1 / 16

Moral Philosophy & Applied Ethics

Moral Philosophy & Applied Ethics. Moral Perspectives 2. Case 1: c hoosing the best candidate.

emele
Download Presentation

Moral Philosophy & Applied Ethics

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Moral Philosophy & Applied Ethics Moral Perspectives 2

  2. Case 1: choosing the best candidate Janet runs a catering service. She has a big event coming and she needs her team to do well for the sake of the growth of the company. She needs to choose someone on her team to work overtime in order to bake the 1500 cakes required for the event. She could choose Carl or Mary. Carl is a new hire, and though he has talent, he has not proven that he is reliable with large orders. Mary has been around longer, and has proven that she is reliable. However, Mary is caring for an ill father that is dying. Janet knows this and is hesitant to ask Mary because of this. However, she goes ahead and asks Mary if she thinks she can do it. Mary tells her that she will ask her father if she can do the overtime, and he can manage alone. She does so, and tells Janet that her father said, ‘she could go ahead and work the extra time’. Mary goes ahead and tries to do the work, she fails, the event is a disaster, and her father dies. Mary is crushed, Janet is crushed, and now Mary and Janet’s relationship at work is tense. Did Janet Do the Right Thing?

  3. Care as a guide to better moral reasoning Thinking about what a Caring person would do can often help us figure out what is important in a situation. Thinking for the perspective of care often allows us to reason better about the needs and emotions of others, which often central to making a good moral decision. To think from a caring perspective one has to be moral attentive, which requires: • Engaging in sympathetic understanding. • Being aware of relationships that are at play in the situation. • Seeking accommodation and harmony for individuals involved.

  4. Factors in Moral Attention Sympathetic Understanding: When one sympathetically understands a situation one is open to sympathizing and identifying with the people involved in the situation. One aims to get information about: • What the needs are of the relevant parties. • What everyone’semotional state is. • How best to respond to the parties involved. • How someone’s emotional state might be clouding their judgment.

  5. Factors in Moral Attention Relationship Awareness: In caring for others one recognizes that their care is directed to others through relationships. • Fellow sentient creature • Fellow citizen • Friend • Sibling • Co-worker • Student • Teacher

  6. Factors in Moral Attention Accommodation and Harmony: one goal of caring for all of the relevant parties in a situation is to accommodate all of the relevant parties, including oneself to the best possible degree. The primary problem is that often one cannot accommodate everyone equally. This conflict requires that one seek harmony in the situation to the best degree possible. Caring for others in a situation requires aiming for harmony as best as possible.

  7. Case 1,from the perspective of care Perhaps Janet did the wrong thing because: • She didn’t think about how Mary’s emotional state would alter her general ability to perform at work. • She didn’t think about how Mary would feel later if she failed and something happened to her father. • How success or failure would effect her relationship with Mary. • Whether or not Mary was lying about what her father said. • That perhaps there was a more creative solution involving Carl helping Mary.

  8. The Heinz Dilemma as a way of understanding the voice of care Sallyis a cancer researcher and has invented a cure for cancer. Harry and his wife Martha live near the lab where Sally has stored her cure. Martha is suffering from cancer and needs the cure, but Harry does not have the money to buy the cure. Should Harry steal enough of the drug for Martha so as to cure her?

  9. Two Kinds of Answers Principled Answer: A principle is selected and on the basis of what the principle says the dilemma is answered by simple argument. Complexity Answer: A search for more information is requested as a way of generating a negotiation between the relevant parties so that a solution that is amenable to all is attempted. The complexity answer often comes from the voice of care.

  10. Details about care as a way of dealing with moral conflict • Care is not gendered. It is possible for both men and women to activate care as a guide for dealing with moral situations. • Speaking from the voice of care is not inconsistent with desiring to give a principled moral argument for what one should do in a given situation. • Caring adds an additional dimension to how we can think about what we should do in a situation. • Caring allows us to see more of what might be going on in a situation.

  11. Care: Decision Procedure • Direct your moral attention to others. • Be open and employ sympathetic understanding. • Be aware of the need to sustain and preserve networks of care. • Act so as to preserve harmony insofar as you can. • Shortcut to action: What would my ideal self do?

  12. Fairness as a common concern • We all have an intuitive conception of fairness. • We all see fairness as a reason forbelieve that something is right or wrong. • There are different conceptions of what fairness is. • The different conceptions of fairness lead to different answers about whether an action, a policy, or judgment is right or wrong.

  13. Two Kinds of Unfairness • Unfairness due to the misapplication of the rule. • Your teacher gives some of you an opportunity to do extra credit even when the policy says there is no extra credit. • Unfairness due to the constitution of the rule. • The rules say that only people with brown eyes can get an A.

  14. Rawls’s Veil Ignorance as a guide for choosing rules fairly Question: How do we choose a set of rules that are fair for all? Procedure: We imagine that each of is in the original position of having to negotiate which rules should govern our society. In the negotiation we each are under a veil of ignorance. That is we don’t know certain things about ourselves, such as our position in society, gender, or eye color. Assumption: we are all averse to exposing ourselves to catastrophic risk.

  15. Using the veil of ignorance Behind the veil of ignorance we ask ourselves the following: Given a possible set of rules, (i) would the rules be chosen by rational negotiators from behind a veil of ignorance? (ii) Would the rules be acceptable to the least well off person in the group? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘no’ then we have an argument for why the rules are unfair.

  16. Example Potential Rule: Only people with blue eyes will be allowed to have the best jobs in society. Decision makers: Jane with blue eyes, Marco with brown eyes. Behind the veil of ignorance: Neither Jane nor Marco knows their eye color. Questions: Would both of them choose the rule? Would the rule be to the advantage of the least well off person (i.e. Marco)?

More Related