Morality

1. Morality

2. What is Morality? • Deceptively easy question • A means of determining right and wrong

3. Utilitarianism • Morality is the greatest good for the greatest number of people • Morally good actions produce the greatest utility • Utility is typically happiness or pleasure

4. Jeremy Bentham • First real utilitarian philosopher • All actions are motivated by pursuit of pleasure • The Hedonic Calculus

5. John Stuart Mill • Mental pleasures are greater than physical pleasures • The Harms Principle: “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”

6. Rule Utilitarianism • Calculating utility for every action is a lot of work! • Instead, evaluate the utility of rules, then follow the rules • Solves some of the more pressing issues with utilitarianism

7. Negative Utilitarianism • Do the least harm to the least number of people • Pain is a greater motivator than pleasure • Problem of painless euthanasia

8. Pros of Utilitarianism • Everybody understands utilitarian calculus • Weighing impacts in round is easy • Relatively simple to run and works with a large variety of cases and impacts • It just works

9. Cons of Utilitarianism • Very hard to quantify happiness • Who’s happiness do we prioritize? • Majoritarian abuses • Making people happy isn’t always the best course of action

10. Utilitarianism in Healthcare

11. Consequentialism • Morality of an action is based on its consequences • An ends based framework. Also referred to as Teleology

12. Variants of Consequentialism • Rule Consequentialism • MohistConsequentialism • State level consequentialism • Ethical altruism • Auguste Comte • Best consequences for everybody else

13. Deontology • Actions are moral in and of themselves • Adherence to rules or duties determines morality • Means not ends • Intentions and motives, not outcomes

14. Deontology Variants • Contractarianism • Morality determined through social pressures and outside influences, like contracts • Divine command theory • Rights Theory

15. Pros of Deontology • Allows you to discount consequentialist impacts • You don’t need to defend plans or implementation • Gives you a clear definition of morality

16. Cons of Deontology • Moral grey areas • What happens when duties conflict? • Layperson’s understanding of deontology can be limited • Often collapses into utilitarianism

17. Deontology in Healthcare

18. Immanuel Kant • German philosopher born in 1724 • Attempted to apply practical reason to morality • Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals • Hypothetical duties are not morally binding

19. The Categorical Imperative • Act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law. • Moral actions are intrinsically good • The only thing we can know is good is will

20. The Categorical Imperative • Humans are independent moral agents who are ends in and of themselves • “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end”

21. Pros of Kant • Absolute morality, clear positions and definitions • You can disregard edge cases and hypothetical situations • Avoids a number of subjective or relativistic criticisms of morality

22. Cons of Kant • Could I lie to a Nazi? • Conflicting universal claims • Universal moral systems are unrealistic, nobody actually follows them • Why is Kant’s view of what morality should be universal?

23. Moral Relativism • Morality is dependant on the individual or social group • Subject to cultural and social pressures • Can differ wildly from person to person, place to place

24. Descriptive relativism • Moral disagreements exist • It’s not up to us to condemn or praise different moral systems • Default position for most anthropology and sociology • Not a common debate position

25. Normative Relativism • Not only do moral disagreements occur, but you should tolerate those who disagree with you • Of course that might just be your opinion • This is the kind of relativism that makes morality more or less meaningless

26. Ethical Egoism • People ought to act in their own best interest • Who better to know what I need than Me? • I can’t know what you need, and shouldn’t try to • James Rachels, Ayn Rand • More in the Capitalism lecture

27. Pros of Moral Relativity • Morality can be meaningless! • Multiple moral definitions can exist simultaneously • Allows you to disregard moral impacts • Very high specificity

28. Cons of Moral Relativity • Morality can be meaningless! • If moral relativity is true, moral definitions are hard to justify • Might force you to admit some awkward things

29. Relativity and Healthcare

30. Moral Skepticism • We can’t know enough about morals to make accurate moral judgments • Doesn’t disallow the existence of absolute moral truth • Epistemological skepticism: Moral beliefs don’t respond to evidence • Morals are similar to the beliefs of the paranoid or insane

31. Moral Nihilism • Basically amorality • Even if things aren’t necessarily moral or immoral, actions can be preferable • Expressivism: Morals have no objective truth, but are still expressed as strong opinions • Error theory: Lack of observable morals leads to no possible moral judgments, all moral proclamations are mistakes

33. Ethics of care • Morality is determined by caring for individuals • Highly dependant on interpersonal relations • Feminist, doesn’t conform to a hierarchy • More details in the Feminism lecture • Carol Gilligan

34. Legal Morality • Law is a codified system of morality • Allows high specificity and a mix of absolute and relative morality • Laws can change and don’t always resemble modern morals • JurgenHabermas

35. Pragmatic Ethics • Morality could do with a dose of SCIENCE! • Morals evolve through hypothesis and testing • Draws from a number of other philosophies • Mostly descriptive, has been criticized for mixing up normative and descriptive morality

36. Situational Morality • Context is everything • Can’t make blanket assertions about morality without taking circumstances into account • Not as much a unified philosophy