Sandel - Justice thread No unread replies. No replies. Again, in an effort to pr

Question

Sandel - Justice thread

No unread replies. No replies.

Again, in an effort to provide some more groundwork regarding the ethical philosophies (utilitarianism, virtue ethics, etc) . These ethical philosophies are based on essentially two basic moral principles or moral reasoning:

- Consequentialist - locates morality in the consequences of an act (ex. utilitarianism)

- Categorical - locates morality in certain absolute moral requirements or categorical duties and rights.

To help explain the above I have a great lecture video for you (it is captioned) by Michael Sandel (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.an excellent professor at Harvard. This video is of a lecture he gave at Harvard in his Justice class. Watch from the beginning to 16:02 (16 minutes, 02 seconds).

REQUIRED:

First, I want you to give me some feedback on the Sandel lecture. What would you have done in each scenario and why. Keep that to about 100 to 150 words.

Explanation / Answer

Michael Sandel is a great lecturer to teach about ethical philosophies (utilitarianism, Consequentialist, Categorical, virtue ethics, etc). One of the famous of Sandel’s lectures is the ‘Lifesaving boat’. In the video about Justice, Sandel provides two scenarios:

Scenario 1- You are a trolly car driver and the brakes fail. At the end of the trolly there are 5 people working. You are sure that the trolly car would hit the people and they die. Suddenly, you notice that there is another track wherein only one worker is working. Would you steer the vehicle towards the right and kill one person to save the 5 people or would you just go right ahead and kill all the 5?

Scenario 2- You are a worker. You see a troll speeding away (due to break failure) to kill 5 people. A big fat man is leaning over you. You push the fat man to stop the trolley to save the 5 lives. Would you not?

Two moral principles exist-

  Personally speaking, I would act categorically instead of being a consequentialist. A murder is a murder be it 5 people or 1 person. I would seek other ways to solve the problem rather than to kill people. In the first scenario, since I am the driver and I know that the trolly is going to kill people, I would shout and wave at them to gain their attention to move away from the track so that the trolley comes to a bouncing stop. This is a categorical approach since the moral requirement is that murder is a sin. Considering murder a sin, I would use the categorical approach to save the lives of people. I would definitely not be a consequentialist since it is a sin to murder people.

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