PHILOSOPHY
Chapter 3: Freedom in the Context of Morality
Lesson 1: Morality and Freedom
 Morality
 Seems to be a heavy or broad subject
matter for discussion if we do not
have the basic tools for analysis
 Quality of actions
 Distinction of right/wrong, good/bad
 Came from the root word mores
 Ethics
 A branch of philosophy that deals
with the systematic questioning and
critical examination of the
underlying principles of morality
 Came from the root word ethos
 Ethos
 Refers to the character of a culture
 Includes the attitude of approval or
disapproval in a particular culture at
a given time and place.
 In every action there’s
a consequences.
 Mores
 The customs including the customary
behavior of a particular group of
people.
 Mores (in Latin) and Ethos (in Greek)
 Both refers to customary behavior
Ethics has been associated with Two
General Approaches
 Normative Ethics
 Is meant to give an answer to the
question, ‘What is good?’
 Pertains to certain norms or
standards for goodness and badness,
rightness or wrongness of an act.
 A comprehensive normative
ethical system tries to give a moral
framework, where its standards of
morality, are based.
 Meta-ethics
 Tries to go beyond the concepts and
parameters set by normative ethics
by trying to question the basis of the
assumptions proposed in a
framework of norms and standards
by normative ethics.
 Examine the presuppositions,
meanings and justifications of ethics
concepts, and principles.
3 Ethos of Human
1. Man has the capacity to know what is good
and evil
2. Man knows what is good and does it and he
knows what is evil and avoid it
3. Man feels the consequences of his actions
expecting reward and punishment
 Human Acts
 Actions that we; knowingly,
voluntary, deliberately, willingly
 Acts of man
 Actions that are; instinctive,
automatic, reflexive
 Factoid
 The act of killing a member of
one’s family by members of one’s
extended family including some
members of a closely knit
community where he/she belongs
and has brought dishonor to is
sometimes called an honor crime.
 William Sumner
 A well-known anthropologist
 His article entitled Folkways, our
notion of what if ‘right’ stems
from man’s basic instinct to
survive
 Notion of ‘right’ and ‘true’ is
known as folkways
 Mores come from folkways, with the
added element of societal welfare
embodied in them
 “The ‘morals’ of an age are never
anything but the consonance between
what is done and what the mores of
the age requires.
 Sanction
 A threatened penalty for
disobeying a law or rule
 Customs
 A traditional and widely accepted
way of behaving or doing something
that is specific to a particular
society, place or time
 Habits
 A settled or regular tendency or
practice, especially on that which is
hard to give up.
Two important factors in the emergence of
morality
 Point of view of society
 Together with its customs,
social rules and sanctions
 Point of view of the individual or
human person
 Who has unconsciously developed
habits in following the social norms
established by his society.
 Freedom
 Has been widely used and applied in
the analysis of Philippine society as a
whole, as well as the application of
freedom to individual right.
 Freedom, of the human person from
the moral sense of the word, assumes
that one is a free moral agent
  When we are exercising freedom in making
choices, we are taking control and
assuming full responsibility for the choices;
we are taking control and assuming full
responsibility for the choices that we are
making.
 There is one important caveat: you are free
but his freedom is not absolute
 Moral
 When one is free to make his choice
in accordance with his own moral
discernment of what is good and bad
 Jean-Paul Sartre
 An existentialist philosopher
 Assume the idea of radical freedom,
by claiming that man is condemned
to be free
 There are no exemptions even when
faced with such situation; the
consequences will not save him.
 John Paul Sartre
 “man in nothing else but that which
he makes of himself”
 Obnoxious
 Extremely unpleasant
 John Mothershead
 Author of the book entitled Ethics:
Modern Conception of the Principle
of Right (1955)
Two necessary conditions for morality to occur
 Freedom
 Assumed when one is making his
choices and is the agent that is taking
full responsibility in planning his
life, and in the process, planning and
budgeting his actions for some
future outlook or goals.
 Accordance with his moral and
rational capacity to know and discern
what is right and wrong
 Obligation
 Construed as one’s duty to himself
to exercise this freedom as a rational
moral being.
