This document summarizes an introduction to ethics session which included discussion of case studies, moral theories, and challenges to morality. The session covered consequence-based, deontological, and virtue-based moral theories as well as theoretical vs practical ethics approaches. Common challenges to morality like egoism, relativism, skepticism, and nihilism were also addressed. Suggested further readings on ethics were provided.

1. Session 1: Introduction to
Ethics
Dr. Chan Ho Mun
Department of Public and Social Administration
City University of Hong Kong
June 6, 2007

2. Cases Studies
 Selected movie scene from “Vertical Limit”.
 Should the son kill the father?
 If you were the son,….
 If you were the daughter,…
 If you were the father,…
 William’s story of Jim and the Indians
 What should he do?
 If you were Jim,...

3.  Four versions of the trolley problem
 What are your answers and justifications?
 Would the answers be different if you were the
person who need to make the decision and
take the action?
 Craniotomy (crushing the skull of the unborn
child to save the life of a pregnant woman) vs
Hysterectomy (save the life of a pregnant
woman by the removal of cancerous uterus)
 Is your response in this case consistent with
the ones in other cases?

4. What is ethics?
 (1) What makes an act morally right or wrong
(a question of conduct)?
 (2) What makes a person or something good
or bad (a question of value)?
 (3) How to draw the correct conclusion about
what we ought to do or what kind of person
we ought to be?
 (1) and (2) are theoretical/conceptual
questions and (3) is a practical question
about moral reasoning.

5. Characteristics of Ethical Issues
 Moral disagreements are common. Moral
issues are often controversial and open-
ended. It is often difficult to arrive at some
consensus.
 How serious could people disagree with one
another? Could the disagreement be radical
and fundamental?
 People even disagree about what and how
much they disagree.

6. Moral Theories
 A moral theory consists of a set of moral
principles.
 These principles specify the conditions under
which an action is morally right or wrong, or
what makes a person or something good or
bad. (Theoretical questions (1) and (2))
 They purport to guide our moral reasoning
(Practical question (3)).

7.  Together with facts about different moral
situations, moral rules that guide the morality
of specific kinds of actions could be derived.
 Together with facts about an individual case,
we can further judge whether an individual
act is morally right or wrong, or whether a
person or something is good or bad.

8. Structure of moral action
 Person  Action  Consequence
 Person: What makes a person morally good?
Be courageous, kind, and so on? Do the
motive, character, and intention of the person
matter in deciding whether an action is right
or wrong?
 Action: What makes an action morally right?
Should the motive, character, or intention of
the actor be taken into consideration? Should
it be solely determined by the consequences?
 Consequence: What constitutes a good or
bad consequence?

9. Three major kinds of moral theories
 Consequence-based theories
 Deontological theories
 Virtue-based theories (approaches)

10. Theoretical Ethics vs Practical Ethics
 The term “applied ethics” is misleading.
 It makes “practical ethics” sound like applied
mathematics.
 Ethical theories sometimes give no clear-cut
answer to specific moral problems. The top-
down approach does not always work.
Examples: euthanasia and abortion.

11.  Bottom-up approach (Case-based approach):
 Start with an obvious (real or hypothetical)
case where we have the strong intuition or
considered judgement that it is morally right or
wrong.
 Analogical reasoning: compare it with a
problematic case that is structurally similar
and then draw the same conclusion.
 Example: Thomson’s arguments for and
Marquis’s argument against abortion.

12. Anti-theory Approach
 Cases have their own voices. This gives us a
very crucial criterion for evaluating moral
theories.
 A moral theory is accepted if it can make sense
of and be compatible with our various intuitively
appealing beliefs and ideas or firmly held
judgements about morality.

13.  Anti-theory approach (moral particularism):
 No theory can meet the above criterion.
 Moral precepts are only rules of thumbs with
lots of loopholes and exceptions. There is no
theory in ethics but only approaches.
 Something like the case law approach should
be adopted.

14. Challenges to Morality
 Egoism
 Psychological egoism: Human actions are
motivated by their self-interests.
 Ethical egoism: One should only promote
one’s own interests, or it is alright for everyone
to do so.
 Relativism
 Descriptive relativism: People of different
cultures follow different norms and have
different conceptions of the good.

15.  Ethical relativism: What makes an act morally
right and wrong or something morally good or
bad depends on the cultural context in which
the question is raised.
 Moral skepticism
 Why should I be moral? It is impossible to give
a non-question begging answer.
 We can never justify our moral beliefs and
ideas.

16.  Moral Nihilism
 Ethical claims are either fictitious (according to
error theories) or neither true nor false.
 They are not answerable to any reality.
 There is no such thing called “morality”.

17. Suggested Readings:
 Elizabeth Burns & Stephen Law (eds.),
Philosophy for AS and A2, London:
Routledge, 2004.
 Julia Driver, Ethics: The Fundamentals,
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
 Christopher Hamilton, Understanding
Philosophy for AS Level, Cheltenham: Nelson
Thornes, 2003.

18.  James Rachels, The Elements of Moral
Philosophy, 4th ed., Boston: McGraw-Hill,
2003.
 Nina Rosenstand, The Moral of the Story: An
Introduction to Ethics, 5th ed., Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 2005.
 Mark Timmons, Moral Theory: An Introduction,
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.