Profession: like lawyer and doctor, you can be barred from the job if you act unethically. Placements to see whether you can act a certain way.
normaitve ethics - system in which we decide things are right or wrong
- able to give reason for moral/ethical planes we make
teh 10 commandments are an example of normative ethics
“premises” lead to “conclusions”. These constitute an “argument”. These are made out of statements
- assuming a valid conclusion, correct premises lead to correct conclusions
Soundness != validity:
- validity means how correct the thing is
- just because an argument is valid doesn’t mean its correct though. I.e if god exists, then god exists. Thats a valid argument but it won’t convince anyone who already doesn’t follow that line of thought.
- some valid arguments are unsound but all sound arugments are valid
Consequentialism Actions don’t have have any moral value. They inherit their moral value from the consequences that they cause.
Remember that morals differ between religions, location, culture, ages:
- e.g spanking students in class was okay in the past. slavery was okay in the past. Both are not acceptable in modern society
Consequentialism → the rules apply to everyone:
- if someone smacks their child to discipline them, it used to be no one elses problem. With consequentialism, it is everyone’s ppl. Consider about ppl who don’t/will exist. → also fall in the moral consideration
Naturalism
- he philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.
Utilitarians are naturalists:
- reducing the good and bad to the “emotional states” of human beings
consider looking into different thought experiments
Deontological ethics
- type of normative ethics
- not concerned with the consequences but the actions
All kantian ethics is deontological. not all deontological ethics is kantian.
figure out the human person capacity for action:
- people have the capacity to act freely → don’t mean they will act freely but more that they can
- We can engage in acts of logical reasoning
kantian ethics;
- relies on an algorithm known as “categorical imperative”
- unless you can draw a hard line, you can not make some of categorical imperative out of it
- kant just said that there are “edge cases” in which its unclear whether something is the correct decision or not and kant says thats fine because majority of the time, it is very clear.
- Kant doews not categorise certain things as person (e.g children :skull:)