GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

THE HUMAN ACT Constituents of human acts:

Concept of Human Act: ■ human act must be knowing and

deliberate act
■ Human Act (Actus Humani) are actions that
proceed from insight into the nature and ■ human act must be free
purpose of one’s doing and from consent of
■ human act is a voluntary act
free will.
1. human act must be knowing and deliberate
■ Human Act are acts which proceed from
act:
insight and free will.
■ deliberation means advertence (direct
■ Human Act can also rightly be called
attention) or knowledge in the intellect of
personal act.
what one is about and what this means.
Human Act : St Thomas:
■ deliberation about the means to perform an
■ human actions are those over which one action and about the end to be achieved.
has voluntary control
■ Example, “a hunter knows what he is doing.
■ human actions are not products of He sights a deer and he knows that it will
deterministic causal forces. They are soon die.”
products of our own free judgment (liberum
■ So deliberation means knowledge.
arbitrium), the exercise of which is a
function of both intellect and will. ■ Awareness or consciousness of the
conditions and implications of one’s action.
■ human actions are actions that are
governed by a reasoned consideration of ■ It is a knowing act.
what is true and good.
2. human act must be free:
Not all actions are considered Human Act:
■ A human act is determined by the will and
 Acts of Man (actus hominis) are actions by nothing else. It is under the control of
performed without intervention of intellect the will.
and free will.
■ It is called a free act. Every human act must
 It comprises: be free.
 All spontaneous biological and sensual ■ You are not forced by facticity.
processes, like nutrition, breathing, sensual
impressions. ■ Since it is free act, it can be done or be left
undone.
 All acts performed by those who have not
the use of reason, like people asleep,
lunatics, drunken people

 Actions which merely happen in the body or

through the body without the awareness of
the mind or the control of the will.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

3. human act is a voluntary act: – True liberty dignifies man; misuse of liberty
debases him.
■ Latin for will is “voluntas” (volition).
■ Authentic Freedom is not “the right to say
■ To say that a human act is voluntary is to
and do anything,” but to “do the good and
say that it is a will-act.
truth.”
■ A voluntary act is defined as the act which
Illustration
proceeds from an intrinsic principle with
knowledge of the end.  A certain UST-L student is aware of the
regulations concerning the wearing of
■ A voluntary act proceeds from the will and
ID before entry & during inside the
depends upon the will.
campus. (Knowledge)
■ A voluntary act is a will-act, not only a
 He/She is free to wear or not to wear
“willed act”
the ID before entry & during inside the
campus. (Freedom)

 He/she did not wear the ID and

consequently disobeys the regulation of
UST-L. (Voluntariness)

The morality of human acts depends on:

a. the object chosen

b. the end sought or the intention

■ When man knows the end of his work to
the greatest degree and moves towards it, c. the circumstances of the action
the voluntary character of his actions is
present to the greatest degree. A. The Object (finis operis)
 It is the direct effect of the human
Freedom action
 It is the first quality determining or
■ Freedom is the power to choose between
describing the human act.
two or more courses of action without
 The basic factor of morality, the
being forced to take one or the other by
very substance of moral act.
anything except our own will.
 It is always and necessarily the
– The whole moral life revolves around the result of the act, independent of
use of freedom. intention and circumstances.
 The object is not the matter of
– The good use of freedom guarantees man
which a thing is made but the
the affirmation of his better self and the
matter about which something is
achievement of the purpose of life.
done.
– The abuse of freedom is the origin of man’s
guilty conduct.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

B. Intention/Motive (finis operantis)

 It is the reason or purpose behind our

acting.

 The reason or purpose on why the

person did the action.

 It is the plan or determination of the

will to bring about a certain effect.

Principles of Intention: C. Circumstances

■ Circumstances are conditions modifying

human actions, either by increasing or by
diminishing the moral responsibility
attending them.

■ Conditions which affect the voluntariness of

the act.

■ A condition that affects what happens or

how somebody reacts in a particular
situation.

The SEVEN Circumstances that affects the

morality of our actions:

■ WHO - the person/subject who does or

receives the action.

■ WHERE - the place/setting of an action.

■ WHAT - the object/effect of an act.

■ WHY - the intention/motive that moves the

person to an act.

