ETHICAL THEORIESManolo V. Alvarez Jr.ICST108 – Professional Ethics

• Relativism denotes any approach to ethics which holds that there are no absolute or unchanging moral principles, but that the rules that govern each situation are to be determined by their relation to something else.

• It is the view that an action is morally right if one approves of it.

• A person’s approval makes the action right. Therefore is subjective to anybody.

SUBJECTIVE RELATIVISM

CASE for• Well-meaning and intelligent

people disagree on moral issues (e.g., taxation & wealth disparity)

• •Ethical debates are disagreeable and often get us nowhere.

CASE against• No moral distinction between

actions • Confused with tolerance. Does

not mean tolerance • Not based on reason

• The view that an action is morally right if one’s culture approves of it. The argument for this doctrine is based on the diversity of moral judgments among cultures: because people’s judgments about right and wrong differ from culture to culture, right and wrong must be relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

CASE for• Different social contexts may

require different moral guidelines • It is arrogant for one society to

judge another’s • Well-meaning and intelligent

people disagree on moral issues (e.g., taxation & wealth disparity)

• Ethical debates are disagreeable and often get us nowhere.

CASE against• Existence of many acceptable

practices does not imply all practices are acceptable (many/any fallacy)

• Societies do, in fact, share certain core values

• What God commands is what is morally right; what God forbids is what is morally wrong.

• The divine command theory (DCT) of ethics holds that an act is either moral or immoral solely because God either commands us to do it or prohibits us from doing it, respectively. On DCT the only thing that makes an act morally wrong is that God prohibits doing it, and all that it means to say that torture is wrong is that God prohibits torture.

DEVINE COMMAND THEORY

CASE against

• Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God? 

CASE for

• There is such thing as moral truth which is God’s law itself.

• One of the two types of Egoism (Ethical egoism, psychological egoism).

• The position where people act from selfish motives to be considered moral.

•  the prescriptive doctrine that all persons ought to act from their own self-interest.

ETHICAL EGOISM

CASE for• Whenever people do something,

it is only because they think something desirable for themselves will result from it.

CASE against• If ethical egoism were more widely

followed, sooner or later, someone’s interests would conflict with another’s interests.

• In such a circumstance, it would be impossible for both to pursue their own interests simultaneously, but how does one decide whose interests take priority? Ethical egoism does not provide an answer.

• “Deontological” = prior to action

• Decide if an act is right or wrong without looking at consequences

• Motivated by reason alone• Reason tells us that something

is always right … all can follow without contradiction

• An act is considered to be good because of its conformity to norms. Its performance will always be moral regardless of situations or circumstance.

KANTIANISM

CASE against• We should do only those actions

that conform to rules that we could will be adopted universally.

CASE for• Protecting our self interests is

the same as protecting others from harm, thus helping them instead.

• Is a utilitarian theory of ethics which states that a person's act is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much happiness as any other act that the person could perform at that time

• The principle of utility is applied directly to each alternative act in a situation of choice. The right act is then defined as the one which brings about the best results (or the least amount of bad results).

ACT UTILITARIANISM

CASE for• Doing things with pleasure and

happiness is actually the goal of life.

CASE against• Happiness does not define and

create meaning in life.

• The principle of utility is used to determine the validity of rules of conduct (moral principles). A rule like promise-keeping is established by looking at the consequences of a world in which people broke promises at will and a world in which promises were binding. Right and wrong are then defined as following or breaking those rules.

RULE UTILITARIANISM

CASE for•  Following rules that tend to lead

to the greatest good will have better consequences overall than allowing exceptions to be made in individual instances, even if better consequences can be demonstrated in those instances.

CASE against•  It is possible to generate "unjust

rules" according to the principle of utility. For example, slavery in Greece might be right if it led to an overall achievement of cultivated happiness at the expense of some mistreated individuals.

• The view that persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. 

SOCIALCONTRACTTHEORY

CASE for• Provides clear analysis of certain

citizen/government problems • –Why is it right to punish

someone for a crime? • –Why is civil disobedience

justifiable?

CASE against• May unjustly treat people who

cannot uphold contract • –In principle, we should distinguish

between people who can’t follow the contract, and those who choose not to.

• –In practice, this can be hard to do.

SOURCES http://infidels.org/library/modern/theism/divine.html http://

www.wwnorton.com/college/phil/ethics3/ch/02/summary.aspx

http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/christian-ethics/divine-command-theory/

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~kevinlb/teaching/cs430%20-%202011-12/lectures/Lect04.pdf

http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/ethical_ego.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_utilitarianism http://

caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80130/part2/sect9.html http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ http://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/dictionary/ethical-egoism