History of Ethics & Morality/Ethics Distinction: Western Tradition

Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian Traditions
- philosophical inquiry into ethics centers on two things:
- role of human reason in human action
- human’s direction or goal/end, which is, the achievement of the ‘good life’
 Socrates
- objective ethical standards [Euthyphro, Gorgias, Republic]
 Plato
- well-ordered soul (rational, spirited, and appetitive) = happiness
 Aristotle
- areté/virtue: moral and intellectual; contemplation of truth (highest form of virtue)
Hellenistic Tradition (Epicureanism and Stoicism)
 Epicurus (341-270 BC)
- happiness or serenity is a result of simple physical and mental pleasures
- distinguishes two forms of pleasure:
 enduring and intense
- ataraxia is the state of serenity (no trouble in the mind and pain in the body)
 Stoics (336-264 BC) [Zeno (336-264 BC) and Epictetus (50-130 AD)]
- self-sufficiency and indifference to nature (we can control our attitudes but not the physical events)
Medieval Christian Ethical/Moral Thinkers
 Augustine (354-430)
- inversion of Greek virtues and the primacy of the eternal -> redirected the goal of moral act
 love of God = salvation
- good or bad actions spring from the human will not from its object; deficient will produces bad results
 Aquinas (1224-74)
- Christian revelation and reason as the foundations of ethical thought (imago Dei)
- adopted Aristotle’s principles:
 telos
 happiness as the final end
 choice (means-end)
 moral character
- human happiness -> found in beatitude with God
- practical reason’s first principle: do good, promote it, and avoid evil (Natural law)
- natural goods: to survive, to reproduce and educate offspring, to know the truth about God and to live in
society
- features of human act:
 mean—end of an action
 circumstance
 the end
- the action is good if the reason is right
Modern Ethics: Hobbes, Hume, Kant, & Mill
- significant shift: back to the classical orientation, motivation, and direction such that modern ethics:
a. moves away from the otherworldly focus
b. rejects the medieval idea that we should look for God for a guide to our actions
c. rejects the medieval idea that eternal salvation should be the motivation for ethical behavior
d. the purpose of ethics is how best to live together in this world
 Thomas Hobbes (1588- 1679)
- based his theory of ethics on the assumptions about the human nature and the world
 state of nature – ‘survival of the fittest,’ ‘nasty, brutish, and selfish,’ each is driven by self-interest
-> absence of social cooperation and solidarity (one lives his own)
 social contract – agreement/contract between individuals to protect each other’s interests ->
mechanism for communal survival; signals the emergence of moral norm (authority, obligation)
- source of ethics: earthly authority (the Sovereign)
- motivation for acting morally: avoid punishment from the sovereign
 David Hume (1711-76)
- source of ethical judgments: sentiments (passion over reason) expressed in a form of approval or
disapproval
- the role of reason is to determine the value outcomes of acts, their relations to other acts, and their possible
conflicts with other goals of man
- what makes sentiments possible -> sympathy
- two kinds of virtue:
  natural – beneficence, charity, generosity
 artificial – justice, keeping a promise, obeying the government
- against Hobbes’s absolute sovereign
- motivation to act ethically: the desire to feel good about ourselves
 Immanuel Kant (1724- 1804)
- ethical principles are discoverable a priori, without experience of the world
- human acts have intrinsic value -> an act is right or wrong in and of itself independent of its consequences
- two imperatives:
 hypothetical
 categorical (formula: universalizability and end-in-itself)
 John Stuart Mill (1806- 73)
- ethical judgments are based on the utility or consequence of the act
- principle of utility: greatest happiness for the greatest number
- happiness made up of lower (material) and higher (intellectual) pleasures
Distinction Between Ethics and Morality: Based on Jurgen Habermas’s Discourse Ethics
Distinct Kinds of Practical Questions: Ethical and Moral
- ethical questions concern who I am (or we are) and who I (or we) want to be, and this cannot be abstracted from
culturally specific notions of identity and the good life (Habermas, xviii)
- Habermas treats the sphere of the moral as coextensive with questions of justice and hence excludes from its purview
much of what has traditionally been included under the rubric of the ethical
Differences between the Ethical and the Moral
1. domain:
a. moral domain – general norms or rules of action and particular judgments that apply such norms to concrete
situations
b. ethics – concerned with goods and values weighed against each other
2. in terms of questions:
a. moral norms and judgments answer questions about how we ought to treat each other as persons
b. ethical value judgments answer questions about the good life or the good of society; existentialist quality
