Detailed notes on the foundations of ethics. Includes normative ethics, trolleyology, kantian deontology and utilitarianism. Looks at hypothetical ethical scenarios to further explore the foundations of ethics.
What is ethics?
There are three main areas of philosophical ethics:
1. Normative ethics
a. What are the correct general moral principles?
b. When can we say that something has moral value?
2. Applied ethics
a. What should we do in this specific, real-life situation?
3. Metaethics
a. What is the nature of moral facts? (metaphysics)
b. How can we know moral facts? (epistemology)
c. When are we morally praise-blameworthy? (Moral
psychology)
There are two kinds of moral concepts:
1. Deontic concepts (right and wrong)
2. Value concepts (good and bad)
We will be focusing on the deontic concepts.
Normative ethics
Imagine the child drowning scenario. There is a specific moral
claim: It is wrong to let the child drown. What would explain
this? Possible moral principles include:
- It is wrong to allow avoidable suffering.
- It is wrong to promote selfish interests at the cost of
someone’s life.
Formula: Moral principles + Facts = Moral claims
- It is wrong to allow avoidable suffering (normative claim)
- By letting the child drown, you are allowing avoidable
suffering (descriptive claim)
- Therefore, it is wrong to let the child drown (logically
derived normative claim).
The goal of normative ethics is to discover general moral
principles. These are principles that give verdicts in all possible
cases. Normative ethics is used to figure out what it is we
should actually do in particular cases. Moral reasoning thus
must involve both normative claims and descriptive claims in
order to be logically derived.
, Trolleyology
Thomson proposed the ‘trolley problem’. In her paper, she had
a goal of showing how you can utilise thought experiments, like
the trolley problem, in order to help us inform our moral
theorising. Using these artificial thought experiments allow you
to focus on the morally relevant features of the situation, away
from the chaos of a real-life situation.
Non-consequentialism
Thomson adopts a type of moral theory called non-
consequentialism: where two actions with exactly the same
consequences can differ morally. There is something about the
action, not the consequence, that makes them morally differ.
An example of the non-consequentialist theory is the Doctrine
of Doing and Allowing, which says that ‘killing is always worse
than letting die’, even if the consequences are the same.
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Trolley problem: 1 person on one track vs 5 people on the other
track.
Not switching tracks = let 5 die
Switch = kill 1
Letting 5 die violates a positive duty to save lives.
Killing violates a negative duty to refrain from killing.
Generally, negative duties are more stringent than positive.
Thus, the duty to refrain from killing is stronger than the duty
to save people’s lives.
However, Thomson believes that it is permissible to kill one in
order to save 5 lives in the trolley problem. Switching is
therefore intuitively permissible. Intuition thus plays a role in
morality. If this is the case, the explanation ‘killing is worse
than letting die’ is inapplicable. It becomes a moral puzzle.
Thomson’s paper is about trying to find the moral explanation
for the different scenarios.
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