00519--Ethical Theories/Terminology/Definitions

Ethical Theory/
Terminology

Definition

1.Pragmatism

Is the ethical theory which states that the meaning of a concept is determined by the
experiential or practical consequences of its application. [Charles Sanders Peirce
and William James]
The belief that pleasure is the greatest good and highest aspiration of humankind.
An approach to ethics, social science and political and social philosophy which
emphasizes the importance of human individuals in contrast to the social wholes,
such as families, classes or societies, to which they belong.
The view that the well-being of others should have as much importance for us as the
well-being of ourselves.
Consequentialism holds that the value of an action is determined entirely by its
consequences and thus proposes that ethical life should be forward looking, that is,
concerned with maximizing the good and minimizing the bad consequences of
actions. [G. E. M. Anscombe]
A major modern ethical theory which suggests that the rightness or wrongness of an
action is determined by its utility, that is, the good (pleasant or happy) or bad
(painful or evil) consequences it produces.
[Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, Sidgwick, and many others]
A twentieth-century political and moral movement. It argues that no
intervention from state and government is necessary or justified. Free choice is
supreme and all conflicts can be settled through the mechanism of the market. Its
strong anarchist form insists that all government is illegitimate.

2.Hedonism
3.Individualism

4.Altruism
5.Consequentialism

6.Utilitarianism

7.Libertarianism

[Reference: The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy

NICHOLAS BUNNIN AND JIYUAN YU]

8.Moral absolutism

The view that there are certain objective moral principles which are eternally and
universally true, no matter what consequences they bring about. These principles
can never justifiably be violated or given up. Paradigms of such principles include
dont lie, keep your promises, and dont kill innocent people. Moral
absolutism is generally represented by various religious moral systems. Kantian
deontology is closely associated with moral Absolutism.
[Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant and many others]

9.moral psychology

An essential part of ethics, especially contemporary virtue ethics, concerned with

the structure and phenomenological analysis of those psychological phenomena that
have great bearing on moral behavior or action. These phenomena include cognitive
states such as deliberation and choice; emotional states such as love, mercy,
satisfaction, guilt, remorse, and shame; and desires, character, and personality.
Moral psychology aims to improve understanding of human motivation and also has
a role in the philosophy of law.
Paternalism is derived from parental caring towards ones children. In ethics it
means interfering with another persons liberty or freedom in
the belief that one is promoting the good of that person, or preventing harm from

10.Paternalism

11.Sexism

12.Social Darwinism

13.Suicide

14.Telishment

15.Trolley problem

occurring to that person, even if ones action provokes that persons disagreement or
protest. Paternalism is challenged by liberalism and is now often viewed as a
violation of liberty, autonomy, and individual rights.
The attitude holding that ones own sex is superior to the other and leading in
practice to limited respect for the rights, needs, and values of the other sex. The term
is analogical to racism, which regards ones own race as superior to others. Both
sexism and racism are thought to be major social evils.
A theory resulting from the application of Darwinism to human society. By
deducing norms of human conduct directly from evolutionary biology,
it attempted to deal with ethical, economic, and political problems on the
assumption that society is a competitive arena and that the evolution of society fits
the Darwinian paradigm in its most individualistic form. According to social
Darwinism, the fittest climb to dominant social positions as a consequence of social
selection, just as natural selection determines the survival of the fittest. Because on
this view human possession of consciousness does not have any moral implications,
social Darwinism held that social inequality and the exploitation of lower classes,
suppressed races, and conquered nations by the stronger were morally acceptable.
From Plato and Aristotle onward, there has been controversy whether suicide is
morally justified. On one view, suicide should be morally prohibited on the grounds
that life is divine, that suicide causes harm to ones family and community, and that
suicide is an offense to God who created life. In contrast, suicide is claimed to be a
self-regarding act that lies outside the prohibition on harming others. It is claimed
that without stronger objections, the right should be recognized to determine when
to terminate ones own life. Aquinas and Kant argued against suicide, while Hume
argued in favor of tolerating it. These different attitudes lead to controversy whether
we should intervene if somebody has the intention of committing suicide. If suicide
is immoral, then we are obliged to prevent it. If suicide is morally justifiable, the
intervention beyond advice will be paternalistic interference that violates the agents
rights. Suicide has been frequently discussed in contemporary applied ethics through
its relations with the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
A term proposed by John Rawls to indicate a crucial problem of the utilitarian view
of punishment. Utilitarianism claims that punishment is justifiable only by reference
to its probable consequences with regard to promoting public good or preventing
crime, rather than because the wrongdoing itself merits punishment. Rawls suggests
that we can imagine a situation in which the authority knows that a suspected
criminal is innocent, but still imposes a harsh punishment on him because such an
action can produce better social consequences. This practice should not be termed
punishment, because the subject of suffering is not a wrongdoer. Rawls names it
telishment. Telishment is intuitively wrong but seems to be justifiable according to
the utilitarian view of punishment.
Ethics An ethical problem put forward by Philippa Foot in her 1967 paper The
Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect. Suppose that the only
possible way to steer a runaway trolley is to move it from one track to another. One
man is working on the first track, and five men are working on the other. Anyone
working on the track the trolley enters will be killed. Most people would accept that
the driver should steer the trolley to the track on which only one person is working

16.Universalizability

because the death of five persons is worse than the death of one person. Now
suppose that the trolley, left to itself, will enter the track on which five men are
working and kill them. If you are a bystander who can change the course of the
trolley, would it be morally required or morally permissible to interfere to switch the
trolley to the other track, on which only one person would be killed? According to
utilitarianism, you should switch the trolley. However, if you do not interfere, you
have not done anything to make you responsible for the five deaths, while if you do
interfere your act does make you responsible for one death. Your own integrity or
moral rules about how to act might lead you to reject the utilitarian conclusion. The
trolley problem touches on both the nature of morality and concrete moral
perplexity. If the driver is right to steer the trolley onto the track with one person in
order to save the lives of five persons, why is it wrong to execute an innocent man to
stop a riot in which five innocent people will be killed? Or why is it morally wrong
to save five patients who would die without transplants at the cost of killing one
healthy man for his organs? In dealing with the trolley problem and
these related questions, some philosophers turn to the principle of double effect,
according to which a moral distinction between the intended and unintended
consequences of an action can help to decide when bad consequences of an action
are acceptable.
The idea that moral judgments should be universalizable can be traced to the Golden
Rule and Kants ethics. In the twentieth century it was elaborated by Hare and
became a major thesis of his prescriptivism. The principle states that all moral
judgments are universalizable in the sense that if it is right for a particular person A
to do an action X, then it must likewise be right to do X for any person exactly like
A, or like A in the relevant respects. Furthermore, if A is right in doing X in this
situation, then it must be right for A to do X in other relevantly similar situations.