Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic

1. ETHICS, PROFESSIONALISM AND CRITICISM OF THE SOURCES MIMA LECTURE Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic Department of Computer Science and ElectronicsMälardalen University20 August 2008

2. Professional Ethics Course • Information about the course: http://www.idt.mdh.se/kurser/cd5590 http://www.idt.mdh.se/kurser/ethics/ [Website provides ethics resources including case studies and contextualized scenarios in applied/professional ethics, working examples of applied ethical problems used in teaching to highlight relevant ethical principles, materials on informed consent, confidentiality, assessment, privacy, trust and similar. ]

3. CONTENT • Identifying Ethical Issues • Basic Moral Orientations • Ethical Relativism, Absolutism, and Pluralism • Immanuel Kant The Ethics of Duty (Deontological Ethics) • Utilitarianism • Rights • Justice • The Ethics of Character: Virtues and Vices • Egoism • Moral Reasoning and Gender • Environmental Ethics • Professional Issues • Criticism of the Sources • Conclusions

4. Identifying Ethical Issues Based on: Lawrence M. Hinman, Ph.D. Director, The Values Institute University of San Diego

5. Ethics and Morality The terms ethics and morality are often used interchangeably - indeed, they usually can mean the same thing, and in casual conversation there isn't a problem with switching between one and the other. However, there is a distinction between them in philosophy!

6. Ethics and MoralityEtymology Morality and ethics have same roots, mores which means manner and customs from the Latin and etos which means custom and habits from the Greek. Robert Louden, Morality and Moral Theory

7. Ethics and Morality Strictly speaking, morality is used to refer to what we would call moral standards and moral conduct while ethics is used to refer to the formalstudy of those standards and conduct. For this reason, the study of ethics is also often called "moral philosophy."

8. Ethics and Morality • Morality: first-order set of beliefs and practices about how to live a good life. • Ethics: a second-order, conscious reflection on the adequacy of our moral beliefs.

9. ETHICS Philosophers commonly distinguish: descriptive ethics, the factual study of the ethical standards or principles of a group or tradition; normative ethics, the development of theories that systematically denominate right and wrong actions; applied ethics, the use of these theories to form judgments regarding practical cases; and meta-ethics, careful analysis of the meaning and justification of ethical claims Source: www.ethicsquality.com/philosophy.html

10. ETHICS LAW MORAL SOCIETY VALUES

11. Identifying Moral Issues • Moral concerns are unavoidable in life. • They are not always easy to identify and define.

12. Ethics as an Ongoing Conversation • Professional discussions of ethical issues in journals. • We come back to ideas again and again, finding new meaning in them. See http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/e/ethics.htm

13. The Focus of Ethics • Ethics as the Evaluation of Other People’s Behavior • We are often eager to pass judgment on others • Ethics as the Search for Meaning and Value in Our Own Lives

14. Ethics as the Evaluation of Other People’s Behavior • Ethics often used as a weapon • Hypocrisy • Possibility of knowing other people • The right to judge other people • The right to intervene • Judging and caring

15. Ethics as the Search for Meaning and Value in Our Own Lives • Positive focus • Aims at discerning what is good • Emphasizes personal responsibility for one’s own life

16. What to Expect from Ethics • Identificationa and description of an issue • Explanation • Support in deliberation

17. The Point of Ethical Reflection • Ethics as the evaluation of other people’s behavior • Ethics as the search for the meaning of our own lives

18. Basic Moral Orientations

19. On what basis do we make moral decisions? (1) • Divine Command Theories --“Do what the Bible tells you” or the Will of God • Utilitarianism --“Make the world a better place” • Virtue Ethics --“Be a good person” • The Ethics of Duty --“Do your duty” • Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory • Ethical Egoism -- “Watch out for #1”

20. On what basis do we make moral decisions? (2) • The Ethics of Natural and Human Rights --“...all people are created ...with certain unalienable rights” • Social Contract Ethics • Moral Reason versus Moral Feeling • Evolutionary Ethics

21. Divine Commands • Being good is equivalent to doing whatever the Bible--or the Qur’an or some other sacred text or source of revelation--tells you to do. • “What is right” equals “What God tells me to do.”