Lesson 2: Value Experience and Morality
 Deliberation
 An act pertaining to humans alone
 This act requires reflection and an
exercise of one’s rational capacity
to the fullest without sacrificing his
ability to empathize with other
human being
 Mothershead
 Conduct refers to deliberate human
action
 only humans are moral in so far as
he is capable of deliberate human
action
 Added that this is the side-taking part
of our experience.
 “All values are priorities with respect
to some aspect of human experience.
This is usually expressed by saying
that values are imperatives; they
make a claim upon us, whether we
admit the claim or not.”
 “Making moral judgments is
budgeting actions.”
 “A moral decision is the most
important class of moral judgments,”
more for him, “has reference to the
judger’s own future action.”
 “Not all moral judgments are
decisions,” thus “many of our moral
judgments have reference to other
people or groups of people.”
 Argues that a value can become a
moral value if they become
unlimited priorities in their scope of
relevance in our life.
 Instinct
 A natural or intuitive way of
acting or thinking
 Scientists agree that animals are known to
possess instincts, while some animals have
been recognized to have the ability to solve
simple problems
 Pre-Reflective Morality
 Animals are not capable of the wide
range of deliberation, reflection,
concept construction and rational and
critical thinking that humans are able
to do.
 Moral Value
 Takes precedence and priority
over other value
 One is willing to give up other
values in order to promote what he
considers as a moral value
 Moral judgments
 What others should or ought to do.
 How people should behave or what
they should have done
 Victor Grassian
 Author of book entitled “Moral
Reasoning: Ethical Theory and
Some Contemporary Moral
Problems” (1922)
 Labeled this confusion as “the
confusion between what one ought
to do and what one would be
inclined to do”
 “What do I ought to do given this
situation?” with this question in mind, We
could very well examine and analyze the
situation as objectively as possible with the
use of intellectual and rational capacity in
order to come up with an intellectual choice
 “What would I be inclined to do, given
the situation?” has to do with the practical
choice when faced with the actual situation
Lesson 3: Approaches to Moral Reasoning other motive must give place,
 Moral Reasoning
 A process of examining
moral arguments
 Contain analysis of what is
considered as good or bad, right or
wrong, correct or incorrect in the
moral realm
 Also known as evaluative
reasoning since one is trying to
evaluate the soundness of the
argument from the moral point of
view
 Argument
 Defined as the search for a statement
or a set of statements that can be
made to yield a new statement,
which is its conclusion
 Phenomena
 The object of a person’s perception
 The knowledge of reality that our
mind is capable of interpreting
and understanding.
 Deontological Ethics
 Also known as deontological
reasoning is an ethic based on duty
 Came from the Greek word dein,
meaning duty
 Recognizes that there are moral
principles that we follow which we
consider as universally correct and
should be applicable to all of
humanity
 This fundamental moral principle is known
as the categorical imperative or the law of
morality
 Immanuel Kant
 Philosopher from Konigsberg
 Made an exhaustive elaboration of
deontological ethics in his article
entitled, Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
 As human being, we perceive the
world as phenomena
 Insist that you are doing something
from duty, which has moral worth
as against doing something
according to duty, which has no
moral worth
 Each member of humanity belongs
to the kingdom of ends, and for this,
you have a duty to save and respect
the life of every human being
regardless of your feelings or
emotions
 “A maxim is the subjective principle
of volition. The objective principle
is the practical law, that I should
follow such a law even if it thwarts
all my inclinations.”
 “Thus, the moral worth of an action
does not lie in the effect which is
expected from it…to duty, every
 because duty is the condition of the will
good-in-itself, whose worth transcends
everything.
 Pure reason
 Provides the a priori (or prior to
experience) source of knowledge
which contains the structure of our
mind as human being
 Practical Reason
 Responsible for our capacity to
recognize what is good through the
will, which he called the Goodwill,
and which he claimed as the only
thing good in-itself, without
qualification.
 It is practical reason that makes it
possible for us to have knowledge of
phenomena.
 Once this will fully functioning, according to
Kant, this is the point where freedom is truly
exercised because this is also when our reason
is working to tell us what we ought to do
 Goodwill
 Responsible for the recognition of the
foundation of morality and the
objective basis for it in the form of the
practical law which in turn is the one
responsible for the cognition of the law
of morality in the form of the
categorical imperative
 Categorical imperative (law of morality)
 The guiding principle in its simplest
formulation could be stated as the
universalizability principle: “Act only
on that maxim, through which you can
at the same time will that is should
become a universal law.
