Ethical Theory and Hard Choices: Vocabulary Review

Vocabulary flashcards covering key definitions, metaethical positions, normative theories (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics), free will concepts, and ethical dilemmas from the lecture notes.

Prudential Reasons

Reasons demonstrating that an action is an effective way to fulfill an individual's existing desires or interests, without evaluating whether those desires themselves are morally objectionable.

Moral Point of View

The perspective adopted when an agent fully justifies their decisions beyond self-interest, maintains impartiality, considers objective reasons, universalizes conclusions, and possesses a disposition to act accordingly.

Axiological Judgments

Moral value judgments concerning the goodness or badness of states of affairs, people, or traits of character.

Deontic Judgments

Particular or general moral judgments specifically concerning the duty, rightness, or wrongness of actions.

Amoralism

The attitude of someone who accepts in principle what morality requires, but practically does not care about morality.

Moral Philosophy (Ethics)

A critical philosophical reflection on morality that reflects on cultural, social, religious, and legal rules to assess their validity, consistency, and hierarchy.

Normative Ethics

An area of moral philosophy that formulates general theories concerning what is right, good, or obligatory, or establishes general criteria for reaching moral judgments.

Metaethics

An area of moral philosophy raising logical and epistemic questions concerning moral justification, truth-values, cognition, and the nature of morality.

Descriptive Ethics

An empirical approach focused on getting scientific facts about human morality through historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, or neuroscientific study.

Conventions

Normative rules grounded in tradition, utility, or mere arbitrariness that are relative to minor matters and easily created or altered by agreement.

Etiquette

The body of non-legal rules specifically tied to participation in certain social groups and situations, such as clubs or high society.

Divine Command Theory (Theological Voluntarism)

The view that moral rules are God's commands, where being right is equivalent to or created by being commanded by God.

Determinism

The thesis that any event at a given time is necessarily caused by the whole set of preceding world events plus the laws of nature.

Incompatibilism

The view arguing that a conceptual incompatibility exists between determinism and liberty or free will.

Compatibilism

The view that universal determinism does not exclude free will, requiring only that actions proceed from an agent's intentions and choices without external coercion.

Consequence Argument

An argument for incompatibilism stating that if determinism is true, human acts follow from past events and laws of nature, neither of which are up to us.

Hard Determinism

An incompatibilist position holding that universal determinism is true, meaning mental events are caused by unchosen neural events and free will is an illusion.

Libertarianism (Free Will)

An incompatibilist view asserting that universal determinism is false, alternate possibilities exist, and human agents possess control over their actions.

Retributivism

The view that attributions of responsibility and punishment are justified by an agent's merit because the agent chose a course of action when having the capacity to do otherwise.

Cognitivism

The metaethical view that moral judgments express beliefs and are truth-apt, meaning they can be objectively true or false.

Non-Cognitivism

The metaethical view that moral judgments express non-cognitive attitudes rather than beliefs, and therefore cannot be true or false.

Descriptive Relativism

The empirical claim based on historical and anthropological observation showing the diversity of moral rules and manners across different human cultures.

Normative Relativism

The view that morality is relative to culture, where right is equivalent to approved by us, implying we should not judge other cultures based on our values.

Subjectivism

A metaethical view holding that morality is a matter of personal opinion or sentiment, where claiming slavery is wrong means simply disapproving of slavery.

Emotivism

A radical non-cognitivist theory holding that moral judgments do not describe reality or assert beliefs, but merely express non-cognitive emotions or affective attitudes.

Judgment Internalism

The view asserting a conceptually necessary link between accepting a moral proposition and being disposed or motivated to act accordingly.

Error Theory

John Mackie's view that moral language purports to refer to objective values, but because objective moral facts do not exist, all moral propositions are false.

Argument from Queerness

Mackie's argument that objective values cannot exist because they would have to be entities of an extraordinarily strange sort—both objective and intrinsically motivating.

Moral Realism

The cognitivist view that moral facts exist and are logically independent of our beliefs or evidence for them.

Naturalistic Moral Realism

The view that moral facts are constituted by and supervene on natural, physical, biological, psychological, or social facts studied by science.

