Is it more important to be a good person or to perform good acts (virtue ethics vs. action ethics)?
I believe that good works or acts are more important than being a good person. The quantifiable aspect of good acts (i.e. you would know how many someone did and like be able to measure the outcome of them) outweighs the value of being an intrinsically good person. You could be a good person and not seek human contact or interaction for decades. You could be a good person and not do anything harmful, but not do anything good for anyone either. You could be a “good person” and have a definition of “good” that registers as a very low bar for others, so would not have anything to show for that definition. In these examples, goodness doesn’t hold water where good acts would. Even if the individual doing the good acts was filled with malicious intent, if the act was genuinely good, it wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t impact the outcome, which would benefit others.
Does the process by which decisions are made matter more than the outcomes of these decisions (procedural justice vs. distributive justice)?
I absolutely do not believe that procedural justice is more important than distributive justice. In my work, there is a procedural justice process for projects and problem solving. What happens in the practice of procedural justice is that a lot of partners in the process feel valued, but the outcome is harder to obtain and, regularly, there is so much compromising on the solution that no one is truly happy with the outcome because they have had to compromise their ethics in some way. Conversely, I value distributive justice because the outcome is what is valuable. How you test that outcome would depend on the situation, but if you could neutrally evaluate the outcome and it benefitted the most individuals or elements, whatever process you used to get there would be better. Unfortunately, I think that people regularly become so enamored with their own goodness in the decision making process that they fail to see that there is a potential for the outcome to not be a good decision or have direct negative impacts.
Is my own life worth more than the lives of others, the same, or less (selfishness vs. altruism)?
It has taken me a long time to admit this, but I do believe that my life values more than the lives of others. Specifically, I believe that my life has more value than the value of some other people who fall into distinct groups like rapists and murders. That might sound logical, but I sincerely did not believe that I discriminated against anyone for any reason; in reality, I believe that people should own their decisions no matter when or where or how they committed them. So, if there were a real scenario where my life was put in immediate judgment against a rapist and the evaluation lead to one of us being killed, I would sincerely believe that I should survive and am actually entitled to live. On less absolute scales as life and death, I believe violent criminals should not have the same rights I do, so I should benefit more directly (from governing bodies and just walking down the street) than they do or ever could.
Hey Erica, my name is Katelyn! The link to my blog is http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/02/03/ethics-6/
I thought it was very interesting that we both talked about number 6 in a similar way. We both said that we feel our lives are more important than those in jail (murderers and rapists). I completely agree with how you started your paragraph too, it is hard to admit that we think our ives matter more than others. I feel like the only people my life does not matter more than would be my family’s. But I really enjoyed reading your post and could agree with a lot of what you are saying.
Erica,
In reading your post I can tell that you hold very strong ethical views, which is why your post caught my attention. With the last question that you answered, selfishness versus altruism, it appears that you feel that you deserve more rights than criminals, because of their past actions. In your first question answer you discussed how good acts are superior to a person that is intrinsically good. In this thinking, what if one of those criminals is released from jail, has a change of heart, and begins to do good deeds in his or her community. Would that former criminal be good person because he or she is completing good actions? Or would that formal criminal be a bad person in the community, even though he or she is currently benefiting the community in a positive way, because of his or her past actions?
http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/02/03/katie-greiner-module-3-ethics/
Hi Erica! My name is Neil Karmaker. You can read my blogpost here:
http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/02/03/module-3-my-ethics-views/
I definitely agree with you that people’s good actions are more valuable than the “goodness” people feel about themselves. Only the way a person acts and benefits other people is a true measure of that person’s goodness. Like you said, even if a person was filled with malicious intent, but their actions were good, they would be considered good by society. This is a particularly tricky situation, but I would say that a person was good if this was the situation, but I think that if they did commit a malicious action and based off of their general malicious intent, I would then consider them a bad person.