 Universalizability principle
 We could now recognize that there
are things that we have to do, for
example, even if we do not want to
do them
 The faculty of pure intuition of space and
time
 A posteriori (from experience)
source.
 From duty
 We could now trace the subjective
principle of you willingness to do it, or
the maxim of you action.
 Has a moral worth
 According to duty
 Has no moral worth
 Maxim
 A short, pithy statement expressing a
general truth or rule of conduct
 Marcel Dupre
 Deontological ethics presumes that
“actions are thought to have intrinsic
value in their own right.”
  “In choosing between various
available courses of action,
consequentialism will merely weigh
up the good and bad consequences in
each case and make their decisions
on that basis.”
 Teleology
 Came from the root word telos,
meaning end, goal or purpose
 Teleologist
 Believes that the end, goal or
purpose of an action must be based
on its consequences
 Examine the actual consequences of
the act of lying, which could, at
times, become good or right, if the
act is proven to bring about good
consequences like saving life.
 Consequentialism
 Use of the dictum, “the end justifies
the means”
 Teleological or consequentialist ethics
 Aims to examine the instrumental
value of the act for the attainment of
the desired consequences or purpose
 Teleological reasoning
 The most popular form of
teleological reasoning is based on
utilitarian ethics
 Utilitarianism
 Construed as the maximization of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain in
order to promote happiness.
 Happiness, become the summum bonum or
the ultimate goal for utilitarian morality
 Summum bonum
 The highest good, especially as the
ultimate goal according to which
values and priorities are established
in an ethical system
 John Stuart Mill
 “Actions are right in proportion as
they tend to promote happiness;
wrong as they tend to produce the
reverse of happiness. By happiness is
intended pleasure and the absences
of pain”
 Made a very profound contribution
to the development of teleological
ethics through his major article
entitled Utilitarianism
 There must be a difference not just
in its quantity but, what is more
important to consider, is the quality
of pleasure
 He distinguished between two kinds
of pleasure, intellectual or mental
pleasure and bodily or
physiological pleasure
 Intellectual pleasure must be
superior than Bodily
pleasure
 “It is better to be a human being
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied;
better to be Socrates dissatisfied than
a fool satisfied”
 Jeremy Bentham
 The original version of utilitarianism
before Mill came into Jeremy
Bentham’s assumption that pleasure
is quantified.
 The amount of pleasure could easily
be measured and demonstrated, or
quantified using Bentham’s
hedonic calculus, in terms of
intensity (the more intense it is, the
better), duration (the longer it last,
the better), certainty (how certain
its occurrence will be), propinquity
(how near at hand will not be
followed by pain), and extent (the
number of people affected by it)
 Sentient
 Able to perceive or feel things
 Deontological point of view
 It is your duty to save him, no matter
what your inclinations may be.
 The act of killing a patient is wrong
in itself.
 Teleological point of view
 Could be considered from a means
and ends analysis
Lesson 4: Common Mistakes in Moral Reasoning
 Victor Grassian
 Pointed out that there are some
common pitfalls or mistakes that we
are prone to commit or we may fail
to recognize when faced with moral
arguments
 It is possible for anyone to lie
1. The failure to recognize the vagueness
of moral concepts
 Grassian used as an example, The
moral principle that it is wrong to
lie
 “lying as false statement made with
an intent to deceive
2. The failure to recognize the value-
laden nature of many concepts which
appear value-free
 Grassian used the concept of
pornography and the definition given
by a leading feminist Helen Longino
 Pornography as defined by Longino
as “a verbal or pictorial
representations of sexual behavior
that have a distinguishing
characteristic: the degrading and
demeaning portrayal of the role and
status of human female as a mere
sexual object to be exploited and
manipulated sexually” this definition
could be value-laden
  Longino was stating her value-laden
judgment in the same definition that
pornography is wrong.
 Value-laden
 Pre-supposing the acceptance of a
particular set of values
 Arguments may go along for years
without being resolved, precisely
because of two opposing values that
each proponent holds.
3. The uncritical use of emotive terms
 Emotive terms are normally
employed for propaganda purposes.