3. content of deliberation and argument differs:
a. moral deliberation requires an impartial point of view that takes into account the interests and values of all
those affected by a prospective rule of action
b. ethical deliberation draws on the individual’s particular traditions, history, and values
4. scope of reasonable consensus:
a. answers to moral questions should command universal agreement
b. ethical questions by no means call for a complete break with the egocentric perspective; in each instance
they take their orientation from the telos of one’s own life
i. from this point of view, other persons, other life histories, and structures of interests acquire
importance only to the extent that they are interrelated or interwoven with my identity, my life
history, and my interests with the framework of an intersubjectively shared form of life
Intersection between Ethics and Morality
- maxims constitute in general the smallest units in a network of operative customs in which the identity and life
projects of an individual’s (or group) are concretized; they regulate the course of daily life, modes of interaction, the
way in which problems are addressed and conflicts resolved, and so forth
- maxims are the plane in which ethics and morality intersect because they can be judged alternately from ethical and
moral points of view
- example: the maxim to allow myself just one trivial deception may not be good (ethical) and just (moral) if
its general observance is not equally good for all
Introduction to Philosophy [VLE Video]
- it inquiries into the fundamental questions about the world, knowledge, and the human condition
- ex. does God exist? What is the right thing to do? Is there a self? What is the good life? Why is there something rather
than nothing? What is death? What are we?
- what happens if we don’t ask; but if we have the courage to ask, we can change the world
- we crave the frontiers of what can be known and we become better human beings
An Introduction to Moral Theory of Mark Timmons [Reading]
- provide systematic answers to these very general moral questions about what to do and how to be
A Sample Moral Controversy: Suicide
- Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act
- allowing physicians to assist patients in ending their own lives; choosing the manner and time of death
- provoked highly charged debates about the legality and morality of this practice
- those who think that there is nothing necessarily wrong with suicide often argue that deciding to end one’s own life is
consistent with the dignity that is inherent in every individual; thus, choosing to end one’s life when continued
existence threatens one’s dignity is morally permissible
- argue that God has dominion over our bodies and so the choice between life and death belongs to him
- kind of act is wrong because allowing it would inevitably lead to bad consequences such as the killing of terminally
ill patients against their wills
- one of a number of moral controversies including abortion, etc.; focuses on reasons for holding one or another moral
viewpoint about them
- reasons like this for some claim that one wants to establish is what philosophers call giving an argument for the claim
- three main tasks:
a. conceptual task of clarifying important concepts such as that of human dignity
b. evaluate various claims being made in the sorts of arguments mentioned
c. evaluating basic moral assumptions that are often unstated in the giving of such arguments
- moral assumptions often express ideas about what makes an action right or wrong
The Aims of Moral Theory
- two fundamental aims of moral theory:
o practical aim – desire to have some method to follow when, for example, we reason about what is right or
wrong; whose use by suitably informed agents will reliably lead them to correct moral verdicts about
matters of moral concern in contexts of moral deliberation and choice; discover a proper moral
methodology (or decision procedure)
o theoretical aim – explore the underlying nature of right and wrong action in order to be able to explain what
it is about an action that makes it right or wrong; asking why they think of such and what makes it that way
 if we suppose that there is some fixed set of underlying features that make all right actions right
and all wrong actions wrong, they will serve as standards, or moral criteria, of right and wrong
action
Moral Principles and Their Role in Moral Theory
- moral principles -> moral statements that purport to set forth conditions under which an action is right or wrong or
something is good or bad
- sample moral principle: an action is right if and only if (and because) the action does not interfere with the well-being
of those individuals who are likely to be affected by the action
- line of reasoning: (1) moral principle, (2) factual claim, and (3) conclusion
- to provide a decision procedure to guide correct moral reasoning, the moral principles used must themselves be
correct
