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AQA Ethics and religionIf using a PC, Hold Ctrl to click on the following links: HYPERLINK \l "NaturalLaw" Natural Law HYPERLINK \l "SituationEthics" Situation Ethics HYPERLINK \l "VirtueEthis" Virtue Ethics HYPERLINK \l "humanethicalissues" Human ethical issues HYPERLINK \l "animalethicalissues" Animal ethical issues HYPERLINK \l "introtometaethics" Meta ethics HYPERLINK \l "freewillandmoralresponsibility" Free will and moral responsibility HYPERLINK \l "conscience" Conscience HYPERLINK \l "benthamandkant" Bentham and KantNatural LawTelos. Aquinas developed Natural law as a form of religious ethics. Aquinas was influenced by Aristotle’s views that there is a natural end to things – everything has a purpose (telos) built into it by its nature – the final cause. We can determine something’s purpose by using our reason. By looking at and understanding an Axe, we can determine it was made to chop wood. Humans also have a purpose. Aquinas believed God created us and our nature. We can use our God given reason to figure out what our God given nature is. That will then tell us how we should live i.e ethics.Sartre’s argument that people cling to a notion of objective purpose due to their fear of having to create their own.As Sartre’s argument is psychological, it commits the genetic fallacy; assuming that the manner someone comes to believe something is relevant to its truth. Sartre could well be right that we believe in purpose because of fear, and yet there still be such a thing as purpose.Arguably, belief in purpose is merely a human projection of subjective feelings onto reality. This would make telos not only false but dangerous ethically as it allows a person to believe their subjective ethical opinion is backed up by God, which they might feel gives them the right to enforce it on others. The Catholic Church has repeatedly done that throughout history.Nonetheless this goes against the experience of the human conscience for many, which orientates around a feeling that humanity has a purpose.The Primary Precepts are the natural inclinations of humans created by God in relation to his natural law which have been distilled into ethical commands by human reason. They are: know God and live in society, reproduce and educate your offspring, protect and preserve human life and defend the innocent. These are absolutist rules which Aquinas believes it is our purpose (telos) to follow. He thinks our God-given nature is to follow these primary precepts. So it’s ‘natural’ to do those things.Arguably what Aquinas thought was part of human nature was really just his society. This can especially be seen in the case of the precept to worship God, since there are societies like Sweden where most people are atheists – unthinkable in Aquinas’ time. It’s also possible for people to become selfish and not care about defending the innocent, which suggests that’s culturally influenced, not caused by our nature. Aquinas’ notion of an orderly society would also be radically different than todays.However, many argue that the rise of atheism is merely causing people to turn to religion in different forms e.g meditation or worshiping the state (politics). People might be made selfish by their social environment but arguably they wouldn’t have been if left to their default state which would therefore come from their nature. Even if Aquinas is correct about our human nature, it didn’t come from God, it resulted from evolution. Therefore, it lacks the moral authority and status required for the basis of an ethical theory. Just because we evolved to be a certain way doesn’t mean that is good.An argument influenced by Marxism is that the dominant power group in society defines human nature in a way that enables and justifies their privileged status. Aquinas and the Catholic Church more broadly could be accused of this, especially in the medieval times Aquinas was writing in.Secondary precepts. The primary precepts are then applied to situations or types of actions. The judgement we then acquire is a secondary precept. E.g Water Pollution. The primary precepts don’t say anything about water pollution exactly, but we can use our God given reason to apply the primary precepts to water pollution, and realise that polluting water harms innocent people and destroys human life. Arguably it even disrupts the functioning of society too. Therefore, we can conclude that water pollution is wrong. That would be a secondary precept.Synderesis is when reason is used to gain knowledge of the primary precepts. The synderesis rule is that humans have a tendency to do good and avoid evil. Conscientia is the secondary precept.Is Aquinas right to think that humans have a tendency to do good and avoid evil? Evolutionary psychologists argue that while we have evolved some positive social emotions like empathy to those in our tribe/group, we nonetheless also have evolved a negative attitude towards those we perceive to be ‘other’ or different to us. This suggests that human nature has a tendency to good in some respects and a tendency to bad in others. Furthermore, if human nature evolved and wasn’t created by a God, thus it has no moral authority and cannot be the basis for ethics.Evolutionary psychology is very controversial because it is difficult to do proper empirical experiments to test its claims. Some argue instead that there is no human nature at all. They use the evidence of how radically human culture can define and change human behaviour, suggesting that if there is a human nature it is at most insignificant. For example, violence has declined over time as society has progressed. This suggests social conditions are the cause of human goodness rather than a God-given nature.Augustine would disagree with Aquinas. The existence of concupiscence, where bodily desires overwhelm reason, suggests that our human nature has become corrupted to the point where our reason cannot be relied on to figure out God’s will.Crime and violence has massively decreased since Augustine’s time however, suggesting that we are not irrevocably cursed with a sinful nature but can be controlled and developed through socialisation.Aquinas is implying that people only do evil due to ignorance. Arguably some people seek out ignorant beliefs in order to justify evil actions, to satisfy their evil desires. The four tiers of Law. The purpose of the four tiers is to show how Aquinas thinks that human law can gain its authority by deriving from the natural and divine law which themselves ultimately derive authority from God’s nature.Eternal Law – God’s mind/nature.Divine Law – God’s revelation to humansNatural law – The moral law in human nature (telos) discernible by reason.Human law – The laws humans make Because reason plays such an important role in ethics for Aquinas, and human reason can go wrong, it follows that ethics can go wrong. We can think something is right when really it is wrong, due to errors in reasoning. This is called an apparent good, whereas it would otherwise be a real good.How could we ever know that we have found a real good then?The double effect. Aquinas argued that a single action can have two effects. So a morally good action could have a bad effect along with its good one. This could make the bad effect justifiable if certain conditions are met: 1 – the act must be morally good or neutral2 – the bad result must not be the means of achieving the good one3 – the intention must be for achieving the good effect, the bad effect unintended4 – the bad effect must not be disproportionately greater than the good effectKnowing what someone’s intention is seems an impractical standard as it’s very difficult to know.Karl Barth argued that Aquinas’ natural law theory was a false natural theology which placed a dangerous overreliance on human reason. Barth argued that if humans were able to know God, including his moral commands, through their own efforts, then revelation would be unnecessary. Since God clearly thought revelation necessary as he sent Jesus, it follows for Barth that after the corruption of the fall, human reason cannot reach God. Barth also argued that the finite has no capacity for the infinite. Our finite minds cannot access God’s infinite mind. Whatever humans discover through reason is therefore not divine so to think it is must then amount to idolatry. Barth argued idolatry leads to worship of nations and then even to movements like the Nazis. Barth believed that as humans were fallen and thereby divorced from our created nature, God is ‘hidden’, meaning we cannot find him.Tillich responds that Barth’s critique relies on the difference between our essential nature and existential nature (meaning current, post-fall nature) being so different that there remains nothing left of our essential nature. Tilich argues this is not our experience however as we have a conscience and that “even a weak or misled conscience is still a conscience”, meaning that although humans did become corrupted by the fall, nonetheless we still retain something of our essential nature by which our reason and conscience might know something of God’s natural law.However, whatever a weak and misled conscience discovers is surely not God’s morality. Also, arguably it seems that Tillich fails to respond to Barth’s argument that revelation would be purposeless if natural law ethics worked.Fletcher’s situation ethics vs Aquinas’ natural law. Fletcher rejected natural law as a ruling norm because even though there might be a natural law, we can’t figure it out since humans disagree about what the primary precepts are because our reason is flawed and we cannot “[think] God’s thoughts after him”. Fletcher also claims the evidence from modern sociology of descriptive moral relativism, that morals differ across cultures, also backs this up as it’s not what