Ah, Burk, I was expecting you to join this thread along about now.
You may want to look over some of the earlier posts, especially the ones
that address Ron O's peculiar [1] behavior.
[1] This is the most value-light word that fits what he is up to.]
First off: I am NOT referring to "principle oriented systems of ethics" etc. My approach
is both more ancient and more modern than these. The ancient one goes back to Homer,
but more relevantly, to Aesychlus, whose plays reflected the breakdown of many
traditional ideas, just as in our time. Our own behavior in talk.origins is a microcosm of that breakdown.
The modern is rooted in existentialism, as exemplified in Kierkegaard's three stages on life's way,
of which the first is the aesthetic stage. According to William Barrett
in _Irrational_Man_, Kierkegaard regarded moralists who confine themselves to abstract
analysis (as in the above paragraph of yours) as acting out their aesthetic stage,
as distinct from the second, moral stage.
I'm at my office in the university, but when I get back home I'll look at my copy there,
and might have more to say about what Barrett wrote.
>
> As an aside, both casuistics and and to virtue ethics have been or are mainstream catholic ethical though, though VE is these days also embraced by many secular thinkers like Food or Nussbaum.
>
> What you seem to mean with "individual oriented" seems to be different from what these mean, but it is difficult to make out what type of ethics you really have in mind when using that term
I've also used the term "person-oriented" for "individual-oriented," but that can
easily be misinterpreted. It is the opposite of the principle-oriented usage
in "The law/God is no respecter of persons." That is, what counts in
dealing with the actions of people has nothing to do with who the actor is.
I recall how surprised I was to see that Nixon could have been treated
like a criminal on top of being stripped of the Presidency: I had taken it for granted
that Presidents had the equivalent of diplomatic/Parliamentary immunity.
This immunity is a mild case of person-oriented ethics.
> >
> > A case of a student I caught taking a test for another is a good
> > introduction. By turning [the one for whom the test was taken] in, I was principle-oriented.
Note the correction in brackets. The one who actually took the test
was not reported for months, as can be deduced from what I wrote next:
> > When it came time for the trial, the one in my class had been pressured by
> > the Dean's office to identify the student who had taken the test--
> > I had never met him before and had to let him go to "go back to
> > my dorm and get my ID card to show you I am ____________"
> > [Of course, he never returned, but my student showed up half an hour later.]
My student readily confessed, in the office of a highly trusted colleague of mine,
with her and me as the witnesses, to having gotten the other student to cheat for him.
But he would not tell us his identity, and we didn't press him because
that was the job of the Dean's office and those appointed by it.
> >
> > One thing my student said at the trial was of the essence of individual-oriented ethics:
> > he complained about how he had been pressured to "rat" on one
> > of his friends, which he deemed to be worse than cheating on a test.
> I can't see how that matches your description above, and why it illustrates "individual centric ethics". Simply by your account of the event, one can also reconstruct it as both of you using principle-based approaches, just disagreeing on the principle.
Unfortunately, words are almost never adequate guides; your legal training should tell you that.
It is the main job of appellate courts to interpret laws, which hardly ever can foresee all situations.
The Catholic Church does the same, by the process of casuistry.
>
> Your principle is: Everyone should always be loyal to their employer and protect their reputation, even if this inflicts harm on third parties",
On the contrary: it is individual-oriented, with the employer as the individual [or collective, as
in the case of a university].
What makes it principle-oriented is the principle of fairness. Cheating on tests is unfair to other students,
because it gives the cheater an unfair advantage over them when it comes to jobs, etc. And if cheating
is generally left unpunished, it would lead to the breakdown of the whole educational
system, which in turn is one of the pillars of our civilization, and famously the Chinese civilization.
> his principle is "everyone should always be loyal to their friends and protect their reputation, even if this is harmful to oneself"
That is strained to begin with, as it revolves about the concept of what a "friend" is,
and that is a tremendously ambiguous concept. Friends who command that sort
of loyalty are a small handful, and best treated as individuals.
Individual-oriented morality almost always involves "looking out for Number One,"
and almost always above all else [1]. Then it expands to friends of the above sort, and then
to lesser degree to those of the sort we see a lot of here in talk.origins: people who have bonded over the years
and instinctively prefer each other to those who are out of favor with them. And it doesn't
go much further than that, except in the form of groups and institutions that they treat with
a similar loyalty, ranging from the home team in a sport to patriotism for one's country.
[1] Returning to your "principle" of loyalty to one's employer and to the cheating of students:
the person who turns a cheating student in is "looking out for Number One" because if he didn't turn
a student whom he caught cheating, he would be breaking a rule laid down by the employer,
and will suffer the consequences.
> Some approaches to ethics may want to decide which of these principles is better, others may be happy to accept that there can be conflicts between rules- virtue ethics e.g. may argue that the moral duties of a professor (what it means to be a virtuos professor) are different from the moral duties of a virtuous student.
>
> But regardless of what approach one takes, and which rules one thinks better supported, nothing in your account indicates that the difference between the protagonists matches one of principle vs individual based ethics.
Now that I have gone deeper into what my distinction is all about, how do you see this difference now?
Peter Nyikos