NORMATIVE ETHICS
-How ought we act? What should we value? Why?
VS
DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS
-What principles do people in fact follow
-What values do they hold?
PERSONAL ETHICS
-Concern matters of personal life and conduct
SOCIAL ETHICS
-Concern collective choices, policies, structures, institutions
-What policies should regulate the impacts of many people?
WORLDVIEW, METAPHYSICS
SOCIAL COORDINATION
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
REASON & RATIONALITY
MEANINGS OF "ETHICS":
• The discipline dealing with good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.
• A set of moral principles or values.
• A theory or system of moral values
• The principles of conduct governing an individual or group.
• An external rule, compliance with which is obligatory, (often or usually) even at personal cost.
"The degree of ethical development of the people of a society is shown in their degree of compliance with the unenforceable." --Lord Moulton
A value relates to something a person and/or a group wants and pursues, out of spontaneous desire, or deliberate reflection and choice. There are many kinds of values. Not the same as a preference which is also internal and directive, but which is shallower, more changeable than a value
Morality is a person's inner sense of right and wrong, and how she or he should behave.
A moral value is a value that relates to matters of right and wrong.
A moral agent is any being that can act morally or immorally, can have duties and responsibilities, and can be held accountable for what it does. Must be capable of reflecting on reasons, weighing them, and deliberately choosing in the case of a moral choice.
A moral patient (or subject) is one to whom duties or obligations are owed. It is an entity that has moral standing or considerability.
Moral conduct is defined as being governed by moral judgment (not by emotion, approval, or specific dictate). Moral action is thus only that which is voluntary and internally governed.
Empirical statements:
Statements about what IS
Can be true or false
Normative statements
Statements about what ought to be the case
Not empirically provable
Subject to rational justification and critique
Types of normative statements:
Conventions (etiquette, games, &c.)
Legal (laws, regulations, etc.)
Aesthetic (beauty, artistic value)
Religion
Moral / ethical (right and wrong; what's permissible & obligatory)
These types are distinguished in various ways and by the kinds of reasons given for them.
Law vs morality
Examples
Normative (ethical) statements:
"Child abuse is contrary to one's duty."
"We should not let people starve to death."
"Human life is very valuable."
Empirical statements:
"Child abuse was absent in Yugoslavia."
"Lying is often motivated by the desire to avoid feeling shame."
"Old growth forests are complex interdependent systems."
A moral or ethical claim is about what someone ought or ought not to do, or a claim about the merit or demerit of someone's character.
Examples:
A. Ethical statements -- that might or might not be reasonable:
"Children should be eliminated from tv advertisements"
"White males should be exterminated"
"Species diversity should be minimized"
"It's all right to torture cats for fun"
B. Some non-ethical normative statements (conventions):
"Keep your elbows off the table."
"It's impermissible to drool in polite society."
"Marital sex solely for pleasure is permissible"
"Public nudity is not allowed."
C. Policy questions with strong ethical components:
"How ought we to treat animals?"
"Should we have a national biodiversity policy?"
"What should we do about holes in the ozone layer?"
"What should we do about global warming?
"Should we eliminate old-growth forests to provide jobs?"
Relations between normative and empirical statements (and RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO ETHICAL ARGUMENT):
Justification and explanation are not the same thing.
Naturalistic fallacy: inferring a moral conclusion from purely empirical premises: You cannot get "ought" from "is." Note: this is controversial.
Examples:
1) Deception will (or does or did) occur.
Therefore, deception is wrong (or right).
2) Killing whales is a very ancient practice in Japan.
Japan should be allowed to continue killing whales.
3) Other nations will sell arms to the 3rd world if the US does not.
Therefore the US should sell military weapons to any developing country.
4) Cutting redwoods causes loss of murrelets.
Therefore it is wrong to cut redwoods.
Suppressed moral premise in number 4:
It is wrong to do something which is known to cause serious harm to murrelets.
CORRECTED VERSION:
5) It is wrong to do something which is known to cause serious harm to murrelets.
Cutting redwoods causes loss of murrelets.
Therefore it is wrong to cut redwoods.
Disagreement about what ought to be done may be rooted in empirical disagreement.
The procedures of empirical science do not necessarily filter out a priori (apart from all experience or evidence) assumptions or those based on very limited evidence or experience.
