A Report on Contemporary Ethical Theories

(EDUC 603 – Administrative Behavior)

by: Therese Rachel Mae A. Tating

General Objective:
At the end of the lecture-discussion, the students will be able to obtain facts about
contemporary ethical issues and their subtopics to enhance their knowledge,
improve their skills, and influence their attitudes as they deal with people in the
various ethical dilemmas

Specific Objectives:
Specifically, they will be able to:
1. Enumerate and define the contemporary ethical theories and their subtopics;
2. discuss the implications of contemporary ethical theories to professional
practice;
3. apply the significant concepts of contemporary ethical theories in their fields
of specialization; and
4. Express a positive attitude towards the application of contemporary ethical
theories.

ETHICS OF VIRTUE
Focus: character of the moral agent and helping people develop good character
traits

Definition: a collection of normative ethical philosophies that place an emphasis

on being rather than doing that comes as a result of intrinsic virtues. It emphasizes
the central role played by motives in moral questions. To act from virtue is to act
from some particular motivation; certain virtues are necessary for a correct moral
decision is to say that correct moral decisions require correct motives. Thus,
developing morally desirable virtues for their own sake will help aid moral actions
when such decisions need to be made

History: Plato and Aristotle

Concepts:
• Wisdom

• Courage

• Self-control

• Justice

• arete (excellence or virtue)

• phronesis (practical or moral wisdom)

 • eudaimonia (flourishing) - It consists of exercising the characteristic human
quality - reason - as the soul's most proper and nourishing activity.

1. Honing and perfecting generally accepted virtues of character

2. Community that nurtures that value

3. Establishing rules and guidelines in order to make sound moral

judgment

4. Find Role models

Criticisms:
• Many moral dilemmas require a great deal of careful reasoning and thinking
— simply having the right character cannot be enough to even make the right
decision.
• Different people, cultures and societies often have vastly different opinions
on what constitutes a virtue. One person’s virtue may be another person’s
vice and a vice in one set of circumstances may be a virtue in another.

Application:
• Whistleblowing in the healthcare setting would be more respected within
clinical governance pathways if it had a firmer academic foundation in virtue
ethics.

• Basis for a balanced approach to understanding capitalism and capitalist

societies. Within the field of philosophy of education

• provide a rationale and foundation for peace education

DISCOURSE ETHICS
Focus: argument

Definition: emphatically taking into consideration the viewpoints of all who

would be affected by the adoption of a certain moral action or normative claim
and demands that participation in a discourse where all are fully aware of the
other's perspectives and interpretations.

History: Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel

Concepts:
 Presupposition

The basic idea is that the validity of a moral norm cannot be justified in the mind
of an individual reflecting on the world. The validity of a norm is justified only
intersubjectively in processes of argumentation between individuals; in a
dialectic. The validity of a claim to normative rightness depends upon the mutual
understanding achieved by individuals in argument.

Provided that:
 1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take
part in a discourse.
2. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
3. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the
discourse.
4. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs.
5. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from
exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2).

 Universalization (U) o

It intends to set the conditions for impartial judgment in as far as it

"constrains all affected to adopt the perspectives of all others in the
balancing of interests". The principle of universalization itself states:

1. All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects that a
proposed moral norm's general observance can be anticipated to have
for the satisfaction of everyone's interests (and these consequences
are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation).

2. Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with
the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a
practical discourse.

3. Consensus can be achieved only if all participants participate freely:

we cannot expect the consent of all participants to follow "unless all
affected can freely accept the consequences and the side effects that
the general observance of a controversial norm can be expected to
have for the satisfaction of the interests of each individual.

It formulates the moral point of view as it arises out of the multiple perspectives of
those affected by a norm under consideration. The moral point of view explicated in
(U) is not the property of an individual subject but the property of a community of
interlocutors, the results of a complex process of role taking and exchange of
perspectives. Furthermore, (U) is deduced from a rational reconstruction of the
presupposition of communication by establishing a foundation in inner-worldly
processes of communication.

Criticisms:
• Even if it is accepted that rationality must be expanded to include normative
and evaluative dimensions, it is not clear what it is that makes a speech act
justified, because it is unclear what constitutes a good reason.

• Accepting the distinction between the different kinds of reasons that

accompany the differentiation of the validity dimensions does not give any
insight into what a good reason in a particular validity dimension would be. In
fact, it complicates the issue because it makes it clear that there are different
procedures unique to each validity dimension and that these dimensions
cannot be reduced to one another.

Application:
 • Establishment diverse sets of norms as legitimate for communities, i.e. free
speech.

ETHICS OF CARE
Focus: importance of relationships

Definition: This body of theory is critical of how caring is socially engendered to

women and consequently devalued. Women tend to affirm an ethic of care that
centers on responsiveness in an interconnected network of needs, care, and
prevention of harm. Taking care of others is the core notion. The person who acts
from rule-governed obligations without appropriately aligned feelings such as worry
when a friend suffers seems to have a moral deficiency. In addition…insight into the
needs of others and considerate alertness to their circumstances often come from
the emotions more than reason. Thus, the emotions seem to have a ‘cognitive role,’
allowing us to grasp a situation that may not be immediately available to one
arguing solely from a ‘justice perspective.’

History: Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings

Concepts:
1. The interdependence of all individuals for achieving their interests
2. The belief that those particularly vulnerable to our choices and their outcomes
deserve extra consideration to be measured according to
i) the level of their vulnerability to one's choices
ii) the level of their affectedness by one's choices and no one else's
3. The necessity of attending to the contextual details of the situation in order to
safeguard and promote the actual specific interests of those involved

Criticisms:
• If women are better carers than men, it may still be epistemically, ethically,
and politically imprudent to associate women with the value of care. To link
women with caring may be to promote the view that women are in charge of
caring or, worse, that because women can care, they should care no matter
the cost to themselves.

• Women's caring, of men in particular, is that women may sacrifice their moral
integrity in the process

Application:
• Sensitivity and emotional response to particular situations (like family
discussions with physicians) provide important guides to morally acceptable
actions. A care ethic also seems to favor adopting procedures from Conflict
Resolution and Dispute Mediation as alternative ways to approach an
apparent ethical conflict.

• Pulling all women towards the goal of gender equity with men
 DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
Focus: distribution of the benefits and burdens of economic activity among
individuals in a society

Definition: Thus, a community in which incidental inequalities in outcome do not

arise would be considered a society guided by the principles of distributive justice.
Allocation of goods takes into thought the total amount of goods to be handed out,
the process on how they in the civilization are going to dispense, and the pattern of
division. Civilizations have a narrow amount of resources and capital; the problem
arises on how the goods should be divided. Distributive principles may vary in
numerous dimensions. They can vary in what is subject to distribution (income,
wealth, opportunities, jobs, welfare, utility, etc.); in the nature of the subjects of the
distribution (natural persons, groups of persons, reference classes, etc.); and on
what basis distribution should be made (equality, maximization, according to
individual characteristics, according to free transactions, etc.).

History: Throughout most of history, people were born into, and largely stayed in a
fairly rigid economic position. The distribution of economic benefits and burdens
was seen as fixed, either by nature or by God. Only when people realized that the
distribution of economic benefits and burdens could be affected by government did
distributive justice become a live topic. Governments continuously make and
change laws affecting the distribution of economic benefits and burdens in their
societies. Economics, at its best, can tell us the effects of pursuing different policies;
it cannot, without the guidance of normative principles, recommend which policy to
pursue.

Concepts:
Strict Egalitarianism
Focus: same level of material goods and services.

Definition: One of the simplest principles of distributive justice is that of strict

or radical equality. The principle is most commonly justified on the grounds
that people are owed equal respect and that equality in material goods and
services is the best way to give effect to this ideal.

Concept: The problem is how to specify and measure levels. The two main
problems are the construction of appropriate indices for measurement (the
index problem), and the specification of time frames. Because there are
numerous proposed solutions to these problems, the ‘principle of strict
equality’ is not a single principle but a name for a group of closely related
principles. This range of possible specifications occurs with all the common
principles of distributive justice.

One way of solving the index problem in the strict equality case is to specify
that everyone should have the same bundle of material goods and services
rather than the same level (so everyone would have 4 oranges, 6 apples, 1
bike, etc.). The main problem with this solution is that there will be many
 other allocations of material goods and services which will make some people
better off without making anybody else worse off.

They also need to specify when the pattern is required. The most common
form of strict equality principle specifies that income (measured in terms of
money) should be equal in each time-frame, though even this may lead to
significant disparities in wealth if variations in savings are permitted.

Criticisms:
• unduly restrict freedom
• do not give best effect to equal respect for persons
• conflict with what people deserve
• everyone can be materially better off if incomes are not strictly
equal.

The Difference Principle (John Rawls)

Focus: social contract

Definition: Also known as the principle of fairness, argues for a principled

reconciliation of liberty and equality. Principles of justice are sought to guide
the conduct of the parties. These parties face moderate scarcity and have
ends which they seek to advance, but desire to advance them through
cooperation with others on mutually acceptable terms.

Concept:
1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic
rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for
all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties,
are to be guaranteed their fair value.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are
to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair
equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the
least advantaged members of society.

The main moral motivation for the Difference Principle is equal respect for
persons. Indeed the Difference Principle materially collapses to a form of
strict equality under empirical conditions where differences in income have
no effect on the work incentive of people. However, in the foreseeable future
the possibility of earning greater income will bring forth greater productive
effort. This will increase the total wealth of the economy and the wealth of
the least advantaged.

Criticisms:
• inequalities permitted are unacceptable even if they do benefit
the least advantaged
• it does not maximize utility - endowment-sensitive
 • involves unacceptable infringements on liberty - ambition-
sensitive
• ignores claims that people deserve certain economic benefits in
light of their actions

Resource-Based Principles (Ronald Dworkin)

Focus: prescribes the equality of resources

Definition: Also called Resource, or Luck, Egalitarianism proposes that people

begin with equal resources but end up with unequal economic benefits as
a result of their own choices. They note that natural inequalities are not
distributed according to people's choices, nor are they justified by reference
to some other morally relevant fact about people. Dworkin proposes a
hypothetical compensation scheme in which he supposes that people do not
know their own natural endowments.

Concepts:
What constitutes a just material distribution is to be determined by the result
of a thought experiment designed to model fair distribution. Although people
may end up with different economic benefits, none of them is given less
consideration.

They note that natural inequalities are not distributed according to people's
choices, nor are they justified by reference to some other morally relevant
fact about people. Dworkin proposes a hypothetical compensation scheme in
which he supposes that people do not know their own natural endowments.
However, they are able to buy insurance against being disadvantaged.

Criticisms:
• It seems impossible to measure differences in people's natural talents.
A system of special assistance to the physically and mentally
handicapped and to the ill would be a partial implementation of the
compensation system, but most natural inequalities would be left
untouched by such assistance while the theory requires that such
inequalities be compensated for.

Welfare-Based Principles
Focus: level of welfare of people

Definition: It views the concerns of other theories - equality, the least

advantaged, resources, desert-claims, or liberty as derivative concerns.
Resources, equality, desert-claims, or liberty are only valuable in so far as
they increase welfare, so that all distributive questions should be settled
according to which distribution maximizes welfare. The welfare functions
proposed vary enormously both on what will count as welfare and the
weighting system for that welfare. For almost any distribution of material
benefits there is a welfare function whose maximization will yield that
distribution (at least in a one sector period).
 Concept: Distribution according to some welfare function is most commonly
advocated by economists, who normally state the explicit functional form.
Most philosophical activity has concentrated on a variant known as
Utilitarianism, which can be used to illustrate most of the main characteristics
of Welfare-based principles. The term welfare has been defined variously as
pleasure, happiness, or preference-satisfaction. It involves choosing that
distribution maximizing the arithmetic sum of all satisfied preferences
(unsatisfied preferences being negative), weighted for the intensity of those
preferences.

