Inventory of Your Views

Inventory of Your Views

Idea for Inventory from L. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory. 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998.)

Rank your position on each statement from 1 to 5 with 1 being complete agreement and 5 being complete disagreement. The statements are controversial. The purpose is for you to see where you stand currently.

1. Everybody is basically selfish and out for themselves. They can’t help but look out for number one. Even helping others is merely a way of helping oneself.

2. People are born naturally good and caring, but this caring attitude has to be developed or it withers.

3. People are neither born essentially selfish or unselfish. They are trained to be one or the other.

4. Reason rather than emotion is the best guide in determining what acts are moral and what acts are not.

5. There are moral absolutes such as stealing is always wrong that apply across cultures and for all times.

6. A practice such as infanticide or human sacrifice may and should be morally correct in one culture and not in another.

7. Moral ideals are independent of individual opinion. Stealing is wrong even if an individual thinks it is right.

8. There are moral absolutes that can be discovered by reason, even if we have not yet identified all of them. We can give reasons to help us discern better from worse in areas of morality.

9. All acts are done to achieve goals. Some goals become means to other goals. For example, I study in order to do well on a test. I do well on the test in order to pass my course. I pass my course in order to graduate, etc.

10. The most important goal in life is _________________________________________.

11. The best guarantee of good behavior is training people from childhood to practice certain virtues such as honesty and courage. Having a good character is very important.

12. To become moral we should copy good role models; i.e., people who we look up to and who model virtuous behavior. We should model our behavior on their behavior.

13. The best guarantee of good behavior is to have strict rules that apply to everyone.

14. One should seek the mean between extremes in governing behavior. Moral virtue is a matter of moderation. E.g., one should not be a coward lacking in courage nor foolhardy with an excess of courage, but somewhere in the middle.

15. People love themselves more than the divine (God or gods) and this causes bad behavior.

16. If someone truly loves God (or gods), then all their actions will be moral because God/s will help them follow the divine will.

17. Reason tells us the facts. Emotions tell us how to value facts. For example, reason can tell us that a man was murdered at 12:45 P.M. with a knife. Sympathy tells us this is terrible and ought not to have been done.

18. The way to tell whether to do an act is to weigh the good and bad consequences it has for me. For example, I should cheat on a test if it is likely to have more good than bad consequences for me.

19. The way to tell whether to do an act is to weigh the good and bad consequences it produces for anyone affected by the act. For example, a person should decide whether to cheat on a specific test based on whether it would produce more pain for him or her, classmates, teacher, future employers, etc.

20. A moral rule should be developed based on whether the rule would produce more pleasure or pain for society if everyone followed it. For example, we should only have a rule against cheating if such a rule produced more pleasure than pain for society when generally followed.

21. The most important thing in judging whether an action is moral is what the motives of the actor are–regardless of the consequences. A person who tries to save a drowning victim has done a good deed even if she fails.

22. The best motive for an action is duty rather than selfish gain or even love. That way people will act out of respect for the moral law rather than personal inclinations. They will treat each person morally even if they dislike them and even if they receive no benefit .

23. One only ought to do an act if the act still is possible if everyone does it E.g, I should not make a promise I know I won’t keep. If everyone lied when they made promises no one would believe promises anymore and promises would no longer exist. A lying promise is self-defeating when everyone does it. One can’t follow a universal rule that makes no sense.

24. Each person should be treated with respect. One ought to keep one’s promises because to do otherwise would be to treat the person one promised something to without respect. People are not things to be used merely as means to one’s own ends.

25. One ought to love both self and others. Both complete selfishness and complete selflessness are wrong.

26. I owe more of a moral duty to friends, family, employers and others with whom I am in a special relationship than to strangers. For example, if a bomb exploded in a store, I would have more of an obligation to try to save my injured child than I would to save an injured stranger.

27. One shouldn’t do to others what one wouldn’t want done to oneself.

28. If people do their duty in their family and personal relationships, this will make them better citizens of their country and of the world.

29. Tradition and teachings handed down from the past are the best guides to correct behavior.

30. Compassion, sympathy, care, and not harming others are a better basis for morality than a set of abstract rules.