social ethics questions

5/4/22, 1:19 AM Week 1 Overview: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-1-overview?module_item_id=17540424 1/5

Week 1 Overview

What is ethical reasoning? What does it mean to reason meaningfully in an ethical way? Historically, this has meant reasoning about a common good, a normative form, or an objective and universal standard of values. This is a task, however, complicated unfortunately by our global economic system. In our capitalist world, society is subordinated to market demands in an unprecedented way. Monetary value is the one sovereign measure of value universally accepted, while all other values must be subordinated to the task of making money. In other words, conditioned by commercialized society we tend to think ethics has to do only with personal values like any other private consumer preference, while the only objective and universal value is money, since this is the only universal standard of exchange we all publicly live by. The dominant default ethical view within this status quo tends to be that of moral relativism: ethical values are nothing more than a multitude of arbitrarily private tastes and feelings. In ethical theory this view is often called “emotivism”: the belief that ethical values do not refer to anything universal or an objectively shared nature but rather function in each individual as subjective expressions of absolutely private emotions and differing beliefs. In this case there is then no possibility to publicly reason in an ethical way, since ethics is not rational but an expression of private whims, like consumer preferences. And we all know how easy it is to simply say in an argument: “Who am I to say? You have your beliefs and I have mine. To each their own!” Yet, can a democratic society survive without a shared sense of a common good and a pursuit of mutual understanding, deferring instead our shared universals solely to the language of money?

5/4/22, 1:19 AM Week 1 Overview: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-1-overview?module_item_id=17540424 2/5

But is it really the case that whenever we make a value judgment such as saying something is “beautiful”, or “good”, or “right”, or “just”, or “true”, we are always referring only to arbitrarily private and absolutely individualistic preferences? How would we ever be able to reach agreement with others? How could we ever identify and reason about injustice and dehumanization? How could we morally condemn such things as sexism or racism if all our moral claims about it refer to nothing more than personal tastes, whether or not we just so happen to privately like it or dislike it? How could we critically reflect on the distinctions between oppression or liberation, false needs and real needs, individual preferences and common goods for what it means to be human? Shouldn’t ethics be about values we commonly share that transcend the relativism of market evaluation, and that can be publicly reasoned about according to objective standards? If we accept the moral relativism of our market place, then we need to realize that while we may have given up on ethics as a universal standard, a measure of value is still being universally determined, and our social relations organized for us, by our global capitalist economy with its monetized law of profits over people. This has become especially evident in our current Coronavirus pandemic, where many pundits, economists and politicians have called for society to sacrifice those most vulnerable so that the economy can continue making money. But if you believe that a human life is worth more than any monetary value and that the economy should serve social life rather than vice versa, then you’re already assuming an objective standard of value beyond the market and its moral relativism. The task of doing ethics is then to articulate and conceptualize these intuitions, dialogue about them publicly, and most importantly, socially practice them with others. This is no simple task, but while doing ethics and social analysis are hard work, it is needed now more than ever, otherwise they will be done for us by the impersonal algorithms of the market.

As we will see, the history of ethics that emerged from Greek philosophy began precisely as a way to challenge the reduction of values to market exchanges and its relativism. In fact, ethics began concretely as a communal reflection on real human needs and the common good that makes any society possible in the first place, but which was forgotten within the encroaching commercialization of Athenian society. Doing some history shows us that ethical discourse was in certain ways more robust, communal, lively, comprehensive, and rational than in current times. The question for the rest of the course, after the first few weeks, then becomes, how did our society

5/4/22, 1:19 AM Week 1 Overview: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-1-overview?module_item_id=17540424 3/5

eventually get reordered around monetary values so as to lose sight of our common good and its ethical discourses?

But first, a word about the emphasis on history in this course …

Often ethics courses present ethical theories in a vacuum as if they are matters of abstract calculation—for example, the famous Trolley problem and its algorithmic formulations! This course, however, will dive into a lot of history since no ethical theory developed in a vacuum but rather emerged within various social contexts as attempted solutions to real social issues. Therefore, there are several reasons why doing history is necessary for doing ethics. First it contextualizes our present, showing us how we got here. This allows us to better understand our present as a historical product and therefore open to change, rather than fixed as an eternal given. So much of our present structures, institutions, practices, behaviors and ideas are often taken as if just natural givens or the way that humans have always operated. But once we do history we get a different picture of humanity as open, dynamic, collectively evolving beings who have gained a certain degree of freedom to creatively change their circumstances and diversify (might this be an objective need we all share by virtue of our commonly evolving nature;). Yet we cannot know our present, how we got here, and how we can creatively change our circumstances for the better if we do not develop this historical consciousness of who we are. That is, without historical consciousness we cannot even diagnose the problems of our present and how they emerged, let alone change them, as our historical blindness will continue to accept oppressive structures as if the best, or the only, possibility. Secondly, in transforming the present and working toward a better future, we must draw extensively and positively from the long arc of history, learning from, participating in, and advancing its bend toward justice. Since our historical being is a collectively evolving project, we can only gain from drawing on all the best resources of our past experiences and traditions of wisdom, rather than remain trapped in a narrowly exclusive focus on STEM. This has become especially evident with the influence of indigenous wisdom in the struggle for climate justice against the destructive forgetfulness of capitalist industry.

5/4/22, 1:19 AM Week 1 Overview: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-1-overview?module_item_id=17540424 4/5

While there are many lines of history to explore, our class only has time to introduce one specific Western line, characterized by utilitarianism and deontology. The reason for this is simply that these two frameworks dominate public discourse and governance in our Western capitalist world--but in order to critically engage our history with more precision, so as to reconstruct a better world, we need to know how and why its practices and theories emerged. Beginning with virtue ethics from Ancient Greece, however, will provide us with a starting point that does not fit in so easily within our Western status quo as it challenges some of its dominant presuppositions (and in this it even provides points of connection, as we will see near the end of the quarter, with more organically communal non-Western views).

To read or watch: Review the materials on the Launchpad page An Introduction to Ethics and its Historical Origins (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/launchpad-an-introduction- to-ethics-and-its-historical-origins) , which includes my video and lecture notes (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034398/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034398/download? download_frd=1) which should be consulted before answering the case study questions. Read Sandel, What's the Right Thing to Do, ch.1 Read George McCarthy, chapter 1 (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034340?wrap=1) (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034340/download? download_frd=1) "Aristotle on the Constitution of Social Justice and Classical Democracy", pp. 19–58

To complete or submit: Complete the Reading Assignment Questions assignment (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/assignments/7016115) , which is due by Saturday at midnight Answer the Case Discussion Questions (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/discussion_topics/7964164)

5/4/22, 1:19 AM Week 1 Overview: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-1-overview?module_item_id=17540424 5/5

regarding the Sandel video, which is located on the discussion page. For this first week, your initial post is due by Wednesday, and all subsequent responses by Sunday. Please review the Class Participation and Discussion (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/class-participation-and- discussion) page for discussion expectations.