are fettered, that nothing is
real in in their power to alter.
 Fate determines all. No man’s destiny
is in any degree up to him.
 Everything he ever does is something
he could never have avoided..it is idle
to speak of free will.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Psychological Determinism
 Christian
Theology, a concept arose
that a perfectly good god, omniscient,
and omnipotent, the entire world and
everything in it, down to the minutest
detail, are absolutely dependent for
existence and character from Him.
 Divine Power and Predestination.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Physical Determinism
 Events
are determined by eternal and
immutable laws of nature.
 A move away from people making
decisions, or god writing out the
decisions to the decisions are really not
decisions at all.
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4
Psychological Determinism
 All
voluntary human action is caused
by the alternate operation of motives,
desires, and aversions...which are
varieties of physical forces.
 The immediate cause of a voluntary
motion is an act of will, but it is never
free, it is caused...by psychological
training. Hobbsian thought
PEP 570: Frankena, Chapter 4