People would want their interests to be protected by law, through various sets of rules. In this case interests can be referred to as a person’s rights. Therefore the law is there to protect a person’s rights by imposing a corresponding duty on the other party so that they are bound in law not to interfere with those rights. Interests and rights are not always easy to define so inevitably, the interests of an individual and those of the majority may sometimes become conflicted. Rudolf von Jhering, a German jurist recognised law as a means of ordering society in a situation where there are many competing interests, not all economic.
Is Mackie’s argument from relativity compelling? Mackie’s ‘Ethics: Inventing right and wrong’ critically assesses the idea that there are, or even can be, objective moral truths, and exposits Mackie’s ‘moral relativist’ stance. I intend also in this essay to criticise the idea of moral objectivity, and to deal with the objections that could be potentially raised to a relativist stance. The most obvious task, it would seem, to begin with when assessing the idea of moral objectivity, is to come to an understanding about what is literally meant by ‘an objective moral truth’. The word objective immediately brings to mind a state of actual existence, as opposed to simply ideal existence.
Describe three major philosophical theories of law. The principal objective of analytic jurisprudence has traditionally been to provide an account of what distinguishes law as a system of norms from other systems of norms, such as ethical norms. All forms of natural law theory subscribe to the Overlap Thesis, which is that there is a necessary relation between the concepts of law and morality. According to this view, then, the concept of law cannot be fully articulated without some reference to moral notions.The Conventionality Thesis emphasizes law’s conventional nature, claiming that the social facts giving rise to legal validity are authoritative in virtue of some kind of social convention. The Separability Thesis, at the most general level, simply denies naturalism’s Overlap Thesis; according to the Separability Thesis, there is no conceptual overlap between the notions of law and morality.
This is a legal but unethical issue. From this we can conclude that compliance ethics expects only the bare minimum, and to be a more ethical organisation, value ethics should be emphasized. Weaver and Trevino (1999) also believe that value ethics would have more of an impact and last longer in the organisation. Next is how formal culture systems promote ethics. Formal ethical systems consist of factors such as leadership, code of ethics, reward systems, orientation, and training programs.
Duty theory is a moral theory, especially connected with Kant, according to what actions are right or wrong because of their inherent content, and the motive from which they are done. Stealing is wrong principally because we can't make taking property a universal law. In general, philosophers usually call duty-based ethics deontology. It focuses on the act and not its consequence. The morally binding nature of a deontological norm derives from the person’s obligation to perform some act in some specified manner, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes it is not.
Cultural relativism is the idea that the moral principles someone has are solely determined by the culture one lives in. These ideas seem to make sense because we as a culture understand that the judgments people make in a different culture will differ from ours whether we choose to support it or not. Our culture has different moral judgments as well and does not look at something like killing someone for stealing as morally right since our culture values human life above theft. Cultural relativism does not exist because some principles are universal and not relative only to culture. People also have the ability to think morally for themselves so morality is relative to someone’s point of view.
In order to evaluate the claim that the possession of knowledge carries ethical responsibility, it is important to understand ethics and knowledge in the general sense To put it simply, ethics is moral philosophy, or rationalization of conduct as either right or wrong. Normative ethics is the study of determining a moral course of action. The two most prominent ethical guidelines are Kantianism and Utilitarianism. Immanuel Kant suggested that ethics revolve around duty, rather than emotions. All actions are related to an underlying principle.
Morality is universally understood as a class of rules held by society to govern the right conduct of its members. Holding strong to this notion St. Thomas Aquinas, brings to light this understanding as personal inclination (or will) to achieve an ultimate end (God); in which those actions become the mean to understandings the human purpose. In his book, A Summary of Philosophy, Aquinas claims that the existence of God allows us to reason with the things around and wills us to act. In a different approach, Friedrich Nietzsche claims that morality is relative to time and power; our actions whether moral or immoral depend on the power they bestow to the perspectives that we hold. He doesn’t believe in a moral definition of what is good and bad; because historically it is contradicted by the men of power.
One of the principal aims of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, especially of the Doctrine of Virtue, is to present a taxonomy of our duties as human beings. The basic division of duties is between juridical duties and ethical duties, which determines the division of the Metaphysics of Morals into the Doctrine of Right and the Doctrine of Virtue. Juridical duties are duties that may be coercively enforced from outside the agent, as by the civil or criminal laws, or other social pressures. Ethical duties must not be externally enforced (to do so violates the right of the person coerced). Instead, the subject herself, through her own reason and the feelings and motives arising a priori from her rational capacities -- the feelings of respect, conscience, moral feeling and love of other human beings, must constrain herself to follow them (MS 6:399-404).
Explain the concept of Relativist Morality. Moral Relativism is an ethical judgement. It is the claim that there is no ethical system better than another. It stems from the fact that to judge an ethical system, it must be judged by a moral standard. Since every ethical system should evaluate itself as the best and only moral system, and every other system is flawed and immoral, it is assumed that moral judgements about ethical systems are meaningless.