ÈTICA

Avaluació continuada: Segon examen parcial

Lliurament: En aquest mateix full, fins les 22:00 d´avui, 3 de Juny, a bilbeny@ub.edu
Es recorda que el plagi anul.la l´examen realitzat

NOM I COGNOMS: Marta Santos Marín

NIUB:

A) Redactar, sense límit d´extensió, només DOS temes, a escollir d´entre els tres
següents (cada tema suposa un màxim de 1,5 punts):

1. Universalisme i relativisme ètics: aspectes teòrics bàsics. Resumir el

pensament i la posició de John Rawls sobre el tema

2. Raonar el paper de la sensibilitat en l´ètica. Respondre si afecta a aquest

paper la crítica de Moore a la fal·làcia naturalista
For starters, sensitivity is defined as the capacity to percieve sensations as well as
experiencing emotions and feelings, and the question is whether we should bear it in
mind when we carry out or various moral judgements or reasonings, or not. If our
consideration regarding the answer to this question is affirmative, then we are
confronted with a further complexity: we must then decide up until what extent it plays
a role in shaping our moral judgements, as well as determining whether it is a leading
one or, on the contrary, it's just subsumed to that of rationality. What should then
prevail? Rationality or sensitivity? And if we admit into the importance of the two, in
what proportion? There are in fact many wordly, 'material' as in given or taking place in
the sensible world, experiences which account for the combined and undissociable
existence of the two (therefore leaving us uncapable to dismiss completely neither one),
such as empathy, forgiveness, precaution or prevention, etc. In such scenarios often
times ideas, prejudices but also emotions and a whole set of phenomena that would
typically fall under the category of sensitivity, become tightly intertwined. The
experience of them, as well as our knowledge or unerstanding of them, is made up
simultaneously by both cognitive elements and others of a rather perceptual nature,
linked to our sensitivity. John Austin, admirer of the works of the second Wittgenstein,
criticizes the philosophical language as a whole, claiming it is poorly concise. He states
that both in empirism and positivism, just as it happened during scholasticism, there is
precisely this lack of accuracy and precission. According to him, none of these currents
managed to succesfully determine the difference between constatative affirmations and
executive or performative affirmations, these consisting of two levels of speech and
affirmation about reality. The last, accounts for that which is creative of 'something', a
sort of command (don't do X, I authorize you to Y, etc) the consequences of which
'create' a specific scenario or reality (which is why it's called performative).
In Sense and Sensibilia, Austin denounces this over-simplification of the philosophical
speech, and then proceeds to focus on how it's also affected moral philosophy and the
speech we use to discuss it. This over-simplication, Austin claims, is partly due to our
proclivity to trust the immediate aprehension of what we recieve through our senses.
Austin's position is contrary to that of an emotivist (such as Ayer,who claims exactly the
opposite, that we should not doubt of out senses for they in fact lie at the very bottom of
a our sentitive knowledge). On the other hand, Austin's point considers that a speech
which acritically builds on our sensitive aprehensions is as a matter of fact insufficiently
precise and therefore cannot satisfactorily articulate the judgements of morality.
Kant's take on the matter, a character who on the other hand we would typically regard
as being categorically dismissive of sensitivity, is in fact not troubled in the slightest by
the presence of sensitivity. Sensitivity is in fact very much present in his ethical works.
Why is that? The aswer is simple and ideed quite reasonable: since we are sensible
beings, morality must then be expressed in the form of commandments. Kank
acknowledges that if we were merely rational and perfect beings, there simply would be
no need for imperatives. But since that is not the case, morality must finda way of being
expressed in terms of obligation, duty. The reason being because we have sensitivity
and, in turn, also inclinations, which is why there need be regulating elements of it. In
this context, Kant briefly discusses desire. He calims it has both a component of
sensitivity and of rationality. For example, when we are judging someone, we might
have the impulse of either doom or reprieve him (neigungen), but there are also cases
where there's room for less impulsive, more rational considerations. These particular
cases, where our inclinations are not only impulsively driven, but also reflected, that is,
sort of rationally backed-up we could say, should, to Kant's eyes, be the object of our
closest considerations, for they hold the potentiality of turning bad from a moral point
of view. Such is the case of passions (Suchten): they are a compound of inclinations and
inteligible/conceptual elements (assessments, ideas, prejudices), potentially leading to
the overall compound resulting in something rejectable from an ethical point of view.
Kant has here in mind the so called 'cold passions': those in which more clearly our
inclinations tend to be accompanied to a great extent by typically wrong ideas,
prejudices or assessments. He distinguishes basically three:
• The passion of power.

