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Example research essay topic: Consequential Ist Categorical Imperative - 1,698 words

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Ethics, broadly conceived, is concerned with questions about value, how we should live, and what we should do. Normative ethics is concerned with developing general theories in response to these kinds of questions. Consequentialist's, contract arians, virtue ethicist's, Kantians, and still others all develop different theories. But these theorists understand the subject matter itself differently, stress different questions, and offer different answers. These differences themselves then become the focal point for further debate about issues such as: What is the relationship between the good and the right?

What is role of impartiality in ethics? What is the importance of character and personal relationships? Are there binding ethical obligations? Is altruism (for example) one of these ethical obligations? Is it misguided or even corrupting to try to develop an ethical theory? etc.

Further reflection on ethics and normative ethics leads us to ask still deeper questions, questions about the status and foundation of ethics itself. Metaethics is concerned with these kinds of questions, such as: Is ethics objective? Are there ethical facts or truths? What do ethical facts or truths consist in? How do we come to know about these ethical facts or truths? Do these ethical facts or truths provide us with reasons to act?

How does the recognition of ethical facts or truths motivate us? Is ethics relative? Once again different kinds of theories attempt to provide systematic answers to these questions. Finally, aside from these more esoteric questions and theories philosophers are concerned with practical questions about real ethical problems and dilemmas.

For without attention to real ethical issues ethical theories run the risk of being ungrounded (on the flip side, without the justification ethical theories provide ethical convictions may be no more than mere prejudice). In this manner philosophers have sought to bring their insights to bear on issues such as: abortion, euthanasia, famine and aid, friendship and relationships, killing and war, the status of animals, the environment, sexism, and racism. Consequentialism is a theory which has its origins in Hume, but was subsequently developed as a distinctive theory by Bentham and Mill. It defines the right in terms of the good impartially conceived, most commonly in terms of maximising the good. Consequentialist's have offered different accounts of the good: pleasure (hedonism), desire-satisfaction, or an objective-list account.

Act-consequentialist's insist that the right act is that which maximises the good, while rule-consequentialist's insist that the right act is that which conforms to a rule which maximises the good. Consequentialism has been the object of numerous criticisms, such as: the theory cannot account for justice and rights (i. e. , fails to accommodate agent-centred restrictions); it is too demanding (i. e. , it fails to accommodate agent-centred options); it violates the integrity of agents; and it gives a skewed account of moral reasoning and human psychology. More recently many consequentialist's have sought to develop indirect consequential ism in an attempt to deal with many of these problems. A de ontological theory denies that the right action is that which maximises the good and instead insists that certain actions are a matter of duty or obligation (e.

g. , telling the truth is an obligation it is the right thing to do even in cases where lying would produce better consequences). According to Kantians, the right action is that which passes the test of the categorical imperative (i. e. , actions must not merely be means-ends rational but must be universalis able). Kant thought that the categorical imperative demonstrates that rational agents are valuable as ends-in-themselves and may not be treated as mere means. The main problem for the Kantian view is demonstrating how morality is grounded in reason (i. e. , that the categorical imperative is the fundamental principle of rationality and that it is capable of generating substantive moral requirements).

Contemporary Kantians have grappled with this and other issues. A reader of a contemporary textbook on ethics will often find the subject discussed in terms of a distinction between consequential ist and de ontological ethics. Consequentialism is said to hold that the rightness of acts is determined by the goodness of their consequences, whereas deontology denies this, holding that acts can be right or wrong in themselves -- -it can be right to tell the truth even if the consequences of doing so are bad, wrong to betray a friend even if that has good consequences. One can imagine a de ontologist attacking a consequential ist with the following invective: It is you, not we, who are concerned with your own moral purity. Your position has the effect of absolving you of all personal responsibility for the things you do. There's no element of personal decision; you simply calculate, and do what the numbers tell you to do, as if you were a machine.