Criticisms:
• fails to take the distinctness of persons seriously (uses the society as
an entity)
• examine, in great detail, all the policies on offer

Desert -Based Principles

Focus: raising the standard of living

Definition: share the value of— collectively, ‘the social product’. Under each
principle, only activity directed at raising the social product will serve as a
basis for deserving income. Hence, desert principles identifying desert-bases
tied to socially productive activity (productivity, compensation, and effort all
being examples of such bases) do not do so because the concept of desert
requires this. They do so because societies value higher standards of living,
and therefore choose the raising of living standards as the primary value
relevant to desert-based distribution.

Concept:
Effort deserves success, wrongdoing deserves punishment, innocent suffering
deserves sympathy or compensation, virtue deserves happiness, and so on.
Getting what is deserved is just, and that failure to receive what is deserved
is unjust.
It is good that a person gets what she deserves, however it is bad that she
doesn't—even if she deserves something bad, like punishment. It also
assumes that it is wrong to treat people better or worse than they deserve,
and right to treat them according to their deserts. In these and other ways,
the notion of desert pervades our ethical lives.

Categories:
1. Contribution: People should be rewarded for their work activity
according to the value of their contribution to the social product.
(Miller 1976, Miller 1989, Riley 1989)
2. Effort: People should be rewarded according to the effort they
expend in their work activity. (Sadurski 1985a,b, Milne 1986)
3. Compensation: People should be rewarded according to the
costs they incur in their work activity. (Dick 1975, Lamont 1997)
 Criticisms:
• they make economic benefits depend on factors over which people
have little control
• implementation of a productivity principle would involve dramatic
changes in modern market economies and would greatly reduce the
inequalities characteristic of them

 Libertarianism
Focus: just actions from individual to arrive at a just outcome

Definition: describe the sorts of just acquisitions or exchanges; a

particular distributive pattern is not required for justice. It concludes that
what is significant about mixing individual labor with the material world is
that in doing so, its value increases, so that self-ownership can lead to
ownership of the external world in such cases.

History: Robert Nozick

Concepts:
For Libertarians, just outcomes are those arrived at by the separate just
actions of individuals; a particular distributive pattern is not required for
justice.

3-part "Entitlement Theory”

If the world were wholly just, the following inductive definition would
exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings:
a. person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle
of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.
b. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle
of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is
entitled to the holding.
c. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications
of (a) and (b).

According to Nozick's interpretation, an acquisition is just if and only if the

position of others after the acquisition is no worse than their position was
when the acquisition was unowned or ‘held in common’. It advocates a
system in which there are exclusive property rights, with the role of the
government restricted to the protection of these property rights. The
property rights commonly rule out taxation for purposes other than raising
the funds necessary to protect property rights.

