Understanding Meta-Ethics

• The term "framework" in ethics refers to a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices.
• Ethicists commonly divide the study of morality into meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.

Meta-Ethics

• Meta-ethics studies the nature of morality, including the meaning, reference, and truth values of moral judgments.
• It explores the meaning of goodness and wickedness and how we come to know them.
• It deals with questions such as: Are there objective moral truths? What do 'good', 'bad', 'right', and 'wrong' mean?
• Cognitivism states that moral judgments convey propositions that are either true or false.
• Moral realism claims moral facts are independent of people's thoughts.
• Ethical subjectivism holds that the truth of ethical propositions depends on personal attitudes.
• Non-cognitivism denies that moral judgments are either true or false.
• Emotivism suggests moral judgments are expressions of emotions.
• Moral universalism proposes moral facts apply to everyone everywhere, also called moral objectivism.
• Moral relativism submits moral facts apply to different people or groups differently.
• Moral empiricism claims moral facts are known through observation and experience.
• Moral rationalism contends moral facts are knowable by reason alone.
• Moral intuitionism submits moral truths are knowable by intuition.

Normative Ethics

• Normative ethics studies how people ought to act, examining ethical norms and guidelines.
• It evaluates standards for right and wrong and determines moral courses of action.
• Normative ethical theories are generally categorized into deontological, teleological, and virtue ethics.
• Deontology bases morality on independent moral rules or duties.
• The term deontology comes from the Greek word deon, meaning duty. Principles are obligatory, regardless of consequences.
• Teleology determines the moral value of actions by their outcomes or results, from the Greek word telos meaning end.
• Virtue ethics emphasize developing good character habits, virtues, and avoiding bad character traits (vices).

Applied Ethics

• Applied ethics philosophically examines specific, controversial moral issues.
• Applied ethical issues must be a matter of moral judgment and be the subject of controversy.
• Bioethics concerns ethical issues pertaining to life, biomedical researches, medicines, health care, and the medical profession.
• Environmental ethics deals with moral issues concerning nature and its nonhuman contents.
• Business ethics examines moral principles concerning the business environment.
• Sexual ethics studies moral issues about sexuality and human sexual behavior.
• Social ethics deals with what is right for a society to do.

Virtue Ethics

• Virtue ethics focuses on developing virtues, which are moral characteristics needed to live well.
• Virtue ethicists focus on the character of the agent and describes right actions as those chosen by a virtuous person.
• Virtues are freely chosen character traits that other people praise.
• The ancient Greeks listed wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice as the four "cardinal virtues."
• Socrates indicates that pleasure and pain fail to provide objective moral standards.
• Central to Plato's philosophy is his theory of Forms, existing immaterial entities that are the object of knowledge.
• Everything resembles or participates in a universal Form or Idea.
• Aristotle's ethics focuses on self-realization and happiness (eudaimonia) through virtue.
• Aristotle's telos refers to the essence of beings, including humans, which lay at their end or purpose.
• Ultimate human goal is self-realization by functioning consistently with human nature.
• Aristotle identified three natures of man: vegetable or physical, animal or emotional, and rational or mental
• Virtue therefore is regarded as knowledge and can be taught. Knowledge of the Good guides moral decision making.
• Human happiness is tied to reason and achieving human telos.
• Aristotle connects happiness to virtues and manifests excellence or virtue with wisdom.
• Happiness is human well-being achieved through balancing habit through moral and intellectual excellences, or virtues.
• Moral virtues are the expression of character formed.
• Virtue lies in the golden mean which is the vice of deficiency or the vice of excess.
• Four basic moral virtues are courage, temperance, justice, and prudence.
• Prudence is intellectual and involves moral knowledge which guides us to what is appropriate with moral virtue.
• Aristotle notes that bad actions aren't blameworthy if we do not know any better.
• Aristotle promotes perseverance since knowing the Good requires an abstinent life.
• Socrates believed that humans who perform immoral actions do so from ignorance of the Good
• Aristotle's moral view is seen to be more ethically practical, personal, and applicable than others.
• The question is to why should man be moral. Ethics shows that doing so leads to true happiness.
• Aristotle explains that we are responsible for actions because we may suppress knowledge of the good.
• Aristotle opens the door to bias with the doctrine of practical discrimination.
• Aristotle doesn't account for times that require extreme action rather than moderate ones.
• It is assumed that moderate things will get you closer to eudaimonia
• Thomas Aquinas' ethics relies on Aristotle's; people pursue happiness as a final end.
• By the term 'law,' Aquinas means an ordinance of reason for the common good.
• For Aquinas, there are four primary types of law: eternal, natural, human, and divine.
• The eternal law refers to God's rational plan for all creation.
• The natural law is that aspect of the eternal law accessible to human reason.
• The human law refers to the positive laws and supposed to prescribe the natural aspect.
• The divine law serves to complement the other types of law through sacred texts.
• The natural law is part of our natural tendency to pursue goals appropriate to us.
• Using practical reason guides us to an ultimate end.
• Morality is simple: the closer to a good action, the more moral.
• Aquinas evaluates actions based on their conformity to natural law.
• For an action to be good, it must be good in kind, appropriate in circumstances, and contain virtuous intention.
• Thomas defined virtue as 'a good habit bearing activity."