would be expected if human reason could get to God’s moral truth.It’s a straw man to suggest that natural law requires us to think God’s thoughts after him. Aquinas is clear that God’s thoughts are the eternal law, but that is distinct from the natural law which is our nature/telos that God created to have an orientation to God’s goodness. So knowing the natural law is not knowing God’s thoughts.Arguably humans in other religions & cultures have different moral values because they made errors in their reason, perhaps because they were tricked by the devil, have not heard Christ’s revelation or simply made a mistake.Fletcher thinks all humans agree with Aquinas’ synderesis rule to do good and avoid evil, but rejects that as a ‘platitude’, a meaningless statement, until it becomes decided what good and evil actually are, which people do not agree on.Aquinas would respond that the synderesis rule is not meant to be a command from God for us to obey, it is a part of our human nature which God has created in us so that we might be inclined to know and do good and avoid evil in accordance with God’s divine law.Situation EthicsAgape. The importance of Agape in Christianity is drawn from Jesus saying that the ‘greatest commandment’ is to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. Fletcher interprets that as suggesting all other commandments only have value insofar as they enable Agape.Why would Jesus have made any other commandments if agape is the only one that is ultimately matters? Perhaps by calling it the ‘greatest’ commandment Jesus meant only that it was the one which would be relevant to the most number of situations. It’s hard to know what Jesus meant, but surely he didn’t mean to sacrifice all other commandments to love by calling it the greatest? What would be the point of making other commandments if loving your neighbour was really the only valid one?Legalism, situation ethics & antinomianism. Legalism is the view that people require fixed rules to follow. Antinomianism is the view that there are no rules or laws to follow at all. Fletcher claimed that his situation ethics was a middle ground. Love was the one single absolute principle which should be applied to all situations.William Barclay thought situation ethics had some validity but didn’t agree with it fully. He points out that situation ethics gives moral agents a huge amount of freedom. Barclay argued that for that freedom to be good, love has to be perfect. If there is no love or not enough then ‘freedom can become selfishness and even cruelty’. If everyone was a saint, then situation ethics would be perfect. John A T Robinson called it ‘the only ethic for man come of age’ – but Barclay argues mankind has not yet come of age and so ‘still needs the crutch and protection of law’. Fletcher thinks people don’t want the intense freedom that comes from having to decide what to do by yourself, so many are more likely to cling to a set of laws and principles given to them by others. In that case, situation ethics will work for those who are capable of enacting it but not for those who don’t, who will then fall back on legalism until society develops to a point where that proportion of the population are insignificant or non-existent, which is arguably fine for Fletcher.The four working principlesPragmatism. An action must be calibrated to the particularities of the situation. Fletcher gave the example of jews hiding from the Nazis when their baby started crying, which would reveal their hiding place. Fletcher said it’s the most loving thing to kill the baby because the situation was that they would all die anyway otherwise.Relativism. Fletcher claimed his theory “relativizes the absolute, it does not absolutize the relative”. Relativizing the absolute means that absolutes like “Do not kill” become relative to love. If it has a loving outcome to kill, such as euthanasia sometimes can, then that absolute is false relative to love. Not absolutizing the relative means that it is not total relativism where any moral claim could be justified. It is always relative to love which means that only moral claims which are valid when relative to love will be justified for Fletcher.Catholics are against pragmatism and relativism since they believe in the sanctity of life which means life has intrinsic value. This means that no matter what the pragmatic situation is, the value of life cannot be relativized. Catholics first of all argue that God commanded ‘thou shalt not murder’. Secondly, Catholics argue that society is held together because of the strength of the value we place on life. If we thought life didn’t have intrinsic value, as Fletcher claims, we might be more likely to kill each other. If we lessen the value we place on life by admitting that life can sometimes be taken, that threatens the stability of society. Positivism. Natural law and Kantian ethics are based on reason but Fletcher thought ethics had to begin with faith in love because Fletcher thought no rational answer can be given for why someone should love as it is a matter of faith in Jesus’ command to love your neighbour as yourself.Personalism. Situation ethics puts people above rules. As Jesus said “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. Fletcher claims this shows that Jesus knew rules could be broken if it was for the good of humanity to do so.Arguably Jesus did not mean to generalise to all commandments though. Breaking the Sabbath is one thing, breaking the commandment not to kill seems different. After all, he only explicitly specified that the Sabbath was made for man, not other commandments.The six fundamental principlesOnly love is intrinsically good. Everything else has conditional value depending on whether it helps or hurts people, but love is always unconditionally and therefore intrinsically good.The ruling norm of Christian decision is love; nothing else. Love and justice are the same, for justice is love distributed, nothing else. Love wills the neighbour’s good whether we like him or not.Only the end justifies the means; nothing else. Love decides there and then. Fletcher’s situation ethics vs Aquinas’ natural law. Fletcher rejected natural law as a ruling norm because even though there might be a natural law, we can’t figure it out since humans disagree about what the primary precepts are because our reason is flawed and we cannot “[think] God’s thoughts after him”. Fletcher also claims the evidence from modern sociology of descriptive moral relativism, that morals differ across cultures, also backs this up as it’s not what would be expected if human reason could get to God’s moral truth.It’s a straw man to suggest that natural law requires us to think God’s thoughts after him. Aquinas is clear that God’s thoughts are the eternal law, but that is distinct from the natural law which is our nature/telos that God created to have an orientation to God’s goodness. So knowing the natural law is not knowing God’s thoughts.Arguably humans in other religions & cultures have different moral values because they made errors in their reason, perhaps because they were tricked by the devil, have not heard Christ’s revelation or simply made a mistake.Fletcher thinks all humans agree with Aquinas’ synderesis rule to do good and avoid evil, but rejects that as a ‘platitude’, a meaningless statement, until it becomes decided what good and evil actually are, which people do not agree on.Aquinas would respond that the synderesis rule is not meant to be a command from God for us to obey, it is a part of our human nature which God has created in us so that we might be inclined to know and do good and avoid evil in accordance with God’s divine law.Fletcher’s situation ethics vs Protestant sola scriptura. Protestants believe that in ethical judgement we should only follow the Bible’s teachings, a view they called ‘sola scriptura’ meaning the ‘Bible alone’ is the source of moral authority, not agape. Fletcher rejected the sola scriptura of the protestant reformers. He points out the competing interpretations of the Sermon on the mount, suggesting that the Bible alone cannot give you clear enough guidance on how to act.Fletcher also argued that taking the bible literally is no solution, suggesting the “headache” of interpreting what the bible meant is far less trouble compared to trying to live as a literalist. Fletcher gives the example of ‘do not resist one who is evil’ as an example.Fletcher argues that the Bible is not a ‘rules book’ but an ‘editorial collection of scattered sayings, such as the Sermon on the Mount’ which at most offers us ‘some paradigms or suggestions’. Surely Fletcher’s critique of the Bible as a source of ethics applies to Fletcher’s own inference of the importance of Agape from what Jesus said was the ‘greatest’ commandment – to love your neighbour as yourself. Isn’t situation ethics just Fletcher’s interpretation of the Bible, no better than protestant sola scriptura according to his own logic?Barclay argues that Fletcher seems to be forgetting the grace of God and its power to make bad men good. “To encourage towards permissiveness is no real cure; to direct to the grace of God is.”Barclay admits that the situationists ‘have taught us that we must indeed be flexible” but claims that “in spite of that we do well still to remember there are laws which we break at our peril”. Fletcher would respond with the question of how we know which those laws are, however. He would still maintain that love is the best guide to figuring out what to do. An illustration Fletcher uses is from Nash’s play ‘The Rainmaker’ – the rainmaker makes love to a spinster to save her from becoming spinsterised. Her brother is morally outraged and wants to shoot him, but her father says to his outraged son “you are so full of what’s right that you can’t see what’s good”.Barclay claims Fletcher