Transcript of Intro to Ethical Theory

hello this is ethics and my name is mark doors B welcome to this video in which we're going to provide or I'm going to give you a sort of introduction to basic ethical theory so welcome everyone thank you guys for tuning in and hopefully this will give you a good foundation as we proceed over the next 15 weeks or so that we begin to study a variety of ethical theories for those of us for those of you who are watching this video on YouTube and you're not in the class so you can know what we're doing is in this video I'm going to be providing a sort of basic introduction to general ethical theory I'm going to sort of give you a tour of ethics if you will talk about what some of the different basic ethical positions are some of the key ideas that you need to be aware of and then in the subsequent videos this this fall we're talk about fall 2017 I'm gonna go ahead we're gonna take a look at Ariston we're into a detailed reading at Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics starting next week followed by a detailed reading of Kant's lecture on ethics and then after that we're gonna look at me cheese genealogy of morality and finally we'll conclude with two brief videos or two videos on fuko's and discipline and punished so that's sort of where we're out here if you're just going to be tuning in with us but what I want to do in this video is really just give you a basic introduction to ethical theory but I should say that then what I'm gonna say is in many ways completely inadequate that is there's much much more to ethical theory than I actually have time to address in this video introduction but this should at least lay some of the basic groundwork for you and give you some sort of orientation here in terms of what ethics is all about and what some of the basic ethical positions are they've been articulated from within the Western Occidental tradition okay so let's sort of start off here and just talk about well what is ethics in general that the word ethics actually comes from the Greek ethos and ethos actually means habit or custom and in fact the word morality also comes from it has a similar derivation it comes from the Latin more days and it also means customs so we're going to sort of think about here what is ethics in terms of the context of philosophy clearly habits and cost an important part of how we live our lives and how we see our actions in the world but we're gonna see here that ethics is a very sort of particular place within philosophy it's considered one of the three or four major branches of philosophy if we're gonna give sort of a quick tagline we could say that ethics is something like the philosophical study of morality or the study of right action in fact that definition comes to us from the Cambridge dictionary of philosophy but there's many other definitions for ethics that have been given for instance some have referred to ethics is the science of right action others have referred to I think says this as the study of normative activity we're going to talk a little bit about all of those things today but just to start off here we can say that ethics is really a philosophical study of morality in the study of how we ought to act I'm frequently fond of saying that ethics is unavoidable that is you could probably live your life I'm not studying metaphysics or theology or any of these other branches of philosophy but ethics is one of these ones in which we're all sort of naturally inculcated in other words because all human beings must act and all human beings must choose how to act it means that humans be are aware that some of our actions are worse or better than others some of our actions seem to be good others seem to be bad or maybe even evil and so what ethics is in attempt to do is it's an attempt to study morality and study action so that we can know what the best way we really ought to act so we can make the best choice we also say here that ethics is a philosophical study I think one of the ways of unpacking that would be to say that philosophy is ultimately always concerned with the principles of its domain of inquiry so if you're studying logic then you're interested in the principles that undergird and serve as the foundation for that did that study for logic right for how to think clearly if you're studying aesthetics which is the study of beauty then you won't understand what the principles for recognizing the beautiful might be you don't understand what those principles are well ethics is similarly concerned with the principles that that are foundational and form the basis for how we understand recognize it will ultimately attain right action so that's the sort of brief way in which I might say it you can also differentiate and say they well on the one hand ethics at least historically has been concerned or with the with goodness what is good and how do we understand what what is good I mean it's sort of a general study of goodness and on the other hand I think seems to be about the general study of right actions so we're acting rightly and understand what something is good are not necessarily the same thing although we assume and it seems to be that they're highly related right it seems that right action depends upon Atkins previous previous worked out conception of what's good because you'd idea would be that when we act we act the right way and acting the right way is the good thing to do but you can see are the right action and goodness ultimately emerge so there's a lot of debate here about it at what ethics really entails and there's no way we're gonna really address it with a great systematicity here today but you'll see that as we continue the video series and as we study a variety of ethical theories we'll see some of this stuff start to get worked out now we can start off by saying really there's three types of ethics if you will there's meta ethics normative ethics and there's practical ethics let's take a moment and sort of pin down each of these first off let's start with meta ethics now you can see here the word meta you may be familiar with because also from the Greek and it means something like that which is above or beyond right so you can say that meta physics is the study of that which goes beyond the physical realm but it's foundational to the physical realm right in a similar sense ethics concerns how we ought act rightly and concerns the good but we can see here is that meta ethics is that particular sort of philosophical inquiry that's concerned with the fundamental questions about the nature of ethical theory itself so for instance imagine if you have a debate with a friend on whether or not it's good to lie to someone if you perceive that person would has ill intense right is it okay to lie well that's a area of sort of practical ethics and applied ethics which would be how do I sort of make the right choice but imagine here if we stop and say well what counts as good itself what is the good or imagine if we ask the question will how can we know what the good is or how can we know what justice is those are questions that are concerned about the fundamental nature of ethical theory in general so you might say that ethics is sort of concerned with particularity zuv how we ought to act right action and then meta ethics is that greater discipline that seeks to sort of set the concepts themselves to articulate the limits and the characteristics of the domain of the domain and of the concepts that get worked out on a practical level so first important we've got meta ethics secondarily we can talk about normative ethics know the word normative really refers to an idea of doing something that's right or doing something you can see the word normal is related there right but northern refers to doing what's right or wrong in terms of right action so we continue that normative ethics is that sort of area of ethical inquiry or ethical Theory that's concerned with what makes an action right or wrong good or bad virtuous or vicious so normative ethics wants to figure out if you will the demarcation or the threshold line then makes something right versus making something wrong right understanding sort of where the limits are if you will in order that fix is ultimately concerned with articulating with the fundamental principles that we ought to adhere to are in terms of right and wrong action okay finally we have here practical ethics and practical ethics seems to be concerned with really practical applicable moral dilemmas that are actually faced by people so for instance if you were talking to a friend and your friend reveals to you that she's considering having an abortion that she was she's pregnant she doesn't want to be pregnant and she's decided to go ahead with an abortion well this would be we might consider as a practical problem in other words it's a problem that's actually faced by the actual person and they actually have to choose right another thing that's important to recognize that when we talk about a practical moral dilemma a dilemma a moral dilemma is a dilemma in which really you must choose but either choice seems problematic and enhanced the term dilemma right so we know that people are faced with lots of different practical problems and as well as moral dilemmas so for instance problems that would be included under practical ethics include for instance problems related to the third world or problems related to world hunger problems related to abortion maybe even genetic genome research all kinds of different practical problems but in general practical ethics is the most particular which you might say here is that meta ethics as I clearly as sort of the is sort of the most OP free ri consideration in the sense that meta ethics is about just what is goodness itself and sort of pinning down these things normative ethics takes us a little bit closer to the real world in the sense that it wants to figure out what the antenna means if you will of right and wrong action on and then finally practical ethics is looking at very concrete practical concrete dilemmas and cases that are actually faced by people so imagine for instance if you're reading an epic book and there's a chapter on climate change that's going to be and I think that's going to be a chapter that's related to practical ethics sometimes practical ethics is also called applied ethics right because you're applying the theory normative ethics in meta ethics both tend to be a bit more theoretical so for instance a normative ethics you can you can articulate a specific principle that will let you figure out what's wrong or what's right whereas meta ethics wants to figure out the most universal senses of the terms themselves so this is this it may be a fully satisfactory explanation but it is an important way of beginning to understand what ethical theory does you can have practical theories meta ethical theories or even Norman theories and what we find is that the philosophers are the most successful that is the the ones who offer us the most credible and what seems to be the most credible moral theories tend to talk about meta ethics and normative ethics and occasionally talked about practical ethics in fact practical ethics until the late 1970s was probably not even considered its own domain of ethics but I think today that applied ethics are practical I think so certainly considered what are the four fronts and major divisions of among ethical theory or ethical investigation okay another thing that's worth mentioning here and this is a debatable point is we can also make a distinction here between morality and ethics now some philosophers don't make this distinction and disagree that there is a distinction here but I think that it's helpful at least at the very beginning here for us as we begin our journey into ethical theory and the way I want to sort of lay it out is think about morality is referring to the actual customs of action that people hold so for instance I would imagine that even if you've never taken a theory to class I feel it's a philosophy class on ethics or morality you already have a certain moral position you already have a certain sense of what you think is wrong or right for most of us that's largely