Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Religion
Founded upon
revelation
Concerned with morals
Morals are absolute.
Have to do with personto-God
Concerned with
supranature
Miracles are a part
Goal is to find God
Philosophy
Founded upon reason
Concerned with ethics
Ethics are relative.
(School of Morals?)
Are person-to-person
Theistic ethics
Monotheistic (believing in one god) religions,
such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam,
believe that one God exists, can be
accessed, and is in control of earthly events.
Their holy books provide detailed guidance as to
what God considers to be right and good.
This guidance is taken as absolute, and may be
in the form of commands.
Hindu/Buddhist philosophy
The gods of the early Indo-Europeans were
gods of light, but this light was not moral light
but rather the illumination of the mind or
understanding.
Philosophy can be defined as strictly
rational speculation, concerned with the
ultimate nature and meaning of reality, apart
from revelation, to satisfy a purely intellectual
need Custance, p. 30.
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Philosophical ethics--Assumptions
Assumes that humans are basically good,
and can be more ethical.
Reason is a sufficient basis for developing
ethics.
Humans are accountable only to other
humans.
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Philosophical ethics--Assumptions
Carl F.H. Henry noted these assumptions:
(1 nature is the ultimate reality
(2 Humans are essentially animals.
(3 truth and right are intrinsically timebound and changing
Carl F. H. Henry, Christian Personal Ethics, 1957, p. 23
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Theological/philosophical worldviews
Monotheistic Philosophical/ Animistic
Anthropological/
Utopian
Kingdom
God
Power
Goal
People
Divine
Kingdom is
coming
Is sovereign
Political, social
Balancing
between
human & spirits
We are the gods God is gone
Is Gods &
delegated
Is ours, by
reason, majority,
force
Please God
Please people or
self
Sinful (Islam-- Basically good-less so)
optimistic
Accountable To God
To people
Belongs to the
spirits
Please spirits
Basically good
To spirits
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Ethical
Moral Truth Exists:
Theories:
discovered by reason
expressions of desire.)
be true or false.)
Sources in , A
Companion to
Ethics, Peter
Singer, Ed.
Relativism by
David Wong, pp.
442-450
is false.)
Realism,
Michael Smith, p
399-410
Absolutism (Bible,
Prescriptivist) (There is one truth--
Intuitionism by
Jonathan Dancy,
pp. 411-419
Universal
Prescriptivism,
by R.M. Hare,
pp. 451-463
Naturalism
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Moral
Deontological
Consequential
that right
exists
theories:Theories
(of the Right)
(of the Good)
Virtue,
Character
Basis:
Absolutes
Consequence
Character
Activity:
Obeying
Weighing
Being
Example:
Universal
prescriptivism Utilitarianism
(Kant)
Natural law
Greek (Plato)
Aquinas
Egoism Humanistic
Franklin
Hedonism
Naturalism
Biblical
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Evolutionary ethics
If the material universe is the product of
nothing, plus time, plus chance, or if matter
itself is eternal, there is no necessary value to
that universe, or anything in it.
Ethics becomes a matter of personal choice, plus
culture, plus a point on the time spectrum.
Right and wrong are defined by the majority and
enforced by sanctions.
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Valentine
He claimed that the UN hurt developing peoples by
providing free commodities, hurting businesses
providing these items, revealing concerned for small
business people.
He advocates going to a tribe or people to help them to
clarify their own values, for each individual to
determine what is right and wrong.
How each person formulating his own ethical system would
foster community he did not say. This seems instead to be
the worst possible foundation for community.
The person has no intrinsic worth.
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