Kant and Contradiction

           Within chapter eleven of, The Fundamentals of Ethics, author Russ Shafer-Landau discusses the “Kantian Perspective.” Immanuel Kant argued against utilitarianism, wherein the ends justify the means and we should do what brings the greatest amount of benefit, by saying that the morality of actions are based on fairness. It is clear throughout this chapter that Shafer-Landau refutes the “Kantian Perspective.” One such account involves a strong argument for Kantian contradiction involving the principle of universalizability as well as Kant’s stance on the presence of some absolute moral duties.

Emotions as Cognitive Functions: The Similar Views of Meeker and Jaggar

On Wednesday, April 3, Ms. Joy Meeker came to DePauw University to give a lecture entitled Facing Discomfort: Engaging Justice. After listening to Ms. Meeker’s stance on emotion as it relates to conflict in our society, many parallels could be derived from our study of Alison Jaggar’s Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology. Much like Jaggar, Meeker disagrees with the positivist view that emotions are an uncontrollable venting of feelings; rather, she believes that emotions should be considered and cognitively processed because it is an unavoidable factor in our thinking processes. Both Meeker and Jaggar agree that it is dangerous to rely on the social constructs that our society has created in regards to emotion. Meeker then proceeds to look at emotion through a positional lens and relate it to a more complete understanding of other viewpoints throughout the conflict resolution process.

The Societal Impact of Outlaw Emotions

           One focus in Alison Jaggar’s article entitled, Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology, is the effect of emotions on our moral judgments. Positivists believe that emotions are irrational. This means that the less emotional and biased group of individuals has a claim to power. However, Jaggar offers the audience an altruistic view that claims emotion as an inevitable part of the human construct: “The alternative epistemological model that I suggest displays the continuous interaction between how we understand the world and who we are as people. It shows how our emotional responses to the world change as we conceptualize it differently and how our changing emotional responses then stimulate us to new insights.” (Jaggar, 184) The author claims that emotions are social constructs, but also to some extent active. The keyword here is active, and I believe that this premise can be explained by outlaw emotions described to the audience using feminist examples.

Surrogacy and Abortion

In her lecture entitled, Fertility Tourism and the Ethics of Intercountry Surrogacy: Renting Wombs in the Global Marketplace, Professor Molly Shanley discussed the morality of surrogacy agreements that span across the world. Much like our current discussions in class, Professor Shanley presented the opposing argument of the exploitation of women’s bodies in foreign countries for cheap surrogacy, and then refuted it with a pro-choice argument wherein women have the right to choose what to do with their bodies. After hearing her argument, I could not help but to draw comparisons to another debate involving a pro-choice argument: abortion.

Does Shafer-Landau Subjectively Support Moral Objectivity?

            In Chapter 21 of The Fundamentals of Ethics, author Russ Shafer-Landau describes the top ten arguments against moral objectivity. This chapter is structured similarly to the other chapters, except for the fact that an author bias is prominent for the first time. Back in Chapter 20, Shafer-Landau foreshadowed his personal ethical stance in his conclusion when he does not completely rule out the nihilism point of view, “Most of us (especially we textbook authors!) hope this isn’t so.” (Shafer-Landau 2010, 318)

In this conclusion, Shafer-Landau states that, “Our discussion of these ten arguments has not revealed a single one that confirms the existence of objective moral values.” (Shafer-Landau 2010, 337) However, in this chapter the author does a great job of disproving the arguments against objectivism. At the beginning of this section, Shafer-Landau easily discredits the more popular arguments against objectivism. Nevertheless, the arguments against objectivism escalate in complexity as the chapter progresses. In this post, I will be discussing Shafer-Landau’s successful disproval of the moral skeptic argument that moral motivation undermines moral objectivity and how this example reflects his ethical stance.

The Morality of Laws Limiting Generic Drug Sales

           While some believe that there are not any general starting points for ethics due to human difference, Russ Shafer Landau argues in his book, “The Fundamentals of Ethics” that, “there are some reasonable constraints that can guide us when thinking about how to live.”(6) One of these constraints applies to current events involving the limitation of generic drugs by name-brand companies. Landau’s argument that, “neither the law nor tradition is immune from moral criticism,”(6) illustrates the current ethical debate of whether a law restricting generic drugs is morally correct.