■ WHEN - the time of the action performed

■ HOW - the different conditions/modalities

such as consent,violence, fear, ignorance or
voluntariness.

■ BY WHAT MEANS-
theways/methods/process of an act.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

Principle – Circumstances: Modifiers of

1. Circumstances may increase or diminish the
goodness or badness of an action
Example:
■ To steal a working animal from a poor
farmer is worse act than to steal it from a
rich man.
2. Circumstances may change a good or
indifferent act into a punishable one.
Human Act
 Modifiers of human act are also called
obstacles of human act that affects or
prevents a clear knowledge of the object of
the act.
 Or impair the coming about of a human act
in its roots by diminishing or preventing the
consent of free will.

Example:
– These modifiers/obstacles may increase,
■ To sleep is an indifferent act. But a guard decrease, or totally inhibit human behavior
sleeping at his post during his duty will be from moral responsibility or liability.
punished by his commander.
Ito ang “nagtuturing” or “nagpapabago” ng
gawaing pantao.

■ A human act, in order to be morally good, “Nababawasan ang pagkakusa ng ginawa.”

must be perfect according to the three
elements: object, intention and
circumstances. Impairements of Required Knowledge:

o Any deficiency will make a human  Ignorance

act morally evil.
 Error
“Bonum ex integra causa: malum ex quocumque
 Inattention
defectu” (The good results from whole
perfection; the evil from any defect) Impairements of Free Consent:

 Passion
■ Human Actions are good (moral) when they  Fear
have the moral perfections and fullness
required by the object of the actions.  Violence

– i.e. When human acts agree with the  Habit

standards or norms of morality which are
human reason, conscience and natural law.

■ Human actions are evil (immoral) when

they are contrary to the moral perfections
required by the object of the action.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

2nd. Vincible Ignorance does not destroy

voluntariness, but it does lessen the
voluntariness and responsibility of an act.

3rd. Affected ignorance does not excuse a

person from his bad actions; on the contrary, it
actually increases their malice or their moral
responsibility.

 Aberratio Ictus – there is mistake in the

blow.

– Means the offender intending to cause

injury to one person actually inflicts it to
another.

 Error in Personae – there is mistake in

the identity of the person.

 Praeter Intentionem – there is mistake

in the intended result of the act.

– Means the injurious result is greater

than what was intended.

 Man is to overcome the errors which

Principles:
1st. Invincible ignorance makes an act
involuntary.
– An act which proceeds from this ignorance
is not voluntary, it is not therefore a human
act and consequently, it is not imputable to
the agent.
hold him under their sway in personal
search for truth, to escape the negative
influence of those forces which
misguide him, and reach views based on
sound reasons.
 For false convictions bring with them
false attitudes to life.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

Inattention Passions in moral point of view:

 It is a failure to take proper care or give
enough attention to something.
 Is an actual, momentary privation of
knowledge.
 Inattention of a person may result to his
contributory negligence to an act, thus,
he/she can be partially liable.
Example
› Using a cell phone while driving and meets
an accident
› Texting while walking
Passions or Concupiscence
 Passions are provided by nature for self-
preservation of the individual and the
human race.
 A person without them would be with no
capacity for self-defence, growth,
improvement and devotion.
 Passions may be called good when ordered
by the rational will to help man in the
practice of virtue, or in the attainment of
that which is morally good.
 Passions may be called bad when used by
the rational will to accomplish morally evil
actions or when it not controlled by reason.
A person should be a master of his/her
passions and not a slave of it.

 Passions are strong tendencies towards the Division – Passions:

possession of something good or towards
the avoidance of something evil.
 The object of somebody’s intense interest
or enthusiasm or overpowering emotions or
a sudden outburst of emotion.
– Passions are neither good nor evil, but
indiferrent (without bias or preference for
one person, group, or thing rather than
another)
Eleven Chief Passions
 Antecedent Passions – it arises
spontaneously before the judgement of
reason and before the will can control the
psychological situation.
Example:
› When a delicious food is served at the table,
it spontaneosly causes appetite and the
desire to it.
 Consequent Passions – it is deliberately
aroused by the will in order to ensure a
more prompt and willing operation.