doesn’t account for how people’s psychology can be the thing which provides the cure for a problematic situation so we don’t need to break a law. In the example of the woman being potentially spinstered, it ignores that many unmarried women are not made unhappy by it. Barclay also brings up the example of John Wesley and questions whether he would have so successfully founded the Methodist Church if he had been married. People’s minds can put their desires to other uses when frustrated from the normal satisfaction – this is called sublimation. We don’t need to break ethical principles to find their satisfaction. Virtue EthicsInfluence from Plato. Plato thought that knowing the form of the Good made you perfectly good, so morality is a matter of knowledge, but Aristotle disagreed. He pointed out it’s possible and common to know what the right action is, yet fail to do it. So for Aristotle ethics isn’t just about telling people the right thing to do since that isn’t enough. We need an ethics that focuses on the human mind with the aim of steadily improving and cultivating it in the right direction.Eudaimonia is best translated as ‘living well’ or living a good life. If you ask someone, for example, why they study for A levels, their response will be to get good grades. If you then ask them why they want good grades, they might say to get into a good university, and so on, however if you keep asking why they want that, eventually they will have to say “because I think it will enable me to flourish – to live a good life.” Whatever humans choose to do, the reason will ultimately trace back to that they think it will help them live a good life. Aristotle claimed this shows that living a good life is the goal (telos) of all human life, because it is the only thing valued for its own sake. Everything else we value only as a means to that end.The function argument and virtues.So, Aristotle establishes that the goal/purpose (telos) of human beings is living a good life, but what is a good life? Aristotle’s function argument answers that. He claimed we call something good when it performs its function well. For example, we say a knife is good when it performs its function of cutting well. Everything has a function, which is a things’ distinctive characteristic. You could use a knife to play the piano, but that is not what a knife’s distinctive characteristic is uniquely good for. Aristotle claimed the distinctive characteristic of humans is reason. The function of a knife is to cut. What enables a knife to cut is its various qualities i.e sharpness. Similarly, what will enable humans to fulfil their function of reasoning well is whatever qualities help us have good reasons for our actions. These are the virtues.The doctrine of the Golden Mean. Aristotle states that a virtue is ‘the habit of choosing the mean between the extremes’. The idea is that each virtue exists in a sphere of action or feeling and within that sphere there can be an excess, a deficiency or the golden mean. Being virtuous is the habit of choosing the action which best manifests the golden mean in the relevant sphere.Sphere of action or feelingExcessGolden MeanDeficiencyFear and confidenceRecklessnessCourageCowardicePleasure and painSelf-indulgenceTemperanceInsensibilitySelf-expressionBoastfulnessTruthfulnessUnderstatementSocial conductBeing too friendlyFriendlinessUnfriendlinessIndignationEnvyRighteous indignationSpitefulnessProper sense of pridePractical Wisdom (phronesis). This is akin to common sense. It’s not enough to know that you should be courageous, for example, you need to know which courageous action to actually do, or which action would best exemplify the golden mean in the sphere of fear and confidence. Aristotle says we figure this out using our practical wisdom, by which we analyse and understand each moral situation we find ourselves in, and thereby figure out how to connect the virtues to that situation.How do we know when we have used our practical wisdom correctly though? Isn’t Aristotle basically saying we ‘just figure it out’ – bit of a cop out?Moral vs Intellectual virtues. Aristotle argued there is a rational part of the human soul and an irrational part. There are virtues in each part that require cultivating, but the moral virtues in the irrational part of the soul cannot be reached by reason and can therefore only be cultivated through experience and habit. E.g if you have some new recruits to an army, you can’t teach them courage by sitting them in front of a blackboard and talking about it – they have to learn it through experiences and habits. Examples of moral virtues are courage, temperance, righteous indignation. Intellectual virtues in the rational part of the soul can also be learned through experience and habit, however since they can be reached by reason, they can also be taught. Examples of intellectual virtues are reason, scientific knowledge, technical skill.Learning from the example of virtuous people. Virtue is acquired through action. One way to learn how to be virtuous is to follow the example of virtuous people. Watching others and imitating them. Examples of moral heroes or excellence could be Jesus, Ghandi, Socrates and Nalson Mandela.However, how do we really know who is virtuous and who isn’t, if we aren’t yet virtuous ourselves? Didn’t people think Hitler was virtuous and followed him? Isn’t it dangerous to advise people to follow others rather than figure things out themselves?Conflicting virtues: if a friend asks you to keep a secret and someone else asks you to reveal it, there is a conflict between truthfulness and friendliness. Aristotle would argue however that the use of practical wisdom would reveal that this case isn’t really within the sphere of self-expression in such a way that demands we must tell the truth. Practical wisdom should tell us that what matters regarding the virtue of truthfulness is not at stake in this situation.Virtue ethics fails to give clear guidance. Utilitarianism and Kant provide systems which explain how to figure out which action is right. Virtue ethics doesn’t do that. It doesn’t give clear guidance on how to act. For example, consider ethical dilemmas like whether the USA should have dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan in WW2. If it helped the war end faster, does that justify killing civilians? It’s hard to see how being a virtuous person could give you an answer to that. In fact being a good person might only make you see how difficult the dilemma is.Aristotle never intended his theory to provide clear guidance. He thought it’s perfectly possible to know what the right thing to do is yet fail to do it because they are not good enough as a person. Arguably that’s the source of most immoral action in the world. Therefore, an ethical system should help people become good rather than telling them what’s good as that is the most pressing issue holding humanity back. Aristotle acknowledged that because life is so complicated, and situations so diverse and nuanced, ethics can’t be about applying rules to situations anyway. A good/virtuous person for Aristotle will have practical wisdom which they will then use to figure out the right action for the situation. Aristotle could be accused of wishful thinking for supposing a virtuous person will just be able to figure out ethical questions using practical wisdom, without any carefully thought out system of ethics. Furthermore, only virtuous people have practical wisdom, therefore his theory gives no guidance to those who need it most. Aristotle argues however that knowledge of the good comes in degrees. Most people will have a good enough degree of knowledge of the good to get along well enough such that they can improve themselves. Those people can ask whether a certain action in a particular situation will manifest the virtuous – will it be courageous, friendly, the proper sense of pride, etc. While people will certainly vary in their ability to judge that, Aristotle is convinced that many will be able to do good enough a job to get it right to increasing degrees. Regardless of that success rate however, fundamentally Aristotle doesn’t see any other way for ethics. Telling someone what’s right isn’t enough to get them to do it. They have to figure it out for themselves.Being virtuous could lead to bad outcomes e.g. it takes courage to rob a bank. In response Foot argues:?Virtues are only virtuous when used to bring about a good outcome.However, this seems to be consequentialist which leads to the criticism: how do you know the consequences of your actions before you do them?McIntyre defended virtue ethics from two criticisms:1: Criticism that there are other cultures with different sets of virtues. Aristotle is assuming his culture is the best.2: Aristotle believed virtues and morality were ultimately rooted in biology for which there is no scientific evidence.McIntyre defends virtue ethics by accepting that Aristotle’s list of virtues were just his culture’s virtues. Different culture will have different lists of virtues but there will still be a golden mean for those virtues, practical wisdom in how to apply them and so ethics can still be about being virtuous even though there is no universal list of virtues.Human ethical issuesHow to do 15 mark evaluation applied ethics essays. You need to know the sub-issues within each ethical issue. You then need to be able to apply Natural law, situation ethics and virtue ethics to those issues. That involves saying what the ethical theories would claim about those sub-issues. Then you need to evaluate whether what that ethical theory said about the issue was correct. For that you need to bring in criticisms of the ethical theory and defences of the ethical theory from those criticisms. Theft Natural law: Stealing is typically thought wrong because property is thought of as