- in fulfilling this theoretical aim, then, a moral principle concerned with right and wrong action can be understood as
indicating those most basic features of actions that make them right or wrong
- moral principles that serve to explain what makes actions right or wrong will thus unify morality by revealing those
basic features that determine in general an action’s rightness or wrongness
- discovering an underlying unity that connects and explains right and wrong action would be a way of systematizing
morality—bringing a kind of order or scheme to the multitude of actions that are properly classified as either right or
wrong
Some Basic Moral Categories: The Right, The Good, and Moral Worth
A. The Right and Deontic Concepts
- when we evaluate the morality of an action, we are primarily interested in whether the action is right or
wrong; we are interested in whether an action is obligatory, wrong, or optional
 often called deontic concepts or categories (from the Greek term deon, which means duty);
concern is what one morally ought to do (and hence has a duty to perform) or morally ought not
to do (and hence has a duty not to perform)
- fundamental deontic categories:
  obligatory actions – something one morally ought to do; we refer to actions that are obligatory as
duties; terms used for this category include “required” and “right”
 wrong actions – something that one morally ought not to do; “forbidden,” “impermissible,” and
“contrary to duty”
 optional actions – is neither obligatory nor wrong—one is morally permitted to perform the
action, but not morally required to do so; “merely permissible” (“merely,” because unlike
obligatory actions, which are permitted, they are not also required)
- talk of right action has both a narrow and a broad use; term is used narrowly, it refers to the category of the
obligatory, as when we say she did the right thing (meaning she did what she morally ought to have done)
- used broadly, right action is the opposite of wrong action: an action is right, in the broad sense of the term,
when it is not wrong; category of the obligatory or the category of the optional, talk of right action (in the
broad sense) covers both of these categories

B. The Good and Value Concepts

- to speak of the value of something is to speak of its being either good or bad, or neither good nor bad
- goodness or badness of persons is not the only kind of value that is of concern to moral theory
 for something to have positive intrinsic value—for it to be intrinsically good—is for the goodness
to be located in that thing; “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such”
 to say that something is merely extrinsically good is to say that it possesses goodness because of
how it is related to something that is intrinsically good
- for something A to be extrinsically good in some way, there must be something B (to which it is related)
such that B is intrinsically good and is the ultimate source of the goodness that is possessed by A
- three basic categories:
 intrinsically good (or valuable)
 intrinsically bad (or disvaluable)
 intrinsically value neutral – intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad (though such things may have
either positive or negative extrinsic value)
- one historically important theory of intrinsic value is hedonism; only bearers of positive intrinsic value are
experiences of pleasure and the only bearers of negative intrinsic value are experiences of pain
 natural law theory – human life, procreation, knowledge, and sociability are all basic intrinsic
goods presumably because they are constituents of leading a life appropriate for members of the
human species
C. Moral Worth and Aretaic Concepts
- Rawls mentions moral worth as among the basic notions in moral theory
 morally good person – someone who possesses and acts upon certain positive character traits that
we call the virtues, a virtuous person
 morally bad person – one who has a vicious character, one who has and acts on certain negative
character traits
- commonly recognized virtues include honesty, beneficence, courage, and justice, whereas dishonesty,
malice, cowardice, and injustice are among the commonly recognized vices
- theory of moral worth, aims to identify the virtues and the vices, and also explain what makes a trait either a
virtue or a vice; aims to explain what makes a person overall a morally good or bad person
- theory of value, as part of moral theory, thus has two main concerns:
a. is interested in determining which things have intrinsic positive value (are intrinsically good)
and intrinsic negative value (are intrinsically bad); why they have whatever intrinsic value
they do have; basis for extrinsic value
b. concerned with the sort of goodness or badness that we attribute to persons in light of their
character as revealed by their actions and attitudes; kind of value -> moral worth
D. Moral Theory and Its Structure
- an account of the nature of right and wrong action represents a theory of right conduct
- account of the nature of intrinsic value, then, represents a theory of intrinsic value
