According to Galen Strawson, moral responsibility to punish some of us with eternal torment (hell) and rewards others with eternal bliss (heaven). I am going to argue that we cannot be morally responsible for our actions which is also Strawson’s argument. He has a basic argument that claims you perform the action that you perform because of the way you are, in particular mental respects. To be truly morally responsible for your action, you must be truly morally responsible for your character, personality, and motivational structure or in other words, who you are. We are born with determined predispositions that we are not responsible for and we are exposed to certain influences that we are not responsible for.
In order to be truly morally responsible for one 's actions one would have to be the cuase of itself,at least in certain crucial mental respects. Therefore nothing can be truly morally responsible. To understand the Basic Argument and prove its validity, I’d like to break it down into 3 steps. Firstly, Strawson argues that we do what we do because of the way we are. Meaning that our actions are determined by the characteristics, personalities etc.
The second argument is essentially upgraded from Argument 1. The author implicitly assumes it to help draw the overall contention. This essay spells it out as: Premise 1: Conditions like food shortage and poor sanitation reflect income imbalance. Hidden Premise: Income imbalance entails failure to eliminate marginal utility, which under the assumption of utilitarianism morality is bad. Qualification: Robustness of the utilitarian view of morality.
It was believed that William Bulger was morally reprehensible in refusing to assist the authorities as family loyalty should not precede impartiality. This analysis of the case will be elaborated in the following paragraphs. To warrant my statement, the theory of moral responsibilities and utilitarian approach will be taken into consideration. To impartially resolve a moral dilemma, one ought to choose between the options that has greater weight. In order to determine the weights of moral responsibilities, a theory is greatly needed.
However, Argument I of Singer’s essay is quite obviously correct and to argue otherwise would be foolhardy and morally cruel. Similarly, Argument III of Singer’s essay, that people in developed societies possess the resources and abilities to alleviate famine and suffering is equally hard to refute. Therefore, it is Argument II of Singer’s essay that I will examine in detail and then offer several objections that will repudiate the hypothesis of Singer’s essay, ‘Famine, Affluence, and
According to me, no party can be judged to be absolutely right or wrong in any given situation; it is a lot more subjective. It depends solely on which imperatives you value most. Simply put, one decision may be unethical on the basis of the consequences of the decision (Consequentialists) but that same decision could be ethical based on the motives of making that decision (Deontologists).
In Louis Pojman’s “Argument Against Moral Relativism”, he classifies the three premises for ethical relativism. Those of which include the diversity thesis, the dependency thesis and the final result of ethical relativism. Following his explanation of these three ideals, he goes onto explain as to why each one of them are invalid. Of the arguments that he provided, I’d consider his justification against the concept of subjectivism. His main argument against this idea is that if it is true, it makes morality a useless concept.
In Response to McGrath’s Dilemma Against Moral Inferentialism An influential argument for moral skepticism is the moral regress argument (Sayre-McCord 1996). Moral inferentialists, who think we do have genuine moral knowledge, argue against the moral regress argument by rejecting the picture of justification one finds in the moral regress argument. Sarah McGrath (2004), in order to make room for her non-inferential moral perception account of moral knowledge, presents a dilemma against moral inferentialism, the thesis that all of our moral knowledge of particular cases is inferential. In particular, she challenges the most compelling version of moral inferentialism, which I call moral bridge inferentialism. In this paper, I argue that both horns of McGrath’s apparent dilemma turn out to lack argumentative weight against the moral bridge inferentialist.
I thought that this chapter was interesting because I think in a similar way. He believed that for one to be moral, they need to have an appropriate motive for undertaking a task. It cannot be based on selfish reasons and it does not have to appease the public. You do something because it is right. He also states that we often mistake ideas for our own because of conformity.
Furthermore, the counterclaim explains the fact that the way an individual chooses to act based on their possession of knowledge, undoubtedly carries an ethical responsibility also. Anyone with the possession of knowledge is forced to assess the potential consequences of their actions. My overall outlook on the referenced claim is that if you possess the knowledge to determine right from wrong from other types of knowledge gained, you have the responsibility to make ethical decisions. Thus, any individual with the possession of knowledge must assess the possible consequences of their actions. Hence as an overall outlook, we can safely conclude that if an individual posses any sort of knowledge, he must evaluate the rights from the wrongs and choose ethically, what to do with the knowledge he possesses.