 They considered emotive because
they are emotionally loaded
 Emotive terms from propaganda
purposes is the word communism
which has been used by western
capitalist countries to scare their
citizens and let them make the
impression that in a communist
country, citizens do not enjoy
their freedom to the fullest
 Someone concludes in a propaganda
that “Communism is bad”
 “I disapprove of communism, you
should disapprove as well”
 According to Alfred Jules Ayer “A
value statement is nothing else than a
command in a misleading
grammatical form.”
4. Hasty Generalizations
 An attempt to make a universal
statement using ‘all’ based only on
a few cases observed.
 According to Grassian, “…all human
beings were considered to have an
equal claim to our aid.”
 Grassian “All human beings were
considered to have an equal claim to
our aid,”
5. Faculty Causal Reasoning
 In an accepted statement of a causal
connection between A and B, you
are making an inference that A is the
cause for the occurrence of B.
 Causal
 Relating to or acting as a cause
6. Rationalization
 A defense mechanism recognized
by psychologist.
 Process of offering justifications or
reasons to cover-up or clothe an
already arrived at decision meant to
hide one’s true negative or
destructive motive, to become an
acceptable course of action.
7. The dismissal of a moral position on the
basis of their origin
 Also known as the genetic fallacy.
 Happens when one is trying to
dismiss the view of another based
solely on the basis of its origin.
 Racial biases would be evident in the
commission of this fallacy.
 These are forms of argumentum ad
hominem when one is attacking not
the belief itself but the source or its
causal origin, that is, the person
himself and his origins
Chapter 4: The Human Person in Their
Environment
Lesson 1: Approaches to Environmental Ethics
 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 “Environmental ethics is the
discipline in philosophy that studies
the moral relationship of human
beings to, and also the value and
moral status of, the environment and
its non-human contents.”
 Aldo Leopold
 An American conservationist and
forester by profession; published an
article entitled A Sand Country
Almanac (1949), which emphasized
the importance of the adoption of a
land ethic giving importance to land
as an entity that should be given due
respect and love.
 An action is right and therefore,
moral, when it has the tendency to
preserve the integrity, stability,
and beauty of biotic community;
and wrong when it does the opposite
which is destruction
 “A thing is right when it tends to
preserve the integrity, stability, and
beauty of the biotic community. It
is wrong when it tends to do
otherwise.”
 “Obligations have no meaning
without conscience, and the problem
we face is the extension of the social
conscience from people to land.”
 Bryan Norton
 His article entitled, Environmental
Problems and Future
Generations, sees the analysis of
environmental problems as
belonging to three generations:
1. Dealt with wisely using our
resources together with the
protection of natural monuments
or protected areas
2. Dealt with the destruction of
natural environments and
pollution
3. Deal with the possibility of
cataclysms or
catastrophes brought about
by ozone
 depletion, acid rain, and the
greenhouse effect.
 Cataclysms
 A large scale and violent event in
the natural world
 Anthropocentrism
 Human being
 State of being human, personhood
 Considered human being as the
center of moral consideration
 Panthocentrism
 Higher animals
 Ability to suffer
 Paved the way for animal liberation
and animal rights movement
 Biocentrism
 All living things
 State of being alive
 Is the view that not only humans and
animals, but also plants should be
morally considered
 Holism
 Animate, inanimate &
supraorganismic whole
 Existence
 Ecosystem-centered ethic or
ecocentrism regard ecosystem as
holistic entities that should be given
moral consideration
 Intrinsic Value
 Has inherent worth in itself, meaning
to say, it is worth pursuing as an
end- in-itself because it is valuable
or good for its own sake
 Instrumental Value
 Considered as a means towards
achieving a certain end, thus its
worth depends on whether it was
successful in bringing about the
particular purpose or end that it is
supposed to serve.
 Criterion of moral consideration or
standing has been the center of debates in
environmental ethics.
 Judeo-Christian
 Tradition where human beings were
given “dominion over the fish of sea
and over the birds of the air and
every living thing that moves upon
the earth.
 Protagoras
 One of sophists; also claimed that
man is the measure of all things.
 Barbara Mckinnon
 Author of a book entitled Ethics:
Theory and Contemporary Issues
(1995), claims that a human centered
anthropocentric perspective would
have to support broad
environmentalism for it to be viable
 “Our own good requires that we have
due and wise regard for animals and
the environment. Moreover, this
good need not be defined narrowly in
terms of the satisfaction of individual
human interests of a limited source.
