1) The document discusses several philosophical approaches to ethics including identifying moral principles, evaluating alternative values, and understanding the relationship between ethics and religious beliefs. 2) It explores whether ethical judgments are relative, subjective, and incomparable or if common values allow for ethical discussion and argument. 3) The document provides examples of ethical arguments and examines the idea of basic versus derivative obligations and different philosophers' attempts to identify a set of fundamental basic obligations.

1. Ethics and Moral Values

2.  Philosophical approaches to ethical
choice and reflection…

3. “The problems of philosophy involve questions in which we
are all (or should all be) deeply interested at the most
basic level. They are important to us as we make
decisions about what to believe, and how to be critical of
our own naively held beliefs. Philosophical investigation
may help us to determine what kinds of choices we
should make, and what kind of person to be. It may help
us to understand and justify our belief (or disbelief) in
God. It may help us to form a rational life plan, and to
better understand our own motives and fears.
Philosophical questions are important to us as we try to
understand what we are and to determine our place in
the scheme of things. And they are important to us as we
try to choose right actions in a complicated and difficult
world, and to find meaning in our lives. These are not
trivial projects.”

4. Identifying Ethics: Principles of ethics
should provide us guidance as we make
choices in a complicated world. Ideally, an
account of ethics should help us to identify
moral principles and morally relevant features
of the choices we face.

5.  There is no simple “recipe” for ethical
decision making. Philosophical and
religious theories about ethics do not
remove our need (obligation?) to
exercise deliberative judgment and to
evaluate alternative values that are at
play in concrete cases.

6.  Ethics: Ethical codes of conduct
instruct us on what we ought or ought
not to do. Typical ethical theories or
ethical codes include basic principles
that are intended to be used to guide
conduct.

7.  Values: Values underlie ethical codes.
For any ethical code, we can evaluate it
by considering the values that support
it.

8.  Values and Wants: The things we want
are usually among the things we value,
but values and wants are different. It is
possible to want what one does not
value, and possible to value what one
does not want.

9.  Role of Religious Belief in Ethics: For those of
us who have religious beliefs, often these
beliefs are intimately tied to our values and to
the ethical principles we accept. But it would
be a mistake to suppose that ethical values are
simply religious values—at least, the
relationship is more complex than people
sometimes realize.

10.  Any time says that we should do X
because it is what God wants us to do, it
is appropriate to consider the reasons
we have for thinking that this is what
God wants. Once we ask this question,
we’re doing philosophy.

11.  Question: Are Ethical Judgments
Relative, Subjective, and Incomparable?

12.  Relative: Different people make
different judgments, and the evaluative
judgments people make are wholly
relative to the values that they hold.

13.  Subjective: “Different people just have
different values, and there is no way to
argue or reason about the evaluative
assumptions that lie behind different
ethical judgments or choices. There are
no evaluative facts in the way that there
are facts about the physical universe.”

14.  Incomparable: There is no way to
compare the judgments of different
people, and no one's evaluative
judgments are any better than the
evaluative judgments of anyone else.

15.  Claim: If it were true that ethical values
are all relative, subjective, and
incomparable, then talking about ethics
would be useless.
 Why might one believe this?
 Is it true?

16.  Claim: Because we have many values in
common, discussions in ethics often
involve appeals to commonly shared
values.

17.  Claim: Often discussions in ethics
involve appeals to values one believes
that others accept, or values one
believes that others have reason to
accept.

18.  Ethical argument and discussion
requires an informed and sympathetic
understanding of other people’s values
and other people’s point of view. We get
no where if we simply preach our own
values without making an effort to
understand others.

19.  One Form of Ethical Argument: Elicit a
value judgment by coming to an
understanding of some of the values
another person holds. Then show that
the value in question has implications
that are not consistent with the persons
actions.

20.  Example: Robert Nozick on
Vegetarianism. (Hand-out.)

21. Ethical Arguments
 Argument: A set of statements, some of
which serve as premises, one of which
serves as a conclusion, where the
premises are intended to provide
evidence for the conclusion.

