Moral Theory and Personal Relationships :: Michael Stocker Ethical Theories Essays

Moral scheme and Personal Relationships In his phrase The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories, Michael Stocker argues that mainstream honorable theories, namely consequentialism and deontology, are incompatible with maintaining personal relations of love, friendship, and fellow tang because they both overemphasise the occasion of duty, obligation, and rightness, and ignore the role of motivation in morality. Stocker states that the great goods of life, i.e. love, friendship, etc., essentially contain certain motives and preclude others, such as those demanded by mainstream ethics.11 In his stem Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality, Peter Railton argues that a particular var. of consequentialism, namely sophisticated consequentialism, is not incompatible with love, affection and acting for the stake of others. In the essays War and Massacre and Autonomy and Deontology, Thomas Nagel holds that a surmise of absolutism, i.e. deontology, may be compat ible with maintaining personal commitments. The first objective of this paper is to demonstrate that despite the efforts of both Railton and Nagel, consequentialism and deontology do not in fact incorporate personal relations into morality in a right way. This essay shows that Stockers challenge may also hold against versions of celibacy Ethics, such as that put forth by Rosalind Hursthouse in her article Virtue Theory and Abortion. The second objective of this discussion is to examine criticisms of Stocker make by Kurt Baier in his article Radical Virtue Ethics. This essay demonstrates that in the end Baiers objections are not convincing. Stocker begins his paper by tilt that modern good theories fail because, by and large, they deal only with the reasons and justifications for mountains actions and ignore peoples motivations. This failure to address the role of motivation has led to a form of schizophrenia in an in-chief(postnominal) area of value22 people are unable to reconcile their motives with the moral justifications for their actions. Stocker highlights the constraints that motives impose on both ethical theory and the ethical life in order to show that only when justifications and motives are in harmony can people lead the good life. Stocker believes that mainstream ethical theories, uniform consequentialism and deontology, make it impossible for people to reconcile their reasons and motives because these theories demand that people perform acts for the sake of duty or for the good, as opposed to because they care almost the people who are affected by their actions.