Kant and Rights Theory

• Kant bases moral judgments on reason alone, not feelings.
• Kant believes reason produces a good will, good not as a means to an end but good for itself.
• A good will habitually wills rightly.
• A truly good person acts from a sense of duty.
• Only the principle used to act is important.
• Inclination is a feeling that pushes us in one direction, and duty is what we ought to do despite our feelings.
• An action can be "in accordance with duty" or "from the motive of duty" but the former isn't moral.
• Acting morally entails acting from the motive of duty regardless of the consequences.
• The Categorical Imperative focuses on using good will in duty to others.
• It is a person's duty, as a rational being, to act on principle (maxim) and to apply the categorical imperative.
• A maxim is a general rule or principle that guides action.
• Kant divides maxims into the hypothetical and categorical imperatives.
• A hypothetical imperative is how reason dictates one to achieve specific ends.
• The categorical imperative commands one to act in a particular way regardless of the desired end.
• Morality should be done through both hypothetical and categorical imperatives to act to an end.
• Kant offers the "universalizability" which is the most famous formulation.
• The "end-in-itself" formulation teaches to respect people as ends, not as only instruments.
• The two can be used to gauge proper morality.
• We are not able to know the results of our actions in the long run.
• The positive view of man advocates for men acting in line with reasons and the Good.
• The lack of ability to see all the results and make all good choices leads to the doctrine's downplay.
• Rights Based Ethics says humans have both positive and negative rights.
• Natural rights are moral, conventional rights are human-created.
• Legal rights may not acknowledge morals.
• Moral rights denote what laws should be.
• Legal rights enjoy recognition and protection of the law.

Utilitarianism

• Utilitarianism states that what is useful is good and actions are determined by the utility of effects.
• In utilitarianism, the ends justify the means.
• The principle of utility is: an action is right = tends to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
• Act utilitarianism the principle of utility is applied directly to every alternative act in a situation of choice. The right act brings about the best results.
• Rule Utilitarianism on the other hand, applies the principle used to decide moral standards.
• Utilitarianism dictates that a moral deed which is the act to maximize benefits and minimizes damages.
• Jeremy Bentham believed that people act in their own interests to seek pleasure and to avoid pain.
• Bentham even created a he 'hedonic calculus,' to calculate the quantitative worth of pleasures.
• Pleasure has different factors to account for.
• John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism follows the doctrine though also stated that it is the greatest Happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.
• Mill distinguishes between higher and lower pleasures than only physical ones like Bentham does.
• Utilitarianism is a negative reaction against Kantian Ethics.
• Utilarianism has a transcultural appeal and points to observable evidence with an understanding of cause and effect.

