IB Theory of Knowledge

1. Ethics

2. Ethics
• We are all faced with difficult decisions
every day and make value judgements
– Not doing your homework is wrong
– She has not done her homework
– Therefore she is wrong
• Is ethics closely related to another area of
knowledge then?
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2012/05/reason-and-universality-of-human-rights.html

3. Ethics
• The problem is: who is to decide the first
principle of the syllogism: i.e. is it really “wrong”
not to do your homework? Does this make the
syllogism a fallacy?
• Despite this problem, humans do seem to have
somehow developed a shared system of ‘values’
or ‘moral principles’
• Is this down to logic, instinct, language?....

4. What is Morality?
• A moral act is a human act which requires both
conscience and liberty
• A moral act always has consequences (good or bad)
• A moral act confers responsibility on the person who
carries it out
• We can label a moral act as ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’
depending on the desired outcome
• An act without conscience and liberty is labelled
amoral

5. What is Morality?
MORAL IMMORAL
A MORAL ACT
AMORAL
AN ACT WITHOUT MORALS
Without conscience and/or libertyWith responsibility

6. What is Morality?
• Is this moral, immoral or amoral?
• Me putting this pen on the table
• MORAL – I have done it with conscience
and liberty

7. What is Morality?
• Is this moral, immoral or amoral?
• A 5 year old child is playing cops and
robbers with his friends. He goes into the
house and finds his dad’s gun. He takes it
outside to continue playing and shoots his
friend dead
• AMORAL – done without conscience of
the outcome

8. What is Morality?
• Is this moral, immoral or amoral?
• A pilot is coming into the airport for a
landing. The pilot does not listen properly
to the instructions from the control tower,
makes a mistake and crashes the plane,
killing everybody on board.
• MORAL

10. Calvin and Hobbes
• In the cartoon, Calvin says he doesn’t
believe in ethics any more. But that’s not
really true
• What he should say is that he believes in
‘moral relativism’ (a branch of ethics)
• What do you think moral relativism
means?

11. Ethics
• Moral relativism is a belief that
different groups of people can
develop different values, and
this simply depends on the
society that you grow up in
• A good example is the growth of
the Nazi State in Germany in
which generally accepted moral
beliefs were changed in favour
of those that benefited the
fatherland

12. Moral Relativism
• There are no universal values
• We all have values determined by the way we are
brought up
• Moral values vary from culture to culture
• The philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss believed there is
only one ethical taboo that all cultures share – do you
know what it is?
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2012/04/taboo.html

13. Arguments in favour of moral relativism
• The ‘Diversity Argument’
– How can there be a single moral code
amongst humans, when some cultures have
allowed practices like: female circumcision,
cannibalism, slavery, stoning of adulterers,
execution, eugenics, euthanasia….
• The ‘Lack of foundations’ argument
– Morals have no grounding in logic. There is
no “moral code” against which all humans can
set their values

14. Moral Relativism
"We are moving toward a
dictatorship of relativism which does
not recognize anything as for certain
and which has as its highest goal
one's own ego and one's own
desires"
Pope Benedict XVI

15. Josef Fritzl
• Josef Fritzel is the Austrian
man who imprisoned his
daughter in a basement for
24 years
• He raped her thousands of
times and she had 7 children
with him
• He allowed at least one of the
babies to die
• He pleaded guilty and been
sentenced to life
imprisonment

16. Michele Mongelli
• This man has been called the
Italian Josef Fritzl
• He is accused of keeping his
daughter captive for 25 years,
and repeatedly raping her
• His son is accused of similar
crimes with his own daughters

17. Arcebio Alvarez
• This man as been called
the Colombian Fritzl
• He abused his daughter
for 25 years and fathered
11 children with her
• His defence was that they
were both in a “loving”
relationship

18. Defintions
• Morals
– the shared ideals of a group, irrespective of
whether they are practiced.
• Ethics
– the rules of conduct recognised in respect to a
particular class of human actions or a
particular group, culture, etc. eg medical
ethics, Christian ethics

19. 1. Religious Ethics
• Pope Benedict XVI, 2007, Brazil :
“Where God is absent - God with the human
face of Jesus Christ - these [moral] values fail
to show themselves with their full force: nor
does a consensus arise concerning them.
I do not mean that nonbelievers cannot live a
lofty and exemplary morality; I am only saying
that a society in which God is absent will not
find the necessary consensus on moral
values or the strength to live according to the
model of these values".

20. 1. Religious Ethics
• Plato: “Is something good because God
says it is good, or does God say it is good
because it is good?”
• But if something is good without the
objective opinion of God, doesn’t that
mean that ethics are completely
independent of religion?
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2011/06/morality-without-religion.html

21. 2. Duty Ethics
• Duty (or obligations) are things we
take for granted. But where do they
come from?
• Some people would say religion (e.g.
the Ten Commandments). But how
do we justify these claims?
• Some people would say intuition
• The philosopher Immanuel Kant said
it is based on reason

22. Kant: The idea of “consistency”
• Kant believed that ethical acts have nothing to do with
‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of their outcomes, but the
intention of the person performing them. This is also
referred to as the deontological argument
• He argued that people see something as their ‘duty’ if
there is inconsistency if it is not done
• For example, it is your duty to stand in line at the
cafeteria
• If you didn’t there would be chaos for everybody and
nobody would get served

23. Kant and Consistency
• Use Kant’s model of consistency to argue
the following:
– It is my duty to be on time for a meeting I have
planned with my friends
– It is my duty to vote in a general election
– It is my duty to give honest information about
myself on my university application
– It is my duty not to commit suicide

24. Duty Ethics
• “If you want to know the foulness of lying for
yourself, consider the lying of someone else and
how you shun it and despise the man who lies
and regard his communication as foul. Do the
same with regard to all your own vices, for you
do not realize the foulness of your vices from
your own case, but from someone else’s.”
Al Ghazali, Muslim teacher (1058 – 1111)
• “Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you”
Based on the words of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the mount (also called
the “Golden Rule” of the Catholic Catechism)

25. 3. Moral Relativism
• A belief that our values are determined by
the society that we grow up in
• This supports the idea that there is no
‘universal moral code’

26. 4. Fear of punishment
• Some people would see this as a way to force
others to conform to society’s norms and others’
ideas of morality
• Consider the fact that many Mexicans are now
supporting the idea that the death penalty
should be re-introduced to combat the rise in
crime
• Many would see religious ethics as ultimately
stemming from a fear of punishment

27. 5. Utilitarianism
• We intuitively stick to a moral code
because that is what will bring “the
greatest happiness to the greatest
number”
• Utilitarians believe that the thing we all
strive towards is happiness, therefore
actions are ‘good’ if they increase
happiness and ‘bad’ if they decrease
happiness

28. Utilitarianism
• It was developed in the nineteenth century
by two British philosophers – Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill
• They wanted to establish a more scientific
foundation for ethics

29. Arguments in Favour of Utilitarianism
• It is a simple and coherent theory
• It is a teleological argument (the opposite of the
deontological). This states that there is inherent
‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ in actions, which would seem
to most people to be intuitively correct
• It is democratic and can by applied on an individual
basis, depending on what makes each person happy
• It is a rational theory which takes into account both short-
term and long-term happiness

30. Arguments Against Utilitarianism
• Happiness is a very difficult thing to measure objectively
• Simply ensuring that pleasure is available does not ensure
happiness. It seems that true happiness comes from
striving to achieve something and being successful
• It is in practice very difficult to predict the outcomes of any
action and how it will affect the happiness of all involved
• The things that bring pleasure to some people are not
always good in themselves. Some are empty pleasures
(e.g. gorging on chocolate) or malicious pleasures (e.g.
sado-masochism)

31. Arguments Against Utilitarianism
• Some people find the idea that the ultimate goal in
life is to pursue pleasure somewhat distasteful
• The Scottish philosopher and writer Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881) called utilitarianism ‘pig
philosophy’ as it appeared to him to be based on
‘the swinish pleasures of the multitude’
• Albert Einstein (1879-1955) once said “well-being
and happiness never appeared to me as an
absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such
moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.”

32. 6. Self interest
• A belief that human beings are essentially selfish
not altruistic
– The definitional argument – all humans are selfish
and we only do things we don’t want to do because
we are being forced to do it
– The evolutionary argument – we are “programmed” to
look after number one
– The fear of punishment argument
– The hidden benefits argument – we gain something
from being moral e.g. gratitude, praise, a debt which
we expect others to repay later

33. The Roots of Morality
• Richard Dawkins gives 4 reasons why
altruism exists in animals (he compares this
to morality in humans)
1. Genetic kinship and the unconscious desire for
one's genes to pass to the next generation
2. Reciprocation: the expectation or anticipation
that favours given will be repaid later
3. The benefit of acquiring a 'reputation'
for generosity
4. The benefit of being able to identify oneself as
dominant due to the ability to give favours
without necessarily expecting payback
The Evolutionary Argument/ Hidden Benefits Argument
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2012/06/morality-in-animals.html

34. 1. The Selfish Gene
• Many birds (e.g.
oystercatchers,
plovers,
sandpipers) will
pretend to be
injured in order to
lure a predator
away from their
nest and protect
their eggs

35. 2. Reciprocation
• Vampire bats feed each
other by regurgitating
blood. A bat that has fed
another one does so with
the expectation that it will
be paid back in blood at a
later date. Some bats
have been observed to be
cheaters and refuse to be
altruistic (it pays to be a
cheat since most bats
don’t seem to identify
them)

36. 3. Reputation
• Cleaner wrasse earn the
right to pick parasites
and dead tissue from
their larger fishy clients
by acquiring a reputation
for being good cleaners.
Cheaters have been
observed to lose their
cleaning rights and
hence their client base

37. 4. Dominance Behaviour
• Some individual babbler
birds have been observed
to assert their dominance
by feeding subordinates,
reacting violently if the
subordinate bird tries to
reverse these roles.
Similarly, dominant birds
will also actively compete
for the dangerous role of
sentinel - the right to sit
on the highest branches
to look out for predators.

38. The Roots of Morality
• Do you agree with Richard Dawkins that
the roots of morality (and therefore ethics)
lie in these kind of instincts that were
presumably present in our hominid
ancestors?
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2012/02/why-do-morals-exist.html

39. Ethical Orientations
• One theory of ethics states that there are
two basic ethical orientations:
– The Ethic of Care
– The Ethic of Justice
• They are not necessarily mutually exclusive
http://edrontheoryofknowledge.blogspot.mx/2012/09/ethical-orientations.html

40. • Dalai Lama
“When each of us learns to appreciate the
critical importance of ethics and makes
inner values like compassion and patience
an integral part of our basic outlook on life,
the effects will be far-reaching”