Branches of ethics
Juwel Rana
What's your
opinion???
Branches of ethics
• There are three/four/five branches of ethics:
• Normative Ethics
• Meta-ethics
• Applied ethics
• Descriptive Ethics
• Moral ethics (Extra)
• Normative Ethics - The largest branch,
• It deals with how individuals can figure out the correct moral action that they should take.
• normative ethics is the study of ethical action, typically focusing on what is morally right and wrong.
• Philosophers such as Socrates and John Stuart Mill are included in this branch of ethics.
• “Murder is wrong.”
• “Giving to charity is good, but not ethically mandatory.”
Normative ethics
Normative ethics
• Normative ethics is the study of…………
• what makes actions right or wrong,
• what makes situations or events good or bad and
• what makes people virtuous or vicious
• Normative Ethics deals with “norms” or set of considerations how one should act.
• It’s a study of “ethical action” and sets out the rightness or wrongness of the actions.
• It is also called prescriptive ethics because it rests on the principles which determine whether an action is right or wrong.
• The Golden rule of normative ethics is “doing to other as we want them to do to us“.
• Example: Since we don’t want our neighbors to throw stones through our glass window, then it will not be wise to first throw stone through a neighbor's window.
• Based on this reasoning, anything such as harassing, victimising, abusing or assaulting someone is wrong.
• Normative ethics also provides justification for punishing a person who disturbs social and moral order.
Metaethi
• Metaethics is the study of the origin and meaning of ethical concepts.
cs
• Meta Ethics or “analytical ethics” deals with the origin of the ethical concepts themselves.
• Meta ethics is the underlying foundation of other ethics.
• It does not consider whether an action is good or bad, right or wrong. Rather, it questions – what goodness or rightness or morality itself is?
• It is basically a highly abstract way of thinking about ethics.
• The key theories in meta-ethics include naturalism, non-naturalism, emotivism and prescriptivism.
• Meta-Ethics - This branch seeks to understand the nature of ethical
properties and judgments such as if truth values can be found and the theory behind moral principals
Metaethics
• Metaethics investigates
• How we use ethical language and where it comes from?
• where our ethical principles come from, and
• what they mean?
• Are they merely social inventions?
• Do they involve more than expressions of our individual emotions?
• Metaethical answers to these questions focus on the issues of universal truths, the will of God, the role of reason in
ethical judgments, and the meaning of ethical terms
themselves.
metaethics
Cognitivism
Non- cognitivism
Naturalism Non-Naturalism Emotivism Perspectivism
Home work-Metaethics
• Major metaethical theories include naturalism, nonnaturalism (or Intuitionism), emotivism, and prescriptivism.
• Intuitionism means Our intuition tells us what is right or wrong.
• Emotivism means What is right or wrong is simply an emotional response to a situation.
• Prescriptivism means When I say something is right I’m
trying to get you to think the same
This is a good gun
what do we mean by using the word good.
Normative and Metaethics
normative metaethics
What is right?
What is wrong ?
What could we mean by right,
What could we mean by wrong? And what could be a proper kind of answer to the question why is that right?
Applied Ethics
• Applied Ethics - This is the study of applying theories from philosophers regarding ethics in everyday life.
• Applied ethics deals with the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life which are matters of moral judgment.
• This branch of ethics is most important for professionals in different walks of life including doctors, teachers, administrators, rulers and so on.
• There are six key domains of applied ethics viz.
• Decision ethics {ethical decision making process},
• Professional ethics {for good professionalism},
• Clinical Ethics {good clinical practices},
• Business Ethics {good business practices},
• Organizational ethics {ethics within and among organizations} and
• social ethics.
• It deals with the rightness or wrongness of social, economical, cultural, religious issues also. For example, euthanasia, child labour, abortion etc.
Applied ethics
• Deals with difficult moral questions and controversial moral issues that people actually face in their lives such as
• Attempting to answer the difficult questions actual people face in the real world. For Example:
• Is abortion always wrong?
• The death penalty?
• Sex before marriage?
• Homosexuality?
• War?
• Selling drugs?
Descriptive Ethics
• Descriptive ethics deals with what people actually believe (or made to believe) to be right or wrong, and accordingly holds up the human actions acceptable or not
acceptable or punishable under a custom or law.
• However, customs and laws keep changing from time to time and from society to society.
• The societies have structured their moral principles as per changing time and have expected people to behave accordingly.
• Due to this, descriptive ethics is also called comparative ethics because it compares the ethics or past and present; ethics of one society and other.
• It also takes inputs from other disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology and history to explain the moral right or wrong.
• Descriptive Ethics - This branch is more scientific in its approach and focuses on how human beings actually operate in the real world, rather than attempt to theorize about how they should operate.
Moral Ethics
• This branch questions how individuals develop their
morality, why certain aspects of morality differ between
cultures and why certain aspects of morality are generally
universal.
Case study
•What would the virtue ethicist say to do in the following scenario?
• Suppose Mr. Robin has just lost his wife of 50 years.
Furthermore, he is in incredible pain when he walks, so he no longer gets to do the various things he has enjoyed all his life.
Lastly, he has recently been diagnosed with cancer which will kill him in approximately two years.
• Given that his prospects for pleasure are extremely low, and his potential for pain is extremely high, should he kill himself?
Write your thinking in the forum section…
Home
work!!!!!!!!!
• Differentiate among Metaethics, Normative ethics and Applied ethics
by using examples.
Midterm (90 minutes)
• True/false: 5
• Normal mcq: 10
• Application based mcq: 8
• Higher order mcq: 7
• Written : 5 marks
• Viva: 5 marks
The difference between normative and applied ethics…
• Normative ethics studies what features make an action right or wrong
• Applied ethics attempts to figure out, in the real world, whether or not those actions have certain features
• Example of difference between normative and applied ethics
• We agree that slavery is wrong…but disagree about what makes it wrong…then the disagreement is one of normative ethics
• We agree that morality is whatever produces the best
consequences….but disagree about the death penalty…the
argument is applied ethics
Normative ethical theories
• Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct.
• Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act (or omission from acting) is one that will produce a good outcome, or consequence.
• Consequentialism is primarily non-prescriptive, meaning the moral worth of an action is determined by its potential consequence, not by whether it follows a set of written edicts or laws.
• One example would entail lying under the threat of government
punishment to save an innocent person's life, even though it is illegal to lie under oath.
Utilitarianism ( Consequentialism)
►
The most common form of
consequentialism is utilitarianism
►
Utilitarianism combines consequentialism with the claim that the only valuable
consequence is pleasure, and the only
invaluable consequence is pain.
Deontological Ethics
►Deontological ethics is often seen as the opposite of consequentialist ethics.
►Where the consequentialist is concerned with the outcome of the action, the deonotologist is concerned with the nature of the action itself (more specifically, the rule/law/reason/maxim for which an action was taken).
►For the deontologist, some actions like murder are just inherently wrong, no matter the ultimate result.
►By far the most famous deontologist was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
