PHIL 1550 Chapter Notes - Chapter Introduction: Applied Ethics, Moral Responsibility, Personal Identity

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 1550
• Professor: Nalini E Ramlakhan

Document Summary

Ethics: the way(s) in which we ought to live our lives. Actions we ought or ought not to perform. Attitudes & concerns we ought or ought not have. Character traits we ought or ought not develop. Practical concerns: those practices & patterns of caring that are central to the living of our lives, both w/ respect to our treatment of ourselves and our treatment of others. Special sort of caring we have only for ourselves. Attitudes toward specific moral issues like abortion, cloning, advance, directives, etc. More abstract commitments to various practices of moral responsibility, compensation, & fair distribution. Relation b/w identity & the rationality of anticipating survival in some sort of afterlife. Applied ethics: one attempts to apply abstract moral theories & principles to concrete, real-life cases. X and y are qualitatively identical if and only if they have exactly similar qualities.