I found the CTAA reading and following podcast very interesting for many reasons. While I was familiar with a few concepts, I found the reading and podcast to be very informative on society. It helped me understand how our society functions and contends with each other, more specifically the role of normative and relative ethical frameworks and how they operate within society. These ideas in the reading made me think of my Justice class were we recently discussed abortion and the varying arguments people may hold following different ethical theories. One argument against abortion that we discussed was that many argue abortion is wrong since a fetus is an innocent person and an innocent person has a right to life, so to kill a fetus by having an abortion would be wrong. However this argument leaves many ideas to be defined in relative terms by each individual. When is a fetus actually considered an innocent person? People with varying viewpoints define that marker of life of a fetus very differently. Arguments in support of abortion often rely on the right of the mother to use her autonomy to make decisions that effect her life and whether she consented to the use of her body by the fetus. Since there is no agreement with the two sides of this argument regarding the practice of abortion, this topic, as well as the concept of the point in which the fetus becomes an innocent person with rights, remains highly controversial. Meaning that there is not one universal truth, as described by normative ethics, about the morality of the practice that can be accepted by all. This is even further seen through how the government struggles to make laws about the legality of abortion.
One idea that stuck with me from the podcast was the discussion of the varying degrees of killing others and how some are deemed more morally unacceptable and met with harsher punishments. I found this of particular interest because while I readily accepted that murder was more morally unacceptable than unintentional manslaughter, I never really thought about the specific reasoning behind why as a society we considered different levels of killing more morally wrong. However, through this reading and the podcast it was made clear to me how consequentialism, deontic ethics, and aretaic ethics all influence this thinking and our punishments regarding killing. By combining these evaluation means to consider the topic of the morality of the degrees of killing, it is now explicitly clear to me the logic behind our society’s views on this issue. These evaluation means and the roommate with the coffee on your computer analogy also helped me to understand when I would get frustrated with people in my own life because of their actions or the consequences of their actions. In my previous life experience even if I have been inconvenienced or in a sense wronged by the actions of another if I felt that it was an accident, meaning it was unintentional, I find it harder to stay upset with the person or blame them because it was not explicitly their fault since it was not their intention. My feelings with experiences like this is the past now make more sense to me after learning about aretaic ethics.
I think that your evaluation surrounding the concept of when a fetus is a person is a really great way to conceptualize normative and relative ethics. I think combining these thoughts with your discussion of the morality of killing helped me to understand our society’s dilemma more as I read your thoughts. I think that normative and relative ethics proved a really interesting framework when comparing similar topics of debate.
Making sense of why we intrinsically find unintentional manslaughter less morally corrupt than murder was very interesting. Despite death being equally permanent regardless of how it happened, I agree it is very interesting how our different types of ethics have combined to create a system that places a value judgement on how one died, or more accurately a value judgement on how they were killed.
I also found the distinction between consequentialist, deontic, and aretaic arguments to be interesting. Aretaic ethics, in particular, because this line of thinking introduces emotion and some guesswork into the evaluation of a person’s decisions. On one hand, evaluating a person based on their intentions can be dangerous. A well intentioned person can still act destructively or immorally. Additionally, using this approach can allow for the perception or emotions toward an individual cloud judgement. However, humans are irrational beings, and it is important to at least consider one’s character and intent in making a decision. Deciding where to draw the line between aretaic argument and a consequentialist or deontic one can be difficult..
I was very intrigued by your discussion of the morality of death and killing, the reading added a new level of complexity about that for me, specifically the scenario with the sheriff having to decide if killing one innocent black man knowing he was innocent would be better than knowing more black people would die if he didn’t. I think that in theory we would think that not directly killing someone is obviously better, but different moral arguments might disagree, if we know for a fact that more people would die, many deaths is “worse” than one death. It very much depends on how you look at it, which is yet another example of how ethnics is not clear-cut.