2. deontology, utilitarianism and theory of justice

Reason

• Provides access to universal truth about the world

• In western tradition → truth is considered as good in itself

• Rationalism → Arrive at truth through biological thinking

• Empericism → Arrive at turth through observing material work around them

• Science insipired by empericism

• Theoretical science (quantem physical) has lots of rationalism

• Rationalism vs empericism play a big role in deontology vs consequentialism

Three families

• Consequentialism

• Deontology

• Virtue ethics

Roots consequentialism

• Based on subjectivism of David Hume

• What can be observed in moral terms are feelings and sentiments to certain acts

• These sentiments arent subjective, these are facts to take seriously

• Ssaying ‘Killing is bad’ you dont say something about the act, you say something about your feelings towards the act

• Impossible to point to murder and say where there are moral worngness in the act

  • You can say that you feel something towards the act

  • Work with this data to construct morals

David Hume

• Fight against mystification of his day, against arbitraty powers

• Empericist pu sang → Nouthing is in our mind, what was not before in our senses

• Judgement/becisions are empowered by passion and they follow hardwired roads to promote our interests and those of our fellow with whom we sympathise

  • Sociobiology

Jeremy Bentham

• Subsequent consequentialist

• Takes Hume’s sentiment and passion and reduces it to pain vs pleasure

  • Founding idea of utilism (utilitarianism → consequentialism)

• Lift Hume’s ideas and transform it into something defensable → able to say something should be condemmed or if an act was moral to do

John Stuart Mill’s

• Perfected utilitarianism

• Tried to created hierarchy of pleasure to combat critique that just following pleasure isn’t moral

• Good and bad is pain vs pleasure

• Formulated Appetitive pleasure

  • Need to do what generates the highest happinness for the most number of people

• Its about the effects of the action, the motivation for the action doesnt matter

Structure of moral dilemmas in consequentialism

• Willing to sacrifice your own benefits to benefit the majority

  • Can cause discomfort in people

• The act might be worse, but if the outcome is better you must sacrifice your own moral intuition to benefit the greater good

• The end justifies the means

Deontologist

• Dont jump to the consequences of the act

• Consider the possibility that regardless of the outcomes, the act might be better/more important than the outcome

Kants deontological ethics

• Humans are rational beings, therefore humans understand that moral law must be followed

• Moral law is suggesting that nature governs all rational agents

• Believes in free will to determine own actions

  • If you are truely free, you will choose to live within the moral law → not free to do whatever you want

• Moral law is a limitation for the needs that we have

Freedom

• Freedom is the ability and the will to choose

• Under threat there is no freedom, no free choice

• If we follow out instincts and pleasure, this isnt freedom because we dont choose ourselves

• Some goes for choosing ignorance, if you dont understand it you cant choose it

• The free autonomous person decides for themselves

Critical reasoning skills

• See → reflect → understand → act

• You are able to defend why you did what you did

  • Why make that decisison, why do you act like that

• Moral law isnt for plants, animals, babies and mentally disabled people

  • Criticism of his theory

Kant’s 3 questions

• Answer ‘all the interest of my reason”

  • 1) “What can I know?” [categories + experience]

  • 2) “What must I do?”

  • 3) “What may I hope?”

Kant’s deontological ethics

• As rational beings, we have to obey moral law

  • our actions are constrained by the law of nature that governs all rational agents

• Rational beings are free in the sense that “free to act in accordance with the moral law

Categorical imperative

• Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

• Intention

  • You will something → you have the intention to do something, and you choose to do so out of free will (autonomy)

  • Logic → You want to live in a world in which everyone wills that same action in similar situations – for you are rational, and so are those your actions concern

Kant & “the golden rule”

• Rational beings make their own rules that grant them freedom

• When two rational beings meet, they can never impose their individual will on the other person, without thereby contradicting their own freedom

  • this contradicts their own choice to live according to a universal moral law

• The basic principle of moral action is

  • Always act so as to treat other human beings as an end in itself and never merelyas a means

Kants job advice

• Practical necessity may justify specific action as a means to reach some other end that one wills to achieve

• This imperitive has a conditional form, it only applues in restricted contexts

• Whoever wills the end also wills (in so far as reason has decisive influence on his actions) the indispensably necessary means to it that is in his control”

• It cannot replace the categorical imperative, but sometimes can be used as exemption

Problems Kant

• How to move from induviduals to society

• How to prioritise duties

• What about duties towards non-rational beings

Deontology in societal issues

• veil of ignorance

• Those engaging in social cooperation choose together the principles which are to assign basic rights and duties to determine the division of social benefits

• Lift individual ethics for how society is arranged