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Wasn't Hume the grand-daddy of emotivism?
Yeah, but people have to actually 'care' that some form or degree or priority of duty, to someone, is a moral prescription. Otherwise, it's just one person's estimation as to what he/she thinks should work ethically in society over and against what someone else thinks should work.
The topic is ethics.
Personally... I have always said that ethics cannot be done in the abstract. I suspect I would resonate alot with the "ethics of care".
What I said comes out of the field of ethics. Remember, Social Philosophy was my forte in college. This isn't to say that I know everything there is to know about Ethics; no, but it is to say that I had a lot of professors who did, and I had both atheists and Christians as teachers.
I'm trying to approach it from a practical point of view, not discuss the nature of ethics. That's just navel gazing to me.
What do you think is the best (most effective?) approach to ethics? There are generally three schools of normative ethical theories (taken from IEP article linked below):
1. Virtue Theories: Stress the importance of developing good habits of character, such as benevolence (e.g. Aristotle).
2. Duty Theories: Base morality on specific, foundational principles of obligation (e.g. Kant).
3. Consequentialist Theories: Correct moral conduct is determined solely by a cost-benefit analysis of an action's consequences (e.g. Bentham)
You may have another theory or approach in mind, or some combination. What is the best theory and why? What is wrong with the ones you didn't choose?
Ethics | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I suppose I'm in the virtue camp since I tend to think of ethics from the angle of the Jews, and Christian Hellenism especially the Stoics and Platonism. I also like some Utilitarianism etc. which I suppose might be consequentialism, but in many ways Utilitiarianism can lead people astray because people can be thinking of the very short term and immediate, rather than something that is much more long term and spread across society in general.
I suppose I'm in the virtue camp since I tend to think of ethics from the angle of the Jews, and Christian Hellenism especially the Stoics and Platonism. I also like some Utilitarianism etc. which I suppose might be consequentialism, but in many ways Utilitiarianism can lead people astray because people can be thinking of the very short term and immediate, rather than something that is much more long term and spread across society in general e.g. - Situational Ethics etc.
I don't think a deontological approach is a very good one, if rigidly held. If I have rule that says I should never lie, and a situation arises where a life is saved by my lying, then it seems lying is called for. I suppose one could take a deontological approach with the assumptuon that some rules can overide others, given the situation and the rules at play. The rule to always save a life overides the rule to never lie when the two come into conflict.
The other issue with a duty based, or rule based, ethic is there are just not enough rules to cover all possible situations. What do I do when I encounter a situation where my duty is not clearly in view?
Deontology can be a good start, but unlike Jesus, some people never articulate a hierarchy for their duties through meta-ethical reflection, and use them in a self-serving manner, reducing a seemingly lofty principle to a self-serving justification glossing over the real motivations. Jesus was very good at pointing this out, much to the ire of his critics.
I think a situational ethic is needed which takes into account the context surrounding the act instead of an absolute moral standard.What do you think is the best (most effective?) approach to ethics? There are generally three schools of normative ethical theories (taken from IEP article linked below):
1. Virtue Theories: Stress the importance of developing good habits of character, such as benevolence (e.g. Aristotle).
2. Duty Theories: Base morality on specific, foundational principles of obligation (e.g. Kant).
3. Consequentialist Theories: Correct moral conduct is determined solely by a cost-benefit analysis of an action's consequences (e.g. Bentham)
You may have another theory or approach in mind, or some combination. What is the best theory and why? What is wrong with the ones you didn't choose?
Ethics | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
That's an interesting point. For some reason I hadn't thought of Jesus as having a deontological approach, but now that you point it out it seems kind of obvious, haha. Really, I was thinking about Kant.
Now, alot of modern evangelicals would say "All the commandments are important".
esus is actually more Nietzschean than people realize, because he really sees sin and truth in a different way than many religious people have.
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