something that comes to us through its inherited by our parents or by the culture that we live in and these are customs of action that we sort of tend to think of as being the right action so sir so for instance both possessor but a morality or a moral system doesn't necessarily have to be something that you reflect upon or something that's been worked out so for instance in one age and in one era so one might say that a moral custom includes the way in which you would treat someone of the opposite sex that there's certain sort of moral customs that need to be adhered to when you you know are dealing or relating to someone of the opposite sex so for instance there's a debate here about should you have co-ed dorms or should you have you know dorms in which the sexes are separated well in large sense that is a reflection of the morality of the institution you're going to if you're talking about a college or university so I'm gonna think of morality here is sort of the operational set of customs and values that we have that relate to how we think we ought to act whereas I want to talk about ethics here at least we'll talk about ethical theory as something a little bit more rational that is another thing about ethics as a rational investigation into action so all of us have morality but not all of us have ethical considerations that is not all of us rationally reflect on how we ought to act some of us just act and that we think we know we're doing the right thing because it's become it's a part of our custom and it's a part of our habitual life or our social life or whatever right so if we can distinguish these and think it's helpful because almost all of us have certain moral beliefs but we're going to see here that those moral beliefs ultimately need to be submitted to a rational investigation and what we find is that when we submit many of our moral beliefs to rational investigation we frequently find that we don't really have as good of reasons as we may think for holding those beliefs ok so I think that's a helpful sort of distinction it's a very rough and loose distinction but it allows us to sort of recognize that on the one hand people already do have sort of moral views and moral beliefs and they live by those but it also lets us distinguish the idea that there do we honestly help we also need to have a sort of reflective deliberate investigation into action so that we can you know do hopefully live with us sort of live possible okay so what I want to do in the rest of the videos now I don't talk too much about that thing's really in this video this is yeah I don't know I think you'd say we've lost connection but what I want to do the next part of they do here is I want to give you some examples of what some of the basic core ethical theories are these are the sorts of things that you would study if you took an intro to philosophy class or an introduction to ethics course where you're going to see here that in the next couple of videos here we're not to be going over all of these theories but we will run up against some of them okay and so I want to just give you sort of a tour here give you if you will a salad a view of what the salad menu bar options of ethical theory are so that way as we go through and we take a look first to Aristotle's virtue ethics and then eventually at constant ology and Nietzsche's genealogy we're gonna see that these different theories fit in different places okay so let's go ahead and get started here with the first sort of ethical one sort of ethical position is what we refer to as hedonism and there's different hedonist but hedonism comes from the Greek term I think hedonic or he dos which means pleasure right so hedonism is any ethical theory that says that the goal of life the goal of living a good life is to live a pleasure full life so hedonism is the idea that you ought to pursue pleasure and that pleasure is what is good so go back to our distinction earlier meta ethics talks about what is good so heinous could say well what's good is pleasure right normative ethics would be concerned with how should we act wrong or Riley the hedonist would say well we ought to act in such a way as to promote the good sort of pleasure pleasure you know good pleasure because not all pleasures are necessarily good and then you might say practical ethics would look at a concrete case maybe the abortion case and say well if by having an abortion you are actually going to increase the pleasure of people obviously you may not increase the pleasure of the fetus but let's imagine for instance that your person is if the person is were to be poor and they'd be living under the absolute most extreme worst conditions imaginable maybe they'd be born a slave in which pleasure becomes impossible under those conditions you can about it maybe the hedonist now that would apply the theory of pleasure in a very concrete particular practical manner so heated isn't as pleasure centered ethics and that's what I want you to think of when you think of hedonism and it's a good example of a heating this philosopher who's the name of Epicurus one moment here and Epicurus he was an ancient philosopher lived around the time of Aristotle and or a little bit after that maybe a generation after Aristotle and epicures argued that the most the best life the good life was ultimately the most pleasureful lives but for him pleasure is needed to be you need to define pleasure in a very concrete particular way his argument was to say that pleasure can be defined as the absence of pain that's a very sort of interesting way to define the whole thing because that means that pleasure is actually rooted first and foremost in pain or in other words pain is the baseline and pleasure is something that arises out of the natural condition of experiencing pain and there does seem to be something right about this which is namely everyone seems to experience pain and pleasure so if pleasures the absence of pain and everyone has pain then that gives us a framework to begin to understand now we have to also distinguish and Epicurus does between the difference between what we