a right. Property rights are thought to hold society together. Aquinas (stable society is a primary precept) would be against stealing for that reason. However if the situation suggests it would not threaten society and instead resulted in something virtuous then Aristotle would be in favour of stealing.Virtue ethics: Stealing is typically thought wrong because property is thought of as a right. Property rights are thought to hold society together. Aristotle (eudaimonia requires stable society).Stealing can sometimes be for the purposes of self-indulgence/greed, which Aristotle would be against because it is not the virtuous attitude to have towards pleasure.If stealing resulted from an improper sense of pride, such as thinking other people do not matter, or anger or lack of friendliness, Aristotle would think it unvirtuousSituation ethics: Stealing is sometimes thought to be acceptable, e.g. stealing food for your starving family or medicine you cannot afford for a dying family member. Fletcher might think that is the loving thing to do.If stealing resulted from something other than love like greed, Fletcher would think it wrong.LyingNatural law: Virtue ethics: Situation ethics: Embryo researchNatural law: Virtue ethics: Situation ethics: CloningNatural law: Virtue ethics: Situation ethics: Designer babiesCuring genetic diseases.Giving people perfect human qualities (IQ, athleticism).Giving people superhuman qualities.Natural law: Virtue ethics: Situation ethics: AbortionPersonhood“her body her choice” Natural law: Abortion is against the primary precept of protecting and preserving human life and so it wrong.Abortion is also seen by Catholics and other followers of natural law ethics to undermine the precept of the stability of society. Mother Theresa said ‘If a mother can kill her own child in her own womb, what is left to stop us from killing one another?’. This Catholic argument is that it is dangerous to give ourselves the right to decide who lives and who dies. Only belief in the sanctity of life prevents us from killing each other.Virtue ethics: Situation ethics: EuthanasiaVoluntary vs non-voluntary euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia is when a person has the mental capacity to want to be euthanized. Non-voluntary euthanasia is when someone does not have that mental capacity. If they are in a coma for example, or braindead.Active vs Passive euthanasia. Active euthanasia is when the person is killed by some positive action such as lethal injection, usually by a Doctor. Passive euthanasia is when no one performs an action which results in the death of the person but they are left to die by natural means, either by the result of their illness if they have one or simply by removing life-support machine equipment or even stopping giving them food. The death takes longer and unless they are unconscious in a coma or braindead, is more painful. However, the moral difference is that no one performed an action of killing them.Sanctity of life is that all life has intrinsic value. This argument is often based on belief that life is a sacred gift from God. “Your body is a temple of the holy spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God. You do not belong to yourself” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Genesis also states that humans were made in the image and likeness of God. This means deliberately ending life is always wrong and so euthanasia is always wrong.Quality of life refers to how happy or unhappy a life is. Proponents of the quality of life in relation to euthanasia regard it as a valid ethical consideration because they think that life has to be of a certain quality in order for it to count as worth living. Peter Singer believes the quality of life to be an important factor in euthanasia. He goes as far as recommending non-voluntary euthanasia for children whose potential quality of life is low, such as due to an incurable condition like spine abifida.Terminal illness is the most common reason for euthanasia as the person is going to die anyway often after a period of suffering.incurable physical illness such as cluster headaches are simply extremely painful and have no cure, reducing quality of life. Other incurable physical illness such as locked in syndrome almost completely paralyse a person which make them incapable of committing suicide even if they wanted to. incurable mental illness raises the issue of whether there is a kind and degree of mental illness which sufficiently impinges on the mind such that a rational choice to die cannot be made. Someone might be suffering considerable from an incurable mental illness, but if their ability to make informed rational choices is undermined by their illness, pro-autonomists would argue they shouldn’t be given euthanasia, while quality of life advocates might decide they should be. In Belgium euthanasia is legal for people who don’t have a terminal illness but have an incurable and severe mental illness. Even young people in their 20s have been euthanized for this reason. If they have tried everything including every medication available, euthanasia is seen as a last resort. Natural law: Virtue ethics: Situation ethics: Animal ethical issuesEating animalsExperimenting on animalsFor medicinal scienceFor cosmetic productsBlood sportsFox huntingBear baitingBull fightingAnimals as a source of organs for transplantsMeta ethicsDivine command theoryMeta Ethics is the question of what ‘goodness’ is.There are two main aspects to meta-ethics: metaphysical and linguistic.Metaphysical - What is the actual nature of morality in reality? Realism: The view that moral properties exist in reality.Anti-realism: The view that moral properties do not exist in reality.Linguistic - What is the meaning of ethical language? Cognitivism - ethical language expresses beliefs about reality.Non-cognitivism - ethical language expresses some non-cognition like an emotion.Ethical Naturalism – is the view that goodness is something real in the world. Ethical language is meaningful as it describes some real property in the world. So ‘X is good’ is essentially the same type of statement in terms of how it is true as ‘X is made of wood’. It is made true by facts in the world. Utilitarianism claims that goodness = pleasure or happiness. Pleasure and happiness are natural properties (at least if you don’t believe in a non-natural soul, which utilitarians generally don’t). Meta-ethically, Utilitarianism is therefore a form of naturalism, moral realism and cognitivism.The linguistic claims of Utilitarian naturalism are straightforwardly that ethical language is cognitivist as it functions no differently to expression of any other type of belief about reality. To describe the color of the table, I say ‘the table is brown’. This is an indicative sentence expressing a belief about reality. The ethical language ‘stealing from a bank is good’ is no different for the utilitarian naturalist. It is an indicative sentence and a proposition about reality which will be either true or false depending on whether that particular action of stealing leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number.Bentham’s Utilitarian naturalism: Step 1: “Nature has placed us under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do … a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while”.Bentham’s argument is that it is our human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so that’s all there is for morality to be about. We just are the kind of thing which cannot help but find pleasure good and pain bad. Bentham claims we could try to pretend otherwise but cannot escape this nature. As this is a fact of our nature, it is therefore a fact that goodness = pleasure.Hume’s law criticises naturalism. Hume said philosophers talk about the way things are and then jump with no apparent justification to a claim about the way things ought to be. Hume claimed this was a fallacy as is-statements do not entail ought-statements.?Hume argues that you could be aware of all the facts about a situation yet if you then pass a moral judgement, that clearly cannot have come from ‘the understanding’ nor be ‘the work of judgement’ but instead come from ‘the heart’ and is ‘not a speculative proposition’ but an ‘active feeling or sentiment’. This looks like an argument against realism but also against cognitivism and for non-cognitivism, specifically emotivism.To illustrate, take the example of abortion. Some argue that because a foetus develops brain activity at a certain time, it’s wrong to do abortion past that point. However, that inference has a hidden premise; that it’s wrong to kill something which has brain activity. It’s a fact that the foetus has brain activity, but that it’s wrong to kill something with brain activity does not seem like a fact nor derived from a fact. We might try and justify that further by suggesting that it’s wrong to kill human life or cause pain and so on. However, while it’s factual that there is such a thing as the ending of human life and the causing of pain, is it a fact that doing such things are wrong? We can easily imagine what sort of evidence establishes that ‘pain can be caused’ is a fact, but it’s not easy to see how to do that to establish that ‘it’s wrong to cause pain’ is a fact. Bentham does think that certain is-statements entail ought-statements but and gives an argument for that. He do not simply ‘leap’ from is to ought without justification, so as long as his argument works they could be considered to solve Hume’s is-ought gap.Moore’s naturalistic fallacy was influenced by Hume’s law and went on to argue that goodness can't be equated with any natural property (like happiness) as any attempt to do so commits the naturalistic fallacy. Moore claimed that we can’t define goodness. We can’t say what goodness is. It is like the color