Ethics Tradition Dombrowski

Aristotle:
(1) perspective: virtue and personal character
(2) explains basic notions: ex. goodness, truth, justice, and rightness
(3) standards of guiding ethical determinations

Kant:
(1) duty or obligation based on fundamental universal principle
(2) principle can be figured out rationally
(3) ethics can be understood by all people
(4) doing the right thing because it is right regardless of consequences

Utilitarianism:
(1) socially desirable course (weighs cost and benefits)
(2) tries to be fair by being impersonal
(3) treats people like interchangeable parts in machinery
(4) unresponsive to individual feelings or interests
(5) government agencies take this approach in an effort to be impartial

Which ethics code or combination do you follow? What situations do you use what? What decides that?

Mark Wicclair and David Farkas:
distinguish ethics from relativistic, self-interested approaches, the law, and religion
3 types of ethical principles:
(1) goal based (utilitarianism)
(2) duty based (kant)
(3) rights based

Aristotle:
Ethics is a subject that does not allow hard and fast answers like mathematics
Making practical and concrete the abstract, metaphysical thinking of his teacher Plato
St Thomas Aquinas - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/#A4
Ethics is about what is sought for goodness itself
Ethics derives from reason
Ethical behavior must be deliberated, actively weighed, and chosen for its own sake
One is does not behave virtuously by nature (contrary to Catholic Church: we just have many temptations)
How does this relate to today?
Some of us think that we can behave ethically occasionally and take the easy way out the rest of the way. Aristotle would question the motives of the person doing so.
Scientists distance themselves to pursue fuller truths (like philosophers of old) that are hidden to the ordinary person
Cousteau, Sagan, and religious priests throughout the ages: they speak to us not as an individual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Yves_Cousteau#Defense_of_the_environment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Scientific_advocacy
Kant:
Ethical system is based on a sense of duty
Ex. World War II
Humans are endowed with moral reason fundamental ethical principle, the categorical imperative: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal Law of Nature.
"Theory of duty is founded on the radically autonomous free will and its capacity to choose otherwise and on its reasoned self-persuasion not to choose otherwise. It is duty based in freedom. Whereas, we usually think of a duty as an onerous burden and a limitation of our freedom.
Another categorical imperative: “Act so that in your own person as well as in the person of every other you are treating mankind also as an end, never merely as a means.”
As a end? What does that mean?
Does this mean we can still treat mankind as a means as long as we treat them as an end?
Ex of treating mankind as a means: Nazi technology, making a promise as a lie

Gilligan:
Moral judgments made by women based on greater concern on feelings and welfare of others. Flexible approach to judgments that weighed contingencies
Men make a rigid insistence on impersonal rules of justice regardless of feeling and contingency
Given brief, objective description of each person
Ex. Medical board of three heart donors and 10 people in need of heart transplants
Should decisions be based on past, should we give leeway for change, would we want to be judged by our past?

Postmodernism seeks to replace modernistic attitudes and values and to rectify their negative effects

Science:
Men isolate each part
Women see the whole organism
Feminists believe we need to create an economy that gives a win-win situation and not a Darwinian male environment where the strongest survive.
Evolution of the economy as worked in the past. Point of view on bailout bill? Is it a win-win situation?

“joystick”, “cockpit”, “male and female couplings” Your take on it? I see it as words that are no longer associated with male or female. There is a reason why couplings are called male and female. The same reason in my opinion why the cpu is called the master while the memory is called the slave.

Confucian ethics:
Grounded in immediate realities not timeless absolutes
Human responsibilities as being constituted in relationships
Real world is the stage where morality is really played out
One’s behavior towards others (explains social code in countries like china and japan)
Virtue does not come from logic or reasoning but from examples of what others have done in the past
Ren, li, ye
Sense of human being related to others, traditional rituals, conscious reenactment of the fundamental sense of righteousness
Accept where you are and make the best out of it (ex. Japanese)
Eastern (Tradition). Western (Innovation) (Ex. Guns in Japan, Bushido Code)

Levinas:
Ethics is human nature in relation to others

Gert:
Morality involves actions, social relations, and avoidance of evil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
No exit