might say are good pleasures and bad pleasures right not every pleasure is equal right set like for instance let's compare two pleasures let's compare the pleasure of people who drink a lot and then they become drunk and then they enjoy their drunken stupor right obviously people were drunk or enjoying themselves in there and pleasure does it follow that the hedonist things that well if you're gonna live the most pleasure fly you should get drunk all the time right well no Epicurus in fact argues the exact opposite because some pleasures you some pleasures have an immediate but their long-term effect is actually greater pain right so for instance the person who drinks a lot and gets drunk they may have pleasure in the immediate context of drinking or becoming drunk but that pleasure will eventually turn into the pain of a hangover or potentially maybe even liver disease or something like that right so drinking a lot actually even though it may seem like pleasure initially actually causes other pains that follow along so that means that epicures thought that well that means you probably shouldn't drink them so that means that hedonist at least for the Epicureans are concerned not just with living the most pleasure for life but with living the life that includes the right sorts of pleasures not every pleasure is good so for instance think about another example here we did drinking let's think about sex right I've rolled like sex or at least most everyone sex is a very pleasurable thing that people do with their bodies right but wait a second let's think about it not every sexual encounter even though a sexual encounter itself may be pleasureful that sexual encounter may lead to pain that happens later if you've ever you know had an intimate relationship with someone that didn't work out you'll know that breaking up with someone can be very very painful in fact if you've had intimate sexual relations with the person and then you have to break up your relationship that too can lead to a great amount of pain this actually led Epicurious to conclude that well sex is not really the right sort of pleasure we should pursue instead he argues we should pursue friendship right because friendship is something that has less pain than a lover's relationship might have so again hedonism even though it's a pleasure centered ethics does not necessarily lend itself to the idea that you should live a life of sex drugs and rock and roll right to use the sort of phrase there you can have a sort of sophisticated hedonism another example that epicures gives is he says for instance that you should always try to eat gourmet food right gourmet food and I love food I'm the foodie right gourmet food tastes good right it tastes better than regular through that you buy at a restaurant so why pursue it's more pleasureful right but one of the things that Epicurus notices is that when people have the pleasure of gourmet food and they eat really well what happens is when they're up when they can no longer eat that Corbyn food when it's no longer available for one reason or another it increases their pain because it looks like our pain is related to our desires right and this is a very deep insight that actually goes to Buddhism but the idea there is that when you when you have a desire for something and you're unable to attain that desire it causes pain so that means that if you become accustomed to eating fancy foods you will begin to sup desire those foods but if those foods are not available and you just have to eat steamed broccoli with rice right you are going to be in pain even though that's actually something that's healthy for you so you can see or that hedonism is about learning to desire the right sorts of pleasures and differentiate those from the wrong sorts of pleasures okay now you can see that epicureanism is a type of hedonism and not ever hedonism is epicurean but Epicureanism is a sort of ethical theory that's able to at least answer some meta ethical normative ethical questions but also includes very concrete practical ethical questions that could be it could be applied towards so that's one version that's one type of that pickle theory we could talk about another ethical theory we could talk about is that of egoism okay now let me differentiate egoism a little bit because on the one hand we could talk about psychological egoism and the other here we could talk about ethical you Gozer let's talk about psychological egoism is first as you can see the root word of egoism is the ego and the ego literally means self right so egoism means the ethics of the self if you will or we could say is that egoism is the idea ethical egoism is the idea that you ought to pursue your own self-interest right so for instance ego is a means that you have to figure out what's in your self-interest and then act accordingly now psychological you go ISM which I just mentioned is the idea that people can only act for their own selfish purposes but the problem with psychological egoism is that it actually precludes ethical action itself because in order to have ethics we have to have the notion of right action well right action implies that we can either choose right or we can you choose wrong that is we have a choice psychological egoism primarily held by psychologists or people who take that theory holds that people will only and always act for their selfish desires right for their own selfish reasons right or for reasons they're related to their self-interest in some way or another right now but if everyone has to act that way then that means no one has a choice if no one has a choice they're not talking about an ethical theory because ethics requires the ability to choose right and so psychological egoism is not the same as ethical egoism right ethically he goes in is that you should pursue your own self-interest although you don't have to write all the others debate about this a good example of an egoist would be actually Frederick Nietzsche's philosophy will talk about Nietzsche here at the end of the video course but Nietzsche argues for something he calls the will to power and it's one