Justice as Fairness

• Rawls rejects utilitarianism because he states that thinking cannot absolutely exclude systems such as slavery.
• Rawls states that slavery is wrong for it does not to respect the fundamental rights and liberties.
• To balance power for people in society, Rawls outlines "Justice as Fairness" which incorporates two principles.
• For Political Instituitons, the "Liberty Principle" means: Each person has the same and indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties.
• Since the real world includes inequalities, Rawls states that a just society must take this imbalance into account with policies.
• For Social Justice, the "difference principle' dictates" That social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions. 1. They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity 2. They are to be to the greatest benefit which is the "Difference Principle".
• To achieve stability, an idea comes to mind around equal thought.
• Society overall must find ways to make these inequalities not be present.
• To rank importance through priority, Rawls lists the following: Liberty over The 1st Second principle but then the 1st part from the second principle. As such, you get both.
• Rawls focuses on making sure that basic institutions are able to help all people which makes it that justice exists in society.
• To get to his points, Rawls has outlined the Idea of The thought experiment to test social institutions.
• This expirement allows for his work to be tested and put into play in society. -It sets a social order under his "veil of ignorance" for all people.
• Social justice principles that maximized the benefits for least advantaged could benefit society.
• Rawls believed that his Justice as Fairness principles, tilted toward the least advantaged, were the best for institutions.
• Rawls' principles do not allow tolerance for beliefs, they conflict greatly. For instance, if individuals belong to a religion that teaches men and women are unequal in some aspects and parts of life, those beliefs will contradict Rawis' principles about equality of basic liberties and equal opportunity.
• Conservatives state that free markets that are used through society is unfair.

Globalization And Ethics

• Globalization had brought cultural conneciton between societies that has potential to for impacts.
• Moral issues are the problems and potential.
• The word "pluralism" has roots with a more is better form of use.
• Moral Pluralism is the idea that can be conflicting moral views that are each worthy of respect with proper ethics. - The lack of a clear objective order has problems though.
• Moral Pluralists point out to the complexity that may result with issues happening.
• One can not just say that simple is better always.

The issues with Globalization Today

• Globalization increases the speed of resource usage at exponential levels.

• With the increased power, this increase results to a lot of emissions and other related problems and that leads to regulations that are hard to make. - With regulators in one country may not know the implications.

• Some globalization benefits will create some issues too. The transfers are limited to parts in the world.

• Globalization shifts investment spending too, this creates too much risk to other people. All this is to say: The balance of resources creates some issues and problems.

• There are trade defficits that have imbalances too.

• The lower cost of resources creates pollution in other places.

• People have been more reliant on other countries which has led to instability too.

• To deal with these problems that have been on going is quite the hard way to work to do with complex structures. - It is required to respond to the differnt situation too, even those on different places and differing factors.

• As for politics, the economical side has issues too.

• There is a shift from progressive to capitalist which deepen the morality of the situation for what can be used under what contexts. It's about that fact alone that ethics must continue to deal with it and try to fix some issues.

• We must seek new universal values! -Such as Justice and love. - To live peace is required to make everyone feel included.

Challenges for Millennials

• People are more involved with communications and new technologies than ever in the world now. -People thrust the new source of knowledge which may make the people more varied that have taken the views that make us the varied people we are.

How a person might look with ethics varies on the age

• Each type had the characteristics of the world.

• It's about a need for new basic truths based on what makes us new people.

• It is difficult now for those not part of the generation to figure out what will be important so a more in touch approach is required.

• It is of importance to the new group with the world to create new sources and methods for the better with ethics.

• Secularism and Humanism are what tend to matter to the millennials as religions have issues.

• Humanisms focuses on humanity. - We make ourselves and have little need for religion.

• It seems to say we made the rules up and so maybe it not there. -It is not objective at all.

• Thus that means there is no way in a natural set up to get to what things ought to be. - It's hard to think about what the source is without our ideas.

There is questions on thought

• Also we can say that there has to be an order based on what creates morality that is not natural. Our thoughts, bodies, and being must be in order for a system to be built without bias.

• So we must follow humanisms and secular side of morality with the true values that has order and rules that is well designed and well formed for ethical implications, and to keep order in our lives.