You tell your victim, 'Sorry, it's not me, you understand, I'm just an instrument of the greater good. ' Moreover, if you " ve done some horrible thing in pursuit of some supposed greater good, and it turns out to have terrible consequences, you shrug your shoulders and say, "I'm not to blame, it just turned out that way. " In essence, you try to transform yourself into a kind of unquestioning slave of utility maximization, and thereby try to escape all personal responsibility by blaming your decisions and actions on your master. The de ontologist uttering these words raises three main questions: (1) do consequential ist systems of ethics absolve their adherents of all personal responsibility? (2) Do consequentialist's in fact select their system of ethics in order to absolve themselves of all personal responsibility? (3) Are de ontological systems of ethics and their adherents innocent on both charges? I will examine each of the first two questions in turn - the answer to the third question will become clear in the process. Our hypothetical de ontologist claims that consequential ism absolves its adherents of all personal responsibility for three presumed reasons: (a) consequential ism removes all personal decision, as the consequential ist simply turns himself into a "slave of utility maximization"; (b) consequential ism allows an agent to rationalize away atrocities such as the injury of one person for the benefit of the many; (c) consequential ism allows one to shrug off disastrous states of affairs that are brought about when one's consequential ist moral calculus advises a course of action that turns out to be wrong.

To reason (a), one may respond that if the consequential ist makes himself a "slave of utility maximization, " then the de ontologist makes himself a slave of a set of rules. Is there any a priori reason why a commitment to utility maximization should be morally inferior to a commitment to a set of absolutist rules? It does not seem that there is, unless one begs the question by approaching it from a de ontological viewpoint. For reason (a) to stand would necessitate an indisputable argument showing a non-consequential ist system of ethics to be the right system, as Kant tries to formulate - but judging from the depth of controversy in moral philosophy today, it seems rather doubtful that such an argument exists.

Reason (a) also ignores the existence of rule-of-thumb-utilitarianism, in which the element of personal decision certainly is present. The rule-of-thumb-utilitarian has no grand moral calculator to churn out a spreadsheet commanding him to a certain course of action, nor does he have a set of inflexible rules to constrain him to a single course of action, as the de ontologist does. The rule-of-thumb-utilitarian consults the collective utilitarian wisdom of the centuries, but the ultimate decision as to what course of action he takes - even while remaining within the framework of consequential ism - is the agent's personal responsibility. To reason (b), one may respond that the consequential ist believes the sacrifice of one for the benefit of the many to sometimes be the morally correct thing to do - the consequential ist would no doubt argue that the ethical systems of consequential ism's de ontological critics allow an agent to rationalize away the atrocity of not injuring one person for the greater good. Briefly speaking, the exact nature of an "atrocity" is a matter of perspective. Granting this, the de ontologist may reply that, indeed, one person must sometimes be sacrificed for the greater good, but that at least the de ontologist will recognize the sacrifice of the one person to be morally distasteful, whereas the consequential ist will simply drop the ax on the poor man and go merrily along his way.

But such an objection is not without problems. In the first place, if we mean by "morally distasteful" that the action should evoke a sense of guilt in the perpetrator, then there is no reason to assume that the consequential ist, simply in virtue of his system of ethics, will not find his actions morally distasteful. Even if the consequential ist believes that he is "right" to choose the lesser of two evils, what is to prevent him from inwardly longing for a non-existent third alternative that makes everyone happy? There are clearly independent psychological grounds from which guilt springs, such that a person can believe what he did to be right - given the options available to him at the time - yet nevertheless suffer nightmares due to a plagued conscience. It is not clear that an agent must even be in part a de ontologist for this to happen to him. But if by "morally distasteful" we mean that the action is in fact not right, how are we to say this in any meaningful way?

In the first place, it seems silly to presume that given two actions, one of which is better than the other, and better than doing nothing at all, that performing that action is wrong - even if it is conducive to guilt. Secondly, to insist steadfastly upon this position would amount to question-begging, as it starts off with the assumption that the de ontological notion of rightness and wrongness. It is especially simple to see that consequential ism does not imply a sacrifice of responsibility when one considers rule-of-thumb-utilitarians once again. The rule-of-thumb-utilitarian, while as much...


Free research essays on topics related to: ethical theories, normative ethics, utility maximization, categorical imperative, consequential ist

Research essay sample on Consequential Ist Categorical Imperative

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