伦理学

分支 branches

Moral theory

  • Subject:

    1. Answer general moral questions about what to do and how to be 2. What makes action/things/person right and wrong 3.回答具体的伦理问题，应该怎么做，为何，如何评价各类行为

    • Two main questions: 1.What make things right or wrong 2.What to do and how to do

    • Two main goals: 1.理论目标：发掘评价事物的道德指标 2.实践目标：提供现实生活中决策的参考

    • Structure of the principles: An action A is … because A has property P 指导原则：1.是否产生更好结果 2.符合特殊的一系列标准 3.理性人原则

    • branches

      • Consequentialism 结果主义论

        • 基本特征：完全就结果的价值来进行道德判断与决策

        • 一般流程：列出所有结果；分析比较

        • 不同结果主义论的区别： 1.判断价值的种类及多元性 2.价值取向的不同：个体与普遍，优先与普适（是否加权） 3.结果的预期性与实际性 4.行动与结果的联系是直接还是间接

        • 主要分支

          • Classic Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism古典行为效应主义（享乐）

            • 主要特征： 1.最大化价值，最小化不利（简单求和)(utility) 2.Monism and Welfarism: 以welfare（个人与群体）为判断的唯一指标 (关注个人的愉悦与痛苦，包括未来与当下） 3.Non-prioritarianism(人人平等对待）

            • Notice:评判的材料有时并不单一，只需按utility和pleasure,pain评价

            • 存在的问题：1.行为结果的不确定性 2.难以处理复杂的现实问题3.忽略了个体的情感取向，以圣人标准要求 4.有时仅因微弱优势选择违背常理 5.为不合理的分配方式辩护 6.忽略内在的价值，仅关注表面的愉快

            • branches

              • actucal utility:只对事实的结果进行评判，客观评价结果

              • Expected utility:关注行为的出发点，未实施前是否有更高的utility(数学期望），指导主观决策

      • Deontologism 义务论

        • 概念：deontologism is a matter of duties, values do not have priority over duties

          • 做与道德准则相符的事

          • 不考虑行为的结果，尊重职责与规范

          • 行为的正确与否与结果无关

        • Branches

          • Duty-based

          • Right-based

        • Kantian Deontologism

          • 概念：1.norms of reason(所有理性个体普遍遵守）2.practical reason: 要求决策人理性思考

          • Hypothetical(假定的） and categorical（绝对的） imperatives

Applied ethics

  • Subject: 1.Concerned with the specific moral questions 2.关注具体的道德实践问题，话题十分聚焦

  • Branches

    • Bioethics

    • Animal ethics

    • Socila ethics

    • Professional ethics

  • Remarks

    • 分类问题：有时Applied ethics 被视为 Moral theory的子领域

    • 领域非常细分聚焦

    • Intedisciplinarity: 跨学科的

  • Top-down Approach 自上而下的方法（从理论出发，寻找应用实例）

    • 从宽泛的Moral theory 出发

    • 应用

    • Problem

      • Unclear and hard to decide

      • Specification: It is impossible to address a practical problem without considering facts,social expectations and other particular situations

      • Circularity: Moral theory 的基石有时是如何解释一些直觉性的道德问题——陷入循环论证

      • Reliability

        • Every moral theory has some moral verdicts which many would take to be wrong—–How can we rely on it

  • Bottom-Up Approaches(从具体问题出发，寻找理论基石

    • Begin with moral intuitions, social agreement about the specific situations

    • find similar moral theories

    • generalize to standards that cover all sufficiently similar situations

    • Problem

      • Insufficiency: In order to draw general judgments about the morality of a certain practice, relevantly similar cases must be connected by some more general rule. So, bottom-up approaches seem to presuppose general principles, rules or maxims.（在推导出普遍适用的道德判断时，似乎假定了推断前提）

      • Conflicting intuitions: 对于直觉性或社会性判断发生冲突的情况无法解决

      • Risk of biases and neglect: Without a normative standard to control, we can’t prevent prejudice

  • The reflective Equilibrium approach （平衡）

    • Start with the broadest possible set of moral judgments about a subject

    • Build a set of principles that reflects such judgments.

    • Search an equilibrium between general principles and particular judgments:
      test and revise principles and try to keep coherent

    • Problems

      • Coherence doesn’t guarantee justification

      • Vagueness of the method: one could distribute different weights to judgement and principles

  • Issues

    • Bioethics

      • Definition: the study of morality concerning biological issues

    • Distributive Justice

      • Involving Theory

        • Utilitarianism

          • A distribution of goods D is just if and only if (and because) D would produce as high a utility as any alternative distributions.