Science aims at description, prediction, and explanation
The Covering Law Model Of Explanation:
Why the logical empircist attempt to denigrate any claim that isn't empirically verifiable fails (and thus we must partake in ethical reasoning):
IF you cannot rationally choose between competing moral claims, or if to speak them is to speak nonsense, then it would be natural to avoid engaging in moral decision making. But:
-It is not empirically verifiable that we cannot rationally choose between moral claims or that they are nonsense. (Thus the position is inconsistent.)
-for example, the two claims
1) we ought to destroy life on earth
2) we ought not to
are not equally reasonable
General moral guidelines:
Do the right thing.
Be good.
Love your neighbor.
Be kind.
Promote happiness.
Look out for number one.
Do no harm.
Leave the world a better place than when you got here.
QUESTIONS:
What's missing from these?
What is permissible vs. not?
What's optional vs obligatory?
What's supererogatory ("beyond the call of duty," highly altruistic)?
Normative ethics, (or ethical theory) explains what the correct criteria are for determining moral right and wrong, or what things, including qualities of character, are truly good.
An ethical theory should explain two things:
1. What has intrinsic value, and thus has moral standing?
(Something has moral standing if the well-being of that entity has value for its own sake.)
2. How are moral conflicts to be resolved?
Single principle vs pluralistic theories
What makes environmental moral issues so hard to determine? Compare:
A paradigmatic moral wrong:
ACTORS: two humans; victim was innocent
ACTION: deliberate, single act
CONSEQUENCE: caused clear harm; harm was above a threshold of significance
STANDING: all agree recipient had moral standing.
A typical environmental wrong:
ACTORS: multiple. Responsibility for act varies
ACTION: deliberate, but not single - rather many
CONSEQUENCE:
-the recipients include those not present (future), and nonhumans of diverse sorts
-for any given recipient, we do not know if harm actually occurred
-the harm is cumulative, not all at once
-there are countervailing benefits
STANDING: disagreement as to the intrinsic value of nonhuman
A crucial question for normative environmental ethics: What has intrinsic value, and thus moral standing?
CRITERIA TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION:
Anthropocentric: humans have value
Theocentric: God is center of value
Reason-centered: Things that can reason have value
Mental-centered: Thinking entities have value
Pathocentric: Feeling things have value
Biocentric: Things with the will to live have value
Ecocentric: Systems of living things have value
Holistic: Systems, including unliving have value
POSITION 1: NATURE HAS INSTRUMENTAL VALUE ONLY
Blackstone: Environmental health as inalienable right of people
Sagoff, Elder: People have right to things of aesthetic value.
Watson: Enlightened self-interest
Ehrenfeld: Anthropocentric/economic values of non-resources
1. Recreational and aesthetic values
2. Undiscovered or undeveloped values
3. Ecosystem stabilization values
4. Examples of survival
5. Environmental baseline and monitoring values
6. Scientific research values
7. Teaching values
8. Habitat reconstruction values
9. Conservative value: Avoidance of irreversible change
POSITION 2: NATURE HAS INTRINSIC VALUE
Morris: "a presumption in favor of" nature
Favre: Constitutional amendment: "all wildlife ... shall have the right to a natural life."
Tribe: Nature one of the "contractors" arranging Rawl's society; maximize benefits for all life.
Feinberg: "Interest" principle underlies "rights":
-ability to be harmed or benefited
-aware of such treatment
-don't have to personally press claim
-excludes plants and "things"
Stone: natural objects have definite needs, can be injured: expands community.
-Thus natural objects need guardians, deserve protection & reparations. Through duties or rights, we have obligations to do these things.
ANIMALS AS MORAL PATIENTS:
Singer: capacity to experience pain>> equal consideration
VanDeVeer: Distinguish basic vs peripheral interests of humans and nonhumans.
Regan: Animals have intrinsic worth, & thus equal right to life
SYSTEMS AS MORAL PATIENTS:
Rodman: All living things and natural systems have telos of own
-Critical of "extensionism's" hierarchy of moral worth
-critical of "sentientism"
Callicott: Ethical holism: the whole carries more weight than its parts
-humans capable of denial of self-interest
Rolston: System's rights supercede those of components
-the unit of survival is appropriate level of concern
-system is productive of & prior to individuals
-therefore we have "duties to species & ecosystems"
Taylor: Biocentric (life-centered)
-Equal inherent value
-extenuating circumstances needed to justify taking of nonuman life
ETHICAL THEORIES
A. TELEOLOGICAL: THE GOOD
VERSUS
B. DEONTOLOGICAL: RIGHTS
A.Teleological theories: The "right" is defined as what maximizes the "good."
