Western Ethics Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Christian morality is an example of slave morality.

In On the Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche contrasts master morality, which affirms strength, pride and nobility as 'good', with slave morality, born of the resentment (ressentiment) of the weak, which calls the strong 'evil' and praises humility, meekness and pity. He saw Christian morality as the triumph of slave morality.

Master morality is its opposite. Will to power is the basic drive Nietzsche finds behind all life, including both moralities, not a type of morality. 'Rational morality' describes Kant's ethics, which Nietzsche also criticised.

Answer: D

The view that moral obligation is based on sentiment is advocated by Hume.

Hume argues in the Treatise (Book 3) that reason alone cannot move us to act and so cannot be the source of moral distinctions: morality is 'more properly felt than judg'd of'. Virtue and vice are known through the sentiments of approval and disapproval we feel on contemplating actions and characters.

Kant grounds obligation in practical reason and the categorical imperative, Aristotle in virtue and practical wisdom, and Plato in knowledge of the Good, so none of them bases morality on sentiment.

Answer: B

Retributive theories of punishment are based on fairness, in the sense of desert.

For the retributivist, punishment is justified because the offender deserves it, and it should be proportionate to the wrong done. It is fair, or just, that a wrongdoer suffer for the wrong, whatever the consequences; Kant and Hegel are its classic defenders.

Basing punishment on its use (deterrence, prevention) is the utilitarian theory, and mercy belongs to the reformative approach. Equality in the crude sense of 'an eye for an eye' is one historical measure of retribution, but the theory's ground is that the punishment is deserved, which is a matter of fairness.

Answer: B

Moral responsibility is based on free agency.

A person is held morally responsible, deserving praise or blame, only for actions done voluntarily, with knowledge and without compulsion. From Aristotle's account of voluntary action to the modern free will debate, freedom is the condition that makes responsibility possible.

Causal agency is not enough: a person pushed into another, or a sleepwalker, causes harm without being responsible for it. 'Meritorious agency' presupposes responsibility rather than grounding it, and social agency concerns roles, not moral answerability.

Answer: C

The concept of good is primary for the teleological approach.

Teleological theories, utilitarianism being the chief example, first say what is good (happiness, welfare) and then define right action as action that produces or promotes the good. The good is prior to the right.

Deontological theories reverse this: some actions are right or wrong in themselves, whatever their consequences, so the right is prior to the good. Contractarian theories ground morality in an agreement, and libertarian approaches in rights and liberty, not in a prior conception of the good.

Answer: D

For Aristotle, virtues are dispositions of character.

In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book 2), Aristotle asks whether virtue is a passion, a capacity or a state, and answers that it is a state (hexis) of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, as a person of practical wisdom would determine it.

Virtues are acquired by habituation, but they are not skills: a skill can be used well or badly, while a virtue always issues in good action. They are not 'ideas of reason' (Aristotle rejects Plato's Form of the Good as the measure), and 'traits of personality' is a loose psychological description rather than Aristotle's definition.

Answer: A

The correct match is a-1, b-2, c-3, d-4.

• Social disparity is a disproportion in the distribution of goods, status or opportunity.
• Human rights are claimed for every person simply as a human being, so their mark is universality.
• Utilitarianism aims at the maximum happiness, 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'.
• Deontological theory, in Kant's form, demands that duty be done for duty's sake.

The other codes, for example linking human rights with duty for duty's sake or utilitarianism with universality, pair concepts that belong to different theories.

Answer: A

The ethical non-naturalist is Moore.

In Principia Ethica (1903), G. E. Moore argued that 'good' names a simple, indefinable, non-natural property. Any attempt to define it in natural terms, as pleasure or what we desire, commits the 'naturalistic fallacy', as his open question argument is meant to show.

J. S. Mill is Moore's chief example of a naturalist, since he identifies the good with happiness. Kant grounds morality in practical reason rather than in a theory of a non-natural property good, and Gandhi's ethics is religious and practical, not a position in this debate.

Answer: A

Moral subjectivism means that morality rests on individual views on morality.

The subjectivist holds that moral judgments report or express the attitudes of the individual who makes them: 'X is wrong' is true, if at all, relative to the speaker's own approval or disapproval. There is no moral fact beyond the individual's view.

Making morality depend on society's views is cultural relativism or conventionalism, a different theory. 'People's attitudes and opinions' taken collectively describes the same social view rather than the individual standpoint, and since option A is correct, 'none of the above' is wrong.

Answer: A

Utilitarianism is a teleological ethical theory.

It judges actions by their consequences, by how far they promote the end (telos) of happiness or welfare. Rightness is defined in terms of producing the good, which is the mark of a teleological, or consequentialist, theory.

It is the opposite of deontology, which holds some acts right or wrong in themselves. Emotivism is a metaethical theory about moral language. Many utilitarians, like Mill, were naturalists, but naturalism is a metaethical view and not definitive of utilitarianism: Sidgwick was a utilitarian who held that 'ought' cannot be defined in natural terms.