Philosophy 2030 Introduction to Ethics Class #10

1. Philosophy 2030 Introduction to Ethics Class #10 Congratulations, all. Job well done!!! (So far  ) This Week: Class Story/Essay/Memoir Due. “42” Worksheet. Discuss Chapter 7, pp. 320-327. Next Week: No Class !!! Final Exam will be posted on Quia this Friday (about noon). Submit FINAL EXAM by email (pdickey2@mccneb.edu) BEFORE 5/21, 6:00 P.M. For every 4 hours the exam is late, a full grade will be reduced. NO EXCEPTIONS. One minute over counts the full four hours 

2. Online Course & Instructor Feedback ONE DAY LEFT! Please Don’t Forget!!! 4/15/14/ - 5/15/14

3. Class Discussion

4. Video: The Four of Us Are Dying An Episode of The Twilight Zone (1960)

5. Chapter Seven: Personhood, Rights, and Justice

6. What is a Person? • Only a true person has ethical duties and obligations. • Only a true person is eligible to receive the benefits of ethical rights. • Although we in the Western world would be hard pressed to deny personhood to others explicitly and logically, do we in essence often do so implicitly? • Historically, frequently cultures have granted personhood to a class of individuals: males only, landowners, or denied it to classes of individuals: foreigners, POWs, criminals, children, mentally incompetent individuals, gays and lesbians. • Could there be Ethical justification to do so? Or is respect for all human beings as persons a universal ethical value? • Immanuel Kant’s ethical view, as are many views, dependent on the nature of a person. By such, he means a moral agent who can rationally evaluate the categorical imperative. But is a human being who does not function rationally a person in a fully ethical sense?

7. What is a Person? • When a human being is denied the basic human rights that recognize them as a person we call it discrimination. • This is a classical example of what Immanuel Kant would suggest is treating someone as a means to an end. • Most (perhaps all of us) agree that if a person is deprived of personhood by acts of discrimination, her right to personhood must be restored, but should an attitude of discrimination be tolerated in a free society as an expression of free speech or free thought? • Would this be wrong in principle or would it be right or wrong based on consequences? • What about the person who is truly evil (based on what you may ask, of course)? But assuming we do know, we must ask further should an evil person still have the rights of personhood? -- if I know that a person will always lie to me, should I still be obligated to tell him the truth?

8. How Does a Person Obtain Rights? • Our Western heritage asserts that persons have natural rights. That is, we have rights from the very nature of being a person. We are born with such rights. • We have inherited this view from various philosophers of the seventeenth century. • Thomas Hobbes argued that a person has the right “to do what it takes to stay alive.” The other side of this for Hobbes is that we must live under a natural law that prohibits us from doing harm to others. • Hobbes went on to argue that other rights (e.g. property) came from our social contract. • John Locke argued that there are three natural rights: life, liberty, and property.

9. How Does a Person Obtain Rights? • John Bentham denied the existence of natural rights and argued that all rights are given by the society in its laws. • John Stuart Mill, as you recall, argued that a person has the right to be left alone if he is doing no harm to society. • Libertarians following Mill typically distinguish between negative rights and positive rights. According to this view, positive rights are those rights which obligate others to act on your behalf. Negative rights are those which prohibit others to act against you. • Negative rights include rights such as freedom of speech, private property, freedom from violent crime, freedom of worship, habeas corpus, a fair trial, freedom from slavery and the right to bear arms. • Positive rights include police protection of person and property and the right to counsel, as well as economic, social and cultural rights such as public education, health care, social security, and a minimum standard of living.

10. How Does a Person Obtain Rights? • Libertarians typically believe that a person fundamentally has negative rights. • John Hospers and Ayn Rand suggest that our basic right is not to be interfered with. • Other philosophers (typically liberals) emphasize positive rights. • Karl Marx suggested that a person has the right for his needs to be satisfied. He would allow the sacrifice of negative rights in order to achieve this. • Most philosophers do not go as far as Marx, but John Rawls argues that negative rights are fairly meaningless without positive rights. What is the good in having free speech if one is starving to death?

11. What Does Equality Mean? • We typically wish to pronounce that persons are equal. Such seems to be the principle of fairness. But what does this really mean? Our text suggests two different versions of equality: • 1. Fundamental Equality. That all persons should be treated equally by the government – no special privileges (American Declaration of Independence) • 2. Social Equality. That all persons should be treated equally within the social framework – equal opportunity (Mill), e.g. voting, running for political office • Note that neither of these versions require sameness in ability or talent. Should we make dancers wear shoes of lead?

12. Justice • There are fundamentally two kinds of justice: • Criminal Justice. That is, the methods by which fundamental (and perhaps social) equality is achieved through the administration of laws. • Distributive Justice. In short, who gets what in the society? On the matter of distributive justice, John Rawls takes issue with John Stuart Mill’s libertarian view by emphasizing the importance of positive rights to achieve fairness in distributive justice. He suggests that everyone should have equal access to social goods. He asks us to consider his “thought experiment” in which we must determine the rules for society without knowing what our position in it will be. This view is Kantian in spirit.

13. Applied Ethics What is death? What is a life worth living?

14. THIS CLASS MAY BE OVER, But wait! What, now? I know you really dig studying Ethics and Morality. Where can you get MORE? Have you ever thought of free online classes?

15. Coursera The Ohio State University. Technology and Ethics with Robert Bailey May 19th 2014 -- 7 weeks long Princeton University. Practical Ethics with Peter Singer Mar 1st 2014 -- 12 weeks long Johns Hopkins University. Guinea Pigs, Heroes & Desperate Patients: The History & Ethics of Human Research with Jeffrey Kahn, Alan C Regenberg, Debra JH Mathews & Joseph Ali Duke University. Responding to 9/11 with David Schanzer Yale University. Moralities of Everyday Life with Paul Bloom.

16. PHLX101-01: Introduction to Bioethics • Introduction to Bioethics explores some of the most difficult - and fascinating - moral challenges we face in health, medicine, and emerging technologies. • Starts: 15 Apr 2014, Georgetown • ER22.1x: Justice • Justice is an introduction to moral and political philosophy, including discussion of contemporary dilemmas and controversies. • Starts: 8 Apr 2014, Harvard