Understanding Moral Arguments and Moral Claims

Ethics and Morality: 3 Dimensions

 everyday moral experience
- includes our ordinary decision-making regarding actions affecting both ourselves and others, our reactions
to, our attitudes about, and our judgments concerning ourselves and others and the actions we and they
commit or omit
 critical reflection [actions, moral judgments, and agents]
- here normative questions arise, for we reflect both on the evidence to our judgments about actions and their
agents
 nature of moral agency
- we reflect upon the nature of the everyday moral experience itself, the manner in which we experience
moral categories, the nature of our emotions and of evaluative experience, the nature of action, and so forth
Two Kinds of Moral Claims
 deontic
- claims about morality that are about whether an action is morally right or wrong
 axiological
- claims about morality that are about whether something is morally good or bad, or morally neutral – that is,
neither good nor bad – as well as claims that one thing is morally better than another

- the way to argue that:

(a) an action is morally obligatory is to argue that it would be wrong not to do it
(b) an action is merely permissible is to argue both that it would not be wrong to do it and it would not be
wrong to refrain from doing it
(c) an action is supererogatory is to show both that it would be morally praiseworthy or admirable to do it
and that it would not be wrong to refrain from doing it
Axiological: The Quest for The Good
- what things are good or valuable?
- 3 Kinds of Goods
o purely intrinsic goods (good because of their nature); eg. pleasure
o purely instrumental goods (means to attaining something); eg. medicine and money
o combination goods; eg. knowledge
- what things are good?
o Hedonism (Sensualists & Satisfactionists)
 (hedon, greek for “pleasure”)
 an experience is good in itself if (if and only if) it provides some pleasure and to the extent that it
provides pleasure
o Non-hedonism (Monists & Pluralists)
 there is a single intrinsic value but that it is not pleasure (monist)
 pluralists: pleasure or enjoyment is an intrinsic good, but there are other intrinsic goods as well,
such as knowledge, friendship, freedom, love, and life itself
- are values objective or subjective?
o objectivists: values are worthy of desire whether or not anyone actually desires them; they are independent
of us
o subjectivists: values are dependent on desirers, are relative to desirers
What Is a Moral Argument?
- what makes an argument a moral argument is just that it has a moral claim – either a deontic or an axiological claim –
as its conclusion
- learning to reason about morality is just learning to recognize and develop good arguments for and against different
moral claims
Normative and Descriptive Claims
- a normative claim is a claim about how the world ought to be or about what is good or bad
- a descriptive claim is a claim about how the world is, not how it ought to be
Moral Premises and The Hume’s Law
- every moral argument needs to have at least one moral premise
- the hume’s law: you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” it means that no argument for a normative conclusion –
that is, for a conclusion about how things ought to be – can be a cogent argument unless it has at least one normative
premise
- consider this argument:
o executing convicted murderers deters some would-be murderers from killing people
o therefore, executing convicted murderers is morally permissible
 several candidates (hidden premise):
1. it is morally permissible to do whatever is necessary to prevent crime
2. it is morally permissible to do whatever is necessary to prevent murder
3. it is morally permissible to kill convicted murderers if doing so saves innocent lives
Making Moral Judgments Without Being Judgmental
- the purpose of reasoning about moral issues is to form well-justified judgments about whether particular actions are
right or wrong
- we can make moral judgments about other people’s actions without being judgmental
- reaching the conclusion that someone else’s action was morally wrong is not the same as judging that the person
should be scolded or punished for doing it – much less that you should be the one to scold or punish the person
- in general, you might form a moral judgment about someone else’s action and yet do nothing to try to change that
person’s behavior
Article: Controversial Studies Give a Deadly Flu Virus Wings [Reading]
- Rotterdam, Netherlands; medical faculty building accessible to only a handful of scientists -> human made virus
- H5N1 avian influenza strain; genetically altered -> easily transmissible between ferrets (most closely mimic the
human response to flu)
- the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic = many millions of deaths
- virologist Ron Fouchier; “one of the most dangerous viruses you can make”; promises major public health benefits