"Consequentialist" because only the consequences are relevant in determining an act's rightness
Main example: UTILITARIANISM
What is right (and thus a duty) is what ever maximizes the total amount of net utility.
UTILITY (the 'good') = want fulfillment; or, alternatively, the psychological state of pleasure.
Rigid adherence to moral rules produces bad results.
Entails summing and comparing harms and benefits.
APPLICATIONS:
-Cost-benefit analysis
-Distributive justice: the acceptability of the share of burdens among individuals. EG, Distribution between:
-social and environmental benefits and harms
-social groups
-nations
-current and later generations
Elaborate examples: Combine with empirical premises to give prescriptions for distribution
A.
1. What is right is whatever maximizes total net utility.
2. Equality of basic legal rights leads to greater happiness.
3. We should encourage equal distribution of basic legal rights.
B.
The "Principle of declining marginal utility": 'consumption' of successive homogeneous units of certain goods yields declining amounts of utility or satisfaction.
1. What is right is whatever maximizes total net utility.
2. The principle of declining marginal utility applies to successive units of financial wealth.
3. The disutility of the loss of a unit of wealth to a rich person is less than the increase in utility of the recipient poor person.
4. We ought to limit (or redistribute) financial inequalities.
The Pareto Principle: at least someone will be better off, and no one will be made worse off by an exchange.
-Said to produce 'efficiency'
-avoids interpersonal comparisons
-does not sanction intuitively immoral actions
But almost any nontrivial proposal will make some party worse off. Thus more is needed:
-full conception of what makes one better off
-justifiable conception of whose well-being matters
Whose well-being matters?
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation:
Evidence that others experience pain.
Sentience is necessary and sufficient for having an interest.
Eating meat is wrong because "we sacrifice the most important interests of other beings in order to satisfy trivial interests of our own"
Questions remain:
Are there interests other than avoiding suffering that matter?
Does suffering generate a right to life, or just to humane treatment?
Is eating meat ok if there is no pain involved? Would it be ok to kill people similarly?
What about plants?
What about species?
What about wholes - no obligations to them since only individuals suffer?
B. Deontological theories hold that what is right, wrong, obligatory, or prohibited is independent of what is good or bad.
Natural rights
Acquired Rights
A definition of "right":
A has a right against B:
to do X
or
to enjoy some state
or
to be the recipient of some act
is to say that
It is permissible for A to so do, enjoy or have these things,
and
It is impermissible for B to prevent, disrupt, or fail to provide these things.
Notes
•A right is a moral trump - a claim that overrides utility, "despite the consequences"
•Another's right describes a duty, something you are morally obligated to do.
•But some duties exist without a corresponding right
Tom Regan - The case for animal rights
Criterion for a thing having inherent value is that it be "the experiencing subject of a life"
True of some animals also (mammals over 1 year of age)
All who have inherent value have it equally
How Regan handles conflicts:
The Minimize Overriding Principle: When all one's options involve harming innocent parties in a comparable way, one ought to override the rights of the fewer rather than the rights of the many.
The Worse-Off Principle: If all options involve harming some, and some would be harmed in worse ways than others, one should override the rights of the many if choosing the alternative would make the few worse off than any of the many would be if the other option were chosen.
Carl Cohen, "The case against animal rights" (esp. in biomedical research)
1) ANIMALS HAVE NO RIGHTS:
"Rights arise, and can be intelligibly defended, only among beings who actually do, or can, make moral claims against one another."
-"What humans retain when disabled, animals never had." - the status as a KIND whose consent must be respected.
-animal lack the critical capacity to make moral judgments
2) COUNTER TO 'SPECIESISM' & UTILITARIAN ARGUMENTS:
-there are morally relevant distinctions between humans and animals
-they do not have equal moral standing
-inconsistent to overlook costs of NOT experimenting on animals
Richard & Val Routley (1979). 'Against the inevitablity of human chauvinism.' In K. E. Goodpaster & K. M. Sayre (Eds.), Ethics and problems of the 21st century.
Various thinkers in Western traditions have suggested humans rightfully favor their own species over all others because humans are distinguished in a morally significant way. Routley and Routley analyze 32 reasons these thinkers have suggested, and ask if any justify speciesism?
To do so, they must do 3 things: