Moral dilemmasRead the 10 moral dilemmas and state your answer and how you reached the answer?

Is conscience always reliable?Look back at any of your decisions.

How do you feel about them?

If you could change your mind, would you?

Questions to considerFor each situation, how reliable a guide was your conscience?

How do you know whether conscience is reliable?

What criteria do you use to decide whether you were right to follow your conscience or not?!

Questions to considerCan you think of situations where it would be wrong to follow the conscience?

If you followed your conscience and then later find out that you made a decision which hurt people were you still right to have followed it?

Conscience is a reliable guide to moral behaviour. Discuss (35)

Newman

Butler

Aquinas 1

Aquinas 2

Aquinas 3

Aquinas 4

What about ethical theories?The problem with following C is that it is subjective and bound to change

Ethical theories are objective and thus more reliable.

Ethical theories are inflexibleHowever ethical theories are inflexible and even the most subtle have myriad flaws if they are adhered to too rigidly

When faced with a dilemma such as the murderer and the friend even the most loyal Kantian would immediately know that in this case it would be better to lie.

But on what basis? What criteria do we use to know when to use an ethical theory and when to rely on conscience?

The strength of always following CThe Strength of C is its flexibility and its immediate and direct access to the good something a utilitarian for example does not have as they weild the clumsy hedonic calculus.

Utilise both C and an ethical theoryBut when is one to be trusted over the other?Should we always follow an ethical theory UNLESS our conscience does not allow it?

Or always follow C until it contradicts an ethical code?

Conscience active or passive?Can we actively call on our C (as Aquinas and Fromm might say) or are we passive recipients of its advice(as Newman and Freud might say)?If C is active then how can we be trusted to change it?If C is passive (ie there is nothing we can do about it) does this lend wait to the innate idea?

FreudIf Freud is right about C does that mean we should avoid following it?Should we simply ignore C?If not, when should we trust it and when not?

Innate CEven if C is innate and God given, does the fact that it differs mean that we should still ignore it (ie because we simply cant be trusted to interpret what he is telling us!)

The primacy of CIs C too important to ignore?

Why do moral feelings seem so universal? (ie the golden rule?)

Even though the specifics of C differ. The fact that everyone does have a moral code lends wait to its importance

Moral dilemmasRead the 10 moral dilemmas and state your answer and how you reached the answer?

Is conscience always reliable?Look back at any of your decisions.

How do you feel about them?

If you could change your mind, would you?

Questions to considerFor each situation, how reliable a guide was your conscience?

How do you know whether conscience is reliable?

What criteria do you use to decide whether you were right to follow your conscience or not?!

Questions to considerCan you think of situations where it would be wrong to follow the conscience?

If you followed your conscience and then later find out that you made a decision which hurt people were you still right to have followed it?