The ideal observer view defines “good” as how we would feel if we were fully rational and combines reason and feeling. We would pick our moral principles by trying to become as informed and impartial as possible, and then seeing what we desire. “X is good” means “We’d desire X if we were fully informed and had impartial concern for everyone. For example, (ADD AN EXAMPLE HERE). The IO view claims that we need to combine our feelings with reason when we perform moral thinking. Feelings and reason are both a part of life and they work together in every action or decision we make. As an example, think about grammar and how we react to grammatical errors. When reading a sentence, our feelings alert us to any errors; we get a feeling that something is “off” about it and this makes us …show more content…
Another claim that the ideal observer view makes is that rational moral thinking requires being fully informed and impartial. To be informed, we must base our feelings and decisions on a correct assessment of the situation, gathering all the information we possibly can. To be impartial, we must make moral judgements from a standpoint that shows concern for everyone. Another way to describe this is to say we should make moral judgments based off the views of an ideal observer – an imaginary person of supreme moral wisdom. To say something is good means we would desire it if we were ideal observers. The idea of an ideal observer gives us a way to understand the meaning of moral judgements and a method to form them. As an example, (INSERT AND DISCUSS EXAMPLE). Another claim that the IO view makes is that it gives objective ways to criticize moral issues such as racism. If we consider the Nazi viewpoint that Jewish people should be persecuted, we can easily show that they are not informed or impartial, and therefore their view is not good like they believe. We can blame this uninformed way of thinking on factual errors or ignorance. A Nazi’s attitudes could be based on
The Relationship lens demonstrates a preference for reasoning over intuition and community over the individual. Under this ethical lens, people are more inclined to use facts and logic to solve problems and reach desired objectives. They tend to design processes and well-defined structures that lead decision making and ethical judgement.
Activities in the concentration camp struck fear within the hearts of the people who witnessed them, which led to one conclusion, people denied the Holocaust. Nazis showed no mercy to anybody, including helpless babies. “The Nazis were considered men of steel, which means they show no emotion” (Langer 9). S.S. threw babies and small children into a furnace (Wiesel 28). These activities show the heartless personality of the Nazis. The people had two options, either to do what the S.S. told them to do or to die with everyone related to them. A golden rule that the Nazis followed stated if an individual lagged, the people who surrounded him would get in trouble (Langer 5). “Are you crazy? We were told to stand. Do you want us all in trouble?”(Wiesel 38). S.S guards struck fear in their hostages, which means they will obey without questioning what the Nazis told them to do due to their fear of death. Sometimes, S.S. would punish the Jews for their own sin, but would not explain their sin to the other Jews. For example, Idek punished Wiesel f...
This requires always taking into account the rational goals of moral agents when making decisions that may affect them. The more important the goals are to the agents, the greater the importance of not obstructing them. Since Sally’s theory has two separate principles, she accounts for the possibility that they will overlap. To do so, she includes an option on how to resolve the conflict. According to the theory, if the principles lead to conflicting actions, then moral agents should resolve the conflict on a case-by-case basis by deciding which principle should be followed given the proposed actions and circumstances.
In the book “Ordinary Men” it shows the evolution from traumatized obedience to passionate murderer. It is clear that the amalgamation of war, racism, and community were important influences in understanding the assimilation of these men into the Nazi ideology (Browning, 186). Browning says it best in the lines on page 186;
The definition of “good” is not as black-and-white as approval and disapproval according to Aquinas. He defines “good” as more “enticing” or “desirable”. The most universal type of goodness is the idea that everything is good as everything is being.
Support for the Nazi party was due to the growing belief that it was a
Gilbert Harman lays out his moral relativism theory with “inner judgments”, the statements concerned with “ought”, in Moral Relativism Defended. However, he assumes an important premise of his theory to be true, which is the reason that I will prove the missing premise – that moral relativism is true – in this paper. Moreover, his form of moral relativism with his “four-place predicate ‘Ought(A,D,C,M),’ which relates an agent A, a type of action D, considerations C, and motivating attitudes M,” has brought about both meta-ethical and practical concerns. He argues that these inner judgments are only possible if agent A acknowledges considerations of the circumstance C, invokes motivating attitudes M, and supports the action D with C and M. In
Adolf Hitler (the Führer or leader of the Nazi party) “believed that a person's characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and behavior were determined by his or her so-called racial make-up.” He thought that those “inherited characteristics (did not only affect) outward appearance and physical structure”, but also determined a person’s physical, emotional/social, and mental state. Besides these ideas, the Nazi’s believed tha...
Kant’s moral philosophy is built around the formal principles of ethics rather than substantive human goods. He begins by outlining the principles of reasoning that can be equally expected of all rational persons regardless of their individual desires or partial interests. It creates an ideal universal community of rational individuals who can collectively agree on the moral principles for guiding equality and autonomy. This is what forms the basis for contemporary human rig...
In the article “Moral Realism and Moral Judgments”, Frederik Kaufman argues that judgments of fact display a certain degree of conceptual sensitivity to error which is not present in moral judgments. He concludes from this that moral judgments cannot be a subset of judgments of fact. In setting up his argument, Kaufman claims that for the most part we form judgments of fact in virtue of natural facts being a certain way, entailing that correct judgments are causal consequences of natural facts.2 Under this conception, moral judgments, if they are indeed a subset of judgments of fact, must also be causal consequences of natural facts3. This conception also gains for the moral realist the idea that moral knowledge is possible, for if there is a causal connection, then the moral judgments gained are gained because of certain natural facts.
There are many arguments for moral realism, one of which is presented by David Enoch, who posits a unique explanation of how normative truths can exist. He argues for moral realism by using his Indispensability Argument, which explains the necessity of normative facts in deliberation. I will argue that Enoch’s claim is valid in that it fairs well against opposition, however it shows weakness by not addressing moral subjectivity.
In order to properly define judgments of perception and judgments of experience, one must first examine the general framework for thought that precedes them. Kant begins by breaking cognition into two distinct parts: analytic and synthetic judgments (p. 9). Analytic judgments are simply statements about the status of some object, and essentially serve as definitions. Analytic judgments are true by virtue, as they “express nothing in the predicate but what has...
In this paper I will defend David Hume’s Moral Sense Theory, which states that like sight and hearing, morals are a perceptive sense derived from our emotional responses. Since morals are derived from our emotional responses rather than reason, morals are not objective. Moreover, the emotional basis of morality is empirically proven in recent studies in psychology, areas in the brain associated with emotion are the most active while making a moral judgment. My argument will be in two parts, first that morals are response-dependent, meaning that while reason is still a contributing factor to our moral judgments, they are produced primarily by our emotional responses, and finally that each individual has a moral sense.
Inner judgements are critiques about a person’s particular behaviour and what they should or should not have done. Judgements include labels that outline a person’s behaviour or lifestyle. An example from Harman’s moral relative defence of moral relativism is that aliens are landing on earth, these aliens have no moral or emotional attachment to the human race and therefore view no issue
In his best known work on moral theory Nicomachean Ethics (350 BCE, p.1131), Aristotle proposes that to be impartial is to ‘treat like cases alike’.1 Another commonly accepted definition of impartiality is, ‘to be unbiased by one's personal preferences or interests in one's judgments’.2 Indeed, many philosophers accept these definitions as being trivially true. However, Bernard Gert suggests that the concept of impartiality is not so simple. In his work, Impartiality and Morality (2008, p.4), Gert proposes the following definition of impartiality, ‘A is impartial in respect R with regard to group G if and only if A's actions in respect R are not influenced at all by which member(s) of G are benefited or harmed by these ...