FCSE 3120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Organ Donation, Cloning, Virtue Ethics
1 May 2018
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Chapter 1 -Nature of Morality
What Is Ethics?
Various moral problems and issues
The Sandra Mendenez story illustrates how moral predicaments arise for us in everyday life.
Other examples of individuals facing moral questions
• Having to decide about pullig the plug o a dying relative
• Deidig hether or ot to sig o as a orga donor at your death
• Assessing the effects of playing a violent computer game
Examples of our society struggling to assess the morality of:
• Capital punishment
• Late-term abortions
• Cloning
• Armed interventions in foreign countries,
• etc.
Ethics studies the nature and concepts of morality in a systematic way, employing the tools of
critical reasoning.
It addresses such questions as:
• What is right or wrong?
• How can we determine what is right?
• Can there be several equally right ways of acting in a given situation?
• What makes something right or wrong?
Morality has to do with persons,
1. how they ought to act
2. What they should be like.
Moral Claims
1. Moral claims serve to guide, regulate, and assess persons and their behavior.
2. Moral value claims are about moral values: what is good or bad in persons.
3. Moral prescriptive claims are about how one should or should not act.
Normative versus descriptive claims
• Normative claims refer to some norm or standard and reflect how things ought to be.
• Descriptive claims describe how things actually are.
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Example 1:
• Descriptive Claim: 2015 was the summer of people lashing out with guns in an attempt
to feel dominant.
• Normative Claim: It is morally wrong to use guns to kill people as a means to act out
your desire to be dominant.
Example 2:
• Descriptive Claim: After disasters, affluent
• Tourists often visit and take pictures of the carnage and aftermath of the disasters.
• Normative Claim: It is morally wrong to visit disaster-stricken areas merely to gaze in
wonder about the tragedies that have befallen real people without helping them in
meaningful ways.
Moral claims are primarily normative, not descriptive.
Nonmoral Normative Claims
Many normative claims have nothing to do with morality. Some of these include:
1. Claims of etiquette: Convention establishes acceptable social behavior.
2. Prudential claims describe what would be prudent or in our interest to do. Best
expressed
3. stateets of the for if . . . the . . .
4. Legal claims are based on laws established by
5. civil authority (can be moral in nature [laws
6. against sexual assault], but often nonmoral in nature [tax codes or speed limits]).
Characterizing Moral Claims
Moral principle: a general moral claim that hold for all
Moral claims are:
• Normative, not descriptive
• Truth claims: assertions that are true or false.
• Because moral claims are truth claims, they can be supported by reasons. Distinguish
truth claims from mere expressions of emotion, and from commands
• Universalizable: can be generalized to anyone in a similar situation
• Overriding: Moral claims take precedence over other kinds of normative claims.
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