22.  When presented with an argument, one
may either
1) Accept the premises and the conclusion
2) Reject the premises
3) Argue (or show) that the conclusion
does not follow from the premises.
Ethical Arguments

23. An Example of an Ethical
Argument:
 Hand-out: Argument for Vegetarianism and
Limitations on Animal Testing
 Do you accept the premises? If not, which
premise do you reject or find questionable?
 Does the conclusion follow from the
premises?

24. Example: Peter Singer
 1) Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and
medical care are bad.
 2) Singer's Principle: Two versions.
 Version i) If it is in our power to prevent something
bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing
anything of comparable moral importance, we ought,
morally, to do it.
 Version ii) If it is in our power to prevent something
very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing
anything of moral significance, we ought, morally to
do it.

25.  Example for Singer’s Principle: If I'm
walking past a shallow pond, and I see a
child drowning in it, I ought to wade in
and pull the child out.
 COST: Muddy Clothing.
 BENEFIT: Child's Life.

26.  Extending the Argument: “Whenever we
spend on ourselves or our loved ones
money we could use to address the
more pressing moral issue of absolute
poverty, we are violating a moral
principle that we accept.”

27.  Notice that Singer’s argument is an
appeal to our integrity. He is not simply
preaching his values and applying them
(perhaps inappropriately) to us.

28. Basic v. Derivative Obligations
 Some obligations derive from other
more basic obligations. For example,
obligations of citizenship may be based
on our obligation to be fair, responsible,
and respectful of other people with
whom we interact.

29. Basic and Derivative
Obligations
 When obligations can be derived from
others, the more basic obligations have
a kind of “priority” over the derived
obligations.

30. Basic and Derivative
Obligations
 Question: Is there an identifiable set of
fundamental obligations, such that all
our real obligations can be derived from
that set?

31. Basic Values: The Josephson Proposal:
 Trustworthiness
 Respect
 Responsibility
 Fairness
 Caring
 Citizenship

32. W.D. Ross’s List of Prima Facie Duties:
1) Duties that rest on previous acts of my own
a) Promises. b) Duty to rectify previous wrongs.
2) Duties that rest on previous acts of others (Duties of
gratitude).
3) Duties of justice (Ross interprets this as a duty to
endeavor to bring the distribution of pleasure or
happiness in line with merit.)
4) Beneficence- Duty to benefit others.
5) Duty to improve one's own virtue or intelligence.
6) Duty not to injure others.

33. Joel Feinberg’s List of Basic Obligations:
1) Fidelity- Obligation to keep promises.
2) Veracity- Obligation to tell the truth, or (or better-- not to tell
lies).
3) Fair Play- Obligation not to exploit, cheat, or "free load" on others
4) Gratitude- Obligation to return favors
5) Nonmaleficence- Obligation not to cause harm, pain or suffering
to others,
6) Beneficence- Obligation to help others in distress, at least when
this involves no great danger to oneself or to third parties.
7) Reparation- Obligation to repair harms to others that are one's
fault.
8) Obligation not to kill others (except in self-defense).
9) Obligation not to deprive others of their property.
10) Obligation to oppose injustices, at least when this involves no
great cost to oneself.
11) Obligation to promote just institutions and to work toward their
establishment, maintenance, and improvement.

34. Finding an appropriate list of basic
obligations may seem like a
philosophers’ game. But the business of
making appropriate ethical decisions is
not a game. One practical goal of such a
list is that it may help us to make
appropriate decisions in complicated
circumstances.

35. What more basic values are involved?
Helping out on your father-in-law’s farm, you
discover that he has ceased to use appropriate
environmental precautions. His plow
patterns are leading to excessive soil erosion
and excessive pesticide run-off. There is
reason to believe that his unsafe practices are
significantly contributing to groundwater
contamination, and that erosion from his
fields is

36.  Ethics and ethical decision making are not
simply the province of philosophers or
ethicists. Our choices reveal our values to the
world. These values are either unreflective
and shallow, or reflective and deep.
Philosophical deliberation should help us to
make our values and choices deep and
thoughtful. Maybe this makes it more likely
that our choices will be the right ones.