 1.Love 8.Sadness Example:

 2.Desire 9.Despair › When a person deliberately provoking

hatred in his heart in order to carry out his
 3.Delight 10.Fear intentions to murder/kill another.
 4.Hope 11.Horror

 5.Bravery

 6.Anger

 7.Hatred
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER
Principles – Passions:
 Antecedent Passions may completely
destroy freedom, and consequently, moral
responsibility.
Example:
› A wife, who, out of love for her husband,
becomes so jealous that in a moment of
savage rage, kills him and the concubine.
 Antecedent Passions lessens freedom and
diminish the responsibility of human actions
because they tend to blind the judgment of
the intellect and block the freedom of the
will.
Example:
› A man who drinks immoderately shows in
his actions more voluntariness but less
freedom than a man who drinks
occasionally only.
 Antecedent Passions do not always destroy
freedom, for passions seldom escape the
control of reason.
 Consequent Passions do not lessen the
voluntariness of an act but may increase it,
because these kind of passions are
deliberately excited and they are voluntary
in themselves.
Example:
› By reading or watching immoral literature in
order to intice or arouse the intellect and
the will for another evil act – masturbation.
Fear
 Fear – is a disturbance of the mind caused
by the thought of a threatening evil.
 It is the apprehension by the mind of an
impending evil.
 It is an unpleasant feeling of anxiety or
apprehension caused by the presence or
anticipation of danger.
Fear can be distinguish into
 Acts done with fear or in spite of fear.
– When a person climbs a dangearous
mountain at night.
 Acts done from or through fear or because
of fear.
– When a sea captain throws his cargo
overboard in a storm in order to save the
ship and the lives of the passengers.
 Fear may be slight or grave according to
the amount or to the proximity of the
impending evil.
Principles – Fear:
 Acts done with or in spite of fear are always
voluntary.
 Acts done from, through or because of fear
are involuntary.
 Fear as a disturbance of the mind lessens
the voluntariness but it does not destroy it.
 Fear considered as an ordinary passion may
increase or diminish the voluntariness of
the human act.
Violence
 Violence or compulsion - is the application
of external force on a person by another for
the purpose of compelling him to do
something against his will.
 It consists in the actual application of
physical force to extort something from a
person.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

Principle – Violence:  If a habit has been contracted absolutely

 Human act resulting from violence are
involuntary by themselves.
– But we are held morally responsible for all
acts of the will itself even when the body is
suffering violence.
Example:
-The body of a woman can be violated (rape),
but her will or internal consent may remain
inviolate or she may internally consent.
 Active resistance should always be offered
to an unjust aggressor. However, if
resistance is impossible or if there is a
serious threat to ones’s life, a person
confronted by violence can always offer
intrinsic resistance by witholding consent;
that is enought to save his/her moral
integrity.
involuntary and unintentionally, it will lack
voluntariness and responsibility as long as
the person concerned remains ignorance of
the existence of such habit.
– Example: A habit of foul language during
childhood.
 If an evil/bad habits has been contracted
voluntarily, but a positive and constant
effort is being made to
counteract/resist/deter it, the acts
inadvertently proceeding from the habit are
considered involuntary and not imputable
to man.
 Example: A person seriously exerts effort to
repress a habit of saying foul words, he/she
is no longer responsible for his/her
occasioanlly foul language.

Example – Ignorance
Habit
A 4 year old boy gave his younger sister a knife
 Habit – is a constant and easy way of doing and a scissor to play with (Invincible Ignorance)
things acquired by the repetition of the
A very busy mother, accidentally gave her baby
same act.
daughter a box to play with that contains sharp
 It is an established action or pattern of objects. (vincible ignorance)
behavior that is repeated so often that it
becomes typical of somebody, although he
or she may be unaware of it.

 Synonymous to addiction, dependency,

fixation, obsession, weakness, custom,
routine, practice, tradition, convention,
pattern.