Aesthetics and health interests may
be included.”
 “A good dose of altruism or
concern for others and for future
generations.”
 Commonly known as enlightened or
prudential anthropocentrism
 Prudential anthropocentrism
 Could pave the way for more
environmentally conscientious
protection and preservation of the
environment, coinciding with the
virtues of prudence, altruism, and
responsibility toward the
environment
 Conscientious
 Wishing to do one’s work or
duty well and thoroughly
 Reformist anthropocentric
 Constitutes the more popular and
accepted philosophical view on the
environment and is one of the three
broad areas in environmental
philosophy
 Environmental philosophy argues
that the root causes of environmental
crises stem from man’s ignorance,
shortsightedness, and greed.
 Peter Singer
 An Australian philosopher who
wrote an article entitled
Animal Liberation.
 Panthocentric view is against
speciesism (interpreted as
exclusively for the benefit of the
species Homo sapiens)
 “To give preference to the life of a
being, simply because that being is a
member of our species would put us
in the same position as racists who
give up preference to those who are
member of their race.”
 “All the arguments to prove man’s
superiority cannot shatter this hard
fact: in suffering the animals are
our equals.”
 The gist of animal liberation
proposed by Peter Singer
 Panthocentrism
 Argues that there are two reason
why animals should have moral
consideration
1. Animals are sentient beings and
they could feel pain
 2. Animals are morally
considerable because they
possess inherent or instinct or
intrinsic value.
 Tom Regan
 A proponent of animal rights who
wrote an article entitled The Case
for Animal Rights, proposed that
animal rights should be accorded to
higher forms of animals, especially
mammals
 Paul Taylor
 His article entitled, The Ethics of
Respect for Nature, all living things
should be considered as “teleological
centers of life”
 Kenneth Goodpaster
 His article entitled, On Being
Morally Considerable, proposes
that being sentient is just a means of
attaining a living organism’s goal
which is being alive or having life
 J. Baird Callicott
 His article entitled The Conceptual
Foundations of the Land Ethic,
proposed that the land ethic morality
is the next stage of man’s ethical
evolutionary development
 “A species is what it is because it
has adapted to a niche in the
ecosystem. The whole, the system
itself, thus, literally and quite
straightforwardly shapes and forms
its components parts.”
 “A universal ecological literacy
would trigger sympathy and feeling
for fellow members of the biotic
community and feelings of loyalty
and patriotic regard for the
community as a whole.”
 Niche
 A comfortable or suitable position
in life or employment
 Benevolence
 The quality of being well meaning
 Holmes Rolston, III
 His article entitled, Challenges in
Environmental Ethics, has
emphasized the need for an
ecological conscience for
environmental ethics to take a
footholds.
 “Environmental ethics is not a
muddle; it is an invitation to moral
development.”
 Tried to improve on the
individualistic biocentrism and at the
same time, tone down the
excessively holistic perspective of
Leopold and Callicott’s ecocentrism
 Assumes the equal baseline or
intrinsic value of all living
organisms, accepting that each has a
good or purpose to fulfill on its own
 Emphasized the importance of
species as having intrinsically more
value than an individual specimen
 “In an evolutionary ecosystem, it is
not mere individuality that counts,
but the species is also significant
because it is dynamic life form
maintained over time. The
individual represents a species in
each new generation. It is a token of
a type. The type is more important
than the token.
 “The system is a value transformer
where form and being, process and
reality, fact and value, are
inseparably joined. Intrinsic and
instrumental values shuttle back and
forth… every good is in community”
 Callous
 Showing or having an insensitive
and cruel disregard for others
Lesson 2: Theories in Radical Ecological
Philosophy
 Deep Ecology
 Proponents of deep ecology,
especially Norwegian mountaineer
Arne Naess, could not keep their
disillusionment with existing modes
of depletion of natural resources by
industries and the heavy pollution
they cause
 They see shallow ecology as an
extension of the traditional and
conventional worldview.
 The article entitled Deep Ecology by
Bill Devall and George Sessions
 An environmental approach
emerged as a reaction to this shallow
ecological point of view.
