Exam 7: Plato Why Should We Be Good

According to Hanley, "Another God-given candidate for the missing ingredient might be the soul. It might then be supposed that clones will be something less than fully-fledged persons. This is a very serious error, and if many are tempted to make it, we are in much more trouble than Dolly can bring us." Do you agree with Hanley?

According to Harris, "the feeling that no man should be required to lay down his life for others makes many people shy away from such a scheme, even though it might be _________ to accept it on prudential grounds, and perhaps even mandatory on utilitarian grounds."

Explain what Kant means when he says, "Virtue, however, is not to be defined and esteemed merely as habit, and as a long custom acquired by practice of morally good actions."

Explain what Huxley means when he says, "But civilization could not advance far, without the establishment of a capital distinction between the case of involuntary and that of willful misdeed; between a merely wrong action and a guilty one."

According to Wong, "There are ________ and _________ versions of meta-ethical relativism."

The point of the Ring of Gyges story was to show that with great power comes great responsibility.

Kant says, "The two parts of moral philosophy are distinguished as treating respectively of ends and of duties of constraint."

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 _______________, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection."

Explain what Harris means when he says, "the feeling that no man should be required to lay down his life for others makes many people shy away from such a scheme, even though it might be rational to accept it on prudential grounds, and perhaps even mandatory on utilitarian grounds."

Aristotle says, "By states of character, the things in virtue of which we stand well or badly with reference to the passions."

According to Wong, "Morality-specific relativism divides into cognitive and non-cognitive versions."

According to Kant, "The notion of ______ is in itself already the notion of a constraint of the free elective will by the law; whether this constraint be an external one or be self-constraint."

According to Wong, "that there exists extensive diversity of moral judgment across time, societies and individuals, and that it concerns central moral values and principles," is the doctrine of eternal morality."

According to Hanley, "We certainly have no evidence that God generally disapproves of alternatives (e.g., bicycles) to his more direct gifts (e.g., legs). So such claims cannot reasonably be used to argue for the wrongness of cloning." Do you agree with Hanley?

Hume says, "Euclid has fully explained all the qualities of the circle; but has not in any proposition said a word of its beauty. The reason is evident. The beauty is not a quality of the circle."

Explain what Rachels means when he says, "it is not exactly correct to say that in passive euthanasia the doctor does nothing, for he does do one thing that is very important, he lets the patient die." Why is this important for Rachels's position?

According to Singer, "it should be clear that we would have to give away enough to ensure that the consumer society, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely."

According to Mill, "the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of ..."

According to Wong, "isomorphic relativism expresses skepticism about the meaningfulness of talking about truth defined independently of the theories and justificatory practices of particular communities of discourse."

Thomson says that her position "allows for and supports our sense that, for example, a sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this out is ..."