Ethics: An Overview - On Demand E-learning from Oxford Royale Academy

It is sometimes said that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. The idea behind this is that without some ultimate standard, morality becomes a mere matter of opinion. According to Divine Command Theorists, actions are right if God commands them and wrong if he forbids them. In this lecture, we’ll discuss the merits of this view as well as some serious problems with it. Even if we think God exists, the idea that morality is dependent on God can lead to some unfortunate consequences.

According to utilitarians like John Stuart Mill, we don’t need God to lay down the ultimate standards of morality. Instead, actions are right if they make people happy and wrong insofar as they cause them pain and suffering. This is an attractive theory, and offers a good explanation of what went wrong in the sad case described above. In this lecture, we’ll examine whether it stands up to more sustained philosophical scrutiny.

Immanuel Kant wanted us to see things differently. According to him, pleasure and pain do not have much to do with morality. Instead, actions are right if they place us in the right sorts of relations with ourselves and others. In fact, he thought that morality could be summed up by just one rule: Act only on those maxims that you can also will to become a universal law. In this lecture, we’ll be asking what Kant might have meant by this ‘categorical imperative’, and whether it really solves the problem.

Over the course of these lectures, we will have seen a number of problems with attempts to find a common principle that explains morality. Some contemporary philosophers have become so impressed by the problem that they have claimed there is no such principle. At first glance, this might look like giving up. But the suggestion that morality is fundamentally resistant to principles will take us back to one of the most innovative and influential thinkers in the history of Western philosophy: Aristotle.