Term
| (1) What is the difference between instrumental and intrinsic goods? |
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Definition
| Intrinsic goods are goods that are good for their own sake, whereas instrumental goods are good because of their facilitating acquisition of other goods |
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Term
| 2 What is a valid argument? what is a sound argument? |
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Definition
| A valid argument is one in which the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. A sound argument is a valid argument in which the premises (and conclusion) are true. |
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Term
| 3 What is welfare hedonism? |
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Definition
| The belief that the sole intrinsic good for persons is pleasure and the absence of pain. |
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Term
| 4 What is truth realism in ethic? |
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Definition
| Cognitivism conjoined with the claim that some first order non-negated moral claims are true. Truth realism states that morality dictates right and wrong. |
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Term
| 5 What is non-cognitivism in ethics? |
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Definition
| The belief that moral claims and thoughts do not have truth values, they are simply approvals/disapprovals that cannot be classified as true or false. instead of "murder is wrong" we mean "boo murder" |
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Term
| One objection to non-cognitivism |
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Definition
| if moral claims have no truth value, argument on morals would be impossible because there would be no truth to argue about. |
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Term
| what is moral objectivism? |
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Definition
| Moral claims are are true based on facts or circumstances, and the truth of a moral claim is independent of the attitudes of persons. |
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Term
| What is the slippery slope argument for a fetus being a moral person from the moment of conception? |
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Definition
1) a human being is a moral person at some point after birth
2) there is no specific point after conception where a human turns from a non-moral person to a moral person
3) if there is no first point of moral personhood, then either a human being is not a moral person or he/she is a moral person from the point of conception |
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Term
| What is one objection to the slippery slope argument? |
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Definition
| Premise 3: Just because there is no first point of clear change among transitionary states between A and B does not show that there is no difference between A and B (e.g. acorns to oak trees, heaps to mountains) |
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Term
| Recount the nine-months version of Thomson's violinist example. What is the point? |
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Definition
| You wake up one morning (after being kidnapped) in the hospital, tubes running out of you and into an innocent violinist in the bed next to you. He needs to be connected to you, using some of your vital organs, for nine months or he will die. If you stay in connected to him for nine months, he will live and you will return to your normal life. This example is meant to draw an analogy to pregnancy and attempts to show that it is intuitively permissible to disconnect, and it is therefore permissible to have an abortion. |
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Term
| What are two claimed dissanalogies between the violinist example and pregnancy. |
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Definition
1. In the violinist example, unplugging from the violinist is letting the violinist die, whereas abortion involves killing the fetus.
2. In the violinist example, the kidnapped person was taken against his/her will, whereas a typical pregnancy results from consensual sex, in which the female must acknowledge and take responsibility for the possibility of creating a life. |
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Term
| What is the people seed example? what is the point? |
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Definition
| there are people-seeds drifting through the air and if you open your window, one may drift in and take root in your home, even if you take preventative measures like putting mesh screens on your windows. if the people seeds stay rooted in your home for 9 months, they then become people and leave, but if you remove them, they die. This example supports Thompson's argument from dependence in that it seems permissible to withdraw aid to the people seeds, and it shows that it is permissible to do the same with a fetus. |
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Term
| Give one objection to Thomson's use of the people seed example |
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Definition
| Opening a window is not analogous to consensual sex in that there is typically more effort involved and the parents bear a special responsibility of providing aid to the person that may result. |
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Term
| What is the principe of alternate possibilities? |
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Definition
| states that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. |
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Term
| What is Frankfurt's objection to the PAP? |
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Definition
| Frankfurt states that in cases in which people had planned on doing action X prior to being forced to do X, he is still responsible for doing X. |
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Term
| (16) What is one objection to Chisholm’s account of freedom of the will? |
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Definition
Someone objecting to Chisholm’s account of freedom of the will would challenge the meaning of “self-causation.”
is questioning the idea of “so is an agent’s actions caused by his existence alone?” The answer, this objector believes, is NO—it must be caused by some feeling or desire inside the agent, and this must have been caused by some action or event occurring in the past. |
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Term
| What is consequentialism. What are the two legs of consequentialist theory? |
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Definition
Consequentialism is the belief that an act is right if it is the option that brings about the most net good for all those affected by the act. The two legs of consequentialist theory are theory of the good and theory of the right.
Theory of the good allows the assessment of goodness of states of affairs and creates a rank ordering of possible outcomes of action. It is what you measure good against.
Theory of the right states that what’s right is what brings about the best consequences—or, the act that maximizes the good. |
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Term
| (17) What is the Minimal Alternative View of the treatment of animals? What revisions to our present treatment of non-human animals would follow from this view? |
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Definition
| The Minimal Alternative View of the treatment of animals is the view that animals are moral enough to not have their vital interests sacrificed for our fairly minor interests. Often fairly trivial research projects will sacrifice animals for a non-existent human benefit. But, if we follow this view, we would only use animals for things that are to extreme importance of us, and the pain/lives of many animals for more trivial things would be spared. |
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Term
| (19) What is utilitarianism? |
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Definition
| Utilitarianism is the belief that the moral worth of an action is determined by the amount of pleasure it brings. Utilitarians measure pleasure by four factors: intensity, duration, likelihood, and propinquity. It is a form of consequentialism that prescribes to welfare hedonism, except looks takes into consideration everyone's pleasure in result, not just one's own. |
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Term
| What is the difference between prescriptive and descriptive morality? |
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Definition
| Prescriptive morality is the study of moral theories that describe how a person should act, and descriptive morality studies people's moral beliefs. |
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Term
| What is one objection of Williams' to consequentialism? |
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Definition
| Utilitarianism does not take into account an individual's values and possible conflict the individual may have in bringing about the most good (e.g. the guilt and self-disgust a person has after killing someone for the "greater good" might make the action wrong in itself). |
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Term
| What are the two defining features of non-consequentialism? |
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Definition
1. That the moral correctness of an action is not solely determined by the outcome and
2. That some actions are intrinsically right or wrong |
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Term
| What is Mackie's argument from Relativism? |
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Definition
| Mackie states that there is widespread and irresolvable dispute about moral claims, and if there were moral properties independent from our beliefs, there wouldn't be these disputes. |
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Term
| (24) What is one reply Brink offers to the Argument from Relativism? |
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Definition
| these “widespread and irresolvable disagreements” are not about moral issues, but instead are about non-moral facts. It states that it is opinions about these non-moral facts that cause these arguments, not the moral claims themselves, and therefore nothing in the argument from relativism even addresses the question of whether or not morals exist objectively. |
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Term
| What is the first formulation of Kant's categorical imperative? |
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Definition
| That an action is moral only if the agent can consistently will the maxim on which he is acting be adopted by everyone. I.e. if he cannot always will the maxim on which is acting to be adopted by everyone, the action is immoral. |
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Term
| Provide one objection to the 1st formulation of the CI |
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Definition
| Some actions can be moral without having to be universalized. For example, lying to a man who is trying to kill your family is clearly moral, but under Kant's claim, it is not. |
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Term
| What is the second formulation of the categorical imperitave? |
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Definition
| Act so that you treat yourself and others always as an end but never as a means to an end. |
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Term
| Provide one objection to the 2nd categorical imperative. |
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Definition
| Many immoral acts are not necessarily intended to treat humanity as a means. (segue example) |
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