The Fundamentals Of Ethics By Russ Shafer-Landau

In chapter 19 of the philosopher, Russ Shafer-Landau’s book, The Fundamentals of Ethics, he presents an overview of the moral theory of ethical relativism. Ethical relativism is the view that there is some moral truth and that truth is relative to each person or culture. The overarching moral principle can be broken down into ethical subjectivism and cultural relativism. The difference being ethical subjectivism says an act is morally acceptable or forbidden if an individual approves or disapproves of the action. And cultural relativism relies on the judgment of morally acceptable or forbidden if a culture or society approves or disapproves of the action (Shafer-Landau, p. 295).

When I first learned that philosophy class was being taught at Johnston Community College I thought it would be an interesting class to take. Before I took this class all I really knew about philosophy was it dealt with the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. In addition, I always believed in the fallacious statement that in philosophy there was no wrong answer. However, even after just reading the passages from the first module from the books The Ethical Life and The Fundamentals of Ethics by Russ Shafer-Landau I realized that my previous belief on how there was no wrong answer in philosophy was completely wrong. The reason is in Chapter 5 which deals with morality and religions said in the book that a theory called Divine Command Theory is wrong it even states, “Therefore, either God is imperfect, or the Divine Command Theory is false. God is not imperfect. Therefore, the Divine Theory is false (Shafer-Landau 69).” In other words, Divine Command Theory is pretty much an act of morality in which people believe something is immoral or not depending on whether it 's been forbidden by God or not. This is false since this theory leads to people believing their is no morality without God. As well as, throughout the semester my style of writing and thought process has changed because in this class it shows students to look at the different perspectives to several different topics.

In the text “the primacy of the ethical” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, she discusses the use of anthropology as well as its relevance to today’s society. She says “anthropologists may be suspending the ethical in our dealings with the other (Hughes, p. 409)”. She means that anthropologists spend a lot of their time studying the culture of a group of people, but they are not always ethical while doing so. In this text it is easy to see that the author does not believe that anthropology serves a purpose today. I believe that anthropology does serve a purpose in society because we can learn about people from all around the world that we do not have a chance to know otherwise by simply reading about them. However, I do believe that some information

For example, there is a hunter who wonders if it is morally acceptable to kill a deer. Act Utilitarianism analyzes the effects of this one action to decide if it is moral by assigning a value to the amount of pleasure and pain each individual involved will experience. In this case the hunter and his family will experience the pleasure of having food from eating the deer, many of the neighbors of the hunter will experience pleasure by having the deer off their property, and the deer’s family will experience the pain of the loss of a family member. If the outcome is that the net value of pleasure is greater than the pain caused by the killing of the deer, it is morally right for the hunter to kill it.

In the article Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Laws, Arthur A. Leff took an agnostic approach when determining what morality should be comprised of. He suggested that humans struggle with desiring to follow a predetermined and unchallengeable set of moral rules, while at the same time wanting the autonomy to create those rules.

By presenting this problem, Burnett tends to reflect reality. Through Mary’s story, she is criticizing the behaviour of English mothers in India. She points out that British wives in India are often described as being far from domestic ideals by both ignoring their children and failing to properly supervise the servants who look after them. Burnett was daring enough to tackle Mary’s mother unaccepted behaviour and hints at infidelity. Many assume that it is hot weather that drives those wives to walk in the wrong path and as a result destroy their families (4).

By it’s nature, Classical Utilitarianism is a normative ethical theory which believes that the action that is deemed as morally right is the action that results in the most good or maximum utility. (Driver, J. 2014). Classical Utilitarianism also ignores the sole intent behind the action to focus on the consequences and promotes the pleasure for the greater good (Green, H. 2016). Utilitarianism falls under two schools of thought, including Rule Utilitarianism, which considers an action that leads to the greater good based on whether or not it adheres to a rule based on circumstance, and Act Utilitarianism, which considers whether a person’s

Act utilitarianism is generally described as believing that the best course of action is the action that would bring in the most net utility. “In their view, the principle of utility—do whatever will produce the best overall results—should be applied on a case by case basis. The right action in any situation is the one that yields more utility (i.e. creates more well-being) than other available actions.” (http://www.iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/). Rule utilitarianism is generally described as 1) an action that can be justified morally if it can be turned into a justifiable moral rule, 2) a moral rule can be justified if its moral code can create more utility than any other possible rules or no rules at all. According to act rule, we must judge a person

The goal of an act utilitarian is to maximize a person’s overall happiness in the universe. With an act utilitarian the goal will be to “Maximize pleasure and minimize pain” (Waller, 2005, p.49). An act utilitarian says that people could do that and they would not only make everyone happier but they would also be doing what is morally right. An act utilitarian doesn’t have conflicts over any action being right or wrong.

Act utilitarianism is an ethical system that defines right and wrong by looking at individual actions and seeing how much happiness these actions produce within the group. Right is defined as creating the most overall utility or happiness and wrong is defined as the latter. Although on the surface it seems right to look at overall happiness there are still flaws in this system. One

The four main ethical frameworks are Proportionalism, Utilitarianism, Situation Ethics and Natural Law. There many other ethical points of view besides these four, some only slightly different from one these and some very different from any of these, but most people will be able to roughly fit in one of these categories.

Act Utilitarianism theory states that everyone should be consider in order to achieve the greatest happiness for the majority of people and that ones actions and intentions should be morally right. Act Utilitarianism also tells us that we should evaluate the consequences of ones actions. We have to decide between our options and decide which one provides the greatest happiness for the majority.

The works of Emmanuel Levinas are considered to be hugely influential within the philosophical disciplines of twentieth century ethics and existentialism, but unfortunately the convolution and misrepresentation of his thinking often results in miscomprehension of his ideas. Totality and Infinity: A Book on Exteriority is one of Levinas’ earlier works (published in 1961 in French and 1969 in English) that has garnered much attention and praise from writers across a multitude of disciplines (not just philosophy) for the fact that it deals with the widely-applicable subject of relations toward and perception of the Other from the perspective of the self. Throughout the book, the author demonstrates the manner in which subjectivity begins from the idea of perpetuity, and how the infinite is an outcome of the correlation of self and Other. The main purpose of Levinas work is to find out the dominance of the Other based on the epiphany of the face. According to his work, infinite is the beginning or foundation of ethics and, he also declines any ethical intellectualism. Levinas acknowledges the idea that not every human being is inherently ethical per se but he or she is an aspiration of Others. Therefore, the remaining part of this paper will focus on sexuality, which is one of the themes that the writer encountered

In Michael Lambek’s Toward an Ethics of the Act, Lambek discusses the ethics of performance and practice rituals through perlocution and illocution. Anthony Gidden’s talks about the duality of agency (action) and structure and argues that that’s two cannot exist without each other. These two compare and contrast in analyzing social actions.

The book I chose is “Business ethics: Ethical decision-making” 10th edition is written by O. C. Ferrell, John Fraedrich, Ferrell. It was published by Cengage Learning in 2014. This book consists of almost 340 pages and five parts. According to Amazon this book is among top seller. Something extraordinary about this book is that, this book highlight several cases related to the business ethics that help the reader to develop better understanding of how to solve several ethical issues in different situations.