          • Problem

            • A problem for the view: Utilitarianism seems to justify highly inequitable distributive justice models

          • Response

            • The response of the Utilitarian: also utilitarianism normally favours a more equal distribution of goods.

              • It produces the biggest total amount of wellbeings. This doesn’t seem the right reason to prefer an equal society over an unequal one. Equality seems to have value in itself.( Just don’t care about what one deserves and human rights)

        • John Rawls’ egalitarianism

          • Imagine that we are reasonable people and know all the relevant facts about a society.

Except that we ignore one thing: our own place in the society (whether we are poor or rich, male or female, young or old…).

The rules of justice are those we would agree under these conditions.(Ignoring your social position)



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				- Rule 1 – Equal liberty principle: Society ought to safeguard the greatest liberty for each person compatible with an equal liberty for all others.


				- Rule 2 – Difference principle: Society ought to promote an equal distribution of wealth, except for inequalities that serve as incentives to benefit everyone (including the least advantaged group) and are open to everyone on an equal basis.


					- 社会倾向于分配平等，除了对所有人皆有益的激励

		- Robert Nozick's Libertarianism

			- whatever you earn fairly, through hard work and just agreements, is yours, and taking it away from you is unjust. 

- Animal Ethics

- Environmental ethics

	- Core question : Does the fact that it has value depend on human beings or not?

	- Suppose environment has value, whether it is dependaent on human beings

		- YES: ANTROPRCENTRISM(人类本位说）

			- We need resources and environment to live in

		- NO: ANTI_ANTROPOCENTRISM

			- Intrinsic values and rights of nature

			- INDIVIDUALISM:

Our duties depend on the rights of individual beings



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			- HOLISM:

Our duties depend on the values and rights of entire species and whole ecosystems

Metaethics

  • Subject: 1.Answer non-moral questions about morality 2.形而上学，探讨认知论与语义学问题，不聚焦于具体问题该分支从形而上学思考伦理问题，不聚焦于具体的问题，而是从从伦理学之外角度来思考道德实践（抽象的语义学，认知论问题）

    • main branches主要学派

      • Cultural relativism

        • 概念：道德评价应基于文化背景

          • What is right or wrong depends on the basic moral standards of that culture

        • 横向：与道德绝对主义认为道德评价普适性相反

          • moral absolutism: no relative to a person,society or culture

        • Two main arguments

          • Anthropological Argument

            • 研究表明：不同社会与文化背景有不同的道德评判标准

            • Problem

              • admit cultural relativism doesn’t mean there is nothing universally right

              • doubt about the degree of cultural difference, and whether the difference is about moral norms

          • Rationally unsolvabmoral disagreements Argument

            • Some moral agreements can’t be solved rationally

            • Problem

              • Actually there are rational methods to moral domain

                • Coherent reasoning, Compassionate attitude

        • Other problems

          • What does count as a culture? 文化的范畴

          • People belong to more than one cultures

          • It breaks up the common ground for all the cultures

          • Customs can change, and even the people in the same culture can hold different views

      • Moral subjectivism

        • Argument

          • What is right/wrong is relative to the feelings and desires of asubject. Values exist only as preferences of individuals

        • Problem

          • Makes moral values and norms depend completely on the preferences and desires of a subject

      • Cognitivism and non-cognitivism

        • Non-cognitivism

          • Moral judgement express non-cognitive mental states (情感，欲望，感受）
            Not supposed to represent things as they are not evaluated depending on whether it is true or false

            • Moral judgement is not factual

            • Often associated with a rejection of the reality

          • Examples

            • Emotivism, Expressivism, Prescriptivism

              • Emotivism

                • Moral judgments do not express beliefs but emotions, sentiments or disapproval

                • Important points

                  • Moral disagreements is not a matter of contradictory beliefs but sentiments

                  • Different from Subjectivism which is cognitivism（注意有无认知过程）

                  • A form of projectivism(将自己的情感投射到外界，形成对现实的认识

          • Main arguments

            • Not strong epistemological and metaphysical commitments

            • Argument from the motivational force of moral judgement

              • 我们不可避免地在道德道德动机中涉及非认识论的内容，因为非认识论的内容可被不清晰提及

          • Problem: The Frege-Geach problem

            • How to guarantee a valid compositional semantics for the logical relations amongst moral statements and between these statements and descriptive statements, since these statements do not have a truth value

              • 无法解决当一堆无法判断真值的陈述组合的语句的真值

            • Counterintuitivity

              • There are no right or wrong actions

            • Moral error

              • How to explain moral error if the moral discourse does not express cognitive states

            • Mind dependence and relativism

              • Moral judgements are subject to changes in the feelings and emotions of the subjects

        • Cognitivism

          • Moral judgement express cognitive mental issues(beliefs)

