00519--Ethical Theories/Terminology/Definitions

Ethical Theory/ Terminology	Definition [Reference: The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy NICHOLAS BUNNIN AND JIYUAN YU]
1.Pragmatism	Is the ethical theory which states that the meaning of a concept is determined by the experiential or practical consequences of its application.  [Charles Sanders Peirce and William James]
2.Hedonism	The belief that pleasure is the greatest good and highest aspiration of humankind.
3.Individualism	An approach to ethics, social science and political and social philosophy which emphasizes the importance of human individuals in contrast to the social wholes, such as families, classes or societies, to which they belong.
4.Altruism	The view that the well-being of others should have as much importance for us as the well-being of ourselves.
5.Consequentialism	Consequentialism holds that the value of an action is determined entirely by its consequences and thus proposes that ethical life should be forward looking, that is, concerned with maximizing the good and minimizing the bad consequences of actions. [G. E. M. Anscombe]
6.Utilitarianism	A major modern ethical theory which suggests that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by its utility, that is, the good (pleasant or happy) or bad (painful or evil) consequences it produces. [Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, Sidgwick, and many others]
7.Libertarianism	A twentieth-century political and moral movement. It argues that no intervention from state and government is necessary or justified. Free choice is supreme and all conflicts can be settled through the mechanism of the market. Its strong anarchist form insists that all government is illegitimate.
8.Moral absolutism	The view that there are certain objective moral principles which are eternally and universally true, no matter what consequences they bring about. These principles can never justifiably be violated or given up. Paradigms of such principles include “don’t lie,” “keep your promises,” and “don’t kill innocent people.” Moral absolutism is generally represented by various religious moral systems. Kantian deontology is closely associated with moral Absolutism. [Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant and many others]
9.moral psychology	An essential part of ethics, especially contemporary virtue ethics, concerned with the structure and phenomenological analysis of those psychological phenomena that have great bearing on moral behavior or action. These phenomena include cognitive states such as deliberation and choice; emotional states such as love, mercy, satisfaction, guilt, remorse, and shame; and desires, character, and personality. Moral psychology aims to improve understanding of human motivation and also has a role in the philosophy of law.
10.Paternalism	Paternalism is derived from parental caring towards one’s children. In ethics it means interfering with another person’s liberty or freedom in the belief that one is promoting the good of that person, or preventing harm from occurring to that person, even if one’s action provokes that person’s disagreement or protest. Paternalism is challenged by liberalism and is now often viewed as a violation of liberty, autonomy, and individual rights.
11.Sexism	The attitude holding that one’s own sex is superior to the other and leading in practice to limited respect for the rights, needs, and values of the other sex. The term is analogical to racism, which regards one’s own race as superior to others. Both sexism and racism are thought to be major social evils.
12.Social Darwinism	A theory resulting from the application of Darwinism to human society. By deducing norms of human conduct directly from evolutionary biology, it attempted to deal with ethical, economic, and political problems on the assumption that society is a competitive arena and that the evolution of society fits the Darwinian paradigm in its most individualistic form. According to social Darwinism, the fittest climb to dominant social positions as a consequence of social selection, just as natural selection determines the survival of the fittest. Because on this view human possession of consciousness does not have any moral implications, social Darwinism held that social inequality and the exploitation of lower classes, suppressed races, and conquered nations by the stronger were morally acceptable.
13.Suicide	From Plato and Aristotle onward, there has been controversy whether suicide is morally justified. On one view, suicide should be morally prohibited on the grounds that life is divine, that suicide causes harm to one’s family and community, and that suicide is an offense to God who created life. In contrast, suicide is claimed to be a self-regarding act that lies outside the prohibition on harming others. It is claimed that without stronger objections, the right should be recognized to determine when to terminate one’s own life. Aquinas and Kant argued against suicide, while Hume argued in favor of tolerating it. These different attitudes lead to controversy whether we should intervene if somebody has the intention of committing suicide. If suicide is immoral, then we are obliged to prevent it. If suicide is morally justifiable, the intervention beyond advice will be paternalistic interference that violates the agent’s rights. Suicide has been frequently discussed in contemporary applied ethics through its relations with the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
14.Telishment	A term proposed by John Rawls to indicate a crucial problem of the utilitarian view of punishment. Utilitarianism claims that punishment is justifiable only by reference to its probable consequences with regard to promoting public good or preventing crime, rather than because the wrongdoing itself merits punishment. Rawls suggests that we can imagine a situation in which the authority knows that a suspected criminal is innocent, but still imposes a harsh punishment on him because such an action can produce better social consequences. This practice should not be termed punishment, because the subject of suffering is not a wrongdoer. Rawls names it telishment. Telishment is intuitively wrong but seems to be justifiable according to the utilitarian view of punishment.
15.Trolley problem	Ethics An ethical problem put forward by Philippa Foot in her 1967 paper “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect.” Suppose that the only possible way to steer a runaway trolley is to move it from one track to another. One man is working on the first track, and five men are working on the other. Anyone working on the track the trolley enters will be killed. Most people would accept that the driver should steer the trolley to the track on which only one person is working because the death of five persons is worse than the death of one person. Now suppose that the trolley, left to itself, will enter the track on which five men are working and kill them. If you are a bystander who can change the course of the trolley, would it be morally required or morally permissible to interfere to switch the trolley to the other track, on which only one person would be killed? According to utilitarianism, you should switch the trolley. However, if you do not interfere, you have not done anything to make you responsible for the five deaths, while if you do interfere your act does make you responsible for one death. Your own integrity or moral rules about how to act might lead you to reject the utilitarian conclusion. The trolley problem touches on both the nature of morality and concrete moral perplexity. If the driver is right to steer the trolley onto the track with one person in order to save the lives of five persons, why is it wrong to execute an innocent man to stop a riot in which five innocent people will be killed? Or why is it morally wrong to save five patients who would die without transplants at the cost of killing one healthy man for his organs? In dealing with the trolley problem and these related questions, some philosophers turn to the principle of double effect, according to which a moral distinction between the intended and unintended consequences of an action can help to decide when bad consequences of an action are acceptable.
16.Universalizability	The idea that moral judgments should be universalizable can be traced to the Golden Rule and Kant’s ethics. In the twentieth century it was elaborated by Hare and became a major thesis of his prescriptivism. The principle states that all moral judgments are universalizable in the sense that if it is right for a particular person A to do an action X, then it must likewise be right to do X for any person exactly like A, or like A in the relevant respects. Furthermore, if A is right in doing X in this situation, then it must be right for A to do X in other relevantly similar situations.