Introduction:
Cross-culturally there are many difference between moral values. The extremes of these moral differences include cannibalism or incest which were normal in some cultures, closer to home there are value differences between liberals and conservatives or between the South and the West, any two cultures will have different ideas of moral values. There are three potential sources to base moral values on, faith, emotion, or reason. Individuals all have different ideas about what is moral and they conflict with one another. If morals were based solely reason everyone would eventually reach the same moral ground. If they could be based only on reason, it would mean universal morals. However, based on how we determine our morals now, where
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Thought experiments such as The Trolley Problem can help give insight into how people make moral decisions and from there, what they rely on to make the decision. In the first situation of The Trolley Problem, you could pull a switch and kill one person instead of five. Here most people would pull the switch. However, in the second situation you would push someone off of a bridge to stop the trolley before it reached the five other people. In the second situation, even though one person dies to save five, the same as the first situation, more people would consider pushing someone off the bridge to be wrong (Levy). This suggests that we are not utilitarian and are not solely rational in our morals as even though both situations have the same number of deaths to save the same number of lives, one is considered to be more morally …show more content…
It is clear that “emotions arise when we respond to a wide range of morally significant events, including rudeness, unfairness, law-breaking, and saving lives” (Prinz). Are emotions simply a side effect of moral judgments, or are they involved in how we determine morals and how we interact in our world? Emotions are often used by parents to convey moral values to their children, through conditioning and experience, violating moral rules becomes associated with negative emotions (Prinz). This could suggest that emotions are important in moral development. The importance of emotions in moral development can be seen even more clearly in research done on psychopaths as they are “deficient in negative emotions, especially fear and sadness. They rarely experience these emotions, and they have remarkable difficulty even recognizing them in facial expressions and speech sounds” (Prinz). Without these negative emotions, psychopathic individuals do not develop remorse, guilt, or empathetic distress the same way as the majority of the population does, this could leave them lacking in the understanding of morality and the ideas of what is wrong. “They treat moral wrongs as if they were merely conventional. Psychopaths treat the word ‘wrong’ as if it simply meant ‘prohibited by local authorities’” (Prinz). It is clear that
Yes, there can be different moral rules for different ethnic and cultural groups. Every culture should be allowed to follow their own set of moral rules to a certain extent .
In general, we are morally permitted to turn the trolley in order to save five, but kill one. On the other hand, we are not permitted to transplant the organs of one healthy person in order to save five who will otherwise die. According to consequentialists, there is no moral difference between “Trolley” and “Transplant.” Consequentialists believe that “consequences are the only things of moral relevance” (Quinn 287). Actually, the consequences of both cases are either saving the lives of five or the life of one. However, our moral judgement leads that the case of “Trolley” is morally permitted, but “Transplant” isn’t permitted. Why do we think that they are different? I think that the difference between the two cases come from the doctrine
Kant says that good will is the only thing that is good. Human’s will, functioning well, is the only thing worth moral approval. It doesn’t matter if the person is smart or courageous if the person has a bad will. If someone is doing something for the wrong reason, but they still have courage doing it, it’s still not moral. The point of reason isn’t happiness, which is opposite from what Aristotle says. Some actions might seem like duties, but are just conformities with duty and because of that have no moral worth. An example we used in class would be the case of the misanthropic philanthropist who hates airports, but goes and helps the refugees because it’s the right thing to do. This shows that happiness doesn’t always come with moral
David Hume sought out to express his opinion in which sentiment is seen as the grounding basis for morality. This sentiment is acting as the causal reasoning for why we have morality or act in a moral way. David Hume, as well as Kant, believe that causal necessity governs humans lives and actions. In this essay, I will show how Hume, provides an argument in favor of sentiment being the foundation of our morality, rather than his predecessors who favored reason. To do this, I will begin to outline Hume’s theories, highlighting his main ideas for grounding morality on sentiment and bring up some possible counterarguments one of which being Immanuel Kant's theories and how that might potentially weaken his argument and how the roots of morality
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason” (Kant 1). The usage of reason as a representation of one’s intellect is a common trait in the 21st century. Happiness, a positive emotion, tends to blur one’s judgement and coerces philosophers to look upon its relevance when formulating ethical decisions. When considering the role of emotion in ethical decisions, one must consider the contrasting views of Immanuel Kant, an 18th Prussian philosopher that focussed his philosophies around the doctrine of reason, in comparison to that of John Stewart Mill, a 19th century British philosopher that followed the doctrine of happiness through the ideology of utilitarianism. I shall argue that when making ethical decisions, it is imperative that happiness should play a very recessive, if any, role in the decision making process as it does not represent morality in any form.