- an account of moral worth represents a theory of moral worth
 - according to what are often called value-based theories, the concept of the good or intrinsic value is taken
to be more basic than the concept of the right, and so right and wrong action are explained in terms of how
actions bear on what has intrinsic value; natural law theory and versions of consequentialism
- according to duty-based theories, the concept of duty is taken to be more basic than value concepts or at
least not less basic than value concepts
- virtue-based moral theories that take considerations of moral worth or virtue to be more basic than right
action and attempt to explain right action (and deontic status of actions generally) in terms of virtue
Brief Summary
- the moral evaluation of actions concerns their deontic status—their rightness and wrongness; one task of moral theory
is to investigate the nature of right and wrong action
- the moral evaluation of persons concerns their moral goodness and badness— their moral value or worth; and so
another task of moral theory is to investigate the nature of moral worth
- because some moral theories make the deontic status of actions depend on considerations having to do with intrinsic
value, an additional task for such theories is to investigate the nature of intrinsic value
- structure of moral theory is determined by how it relates the various branches of moral theory (and the categories
these branches contain)
- in giving accounts of the nature of the right, the good, and moral worth, a moral theory aims to discover principles
that will provide (if possible) both a unified theoretical account of the nature of such things and a decision procedure
that can be used to reason correctly about matters of morality and thus serve as a guide to choice and action
Evaluating Moral Theories
 consistency
- moral theory should specify principles whose application yields consistent moral verdicts about whatever is
being morally evaluated
- moral theory might fail to be consistent is when its principles (together with relevant factual information)
imply that some particular concrete action is both right and wrong
- imply that a particular instance of lying is both obligatory and not obligatory, it would fail the consistency
standard
 consistency standard
- moral theory should be consistent in the sense that its principles, together with relevant
factual information, yield consistent moral verdicts about the morality of actions,
persons, and other objects of moral evaluation
- any moral theory that fails to yield consistent moral verdicts in a range of cases will fail (at least in those
cases) to supply a decision procedure of the sort desired
 determinacy
- yield definite moral verdicts about the morality of whatever is being evaluated
- moral theory might fail to be determinate is when its basic principles are excessively vague and so fail to
imply any specific moral verdicts
- theory will not yield definite moral conclusions
 determinacy standard
- moral theory should feature principles which, together with relevant factual
information, yield determinate moral verdicts about the morality of actions, persons,
and other objects of evaluation in a wide range of cases
- moral theory that is grossly indeterminate will fail to provide a useful decision procedure -> no guidance
about what to do and what to believe regarding a wide range of cases
- failing to explain properly the underlying nature of right and wrong or good and bad; failed to pinpoint
exactly what it is about such actions that make them right or wrong
 applicability
- fail to be very useful as a decision procedure
- as human beings, we often are incapable of obtaining reliable information about the effects of our actions
 applicability standard
- the principles of a moral theory should be applicable in the sense that they specify
relevant information about actions and other items of evaluation that human beings can
typically obtain and use to arrive at moral verdicts on the basis of those principles
 - appropriately related to (1) our beliefs about morality, (2) our considered moral beliefs, and (3) our
nonmoral beliefs and assumptions
 intuitive appeal
- we have beliefs about morality
- morality is rooted in facts about human nature, and morality represents an impartial standpoint for
evaluating actions, people, and institutions
 intuitive appeal standard
- moral theory should develop and make sense of various intuitively appealing beliefs
and ideas about morality
 internal support
- there are many moral beliefs we have that are deeply held and widely shared and which we would continue
to hold were we to reflect carefully on their correctness -> considered moral beliefs
- one way to check the correctness of a moral principle is to test it against our considered moral beliefs about
specific cases
- when a principle, together with relevant information, logically implies one of our considered moral beliefs,
we can think of the principle as having a correct moral implication
