University of Kansas, Fall 2002
Philosophy 672: History of Ethics
Ben Eggleston
Class notes: introduction
The following notes correspond
roughly to what we cover, including at least a portion of what I put on the
board or the screen, in class. In places they may be more or less comprehensive than what we
actually cover in class, and should not be taken as a substitute for your own
observations and records of what goes on in class.
The following outline is designed to
be, and is in some Web browsers, collapsible: by clicking on the heading for a
section, you can collapse that section or, if it’s already collapsed, make it
expanded again. If you want to print some but not all of this outline, collapse
the parts you don’t want to print (so that just their top-level headings
remain), and then click here to print this frame.
-
three sub-fields within ethics
- applied ethics: the branch of ethics devoted to
the study of specific ethical issues, such as whether cloning is all right or
whether we are morally obliged to treat animals better than we do. Sometimes
this branch of ethics is associated with the idea of “case studies.”
- normative ethics: the branch of ethics devoted (mostly) to the development
of moral theories: theories that specify, in brief and general terms, what
actions, policies, institutions, etc., are morally acceptable. Within
normative ethics, there are three main theoretical traditions:
- virtue ethics
- deontological ethics (emphasizing duties and rules)
- consequentialist ethics (emphasizing outcomes rather than how they happen
to come about)
- meta-ethics: the branch of ethics devoted to
explaining what we are doing when we make moral judgments or engage in moral
debates. Meta-ethicists try to give accounts of such things as the meaning of
moral terms and the grounds of moral judgments.
- the orientation of the works we’ll study
- Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (fourth century B.C.) is the seminal
work of virtue ethics.
- Hume’s An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) is
essentially meta-ethical (but with consequentialist normative-ethical
leanings).
- Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) is
deontological.
- Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861) is consequentialist.
- Before you start reading Mill, there is one thing that it helps to be
aware of, and that is Mill’s main target in Utilitarianism, or what
Mill is most concerned to argue against.
- To be sure, Mill is aware of deontological theories and virtue-ethical
theories, and is trying to present a theory that will outdo these. But Mill
has another, more immediate target, and that is the approach to ethics
sometimes known as intuitionism. The core idea of this approach is that you
don’t need an elaborate theory (or any theory at all!) in order to reach
correct moral judgments; on the contrary, ordinary people can reach correct
moral judgments by just getting the facts of particular cases in view and then
thinking in a focused and dispassionate way about the moral features of those
cases; and many intuitionists also maintain that ordinary people can come up
with correct moral rules, such as perhaps “Never break a promise except in an
emergency,” in the same way—that is, with just some sincere reflection on the
merits of the rule. So whether it’s a matter of particular cases or general
principles, the intuitionist approach is basically, “Trust your conscience.”
This approach is Mill’s most immediate target as he explains and argues for
his utilitarianism.
- If you’ve read On Liberty, or are otherwise familiar with the view
Mill expresses there, then you can connect this aim of Mill’s (just described)
with his awareness of, and apathy towards, the tyranny of the majority. Mill
felt that English society in the middle of the nineteenth century was
dominated by strict customs (this was the Victorian era, after all), and that
the widespread use of intuitionism as an approach to ethics was part of the
cause of this, because it made majorities feel perfectly entitled to impose
their view on minorities. The more people who would see morality in
utilitarian terms rather than intuitionist terms, Mill thought, the better it
would be for individual liberty and social progress.