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...
The idea of a perspective view when it comes to the morals of another’s decision could be said that “[b]eauty is in the eye of the beholder” (Margaret Wolfe Hungerford). Morals can be defined as, “Normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons”(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Of Morality). The code of conduct is reference that people like to go to when asked what their reasoning for doing a certain action over another, and if that person had deemed their actions morally wrong or right. The definition of perspective is that “[t]he capacity to observe items, occurrences, and ideas in realistic proportions and unions” (Pam Nugent, Perspective).
Kant attempts to make sense of what the moral law would have to be like if it was present and to show that it is indeed present, and humans should realize this because this moral logic is reliable for humans. The foundation is that morals must be attentively clear of everything experiential, so that we can know how much pure rationale can attain. We can also know from what origins it forms its a priori principles. Feelings, such as compassion, are essentially instinctive, and cannot be the foundation for a fixed and universally well balanced structure. This conveys that individual experiences cannot give the idea that something is “necessary” -- it should come from pure rationality, which contributes to Kant’s argument of this quote: rational concepts have a strong connection to the world; furthermore, if moral ideas were grasped from experiences, then they are not dependent on universal logic and they would be especially corrupted.
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.
The Bystander at the Switch case is a fundamental part of Thomson’s argument in “Trolley Problem.” The basis of her paper is to explain the moral difference between this case, which she deems morally permissible (1398), and the Transplant case, which she deems morally impermissible (1396). In the Bystander at the Switch case, a bystander sees a trolley hurtling towards five workers on the track and has the option of throwing a switch to divert the trolley’s path towards only one worker. Thomson finds the Bystander at the Switch case permissible under two conditions:
Every individual is taught what is right and what is wrong from a young age. It becomes innate of people to know how to react in situations of killings, injuries, sicknesses, and more. Humans have naturally developed a sense of morality, the “beliefs about right and wrong actions and good and bad persons or character,” (Vaughn 123). There are general issues such as genocide, which is deemed immoral by all; however, there are other issues as simple as etiquette, which are seen as right by one culture, but wrong and offense by another. Thus, morals and ethics can vary among regions and cultures known as cultural relativism.
Trolley Investigation Choosing a Variable Before I begin the investigation, I must first decide which variable I should investigate. Variables can be divided into 2 major groups: dependant variables and independent variables. In measuring the behaviour of a trolley the dependant variable is speed. This is because the speed will change when other variables are changed. An independent variable is a variable which cannot be affected by other variables.
Kant believed that morality has to be something free and freely controlled by the person taking the moral action excluding consequences because consequences are not controllable. Morality is freely chosen and legislated universal law that any rational being could construct and all rational beings who want to be moral do
Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection” (87). In conclusion, I believe that Hume thinks that reason, while not completely useless, is not the driving force of moral motivation. Reasons are a means to sentiments, which in turn are a means to morality, but without reasons there can still be sentiments. There can still be beauty. Reasons can not lie as the foundation of morality, because they can only be true or false.
“Different cultures have different moral codes”, James Rachels discusses in his article Why Morality Is Not Relative? (Rachels, p. 160). A moral code is a set of rules that is considered to be the right behavior that may be accepted by a group of individuals within a society. Each culture tends to have their own individual standards and moral codes. Moral codes are guidelines laid out by a cultures ancestors. Standards are guidelines set forth by the individual themselves. Standards and morals don’t always have to be the same, but there are instances where they are. The moral codes claim what is “right” and what is “wrong”. Moral codes outline what behaviors individuals are supposed to make. These codes are basically laws, but specifically