Morality
What is Morality?
• Deceptively easy question
•A means of determining right and wrong
Utilitarianism
•Morality is the greatest good for the greatest
number of people
•Morally good actions produce the
greatest utility
•Utility is typically happiness or
pleasure
Jeremy Bentham
•First real utilitarian philosopher
•All actions are motivated by pursuit of pleasure
•The Hedonic Calculus
John Stuart Mill
•Mental pleasures are greater than physical pleasures
•The Harms Principle: “That the only purpose for
which power can be rightfully exercised over any
member of a civilized community, against his will, is
to prevent harm to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”
Rule Utilitarianism
•Calculating utility for every action is a lot of
work!
•Instead, evaluate the utility of rules, then follow
the rules
•Solves some of the more pressing issues with
utilitarianism
Negative Utilitarianism
•Do the least harm to the least number of people
•Pain is a greater motivator than pleasure
•Problem of painless euthanasia
Pros of Utilitarianism
•Everybody understands utilitarian calculus
•Weighing impacts in round is easy
•Relatively simple to run and works with a large
variety of cases and impacts
•It just works
Cons of Utilitarianism
•Very hard to quantify happiness
•Who’s happiness do we prioritize?
•Majoritarian abuses
•Making people happy isn’t always the best course
of action
Utilitarianism in Healthcare
Consequentialism
•Morality of an action is based on its consequences
•An ends based framework. Also referred to as
Teleology
Variants of Consequentialism
•Rule Consequentialism
•Mohist Consequentialism
•State level consequentialism
•Ethical altruism
•Auguste Comte
•Best consequences for everybody else
Deontology
•Actions are moral in and of themselves
•Adherence to rules or duties determines morality
•Means not ends
•Intentions and motives, not outcomes
Deontology Variants
•Contractarianism
•Morality determined through social pressures and
outside influences, like contracts
•Divine command theory
•Rights Theory
Pros of Deontology
•Allows you to discount consequentialist impacts
•You don’t need to defend plans or implementation
•Gives you a clear definition of morality
Cons of Deontology
•Moral grey areas
•What happens when duties conflict?
•Layperson’s understanding of deontology can be
limited
•Often collapses into utilitarianism
Deontology in Healthcare
Immanuel Kant
•German philosopher born in 1724
•Attempted to apply practical reason to
morality
•Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals
•Hypothetical duties are not morally
binding
The Categorical Imperative
•Act only according to that maxim by which
you can also will that it would become a
universal law.
• Moral actions are intrinsically good
•The only thing we can know is good is will
The Categorical Imperative
•Humans are independent moral agents who are
ends in and of themselves
•“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in
your own person or in the person of any other, never
merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as
an end”
Pros of Kant
•Absolute morality, clear positions and definitions
•You can disregard edge cases and hypothetical
situations
•Avoids a number of subjective or relativistic
criticisms of morality
Cons of Kant
•Could I lie to a Nazi?
•Conflicting universal claims
•Universal moral systems are unrealistic, nobody
actually follows them
•Why is Kant’s view of what morality should be
universal?
Moral Relativism
•Morality is dependant on the individual or social
group
•Subject to cultural and social pressures
•Can differ wildly from person to person, place to
place
Descriptive relativism
•Moral disagreements exist
•It’s not up to us to condemn or praise different
moral systems
•Default position for most anthropology and
sociology
•Not a common debate position
Normative Relativism
•Not only do moral disagreements occur, but you
should tolerate those who disagree with you
•Of course that might just be your opinion
•This is the kind of relativism that makes morality
more or less meaningless
Ethical Egoism
•People ought to act in their own best interest
•Who better to know what I need than Me?
•I can’t know what you need, and shouldn’t try
to
•James Rachels, Ayn Rand
•More in the Capitalism lecture
Pros of Moral Relativity
•Morality can be meaningless!
•Multiple moral definitions can exist simultaneously
•Allows you to disregard moral impacts
•Very high specificity
Cons of Moral Relativity
•Morality can be meaningless!
•If moral relativity is true, moral definitions are
hard to justify
•Might force you to admit some awkward
things
Relativity and Healthcare
Moral Skepticism
•We can’t know enough about morals to make
accurate moral judgments
•Doesn’t disallow the existence of absolute moral
truth
•Epistemological skepticism: Moral beliefs don’t
respond to evidence
•Morals are similar to the beliefs of the paranoid
or insane
Moral Nihilism
•Basically amorality
•Even if things aren’t necessarily moral or immoral,
actions can be preferable
•Expressivism: Morals have no objective truth, but
are still expressed as strong opinions
•Error theory: Lack of observable morals leads to no
possible moral judgments, all moral proclamations
are mistakes
Ethics of care
•Morality is determined by caring for individuals
•Highly dependant on interpersonal
relations
•Feminist, doesn’t conform to a hierarchy
•More details in the Feminism lecture
•Carol Gilligan
Legal Morality
•Law is a codified system of morality
•Allows high specificity and a mix of absolute
and relative morality
•Laws can change and don’t always resemble
modern morals
•Jurgen Habermas
Pragmatic Ethics
•Morality could do with a dose of SCIENCE!
•Morals evolve through hypothesis and testing
•Draws from a number of other philosophies
•Mostly descriptive, has been criticized for mixing
up normative and descriptive morality
Situational Morality
•Context is everything
•Can’t make blanket assertions about morality
without taking circumstances into account
•Not as much a unified philosophy