Principles – Habit:

 Habits do not destroy voluntariness, and

actions performed by the force of habits are
imputable to man.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER
Feelings and Moral Decision Making
Decision Making
• a process of making choices by identifying a
decision, gathering information, and
assessing alternative resolutions.
Moral Decision Making
• the ability to make a choice or decide
which is the right course of action when an
ethical issue arises.
First Approach (In order)
 Problem
 Reason
 Judgement
Moral Reasoning
“Conscious mental activity through which one
evaluates a moral judgment for its
(in)consistency with other moral commitments,
where these commitments are to one or more
moral principles and (in some cases) particular
moral judgments.”
-imply a rigorous assessment of conduct (one’s
own or that of others) according to its fit with
one or more deeply held principles.
• Moral reasoning is a controlled and ‘cooler’
(less affective) process.
• it is conscious mental activity that consists
of transformation information about people
and their actions in order to reach a moral
judgment or decision.”
• includes discernment, reflection, analysis,
contemplation.
Case 1
A 40-year old man quietly does compassionate
acts. He takes in stray animals, organizes food
drives for a soup kitchen, and recently quit a job
at a bank that he felt encouraged dishonest
advice to its customers. He had once offered to
donate a kidney to his step-mother, but his
father vetoed the gesture and that woman died.
The man’s own drug-addicted mother died not
long after. He subsequently came across a
newspaper ad placed by a woman—a total
stranger—needing a kidney. Against his family’s
strong disapproval, this time he went ahead
with the donation.
Second Approach (In order)
 Problem
 Emotion
 Judgement
 Reason
Emotions (feelings)
• feelings are used as instinctive response to
moral dilemmas.
• feelings may sometimes prohibit us to make
right decisions, but it can also be used in
making the right one.
• emotions are rapidly activated when people
are presented with certain kinds of moral
dilemmas.
• Emotions can trigger our thoughts; insights
can shape our feelings.
Case 2
A man on a Manila subway platform collapsed
from an apparent seizure. In his struggle to get
up, he fell down on to the tracks below just as a
train sped into the station. Scores of stunned
people watched in horror but did not move.
Another man, though, a 50-year old father
accompanying his two young daughters, saved
the stricken stranger by jumping down into the
trench and pressing him down between the
tracks, as the train barreled inches over them.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER
From underneath, he shouted, “Tell my girls
we’re all right.”
• Moral intuition refers to the fast,
automatic, and (usually) affect-laden
processes in which an evaluative feeling of
good-bad or like-dislike (about the actions
or character of a person) appear in the
consciousness without any awareness of
having gone through steps of search,
weighing evidence, or inferring a
conclusion.
• emotions as the result of logical analysis
through which we first analyze someone’s
behavior, make an appropriate judgment,
and then feel whichever is called for,
respect or contempt.
Moral Reasoning and Feelings:
 reason and emotions are jointly at work
and tightly intertwined in decision making.
 According to Ells (2014), emotion is a
response to stimuli based on past
experiences which is made instinctively
while reason is a form of personal
justification which changes from person to
person based on their own ethical and
moral code, as well as prior experience.
 Both hold the moral judgment as they are
even deemed by some as instinctive and
trained response to moral dilemmas (De
Guzman et al. 2017)
Case 3
Denise Cornejo, CL’s Vice President for
Corporate Development, told Vhong Navarro,
the CEO, about misstatements in the company’s
financial reports. Her warnings were ignored.
At about the same time, two CL traders were
caught on tape gloating about how their
company’s manipulation of the energy market
had screwed “APEC.”
 emotion and reason are tightly intertwined.
 Emotion and reason are jointly at work
when we judge the conduct of others or
make choices ourselves.
 a cognitive deficit of either type can impair
our decision making capacity about all
manner of things, including moral
judgments.
 reason and emotion are not really opposite.
 both abstract inference and emotional
intuitions or instincts are seen as having
relative roles in ethical thinking.
 feelings or emotions are said to be
judgments about the accomplishment of
one’s goals.
 emotions, can be rational in being based at
least sometimes on good judgments about
how well a circumstance or agent
accomplishes appropriate objectives.
 feelings are also visceral or instinctual by
providing motivations to act morally (De
Guzman et al. 2017).
 reason when removed from emotion,
allows a person to make conscious decisions
