Category
Ethics
How should we live and act? Moral theories, character, and hard cases.
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What are the ‘four principles’ of medical ethics, and what do you do when they conflict?
A drug rep who also teaches a short course mentioned "the four principles" as if everyone knew them, and I nodded and then looked them up: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. I understand each one on its own. My problem is a…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
Why did Philippa Foot invent the trolley case, and what did Judith Jarvis Thomson change?
The trolley problem comes up at every debate tournament, usually as a gotcha: "so you'd push the fat man?" My students treat it as a puzzle with a trick answer. I'd like to teach it properly, which means knowing where it came…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
What were Mozi’s three tests for judging whether a doctrine is right?
I've been reading about early Chinese philosophy for fun. Several books mention that Mozi proposed "three tests" or "three standards" for judging a doctrine, and one claims this was the first explicit methodology in Chinese thought. I'd like to know what the…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
When the ventilators run out: lottery, first come first served, or most life-years saved?
During the pandemic a doctor friend in Nairobi described a night when her hospital had two ventilators and five patients who needed them. Since then I've been reading about allocation rules, and I'm surprised how much they disagree. The main options, as…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Adab, li and hexis: is character trained the same way in three traditions?
When a girl comes to learn batik in my mother's workshop, she doesn't begin by drawing. She begins by preparing cloth, heating wax, watching. She learns how to sit, how to hold the canting, how to speak to the older women. After…
Started by Ratna WulandariAnswer first (no replies yet) -
If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?
Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me. The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in…
Started by Gerrit Venter5 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?
I am thinking of my years in the army, and I am not talking about atrocities. I mean ordinary things the role required: enforcing a punishment I thought was disproportionate because the regulation was clear, sending a capable young private on a…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies -
What is threshold deontology, and isn’t it just consequentialism with extra steps?
In my constitutional law seminar we discussed whether rights can ever be suspended in an emergency. I mentioned the ADM Jabalpur case from 1976, when our Supreme Court accepted that even the right to life could not be enforced during the Emergency,…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
My students spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every year, and that what we…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Is negative utilitarianism the most compassionate moral theory, or the most dangerous one?
On the trekking routes I meet a lot of young Westerners who have read a little philosophy and a little Buddhism, and lately some of them talk about negative utilitarianism: the view that morality is about minimising suffering, not maximising happiness. Karl…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
“You are your relationships”: is that Confucius, or a modern reading of him?
I'm a retired teacher reading the Analects slowly with a commentary, and I keep meeting a claim in the secondary literature that I can't quite find in the text. The claim, associated with Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont and their "role ethics",…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Does knowing what a kelp forest is make it more beautiful, or just different?
When I take visitors down into the kelp, most of them see brown weed swaying in murky water and come up politely bored. When I take students who have studied the system, who know that the kelp can grow astonishingly fast, that…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
Xunzi says the sages invented ritual and rightness. Does that make him a moral anti-realist?
I came to Xunzi through the debate with Mencius about human nature. That debate is usually told as optimism against pessimism: Mencius thinks we are born with the sprouts of goodness, Xunzi thinks our nature is crooked and goodness comes from deliberate…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
What does Moore’s open question argument actually prove, and what is the standard reply to it?
Moore's open question argument from Principia Ethica (1903) keeps coming up as I work through ethics on my own, and I cannot tell whether it is a deep insight or a trick. Here is my understanding. Take any proposed definition of good…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?
We read The Art of War in the army as a manual, which is how most soldiers meet it. Rereading it in retirement, I am struck by how much of it counsels restraint. It opens by calling war a matter of life…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun4 replies -
Was the abolition of slavery a moral discovery or a moral change? A teacher’s test case
Every July my after-school reading circle reads Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. This year a student asked a question I could not answer cleanly: “When people stopped thinking slavery was okay, did they find…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
Could a psychopath genuinely know that cruelty is wrong? The amoralist and the clinical literature
Meta-ethicists argue about the amoralist: someone who sincerely judges that cheating or cruelty is wrong and feels no motivation whatever to avoid it. Internalists say such a person is impossible, that someone wholly unmoved has not really made the judgement, only learned…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
What did Milton Friedman actually argue in his 1970 essay on business and profit?
In every business-ethics discussion I've been in, someone quotes Friedman's line that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and everyone either nods or sneers. Usually it's summarised as "greed is good". I've now found the essay (in the…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Who was al-Ruhawi, and what does his Adab al-Tabib actually say about the physician?
At a hospital conference in Cairo, a speaker mentioned al-Ruhawi's Adab al-Tabib as one of the earliest systematic works on medical ethics, written in the ninth century, and then moved straight on to modern guidelines. I've been unable to find much more…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Can reason tell right from wrong on its own, or does it need revelation?
In the courts I covered in Lahore, judges applied statutes, precedent and, where the law allowed, the principles of Islamic law. Many times a case was decided correctly by every rule and I went home feeling it had been decided wrongly. I…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies