Ethics and Morality (original) (raw)
Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality. Ethicists are concerned with a wide range of topics, such as human nature, the meaning of life, the nature of value, how judgments are made, how judgments can be improved, how moral attitudes arise or change, and the workings of morally significant mental states such as love, hate, greed, envy, indifference, pity, desire, aversion, pleasure and pain. Moral or ethical theories offer means of understanding significant elements in these and other areas of inquiry. Ethical theories tend either toward merely describing, or toward both describing and judging. As a result, some moral theories seem to belong to anthropology, psychology or sociology, while others look like instances of what ethics purports to study, that is, like moral doctrines or judgments. For this reason, a major distinction employed by moral theorists distinguishes descriptive from prescriptive, or normative, theories, or elements of theories. Moral judgments tend to state either that something is good or bad, or that something agrees or conflicts with our obligations. Consequently, a major division in moral theories is between theories of value (axiology) and theories of obligation (deontology). In each area, ethicists want to determine the meaning of moral judgments, their truth or falsity, their objectivity or subjectivity, how judgments are made, how they can be tested, how they can be justified, and the possibility of organizing judgments under first principles. A third major distinction places theories about the meaning of moral judgments in a category of their own called metaethics. Obviously, metaethical questions arise in all areas of ethics. Prescriptive or normative moral thinking recommends at least one moral evaluation, or else it attempts the same for at least one moral obligation. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics sought both to find the best kind of life, and to strongly recommend the judgment that it was in fact the best. Others, such as Immanuel Kant, attempted to describe the nature of obligation, but also provided grounds for justifying or recommending certain obligations. The theories of David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Darwinism and Logical Positivism exemplify the tendency to separate the task of description from that of prescription, or to eschew prescription altogether, in order to describe and organize moral judgments for the sake of understanding alone. Unwavering pursuit of the metaethical question of the meaning of moral judgments brought many recent philosophers to the conclusion that moral judgments are not the sort of statements that can be true or false, but instead express resolutions, preferences, feelings, demands or other states of mind. Hume thought they reported subjective feelings, so that a judgment, for example 'insider trading is immoral,' would not be understood as ascribing a predicate to insider trading, but as saying something like 'I disapprove of that act.' A. J. Ayer, a Logical Positivist, believed that moral judgments did not report feelings, but merely expressed them. For him, the statement 'insider trading is immoral' merely expresses a negative emotional reactionalong the lines of 'boo insider trading!'. Such expressions are neither true nor false because they do not describe anything. Hume and Ayer represent the school known as Emotivism. A neighboring school, Prescriptivism, interprets 'insider trading is immoral' as an
Three General Theories of Ethics and the Integrative Role of Integrity Theory
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2011
Greek telos, "end"). Actions are taken to achieve a certain end, often with a view to a more distant goal. When ends are a means to a more distant goal, they are referred to as instrumental ends. Ends that are achieved for their own sake are intrinsic. Teleologists are particularly interested in the latter kind of ends. One or more of such ends are chosen as a standard for judging the moral content of actions. The ends that function in teleological theories are not moral in itself. They become morally charged in their use as a standard for the moral content of actions. Depending on the number of intrinsic ends that a teleological theory employs, we call it either monistic or pluralistic. Monistic theories hold that there is only one intrinsic end to which all other ends lead, and on the basis of which all actions can be morally evaluated. Pluralistic teleological theories hold that there is more than one such intrinsic end. Teleological theories are also subdivided according to the nature of the end employed. Hedonism, for instance, holds that this end is pleasure or delight. This criterion for action dates back to the beginning of classical antiquity. One problem that the hedonists have been up against is how to rank different dimensions of pleasure. How is it possible to compare a brief, yet, intense, pleasure with one that lasts longer but that is not quite so intense? The Greek philosopher Epicurus (342/341-270/271 BC) draws the conclusion that the end is not physical pleasure but the satisfaction of the needs of the spirit. As powerful as physical pleasure may be, it remains short-lived. Moreover, the pursuit of physical pleasure as an end would lead to all kinds of evil. Feeding one"s spiritual pleasure is, to his mind, significantly more valuable and leads to a lasting sense of well-being. Teleological theories revolve around this targeted end, which can differ from person to person. As individual ends often conflict with each other, the question arises as to which end should be employed as the criterion for moral action. This question subdivides teleological theories once again. At this third level, ethical egoism (a theory we reject as a normative ethical theory given that it falls short on generalizability) holds that individual pleasure and pain should serve as the ultimate criterion, whereas utilitarianism holds that the common good forms the true end. Classical utilitarianism Adam Smith advocated the pursuit of individual self-interest in the belief that this would indirectly serve the common good. According to utilitarianism, the criterion for evaluating actions is the welfare of society. Utilitarianism is the general term for all ethical theories that hold that actions should 3 be judged on the basis of their total costs and benefits for society. The action that produces the greatest benefits at the lowest costs for society is the action we are morally obliged to follow. