Traits of a Moral Principle
This trait tells us that the moral considerations of any principle must be able to override any other considerations, such as legal, aesthetic, or prudential.
What is Overridingness?
These are types of goods that are good for their own sake. In other words, they are not good for something else - they are in and of themselves good.
What are intrinsic goods?
Ethical Theories that are grounded in the belief that there is no universal, objective set of moral rules to follow. Instead, this type of ethical theory states that morality is simply relative or subject-dependent.
What is Moral Relativism?
This woman was brutally attacked and murdered in the streets of New York, while many bystanders failed to intervene, prompting questions about whether we are morally obligated to help others in need, even if we don't have a legal obligation.
Who is Kitty Genovese?
These are commonly thought to be sources of morality, but each has several limitations as to why none of them can be considered the source of morality.
What are Religion, Etiquette and the Law?
This is a type of argument which tries to extend the similarities of two categories of things and show that they will share all of their properties through an analog.
What is an argument by analogy?
This trait describes the function of moral principles as needing to be able to apply to every morally relevant agent.
What is Universalizability?
The Schema of the Moral Process shows that this is at the center of every moral theory.
What is value?
These are the two types of relativist views which state that morality is just a construct of one's own personal moral code or a culture's acceptance of a set of moral rules.
What are Conventionalism and Subjectivism (Conventional Ethical Relativism and Subjective Ethical Relativism)?
This thought experiment demonstrates a difficulty regarding Hedonism altogether, given that if we were to take part in this machine that constantly feeds us nothing but pleasurable sensations, most of us would opt to not live in this contraption.
What is the Pleasure Machine example?
This type of ethical field describes the systematic effort to understand moral concepts and justify moral principles and theories.
What is Moral Philosophy (Ethical Theory, Metaethics)?
This type of argument style is one in which the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.
What is a deductive argument (deduction)?
This trait tells us that we must be able to practice the moral principles we are told to follow, for a rule is only worthwhile if you can follow it.
What is Practicability?
This describes a type of good that is worthy of our consideration because it leads to a further good.
What is an instrumental good?
The real goal of relativistic views is to promote this aspect of being more accepting of differences between cultures, also called this term.
What is tolerance (being tolerant)?
This thought experiment is supposed to be a detriment for conventionalism, in that if we allow for moral rules to be valid only by virtue of cultural acceptance, then a corporation that makes its employees kill people would have to be considered morally acceptable if everyone in that company agreed to those rules.
What is the Murder Mike case?
Action, Consequences, Character and Motive all describe this feature of morality.
What are Domains of Ethical Assessment?
These are types of logical fallacies that purposely introduce irrelevant information to divert the audiences' attention.
What are irrelevancy arguments (ad hominem, red herring/distraction)?
This trait ensures that a moral principle is capable of being made publicly available to every moral agent.
What is Publicity?
These types of philosophers believe that there aren't any intrinsic values that actually exist.
Who are non-intrinsicalists?
The Diversity Thesis and the Dependency Thesis claim that because of the diversity of cultures and the fact that morality is dependent on societal acceptance, that this ethical theory must be true.
What is Conventionalism (Conventional Ethical Relativism)?
This paradox is supposed to demonstrate that there is an underlying difficulty between the sensualist suggestion that all pain is bad and all pleasure is good, given that some people find pleasure in pain.
What is the Paradox of Masochism?
This ethical theory states that there is no such thing as morality. In other words, morality is an illusion or a fiction that we create.
What is Ethical Nihilism?
This is the strongest type of inductive argument one can make, meaning it's more than 50% likely to be true.
What is a cogent argument (cogency)?
This trait of a moral principle states that any good moral rule must guide our actions, by telling us how to act in any given moral situation.
What is Prescriptivity?
This type of good is described by Socrates as being both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable.
What are combination goods?
The biggest problem with subjectivism is that it ultimately results in this kind of logical conundrum.
What is a logical contradiction (or inconsistency)?
This thought experiment draws a tension between our duty to not kill and to consider the consequences of the number and value of lives at stake, by making us imagine a situation in which we either allow five people to die or pull a lever and kill one person to spare those five.
What is the Trolley Problem?
According to Aristotle, this term is used to describe "the objectively fulfilled or happy life", deriving from the Greek words meaning "good demon".
What is Eudaimonia?
This is a type of deductive argument in which one assumes the truth of a conclusion only to derive a contradiction from it. How absurd!
What is Reductio Ad Absrudum?