Welcome to our class.
My name is Joseph DeMarco, and I’m a professor of philosophy at CSU. I write mainly in ethics, and also work and publish bioethics. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State in 1969, and have been teaching classes since 1966. I taught at Penn State as a graduate student and full time first at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. I came to CSU in 1972. My first publications are on the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism who is widely considered America’s greatest philosopher. Peirce has proved to be a large philosophical influence on my thinking about ethics.. This may seem a little surprising because he wrote little on the topic. I’m not sure I agree with anything in particular that he claimed, so I think it is his approach to doing philosophy that most influences me. After publishing on Peirce I turned to writing almost exclusive in ethics, political philosophy, and bioethics.
I’m presenting these Lessons in a way that is similar to the way I teach in class, or at least I think so. For that reason, some of this is not very formal. If I tell you to take a break, you might imagine me doing that in class, as I sometimes do. It usually happens when I’m not sure what to do next. When I say something that seems a bit controversial, at least to me, I may ask you to think about it in a parenthetical comment. Sometimes I do that for other reasons, maybe because I don’t want to draw implications that I think you should spot. Sometimes its because something I think is funny comes to my mind. I find those irresistible in class, but here I’ll keep that to a minimum, mainly because in writing things sound less funny to me.
Basic Topics
In this class we will mainly do an overview of issues in contemporary ethics. Twelve sections will cover issues ranging from method in ethics to utilitarianism.
Here are the topics:
· Method in Ethics
· Metaethics
· Moral Realism and Ethical Relativism
· Kantian Ethics
· Utilitarianism
· Rule Theory
· Particularism
· Contractarianism
· Justice
· Equality
· Resolving Moral Problems
We will be doing some seminar presentations. Those involve one of you presenting a paper, maybe three or four pages in length. Other people in the class, including me, will either comment on the paper or ask questions about it.
Back to substantive issues.
My view in ethics is a coherence view. In this position, I take seriously many moral concerns and theories. There is more to it than that. One has to order and show the relationships and interactions between various aspects of moral thinking.
I thought I should tell you that up front because I’m sure it will influence my presentations. However, I will try, and think I succeed to a good degree, to be as objective as I can. (As they say on TV, you be the judge.) Actually, holding a coherence view makes it easier for me, I think, to be fair to other views, because they influence my position.
Ok. This is a web course so we can’t chat. We have to get to work. The course begins here.
Moral Theory
Every once in a while I’ll say that every philosopher should know this. Actually, I think everything we say in this course should become part of your working philosophical “vocabulary.” But some times are always more important than other things. The following is elementary.
Moral theory is divided in a number of different ways. The first division is the distinction between whether we are examining actual moral proposals or whether we are examining the moral enterprise as such. Here is the division:
Substantive Ethics. Those doing substantive ethics tell us:
· How to come to good moral conclusions
· What principles to use in resolving moral issues
· What rules to use
· What the correct view is on topics such as justice, equality, and freedom
Not all those doing substantive ethics do all of those things. And that’s a partial list but it is enough for now. We will be examining many positions in substantive ethics, so for now we are just clarifying the distinction.
Here is an example. Many utilitarians tell us that we ought to choose the action, from among all of our alternatives, that produce the best consequences. (Be sure you understand why not all consequentialists hold this. I you don’t know why, ask me.) We are morally obligated to do this, say those utilitarians. They are making a substantive claim about what we should do, so they are engaged in substantive ethics.
Metaethics. This branch of moral philosophy is not about giving information about the right thing to do, or about specific moral values. Instead it is a general inquiry into ethics and ethical theory.
(I’m going to give an aside now because it came to mind. I use the words “ethics” and “morals,” and the like, interchangeably. I know that lots of people distinguish them, but I never found a good enough reason to do so. If you are interested in the difference, probably the best thing to do is to look them up on the web in OneLook dictionary, a good resource.)
Here is an example. We say things, at least in formal ethics, such as, “It is morally wrong to inflict needless pain.” In general, we say: “X is morally wrong,” where you could insert many kinds of statements for “X.” In metaethics, we don’t care much about what might be substituted for “X.” Instead we are interested in what, in general, it means to say that something is “morally wrong.” For one thing, metaethics is concerned about the meaning of moral terms.
Metaethics is also concerned about method in ethics, about the status of ethical claims (for example are they objective or hopelessly subjective), and so on. We will do some methethics later. But we should add right now that the distinction between substantive ethics and metaethics isn’t so clear as it may seem. For example, someone who claims that the coherence theory in ethics is the right one is talking about method. That sounds like metaethics. But what goes along with that is a moral evaluation of different ethical positions, and that sounds like substantive ethics. Although there is overlap, sometimes it is absolutely (or almost so) clear what is being done, as when someone looks at the meaning of: “X is morally good” without concern about what we should substitute for ‘X’.
For another big example (well not really ‘big’), whether ethical relativism is part of metaethics or of substantive ethics is a tough question to answer. We’ll cover ethical relativism later.
Let’s finish this part of the Lesson with another important distinction.
Substance ethics is often divided into two parts:
· Consequentialism
· Deontology
Consequentialism maintains that moral responsibilities derive from the consequences of actions. In general, good consequences indicate our moral obligations. We are morally obligated, in this view, to produce good consequences. The consequences considered are typically, but not always, morally neutral in themselves. For example, some actions lead to pleasure, but pleasure itself is neither morally good nor morally bad. More about that later. Utilitarianism is the dominant consequentialist theory.
Deontology maintains that actions are right or wrong, at least in part, independent of consequences. For example, I might have a moral obligation not to lie even if telling a lie produces better consequences. Kantian deontology is the main theory here.
This basic division isn’t exhaustive, which means that some substantive theories seem to fall outside these categories, unless we take the part about “at least in part” under deontology too seriously. When we think of virtue theory, which we will see later, it isn’t so clear which of these it fits into, if either.
Well, people think that distinctions are boring. As you now see from the above, it can be pretty interesting (at least if you think like I do).