answer questions 373

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1. What is the Principle of Utility?

2. What is Hedonism?

3. Give two similarities and two differences between the utilitarian views of Bentham and Mill.

4. Why might utilitarianism offend our sense of justice? Give example(s). What would a defender of utilitarianism respond to the justice objection?

5. Using your own example, explain how being an Act Utilitarian could lead you to commit a morally wrong action.

6. Explain the difference between act and rule utilitarianism.

7. Explain how Mill revises Bentham’s quantitative “calculus of felicity” to include the quality of higher pleasures. Do you agree that some pleasures are of a higher quality? Explain.

8. Explain the main problems with utilitarianism: including the problem of motives, difficulty of predicting consequences, violation of rights and duties, radical self sacrifice (Peter Singer), falsity of hedonism.

Kant (duty oriented morality)

9. Explain the distinction between autonomy vs heteronomy.

10. Explain the distinction between duty vs inclination.

11. Explain the distinction between hypothetical vs categorical imperatives.

12. What is Kant’s criterion for moral acceptability of a maxim, according to the universalizability formulation of the categorical imperative? Give an example of a maxim that satisfies Kant’s criterion and explain why the maxim you pick would be morally acceptable for Kant.

13. What does the respect formulation of the categorical imperative command?

14. Explain why illegally downloading movies is a violation of the first formulation of the categorical imperative. (Be careful, the ultimate reason should not refer to any consequences.)

15. Say I come upon a red light with my wife who is just staring to give birth. There is nobody around and the faster I get her to the hospital the better. What would an act utilitarian most likely say I should do, and why? What would a rule utilitarian say I should do and why?

16. Say John lies to Mary in order to have sex with her. Using Kant’s, Third Version of the Categorical Imperative, explain why that is morally wrong.

  • 17. What do existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre mean when they say Freedom has priority over Reason and what does this mean for their understanding of morality?
  • 18. What are analytic statements? What are synthetic statements? Why aren’t moral claims either? What category do they fit into?
  • 19. What do logical positivists like A. J. Ayer think about statements like; “It is wrong to kill people.”?
  • 20. What is the “Naturalistic Fallacy”? Give an example of this fallacy.
  • 21. What does Palmer think about the claim that there are no universally held moral values?
  • 22. Even if all cultures differed in their values why is it an invalid step to conclude from that, that there are no objectively best values that should be adopted by all cultures?
  • 23. Explain at least two arguments against cultural relativism.
  • 24. Based on the reading, make an argument that some cultures have better moral values than others and are are morally justified in making moral judgments about cultural practices of other societies and in some cases even forcing them to abide by better moral principles.
  • 25. How does the allegedly typical “female” style of moral thinking differ from utilitarianism or Kantianism?
  • 26. Why do deep ecologists think traditional ethical systems need to be revised?
  • 27. Who would be more likely to defend experimenting on animals in order to find medicines that benefit people: Arne Naess or Immanuel Kant? Explain why.