• The passion of greed (as in wealth).

• The passion of vanity (as in fame, vainglory).

According to Kant, these are the worst. Sensitivity is here accompanied by a perturbing
element, such as a specificy ideology or way of thinking: power, greed or vanity. But,
his overall view on sensitivity is by no mean a prejudiced one: he himelf claims
sensitivity has its own dignitiy. But, back to where we started, if he have stated that
Kant does not deny the role of sensitivity in moral matters, where does it stand? Kant's
point is that the responsability for our moral actions does not lie upon our sensitivity,
but rather on our rationality. Thus, rationality leads the way, and sensitivity follows its
lead. And, if we have agreed is does not rule over rationality, it simply cannot confuse
it, and therefore confussion, when it happens, comes from our understanding alone,
which can err in discernment, this being the reason why it requires an imperative. Also,
on the matter of the imperative, already discussed, Kant states the impossibility of there
being an imperative of sensitivity, but, however many the differences, there isn't in
Kant's philosophy an impossibility to conjugate both sensitivity and understanding (like
the relationship between ehtics and aesthetics, good and evil, inclination and
obligation), and that is truly a mastership. Schiller himself, Kant's pupil, was of his
same opinion.
As for Moore, it does in a way affect it, for he is within the current of intuitionist
trascendentalism, according to which the ethic premises trascend empirical experience,
the sensible world, and therefore ehtics cannot be ground, not even on a lesser degree
upon them. Sensibility is out of the question for Moore in this matter, and in this sense
he'd be closer to Ayer, mentioned above.

3. Explicar què és l´heteronomia moral. Esmentar teories i posar exemples

pràctics.

Within the context of moral philosophy, heteronomy consists of having one's own will
determined or shaped by one or different external factors, meaning outside the
individual him/herself. This external influence can be due to all sorts of causes, such as
sentiments, instinct or even social conventions, which, one way or another, eventually
constrain or shape the individual's own and private will. It's the flip-side concept of
autonomy, deifned by Kant as the freedom to act according one's own law.Autonomy
and freedom are often times interchangeable concepts, at least in moral philosophy, and
in fact Rousseau himself defines freedom in a very similar way Kant does autonomy:
the obedience to one's own law. Even though they seem to be mutually exclusive
elements, they are not, and they can in fact be conjugated simultaneously in the sense
that they could be taking place at the same time about the exact same matter without
necessarily incurring in contradiction. For example, we could have a mother who
decides to help out his children out of her sheer free will, but also because she loves
them and is driven by her sentiment to do so. She could very well in this case be
combining two different sources for determining her own will: one that is entirely
dependent on her rational will, and therefore is not biased by external elements, and one
that is in fact dependent of elements that would account as heteronomical, such as her
loving of her children and her being bound to help them out as a consequence of it. But
the point to remember here is that, even though there can be scenarios where autonomy
excludes heteronomy and viceversa, it is not a logical necessity that they should exclude
one another in all given cases.
As far the theories as concerned, there are manily two cases where the individual own's
will is determined by external factors of different nature:
• Institutional theories of moral justification . These theories justify the will and its
derived action by appealing to institutions, not the elements within the subject
which as well come across as capable of shaping its will, but which are still
considered heteronomical, such as some of the aforementioned: intuition,
sentiment, etc. We can think of science as belonging to this particular case, when
it claims our health status, metabolism, hormone levels, etc, has a direct
repercussion upon our acts or deeds.
• Religious heteronomy. These heteronomical theories claim that someone's deed
is dependent upon the commandment(s) recieved by his/her God, religion or the
spiritual institution in question to which the person is subjected or linked. A
exemple but we to simply act on a commandment of this sort. When a man kills
another man because his Gold 'told him to do so', however muh horrible it
registers, it accounts for a case of heteronomy. Although there is no time to
discuss the matter further, in this particular case, acting withing heteronomical
frames, does not relieve the indivual from the responsability of his deeds.

