Wozu soll Gutsein gut sein? PDF

# Wozu soll Gutsein gut sein? ## M1 Werte im Ausverkauf - In many companies and banks it has become fashionable to develop ethical guidelines and binding values for themselves and their employees. - Friedrich Wilhelm Graf argues that no one expects their butcher or hairdresser to advertise their “...

# Wozu soll Gutsein gut sein? ## M1 Werte im Ausverkauf - In many companies and banks it has become fashionable to develop ethical guidelines and binding values for themselves and their employees. - Friedrich Wilhelm Graf argues that no one expects their butcher or hairdresser to advertise their “values”. ## M2 Moralmärkte - In the fashionable ethics boom, it's not only banks that are subject to increased public pressure to be moral. - Of course they are allowed to make a profit, but please don't talk about profit without living by ethical “values". - In competitive morality markets, everyone wants to be the hero of virtue. - But only conventional trivial morality is offered in the guidelines. - Nowadays, everyone wants to be sustainable, eco-sensitive and climate-friendly. - Often, the value guides are formulated in a tone of religious confession. - Not infrequently, one succumbed to the suggestive power of holy numbers and wrote, like Moses, ten principles on his value tablets. ## M3 Indien testet billiger - Something immoral is attached to the term “attractiveness”. - India is the most attractive market for clinical drug trials. - This is how global pharmaceutical companies describe it, as they invest hundreds of millions in this final testing phase with trials on sick people before launching each new drug. - At least in industrialized countries, it costs that much. - In contrast, tests are much cheaper in India - up to 60% cheaper. - The test subjects in the prestigious All Indian Institute for Medical Sciences in Delhi were probably cheap as well. - 49 sick children, most under the age of one, have died there in the past two and a half years after clinical trials. - The case causes a lot of unrest because it is assumed that most of the children came from poor and uneducated families, most of whom barely understood what they were getting into. - Such families are common in the country. - The billion-strong population offers a wide selection of potential test subjects with all kinds of diseases, who are desperate and poor enough to take great risks for little money. - Other cures are beyond their means. - Their bodies are rarely exposed to medication, which makes them even more attractive to the industry. - But who controls this? ## M4 Ein kleiner Moraltest: Was tun Sie? 1\. While walking home from the supermarket, you notice that you have been given €10 too much. - a. Turn around and give the money back. - b\. Go home. 2\. You are running late for a crucial exam, when you see a man lying motionless on the sidewalk. - a. Ask if you can help him. - b\. Keep walking. 3\. A friend offers you a pirated copy of a computer program you urgently need. This saves you €50. - a. Refuse his friendly offer. - b\. Accept the offer. ## M5 Entscheidungshilfen - Why shouldn’t I lie to others, asks Annemarie Pieper, and names six good reasons for justifying your actions. 1. Because he is my friend. (Reference to fact). I refer to a general norm or value judgment that is generally accepted without question: You don’t lie to friends. 2. Because I like him very much. (Reference to feelings). Feelings explain and make actions understandable but do not justify them morally. 3. Because the other person would no longer trust me. (Reference to possible consequences). I refer to the possible negative or positive consequences of my actions, depending on whether they harm me or the other person. 4. Because honesty is a virtue. (Reference to a moral code). I refer to an accepted set of norms and rules that are recognized by the members of a group/society. 5. Because my parents told me to. (Reference to moral competence). I refer to the judgment of respected people whom I regard as a moral authority. 6. Because my conscience tells me to. (Reference to conscience). Conscience as the ultimate moral authority is a form of justification that is generally accepted in practice. ## M6 Ethisch bewerten lernen - Ethics teaches us to assess whether an action is right or wrong, natural or unnatural, good or evil. - For the ethical assessment of an action, we need double knowledge: Firstly, we have to know human nature as the standard of our behavior. This is a very general knowledge that leads to general rules of conduct like "Murder is wrong" or "You must stand up for your friends”. Secondly, we need to know how to apply the law to individual cases. For example, can I shoot someone who is trying to rape my mother? Should I continue to befriend a friend who has become a neo-Nazi? We therefore need to know whether something is right or wrong here and now, under the given circumstances and at this particular moment. ## Handeln und Entscheiden ## M1 Lebenswege - Compared to the narrow, predetermined paths that our ancestors walked through life, a confusing network of possible lifepaths unfolds before us. - “Impossible is nothing", they say, and that means nothing other than that we have to decide more and more often. ## M2 Freie Handlungen - It is immediately evident that our question about good and evil -- and