 Presupposes biospheric
egalitarianism which assumes that all
living things possess equal value and
intrinsic worth regardless of their
usefulness or utility to other beings.
 Arne Naess
 Believed that human beings should
look at the self as an extension of
nature, where the human ego would
be identified with nature
 “… To maximize self-realization – I
don’t mean self as ego but self in a
broader sense – we need maximum
diversity and maximum symbiosis…
Diversity then is a fundamental norm
and a common delight. As deep
ecologist, we take a natural delight in
diversity, as long as it does not
include crude, intrusive forms, like
 Nazi culture, that are destructive to  Second Nature (Human Nature)
others”  From the social relations of man as a social
 Depletion being together with his culture
 Reduction in the number or quantity  Utopia
of something  an imagined place or state of things in which
 Symbiosis everything is perfect
 Interaction between two different organisms  Ecofeminism or Ecological feminism
living in a close physical association  It was a reaction against male domination and
the corresponding oppression of women.
Deep Ecology Dominant Worldwide  Superiority justifies subordination
 Harmony with  Dominance over
nature nature Some Features of the Ecofeminist View
 All nature has  Natural 1. Historical, typically causal connections
intrinsic environment as  According to Warren, some ecofeminists argue
worth/biospheric resource for that this is traceable to “prototypical patterns of
equality humans domination”
 Elegantly simple  Material/econom 2. Conceptual connections
material need ic growth for  Karen J. Warren emphasized that the
(material goal human historical-causal connections are justified using
serving the population conceptual parameters or framework
larger goal of  Belief in ample  Disjunctive is the lacking connection or
self- realization) resource consistency
 Earth “supplies” reserves 3. Symbolic connections
limited  High  In the realm of symbols or language, evidence
 Appopriate technological regarding the devaluation and degradation or
technology; non- progress and women and nature comes to the fore
dominating science solutions
 Doing with enough-  Consumerism Lesson 3: Environmental Challenges
recycling  National/
 Minority Centralized Environmental Challenges
tradition/bioregion community  Climate Change (The Present Challenge)
 Ramachandra Guha of India  Preservation of Endangered Species
 The poor are not at all concerned with intrinsic (The Continuing Challenge)
value of nature and its species or the quality of  Water Scarcity (The Emerging Challenge)
life: survival is their main concern  Sustainable Development (The
 His main concern is from the point of view of Future Challenge)
the poor people of the Third World.
 He believed that concerns about pollution and  Peter Wenz
land ownership should be given priority to  He recognized prima facie obligation to our
benefit the poor population. ecosystems, particularly, the obligation to
 Social Ecology avoid destroying them
 It is an offshoot of the movement against  He claims that a positive duty is a “duty to
domination of existing hierarchial structures in protect the environment from any and every
society. threat, or a duty to bring aid.”
 Murray Bookchin  Scarcity means the state of being short
 “Until human beings cease to live in societies in supply
that are structured around hierarchies as well as
economic classes, we shall never be free of Global Initiatives
domination, however much we try to dispel it  Kyoto Protocol (1997)
with rituals, incantations, ecotheologies, and  It was agreed upon by member nations to
the adaption of seemingly natural ways of life.” reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, thus
 He believes that ecological problems could be reducing human-induced warming
traced to social problems, which, he claims are (anthropogenic) of the global climate
the ‘sources of the growing environmental  Montreal Protocol (1987)
crisis’  This is the result of the Vienna Convention of
the Protection of the Ozone layer which aims to
2 Natures: reduce ozone depletion by phasing out products
 First Nature (Biotic Nature) that contain substances responsible for such
 Man’s biological evolutionary history or  Basel Convention (1989)
his physical world  It is aimed at controlling ‘transboundary
movements of hazardous wastes and their
disposal’
 Global Marshall Plan (1990)
 It was proposed by Albert Gore.
 It envisions the attainment of sustainable
development by making wealthy nations with
advanced economies help Third World
nations by bringing and sharing their
advanced green technologies

5 Strategic Goals in the Global Marshall Plan

1. The stabilizing of world population
2. The rapid development of environmentally
appropriate technologies
3. A comprehensive change in the economic
“rules of the road” by which we measure
the impact of our decisions on the
environment
4. Negotiation and approval of a new generation
of international agreements
5. A cooperative plan for educating the
world’s citizens about global environment