A Study of Ethical Thinking

1. A Study of Ethical Thinking You get to decide what works for You.

2. Why Study Ethics? • Why speak in hypotheticals? • Ethics allows you to live an authentic life. An authentic and meaningful life requires you to live with a sense of integrity • Integrity is making commitments and sticking to them through thick and thin — no matter how much violating them may benefit you. Having a firm character or set of principles to guide your life and the choices you make is what ethics is all about

3. Ethics provides for a stable society.  • When people live ethical lives, they tell the truth, avoid harming others, and are generous. Working with such people is easy • On the other hand, callous and insensitive people are distrusted, so it’s difficult for them to be integrated well into social arrangements. A stable societyrequires ethical people working together in highly coordinated ways. If society were mostly composed of unethical people, it would quickly crumble (*link this back to our HN discussions)

4. 1 . Notice what moral values are at stake in a variety of situations 2. Clarify the reasons behind moral judgments and decisions 3. Make some sense out of changing and conflicting moral values 4. Decide where you will stand on difficult ethical choices you face 5. Understand why being ethical matters

5. Descriptive component • How things are & how we know • 1. What is the fundamental nature of reality? • 2. How do we know about and judge reality? • 3. Does God exist? • 4. Do we have free will? • This branch includes METAPHYSCIS-what there is and EPISTOMOLOGY –how we know

6. Normative component (value judgments) •  How things ought to be • 1. Aesthetics – what is beautiful? Why? • 2. Moral philosophy- what is morally right or good • 3. Political philosophy – how should societies be structured? What makes societal structures legitimate?

7. Normative Theory • Normative ethics is the study of ethical action. It is the branch of philosophical that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking. Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics because it examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, while meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts • Normative ethics is also distinct from descriptive ethics, as the latter is an empirical investigation of people’s moral beliefs. To put it another way, descriptive ethics would be concerned with determining what proportion of people believe that killing is always wrong, while normative ethics is concerned with whether it is correct to hold such a belief

8. Recap from last Unit: • Egoist: the theory that one’s self is, or should be, the motivation and the goal of one’s own action (i.e., your action is morally correct if you are looking out for your own interests) • Kantian: is based on the view that the only intrinsically good thing is a good will; an action can only be good, therefore, if its maxim – the principle behind it – is duty to the moral law. Central to Kant's construction of the moral law is the categorical imperative, which acts on all people, regardless of their interests or desires (i.e., can your action be prescribed as a universal action for all people?) • Utility: holds that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes utility, usually defined as maximizing total benefit and reducing suffering or the negatives

9. Virtue Ethics • Virtue ethicsmay, initially, be identified as the a system of ethical thinking that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach which emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that which emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism)

10. LASA Honor Code • “On my honor I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on my work, nor do I tolerate academic dishonesty in others.”