our experience of good and evil -- is an everyday concern, an undeniable fact. - Television series, novels, newspapers revolve around actions that are sooner or later judged as good or evil. - The history of mankind ist full of free actions. - The concentration camps of the Nazis, the millions of Portuguese people enslaved by the Africans, the discrimination of black people, the disadvantages of women in public life, Stalin's mass murders, the artificially fabricated price increases for basic foods in Latin America, the bribery of governments in many parts of the world -- all these are events where, at some point, an individual made a decision. -Because they are actions depending on human freedom, we can oppose them and cry out: “That cannot be true!” - In the face of an earthquake, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, we do not seek culprits- we try to understand these physical events better so that we can predict them and take the appropriate precautions. - We criticize at most the negligence of the politician or scientist who could have foreseen a disaster but did not. ## M3 Handlungen - Actions differ from events or sequences of events in a revealing way. While events simply occur or do not, actions can only be spoken of when acting subjects intervene in the course of events by carrying out a conscious enterprise. - An action is therefore something that each individual actor could have omitted and instead done something else. -This understanding of actions [...] makes it understandable why ethical problems present ## M4 Handlungen als „Ich-Leistungen“ - Actions are controlled by reflexes initially, then by drives, feelings, and affect, early on by conditioning, by which we are, so to speak, trained, finally we act according to habits, attitudes, and characteristics that have formed within us. Accordingly, we speak of reflex actions, drive actions, affect actions, habit actions, experience actions (actions according to our attitudes, characteristics, virtues, and vices). - Finally, we speak of insightful actions and purposeful actions. - The instances responsible for our actions appear to become increasingly complex, conscious-dependent, and, to a greater extent, dependent on oneself as our development progresses, they are becoming increasingly conditional and intentional. - Conditioning: Learning process in which, for example, a person is made to react in a certain way. -Acting - A knocks over the big vase in the living room trying to create a happening for a party. - Mental cause: Intention / goal of the acting person. - Intentional causality. - The goal is to cause a happening, to draw attention to oneself. - Behaviour - B bumps into the big vase in the living room during a party and knocks it over. - Physical cause: Physical condition or event, laws of nature. - Cause by event: Cause = lack of space, gravity, the vase’s fragility. ## M5 Werturteile - Value judgments about value behaviour are called value judgments and, in special cases, belong to ethics. - In contrast to a factual statement, a value judgment is a normative statement with the claim to universality or objectivity. - Through value judgments, an object, a situation, an action, or a sequence of actions is evaluated. - The following diagram shows how ethics is conceived as teaching general moral obligations and value judgments. - Prescriptive judgments - Judgments - Descriptive judgments - moral judgments - value judgments ## M6 Moralische und außermoralische Werte - Moral worth (moral good and bad) is not only a matter of moral duty, moral rightness and wrongness, but also of non -moral worth. - Moral values or things that are morally good, are something different from non-moral values or things that are good in a non-moral sense. - We have to explain this difference in more detail. In part, it is based on a difference in objects which are referred to as good or bad. Things that can be called morally good or bad include persons; groups of persons, traits of character, talents, feelings, motives, and intentions -- in short, persons, groups of persons, and personality elements. - On the other hand, all kinds of things in the non-moral sense can be good or bad; e.g. physical objects like cars and pictures, inner experiences like pleasure, pain, knowledge and freedom, forms of government like democracy. It does not make sense to call most of these things morally good or bad unless you want to say that it is morally right or wrong to strive for them. ## M7 Werte als Orientierungsregeln - Values are conscious or unconscious orientation standards from which individuals or groups let themselves be guided in their conduct. - They are fundamental and deeply rooted conceptions of what is considered right and desirable in a community. -Such collective goals are not always rational and well-founded, but can also be determined by instinct, emotion, worldview, or religion. As general goals, they are on a different, higher level than concrete action-oriented principles in the form of norms. - Thus, the norm “You should help those in need” could be based on the abstract value “Helpfulness”, “You should not kill” on the very general value “Life”. Norms and values reinforce each other in a cultural community. While the values have a justifying function, norms have the task of guiding the concrete implementation of abstract values .