          • Supposed to represent things as they are

          • Can be assessed right and wrong

      • *‘Best opinion accounts’ *

        • Consists of versions of Constructivism

          • moral turths exist

          • Moral properties are partially or completely constituted by a subject

          • actual observer: subjectivism, constructivism
            ‘Best opinions’ : ideal obverser

        • Argument

          • X is morally P(good,bad,right,wrong) means that X tends to cause a certain specific response on the part of an ideal

            • Cognitivism

            • Antirealism

              • 没有完全独立于主观意识的道德事实，但道德事实是存在的（道德事实一定会与特定主体相关）

            • Relevant responses come from the ideal subjects

              • 但强调主体的理想性

        • Advantage

          • Metaphysical

            • On the one hand, we don’t need to postulate all moral facts totally independent of minds
              On the other hand, we will not slide into entire relativism, which break down the common ground of normal beings

          • Epistemological

            • Easier to explain how can we know facts

        • Problem

          • Circularity

            • It’s hard to define the ideal condition and observer, which forces us to take all moral values into consideration. It is a kind of circle.

          • Conditional fallacy

            • There are some cases that ideal observers will not judge its rightness or wrongness

      • Moral realism

        • There are objective moral facts independent of the subjects’ minds

        • feature

          • Cognitivism: moral statements and opinions are supposed to contain moral reality

          • Moral reality consists of a domain of objective facts, not dependent on the mind of a subject

        • Difference between those

          • What is the nature of these moral facts

            • Non-natural properties

            • Natural properties

              • Reducilble to other natural properties studied by other psychological properties

              • Not reducible to other natural properties studied by other psychological properties

        • Objection

          • Moore’s open question argument
            We can not use natural properties(non-normative forms) to define normative notions

            • Natural property is always non-trivial,open and meaningful question

        • Advantage (intuitive)

          • corresponds to common sense

          • consistent with our sense that moral facts can always be learned

          • Some moral principles seems necessary

        • Problem

          • The existence of moral facts is strange

          • How can one learn about moral facts

      • Error Theory

        • Main argument

          • According to a certain part of discourse D,the statement of D are systematically and uniformly false

        • The argument of J.Mackie

          • Conceptual Thesis: Our concept of a moral property is a concept of an objective and categorically prescriptive property.

          • Ontological Thesis: There are no categorically prescriptive and objective facts and properties.

          • Conclusion: There is nothing in the world to which moral concepts refer. There are no facts or properties that make our moral judgments true. Our moral judgments are systematically false.

        • Property

          • Cognitivism Theory

          • Radical thesis, against common sense

        • Problem

          • It is a mistake to think that moral facts are radically different from other facts studied by the natural and social sciences.

          • It seems reasonable to explain the normative and motivational force of moral judgments without abandoning realism.

          • The same considerations about moral normativity can be extended to other types of normativity for which an error theory doesn’t seem very plausible.

    • 研究对象：从外部视角来研究伦理，以旁观者视角评判，不涉及道德评价

    • 目标：Answer non-moral questions about morality

      • Semantic questions(语义学的）

        • 思考道德审问的内涵

      • Metaphysical questions（形而上学的）

        • questions about the nature and existence of moral facts

      • Epistemological questions（认识论的）

        • Source of moral knowledge

Basic moral categories

Denotic

terminology obligatory,right,wrong,optional,unjust,duty,what one ought to do, permissible, forbidden
may be held responsible and blameworthy for complying or not with a norm
be committed to constraints bearing on the abilities
词汇的强制性，划定行为的可执行性，允许，强制等

Evaluative

Emotional, Gradable, Large domain、
常带有情感倾向与价值判断

Aretaic

About the evaluation of moral characters and persons

定义 definition

Domain of the philosophy with moral normativity

  • Normativity: assessment or evaluations of sb. or sth.Expressions:
    good , bad , better , worse than , should , ought , may , permitted , forbidden , prohibited
    Assessments:
    positive negative neutral
    Gap between : what is and what ought to be

  • Roles of normativity

    • Evaluative role（ 起道德评判的准则标准）

    • Guiding-Motivational role （引导主体向善-自我驱动）

    • Explanatory-Justificatory role （解释、辩解作用）

  • Kinds of normativity

    • DescriptiveEmpirical :经验主义
      Abstract
      Modal: 模式的，情态的

    • Normativelegal
      aesthetic 美学的
      prudential 审慎的
      epistemic 认知论的
      moral
      technical

  • How to judge moral normativity

    • Motivational force and over riddingness

    • universalizability and impartially（公平公正）

    • Impersonality(非个人的，即具有普适意义）

    • Connection with blame and praise: good to be praised , and bad to be blamed