- knowing exactly what could turn H5N1 into a virus with pandemic potential is useful because scientists can look out
for such changes in the wild and prepare countermeasures
- subject of a heated debate among scientists, biosecurity experts, and U.S. government officials; a similar study with
similar results by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tokyo; has also
been submitted for publication
- humanmade strains could escape from the lab; publishing the results would be akin to giving bioterrorists a recipe
- studies apparently started without a review of their risks; studies “should never have been done,” Richard Ebright
- dual-use papers -> might benefit public health but could also be used nefariously; “this is a watershed moment”
- Kawaoka and Fouchier teams set out to answer a question: does H5N1, which rarely causes human disease, have the
potential to trigger a pandemic; virus has decimated poultry flocks on three continents but has caused fewer than 600
known cases of flu in humans since it emerged in Asia in 1997, although those rare human cases are often deadly;
virus spreads very inefficiently between -> unable to set off a chain reaction and circle the globe
- some scientists think the virus is probably unable to trigger a pandemic; adapting to a human host would likely make
it unable to reproduce; virus would need to reshuffle its genes with those of a human strain, a process called
reassortment; process is most likely to occur in pigs, which host both human and avian strains
- flu pandemics can be caused by only H1, H2, and H3 viruses; but not by a mostly avian strain such as H5; Fouchier
says his study shows all of those ideas to be wrong
- Fouchier initially tried to make the virus more transmissible by making specific changes to its genome (reverse
genetics)
- when that failed, he passed the virus from one ferret to another multiple times, a low-tech and time honored method
of making a pathogen adapt to a new host
- after 10 generations, the virus had become “airborne”; healthy ferrets became infected by being housed in a cage next
to a sick one; airborne strain had five mutations in two genes, each of which have already been found in nature; just
never all at once in the same strain
- ferrets aren’t humans -> any influenza strain that has been able to pass among ferrets has also been transmissible
among humans, and vice versa
- keeps flu scientists up at night because of the virus’s power to kill
- human cases so far, more than half were fatal; real case fatality rate is probably; scientists agree that the virus is
vicious
- if its adaptation to a mammalian host does not make it less lethal -> a pandemic could have a massive death toll
- potential benefits for public health:
o knowing the exact mutations that make the virus transmissible also enables scientists to look for them in the
field and take more aggressive control measures when one or more show up
o enables researchers to test whether H5N1 vaccines and antiviral drugs would work against the new strain
- U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) -> agreed to the publication, Fouchier says, including officials at the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
- key question for that group is whether the full results should be published
- omit certain key details from controversial papers and make them available to people who really need to know; the
board’s debate comes far too late, because the studies have been done and the papers are written
- need for a robust and independent system of PRIOR review and approval of potentially dangerous experiments
- “blocking publication may provide some small increment of safety, but it will be very modest compared to the
benefits of not doing the work in the first place”
- scientists have long debated whether dual-use studies should have a mandatory review before they begin
- 2007 proposal by four -> “activity of extreme concern” that would have required international preapproval; debate
should take place at an international level
- mandatory review systems for dual-use work don’t exist at the national level either; study was green-lighted in
advance by the Dutch Commission on Genetic Modification; it’s not COGEM’s job to decide whether a study is
desirable
- its only recommended that researchers ask an institutional review board for advice if they think a study raises
concerns
- lack of prior approval systems is baffling to critics -> decisions should not just be left to influenza scientists
- need for reviews up front -> shouldn’t wait until you have submitted a paper before you decide it’s dangerous (Keim)
- NSABB does not have the power to prevent the publication of papers, but it could ask journals not to publish; results
can be kept under wraps
- Ebright says he’s against efforts to ban the publication now; “you cannot post hoc suppress work that was done and
completed in a non-classified context”