Exam 7: Plato Why Should We Be Good

According to Huxley, "The idea of justice thus underwent a gradual sublimation from punishment and reward according to acts, to punishment and reward according to desert; or, in other words, according to motive."

For the purposes of his argument, Socrates describes the human soul or creature as solely a rational, intelligent being.

According to the received nature, or common view of justice (not Socrates's view), laws and what is considered "just" are arrived at through the political process.

According to Harris, "Many philosophers have for various reasons believed that we must not kill even if by doing so we could save life. They believe that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die." Explain the difference.

Mill says that his position has critics, "who say that happiness, in any form, cannot be the rational purpose of human life and action; because, in the first place, it is unattainable."

According to Marquis, "If 'human being,' on the other hand, is taken to be a moral category, then the claim that a fetus is a human being cannot be taken to be a premise in the anti-abortion argument, for it is precisely what needs to be established."

Marquis considers two rival accounts to his theory that have different implications for the ethics of abortion; they are:

How are the perfectly unjust man and perfectly just man each isolated to argue against Socrates that the unjust man is happier?

According to Hume, "No satisfactory answer can be given to any of these questions, upon the abstract hypothesis of morals; and we must at last acknowledge, that the crime or immorality is no particular fact or relation, which can be the object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the sentiment of disapprobation."

According to Marquis, the position he will assume in the reading is that "whether or not abortion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether or not a fetus is the sort of being whose ..."

According to Harris, "Y and Z are willing to concede one exception to the universal application of their scheme. They realize that it would be unfair to allow people who have brought their misfortune on themselves to benefit from the lottery."

Explain what Hursthouse means when she says, "It is a noteworthy feature of our virtue and vice vocabulary that, although our list of generally recognized virtue terms is comparatively short, our list of vice terms is remarkably, and usefully, long, far exceeding anything that anyone who thinks in terms of standard deontological rules has ever come up with."

According to Harris, "to remove the arbitrariness of permitting doctors to select their donors from among the chance passers-by outside hospitals; Y and Z put forward the following scheme: they propose that everyone be given a sort of lobotomy."

According to Mill, "Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a ..."

According to Huxley, "There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called 'ethics of evolution.' It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent 'survival of the fittest'; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection."

In the reading, Rachels asks us to consider this case: If letting die were in itself less bad than killing, then someone who said "After all, I didn't do anything except just stand there and watch the child drown. I didn't kill him; I only let him die," should have at least some weight. Rachels says, "But it does not. Such a 'defense' can only be regarded as a grotesque perversion of ..."

According to Rachels, "If one simply withholds treatment, it may take the patient longer to die, and so he may suffer more than he would if more direct action were taken and a lethal injection given. This fact provides strong reason for thinking that, once the initial decision not to prolong his agony has been made neutral euthanasia is actually preferable to benign euthanasia, rather than the reverse."

According to Rachels, "If the life of such an infant is worth preserving, what does it matter if it needs a simple operation? Or, if one thinks it better that such a baby should not live on, what difference does it make that it happens to have an unobstructed intestinal tract? In either case, the matter of life and death is being decided on irrelevant grounds."

According to Hursthouse, one concept of virtue ethics concerns practical or moral wisdom; this is referred to as eudaimonia.

According to Harris, if two people, X and Y, have diseased organs, then "Why, they might argue, should their living or dying be left to ________ when in so many other areas of human life we believe that we have an obligation to ensure the survival of the maximum number of lives possible?"