PHL1150 Ethics
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Handbook entry- a brief description of the subject can be found in the handbook entry. The handbook also provides information about the unit leader, the semester and mode in which the unit is available, the contact hours and the assessment requirements.
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MUSO/Blackboard site - there is a MUSO/Blackboard site for this unit where assessment tasks, lecture notes and other unit resources will be posted. Once enrolled, students taking this unit are advised to check MUSO/Blackboard regularly.
Please note: For most students, this unit is best taken at 2nd year level, as PHL2150. It is available as a first year unit only to students who have completed significant studies in philosophy at secondary school, and who might wish to skip the standard first year philosophy units, but still wish to obtain a first-year sequence in philosophy.
Subject description:
All of us make moral judgements. Lets think about some of those moral judgments and what might be said in support of them.
It is right to give to famine relief
It is wrong to tell a lie
You ought to visit your ill grandmother in hospital even though it means missing out on a date.
It would be wrong to drive past a serious accident when you could have easily stopped and given assistance.
It was right for the pilot to crash land in a lightly populated area rather than allow terrorists to fly the plane into a skyscraper.
Euthanasia is always wrong.
Now think about what kinds of reasons you (or someone) might give for making each of these judgements. Are you giving the same kind of reason each time or are you appealing to different considerations to support the different judgements? In trying to support our moral judgements about particular actions we might point to the good or bad consequences of such actions. We might appeal to certain obligations or duties which such actions would violate or uphold. These might be special obligations to particular others such as family. Or they might be duties, say of respect for humanity, that we owe to everyone. Or we might look to other factors such as what the action would say about the character of the person who performed it. In any case this sort of moral discourse is typical of what we do when we engage in normative ethics.
What philosophers are usually trying to do here is to establish some sort of general theory of what is right and wrong so that our particular moral judgements are consistent with each other and follow some sort of systematic order. These theories themselves need to be argued for. Utilitarianism tells us that we should act so as to bring about the most amount of happiness or preference satisfaction that we can. There have been many objections to this view some of which are presented in the 'Life, Death and Morality' component of PHL1010. In this course we examine a set of objections which focus on the psychology of the utilitarian moral agent and the kinds of demands which utilitarianism makes of moral agents.
As well as thinking about our reasons for making a particular moral judgement and about the theories that guide our particular moral judgements we sometimes reflect on more abstract questions about the nature of moral judgements themselves. We might ask whether, in making a moral judgement we are expressing a belief or a feeling, and whether a moral judgement is the sort of thing that can be true or false. If I say that there is a cat on the rug and you say that the animal on the rug is a dog, it is pretty clear that at least one of us is mistaken. But if I say that euthanasia is sometimes right and you say that it is always wrong, is it similarly clear that one of us must be making a mistake. Are we pointing to some kind of fact about euthanasia here? If so what kind of fact could that be? Or are we just expressing how we feel about euthanasia? The question about whether moral judgements can be objectively correct is a central question in meta-ethics. In meta-ethics it is as if we step back a level from normative ethics and try to examine the underlying assumptions of our moral practices. Rather than actually making or defending moral judgements we are asking what is involved in making normative judgements at all. What is a moral argument about?
A second central question that concerns us in meta-ethics is about the nature of the connection between our moral judgements and what we do. Moral judgements, after all, are not simply about our actions - they are usually intended to guide our actions. As Jonathan Dancy says "It is ludicrous to say that we might accept that an action is outrageously wrong and still think of this as not in itself giving us reason to hold back." ("Intuitionism" in Peter Singer (ed) A Companion to Ethics, Blackwell 1993, p.415) But different theories offer different explanations of this connection and in doing so provide us with different pictures of what it is to be a moral agent. We will compare the sentimentalism of David Hume with the rationalism of Immanuel Kant and consider how their meta-ethical views might be connected to normative theory.
Textbooks:
There is one prescribed text:
Peter Singer (ed.), Ethics (in the Oxford Readers series), Oxford University Press, 1994 (ISBN 0192892452).
In addition there are several recommended texts:
James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw Hill, 1986.
This is an introductory text with clear, easy to understand chapters on several of the topics we will address.John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Pelican, 1977.
Samuel Scheffler (ed), Consequentialism and its Critics, Oxford University Press 1988.
This book contains a collection of readings which are relevant to the latter part of the course.