PHILOS 2YY3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Prima Facie, Kantianism, Virtue Ethics
16 May 2018
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PHILOS 2YY3 Tutorial – Mar 12 2018
Case Study 2 – due next FRIDAY (23 March)
• Instead of comparing 2 moral outlooks, you choose one – utilitarianism or Kantism
• Provide argument for/against practice you summarized based on the moral theory you
have chosen
• What does a utilitarian think about capital punishment?
• Engage in a back and forth reasoning – with imagined interlocutor
o Someone with whom the paper is discussing
• Provide argument for why moral theory takes the stance it does
• And then answer possible objection, for someone who has the same moral outlook, but
they reach a different conclusion about the practice
o Utilitarian – capital punishment is ok because of the utility that comes out of it
o Imagined interlocutor – soe utilitaria’s ight thik that apital punishment is
not accepted in every circumstance but only some
Ross
• Midway between deontology and virtue ethics
• Wants to talk about duties, but not in the way Kant does
o He does’t thik duties are hat Kat thiks duties are
o Kant: moral duty to do something is derived from rationality; reason → what is
right → what our duties are
▪ Kant: good thing to do, is to will to do what is written above
▪ Only thing that has moral content without qualification is willing the
duties that you have
▪ If you have a duty to do X, you always have a duty to do X
▪ If you cant lie for Kant, you cant lie ever
▪ Duty not to lie: logical consistency in the concept of lying
• Ross: duties → you hae duties, ad that’s it
o They are facts about the world
o Brute moral facts about the world
o Prima facie duties; not just on the fact of it, they just happen to always be there
o Some duties can override other duties
▪ Duty to not lie overrides the duty to beneficence
▪ False promising
o When you have a duty to do something; you are thrown into the moral fabric of
the world, and meshed with certain duties that we have to be doing but this is
based on the circumstances and the people who are in those circumstances
o Duty to not lie: duty to not lie to YOU as a person, because you are here right
now
• If one duty can override another duty, how can we tell when one duty overrides
another?
o Utilitarian calculation?
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