B) A propòsit dels texts de A. MacIntyre i de Ph. Foot: 1) Quina és la tesi essencial

de cada un dels texts; 2) Coincidències de fons entre els dos autors; 3)
Discrepàncies; 4) Quin dels dos texts t´ha interessat més, i per què. (Valor
màxim: 2 punts)
1) MacIntyre begins by depicting the most intimate essence of emotivism as that of a
current which presumes that all moral assessments ultimately boil down to expressions
of the moral preferences held by individuals. Which means that, according to all
emotivists, there isn't (and there can never be) any truly rational independent founding
of morality. This is a feature emotivists percieve as inherent to all human culture,
ressembling thus in this respect skepticism, but MacIntyre's point is that this is as a
matter of fact not the case. He acknowledges as a trait is it indeed applicable to our
culture, but does not stand with the emotivist claim that it applies to all culture of any
place and time. From here on, he traces the procedures which eventually led to the
decomposition of morality as we know it today. MacIntyre also claim that the changing
in how we view morality hasn't in fact been percieved as a loss, but rather as a gain, in
the sense that it would be the manifestation of our liberation from superstition and the
illusion of teleology.
As for Foot, she tackles many different aspects. Related, but independent at the same
time. I'd say her structuring of the chapters is more compartmentalized than that of
MacIntyre's, where the continuity amongst them is more easily trackable. Having said
this, she first tackles the question og whether it's possible to establish a link between
moral goodness and the reasons we have for action, to which she responds
affirmatively, and then she addresses the matter of the moral responsability the
individual has toward him/herself, something she considers has been greatly overlooked
in the history of moral philosophy, even among young her modern colleagues. Finally,
she addresses the connection between happinness and moral good, and distinguishes a
happy life, in the sense of filled with pleasantries, from a a good life, despite this one
having been a miserable one. At the end, she seems to settle for the aristotelic view that
the good of man is that which serves to the acquisition of the objectives dictated by
virtue.
2) The common backgorund to both authors is their common wish (and therefor their
derived attempts) to establish, to the degree that is possible, a unification in the criteria,
one that successfully grasps the sense in which we say an action or deed should be
unmistakeably deemed as moral. MacIntyre, throughout the chapters, denounces the
decomposition of traditional morality as in a morality embedded in a certain historical
context from which it was unthinkble to be dissociated. He then proceeds to depict the
structure why the Enlightenment project failed to succeed, eventually giving way to
emotivist theories, but the point is that he regards the direction taken by modern theories
of morality as one of decay, and so dies Philippa Foot in so far as she attempts, in the
chapters at discussion here, to build a sense of morality as meaning something more
than just a reflection of the agent's mere personal, subjective preferences. This is exactly
her purose in the chaper 'Practical rationality'. Through the analysis of different
concepts, she conceptually apromixates to what would account for good and bad
behaviour, that is, according or not to virtue, all the while she tackles the problem of
whether acting againt reason would equates to acting in accordance to evil. Like I said,
she addresses many topics from many different perspectives, but the idea is that she
refuses to give in to total subjectivism/relativism or skepticism.
3) I'd say the main discrepancy between the two is mainly tackled in Foot's chapter on
human goodness, wheres she states something along the lines of “the majority of
modern moral philosophers consider the object of their speculations only regarding the
relation either between two individuals or the relation between an individual and his/her
society”, meaning that the only objects susceptible of moral consideration are those
which fall under either one of these two categories. So is Mill's opinion, as well as
MacIntyre, for he omits the inner rapport Foot believes the individual morally owes to
him/herself too. In the aforementioned chapter, Foot states that these discernible (can be
easily portrayed/thought as 'ontologically' different from a logical point of view alone)
assessments in fact share a set of elements which she puts to put under the label of
'assessments of human's rational will' (p128). MacIntyre's reflection, on the other hand,
focuses alone on either the relationship between men and society on men to men, the
two types of moral relations that Mill acknowledges, common to the majority of current
modern moral philosophers, and which Philippa Foot criticizes and objects to. This
specific point is addressed, like I said, on 'human goodness'.
4) I personally found most enjoyable Philippa Foot's text, overall. There are elements of
the two with which I don't personally agree, of example on point three I woudn't say I
am agaisnt it, but at the same time I find it difficult to discern and describe the terms in
which we should think of the obligation toward ourselves as moral in the classic sense
of the word. Perhaps she is here redescribing what is to be understood of morality, but I
am not entirely in alignment with her point here. However, she still remains my
favourite of the two. In all honesty, MacIntyre's point, however much I agree (or want
to agree, since it is, I will say, my personal preference as well, as ironic as that sounds
having discussed emotivism) overall, seems to be excessively splitting hairs, large doses
of speculation I am much doubtful about, although I wouldn't dare question his research
since I don't know his work in depth and this has in fact been my first aproximation to
it. But it seems to me to be someone very capable to successfully argue both ways any
given matter at stake. I follow his trail of thought, and I understand where he is going,
but I am under the impression, from the little I know, that his points are, however much
well written and carefully articulated, less grounded and therefore (to me) less relatable
than those of Philippa Foot (again, to me).