Introduction to Ethical Theories

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Ethics is the study of how people should live. people have different views and beliefs of how they're supposed to live their life. people from all over the world have different ethical beliefs and different ways to determine which beliefs are right and which are wrong. when you visit a different country, you notice things they are doing and those things might seem wrong to you and you would never consider doing what they have just done but in their society its normal and everyone does it. inside the margins of this paper I am going to analyze the top three models used to determine a morally significant being based on the criteria in your book. I will first define a moral agent and a morally significant being then take you through the steps to deciding what a significant being is and which criteria you would use for each.

Moral agents are beings that have a full advantage in their society. They are able to create ideas, formulate an action and decipher the differences between right and wrong as well as execute them in a human language all the while, understanding the circumstances associated with their decision making process. We can relate this to ethics because moral agents make decisions determining what has value, what is important, and what has worth to our society. They determine the significance of other beings by careful consideration of the way our society behaves, what is expected from our culture and what our society believes is the correct way to live. Morally significant beings are beings whose interests are taken into consideration by moral agents who are trying to act ethically. Babies are considered morally significant because although they cannot yet make decisions for themselves, the presence of the baby br...

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...d they can not contribute anything to our society but their meat to use as our food.
After analyzing the three most common criteria for choosing a morally significant being I conclude that moral agents decide who is morally significant by looking at the interests of the society as well as the interest of the morally significant being and deciding if the morally significant beings interests are comparable to those of a moral agent. in my opinion, ethical relativism is a good concept because people who live together in a society can produce rational ideas which will eventually lead to ethical decisions and after that, laws.

Works Cited

Birsch, Douglas. Introduction to Ethical Theories A Procedural Approach. Long Grove: Waveland Pr, 2013. Print.
Singer, P. All Animals Are Equal. N.p.: Shiplee, B, 1999. Print.

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