PHIL 313 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: The Brothers Karamazov, John Stuart Mill, Universal Prescriptivism
11 Jan 2017
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Bioethics: the study of ethical issues arising from the biological and medical sciences. People argue that ethics are subjective so there is no reason to debate but there is some scope for argument in ethics (ie. should there be physician assisted suicide?) Ethical relativism: a relativist holds that it is not individual attitudes that determine what is right or wrong, but rather the attitudes of the culture in which one lives. Herodotus speaks of how king darius asks the greeks how much he would have to pay for the(cid:373) to eat their fathers(cid:859) dead (cid:271)odies a(cid:374)d they (cid:449)ere horrified. Anthropologists argue that since morality is relative to culture, no culture (ie. western) can regard their morality as superior to another. Universal prescriptivism: if one is to make an ethical judgement, one must be prepared to state it in universal terms and apply it to all relevantly similar situations.
