Discussion Questions:Do you think it is the same to act in your own self-interest as it is to act in a selfish way?
1. A common ethical dilemma used to distinguish between philosophical reasoning methods is the following. Imagine that you are standing on a footbridge spanning some trolley tracks. You see that a runaway trolley is threatening to kill five people. Standing next to you, in between the oncoming trolley and the five people, is a railway worker wearing a large backpack. You quickly realize that the only way to save the people is to push the man off the bridge and onto the tracks below. The man will die, but the bulk of his body and the pack will stop the trolley from reaching the others. (You quickly understand that you can’t jump yourself because you aren’t large enough to stop the trolley, and there’s no time to put on the man’s backpack.) Legal concerns aside, would it be ethical for you to save the five people by pushing this stranger to his death? Use the deon- tological and teleological methods to reason out what you would do and why.
2. Another ethical dilemma deals with a runaway trolley heading for five railway workers who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. The only way to save these people is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto a side track, where it will run over and kill one worker instead of five. Ignoring legal concerns, would it be ethically acceptable for you to turn the trolley by hitting the switch in order to save five people at the expense of one person? Use the deontological and teleological methods to reason out what you would do and why.
3. The following two statements about virtue were made by noted philosophers/writers:
a. MacIntyre, in his account of Aristotelian virtue, states that integrity is the one trait of char- acter that encompasses all the others. How does integrity relate to, as MacIntrye said, “the wholeness of a human life”?
b. David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), an educator and writer, said, “Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.” Explain the meaning of this phrase as you see it.
4. a. Do you think it is the same to act in your own self-interest as it is to act in a selfish way? Why or why not?
b. Do you think “enlightened self-interest” is a contradiction in terms, or is it a valid basis for all actions? Evaluate whether our laissez-faire, free-market economic system does (or should) operate under this philosophy.
5. In this chapter, we have discussed the Joe Paterno matter at Penn State. Another situation where a respected individual’s reputation was tarnished by personal decisions is the resignation of former U.S. military general and head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), David Petraeus. On November 9, 2012, Petraeus resigned from the CIA after it was announced he had an extra- marital affair with a biographer, Paula Broadwell, who wrote a glowing book about his life. Petraeus acknowledged that he exercised poor judgment by engaging in the affair. When Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents investigated the matter because of concerns there may have been security leaks, they discovered a substantial number of classified documents on her computer. Broadwell told investigators that she ended up with the secret military documents after taking them from a government building. No security leaks had been found. In accept- ing Petraeus’s resignation, President Obama praised Petraeus’s leadership during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and said: “By any measure, through his lifetime of service, David Petraeus has made our country safer and stronger.” Should our evaluation of Petraeus’s lifetime of hard work and Petraeus’s success in his career be tainted by one act having nothing to do with job performance?
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6. One explanation about rights is that “there is a difference between what we have the right to do and what is the right thing to do.” Explain what you think is meant by this statement.
7. Steroid use in baseball is an important societal issue. Many members of society are concerned that their young sons and daughters may be negatively influenced by what apparently has been done at the major league level to gain an advantage and the possibility of severe health problems for young children from continued use of the body mass enhancer now and in the future. Mark McGwire, who broke Roger Maris’s 60-home-run record, initially denied using steroids. He has never come close to the 75 percent positive vote to be in the Hall of Fame. Unfortunately for McGwire, his approval rating has been declining each year since he received 23.7 percent of the vote in 2010 and only 16.9 percent of the sportscasters voted in 2013 to elect him into the Hall. Some believe that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who were the best at what they did, should be listed in the record books with an asterisk after their names and an explanation that their records were established at a time when baseball productivity might have been positively affected by the use of steroids. Some even believe they should be denied entrance to the baseball Hall of Fame altogether. The results for Bonds (36.2 percent) and Clemens (37.6 percent) in their initial year of eligibility (2013) were not close to meeting the 75 percent requirement and that led some to question whether these superstars would ever be voted into the Hall. 79 Evaluate whether Bonds and Clemens should be elected to the Hall of Fame from a situational ethics point of view