Transcript The Moral Point of View - Seattle Preparatory School

The Moral Point of
View
Sandra Foy
Bioethics
Fall Semester, 2004
Why Study Ethics?
Moral concerns are unavoidable in life.
 Analogy: morality is a lot like nutrition.

 Principal
concern: health
 The role of experts
 Disagreement
Ethics as an Ongoing
Conversation
Professional discussions of ethical issues
in journals.
 We come back to ideas again and again,
finding new meaning in them.

Ethics and Morality
Morality: first-order set of beliefs and
practices about how to live a good life
 Ethics: a second-order, conscious
reflection on the adequacy of our moral
beliefs.

Moral Health
The goal of ethical reflection is moral
health.
 Thus we seek to determine what will
nourish our moral life and what will poison
it.

The Moral Point of View

What makes something a moral issue?
 Content:

duties, rights, human welfare, suffering,
character, etc.
 Perspective:

impartial, compassionate, etc.
Example: Cheating
Imagine a situation in which you see a
classmate cheating. There are several
elements from a moral point of view:
 Some
people are hurt by the cheating
 There is deception in the situation
 Cheating seems to be unfair to those who don’t
cheat
 There are conflicting values—honesty, loyalty, etc.
 There are questions of character.
The Language of Moral
Concerns

Some philosophers have argued that
moral issues are characterized by a
particular kind of language—terms such as
duty, obligation, right, and good.
Impartiality
Many philosophers have argued that the
moral point of view is characterized by
impartiality, that is, I don’t give my own
interest any special weight.
 Immanuel
Kant
 John Stuart Mill
Compassion
Other philosophers have seen the origin of
the moral life to be in compassion, feeling
for the suffering of other sentient beings.
 Josiah Royce: “Such as that is for me, so
is it for him, nothing less.”

Universally Binding
Moral obligations, some philosophers
maintain, are universally binding and
that is what gives them their distinctive
character.
 Kant: morality is a matter of categorical
imperatives.

 Distinguish
between hypothetical and
categorical imperatives.
Concern for Character
Philosophers from Aristotle onward have
seen the primary focus of morality to be
character.
 Two questions:

 What
ought I to do? (Kant and Mill)
 What kind of person ought I to be? (Aristotle)
The Focus of Ethics

Ethics as the Evaluation of Other People’s
Behavior
 We
are often eager to pass judgment on
others

Ethics as the Search for Meaning and
Value in Our Own Lives
Ethics as the Evaluation of
Other People’s Behavior
Ethics often used as a weapon
 Hypocrisy
 Possibility of knowing other people
 The right to judge other people
 The right to intervene
 Judging and caring

Ethics as the Search for
Meaning and Value in Our
Own Lives
Positive focus
 Aims at discerning what is good
 Emphasizes personal responsibility for
one’s own life

What to Expect from a Moral
Theory
Functions of theory:
 Describe
 Explain
 Give strength (Stockdale)
 Prescribe
 Open
new possibilities
 Wonder
What to Expect from a Moral
Theory, 2
What is ethics like?
 Physics
 Clear-cut,

definitive answers
Engineering
 Several
possible ways of doing things, many
ways that are wrong
The Point of Ethical Reflection

Ethics as the evaluation of other people’s
behavior
 Sources of mistrust about
 Hypocrisy
 Knowing other people
 The right to judge
 Judging and intervention
 Judging and caring

moral judgments
Ethics as the search for the meaning of our own
lives
Conclusion:
Ethics & Good Health

Ethics is like nutrition
 One
studies bodily health, the other moral
health
 Significant disagreement in both fields
 Still there is a significant common ground.