Introductory remarks

1) Morality occupies a central role in our lives because we make moral choices every day, some trivial, e.g., whether to tell a white lie, some serious, e.g., what position we should take on abortion, the death penalty, suicide & euthanasia, punishment, animal rights etc.

We typically appeal to morality when dealing with a variety of issues such as:

• the preservation of society
• the amelioration of human suffering
• the promotion of human flourishing
• the resolution of conflict in just and orderly ways
• the assignation of praise and blame, reward and punishment.

2) A judgment like “The Earth is round” is different in nature from one like “Murder is wrong”. For example, the latter involves a value judgment which we expect to result in an injunction, “Don’t murder”, towards which we should feel a duty. Some terminological distinctions may be useful:

1. Descriptive judgments involve the representation of "facts" in the world, e.g., that the inflation rate is thus and so, that a fetus is a member of the species homo sapiens, or that the Earth is round.
   NOTE: At times, answering a question about facts is a non-trivial affair (is the fetus a person?).
2. Normative judgments involve valuing things, persons, states of affairs, that is, deciding which are good, better, worse, right, or wrong, etc. So, “Murder is wrong” is an evaluative judgment

NOTE: Normative judgments typically result in injunctions

3) A moral judgment involves (1)-(2), and results in a moral duty that must be fulfilled. Non-compliance

· deserves punishment

· may give rise to justified anger

· is expected to produce guilt in the transgressor

4) The terms "ethics" and "morality" are often used interchangeably. However, it may be helpful to introduce the following distinction:

· Morality is a set of practices and beliefs that include normative criteria. To be a moral person, one must strive to follow what morality prescribes. Being moral requires a training of the intellect and of the emotions.

· Ethics, by contrast, is a theoretical discipline which studies morality.
NOTE: One needn't be moral to study morality any more than one needs to be a believer to study the scriptures or theology: being an ethicist does not involve being moral. This course aims at teaching you ethics, not at making you moral.

5) For pedagogical reasons, ethics can be divided into different branches, depending on the various ways to study morality:

1. Descriptive ethics, which tries

a. to describe the genesis of morality

b. to understand, and explain the moral beliefs and practices, both general and particular, of a group (e.g., the Huaorani, the white business community, SIUE graduates, etc.)

2. Philosophical ethics , which has two overlapping parts

a. metaethics, which tries, among other things, to analyze basic moral concepts (e.g., 'good' , 'right', 'duty', etc.), and to determine what counts as a justification for a moral theory.

b. normative ethics, which tries to determine which, if any, of the various moral frameworks is the correct one. An interesting part of normative ethics is applied ethics, which tries to determine the morally correct solution to a host of moral problems in various areas of human endeavor and concern like medicine, business, the environment, the judicial system, etc.

6) Some very basic considerations about addressing a moral issue.
i. How not to answer a normative ethical or moral question:

• By statistics alone, as at most one learns how people do think, not how they ought to think, in ethical matters; ex. the Nazis.
• By appeal to authority, religious or otherwise, because before justifiably appealing to authority we need to evaluate its performance, i.e., know that it is, as it were, an authoritative authority. But this requires that we already know what's right/wrong. If we don't know, we are liable to engage in parroting. Of course, we may have reasons outside ethics to trust a certain authority. For example, we may trust the minister because she is trustworthy in religious matters. However, her theological ability need not transfer to ethical and moral matters. Historically, many (perhaps all) religions and sects have supported horrible practices. The same is true for political authority or familial authority (the great leader knows best, and father knows best).

· In a purely subjectivist mode, otherwise moral disagreement becomes impossible. If when Jim says “Homosexuality is wrong, for me” he merely means to report his subjective belief, and Joe says “Homosexuality is morally permissible, for me” in the same way, then Joe and Jim do not disagree at all. That is, there is a conflict between them as Jim may prevent Joe from adopting children or marrying his partner, but their moral statements don’t contradict each other because each is simply reporting one’s belief. In addition, Joe may agree with Jim that for Jim homosexuality is wrong, and Jim with Joe that for Joe homosexuality is permissible. Consequently, if pure subjectivism is correct, as long as Joe and Jim report their views correctly no moral disagreement is possible because they are both right. So, neither Jim nor Joe has a good reason to try to convince the other (each knows that the other is correct), and any discussion about who’s right and who’s wrong is pointless. The result is that morality fails to provide a ground on which to resolve conflicts. Hence, when one says “I believe that homosexuality is permissible” in a moral discussion he should not merely report one’s subjective belief; rather, one should be implicitly saying that others should also believe that homosexuality is permissible, otherwise one has moved the discussion to psychology or sociology

• In general, without any sort of rational justification.

ii. What to look for in an answer to a normative ethical or moral question:

• Conceptual clarity in the use of concepts and in argumentation. Hence, the importance of explaining the basic concepts employed, possibly by providing the exact necessary and sufficient conditions for their applicability. This is hard, and at times probably impossible, because important concepts like "being a person" are somewhat fuzzy.
• Correct information about relevant factual issues. For example, to what extent is a certain type of application of the death penalty a deterrent to murder? What are the actual conditions of animals in animal farming?  However, this is often hard to obtain; consider: is the fetus a person?
• Rationality. This is a complex issue because of lack of agreement on the nature of rationality. However, at a minimum one must accept standard argumentative procedures. For example, if I agree that all humans have inalienable rights and my enemy is human, then I should accept that my enemy has inalienable rights. 
• Impartiality.  The answer cannot be partial to some individuals or groups, that is, individuals or groups can be treated differently only to the extent that their differences are morally relevant and actively enter into the justification of why they are treated differently.

Many of these are difficult to are difficult (perhaps even impossible for us) to obtain with total certainty. However, we should strive for them.