22. Epicurus (341-270 BC) John Stuart Mill 1806-1873 Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) Utilitarianism(Consequentialism) • Hedonistic utilitarianism: Seeks to reduce suffering and increase pleasure or happiness • Epicurus (341-270 BC) Greek“We count pleasure as the originating principle and the goal for the blessed life”. (Letter to Menoeceus) • Frances Hutcheson (1694-1747) Irish“The action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest number; and that worst, which in like manner, occasions misery.” (An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil, 3.8) • Bentham’s Utilitarian Calculus • Mill’s Utilitarianism“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote [general] happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of [general] happiness. (Utilitarianism, 2) • http://www.utilitarism.net/(in Swedish)

23. Plato (427-347 BCE) Aristotle (384-322 BCE.) Virtue Ethics • One of the oldest moral theories.Ancient Greek epic poets and playwrights Homer and Sophocles describe the morality of their heroes in terms of virtues and vices. • Plato - cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Even accepted by early Christian theologians. • Aristotle: The Nichomachean Ethics • Morality is a matter of being a good person, which involves having virtuous character traits. • Seeks to develop individual character

24. The Ethics of Duty(Deontological* Ethics) • Ethics is about doing your duty. • Cicero (stoic): On duties(De Officiis) http://www.stoics.com/cicero_book.html • Medieval philosophers: duties to God, self and others • Kant: only moral duties to self and others • Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694):moral duties spring from our instinctive drive for survival – we should be sociable in order to survive. • Intuitionism: we don’t logically deduce moral duties, we know them as thy are! • For each duty there is a corresponding virtue. *‘deon’ = duty Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 - 43) BC Immanuel Kant1724-1804

25. Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory • Human reason makes moral demands on our lives • The categorical imperative: Act so that the maxim [determining motive of the will] may be capable of becoming a universal law for all rational beings." • We have moral responsibility to develop our talents Immanuel Kant1724-1804

26. Ethical Egoism • Says the only person to look out for is yourself • Ayn Rand, The Ethics of Selfishness • Well known for her novel, especially Atlas Shrugged • Ayn Rand sets forth the moral principles of “Objectivism”, the philosophy that holds that man's life--the life proper to a rational being--as the standard of moral values. • It regards altruism as incompatible with man's nature, with the requirements of his survival, and with a free society. shrug - To raise (the shoulders), especially as a gesture of doubt, disdain, or indifference

27. The Ethics of Rights • The most influential moral notion of the past two centuries • Established minimal conditions of human decency • Human rights: rights that all humans supposedly possess. • natural rights: some rights are grounded in the nature rather than in governments. • moral rights, positive rights, legal rights, civil rights

28. The Ethics of Rights • Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) right from nature implies a liberty to protect myself from attack in any way that I can. • John Locke (1632-1704) principal natural rights:life, health, liberty and possessions. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) John Locke (1632-1704)

29. Evolutionary Ethics • Human social behavior is an extended development of biological evolution. • Evolutionary ethics: moral behavior is that which tends to aid in human survival. • Darwin: Origin of Species focuses on the evolutionary mechanisms of nonhuman animals. • Biologists and philosophers of nineteenth century attempted to frame morality as an extension of the evolutionary biological process. • Problem of the theory: what is progress? What is good? Any signs of moral improvement since Plato?

30. Moral Reason versus Moral Feeling • Morality is strictly a matter of rational judgment: Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) • Since time of Plato: moral truths exist in a spiritual realm. • Moral truths like mathematical truths are eternal. • Morality is strictly a matter of feeling (emotion): David Hume (1711-1729) • We have a moral sense Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) David Hume (1711-1729)

31. Ethical Relativism, Absolutism, and Pluralism Based on: Lawrence M. Hinman, Ph.D. Director, The Values Institute University of San Diego

32. Classical Ethical/Cultural RelativismThe Greek Skeptics (1) • Xenophanes (570-475 BCE) “Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and dark, Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired. If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like ox, and each would make the god’s bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.” • The historian Heroditus(484-425 BCE) “Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.”

33. Classical Ethical/Cultural RelativismThe Greek Skeptics (2) • Sextus Empiricus (fl. 200 CE) Gives example after example of moral standards that differ from one society to another, such as attitudes about homosexuality, incest, cannibalism, human sacrifice, the killing of elderly, infanticide, theft, consumption of animal flesh… Sextus Empiricus concludes that we should doubt the existence of an independent and universal standard of morality, and instead regard moral values as the result of cultural preferences.

