Western Ethics Questions and Answers

Answer: B

"Eye for an eye" belongs to the Retributive theory.

The retributive theory holds that punishment is justified because it is deserved: the offender should suffer in proportion to the wrong done. The lex talionis, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, is its oldest and strictest form, matching the penalty to the injury.

The other theories look forward to consequences rather than back to the offence. The deterrent theory punishes so that the offender and others will be discouraged from crime; the preventive theory aims to make the offender unable to repeat it, as by imprisonment; and the reformative theory aims to change the offender into a law-abiding person. None of them requires the penalty to mirror the injury.

Answer: A

The standpoint is Moral Subjectivism.

Subjectivism holds that a moral sentence reports an attitude: 'stealing is wrong' means that the speaker, or people generally, disapprove of stealing. The sentence is about attitudes and is true or false according to whether those attitudes exist.

Emotivism, the nearest rival, denies this: for Ayer and Stevenson moral sentences express attitudes, like a cry of disapproval, and state nothing true or false. Moral realism says moral sentences describe objective moral facts independent of attitudes, and Hare's universal prescriptivism treats them as universalizable prescriptions, a kind of command.

Answer: B

The statement not true of altruism is An altruistic and has to be necessarily self-sacrificing (the paper prints 'and' for 'act').

Altruism is acting for the good of others. It need not involve a loss to oneself: helping someone at no cost is still altruistic. Self-sacrifice is only one, extreme, form of it, so to say altruism is necessarily self-sacrificing is false.

The other statements describe the standard distinctions. In pure altruism, self-interested motives are wholly absent. An act is altruistic in a weak sense when it is done for the thought (the paper prints 'tort') that it benefits others or at least injures no one, and in a strong sense when it is done although one sees that it costs one some loss of well-being.

Answer: C

On the paper's reading, teleology and deontology are synthesized in Virtue-ethics.

Teleological theories judge conduct by the end it serves, and deontological theories by duty or rule regardless of consequences. Virtue ethics, in its Aristotelian form, keeps an end, eudaimonia or the flourishing life, while also holding that the virtuous person acts from settled character and does what is right because it is right. For this reason textbooks often present it as the position in which the two approaches are brought together.

Rule-ethics and principle-ethics are forms of deontology (or of rule consequentialism) rather than a union of the two. Meta-ethics is not a normative theory at all: it studies the meaning and status of moral terms.

Answer: C

Justice is ensured by Wisdom, Courage, Temperance.

In the Republic, Plato finds four cardinal virtues in the ideal city and in the soul. Wisdom belongs to the rulers (the reasoning part), courage to the auxiliaries (the spirited part), and temperance is the agreement of all classes about who should rule. Justice is what remains when each of these is in place: each part doing its own work and not meddling with the others.

Truth, goodness and beauty are the classical transcendental values, not Plato's list of civic virtues, and 'truth, knowledge, beauty' or 'wisdom, fortitude, love' mix in items that are not among the four.

Answer: C

Deontological performance of duty is prescribed by Kant.

For Kant an action has moral worth only when it is done from duty, out of respect for the moral law, and not from inclination or for its consequences. The categorical imperative commands unconditionally: act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a universal law. That is the model of deontological ethics.

Bentham and Mill are utilitarians, judging actions by their consequences for happiness, which is a teleological theory. Hume grounds morality in sentiment, approval and disapproval, not in duty for duty's sake.

Answer: C

Aristotle speaks of eudaimonia in terms of Excellence.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing) is 'activity of the soul in accordance with virtue', where virtue (arete) means excellence: the excellent performance of the function proper to a human being, which is rational activity. Happiness is thus excellence in living, over a complete life.

Benevolence and patience are particular dispositions, not the definition of happiness, and magnificence (spelled 'Magnificience' in the paper) is one specific virtue concerned with large expenditure, not the whole of eudaimonia.

Answer: B

Bentham's four sanctions are Physical, Social, Political, Religious.

In the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham names four sources of pleasure and pain that give binding force to rules of conduct: the physical sanction (natural consequences), the political sanction (penalties imposed by the state), the moral or popular sanction (the approval and disapproval of society, here called social), and the religious sanction (rewards and punishments expected from a superior being).

Every other option includes 'mental' or 'linguistic', which are not among Bentham's sanctions. Mill later added an internal sanction, conscience, but that is not one of Bentham's four.

Answer: B

The hedonistic calculus was proposed by Bentham.

In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Jeremy Bentham proposed measuring pleasures and pains by their intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent, so that the value of an action could be calculated. This is the felicific or hedonistic calculus.

J.S. Mill rejected a purely quantitative measure and distinguished higher and lower pleasures. Sidgwick refined utilitarianism in The Methods of Ethics but did not originate the calculus, and Kant rejected basing morality on pleasure at all.

Answer: C

The view can be attributed to A.J. Ayer.

In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), Ayer argued that ethical sentences are neither true nor false. They express the speaker's feelings of approval or disapproval and are calculated to arouse similar feelings and so to influence the actions of others. This is the emotive theory of ethics, later developed by C.L. Stevenson.

Bentham and Sidgwick were utilitarians who treated moral judgements as statements about consequences that can be true or false. Kant grounded morality in reason and the categorical imperative, not in emotion.