Choose your own adventure

If you were a teacher, would you fudge scores to encourage an underperforming student? Would you call that student out if you found out they were cheating?

If you had a friend in prison for something that you did, too, and you could reduce their sentence, would you turn yourself in? What if it was a matter of life and death, meaning you could save them from execution if you agreed to a prison sentence?

Would you risk the lives of eight men to save one?

Well, you could think about all of that, or you could just watch "The Emperor's Club," "Return To Paradise," and "Saving Private Ryan."

My journalism ethics class has been discussing these movies this week as a means for discussing the points of view of key moral philosophers.  We're looking at 7 key philosophers and their views of morality:

1. Aristotle: virtue-based; judge an act based on the virtues of a good person; a good person will act virtuously and seek to attain happiness, which is the final good; virtue is making choices guided by reason in accordance to the doctrine of the mean --> harmonization of the soul; you recognize virtue in other people and are naturally drawn to them
2. Jesus: care-based; the Golden Rule --> do unto others as you would have them do unto you; exemplified in the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which we learn that we must even do good unto those who are abhorrent to us because everyone is our neighbor
3. John Locke: rights-based; morality will extend and protect individual rights; respect for the government is tantamount to morality; the government exists to protect rights; moral behavior fully respects the rights of others
4. Immanuel Kant: duty-based; conduct conforms with universalisable rules; anti to situational ethics; can't use people as a means to an end; it's not what you do, it's what makes you do it --> your duty matters the most, not the results you are trying to achieve; do something if you could in good conscience tell everyone else to do it too
5. John Stuart Mill: consequence-based; morality is based on effects (utilitarianism); greatest good for the greatest number; minimize pain and suffering
6. John Rawls: justice-based; morality as actions that conform to principles of fairness that we can all agree on; very interested in social equality; if Rawls had his way, morality would be drawn up by a group of people who anticipated being placed in a stratified society but didn't know who they would be in the society (e.g. rich or poor), so they would have to agree on moral rules that would benefit themselves and everyone else before knowing how they would fit in; the idea is that people in this situation will seek the best solution that minimizes inequality and harm
7. Baier: trust-based; morality strengthens trust to constitute society

We haven't actually discussed Mill and Baier yet, so I don't have notes for them.  It's really interesting to consider the aforementioned ethical dilemmas in the context of these philosophies, though.  Some various thoughts we have discussed about morality in general:

• ethics is not just restraint, you don't avoid wrong by doing less or doing nothing
• ethics is not the brake pedal, it's the way that you drive
• the challenge with ethics is to create institutions that cultivate morality
• we are driven by sentiment, the nobility of the soul
• we could agree on the right thing and still be unwilling to do it
• morality generally has to do with assigning a value to people

So what would you do?