Week 1: Introduction to the course
Lecture 1
The trolley case shows
- We have intuitions about morality
- But these might conflict:
1. Sugeon killing healthy patient to save five
2. Psychologist harming subject to gain insight
- Indicated conflict of values (helping vs. not (actively) harming)
- Controlled environment for inspecting and improving intuitions
- So simple, but triggers philosophical questions
What is ethics about?
1. Boundaries of ethics can shift
2. Actions that concern others
3. Hard to draw precise boundary
Ethics (or Moral Philosophy)
- Systematic reflection on morality
- As a discipline
- Guiding, improving, developing and evaluating morality
- Needed to explain Ehtos/Morality
Ehtos (or Morality)
- Ethos (custom, habit)
- Guiding ideals, attitudes and habits that characterizes a person or community
- Gut feelings
- Immediate, pre-reflective response
,Mataethics
Very reflective on ethics itself, so what is “good” or even what is ethics.
Challenges to ethics:
- No free will no right or wrong
- No God so anything goes
- Morality is fiction all egoists
- Morality is a lie control people
- No action is ALWAYS right or wrong
- Differences in culture or individual
- Intuitive choices no ethics needed
Normative ethics
About determining moral standards and how we should live our lives.
Moral relativism:
Moral universalism:
, Acculturation
Ethical environment (Lloyd & Hansen)
- Ethical environments change over time
- Exploring the ethical basis for a law of rule can be a way to understand the ethical
environment within the law operates
- Natural environment shows what is possible, ethical environment selects possibilities that
ought and ought not to be done
Acculturation is the intersection between personal and professional morality and ethics
4 strategies of acculturation along 2 axes
1. Cultural maintenance (do we hold on to our personal ethics of origin of not?)
2. Contact and participation (do we embrace psychological ethics or not?)
Marginalization: