F. Self, Meaning, and Culture
F.1 Ethics and Moral Reasoning
Course description
Ethical questions have already come up in earlier sections: inequality in D.2, automation and AI in E.4. Here you study them directly, through the major frameworks and the arguments for and against each. Consequentialism judges actions by outcomes; Bentham and Mill's utilitarianism is the clearest version, aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, a phrase Bentham inherited from Francis Hutcheson's 1725 formulation rather than coined himself. Deontology judges actions by duty regardless of outcome; Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals argues that people must be treated as ends in themselves, never purely as means. Virtue ethics, going back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, asks what a person of good character would do, and treats courage and practical wisdom as skills built by practice rather than rules applied. Read at least excerpts of Mill's Utilitarianism and the Groundwork directly, rather than a summary of either.
The Mohists argued for impartial care: a stranger's welfare carries the same weight as your family's. Confucians argued for graded care, starting from family and radiating outward, and Mengzi's reply to the Mohist challenge is worth reading on its own terms. It is close to the same argument utilitarians and their critics still have over whether special obligations to people close to you are a bias to correct for or a fact about ethics. Buddhist ethics, built on non-attachment and the reduction of suffering, is worth a chapter of general reading even without a single primary text assigned at this stage.
Apply the frameworks to live cases: an autonomous vehicle's collision algorithm, a version of the trolley problem in which the rule has to be fixed in advance rather than chosen in the moment; a bioethics case drawn from organ allocation; an environmental case about obligations to people not yet born. Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics and Quinn's Ethics for the Information Age work through cases like these with explicit principles. Gandhi's autobiography shows one person trying to live by a framework every day.
Checkpoints
Each checkpoint is tagged with the stage of the cycle it tests.| Stage | Checkpoint | Attempts |
|---|---|---|
naive realism | Before reading any theory, write your verdict on the autonomous-vehicle case and the principle behind it; after studying the frameworks, say which one your principle belonged to. | Post the first attempt |
formalism | Apply the three main frameworks in writing to one case and say where each gives a verdict you find hard to accept. | Post the first attempt |
abstraction | State the Mohist objection to Confucian graded care and Mengzi's reply, then map both onto a modern debate about impartiality, such as effective altruism against obligations to family. | Post the first attempt |
intuition | Take a moral position you reject and steelman it in writing until someone who holds it agrees with your statement of it. | Post the first attempt |