Supervenience

A relationship between sets of properties where higher-level properties depend on base properties such that no change in higher properties occurs without a change in base properties.

Non-Naturalistic Moral Realism

The view that moral facts are objective, non-natural normative facts concerning what agents have objective reason to do or refrain from doing.

Humean Theory of Motivation

The belief-desire theory of action asserting that human actions are motivated only by the concurrence of a belief (mind-to-world fit) and a desire (world-to-mind fit).

Teleological Theories

Normative theories that conceive of ethics as the pursuit of a specific goal or end (such as happiness or human perfection) and evaluate actions with reference to that goal.

Deontological Theories

Normative theories that view ethics as principles limiting personal interest satisfaction, evaluating actions against a priori duties or principles rather than consequences alone.

Welfarism

The theory of value that equates human good exclusively with welfare or well-being.

Act Utilitarianism

A direct consequentialist theory holding that an act is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much aggregate utility as any alternative act available to the agent.

Rule Consequentialism

An indirect consequentialist theory holding that an action is right if and only if it is permitted or required by a rule within an optimific moral code.

Hedonism

The classical theory of value holding that pleasure and the absence of pain are the sole elements that make human life better.

Experience Machine

Robert Nozick's thought experiment illustrating that people value actually doing things and being a certain way over mere pleasurable mental experiences.

Objective-List Theory

A theory of well-being stating that human welfare is tied to obtaining certain objective goods (e.g., health, knowledge, autonomy) regardless of subjective pleasure or desire.

Categorical Imperative

Immanuel Kant's foundational moral command of practical reason, requiring agents to act only on maxims that can be willed as universal laws.

Prima Facie Duty

W.D. Ross's concept of an initial right-making characteristic of an act that would be an actual duty if not overridden by another competing, morally significant duty.

Actual Duty

In Rossian deontology, the overall moral obligation belonging to an act in virtue of its whole nature and all competing prima facie duties in a specific situation.

Agent-Neutral Reasons

Impersonal moral considerations relative to others' benefits and harms that provide everyone with a perspective-independent reason to act or omit action.

Agent-Relative Reasons

Moral considerations tied directly to an individual agent's perspective, personal projects, special obligations, or deontological demands.

Trolley Problem (Bystander Scenario)

An ethical thought experiment evaluating whether an agent ought to pull a lever to divert a runaway trolley onto a side track to save five lives at the cost of one.

Fat Man Scenario

A trolley problem variant testing deontological constraints by asking whether an agent should push a heavy person off a bridge onto the track to stop a runaway trolley.

Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA)

A deontological doctrine asserting a moral distinction between doing or actively causing harm versus merely allowing harm to occur.

Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE)

A deontological principle distinguishing between harm brought about as an intended means/end versus harm foretold or foreseen as an unintended side effect.

Rights as Side-Constraints

Robert Nozick's concept that individual rights act as boundaries limiting goal-directed behavior, prohibiting rights violations even to lessen overall rights violations.

Separateness of Persons

The principle emphasized by Rawls and Nozick that society consists of distinct individuals with separate lives, making it unjust to force uncompensated sacrifices on one person for others.

Virtue Ethics

An agent-centered normative approach focusing on moral character, practical wisdom, and human flourishing rather than duties or act-based consequentialism.

Eudaimonia

The ancient Greek concept referring to human flourishing, well-being, or living a complete and accomplished human life through virtuous activity.

Areteic Concepts

Character-based moral concepts (such as virtue, vice, and character traits) prioritized in virtue ethics over deontic concepts like duty or rightness.

V-Rules

Action-guiding prescriptions within virtue ethics formulated using thick moral terms, such as 'Act charitably' or 'Do not act unjustly'.

Unity of the Virtues

The classic doctrine claiming that genuine virtues are interconnected via practical wisdom, so that possessing one virtue fully requires possessing the others.

Agent-Based Virtue Ethics

Michael Slote's normative account holding that the moral status of acts is entirely dependent on the internal motives or character traits expressed by the agent.

Situationism

A position in social psychology asserting that human actions are primarily governed by immediate situational variables rather than robust, cross-situationally stable character traits.