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SAPhilosophy

Ethics

4 dot points across 4 inquiry questions. Click any dot point for a focused answer with worked past exam questions where available.

How do general moral theories help us reason about concrete life and death cases such as euthanasia, abortion and animal welfare?

Apply normative ethical theories to contested applied issues in bioethics and animal ethics, and evaluate the arguments on each side
Applied ethics takes the abstract theories of normative ethics and tests them against hard cases such as euthanasia, abortion and the treatment of animals. The skill is to identify the morally relevant features and reason carefully from a principle to a verdict.
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Are moral claims objectively true or merely expressions of attitude?

Examine metaethical positions on the status of moral claims and evaluate moral relativism
Metaethics asks what moral claims mean and whether they can be true. Positions range from moral realism through error theory and emotivism to relativism. Each is tested against intuitions about moral disagreement and progress.
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How should we decide what makes an action right or wrong?

Compare and evaluate consequentialist, deontological and virtue-based theories of normative ethics
Normative ethics asks how we ought to act. The three major frameworks are consequentialism (Mill), deontology (Kant) and virtue ethics (Aristotle). Each judges right action differently and each faces well-known objections.
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Can we logically derive a conclusion about how things ought to be from premises only about how things are?

Explain Hume's is-ought gap and Moore's naturalistic fallacy and assess whether moral facts can be reduced to natural facts
Hume noticed that arguments often slide from descriptive premises to a moral conclusion without justification. Moore argued that goodness cannot be defined by any natural property. Together these claims challenge attempts to ground ethics in facts about nature.
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