Midterm Exam Pointers Review PDF

***Chapter 1 THE ETHICAL DIMENSION OF HUMAN EXISTENCE*** ***Etiquette** -- certain approval or disapproval of actions which can be relatively more trivial in nature. It is concerned with right and wrong actions, but those considered not quite grave enough to belong to the discussion on ethics.* **...

***Chapter 1 THE ETHICAL DIMENSION OF HUMAN EXISTENCE*** ***Etiquette** -- certain approval or disapproval of actions which can be relatively more trivial in nature. It is concerned with right and wrong actions, but those considered not quite grave enough to belong to the discussion on ethics.* ***Descriptive Ethics** -- reports how people, particularly groups, make their moral valuations without making any judgement either for or against these valuations.* ***Normative Ethics** -- often done in philosophy or moral theology, engages questions "What could or should be the right way of acting? In other words, prescribes what we ought to maintain as our standards or bases for moral valuations.* ***Moral issue** -- used to refer to those particular situations that are often the source of considerable ad inclusive debates (thus we would often hear topics such as capital punishment and euthanasia)* ***Moral Decision** -- when one is faced in a situation and confronted by the choice of what act to perform.* ***Moral Judgment** -- when one is an observer who makes an assessment on the actions or behavior.* ***Moral Dilemma** -- Going beyond the matter of choosing right over wrong, or good over bad, and considering instead the more complicated situation wherein one is torn between choosing one of two goods or choosing between the lesser of two evils; When an individual can choose only one from a number of possible actions and there are compelling ethical reasons for the various choices.* ***AUTHORITY OF THE LAW*** - *It is a system of rules that are created and enforced through social and governmental institutions to regulate behavior. It has been defined as the science of Justice or the Art of Justice. It is a system that regulates and ensures that individuals or a community adhere to the will of the state. Furthermore, It is enforced by way of a systems of sanctions administered through persons and institutions, which all help in compelling us to obey. Provides us with an objective standard that is obligatory and applicable to all.* - *One point to be raised is the prohibitive nature of this. It does not tell us what we should do; it works by constraining us from performing acts that we should not do. To put it slightly differently, It cannot tell us what to pursue, only what to avoid.* ***AUTHORITY OF THE RELIGION*** - *On the practical level, we realize the presence of a multiplicity of religions. Each faith demands differently from its adherents, which would apparently result in conflicting ethical standards.* - *On conceptual level, we can see a further problem where one requires the believer to clarify her understanding of the connection between ethics and the Divine.* ***AUTHORITY OF CULTURE*** - *It is the integrated pattern of human knowledge belief and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.* ***[Cultural Relativism]*** - *It seems to conform to what we experience which is the reality of the differences in how cultures make their ethical valuations.* ***SUBJECTIVISM*** - *Recognize that the individual thinking person (the subject) is at the heart of all moral valuation. She is the one who is confronted with the situation and is burdened with the need to make a decision or judgement.* - *The individual is the sole determinant of what is morally good or bad, right or wrong.* ***PSYCHOLOGICAL EGOISM*** - *"Human beings are naturally self-centered, so all our actions are always already motivated by self-interest". The theory describes the underlying dynamic behind all human actions. As a descriptive theory, it does not direct one to act in any particular way. Instead, it points out that there is already an underlying basis for how one's act. The ego or self has its desires and interests, and all our actions are geared toward satisfying these interests.* ***ETHICAL EGOISM*** - *It does not suppose all actions are already inevitably self-serving. Instead, ethical egoism prescribes that we should make our own ends, our own interests, as the single overriding concern. We may act in a way that is beneficial to others, but we should do that only if it ultimately benefits us.* ***Simplicity** -- when an idea is marked by simplicity, it has unique appeal to it; a theory that conveniently identifies a single basis that will somehow account for all actions is a good example of this.* ***Plausibility**- It is plausible that self-interest is behind a person's actions. It is clearly the motivation behind many of the actions one perform which are obviously self-serving; it could very well also be the motivation behind an individual's seemingly other-directed actions.* ***Irrefutable** -- there is no way to try to answer it without being confronted by the challenge that, whatever one might say, there is the self-serving motive at the root of everything.* ***Chapter 2 UTILITARIANISM*** ***Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)*** - *He argued that our actions are governed by two sovereign masters -- which he calls "pleasure and pain". These masters are given to us by nature to help us determine what is good or bad and what to be done and not; they fasten our choices to their throne.* - *He equates happiness with pleasure.* - *He provided a framework for evaluating pleasure and pain commonly called Felicific Calculus.* ***John Stuart Mill (1806-1873*** - *He reiterates moral good as happiness, and consequently happiness as pleasure.* - *He clarifies that what makes people happy is intended pleasure and what makes us unhappy is the privation of pleasure.* - *He argues that we act and do things because we find them pleasurable and we avoid doing things because they are painful.* - *He dissents from Bentham's single scale of pleasure. He thinks that the principle of utility must distinguish pleasure qualitatively and not merely quantitatively.* - *Utilitarianism cannot promote the kind of pleasures appropriate for pigs or to any other animals. He thinks that there are higher intellectual and lower base pleasure.* - *We are capable of searching and desiring higher intellectual pleasures more than pigs are capable of.* - *Contrary to Bentham, Mill argues that quality is more preferable than quantity. An excessive quantity of what otherwise pleasurable might result in pain.* ***Utilitarianism*** - - - - - ***Chapter 3 NATURAL LAW*** ***Thomas Aquinas:*** - *Hailed as a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. A Dominican friar who was the preeminent intellectual figure of the scholastic period of Middle Ages, contributing to the doctrine of the faith more than any other figure of his time. His Summa Theologiae, his magnus opus, is a voluminous work that comprehensively discusses many significant points in Christian theology. He was canonized in 1323.* - ***He** elaborated and maintained in all his works the promise right at the center of Christian faith: that we are created by God in order to ultimately return to Him.* - ***He** speaks of God, and although we acknowledge that our limited human intellect cannot fully grasp Him, we nevertheless are able to say something concerning His goodness, His might, and His creative power.* ***Plato:*** - ***He is** a Greek philosopher who was credited the notion of the idea of a supreme and absolutely transcendent good has shaped and defined the Christian Doctrine of Aquinas while inspired by divine revelation.* - *For **him** the real is outside the realm of any human sensory experience, but somehow grasped by one's intellect.* ***Efficient cause:*** - *Something which brings about the presence of another being.* - *One can also realize that this being does not simply pop up from nothing, but comes from another being which is prior to it. Parents beget a child. A mango tree used to be a seed that itself came from an older tree.* ***Formal cause:*** - *The "shape" that makes a being a particular kind.* - *We also realize that this material takes on a particular shape: so a bird is different from a cat, which is different from a man.* ***Material cause:*** - *We recognize that any being we can see around is corporeal, possessed of a certain materiality or physical "stuff".* - *A being is individuated- it becomes unique, individual being hat it is- because it is made up of the particular stuff.* ***Final cause:*** - *It has an apparent end o goal.* - *A seed to become a tree or a child to become an adult.* ***Aristotle:*** - ***His** book entitled **Nicomachean Ethics** is the first comprehensive and programmatic study of virtue of Ethics.* - *Happiness for him is the only self-sufficient aim that one can aspire for. No amount of wealth or power can be more fulfilling than having achieved the condition of happiness.*