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 is an excellent professor at Harvard. In his video, he said that, Part 1 - The Moral Side of Murder: If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothingwhat would you do? What would be the right thing to do? Thats the hypothetical scenario Professor Michael Sandel uses to launch his course on moral reasoning.Part 2 - The Case for Cannibalism: Sandel introduces the principles of utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, with a famous nineteenth century law case involving a shipwrecked crew of four. After nineteen days lost at sea, the captain decides to kill the cabin boy, the weakest amongst them, so they can feed on his blood and body to survive. Link: https://theopenacademy.com/content/lecture-1-moral-side-murder

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

As we can realize there are two clear ways of thinking in these scenarios, both of these are similar. First is based on the idea of reasoning based on utilitarianism, which means the benefit of most of the people and not necessarily the moral stand, as per this one killing if saves life of others is the best option. Second is based on the moral stand point where no one is killed and if one dies then that can be used to help others survive, but that risks other’s life as well as it could be too late for others to revive.

I would go for the first, as this would ensure one is sacrificed for the survival of the rest, though choosing the sacrifice is always difficult but in most cases the weakest or the least useful is the one selected.

In the second case the decision was correct, unless the cabin boy was of immense use in some other way.

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