Divine Command Ethics Case Study

Ethical Approaches

Divine Command Ethics

Divine command ethics is the idea a “divine being who has set down a finite series of rules that adherents claim can provide guidance to most, it not all, moral decisions” (Edge & Groves, 2006, p. 48). In this method of moral reasoning “religious belief remains a primary factor, indeed for many people the most important factor, in moral reasoning” (Widdows, 2007, p. 99). In Divine Command ethics the rules, beliefs and commandments of the religion guide followers in their decision making process and thus their actions.

The Roman Catholic church places emphasis on the family unit and on the sanctity of marriage and life. From a Catholic perspective life begins at conception as such, “the human zygote

Aristotle follows in the paths created by Socrates and Plato regarding ethics and agrees the “taking of virtues to be central to a well-lived life” (Kraut, 2014). In virtue ethics great emphasis is placed on the virtues or traits a good moral person should have, thus someone who has good moral character will act in moral ways (Edge & Groves, 2006). “Virtue ethics hold that if is not only important to do the right thing but equally to have the right disposition, motivation and traits for being good and doing right” (Edge & Groves, 2006, p.

John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, “his views are not entirely original, having their roots in the British empiricism of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, and in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham” (Wilson, 2014). This fundamental basis of this type of ethical reasoning is to incase the amount of pleasure and decrease the amount of pain. In Utilitarianism ethics the idea is to “maximize the overall good or in a slightly different version, of producing ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’” (DesJardins, 2014, p.