more of a psychological notion but he relates it to ethics and the idea that he thinks that the the most superior ethical creature is the creature that creates their own creates their own moral values out of themselves right and there's other ethical egoistic including Ayn Rand even may have heard of her she's an ethical a list and she's strictly speaking argues that you should pursue your own self-interest and that she argues that altruism is a lie right that you can never and you should never try to pursue this self-interest of another person but only promote your own interest so egoism is this notion of self-interest as ethics now that means that the ego signal isn't necessarily comes along with its own meta ethical senses right so some of the meta ethical categories for the egoist or commitments for the egos would be the idea that what is good is essentially that which is related to the self in a beneficial way as opposed right normative ethics would say okay you have to choose one way or another what's right right action is determined by whether or not the action has a positive effect on one's self-interest so for instance think about smoking right people shouldn't smoke it's bad for them which means that it's in every person's self-interest not to smoke so a normative egoistic discussion on smoking would likely entail that you should not even though you may want to write and of course there's practical problems we can apply to it as well okay so that's egoism okay next would be utilitarianism and again I'm just going through this pretty rough and tough here so forgive me but utilitarian you can see the root word there is utility right so what is a utility well utility is something that you use right think about it when you pay your monthly water bill or sum or electric bill that's usually referred to as a utility bill now utilitarianism holds something very interesting and loads that our actions are like utilities there are things we use in order to gain happiness right that's what the utilitarian things and they're to the tune this the classic utilitarian coming from John Stuart Mill subscribes to what we call the general happiness principle and the idea of the general happiness principle is that you should pursue those actions which promote the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people and so in other words our actions are tools that we use to promote the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people so utilitarianism says ok the ethical field is really about trying to figure out what works and what context to promote happiness I mean not just what the happiness of the single individual like the egoist might say but the happiness of all people who you can are involved right to promote the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people and this theory comes out of work of John Stuart Mill Jeremy Bentham contemporary authors include for instance Peter Singer who writes on animal rights and there's many other utilitarians so utilitarian is about pursuing the greatest of happiness for the greatest amount of people and this means but that you can see here is that how our actions actually do this can differ based upon the situation right so for instance imagine I imagine if there is a fire and you see that a person stuck inside of a burning building and you're able to save them but in order to save them you have to break the window right you would probably break the window even though you're destroying that person's property in order to save them because I would promote the greatest amount happiness for the greatest amount of people but but you can see here that very same action of breaking a window would not be okay if there was no burning fire so let's say you walk by your neighbor's house and you just decide to walk through their window well that action even though it's the very same action as the fire case will be considered bad why because it's not useful in that context for promoting the greatest mode happiness what this means though is that utilitarianism is what we call a non-consequentialist theory of ethics right consequentialist theories of ethics imply that the value or the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined upon the consequences that follow from that action so I break the window I pull you out from the fire the consequences are good right but I Drive by and I just throw a window through your rock and then pull you through it but there's no fire the consequences are very bad people would consider you as a criminal and a kidnapper or something right so the notion here is that utilitarianism is utilitarianism is a consequentialist duty of that things and not I think I made a misspoke non-consequential ISM is the idea that the consequences don't matter to an ethical Theory utilitarianism again is a consequentialist theory of ethics I think I accidentally misspoke there in my apologies so that's utilitarianism now another theory which is non consequential it's now again non consequentialism means that the rightness or wrongness of an action is independent of the consequences that follow from that action now a famous type of theory arose deontology and deontology roughly stated is what we might say is a duty based ethics it's any ethical theory that says there are particular concrete duties that you must fulfill in order to be a good person or to do the right sort of thing right you know the deontologist particularly we're thinking I'm thinking of here we're gonna read and that's a manual comment we're gonna be looking at his lecture on ethics which is pretty interesting because it's his textbook he wrote for his own students on ethics but he's the famous deontologist and he argues that there's a universal duty to do certain things and that universal dude is independent of the consequences that follow from that action famously he argued that lying was wrong under all cases so for instance you can ask yourself let's imagine I'm getting ready for a party and my wife see my wife is getting dressed my wife says do I look fat in this dress and let's say she does look a little fat