1. PARADIGM SHIFTS IN ETHICS AND MORALITY
March
Csató Péter

3. Paradigms
Patterns of thought and discourse within a certain field of study or discipline.

4. MORAL/ETHICAL PARADIGMS
METAPHYSICAL
(Essentialist)
CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIVIST
(Anti-essentialist)

5. The Evil Gargamel

7. PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

8. The ultimate goal of a good life is self-realization
Socrates (Plato)
knowledge = virtue = happiness; if you know what is right, you will act morally
Aristotle
The ultimate goal of a good life is self-realization

9. Deontological ethics (ethics of duty) Categorical Imperative
– a single a priori (intrinsically valid ) moral obligation deriving from
an innate sense of “duty”
Immanuel Kant
( )
“The starry sky above me and the moral law inside me”

10. Marc Hauser: “[W]e are born with abstract rules or principles, with nurture [socialization] entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems” Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (2006)

15. Utilitarian ethics Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) John Stuart Mill
( )
Moral value is determined by utility. The goal to be attained is the greatest happiness of the greatest number for the greatest number of people.

16. Egoism aka “master-slave morality”
Friedrich Nietzsche
( )
Egoism aka “master-slave morality”
(ethics and power)
The moral principles of Judeo-Christian culture and of liberalism are tokens of “slave morality” which unjustly robs the powerful of their natural right to rule. (The principle of “might makes right”). Social cooperation is not the utmost good human beings can achieve.

17. Solidarity-based views of ethics
Judith Shklar ( )
Cruelty is the worst thing we do, solidarity is to be based upon the avoidance of cruelty and humiliation at all costs.
Richard Rorty ( )
Solidarity is a matter of “we-intentions,” contingent on our membership in a community.

18. The “ethics of the other”/ the “ethics of alterity”
Ethics is “first philosophy”
Ethics arises from an encounter with the Other
Engagement with the Other takes place through “seeing” the face
The Other is ultimately unknowable
Emanuel Levinas
( )

19. Cultural anthropology
No one civilization can possibly utilize in its mores the whole range of human behavior. [. . .] Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined. We [should] not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our own locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature. [. . .] We recognize that morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits (“Anthropology and the Abnormal”)
Ruth Benedict
( )

20. ETHICS AND LITERATURE

22. Everyman

23. (1605/1615)

25. Determinism

26. Clyde Griffiths (Everyman) Murder by accident (?) (1925) Execution
( )

27. (1940)
Bigger Thomas
(African-American)
Murder by accident
Murder “by design”
Execution
( )

28. “Seventy Thousand Assyrians”
If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.
We grow up and we learn the words of a language and we see the universe through the language we know…
I am thinking of Theodore Badal, himself seventy thousand Assyrians, [. . .] and man, standing in a barber shop, in San Francisco, in 1933, and being, still, himself, the whole race.
William Saroyan
( )

29. William Styron
( )
(1951)

30. (1967)

31. (1979)

32. Someday I will understand Auschwitz
Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?” 

33. “Good Country People”
Flannery O’Connor
( )

34. Bret Easton Ellis
(b. 1964)
(1991)

35. (1985)

36. When we get to Rip's apartment on Wilshire, he leads us into the bedroom. There's a naked girl, really young and pretty, lying on the mattress. Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are tied above her head. [. . .] She keeps moaning and murmuring words and moving her head from side to side, her eyes half-closed. Someone's put a lot of makeup on her, clumsily, and she keeps licking her lips, her tongue drags slowly, repeatedly, across them. Spin kneels by the bed and picks up a syringe and whispers something into her ear. The girl doesn't open her eyes. Spin digs the syringe into her arm.