Criticisms:
• to show that self-ownership is only compatible with having such
strong exclusive property rights
• that a system of exclusive property rights is the best system for
treating people with respect, as ends in themselves.
Application:
• Few philosophers explicitly discuss the methodology they are using. The most
notable exception is John Rawls (1971, 1974) who explicitly brought the
method of wide reflective equilibrium to political philosophy.
• Distributive decisions arising through the legitimate application of particular
democratic processes might even, at least in part, constitute distributive
justice. Data on people's beliefs about distributive justice is also useful for
addressing the necessary intersection between philosophical and political
processes. Such beliefs put constraints on what institutional and policy
reforms are practically achievable in any generation — especially when the
society is committed to democratic processes.
• Almost all changes, from the standard tax and industry laws through to
divorce laws have some distributive effect, and, as a result, different societies
have different distributions. Distributive justice theory contributes practically
by providing guidance for these unavoidable and constant choices.
• The concern of the distributive justice must be on the principles to be
implemented in real societies with the problems and constraints inherent in
such application. Given this, pointing out that the application of any particular
principle will have some, perhaps many, immoral results will not by itself
constitute a fatal counterexample to any distributive theory. So, it is at least
possible that the best distributive theory, when implemented, might yield a
system which still has many injustices and/or negative consequences.
• Distributive justice is not an area where we can say an idea is good in theory
but not in practice. If it is not good in practice, then it is not good in theory
either.

LIBERATION ETHICS
Focus: arrive at an agreement whose validity rests on consensus, autonomy
and legitimacy

Definition: For liberation ethics, the first task is to penetrate and overthrow the
basis of the system and replace it with another basis, one beyond,
transcending, the present system. Analytic thinking leaves room for dialectic, and
negative dialectic permits an "analectic".

History: The poor, the oppressed class, the peripheral nation, the female sex object,
all have their reality "beyond" the horizon of the system that alienates them,
represses them, and dehumanizes them.

Concepts:
We are dealing with an ethical problem related to the way we think of the world.
This implies, of course, forms of organization and the way it operates its systems of
production, consumption and social life. That is, with the different ways in which
society has been organized, supposedly with the aim of living better. Thinking of a
different world, under different forms of organization implies thinking about aspects
of the ethics of human action. On such a basis, we should be able to elaborate
critical principles from which we can transform reality.
Ethical action ought to act normative on:
1. production, reproduction and development of the life of the community
2. defense of the life of an individual
3. feasibility of the protection of life and the promotion of symmetric
participation in the building of a collective and rational form of organization

Guides in Transformation:
1. Every system is imperfect
2. impossibility of victims taking action until they recognize their own condition
3. liberation principle

Criticisms:
• Fosters guilt-inducing process in such a way that it prevents personal and
social change

Application:
• recognize the tremendous problems of poverty, injustice and exclusion;
outlines recommendations for the said problems

APPLIED ETHICS
Focus: analysis of specific, controversial, moral issues

Definition: It is the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular

issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment. It is thus a term
used to describe attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally
correct course of action in various fields of human life. Applied Ethics attempts to
deal with specific realms of human action and to craft criteria for
discussing issues that might arise within those realms.

History: The contemporary field of Applied Ethics arouse in the late 1960s and early
1970s. It appeared, in part, by means of an unexpected confluence of advances in
medical technology and a growing patients' rights movement.

Concepts:
Much of applied ethics is concerned with just three theories:
1. utilitarianism, where the practical consequences of various policies are
evaluated on the assumption that the right policy will be the one which
results in the greatest happiness,
2. deontological ethics, notions based on 'rules' i.e. that there is an obligation to
perform the 'right' action, regardless of actual consequences (epitomized by
Kant's notion of the Categorical Imperative), and
3. virtue ethics, derived from Aristotle's and Confucius's notions, which asserts
that the right action will be that chosen by a suitably 'virtuous' agent..

Criticisms:
Ethical analyses in these domains require a level of detail not immediately available
to the general theorist.
Application:
Today, it is a thriving part of the field of ethics. Numerous books and web-sites are
devoted to topics such as Business Ethics, Computer Ethics, and Engineering Ethics.

REFERENCES:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics

http://atheism.about.com/od/ethicalsystems/a/virtueethics.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_ethics

http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/Forum/meta/background/HaberIntro.html

http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80130/part2/II_7.html

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-ethics/

http://www.csus.edu/org/wpsa/pisigmaalphaaward.pdf

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/

Globalization, Organization and the Ethics of Liberation; Enrique Dussel and Eduardo
Ibarra-Colado Organization 2006