yellow - you can't describe or define yellow, you just experience it and can only point to yellow things. What is yellow? What does it look like? Just yellow... Moore says the same is true for goodness. Therefore, goodness can't be a naturalistic thing as naturalistic things can all be defined. So, we experience goodness, which Moore clams is due to a faculty of intuition.The open question argument is Moore’s main argument against naturalism.If goodness were identical to some natural property like happiness as utilitarians claim, then the statement 'Goodness is happiness' should be equal in meaning to 'happiness is happiness'. If A and B are identical, then they should be interchangeable such that 'A = B' should mean the same as 'B = B'. However, Moore argued that since a naturalist is claiming that goodness is a natural property (like happiness) then 'Goodness = X natural property' must be a synthetic statement about the world, yet 'happiness = happiness' is analytic. A synthetic statement cannot be equivalent in meaning to an analytic one, therefore they do not have the same meaning and therefore cannot be identical.A question is closed if it shows ignorance of the meanings of the terms involved to ask. A question is open if it does not display ignorance of those meanings to ask it. Since 'Goodness = X natural property' for a naturalist would be synthetic, one could be acquainted with the subject (goodness) but not the predicate (X natural property) and therefore would not necessarily be displaying ignorance of the terms involved to ask the question. Therefore, it will always be an open question whether goodness really is X natural property as we can always meaningfully and intelligibly ask the question 'is goodness really X natural property?'Some have argued that Moore’s argument is merely a case of the paradox of analysis. The reason for its failure is clearer when applied to the case of water and H2O. If H2O = water, then H2O = water should be equal in meaning to H2O = H2O. Yet the former is synthetic and the latter analytic. Moore’s logic seems to imply that water cannot be equivalent in meaning to H2O.W.D. Ross defended intuitionism from this criticism, arguing that in cases other than ‘goodness’, such as the water and H2O example, proper understanding of the definition of water as H2o will lead one to realise that ‘water = H2O’ is actually analytic. In that case, H2O = water is equivalent in meaning to H2O = H2O, and therefore water does = H2O. However due to Moore’s claim that ‘goodness’ cannot be defined, that cannot be done with goodness. No amount of understanding of the term ‘goodness’ can make you think that ‘goodness = happiness’ is equivalent to ‘happiness = happiness’.Arguably Moore can only prove that the linguistic concepts of goodness and happiness are distinct concepts that cannot be identical. Metaphysically, the property of goodness and the property of happiness could still be non-analytically identical. The concepts may be non-identical, but in this universe they might happen to be identical. For example, there is a possible world in which water is not H2O, so the concepts ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ are not analytically identical but do have synthetic identity in this universe. The same might be true of goodness and happiness in this universe. The distinct concepts of ‘goodness’ and ‘happiness’ when instantiated as properties in this universe might happen to refer to the same property. So, Moore’s proof of conceptual distinctness (analytic non-identity) does not rule out the synthetic property identity of goodness and happiness.Moore’s Intuitionism holds that when we observe or reflect on a moral situation, such as someone stealing, our intuition gives us the proposition ‘stealing is wrong’, depending on the consequences. This isn’t reducing morality to some subjective feeling however. Just as all humans have no choice but to perceive the color yellow when looking at a yellow thing, Moore thinks humans have no choice but to apprehend the truth or falsity of a moral proposition when observing or reflecting on the relevant moral situation. He thinks this occurs because we apprehend ‘non-natural properties’. Intuitionism is cognitivist as Moore thinks that ethical language expresses a belief about the non-natural reality, which is based on an intuition. Moore is criticised for having an indulgent metaphysics of non-natural properties existing in a supersensible realm being somehow apprehended by a mysterious faculty of intuition. How could he possibly prove any of this?Moore responds by making an analogy between his non-natural notion of ‘goodness’ and numbers, saying that neither ‘exist’ but do have ‘being’ in some way. Moore says there is no supersensible reality. By ‘intuitive’ he only meant not inferred from other kinds of knowledge like logical or natural truths.Mathematics has other sources of verification however, such as its use in physics and engineering. It’s possible goodness functions similarly to maths, but does it? Moore is claiming both that there are truths which are neither natural nor logical truths which can be accessed in a non-empirical way. This is unacceptable to empiricists who would question how Moore could possibly know this. Isn’t it more evidence based and simpler to claim instead that intuitions come merely from upbringing and social conditioning, thereby making them subjective, anti-realist and relativistic?Moral disagreement. Not everyone has the same intuition about what is ethically good or bad. How can Moore explain moral disagreement if everyone has intuitive access to objectively true moral propositions?Moore firstly argued that people often fail to be as clear as possible in their ethical propositions. Moore secondly argued that the process of figuring out ethical truth required fitting your intuited moral propositions together which must be coherent, thereby requiring you to use reason which thereby provides room moral disagreement.Pritchard, an intuitionist, responds that moral disagreement occurs because some are less morally developed than others.But consider The Pope, the Dali lama, and Peter singer. All are very morally developed people, yet all differ radically in their conception of ethics. This could suggest that intuitions just come from culture and upbringing rather than a non-natural reality. That is the view of moral relativism.W. D. Ross – took intuitionism in a different direction than Moore. Moore believed that moral propositions were intuited. Ross believed that what he called ‘prima facie duties’ were intuited. These are duties such as Justice, Harm-Prevention, and Promise keeping. Moore believed that since we intuit moral propositions, we got quite clear and precise guidance on which action to do ethically. However, for Ross, we only intuit the duties and it’s up to us to figure out which action would best fit the fulfilment of those duties. Ross seems to get around the criticism that everyone has different intuitions of what to do, since he allows that people have to figure out what to do and might therefore reach different conclusions. As Ross allows that there is an essential element of people figuring things out in moral judgement, this can mean that some will figure things out wrongly and this could be how he can explain away Hitler, whereas Moore has more of an issue explaining Hitler. Pritchard tried to use the argument that some people are simply more morally developed than others but this has its failings as seen above.Free will and moral responsibilityHard/Philosophical determinism. Barron D’Holbach was one of the first Atheists and observed that if we are not created by God and don’t have a soul, we are just physical things like any other and therefore follow the same laws of cause and effect. Every event is caused by previous events, including human action. If we keep tracing the cause of our action back in time, eventually we will get to before we were born, and could ultimately go all the way back to the big bang. We were not responsible for the big bang, nor our birth, but therefore we cannot be responsible for our actions either. So there is no such thing as free will.But it still feels like we have free will! John Locke illustrated that feeling was an illusion by asking us to imagine a man in a locked room who wakes up, unaware it is locked, and ‘chooses’ to stay in the room. He felt like he made a choice, when actually reality was such that no choice was in fact available to him. Locke argues this could be the case for every human action. We simply are unable to directly perceive all the causes and effects that determined our action, which leaves us with the illusion that we were not determined, when really we were. Honderich argued that determinism being true meant we have no moral responsibility. Quantum mechanics tells us that some things happen without a cause. Therefore determinism seems false. However, if our actions happen because of random quantum mechanics, that hardly seems a better basis for free will than determinism. Honderich responds to this criticism by arguing that the structures of the brain might be large enough that the laws of quantum mechanics (which only applies to the very small atomic level) might not actually apply to them nor their function. If this is the case, while determinism might not be true at the Quantum level, it could still be true at the macro level.Psychological determinism. Pavlov rang a bell whenever he fed his dogs. After a while, he found that he could ring the bell and the dogs would start to salivate even before he fed them. The dogs had associated the bell with food. This is called classical conditioning – when a biological function is associated with something. This was developed by Skinner who was a behaviourist. He invented operant conditioning, which involves