PHIL
440A ETHICS
Talbott,
5 credits
This
course will focus on contemporary discussions of important issues in
philosophical ethics. In the first half
of the course, the main issue to be discussed will be: What are we doing when we make a moral
judgment? This will lead to a discussion
of the question: What are we doing when
we make judgments about what it is rational to do? This will lead to a consideration of various
types of moral and normative realism and anti-realism. In the second half of the course, we will
discuss various substantive ethical theories, including utilitarian ethics,
social contract ethics, virtue ethics, and feminist ethics. There will be a Midterm Exam and a Final
Exam. Each exam will include an in-class
portion and a take-home portion. The
take-home portion will be a 5-page essay.
No prerequisites, but PHIL 240 or at least one other course in
philosophy is recommended. Meets I&S Requirement.
Texts: Louis P. Pojman, Ethical Theory (5th ed.) and a photocopied
reader.
IMPORTANT
TERMINOLOGY
NORMATIVE TERMS are terms
that have ACTION-GUIDING [PRESCRIPTIVE/ PROSCRIPTIVE] force.
Some common normative terms
are: ought; duty; obligation;
permissible; and forbidden.
When applied to actions, appropriate and inappropriate are
normative terms. [Note that not all
NORMATIVE terms are MORAL terms. For
example, ought can be used in a NON-MORAL,
PRUDENTIAL sense, as in: One ought to
eat nutritious foods.]
NORMATIVE MORAL TERMS are
NORMATIVE TERMS with MORAL ACTION-GUIDING force.
EVALUATIVE TERMS are terms
that express approval or disapproval.
Some common evaluative terms
are: good; bad; excellent;
and awful. EVALUATIVE TERMS can
express moral approval or disapproval, but can also express other types of
non-moral approval or disapproval (e.g., The statement
that apples taste good is a non-moral evaluative statement).
PURELY DESCRIPTIVE TERMS are
terms that are NOT NORMATIVE and NOT EVALUATIVE.
PURELY DESCRIPTIVE STATEMENTS
are statements that contain only PURELY DESCRIPTIVE terms (no NORMATIVE or
EVALUATIVE terms).
NORMATIVE/EVALUATIVE
STATEMENTS are statements that include at least one normative/evaluative term.
For example, moral statements about what one ought or ought not to do (e.g.,
the statement that one ought not to steal or the statement that one ought to
tell the truth) are NORMATIVE, because they contain the NORMATIVE term ought. [Note that not all normative statements are
moral. See above, for an example of a
normative prudential statement.]
[Note that
Normative/Evaluative statements can contain SOME Purely Descriptive terms, but
Purely Descriptive statements cannot contain ANY Normative/Evaluative terms.]
METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY
Metaphysics Deals With The
Nature Of Reality--How Things Really Are.
Epistemology Addresses How We
Can Have Knowledge Or Justified Beliefs.
Questions of Moral
Metaphysics: Are there objective moral
values? Are there universal moral
truths?
Questions of Moral
Epistemology: If there are objective
moral values or universal moral truths, can we ever have moral knowledge or
justified moral beliefs? If so, how?
A QUESTION OF MORAL METAPHYSICS
Can there be purely
descriptive necessary and sufficient or even only sufficient conditions for
moral wrongness (or rightness)?
Question: Wrong ó [PD] ?
[PD] ŕ Wrong? Wrong
ŕ [PD]
Hume and Moore's
answer: No.
Utilitarians' Answer: Yes
Consider Act
Utilitarianism:
-(Maximizes
Overall Utility) ó Wrong
Maximizes Overall Utility ó Right
The failure of utilitarianism has reinforced the view that
there is no logical analysis of
MORAL—or more generally, NORMATIVE—TERMS in purely descriptive terms.
MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY:
TWO PARADIGMS FOR MORAL REASONING
1. TOP-DOWN REASONING:
Reasoning from Moral Norms or Principles and
other Acceptable Premises to a Moral Judgment about a Particular Case (a
Particular Moral Judgment).
For religious traditions with an infallible moral authority,
all moral reasoning is Top-Down. Enlightenment
philosophers assumed that all reasoning was Top-Down, from infallible
premises. I refer to this model of
reasoning as the Proof Paradigm.
2. BOTTOM-UP REASONING:
Begin with judgments about particular cases. Find the moral norms or principles that best
EXPLAIN our particular moral judgments about actual and hypothetical
cases. We don't prove anything, but
rather try to figure out what it makes the most sense to believe.
Bottom-Up Act Utilitarianism
Maximizes Overall Utility [MOU] ó Right [R]
What is the status of this
principle? For a bottom-up act
utilitarian, it would be an explanatory principle. The bottom-up act utilitarian would ask us to
think of acts that we consider right and acts that we consider wrong. Then s/he would point argue that act
utilitarianism explains the difference between the two kinds of act, because
the right acts are acts that maximize overall utility and the wrong ones are
acts that do not.
EQUILIBRIUM MODEL OF
REASONING
Equilibrium Reasoning is both Top-Down and Bottom-Up. In Equilibrium Reasoning, our main reason for
accepting a moral principle is usually that it seems to provide a good
explanation of particular cases. When we
accept a moral principle on this basis, we can then reason Top-Down from that
moral principle to a particular moral judgment, but the moral principle is not
regarded as infallible. If we discover a
particular moral judgment that the principle conflicts with, we must either
give up the particular moral judgment or give up the principle. The decision about which to give up is based
on what makes the most sense.
In this course we don't prove anything. We use equilibrium reasoning to try to find
principles that explain our judgments about particular actual and hypothetical
cases. When someone proposes such a
principle, we consider its deductive implications and try to find
counterexamples to it. If we decide that
there is a counterexample to a proposed principle, we don't give up trying to
find an adequate principle. We use
counterexamples as clues to help us formulate better explanatory principles.