based on fact, with no references to
personal involvement.
 the use of reason as a way of knowing,
allows for the knower to see the
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER
consequences of their actions through-out
the decision-making process.
 there are limitations to decisions made
based on reason alone, perception of
situations is not questioned as it may be
with an emotional decision (Ells, 2014).
Moral Judgment
Our moral judgments thus can (and often
should) be generated by the interplay of both
head (reason) and heart (feeling).
Feeling based Theories:
1. Ethical Subjectivism
2. Emotivism
• Another way of looking at this is that
judgments about human conduct are
shaped by, and in many ways limited to,
perception
Ethical Subjectivism Varieties
• Simple Subjectivism: the view (largely as
described above) that ethical statements
reflect sentiments, personal preferences
and feelings rather than objective facts.
• Individualist Subjectivism: the view
(originally put forward by Protagoras) that
there are as many distinct scales of good
and evil as there are individuals in the
world.
• It is effectively a form of Egoism, which
maintains that every human being ought to
pursue what is in his or her self-interest
exclusively.
• Moral Relativism (or Ethical Relativism): the
view that for a thing to be morally right is
for it to be approved of by society, leading
to the conclusion that different things are
right for people in different societies and
different periods in history.
• Ideal Observer Theory: the view that what
is right is determined by the attitudes that a
hypothetical ideal observer (a being who is
perfectly rational, imaginative and
informed) would have.
Criticism against Ethical Subjectivism
• subjectivism implies the moral
statements are less significant than most
people think they are – this may of course
be true without rendering moral statement
insignificant.
• Ethical Subjectivism has implications that
are contrary to what we believe about the
nature of moral judgments.
• it also implies that each of us is infallible so
as long as we are honestly expressing
our respective feelings about moral
issues.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER
• it cannot account for the fact of
disagreement in Ethics.
• the theory could also have dangerous
implications in moral education (De
Guzman et al. 2017).
2. Emotivism
• refers to a theory about moral judgments,
sentences, words, and speech acts;
• it is sometimes also extended to cover
aesthetic and other non-moral forms of
evaluation.
• strictly speaking emotivism is the name
of only the earliest version of ethical
non-cognitivism (also known as
expressivism and non-descriptivism).
• To understand how the theory views moral
judgments, it would help to note that
language is used in a variety of ways.
• Principally, language is used to state facts or
what we believe to be facts. But there are
other purpose for which language may be
used like utterance or command.
• The purposes of utterances are
(1) they are used as means of influencing
other’s behavior and
(2) moral sentences are used to expresses
(not report) the speaker’s attitude
(De Guzman et al. 2017).
• Emotivists believe that moral language
expresses emotions and tries to influence
others; it has no cognitive content.
Emotivism Example
 If I say homosexuality is evil, I’m just
expressing my feeling that homosexuality
is disgusting! I am expressing my emotions
and, at the same time, trying to influence
you to dislike homosexuality.
 The same analysis applies to any moral
judgment. If I say that war/capital
punishment is wrong, I’m just expressing
my dislike for it and trying to get you to
agree with me. I might as well have said
war/capital punishment while shaking my
head and rolling my eyes.
Criticism against Emotivism
• emotivism presupposes that moral
disagreements are incapable of being
resolved by rational discourse.
• There is no way to resolve our
attitudinal disagreements unless we are
persuasive enough (or violent enough).
• But we have already seen that there’s
another way to persuade-using reason
to support our position. We can provide
good reasons why x is right or x is
wrong.
• If we appeal to reason, we have
discovered a way to resolve our
disputes that other than by shouting
or beating others into submission.
• And if reason plays a role in ethics, then
there is truth or falsity about ethical
judgments.
Moral Decision Making Development:
moral development may rest in our ability
to be mindful of our own feelings, thoughts,
and values—and the context in which we
are functioning.
1. Don’t accept the problem as given.
 How choices are framed can sway
your choices in ways that may
contradict your core beliefs.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER
 Generate multiple options and
assess them against one another
instead of considering them in
isolation.
 Look at different angles of the
problem
2. Listen to both your heart and head.
 Issues of right and wrong matter
deeply to us, as they should.