conditioning behaviour by the giving of rewards. This could potentially be used to condition anyone into any particular behaviour the conditioner wanted. Skinner argued that all humans are already conditioned by their society which gave them a certain upbringing. We don’t have free will because our choices are the result of our upbringing, which we didn’t choose.Arguably conditioning and our upbringing only creates influence, rather than completely determining our action. It might give us a strong temptation or desire to behave in a certain way, however we still have the ability to resist this influence and choose otherwise. In response to this, the behaviourist could argue that this ability to choose otherwise could also have been conditioned by other, less obvious factors.Darrow was a lawyer who used psychological determinism as an argument in the case of two boys Leopold and Loeb, who had committed murder. Darrow argued the boys were a product of their upbringing, which they did not choose, and therefore should be considered less responsible. Their sentence was reduced from the death penalty to life imprisonment. Wouldn’t it be disastrous for our society if we judged criminals not responsible if they had a bad upbringing?Soft Determinism – also called compatibilism - is the view that free will and determinism are compatible (can both be true). Hume distinguishes between internal causes (causes that are internal to a person – their beliefs, desires, motivations, intentions) and external causes (causes that are external to a person – someone forcing them to do something). Hume noticed that we only hold people responsible for actions that result from our internal causes. So Hume defined free will as being determined by your internal causes not external causes. Even though our internal causes are just as determined as our external causes, Hume thinks this definition of free will nonetheless gives us the conception of moral responsibility we want.Arguably this is not the definition of free will people want. They want to actually be the uncaused cause of their actions, and to have the ability to have done otherwise. Does this picture of moral responsibility even work? How can we be morally responsible for something we couldn’t have helped doing? Is the distinction between internal and external causes coherent? Don’t internal causes ultimately trace back, if we go far enough, to before we were born, and therefore to external causes? Psychological determinism would argue that our internal causes are the direct result of conditioning external causes, which also questions the validity of Hume’s conception of moral responsibility.LibertarianismWe feel like we have free will, therefore we do. When deliberating over a choice, it really feels like we could choose either path. This would not be if one path was really closed.Peter Van Inwagen argued that it would be impossible for someone who truly doesn’t believe in free will to decide which action to do. One cannot decide whether to do action A or B unless one believes that both A and B are possible to do. So in a rational sense, everyone is committed to the belief that there is free will simply because they perform actions. Those who then also hold a belief that free does not exist therefore hold inconsistent beliefs.C.S Lewis argued that if the universe were proven underterministic, this could make room for free will.ConscienceReligious views on conscienceAugustine had perhaps the simplest view, which is that the conscience is simply the voice of God speaking to us, telling us what is right and wrong. Psalm 51 'create in me a clean heart o god and put a new and right spirit within me'. Augustine claimed conscience isn't enough to make one virtuous, we also need God's grace. The ethical role of conscience for Augustine is therefore that it is a direct line to an?objectively true ethics.Different people's consciences tell them different things. Every Nazi soldier had 'God on our side' written on their belt buckle. However, Augustine could reply that God telling different people different things might be some part of his plan, which we simply can't understand.Christians like William Wilberforce disagreed with the privileging of conscience over the bible which they believed should be the primary source of ethics. However, Augustine could reply that if conscience really is the voice of God, surely it should have primacy over anything else? However, what about the situations when the conscience goes directly against the teachings of the church or bible? Couldn't we sometimes be mistaken or deluded about what we think our conscience is telling us? E.g mental illness, brain hallucinations, fasting, drugs, alcohol, the devil.Newman also thought that conscience is?an innate sense in us created by God which directs us to the divine law and is essentially manifesting?the voice of God in us, 'when a person follows the conscience he is ... following the divine law .. conscience is a messenger of God and it is God speaking to us when we feel this intuitive moral knowledge'. So the conscience is ethically the most important thing as it is a direct line to the objective divine law.Newman didn't think Conscience should simply override church teachings if it conflicted - we have?to think about it and try to figure it out. Though arguably he does a bit of a cop out to dealing with this inconsistency by saying we should just pray for the resolution.The same criticism that different people have different conscience applies to Newman as it did to Augustine.Aquinas - believes all humans have a 'tendency to do good and avoid evil - the synderesis rule. Aquinas believed the conscience was an innate faculty given to us by God. We then develop this faculty throughout our life through synderesis and conscientia. Synderesis is our innate ability to know the primary precepts.?Conscientia is the application of them to new moral situations in the form of judgements. Aquinas said that reason plays a role in all stages of this process. Because human reason is fallible, the conscience thereby becomes fallible. We could be mistaken for example when we don't know a moral rule (mistake in synderesis)?or when we?don't?know that a general rule applies to a certain situation (mistake in conscientia). While Aquinas acknowledged that conscience can be mistaken through normal human reason errors, it could also be deliberately corrupted.Aquinas says conscience is reasoning used correctly to see what God sees as good, it is not just a voice inside us.Copleston argues that Aquinas is wrong to think conscience only involves reason - it also involves emotion. If so, this could potentially disrupt the ethical importance Aquinas placed on it. While reason can go wrong and therefore be corrected, if it is emotion that guides the conscience, it's hard to see how that could be corrected or even accurately described as correct or incorrect.The Bible says that we should “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding”. This suggests that Aquinas is wrong to think we should rely on our reason. Aquinas vs Augustine on human nature. Augustine thought human nature tended towards evil whereas Aquinas thought it tended towards good. Concupiscence.Arguably Augustine is wrong to think concupiscence is an essential part of our nature because people commit less crimes in modern society. Is it really true that there is a human nature which seeks to do good and avoid evil? What about violence embracing cultures like Nazism?Aquinas could respond that even in those cases, the problem is that errors in reasoning have led their good human nature astray. Nazi’s truly believed in ancient Nordic blood myths which they thought established their racial superiority, for example. But couldn’t we respond again that perhaps evil people actually seek these ideologies out because it gives them an excuse to be evil. In that case, they weren’t innately good people confused by an incorrect ideology, they were innately evil people who invented or cleaved to an ideology that gave that evil expression. Aquinas was not as aware of different cultures as we are today. As we now know, there are vastly different moral beliefs across cultures which suggests that there is not an innate God-given ability of reason to discover the natural law. Freud would argue that society conditions our moral views.However there do seem to be some core similarities between the moralities of different cultures such as not killing for no reason and rules about stealing. Moral thinkers from different cultures came up with similar moral prescriptions such as the golden rule to treat others as you would like to be treated, which can be found in ancient Chinese Philosophy, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity.This might have resulted from a biologically evolved morality rather than one designed by a God however, which would mean it might carry no ethical weight for Aquinas’ purposes.Alternatively, cross-cultural morality might result merely from the basic requirement of a society to function. If anyone could kill or steal from anyone else for no reason whenever they wanted, it’s hard to see how a society could exist. That might create an existential pressure which influences the moral thinkers of a society, yielding prescriptions such as the golden rule. Cross-cultural ethics therefore has a practical reality as its basis, not God and not or not only evolution, notwithstanding the supernatural ascriptions of some moral thinkers who simply weren’t aware that their creativity was actually channelling more mundane pragmatic interests.A Marxist-style argument against Aquinas would be that those with power often claim human nature is such that society ought to be organised in a way which benefits them. Aquinas and the Catholic Church could be accused of this.Karl Barth