social ethics questions

5/9/22, 1:25 AM Week 3 Overview - Historical Transition: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-3-overview-historical-transition?module_item_id=17540432 1/4

Week 3 Overview - Historical Transition In Week 2 we got an introduction to Aristotle’s virtue ethics. This ethical paradigm is focused on doing what is good for fulfilling our most excellent form as social and rational political animals. The very notion of “virtue” is not about rule following or obedience, but about practicing and cultivating those habits that realize our higher social and rational qualities of self-determination in order to become more fully human. This week we will briefly wrap up virtue ethics by exploring its modern-day application in the contemporary virtue ethicists, Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum, as well as look at a practical example of virtue ethics within the “guerilla gardening” movement in South Central LA. Here we will see that their version of contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics moves away from Aristotle’s own elitism, and instead radically pivots from common people and working-class communities as the locus for becoming political animals. What both Nussbaum and MacIntyre recognize against the tendencies toward nihilism and relativism within our consumerist market society is that communities that actually work together can more easily see within their productive activity their social nature, its common good, and those required social virtues of practical reasoning, creativity, cooperation, care, compassion, and solidarity for its fulfillment.

Speaking of our market-generated moral relativism, how did we get to what Sandel described as now our society dominated by the market? As we now pivot from the ancient world and toward our modern context, we will find that ethics no longer objectively derives values from any higher qualities in our nature; rather, values are derived subjectively from immediate private pleasures (utilitarianism) or from pure reason over against pleasures (deontology). Within these ethical paradigms nature, and especially human nature, are considered a brute given without higher qualities, values, or purposes toward which they inherently strive. In other words, a robustly objective notion of the common good begins to disappear in our modern world as the

5/9/22, 1:25 AM Week 3 Overview - Historical Transition: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-3-overview-historical-transition?module_item_id=17540432 2/4

good becomes privatized as a matter of mere consumer goods based on the whims of the marketplace. With the rise of capitalism we also find an increasing reduction of nature in its entirety to mere quantifiable stuff according to market prices and monetary values, exchanged and consumed for private self-interests. This background is important as we will see later, since utilitarianism (Week 4) and deontology (Week 5) arose as specific modern attempts to ameliorate or regulate the effects from this reductive view of our marketized reality.

Before we explore those ethical theories, however, this week we will first read some history about this transition to our modern world. While most of us know well the positive outcomes that came with modernization, which we should rightly celebrate, what is often left out of our dominant historical accounts however are some of the unfortunate hidden costs of capitalist development. If ethics is to be a genuine pursuit of truth and justice pertaining to the common good, then we cannot shy away from critically analyzing our modern world. The reading by Carolyn Merchant starts us off by looking at how our transition in the West toward modernization brought with it a new view of nature. She characterizes this shift in perspective as a new mechanized worldview that no longer sees inherent value or meaning in nature, but instead views nature as a lifeless machine to be used up for economic value rather than a purposeful organic movement to be cultivated for its own sake. She points out that this shift follows the new imperatives of an emerging market society whereby goods are no longer produced for social use-values but rather exclusively for monetary exchange- values and private profit. Hence, all of nature, including human bodies, start to become more severely commodified. Speaking of the commodification of human bodies, we also find at the beginning of our modern capitalist society the largest commercialized trade of slaves in recorded history. Of course slavery and colonization existed for a long time throughout history, but how should we understand the dramatic increase in colonization and slavery that occurred at the beginning of our modern world? Julia Ott’s piece introduces us to this difficult part of capitalism’s history, setting some background to understanding the relation of slavery and racism in our capitalist society, which we will explore in more detail in Week 6 when we look at the nature of our capitalist economy.

To read or watch:

5/9/22, 1:25 AM Week 3 Overview - Historical Transition: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-3-overview-historical-transition?module_item_id=17540432 3/4

Review the materials on the Launchpad page Summary of Historical Transition to Our Modern Period (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/launchpad-summary-of- historical-transition-to-our-modern-period) . Read Martha Nussbaum, "Capabilities and Social Justice" (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034379/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034379/download? download_frd=1) Alasdair MacIntyre, "How Aristotelianism can become Revolutionary" (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034375/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034375/download? download_frd=1) Read Julia Ott, "Slaves: The Capital that made Capitalism" (https://publicseminar.org/essays/slavery-the-capital-that-made-capitalism/) (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034367/download?wrap=1) Read Carolyn Merchant, "Science and Worldviews" (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034397/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034397/download? download_frd=1) Watch Ron Finley's talk for the case study questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w)

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w)

To complete or submit: Complete the Reading Assignment Questions assignment (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/assignments/7016119) , which is due by Saturday at Midnight. Complete the Case Discussion Questions (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/discussion_topics/7964166) . The

5/9/22, 1:25 AM Week 3 Overview - Historical Transition: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-3-overview-historical-transition?module_item_id=17540432 4/4

initial answers are due Wednesday by Midnight, and subsequent responses are due Sunday by Midnight.