- having correct implications is one way a moral principle receives support, support that comes from moral
beliefs—beliefs internal to morality
 internal support standard
- moral theory whose principles, together with relevant factual information, logically
imply our considered moral beliefs, receives support—internal support—from those
beliefs; on the other hand, if the principles of a theory have implications that conflict
with our considered moral beliefs, this is evidence against the correctness of the theory
 explanatory power
- moral theory attempts to discover not only moral principles that support our considered moral beliefs but
also principles that explain what it is about actions that make them right or wrong (or something good or
bad); intends to satisfy the theoretical aim
 explanatory power standard
- moral theory should feature principles that explain our more specific considered moral
beliefs, thus helping us understand why actions, persons, and other objects of moral
evaluation are right or wrong, good or bad, have or lack moral worth
 external support
- was expressed by J. L. Mackie (1912–1982); noted that “Moral principles and ethical theories do not stand
alone: they affect and are affected by beliefs and assumptions which belong to other fields, and not least to
psychology, metaphysics, and religion” (Mackie, 1977, 203)
- standard of external support has to do with the support that a moral theory in general, and its principles in
particular, may receive from nonmoral views and assumptions, including those from the specific fields of
inquiry Mackie mentions
- to represent a correct theory about the nature of morality (and thus satisfy the relevant theoretical aim of
such theories) if its principles enjoy corroborative support from well-established beliefs and theories from
other areas of thought
- defend their favored theory by appealing to nonmoral theories and assumptions
- moral theory is supported by some nonmoral theory is some evidence in its favor, the fact that a moral
theory conflicts with certain well established nonmoral views is evidence against it
- there are other desiderata (and associated standards) that philosophers invoke in evaluating moral theories
o first, satisfying these standards is a matter of degree
o second, it is worth keeping in mind that in addition to determining how well any one theory does according
to these standards, part of evaluating moral theories involves comparing them with one another to see how
well they do in satisfying the relevant standards
o finally, some of these standards are controversial, others are not
Some Remarks About the Field of Ethics
- ethics (often called moral philosophy) is the area of philosophy that inquiries into morality
o two main branches of ethics: normative ethics and metaethics
- normative ethics investigates moral questions; attempts to answer very general moral questions about what to do and
how to be
- applied moral theory investigates the morality of specific actions and practices; controversial; moral issues as
abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, and others, many of which we have already mentioned
- questions about knowledge belong to the area of philosophical inquiry called epistemology; from the Greek term
episteme, or knowledge
- one important philosophical question concerns how one can come to know moral statements generally and moral
principles in particular -> is called moral epistemology
- to really come to know a moral principle, one must be justified in accepting the principle in question; one must
understand what the claim means, and this in turn requires that one know something about what makes the claim true
or false; questions about meaning and truth are semantic questions, and the branch of semantics that deals with such
questions about moral thought and language is called moral semantics
- questions about meaning and truth are related to metaphysical questions; metaphysics -> inquiries into the nature of
reality—into what exists (what is real) and its ultimate nature; existence and nature of space and time, about
causation, about substance, and about events are all matters of metaphysical inquiry
- there are also metaphysical questions concerning morality
- philosophers have been skeptical of the existence of moral facts, denying that there really are any -> is called moral
metaphysics
- epistemological, semantic, and metaphysical questions about morality are typically referred to as metaethical
questions; branch of ethics called metaethics (“meta” meaning “about”) attempts to answer them
- no such neat and tidy division really exists
- moral theory not only attempts to discover true or correct moral principles but is also concerned to justify or prove
such principles; thus questions about the proper way to justify or prove moral principles in particular, and moral
claims in general, are necessarily involved in giving a normative moral theory
- epistemological questions about justification are just beneath the surface when engaging in moral theory