argued that Aquinas’ natural law theory was a false natural theology which placed a dangerous overreliance on human reason. Barth argued that if humans were able to know God, including his moral commands, through their own efforts, then revelation would be unnecessary. Since God clearly thought revelation necessary as he sent Jesus, it follows for Barth that after the corruption of the fall, human reason cannot reach God. Whatever humans discover through reason is therefore not divine so to think it is must then amount to idolatry. Barth argued idolatry leads to worship of nations and then even to movements like the Nazis. Barth believed that as humans were fallen and thereby divorced from our created nature, God is ‘hidden’, meaning we cannot find him.Tillich responds that Barth’s critique relies on the difference between our essential nature and existential nature (meaning current, post-fall nature) being so different that there remains nothing left of our essential nature. Tilich argues this is not our experience however as we have a conscience and that “even a weak or misled conscience is still a conscience”, meaning that although humans did become corrupted by the fall, nonetheless we still retain something of our essential nature by which our reason and conscience might know something of God’s natural law.However, whatever a weak misled conscience discovers is surely not God’s morality. Also, arguably it seems that Tillich fails to respond to Barth’s argument that revelation would be purposeless if natural law ethics worked.Psychological views on the conscienceFreud thought the conscience was just the result of psychological forces that science could understand. Freud believed the mind was divided into the Id (our unconscious animalistic desires), Ego (Our conscious decision-making self) and the Super Ego (the part of us that stores the values we introjected ((unconsciously adopted)) from authority figures during childhood and is the source of our moral feelings). When a desire bubbles up from the unconscious Id into our conscious Ego, we become aware of wanting to act on it, but our Super Ego then tells us whether the values of our society allow it. If so, we can act on it. If not, we have been conditioned to repress that desire, which Freud thought responsible for many mental problems. The ethical implication is that conscience is not the voice of God in us, it is just what our society wants from us. Our society might be good or bad, therefore our conscience is not the best guide if Freud is right. Furthermore there might not even be a ‘good or bad’, if morality is merely the conditioning of societies on its members.Freud was influenced by Nietzsche who argued that human conscious mind (what Freud called the ego) developed by necessity when humans underwent the radical change from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Our natural animalistic instincts (What Freud called the Id) were of less use to us in the new environment of society, in fact they were a hinderance as they called on us to behave in ways that would make society fall apart. Consciousness emerged as the space in-between our instincts and the outside world as a mediator which had to decide which instincts to act on and which not to. Freud has been criticised by contemporary psychologists for not being empirical enough. Karl Popper criticised Freud’s theory for being ‘unfalsifiable’ as it could not say what would prove it wrong. This means it is not true empiricism.If Freud is right then the conscience just tells us what authority figures have conditioned us to feel, it does not provide objective morality. That doesn’t mean it is false, however.Freud seems to contradict himself when he claims that those who do not regulate their id well are ‘maladaptive’, however, as that seems to smuggle in a value judgement which would thereby be inconsistent with his lack of objective morality. It is true that a mentally ill person is maladaptive to our society, but to suggest that is ‘bad’ is to presuppose that our type of society is ‘good’. How do different societies come to have similar rules over e.g. murder and theft? There are a set of core moral principles similar in all societies. This could suggest there is some absolutist moral truth that humans are somehow apprehending, perhaps from a God.Arguably societies have similar views on murder and stealing because a society which allowed such actions would fall apart and cease to exist. So, societies have that core similarity because of practical necessity, not because of absolutist objective moral truths.Alternatively, evolution could provide the explanation for that. Dawkins claimed that humans evolved a moral sense because we evolved in groups and developed social emotions like empathy. This suggests Freud is wrong to think that the conscience is completely socially conditioned since part of it is biological. However it does not suggest Freud is wrong to think the conscience can be explained in naturalistic terms, it’s just expanding the range of naturalistic explanations that together account for the conscience.Piaget was a contemporary psychologist who developed better empirical methods of experiment than Freud. He studied the development of children and argued that there occurs a fundamental shift in the nature of ‘conscience’. Before the age of 11 children have what he called heteronomous morality. This means they merely associate actions as bad because of the influence of their authority figures like parents. For example, an 8 year old child dangerously runs into a road and their parent yells at them. The child will learn not to do that again, but not because they have cognitively understood that running into the road will cause them injury or death which would be a bad thing, but because they merely associate the action of running into the road with the loud scary noise of their parents shouting occurring. After 11 year old however, Piaget argued that the autonomous morality develops in children, where they can begin to have abstract cognitive moral beliefs about how one ought to act and why.If Piaget is correct and the conscience develops over time, this seems to argue against the possibility of it being the voice of God in us, since God’s commands are eternal and unchanging – they do not develop over time. Aquinas’s theory might be safe from this criticism however, since their theory of conscience involve its development over time.Augustine could potentially respond by arguing that God speaks to young children differently than older ones, though this seems a bit far-fetched. It also seems to misunderstand Piaget’s view. The Heteronomous morality is not merely a voice ‘in a different way’, but really a non-cognitive purely associative part of the mind. The strength of Piaget is that his work is based on empirical evidence, not faith.The role of conscience in making moral decisions with reference to: ? telling lies and breaking promises ? adulteryBentham and Kant? Comparison of the key ideas of Bentham and Kant about moral decision making. ? How far these two ethical theories are consistent with religious moral decision making.Act utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham invented the first form of Utilitarianism – Act utilitarianism. He was one of the first atheist philosophers and wanted to devise a morality that would take into account that new understanding of what it meant to be human. No longer considering ourselves as a special part of creation, just another part of nature. Bentham argued ‘Nature has placed us under the governance of two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain’. So it is the nature of the human animal to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so that’s all there is for morality to be about. Bentham devised the principle of utility:‘An action is good if it leads to the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people’Utilitarianism is consequentialist – it argues what makes something good is the consequences it leads to. This seems to justify bad actions – e.g multiple people gaining pleasure at the suffering of an individual seems to be the greatest happiness for the greatest number.One could try to argue that the psychological suffering of victimised people lasts their entire life and therefore outweighs the pleasure.Just scale up the number of people gaining the pleasure then and make the victimised person die – like gladiators in Ancient Rome providing pleasure to the tens of thousands in the crowd.Utilitarianism only views the consequences of actions as good, not the character (integrity) of the person who performs them. This goes against the intuition that a person can be a good person. It also has the bizarre effect that e.g stabbing someone could be good if after being rushed to hospital it was found, coincidentally, they had a brain tumour. Or someone who attempts to do good but bad consequences result which were unforeseeable, such as the priest who saved Hitler’s life when he was a child.Mill responds firstly that a person’s character does matter because it will determine their future actions. The stabber should be condemned for his motive because that will prevent them stabbing others in future. The priest should be forgiven because he’s not likely to do anything bad in the future as his character is good. Secondly, Mill argues that having a good character helps you become happy. Motives and character therefore do matter ethically, though not intrinsically but only insofar as they result in good consequences, in line with consequentialism.Hedonic Calculus. The principle of utility holds that the ‘greatest’ pleasure is the goal of ethical action. It follows that a method for measuring pleasure is required. Bentham’s hedonic calculus is far too time consuming to be of practical use.Mill thought getting that