Page 106. Watch the Lecture. Part B. LISTEN FOR MAIN IDEAS

Unit 11

page 106

watch the lecture

part B: listen for main ideas

every day, we have to make decisions; we have to ask ourselves what’s the right thing to do and whats the wrong thing to do.

but how do we make these decisions?

how do we know what’s right and wrong?

the study of ethics can give us some answers; but today I’d like to talk about two different approaches; two different ways to make ethical decisions.

the rights approach and the utilitarian approach.

So, first I’ll explain each approach and then we’ll see how these work in the real world examples.

First, let’s talk about the rights approach.

we use the idea of rights to talk about many ethical problems.

this idea of rights comes originally from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher in the 18th century.

the principal says that each individual has the freedom to make choices that other people must respect those choices.

let’s take the right to free speech as an example; freedom of speech means two things: first, that I have the right to say whatever I want and second that other people must respect my right to speak.

So, according to the rights approach, an ethical action must respect an individual’s choices.

the power of the individual to make his or her own decisions to decide if an action is ethical using the rights approach we must always ask “how does this action affect the individual’s freedom to make choices?”.

now let’s look at another approach, the utilitarian approach; that’s utilitarian.

the utilitarian approach was made popular in the 19th century by British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

in this approach, the most important thing is not individual rights, the most important thing is making the world a better place.

So, here an ethical action is one that creates the greatest amount of good.

let’s take for example paying taxes; the government collects taxes from individual people.

Now most people don’t like paying taxes because they have less money to spend on other things.

However, taxes help the community as a whole; paying for things like hospitals, roads, schools, parks, things that benefit everyone.

So, even though paying taxes is bad for some people individually, it’s good for the majority, for most people in the community.

So, to decide if an action is ethical following the utilitarian approach, we must ask what action will cause the greatest good for the most people?

Now, let’s take a real world example and look at how to make decision using these two approaches; that is the rights approach and the utilitarian approach.

let’s look at the question of public smoking.

starting in the late 1990s, this became an issue in many places when smoking was banned in office buildings, schools, restaurants and so on.

the question is how do we make a decision about whether to ban smoking or not.

when you look at the problem from the rights approach, we have to ask “how the smoking in public affect individual rights?” we have to look at the rights of two groups of people: smokers and non-smokers.

So, first let’s look at the rights of smokers.

smokers will say that they should be free to smoke wherever they want and that other people should respect that right, even if they don’t like it.

but what about non-smokers?

non-smokers say that they should be free to breathe clean air and that smokers should respect that right; smokers shouldn’t force people to breathe their cigarette smoke.

this however, shows us one of the problems of using the rights approach; because when you have two groups, how do you decide whose rights are more important?

smokers or non-smokers?

for another point of view, let’s take the utilitarian approach; following that approach, we have to ask what creates the greatest amount of good?

allowing smoking in public places? Or banning it?

so what’s good about allowing smoking in public places?

Well, smokers will be happy; that’s pretty much it.

but it causes a lot of harm; so, overall you can argue that the ethical choice is to impose a ban on smoking in public places because it creates the greater good.

public places will be healthier and will save money on health costs because fewer people will get sick.

through this example, we can see the differences between looking at an ethical problem from the rights approach and from the utilitarian approach.

So, until next time, I’d like you to think of some other real-life examples and consider them in the context of the two ethical decision-making approaches we discussed today, that’s all…