PHL-1502 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Golden Rule
13 Sep 2016
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The study of ethics begins with a very simple observation: you are not alone in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people. When studying ethics, you are not studying a specific doctrine. Instead, philosophers study the rational logic behind actions. Moral intuitions: feelings of right and wrong that are not based on explicit moral reasoning: moral reasoning might result in discovering that are intuitions are wrong. If we only understood harm as physical, theft would not be harm. Suppose we define harm as causing physical or psychological pain. Then any instance of psychological pain would be immoral. This would restrict us from doing anything. o. If harm is defined to narrowly, then our theory would fail to capture genuine instances of unethical behavior. o. If harm is defined to broadly, then almost anything would be unethical. The golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. o.