 Twinges of disgust or shame may be
internal signals that we are nearing
the outer bounds of acceptable
behavior.
 One should also reflect on the
sources of our feelings, be they
negative or positive, as they may be
triggered by associations that have
nothing to do with the matter at
hand.
3. Watch your language.
 How we name things exposes (or
masks) the nature of our actions
and their consequences.
 Example: firings become layoffs,
layoffs become downsizing, and
downsizing becomes right-sizing.
 this action may be unavoidable, but
we should not sugarcoat the fact
that people who once worked with
or for us are now jobless.
4. Take special care in dimly lit places.
 our actions-and ultimately even our
values-are influenced by the
company we keep.
5. Be modest about your virtue.
 most of us believe that we are more
ethical than are others.
 countless experiments and real life
examples, however, should remind
us that people who are most self-
righteous may be most likely to slip.
6. Understand why others transgress.
 some lapses may be due to moral
failure, but others can be caused by
external factors that have little to
do with their fundamental nature.
 Luck plays a role in regard to how
people are tested and what
resources they can draw upon.
 Refrain from judging a person’s
core character, positively or
negatively, on the basis of a single
event.
7. Don’t give up on yourself (or on others).
 An ancient proverb says, “Every
saint has a past. Every sinner has a
future.”
 Honest reflection about the past,
coupled with a measure of humility,
can serve as foundation for leading
a responsible life going forward.
Think and feel about it
Morality is not merely-or even
principally-determining the right thing
to do in specific instances, rather it
entails who we want to be and what
kind of life we want to lead.
-As Appiah notes, “temperance, continence,
kindness, friendship [and] simply being nice” all
comprise being a virtuous person, yet none of
these traits are evoked or tested by clever
philosophical puzzles. “One cannot riddle one’s
way to the good life,” he reminds us, “and if the
term ‘ethics’ conjures a hectoring moralism, a
focus on misdeeds, a list of italicized demerits,
then something has indeed been lost.”
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER
Reason and Impartiality as Minimum
Requirements for Morality
Reason
• Rationality is the capability for logical
thought with the ability to reason towards
sound conclusions based on facts and
evidence, draw inferences from situations
and circumstances, and make sound well-
reasoned judgments based on factual
information.
• Reason is the ability of the mind to think,
understand, and form judgments by a
process of logic.
• It is an innate and exclusive human ability
that utilizes new or existing information as
bases to consciously make sense out of
thing while applying logic.
• Reason is also associated with thinking,
cognition, and intellect
• is also identified with the capacity that
enables us to identify “reasons,” the
particular considerations that count in favor
of belief or action.
• A person is called “rational or reasonable”
when his beliefs and actions conform to the
dictates of those principles, or when he is
subjectively guided by them.
• Reason spells the difference of moral
judgments from the mere expressions of
personal preference.
-i.e. If after eating someone says, “I like a sweet
cake,” he is not required to support it with good
reasons for that is a statement about his/her
personal taste and nothing more.
Reason in Moral judgment:
• In moral judgments, it must be assisted by
reasons.
• In the absence of sensible rationale, they
are merely capricious and ignorable.
• Moral deliberation is a matter of weighing
reasons and being guided by them.
• In understanding the nature of morality,
reasons are indispensable.
• Truth in Ethics entails being justified by
good reasons. That is, the rightful moral
decision involves selecting the option that
has the power of reason on its side. Respect
for truth at all costs is necessary
REASON:
The minimum conception of morality is:
• Morality is the effort to guide one’s
conduct by reason – that is, to do what
there are the best reasons for doing –
while giving equal weight to the interest
of each individual affected by one’s
decision (Rachels, 2018).
 Being defined by good reasons, moral
truths are objectives in the sense that they
true no matter what we might want or
think.
 We cannot make an act moral or immoral
just by wishing it to be so, because we
cannot merely will that the weight of
reason be on its side or against it. And this
also explains why morality is not
arbitrary.
 Reason commends what it commends,
regardless of our feelings, attitudes,
opinions, and desires.
 Since the connection between moral
judgments and reasons is necessary
important, then a proposed theory on the
nature of moral judgment should be able to
give an account for the relation.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

