Philosophy 265

NEW LINKS:

Killing and Letting die

WA Death with Dignity Act:

http://wei.secstate.wa.gov/osos/en/Documents/I1000-Text for web.pdf

My Aristotle notes: http://facweb.bcc.ctc.edu/wpayne/aristotle1.htm

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html

John Stuart Mill's Utilitartianism: http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm

_________________________________________________________________________

HEALTH CARE

I'm covering health care in different way this quarter on account of the currently proposed reforms to our health care system. I want us to think about these three issues for starters:

What are the aims of health care reform?
What policy changes are we considering in current legislation?
How are these policy changes supposed to achieve the stated aims of reform?

Here is a link to Pres. Obama's recent address on health care reform:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSJugLUsM58

Some health care numbers

The branch of ethics most relevant to health care policy is the theory of social justice. We discussed Locke and Rawls on this topic. For an application of these views about justice to the question of whether people have a right to health care, see Allan Buchanan's article on p. 628 of our text.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION TO ETHICAL THEORY

We discussed three levels of ethical theory. These are:

meta-ethics, where we focus on the questions of whether there are any ethical truths and if so what makes them true
normative ethics, which aims at discovering general action guiding principles
applied ethics, where we apply normative theories to interesting or problematic kinds of cases.

Regarding our meta-ethical questions, we can distinguish three meta-ethical views about the fundamental nature of morality. These are:

Moral anti-realism, also known as subjectivism, which is the view that there are no moral truths. Note that this is not the view that its OK to do what ever you want (this is itself a moral claim). Many 20th century empiricist philosophers subscribed to moral anti realism. A significant problem faced by subjectivism or anti-realism about morality concerns how to explain moral reasoning. See my note about and against subjectivism for an explanation.
Conventionalism takes there to be moral truths that are made true by somebody's say so. Conventionalist view include divine command theory and popular varieties of moral relativism. It is a rare thing for a professional philosopher to take conventionalist theories of morality seriously. My note on moral relativism explains some of the grounds for dim assessments of conventionalist views.
According to realist views about the nature of morality, there are moral truths, but these are not made true by the will or say so of any person or group. Rather, the moral realist takes there to be features of the world independent of our will that ground morality. The two dominate realist views of right action are Kant's respect for persons theory and utilitarianism. Substantive theories of social justice, like Locke's and Rawl's, are also realist theories.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CRITICAL THINKING

We begin with a brief introduction to critical thinking and how philosophy involves formulating and evaluating arguments. See my note on arguments for the basics. In brief, an argument consists of a set of premises that offer a reason for believing a conclusion. Evaluating and argument involves determining whether the premises support the conclusion (that is, whether the premises would give us a reason for accepting the conclusion if they are true) and considering whether or not the premises are in fact true. Our first assignment is the deduction worksheet (4 points). The key notion in deductive logic is validity, the deductive standard of support. An argument is deductively valid if it is the case that if its premises are true, then its conclusion must also be true. Alternatively, but equivalently, a deductively valid argument is one where it is impossible for the premises to all be true and the conclusion false.

Arguments can be flawed in many ways. A mistake in reasoning is a fallacy. An invalid argument commits a formal fallacy (because it involves an error in the arguments logical form). This note will introduce you to a couple of commonly committed formal fallacies. It is also a good thing to be acquainted with informal fallacies. Here are a couple of links to sources on the web:

http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/fallacy_topics.html

http://mcckc.edu/longview/ctac/fallacy.htm

http://www.drury.edu/ess/convo1.html

http://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions.html

I like to have students read King on non-violence for a discussion of how critical thinking can be practiced in a way that is mutually respectful by people who disagree with each other.

Review materials and assignments:

Notes etc:

the tragedy of the commons

against subjectivism

true for me not for you

the is/ought gap

Euthanasia definitions

Brandt on suicide

Rachels on euthanasia

Thomson on abortion