Moral Issues

1.) If, as Barbara MacKinnon offers in Ethical Theory and Contemporary Issues, "ethics, or moral philosophy, asks basic questions about the good life," then all individuals and human societies are bound to thresh out these questions until some basic answers are obtained about "what is better and worse, about whether there is any objective right and wrong, and how we know it if there is" (4). In this, the myriad issues that challenge our sensibilities every day are, essentially, moral or ethical issues that adumbrate more fundamental questions. How we settle these issues determines, in large part, what sort of society we become.

The notion that we can pattern our conduct on a set of moral principles is a complicated one, and not all ethical theorists will agree that this is even possible. Most, however, are occupied with the task of configuring a set of objective first principles from which all human action and conduct can flow. For this, the basic questions and problems of ethics trickle out and inform virtually every decision that individuals make in their own lives. MacKinnon's own examples ask such questions as: "Is abortion unjustified killing or at least sometimes a morally permissible choice?" and "Is lying always wrong or is it sometimes justifiable?" (1). These questions are ethical questions in that buried within their answers are assumptions about the good life, right conduct, and the obligation to act in accordance with specific conclusions. If abortion i

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s no objective right and wrong (24). Generally, this idea hinges upon the notion that different ethical values obtain for different individuals and in different societies, and that no one individual or one society has a purchase on what it means to live a "good life" or to act "rightly". Even a cursory look at human history (or the world today) will reveal little ethical parity across cultural divides (25); an objective hierarchy of values has not obtained for all persons and in all societies, and this enduring fact leads many to believe that this is because an objective laundry list of goods and bads does not, cannot, exist. Hence, our ethics are relative, peculiar even, to our place and time, and to our customs and mores. On this view, the diversity of moral views is taken well into account. It is no longer surprising that in ethics, there has been so little agreement over the ages. That basic moral principle or values conflict is not problematic, but merely endemic to a human race that is highly situated and contingent (26). However, is not this conclusion a bit too complacent, or at least too out of step with another human tendency, that tendency to believe that whether we know it or not, that there is a right thing

Category: Psychology - M