Ethics

Ethics Study Guide Existentialism is a philosophy that focuses on finding one’s self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Existentialists believe that people are continually searching to discover who and what they are in life as they exercise choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlooks. Personal choices are unique and independent of an objective form of truth. An existentialist believes that a person should be required to choose and be responsible without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions. Because existentialist ethics reject the idea of absolute moral laws and most religious-based ethics, it has to find moral significance without these traditional justifications. Gilligan, Carol , a psychologist who studied the differences in morality between the sexes, found that men tended to define morality in more global terms, and women used more affective terms. Her body of work, and others, let to the notion of a female moral perspective. This perspective focuses on the context of relationships, emphasizes responsiveness and responsibility to others, and focuses on love, trust, and human bonding. Harm Principle holds that individual liberty is justifiably limited to prevent harm to others. John Stuart Mill claims that only the harm principle can justify the limitation of liberty. This principle is one of the most widely accepted. Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679 C.E.) lived in revolutionary times. For the first time in history, Puritan revolutionaries had engineered the overthrow and beheading of the English King, Charles I, in 1641. Hobbes’ writing in 1651 had, therefore, a very recent example as motivation for the development of his theory of government. His account of the origin of government in the social contract, later picked up by John Locke and John Rawls as the moral basis of a civil society, is for our purposes, less interesting than his articulation of another notion: the natural rights of the citizen as the moral foundation of that government. Self-preservation, and what is needed to achieve this, is seen as the only natural motive when researching the human race. Yet, Hobbes believed in a state where the citizens follow, unquestioningly, the government that allows the people to live in peace and without fear. Hobbes gives an argument for survival: submit to the leader or die, either at the leader’s hands or at the hands of your neighbor. Because you value your life, you sign the social contract that establishes the Leviathan, and obey it until that life is threatened by it. This contract abolishes all other rights. At the point when the government fails to live up to its end of the bargain—protecting the lives of the people—then the people are no longer obligated to support the government. Individual Liberty is justifiably limited to prevent harm to self. In modern philosophy and law, it is described as “an act for the good of another, without that person’s consent,” as parents do for children. At the expense of liberty, paternalists believe they canmake better decisions than the people for whom they act. The principle of paternalism can arise in any situation where people hold power over others, such as parenting, education, and medicine. It seems most controversial in cases of criminal law, where the state seeks to protect a person’s good by acting to protect the person from him/herself. The state does this coercively, often against a person’s will. John Stuart Mill clearly rejects this principle as a basis for limiting liberty. ©2018 Achieve Page 109 of 116