3.2 Moral philosophy
Normative ethical theories
- The meaning of good, bad, right, wrong within each of the three approaches specified below
- Similarities and differences across the three approaches specified below
Utilitarianism
- The question of what is meant by 'utility' and 'maximising utility', including:
- Jeremy Bentham's quantitative hedonistic utilitarianism (his utility calculus)
- John Stuart Mill’s qualitative hedonistic utilitarianism (higher and lower pleasures) and his ‘proof’ of the greatest happiness principle
- non-hedonistic utilitarianism (including preference utilitarianism)
- act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism.
Issues, including:
- whether pleasure is the only good (Nozick's experience machine)
- fairness and individual liberty/rights (including the risk of the 'tyranny of the majority')
- problems with calculation (including which beings to include)
- issues around partiality
- whether utilitarianism ignores both the moral integrity and the intentions of the individual.
Kantian deontological ethics
- Immanuel Kant’s account of what is meant by a ‘good will’.
- The distinction between acting in accordance with duty and acting out of duty.
- The distinction between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives.
- The first formulation of the categorical imperative (including the distinction between a contradiction in conception and a contradiction in will).
- The second formulation of the categorical imperative.
Issues, including:
- clashing/competing duties
- not all universalisable maxims are distinctly moral; not all non-universalisable maxims are immoral
- the view that consequences of actions determine their moral value
- Kant ignores the value of certain motives, eg love, friendship, kindness
- morality is a system of hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives (Philippa Foot).
Aristotelian virtue ethics
- ‘The good’ for human beings: the meaning of Eudaimonia as the ‘final end’ and the relationship between Eudaimonia and pleasure.
- The function argument and the relationship between virtues and function.
- Aristotle’s account of virtues and vices: virtues as character traits/dispositions; the role of education/habituation in the development of a moral character; the skill analogy; the importance of feelings; the doctrine of the mean and its application to particular virtues.
- Moral responsibility: voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary actions.
- The relationship between virtues, actions and reasons and the role of practical reasoning/practical wisdom.
Issues including:
- whether Aristotelian virtue ethics can give sufficiently clear guidance about how to act
- clashing/competing virtues
- the possibility of circularity involved in defining virtuous acts and virtuous persons in terms of each other
- whether a trait must contribute to Eudaimonia in order to be a virtue; the relationship between the good for the individual and moral good.
Applied ethics
Students must be able to apply the content of Normative ethical theories and meta-ethics to the following issues:
- stealing
- simulated killing (within computer games, plays, films etc)
- eating animals
- telling lies.
Meta-ethics
The origins of moral principles: reason, emotion/attitudes, or society.
The distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism about ethical language.
Moral realism
There are mind-independent moral properties/facts.
- Moral naturalism (cognitivist) – including naturalist forms of utilitarianism (including Bentham) and of virtue ethics.
- Moral non-naturalism (cognitivist) – including intuitionism and Moore’s ‘open question argument’ against all reductive metaethical theories and the Naturalistic Fallacy.
Issues that may arise for the theories above, including:
- Hume's Fork and A J Ayer's verification principle
- Hume's argument that moral judgements are not beliefs since beliefs alone could not motivate us
- Hume's is-ought gap
- John Mackie's argument from relativity and his arguments from queerness.
Moral anti-realism
There are no mind-independent moral properties/facts.
- Error Theory (cognitivist) - Mackie
- Emotivism (non-cognitivist) – Ayer
- Prescriptivism (non-cognitivist) – Richard Hare
Issues that may arise for the theories above, including:
- whether anti-realism can account for how we use moral language, including moral reasoning, persuading, disagreeing etc.
- the problem of accounting for moral progress
- whether anti-realism becomes moral nihilism.
Set texts
Annas, Julia (2006), 'Virtue Ethics', in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 515–536
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Books 1 (1–5, 7–10, 13), 2 (1–7), 3 (1–5), 5, 6 (1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13), 7 (12–13), 10 (1–8)
Ayer, Alfred J (1973/1991), The Central Questions of Philosophy, London, Penguin, 22–29 and Ayer, AJ (1946), Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd Edition, New York, Dover, (esp. Chapters 1 and 6)
Bentham, Jeremy (1789), Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Chapter 1 (The Principle of Utility) and Chapter 4 (Measuring Pleasure and Pain)
Diamond, Cora (1978), ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’ Philosophy 53: 465–479
Foot, Philippa (1972), ‘Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives.’ Philosophical Review, vol 81, issue 3, 305–316.
Hare, Richard M (1952) The Language of Morals, Chapters 1, 5, 7, 10.2
Hume, David (1739–40), Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part 1
Kant, Immanuel (1785), Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Chapters 1 and 2
Mackie, John L (1977), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin, Chapter 1, Sections 8 and 9
Mill, John Stuart (1863), Utilitarianism, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5
Moore, George E (1903), Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Sections 6–14
Smart, Jack J C & Williams, Bernard (1973), Utilitarianism: For and Against, Chapter 2 (Act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism) and Chapter 3 (Hedonistic and non-hedonistic utilitarianism)
