Nascent Thinker | Contemplations Along The Way

My Frustration with Ethics

Ethics is at once my favourite and least liked area of inquiry, espe­cially ethics courses.  One such course was an ‘intro­duc­tory’ Bioethics course I took last year; a course which famil­iar­ized and focused on Util­i­tar­i­an­ism, Kant’s Cat­e­gor­i­cal Imper­a­tive, and Virtue Ethics in rela­tion to the ‘prob­lems’ of Bioethics. The prob­lem is that ethics as it’s cur­rently prac­ticed is impos­si­ble, and it frus­trates me. The result is that I’ve taken to read­ing books on ethics (and virtue) and the out­look looks fairly bleak.

It was a com­mon require­ment of my Bioethics course to exam­ine dif­fer­ent issues from the per­spec­tives of at least two moral the­o­ries. I usu­ally chose Util­i­tar­i­an­ism and Kant’s Cat­e­gor­i­cal Imper­a­tive (I think now I would run to Virtue Ethics first). The prob­lem that makes ethics impos­si­ble is that there doesn’t seem the pos­si­bil­ity of con­sen­sus — by this I mean progress, or one eth­i­cal for­mu­la­tion being supe­rior … (Read more)