MORAL ISSUES

Moral Issues

Moral Issues

1. Louis Pojman and Reiman's Views on Capital Punishment

Louis Pojman assets further that subjectivism reduces morality to aesthetic individual tastes: if I like to murder, I will craft my morality to suit my taste for death. According to Pojman, "a contradiction seems to exist between subjectivism and the very concept of morality..." because morality is the "proper resolution of interpersonal conflict and the amelioration of the human predicament". To the subjectivist then, there is no proper, and therefore no need for morality (teachweb.cis.uoguelph.ca).

Pojman bases his view of objectivism on the assumption that "human nature is relatively similar in essential respects, having a common set of needs and interests." He then defines moral values as "functions of human needs...instituted by reason." Pojman is not an absolutist; he does not necessarily think that values are non-overrideable. Instead, he assets that certain values hold true across cultures and relativism comes in at the application stage. These values, which form his "core morality," are general and leave less important or secondary issues up to the individual or to society (teachweb.cis.uoguelph.ca).

In contrast to Pojman, Reiman views the death penalty as a horrific act that gives pain and nothing else. According to Reiman, “I think that this view overlooks important differences in the manner in which people reach their inevitable ends. I contend that execution is especially horrible, and it is so in a way similar to (though not identical with) the way in which torture is especially horrible (www.scu.edu).

I believe we view torture as especially awful because of two of its features, which also characterize execution: intense pain and the spectacle of one person being completely subject to the power of another” www.scu.edu.

2. Singer, Hardin and Abelson's views on Rich and Poor

Peter Singer asserts that “…how well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps if we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.” Singer believes that there is something that can be done to prevent some people from starving and that people should take action. He states that there is hunger that can be stopped without the rich having to give up something significant (www.utilitarian.net).

In contrast, Hardin considers the nations of the world as the lifeboats with the rich sitting inside and the poor swimming in the oceans outside. Hardin explains how allowing all of the poor into the boat with the rich would be completely moral but would but everyone in the ocean would perish because the boat can't support that number of people, just as the lands can't support a large group of people because of limited natural resources (stairs.umd.edu).

Abelson also follows Hardin's footsteps in claiming that poor people are victims of richness but they ought to be because they have not developed any resources of their own and that the rich countries are going to suffer if they continue to relentlessly help these poor nations, which are truly a burden on their ...