Impartiality

• “When making moral judgment, it must not • A good test of impartiality: is to

be compromised, and cannot reasonably be
seen to be compromised, by bias, conflict of
interest, or the undue influence of others.”
• Impartiality (fair-mindedness) is a principle
of justice holding that decisions should be
based on objective criteria, rather than on
the basis of bias, self-interest, prejudice, or
preferring the benefit to one person over
another for improper reasons.
imagine a fair-minded and informed
observer: would this person have any
reason to suspect that your impartiality
might be compromised?
i.e. Suppose you went to a basketball game and
you found out that the referee is the uncle of a
player on one of the teams. Would you think
that the uncle would be impartial in his
refereeing?

• Impartiality is manifesting objectivity.

• It is the quality of being unbiased and Reason and Impartiality:

objective in creating moral decision –
• Reason and impartiality become the basic
underscoring that a (morally) impartial
prerequisite for morality as one is excepted
person makes moral decisions relative to
to be able to deliver clear, concise, rightful,
the welfare of the majority and not for
and appropriate judgments made out of
specific people alone.
logic and understanding in an unbiased and
• Other elements of impartiality are accuracy, unprejudiced manner while considering the
fairness, balance, context, and no conflicts general welfare to accurately concoct
or prejudgments. moral decisions.

• Impartiality involves the idea that each 7 steps Model

individual’s interest and point of view are
1. Gather the Facts
equally important.
2. Determine the Ethical Issues
• Also called evenhandedness or fair-
mindednes. 3. What Ethical principles have bearing on
the case
• It requires that we give equal and/or
adequate consideration to the interests of 4. List the alternatives
all concerned parties (Common Good).
5. Compare the alternatives with the
principle
 The principles of impartiality assumes 6. Weigh the consequences
that every person, generally speaking, is
equally important; that is, no one is seen as 7. Make a decision
intrinsically more significant than anyone
else, is not to say that there is no reason
whatsoever for which an individual might
demand more moral attention or better
treatment than others.
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

Moral Courage • Instead of rewards the person who shows

Moral Courage
• Moral courage is a subtype of prosocial
behavior (e.g., Bierhoff, 2002).
• Prosocial behavior “covers a broad range of
actions intended to benefit one or more
people” (Batson, 1998, p. 282), such as
helping, showing moral courage, sharing, or
donating.
• Moral courage (also called as Civil Courage)
as “the expression of personal views and
values in the face of dissension and
rejection” and as the situation “when an
individual stands up to someone with
power over him or her (e.g., boss) for the
greater good”
• Moral courage means doing the right thing
even at the risk of inconvenience, ridicule,
punishment, loss of job or security or social
status, etc.
• It require that we rise above the apathy,
complacency, hatred, cynicism, and fear
mongering in our political system,
socioeconomic divisions and
cultural/religious differences.
• Is necessary in situations which demand a
morally courageous intervention, instances
of injustice happen, human rights are
violated, persons are treated unfairly and
degradingly, or nature and cultural assets
are in danger; these situations are about
discrimination against foreigners or other
minorities, violence and aggression against
weaker individuals, sexual harassment or
abuse, mobbing, or illegal business
practices (Frey, Scheafer, & Neumann,
1999).
moral courage has to anticipate social costs
like being insulted, excluded, attacked,
psychically or physically violated.
• Most of the social costs moral courage
entails emanate from the confrontation or
the conflict with the perpetrators
• Moral courage as brave behavior
accompanied by anger and indignation
which intends to enforce societal and
ethical norms without considering one’s
own social costs.
• Social costs (i.e., negative social
consequences) distinguish moral courage
from other prosocial behaviors.
• Moral courage involves the willingness to
speak out and do what is right in the face of
forces that would lead us to act in some
other way.
• Moral courage is an important virtue within
society and it is not an innate behavior but
can be learned and trained.
•
Lack of Moral Courage:
Example:
• Walking away from someone in need
• Taking more that your fair share
• Laughing at someone’s misfortune or
accident
• Grabbing the spotlight from someone who
has earned it
• Placing too much reliance on the letter
rather than the spirit of the law.

• Moral courage is a prosocial behavior with

high social costs and no (or rarely) direct
rewards for the actor (e.g., Bierhoff, 2002).
 GE 08 ETHICS MIDTERM REVIEWER

Development of Moral Courage

1. Moral courage must be taught (learned)

and habituated

2. Use stories and heroes (self-sacrifice)