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) is widely considered the father of utilitarianism. Just as in the case of most other theorists Bentham, too, relied on a number of pioneers such as Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-1776), and Adam Smith. Bentham was a true revolutionary of his times. His theory of utilitarianism constitutes a break with ideas on social status common at the time. His criterion is the "greatest pleasure for the greatest number" on the basis of which all actions must be judged. In this regard, he considers the pleasure of a vagabond just as important as that of a well-to-do citizen. Everyone counts as one and no one counts for more than one. The core of his universalistic hedonism is articulated in several passages in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation published in 1789. Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. .. The principle of utility seeks to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. .. By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual. .. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then, what is it? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. .. Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility one may always say either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that it is not one that ought not to be done. 6 For Bentham it is possible to formulate the utilitarian criterion in quantitative terms. Ethics in his opinion is simply a matter of counting. The meaning of the "greatest pleasure" can be explained in quantitative terms. Happiness lies in the greatest possible amount of pleasure and the absence of pain. To achieve the greatest pleasure for the greatest number, he devises a hedonistic calculus to
Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, 2015
Moral theories are among the tools that the philosophical tradition has developed to help clear thinking about moral issues. In the bioethical debate, a number of moral theories have confronted themselves with each other and with the prominent problems raised by the advancement of the biomedical sciences. A particular theory, called "principlism," has been proposed as specifically tailored for biomedical ethics, but the main ethical theories in the debate are recent versions of long traditions of thought, such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, natural law theory, and rights theory. Other theories enter the picture, although they are less influent in the debate. Moral theory has received strong impulse from bioethics, and it has sustained a rich and fruitful confrontation of reasons among scholars and in the public arena. New challenges create the premises for new developments.
An Introduction to Ethics in Robotics and AI
This chapter introduces the theories that form the basis of the ethical review of robots and AI systems. We introduce the major approaches to moral theory (deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics) and discuss the relation of ethics to law. Finally, we discuss how these theories might be implemented in a machine to enable it to make ethical decisions. The terms "ethics" and "morality" are often taken as synonyms. Sometimes they are distinguished, however, in the sense that morality refers to a complex set of rules, values and norms that determine or are supposed to determine people's actions, whereas ethics refers to the theory of morality. It could also be said that ethics is concerned more with principles, general judgements and norms than with subjective or personal judgements and values. Etymologically, the word ethics goes back to the ancient Greek "ethos". This originally referred to a place of dwelling, location, but also habit, custom, convention. It was Cicero who translated the Greek term into Latin with "mores" (ethos, customs), from which the modern concept of morality is derived (Cicero 44BC). The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (see Fig. 3.1) characterised ethics as dealing with the question "What should I do?" (Kant 1788). There are several schools of thought on ethics and we will introduce them in here in no particular order. 3.1 Descriptive Ethics Most people, when thinking of ethics, have normative ethics in mind as described below. Like ethnology, moral psychology or experimental economics, descriptive ethics deals with the description and explanation of normative systems. For example,
Philosophical Investigations, 2009
Contemporary academic moral theory is a territory partitioned between a number of highly professionalised and (on the face of it) fiercely opposed schools of thought about how we should systematise our ethical thinking: consequentialism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, contractualism, natural law theory, sentimentalism, and others. Not every academic ethicist is aligned with any of these schools, but most are, and all face insistent pressure to become aligned. (For example, appointing committees for ethics jobs often ask, either directly or indirectly, "What sort of ethicist are you?", and tend, both intentionally and unintentionally, to penalise complex or unusual answers.