Summary Ethics IBA: Knowledge clips, lectures and book (including all philosophers and theories)
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Course
Ethics (E_IBA3_ETH)
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
This summary includes everything you need to know in order to pass your ethics exam. In this summary you will find the different theories and philosophers that will definitely come back in the exams.
Ethical dilemma: “No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or another”
• Vows resemble moral imperatives, ethical values that we want to uphold
• These ethical decisions often involve many stakeholders
Ethical decision making
• Recognising alternatives
• The possible actions that one can take
• Underlying assumptions/ perspectives and other unre ected ethical
considerations can limit noticing all possible actions
• Conscious ethical considerations can exclude certain actions
• E.g., You don’t want to use violence, thus the option to save your own
life is excluded
• Recognising stakeholders
• Who will be affected and how will they be affected?
• Humans and other living beings
• Recognising consequences
• Understand the gain and loss from an ethical standpoint
• Look beyond the economical outcome
Ethical dilemmas
• Clashes of legitimate rights or values to different principles and notions of good.
• Core to ethical decision-making is the ability to balance clashing values
• No clash of values is no ethical problem
• Therefore we need to recognise ethical values
• So, an ethical dilemma is a decision that has con icting moral values involving
stakeholders (people)
• E.g., Freedom to associate in a certain way in contrary to common good
Moral questions
• E.g., Why are we justi ed to intervene in operations of market
Ethical behaviour
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, • Ethical behaviour is not acting according to:
• Feelings and emotions
• Religious beliefs
• Following the law (e.g., following the laws does not mean that you act ethically)
• Following the social conventions
• Scienti c knowledge
• These things are input that we should take into account when considering ethical
questions, but they are not the whole story.
Virtue
• According to Aristotle, you should do things that bring you closer to virtue.
Human dignity and self-determination
• According to Emmanuel Kant, every decision, ethical problems, and question has to
be read and understood through this lens.
Utilitarians
• We should not consider anything other than the outcome, the consequences of our
actions and how much pleasure and happiness or harm they bring to people
John Rawls
• Understanding our position in society and understanding that the core of our
existence lies in the idea that we are sharing one another’s fate.
• Difference between what is just and what is fair
• Fairness is the cornerstone of a just society
Communitarians
• As humans we are part of communities
• We cannot ignore our obligations to them, exclude them from our ethical
considerations
General ethical principles might clash with each other when we try to apply them to
concrete situations
• All theories bring about an important aspect of ethical thinking
Lecture 1
Ethics
• The word ethics is derived from the greek ἦθος meaning character, custom, habit
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, • Meaning of ethics today:
• A set of moral principles: theory of system of moral values
• The discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and
obligation
• History provides the dialogue of these ideas, their context and how they arose.
• A decision is often not an economic decision, often ethical values are involved
Business science and business ethics
• Business science focusses on organisations:
• Organizations as agents (they interact)
• Organizations as environments (structured groups of agents/ the ambiance
space in which people act)
• Both perspectives elicit fundamental ethical questions, e.g.:
• If agents: their behaviour can be evaluated on ethical grounds: which of their
actions and decisions are ethically justi able.
• If environments: how does the organisational structure affect the behaviour
of the individual agents within the organization and outside the organization
from an ethical perspective?
Business science focusses on markets
• Markets as environment in which organisations operate
• Markets as coordination systems alternative to organisations (substitute)
• Be used to produce outcome in different way than organisations
• Both perspectives elicit fundamental ethical questions: e.g.,
• If environments: how do organisations balance their need to be competitive
with their ethical standing? And how should markets be regulated in a way
that makes it possible for organisations to nd a balance?
• If alternative to organization: in which ways this difference affects the forms
of evaluations (including ethical evaluations) practiced within and outside
organisations? Which things should be ran in this sort of arrangements
Business science focuses on markets in society:
• The impact of markets on society
• The impact of society on markets
• Both perspectives elicit fundamental ethical questions, e.g.:
• To which extent current societal values are affected (or should be affected) by
“what is good for the markets”?
• To which extent should regulations on markets re ect societal values?
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, Chapter 1: Doing the right thing
Welfare, freedom and virtue
• Context: debate about price gouging, charging people that are affected by a natural
disaster higher prices on primary goods and services and the role of law.
• Question of political philosophy: Does a just society seek to promote the virtue of its
citizens? Or should law be neutral toward competing conceptions of virtue, so that
citizens can be free to choose for themselves the bets way to live.
• Virtue argument: greed is a vice (a bad way of being) and at odds with civic virtue
• Price-gauging laws would restrain greed to a certain extent.
• Aristotle:
• Justice means giving people what they deserve
• We can’t gure out what a just constitution is without rst re ecting on the
most desirable way of life.
• Law can’t be neutral on questions of the good life
• Theory starts with virtue
• Modern political philosophers (Kant/Rawls):
• Principles of justice that de ne our rights should not rest on any particular
conception of virtue, or of the best way of live.
• A just society respects each person’s freedom to choose his or her own
conception of the good life.
• Theory starts with freedom
What wounds deserve the purple heart?
• Context: wounded or killed veterans are honoured by receiving the purple heart.
However, veterans with PTSD or depression should also qualify for these purple
hearts.
• Real issue: the meaning of the medal and the virtues it honours.
• Virtues that are being honoured: sacri ce, not bravery
• The question: what kind of injury should count?
• At the heart of the disagreement are rival conceptions of moral character and military
valour
• Aristotle’s theory of justice:
• We can’t determine who deserves a military medal without asking what virtues
the medal properly honours. And to answer that question, we have to assess
competing conceptions of character and sacri ce.
• A question about how to distribute the fruits of prosperity, or the burdens of
hard times and how to de ne the basic rights of citizens.
• What do people morally deserve and why?
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