reasonable expectation for every single action was still too impractical, since happiness is ‘much too complex and indefinite’. Instead Mill proposes using rules since society has, over time, figured out what causes happiness. We should go with those rules except in cases when they come into conflict with each other. Then we should apply the principle of utility to that particular case. In most cases we won’t be required to do such impractical calculating however.We can’t acquire the information the hedonic calculus needs in advance. We can’t know the consequences of our actions. The butterfly effect is a concept from chaos theory which states the flapping of a butterfly’s wings might cause a hurricane half way across the world. Future actions are incalculable in such a complex world.Bentham argues that an action is right regarding ‘the tendency which it appears to have’ to maximise happiness. So, we actually only need to have a reasonable expectation of what the consequences will be. So Bentham responds to the criticism that we can’t predict the future by claiming we don’t need to predict it perfectly.Kant rejected consequentialism in ethics. He argued that the consequences can’t really be what matters for morality since we cannot control and therefore be responsible for the consequences of our actions. Kant was a Deontologist who argued it was the action and intention that matter.Just because we can’t control consequences completely, does that mean they don’t matter ethically? Also, consequentialism isn’t arguing we can completely control the consequences, just that we should consider them when acting. Furthermore, we can control consequences to a degree. Shouldn’t we therefore be responsible for them to that degree?Kant - Basing morality on reason. Kant was part of the intellectual movement called the enlightenment, which was in part a reaction to religious warfare. Kant thought that if we based morality on reason we could solve this issue. Kant thought that this project could work because reason places constraints on us. This can more easily be seen in the case of mathematics. Our reason tells us that 1+1=2 and that we are being irrational if we try to claim otherwise. In fact, we can’t reason otherwise even if we wanted to. Mathematical equations are thus agreed on by everyone as we all reason the same. Kant thought the same could be achieved in morality. If you want to do something that would be impossible for everyone to do, then you must think there is something special about you that justifies your being the one who should be allowed, but reason cannot provide any such justification. You might like yourself more than other people, but that’s an emotion or attitude, not reason. Kant thought that the fact that we have reason and that other people have reason too means our reason places a restraint on us such that we cannot rationally think others are lesser than us, or indeed that we are less than others. The effect of our reason all functioning the same and placing restraints on our actions in the form of judging some of them rational and others irrational amounts, for Kant, to there being a universal moral law which each individual person’s reason can discover.A Categorical imperative is something we should do in all situations no matter the consequences and regardless of how we might feel, it is our duty. A hypothetical imperative is a moral action that a rational will adopts for reasons other than duty. As rational beings we may adopt ends that are not categorical, which makes them hypothetical. The first formulation of the categorical imperative is the first claim that we should only do something if everyone can do it. Kant says ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you could at the same time will it become a universal law’. This is the test of universalizability. The maxim of your will is the moral statement of what you want to do. The test if whether you can rationally will that everyone do what you want to do. E.g Lying – Kant thinks lying cannot be universalised because if everyone were to lie, there would be no such thing as truth anymore. However lying depends on truth, therefore by willing everyone to lie, we would be willing the undermining of the concept on which lying depends for its existence in the first place. That is inconsistent and therefore irrational and therefore a maxim involving lying cannot rationally be willed into a universal law.Kant thinks this universalisibility test is the final test of whether we have truly removed consequences and personal feelings from consideration. If we have, then all that should be left of an action is the pure action itself in the abstract as done by anyone or everyone. Therefore, once we have removed consequences and personal feelings, an action should be universalisible which is why it is a good test of its morality in Kant’s view.If a Nazi asked whether we were hiding Jews and we were, it seems Kant is committed to the view that it’s wrong to lie. That seems to go against most people’s moral intuitions.Kant would respond that each person is ultimately responsible for what they do. As a rational agent, you are responsible for what you do, and the Nazi is responsible for what they do. Lying to prevent the Nazi from killing is to act as if you were responsible for the Nazi’s action, but you are not. You are responsible for what you do, and so you should not lie.Kant’s picture of humanity as atomised loci of rational agency is arguably a false one. Human beings are not as rational as he thinks. We are caught up in complex webs of social influence which we cannot escape, indeed arguably there is no meaning outside the social landscape, as Wittgentstein’s language games argued. We exist in deep connection to other people and thus to that extent in fact are responsible for each other’s actions.Kant could respond that rationality itself is able to transcend the historical cultural contingencies that admittedly do define each person but cannot define nor determine their reason.The second formulation of the categorical imperative – Kant says ‘Always treat persons, whether others or in yourself, always as an end, never as a means’. This essentially means ‘don’t use people, or abuse yourself’. Our reason makes us a rational agent and thereby no better or worse than anyone else inasmuch as they are also rational agents. Rational agents have and seek goals which Kant called ‘ends’. To treat a person as if they were a mere means to an end is irrational as it contradicts the fact that they have their own end. Your treating them as a means is dependent on your viewing yourself as a rational agent who adopts means to achieve ends, but denying that another rational agent has their own ends is to contradict the basis on which you attempted to use them in the first place; that you are a rational agent who adopts means to achieve ends. It’s like suggesting that denying the intrinsic value of another human being amounts to denying your own. Kant claimed that all rational agents are therefore ends in themselves.The Good will, for Kant, is one which has the right attitude morally. We should leave out personal feelings/desires and just do ‘duty for duty’s sake’. Eg if a friend is in hospital, we should go and visit them not out of empathy but because it’s our duty. Kant believed morality could rest on rationality. He argued that to be a human is to be in possession of a ‘rational will’. Since all humans have access to this rationality, a kind of equality and uniformity and absolutism can be generated for ethics. All humans rationally accept that 1+1=2. Kant hoped that by embedding morality in reason and rationality rather than something like God, all humans could come to the same moral views if only they could be led by their rationality. This is why Kant argued we should be led by our duty be our only motivation. However if a friend in hospital asked us why we were there and we said our duty they might feel offended. This is not an accurate understanding of the nature of human relationships. We need our feelings and desires, it’s what makes us human. We would be suspicious of someone who gave to charity without feeling empathy. If a parent claimed to help their child out of duty rather than love, we would find that disturbing. Therefore having the appropriate emotion regarding an action seems part of our conception of a good moral character but Kant seems unable to recognize this.Bernard Williams claims it is inhuman to desire moral judgement to be free from emotion and an ethic like Kant’s which recommends it is therefore immoral. For example, giving money to charity because you feel empathy for suffering people seems like a moral act, but Kant would regard it as non-moral.Kant would back up his theory however by arguing that something is either right or wrong regardless of how a person might feel about it. Those who think it morally good to give money to charity out of empathy are actually committing themselves to the claim that the goodness of the act consists in their feelings of empathy, at least in part. If they asked themselves why it was good to give money to suffering people, however, satisfying the empathetic feelings of the giver would generally not be considered a reason. The deservedness of the receiver of charity is not thought by anyone to depend on the presence of feelings of empathy on the part of the giver. Therefore, those who think it morally good to give to charity out of empathy should recognize, Kant would argue, that the goodness of their act does not depend on their feelings. Acting out of feelings is therefore failing to act morally. If not wrong, arguably it is at least impractical to expect humans to be able to prevent their emotions from affecting their moral judgements. ................
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