34. Later Ethical Relativism (1) • French philosopher Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592): Custom has the power to shape every possible kind of cultural practice. Although we pretend that morality is a fixed feature of nature, morality too is formed through custom. • Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) “fashion, vogue, custom, and law are the chief foundation of all moral determinations”

35. Later Ethical Relativism (2) • The fact of moral diversity • We should not pass judgment on practices in other cultures when we don’t understand them • Sometimes reasonable people may differ on what’s morally acceptable

36. Insights of Ethical Relativism Ethical relativism has several important insights: • The fact of moral diversity • The need for tolerance and understanding • We should not pass judgment on practices in other cultures when we don’t understand them • Sometimes reasonable people may differ on what’s morally acceptable

37. Ethical Relativism: Limitations • Presupposes an epistemological solipsism* • Is unhelpful in dealing with overlaps of cultures--precisely where we need help. • Commerce and trade • Media • World Wide Web [*Solipsism - belief in self as only reality: the belief that the only thing somebody can be sure of is that he or she exists, and that true knowledge of anything else is impossible]

38. Ethical Relativism:Overlapping Cultures, 1 • Ethical relativism suggests that we let each culture live as it sees fit. • This is only feasible when cultures don’t have to interact with one another.

39. Ethical Relativism:Overlapping Cultures, 2 • The challenge of the coming century is precisely overlapping cultures: • Multinational corporations • International media--BBC, MTV, CNN • International sports--Olympics • World Wide Web

40. Ethical Relativism:Overlapping Cultures, 3 • The actual situation in today’s world is much closer to the diagram at the right.

41. Ethical Relativism: Our Global Village, 5 • What if our world was a village of 100 people? • 58 would be Asians, 15 Europeans, 13 would come from the Western Hemisphere, 12 would be Africans • 70 would be non-white • 67 would be non-Christian (33 Christians; 18 Moslems; 14 Hindus; 6 Buddhists; 5 atheists; 3 Jews; 24 other.) • 16 would speak Chinese; 8 English; 8 Hindi; 6 Spanish; 6 Russian; and 5 Arabic. • 50 % of the wealth would be held by 6 people. • 70 could not read and • only one would have a university education. http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/103/3areaoutline.htm

42. Ethical Relativism:A Self-Defensive Position • Ethical relativism maintains that we cannot make moral judgments about other cultures • The corollary of this is that we are protected in principle against the judgments made by other cultures

43. How Much Dressed? Naked? Rembrandt Monk Reading, 1661 Fencer – protective suit Apollo Belvedere 320 BCE Taliban law requires women in Afghanistan to wear a chador or burqa that covers the face and entire body. From the solitude of the Holy Cross Abbey in Virginia, a monk works on the Internet, 21th century A proper dress? Amazonian indigenous woman with child Nuns uniforms

44. Dieric Bouts - Madonna and Child Leonardo da Vinci Lady with an Ermine 1483-90 Holbein’s Family 1528 How Much Dressed? Naked?

45. Arguments Against Ethical Relativism • There Are Some Universals in Codes of Behavior across Cultures Three core common values: • caring for children • truth telling (trust) and • prohibitions against murder The society must guard against killing, abusing the young, lying etc. that are at its own peril. Were the society not to establish some rules against such behaviors, the society itself would cease to exist.

46. Ethical Objectivism • The view that moral principles have objective validity whether or not people recognize them as such, that is, moral rightness or wrongness does not depend on social approval, but on such independent considerations as whether the act or principle promotes human flourishing or ameliorates human suffering. • What is moral depends on the fabric of human nature. Plato (427-347 BCE) Immanuel Kant1724-1804

47. Ethical Absolutism/Universalism • Ethical Absolutism: Morality is eternal and unchanging and holds for all rational beings at all times and places. In other words, moral right and wrong are fundamentally the same for all people. (Morality is considered different than mere etiquette). There is only one correct answer to every moral problem. A completely absolutist ethic consists of absolute principles that provide an answer for every possible situation in life, regardless of culture.

48. Ethical Absolutism • Absolutism comes in many versions--including the divine right of kings • Absolutism is less about what we believe and more about how we believe it • Common elements: • There is a single Truth • Their position embodies that truth Louis XIV(1638 – 1715)Louis the Great, The Sun King

49. Ethical Absolutism • Ethical absolutism gets some things right • We need to make judgments • Certain things are intolerable • But it gets some things wrong, including: • Our truth is the truth • We can’t learn from others

50. Ethical Pluralism (1) • Combines insights of both relativism and absolutism: • The central challenge: how to live together with differing and conflicting values • Fallibilism: recognizes that we might be mistaken • Sees disagreement as a possible strength