Notes for 11/25/2025

 

11/25/2025

[Philosophy Club every Tuesday at 5:00pm in CAS 436 ("The Cave")]

[Challenge for today: Try to think of (and possibly ask) at least one question.]

Suppose you are offered a mysterious lottery ticket for $1. You are told that IF the lottery gets 1 billion players, there will be ONE winner who will receive $1 billion. But one other randomly selected player will die. If fewer than 1 billion tickets are sold, the lottery will be canceled. Would you play? Would it be WRONG to play?

 

Deontology

Virtue ethics

 

 

 

Normative/applied ethics

 

Bypasses defenses of ethical theories.

 

 

Broad theory-independent heuristics/principles.

 

e.g., “First of all, do no harm” (Principle of non-maleficence)

 

or:

“respect people’s rights”

ACED

 

Affirm

The foundation of the ethical mindset is the affirmation of the other.

 

What is involved in affirming the other?

 

Acknowledgment that others are (also) centers of moral value.

 

To be a center of moral value includes, primarily:

-      Ability to be positively or negatively affected by actions or events.

-      Capacity for self-agency.

 

These make the basis for the following common moral principles:

-      Non-maleficence (not harming)

-      Beneficence (acting for the benefit of the other, where feasible)

-      Autonomy & self-actualization (allowing individuals to make decisions for themselves)

-      Respect for rights (the value of individuals is not merely instrumental or subordinate to a majority, but inherent)

 

Consider

 

This involves mainly taking care to enumerate available options as objectively and dispassionately as possible.

 

This seems obvious and unworthy of special attention. But the reality is that various factors, especially social, psychological, organizational, and situational, can create “tunnel vision” that ignores other options.

 

Group dynamics often include a kind of organizational culture that results in certain established ways of doing things. These can prioritize some approaches and types of decisions not only as defaults, but can come to be seen as normative – as “the right way” to do things.

 

Inferior or even harmful practices can become normalized because they are not questioned or challenged.

 

This can happen especially when certain individuals or groups within an organization become treated as the defacto decision-makers, not from genuine knowledge, but from habit (cognitive off-loading).

 

Another principle within the “Consider” domain is that “choices are vectors.”

 

Explicitly looking for “alternative-limiters” is necessary if one is to prioritize ethical choice.

 

Evaluate

 

The evaluation stage of ethical choice involves attempting to apply fundamental and derived principles from ethical theories.

 

Where possible, cross-theoretical principles should be prioritized, to avoid being bound too closely to any particular ethical theory.

 

This is not always possible. In such cases, basic theoretical commitments may be necessary.

 

In many real-world cases, some (but not all) of the evaluation can be shifted to “compliance” (especially legal/regulatory compliance) or even legal prudence (for example, avoiding lawsuits).

 

Law is not the same as ethics.

But the process of establishing laws and regulations are generally largely sensitive to ethical guidelines.

As a result, that a decision would be legally problematic is prima facie reason against it.

 

Many organizational decisions also must fulfill some fiduciary duties to clients. These can also help elevate some options above others.

 

But just because a decision would be legal does not mean it would be ethical. Compliance is not enough.

 

Design

 

We tend to think of choices as single events, like pulling a drain plug where everything afterwards happens automatically.

 

But the reality is that choices are often ongoing processes.

 

Designing an implementation plan requires taking account of this.

 

Importantly, because of the fact that choices are vectors and subject to “continuation bias,” it is vital to build in explicit checkpoints to take stock of how things are going and to provide opportunity to backtrack or change course.

 

This is something many organizational decisions often lack.