should I be honest with her and tell her that she does well what the deontologist says is well let's think about it lying is do we have a duty to lie no they say we have a duty not to lie and there's reasons for that they relate to order what's known as the categorical imperative I don't wanna get into that right now because we're gonna study it later but their view is that you always have a duty to tell the truth no matter what it doesn't matter what the consequences are so the deal intelligence would say it's always wrong to lie right because you have a duty and your fulfillment of the duty is what you is what determines what's right or wrong what's good or bad and so the dealers would say no you have to tell your wife that she does look fat if she asked right this isn't Duty based ethics similarly for instance the deontologist caught he argues that suicide is always morally wrong and what that means then is that it doesn't matter why people want to commit suicide and it doesn't matter what the effect of his suicide will be maybe if I commit suicide my family will be unburdened from having to care for me as I slowly die right that would be is seems like a nice sort of thing but the deontologist doesn't care about that it's a no you have a duty to respect yourself as a person and you have a duty not to treat yourself as an object or as a means and by committing suicide you do treat yourself as an object in a means which means that you break or violate that Duty hence you have a duty not to do that thing so the deontologist is a non-consequentialist theory whereas by contrast we as we said the utilitarian is a consequentialist theory of ethics okay so that's a deontology now one of the we're not through yet we're getting close here one of the next ones I want to mention is virtue theory we're gonna this is the first kind of deer we're gonna be looking at in this course as we read Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics will be post enough to do here within the next week now virtue ethics argues it's there's different forms of virtue in theory but I'm gonna stick with Aristotle's virtue theory and his idea is that is that the goal of life is that it has happiness you want other the happy life but in order to live a happy life you have to cultivate the right sort of character so instead of asking whether or not lying is wrong or right or having an abortion is wrong or right or those sorts of things whether or not specific actions or moral activities are wrong or right the virtue theorist focuses less on the activity and more on the actor right more on the individual who must act so in other words the virtue theorist focuses on the character that we ought to cultivate the notion is simple is that it's very difficult maybe to figure out whether or not it's wrong to lie in this situation right to let in this situation and so forth especially using some sort of grand abstract Theory instead maybe what we ought to try to cultivate is to become good people because good people tend to make good decisions and so aerosols theory is that well in order to become a good person you have to cultivate the right sorts of character traits or in other words the right sorts of character virtues right in fact the word virtue is in Greek is arattai and it means something like excellence so think of it like that right is that you have to cultivate an excellent character trait but there's many different domains and dimensions of who you are and so the notion of your character so the notion of virtue ethics is you have to become excellent in a whole variety of ways in a whole variety of character trades so for instance eros all the classic virtues are courage right temperance wisdom justice magnificence being honest right and so on and so forth right so the notion here is that aerosol tickets that you have to get what you have to figure out how you contain these virtues now aerosol is notion was that a virtue was a middle point between the extremes of excess and deficiency doing too much doing too little right the notion airs that virtue is always this middle point this balancing point in which you're not doing too much you're not doing too little you're not lying too much and you're not and you lie it just the right times right up as it were so virtue theory seeks to cultivate the character of a person rather than to articulate the specific conditions and context under which happiness can arise right so there's a little bit of notion of virtue I may be quick on it because you're gonna see that the next I don't know six videos are going to be on Aristotle's virtue ethics and so we'll get to that in very substantive way in the coming videos another ethical theory is known as subjectivism and one of the key philosophers here to think about his name is Jael Mackey wrote an essay called the subjectivity of values and which he articulates the theory of subjectivism subjectivism is the notion that number one there are no moral facts that is you can't look to the world the way you can look in the world and see if there's a tree here or there's a signpost there or there's a car here your friend lives there those are all facts of the objective world and Mackey's idea is that morality and ethics is ultimately concerned with what is subjective that is there's no facts in the world so how do we know what's wrong or right and that means that with subjectivist and we see a very different position in meta ethics than we see in the other theories such as virtue ethics or utilitarianism erecting ontology for the subjectiveness it's ultimately the individual subject that's at stake in terms of determining moral values now to be clear Mackey thinks that for instance murdering people and stealing people's properties wrong objectively but it's only objectively wrong because it's illegal right what makes something morally wrong what makes stealing morally wrong has to do with the subjective appropriation of the individual it has to do with the values that the individual person or subject holds subjectivism is a challenge to many moral theories and more many moral thinkers because