1. Philosophers & Ethics

2. Ponder this…
You have a student who is from a single-parent family. The student must work to attend college. However the job is interfering with the student’s performance and several assignments have not been turned in. You have determined that a D is all the student can make when a counselor informs you that the student needs a C to qualify for an academic scholarship.
Should you give the student a C?

3. Ethics A system of moral principles
Branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions

4. Confucius (551—471BC) Goal of virtuous living is to cultivate oneself and those around you
-lived in tumultuous time in China with warring dynasties
-saw the solution as a basic return to order and harmony through virtue and ethics
-ideas collected by his students in The Analects
-theory is all relational in that the individual discovers their role in society and performs that role to the best of their ability
-duty to improve yourself and those around you each day

5. Plato (427-347BC) Balance is the key to a virtuous life
Main ethics work, The Republic
-Ethics is not relative, it is absolute
-By attaining ethics in the individual, society attains justice.
-The state cannot be just without ethics in the individuals
-The four main virtues that must be balanced in the individual are: temperance, wisdom, courage, justice

6. Aristotle (384-322BC) Virtues are habits
-led Plato’s school, The Academy
-formed his own school, The Lyceum
-famous ethics work, Nicomachean Ethics
-believed that ethics/virtues are habits we cultivate to become a successful person
-individual must cultivate habits in association with the virtues of human excellence for happiness to occur in society

7. Ponder this…
Students in a cyber lab are frustrated with the course they are taking. Due to the length of time it takes for the cyber professor to answer s, they often are left to figure out the material on their own. They quickly realize that 6 of them in the lab of 20+ students are taking the same course. They divide up the material and communicate in the lab by text so that on the next exam they all do very well.
Should the students be given zeros for cheating?

8. Ponder this…
A benevolent teacher…we’ll call her Mrs. Plutnicki…puts a mug of pens and pencils in her classroom for students to use while in her classroom. Approximately every two weeks, the pens and pencils are gone. Being pure and benevolent, Mrs. Plutnicki replaces the missing pens and pencils bought with her own money repeatedly so her students will continue to expand their minds and do quality work in her class. The students are kind to their teacher and do indeed produce quality work and go on to make their teacher proud.
Is it stealing to take the pens and pencils from the mug?

9. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Contract Theory
-English philosopher born in great unrest in England
-greatest work, The Leviathan, argued for a novel, secular approach to morality and the necessary supremacy of a strong monarch
-without “civilization” humanity’s natural state is to be at war with one another and dissolve into chaos
-without laws/order people’s lives will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short”
-people must join together under a social contract with the king to improve this condition
-by giving their rights to the king, their lives become better and individual ethics become possible
-thought to be the beginnings of modern democratic state philosophy

11. David Hume (1711-1776) Morals don’t stem from reason, but from emotion
-Scottish philosopher, famous skeptic
-famous work, A Treatise on Human Nature, covers knowledge, reality, language, and ethics
-attacks the supremacy of reason
-moral judgments don’t stem from reason, but from feelings
-reason does not evaluate things as good or bad
-reason sorts through facts and feelings determine/reveal what is good
-“reason is the slave of the passions”
-human nature has the built in capacity for altruism and sympathy
-you derive pleasure from the success of your friends, etc

12. John Calvin (1509-1564): Religious Reform
-important Theologian, took over where Martin Luther left off in the Protestant Reformation
-rejected Catholic rule and doctrine
-emphasized the sovereignty of the scriptures and divine predestination, a doctrine holding that God chooses those who will enter Heaven based on His omnipotence and grace.
-known for his intellectual, unemotional approach to faith
-credited as the most important figure of the second generation of the Protestant Reformation after Martin Luther

13. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Being Ethical makes you free
lived his whole life in Konigsberg, Prussia
(what is now Russia)
-went from being a lowly tutor to one of the most influential philosophers of all time
-main ethics work, Critique of Practical Reason, Metaphysics of Morals
-believed we could create a balancing system of animal passions and human reason by creating an ethical system that each person takes on for him/herself—transcendentalism.
-he thought there was a deep connection between ethical principles and the freedom of the will.
-If you are doing what’s right, you are doing what makes you free.

14. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) : Maximize Utility
-English philosopher, famous for political and ethical philosophy
-father was a good friend of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the modern version of utilitarianism called hedonism.
-Mill was a great defender of utilitarianism
-main work, On Liberty, and Utilitarianism
- he argued that we need to maximize the general good for the greatest number of people
-unlike Bentham, Mill argued that not all pleasures are equal and they are worth more if they’re associated with reason, deliberation, or socially valuable emotion

15. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) : Connecting Morals and Power
German philosopher famous for his attacks on traditional morality
-Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- felt traditional morality emphasized and glorified weakness and crowd thinking over real power and individuality
-traditional morality turns people into drones
-his response is to pull away from the crowd and do your own thing
-see who you are as an individual and value your strength without a need to seek approval from the crowd

16. John Rawls (1921-2002) : Looking out for the Less Fortunate
-American philosopher, fought in WWII, then
became a professor at Cornell and Harvard
-major work, A Theory of Justice
-a Kantian view of politics, tried to resist the utilitarianism view of politics
-Rawls proposed a method called original position, where just principles for governing society could be constructed
-policies should promote liberty while directing benefits from any inequalities to those who are the least well off in society
-the poor would benefit from those with the good luck to have been born into advantage
-develop ways that diverse peoples could live in stability

17. Peter Singer (1946-): currently teaching at Princeton University
-on the news occasionally
-a utilitarian, like Mill, he is best known for his application of utilitarianism to animal rights and global poverty
-book, Animal Liberation, is considered one of the most important works in the animal rights movement
-essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is considered the most influential piece in fighting global poverty
-challenges people to cut back on material goods to help poorer countries meet basic needs.
-praise from his supporters, constant death threats from detractors

18. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) absolute freedom vs
Simone de Beauvoir ( ) absolute freedom vs. the constraints of circumstance
A French existentialist, Marxist, and founding mother of second- wave feminism.
She wrote dozens of books, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, and is noted for having a very accessible writing style.
Her work is often focused on the pragmatic matters of existentialism, as opposed to that of her life partner, Jean-Paul Sartre.
She was very active in French politics, as a social critic, protester, and member of the French resistance.
She and Jean-Paul Sartre were partners for fifty-one years until his death in 1980

19. Philippa Foot (1920-2010) the rationality of morality
An English philosopher working out of Oxford and UCLA, she is often credited with sparking a revival in Aristotelian thought.
Her work in ethics is extensive and well known: she wrote the “trolley problem.”
Over her lifetime she worked with many philosophers and heavily influenced others.
A collection of her essays, Virtues and Vices, is a key document for the recently revitalized interest in virtue ethics.
“You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don’t understand your question anymore.”