Philosophy 2030
Introduction to Ethics
Class #10
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“42” Worksheet.
Discuss Chapter 7, pp. 320-327.
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Class Discussion
Video:
The Four of Us Are Dying
An Episode of
The Twilight Zone (1960)
Chapter Seven:
Personhood, Rights,
and Justice
What is a Person?
•
Only a true person has ethical duties and obligations.
•
Only a true person is eligible to receive the benefits of ethical
rights.
•
Although we in the Western world would be hard pressed to
deny personhood to others explicitly and logically, do we in
essence often do so implicitly?
•
Historically, frequently cultures have granted personhood to a
class of individuals: males only, landowners, or denied it to
classes of individuals: foreigners, POWs, criminals, children,
mentally incompetent individuals, gays and lesbians.
•
Could there be Ethical justification to do so? Or is respect for
all human beings as persons a universal ethical value?
•
Immanuel Kant’s ethical view, as are many views, dependent
on the nature of a person. By such, he means a moral agent
who can rationally evaluate the categorical imperative. But is a
human being who does not function rationally a person in a
fully ethical sense?
What is a Person?
•
When a human being is denied the basic human rights that
recognize them as a person we call it discrimination.
•
This is a classical example of what Immanuel Kant would
suggest is treating someone as a means to an end.
•
Most (perhaps all of us) agree that if a person is deprived of
personhood by acts of discrimination, her right to
personhood must be restored, but should an attitude of
discrimination be tolerated in a free society as an expression
of free speech or free thought?
•
Would this be wrong in principle or would it be right or wrong
based on consequences?
•
What about the person who is truly evil (based on what you
may ask, of course)? But assuming we do know, we must
ask further should an evil person still have the rights of
personhood? -- if I know that a person will always lie to me,
should I still be obligated to tell him the truth?
How Does a Person Obtain Rights?
•
Our Western heritage asserts that persons have natural
rights. That is, we have rights from the very nature of being a
person. We are born with such rights.
•
We have inherited this view from various philosophers of the
seventeenth century.
•
Thomas Hobbes argued that a person has the right “to do what
it takes to stay alive.” The other side of this for Hobbes is that
we must live under a natural law that prohibits us from doing
harm to others.
•
Hobbes went on to argue that other rights (e.g. property) came
from our social contract.
•
John Locke argued that there are three natural rights: life,
liberty, and property.
How Does a Person Obtain Rights?
•
John Bentham denied the existence of natural rights and
argued that all rights are given by the society in its laws.
•
John Stuart Mill, as you recall, argued that a person has the
right to be left alone if he is doing no harm to society.
•
Libertarians following Mill typically distinguish between
negative rights and positive rights. According to this view,
positive rights are those rights which obligate others to act on
your behalf. Negative rights are those which prohibit others to
act against you.
•
Negative rights include rights such as freedom of speech,
private property, freedom from violent crime, freedom of
worship, habeas corpus, a fair trial, freedom from slavery and
the right to bear arms.
•
Positive rights include police protection of person and property
and the right to counsel, as well as economic, social and
cultural rights such as public education, health care, social
security, and a minimum standard of living.
How Does a Person Obtain Rights?
•
Libertarians typically believe that a person fundamentally has
negative rights.
•
John Hospers and Ayn Rand suggest that our basic right is not
to be interfered with.
•
Other philosophers (typically liberals) emphasize positive
rights.
•
Karl Marx suggested that a person has the right for his needs
to be satisfied. He would allow the sacrifice of negative rights
in order to achieve this.
•
Most philosophers do not go as far as Marx, but John Rawls
argues that negative rights are fairly meaningless without
positive rights. What is the good in having free speech if one is
starving to death?
What Does Equality Mean?
•
We typically wish to pronounce that persons are equal. Such
seems to be the principle of fairness. But what does this really
mean? Our text suggests two different versions of equality:
•
1. Fundamental Equality. That all persons should be treated
equally by the government – no special privileges (American
Declaration of Independence)
•
2. Social Equality. That all persons should be treated equally
within the social framework – equal opportunity (Mill), e.g.
voting, running for political office
•
Note that neither of these versions require sameness in ability
or talent. Should we make dancers wear shoes of lead?
Justice
•
There are fundamentally two kinds of justice:
•
Criminal Justice.
That is, the methods by which fundamental (and
perhaps social) equality is achieved through the
administration of laws.
•
Distributive Justice.
In short, who gets what in the society?
On the matter of distributive justice, John Rawls takes
issue with John Stuart Mill’s libertarian view by
emphasizing the importance of positive rights to achieve
fairness in distributive justice.
He suggests that everyone should have equal access to
social goods. He asks us to consider his “thought
experiment” in which we must determine the rules for
society without knowing what our position in it will be. This
view is Kantian in spirit.
Applied Ethics
What is death?
What is a life worth living?
THIS CLASS
MAY BE OVER,
But wait! What, now? I know you really
dig studying Ethics and Morality.
Where can you get MORE?
Have you ever thought of free online
classes?
Coursera
The Ohio State University. Technology and Ethics
with Robert Bailey
May 19th 2014 -- 7 weeks long
Princeton University. Practical Ethics
with Peter Singer
Mar 1st 2014 -- 12 weeks long
Johns Hopkins University. Guinea Pigs, Heroes &
Desperate Patients: The History & Ethics of Human
Research with Jeffrey Kahn, Alan C Regenberg, Debra
JH Mathews & Joseph Ali
Duke University. Responding to 9/11
with David Schanzer
Yale University. Moralities of Everyday Life
with Paul Bloom.
PHLX101-01: Introduction to Bioethics
Introduction to Bioethics explores some of the most
difficult - and fascinating - moral challenges we face in
health, medicine, and emerging technologies.
• Starts: 15 Apr 2014, Georgetown
ER22.1x: Justice
Justice is an introduction to moral and political
philosophy, including discussion of contemporary
dilemmas and controversies.
Starts: 8 Apr 2014, Harvard