it seems to violate the potential possibility of having objective judgments and morality after all part of the whole point of moral discourse in moral theory is to give us some way to figure out what's wrong or right for all of us and subjectivism seems to hold that what's wrong or right at the meta ethical level ultimately has nothing to do with the world that has rather more to do with our dispositions towards the world so subjectivism is that those subjectivism would be a sort of a tag line if you will for those moral theories which focus on the subject as the primary criterion for determining moral value okay let's move on here we're going to talk about all this as we go and this is going to leave me to my served last room the notion here which is actually well I don't know if this is an ethical theory although some people do probably theorize on this on people do in fact theorize on these grounds but in many ways it's also a major problem for moral theory and this is the notion of moral relativism sometimes this also referred to as cultural relativism now relativism is the idea that two things can be compared and weighed but only with reference to each other right so then a diet the idea of moral relativism is is that or this this typically owns but is that our moral values are relative to the culture the situation or the sort of moral inheritance that we have right in other words there's really nothing wrong or right about stealing it's just merely something that's relatively wrong because we're living in this culture in this time in place I in fact think that many people think their moral relativist but there is in fact I think a major problem moral relativism which is namely that moral relativism seems to preclude the possibility of making moral judgments at least making objective moral judgments and this has real ramifications if for instance we take a look at something like criminal justice or criminal jurisprudence right the justice system the court systems goal is to adjudicate and treat people fairly into you know ultimately to uphold the principles of justice out whatever those might be but they should be the same for everyone at least in principle but what we find is that different cultures and even different peoples within cultures hold very different moral views concurrent with each other so this seems to indicate that there's a sort of moral relativity to things but if that's the case then how am I ever really going to say that what someone else has done is wrong so imagine for instance take the case of in the Western world we call it female genital mutilation and let's say the eastern world it's or it's referred to as female circumcision now if you're not familiar with this I apologize it's kind of graphic but what happens is what a girl is between the age of 8 and 14 what will happen is in some cultures usually it's another woman or it's a doctor or some sort of person will go and then cut the clitoris off of a woman's genitalia and what this means is it actually is very very painful and it actually after the surgery or after the cutting what happens is that scar tissue build up on the female genitals now what that means that whenever a woman engages in sexual intercourse from that moment forward because of the way the scar tissue develops it causes intense pain through the nerve endings that are located there there's many many nerve endings in both male and female genitals so what happens as a consequence is it causes a lot of pain and the idea originally was that well this way people women won't want to be promiscuous because it'll be painful right now this is a custom that's been carried on for really centuries in fact now in the Western world we tend to find this as absolutely important such that we call it mutilation we don't call it circumcision we call it mutilation but you can ask yourself well who's right easy are we right in the United States to say that female circumcision is morally reprehensible that you should not do this to your your teenage or your your children your yeah your female children we do think it's wrong and we do in fact have laws against doing it in the Western world but what about the the relativist would say well okay it's wrong in the United States may be wrong in Europe but is it wrong in in certain parts of Africa or certain parts of the Middle East where this custom is practiced right you can see are the relativist what they want to say is that our moral values are ultimately relative to some other condition and that may be just simply speaking a cultural or religious tradition and if that's the case that means that there's no way to ever arbitrate a custom is actually being wrong or right so you can see it's not the same as subjectivism but it has a similar position to subjectivism I think moral relativism is a bigger problem ultimate because if all things are morally relative then it raises the question of what exactly are we talking about when we talk about morality it seems to invite us into this form of equivocation in terms of our moral discourse now these are just some of the basic positions we've looked at in terms of moral theory but what I wanted to do in this video again is just give you a sort of quick sneak peek a quick tour of what some of what some of what was studying in ethics and well some of what some of the basic ethical positions are especially regarding virtue theory and egoism because we're gonna be looking at those and with great specificity on deontology with great specificity throughout this video series in these video lectures okay so once again welcome to ethics and I hope that this introduction to ethical theory at least gets your wheels turning wets your appetite and gets you thinking about what ethics is all about you're gonna see we're going to jump pretty quickly in our next video by taking a look at Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics book one through three so if you want read that before you go in before you take one take a look at the next video once it's posted okay thank you very much for watching I look forward to seeing guys all night