1) Difficulty of proving Supernatural Existence

2) Religious people can be immoral.

3) Non-religious people can be moral

4) Different religions promote different ethical systems.

Objectivism, Absolutism and Cultural Relativism

Relativism:

• The truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons

• Moral values seem to be different in different societies

Cultural Ethical Relativism

1. Different cultures have different moral codes

2. The moral code of a society determines what is right within that society

3. There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one society’s code as better than another’s

4. The moral code of our own society has no special status

5. It is arrogant for us to judge other cultures. We should always be tolerant of them

Why do some ethicists support Cultural Relativism?

1) The diversity of moral values and cultures

2) Moral uncertainty: sometimes we don’t know what is the most important thing to do

3) Situational differences: people and cultures differ in significant ways across times and spaces

What follows from Cultural Relativism

1) We could no longer say that the customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own

Example: The killing of students on the Tiananmen Square is not wrong because China has a long history of repressing a political dissent;

2) We could no longer criticize the moral code of our won society

Example: bride kidnapping in KG and KZ, or cast system in India

3) The idea of moral progress is called into doubt

Example: The status of women in society

Absolutism

• There are some moral rules that all societies must embrace, because those rules are necessary for society to exist.

• Moral rules or principles have no exceptions and are context independent.

• Similar moral principles exist in all societies such as the preservation of human life,

• People in all cultures have similar needs, such as the need to survive, to eat and drink.

• There are many cultural similarities

CULTURAL ABSOLUTISM

• For example, stealing is wrong even if a person is starving to death à an objectivist who is not an absolutist may argue that there are exceptions to the rule that stealing is wrong when more important values - like the preservation of life - are involved.

Sound argument:

• Appeal to logic and reason rather than emotion

• Appeal to facts

• Fallacies – arguments that are not sound because of various errors in reasoning. They are often persuasive because they usually appeal to our emotions and prejudices

Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900)

• He glorified the individual self

• Life is governed by primal force - the will to power – ‘the will to grow, spread, seize, become predominant”

• The will to power finds its expression in desire to control others and impose our values on them

• Thus the ultimate moral good – to realize individual’s will to power to the fullest extent

These ideas were opposite to the Christian and Judeo-Christian morality of his time

• Why? Because these virtues were the product of conspiracy of the weak design to constrain the strong and powerful individuals

• Instead of encouragement to fulfill the potential through expression of will to power, this code forces people to serve others

• Human beings are destined to develop to the highest form of being - superman

Two moralities

• 1) Master Moralities

• 2) Slave Moralities

Master moralities:

• Aristocrats/nobles – brave; belief in yourself

• Pride in yourself

• Hostility and irony towards “selflessness”

• The role of master - superman - to create values not to conform to slave morality;

• Its up to human beings, not God, to create a moral code and meaning in life

• Will to power

Slave moralities:

• Self-sacrifice

• Humility

• A denial of self

• Dependency

• A good person should be harmless

• Pity

• Altruistic behavior

• Slave morality is a morality of utility

• He denies slave morality; virtue is weakness

Subjectivism

Rejects Cultural Relativism

The morality is a matter of sentiment rather than fact (Hume)

Advocates moral freedom

Value judgments are based on feelings, emotions

Moral truth are relative to the individual

Values exist only in the preference of individual people

You have your preferences, I have mine

No preferences are objectively correct or incorrect

Subjectivism implies that we are always right because our judgments are based on feelings

But this is not a good argument

What is a good and sound argument

Sound argument:

• Appeal to logic and reason rather than emotion

• Appeal to facts

• Fallacies – arguments that are not sound because of various errors in reasoning. They are often persuasive because they usually appeal to our emotions and prejudices

Cynics

• Cynic is translated as doglike

• Diogen of Sinope, an individual known for dog-like behavior. Other cynics – Zeno, Crates

• Cynicism is a way of living. They barked at those who displeased them, spurned Athenian etiquette, and lived from nature.

• Cynics neglect or even ridicule speculative philosophy (Plato, Aristotle)

• Virtue is a life lived in accord with nature.

• Nature replaces convention as the standard for judgment

• it is through nature that one can live well and not through conventional means such as etiquette or religion

• Three forms of freedom

1. Freedom/Liberty (eleutheria)

2. Self-sufficiency (autarkeia)

3. Freedom of speech or parrhēsia

• the Cynic trains the body for the sake of the soul, not for the Olympic Games or battlefield

• free oneself from convention, promote self-sufficiency, and live in accord with nature

Stoicism

• Stoicism comes from the Greek word “stoa,” referring to a colonnade

• The Stoic doctrine is divided into three parts: logic, physics, and ethics.

• A coherent universe governed by a divine reason

• The idea of pantheism: God is everywhere, in everything

• a life in accordance with nature and controlled by virtue.

• The stoics taught indifference (apathea) to everything external

• Hence, pain and pleasure, poverty and riches, sickness and health, were supposed to be equally unimportant.

• God is absolute reason

The world is governed by reason, since God is reason and is everything

Two things follow:

1. There is purpose in the world, and therefore, order, harmony, beauty, and design.

2. Since reason is law as opposed to the lawless, it means that the universe is subject to the absolute law and it is governed by the rigorous necessity of cause and effect.

Ethics: “Live according to nature.”

1) the universe is governed by absolute law, which admits of no exceptions;

2) the essential nature of humans is reason

• Virtue is the life according to reason (=Plato and Aristotle)

• Morality is simply rational action. It is the universal reason which is to govern our lives, not the caprice and self-will of the individual.

Cyrenaics

• Name of the city, Cyrenaica

• Founder of the school was Aristippus

• Pleasure is aim and value, not virtue or self control

• Following nature is enjoying and getting positive sensations

• Pleasure for mind and for body, Socratic dichotomy

• Some pleasures can bring pain, so virtue is control over pleasures

• Social obligations and friendship as some kind of psychological pleasure

Epicurus

Born 341 B.C.

The goal of philosophy is to help men in the search of happiness à ATARAXIA or Tranquility: a radical independence from fear and pleasures.

Two main obstacles: the fear of gods and the fear of death

Happiness is the goal in life

1. To free men from the fear of gods (because gods do not care about human things)

2. To free men from the fear of death Showing how it is simple to get pleasure

3. Showing that pain is a transient condition

Happiness is the highest good

Pleasure is good and pain is bad

BUT not all pleasures are choiceworthy or all pains to be avoided

1. natural and necessary desires (food): easy to satisfy, natural and limited

2. natural but non-necessary desires (luxury food): ok if they happen to be available, but they lead to unhappiness if you become dependent on such goods

3. "vain and empty" desires (power): difficult to satisfy, inculcated by society and they should be eliminated

So in order to reach ATARAXIA:

• Sometimes smaller pleasures should be given up in order to get higher level pleasures

• Simple pleasures should be preferred

Luxurious pleasures are not forbidden as long as they are fortuitous and not sought

Virtue Ethics

• Socrates, Plato but mainly Aristotle: What traits of character make someone a good person?

• In contrast, modern philosophers ask the question: What is the right thing to do? (Ethical Egoism, Utilitarianism, The Social Contract Theory, Kant’s theory)

• Virtue is a trait of character manifested in habitual action, that it is good for anyone to have (Rechels, p.159)

• The word virtue is translated from the Greek word areté. Its connotation is “to be the best at something one can be.”