Theory building activities: mountain terrorist exercise  (Page 4/5)

• These different approaches are meant to work together. Each gives us insight into different dimensions of the problematic situation. Utilitarianism and deontology both focus on the action. Utilitarianism uses consequences to evaluate the action while deontology evaluates an action in terms of its underlying motive and its formal characteristics.
• Virtue ethics turns away from the action to focus on the agent. It asks us to determine what the action says about the character or person of the agent. If the action is irresponsible, then the agent is irresponsible. Virtue ethics can be implemented by projecting a moral exemplar into the situation. You might ask, "What would so-and-so do in this situation?" if this person were your mentor, a person you admire, or a moral exemplar. Or you might examine virtues that are realized through your action. For example, Williams says that taking the life of a villager might seriously disrupt or corrupt your integrity.
• The capability approach takes a still different focus on the situation by having us bring into view those factors in the situation which could empower or impede the expression of human capabilities like thought, imagination, movement, health, and life.

Comments on the relation between ethical approaches

The Mountain Terrorist Exercise has, in the past, given students the erroneous idea that ethical approaches are necessarily opposed to one another. As one student put it, "If deontology tells us to walk away from the village, then utilitarianism must tell us to stay and kill a villager because deontology and utilitarianism, as different and opposed theories, always reach different and opposed conclusions on the actions they recommend." The Mountain Terrorist dilemma was specially constructed by Bernard Williams to produce a situation that offered only a limited number of alternatives. He then tied these alternatives to different ethical approaches to separate them precisely because in most real world situations they are not so readily distinguishable. Later this semester, we will turn from these philosophical puzzles to real world cases where ethical approaches function in a very different and mostly complimentary way. As we will see, ethical approaches, for the most part, converge on the same solutions. For this reason, this module concludes with 3 meta-tests. When approaches converge on a solution, this strengthens the solution's moral validity. When approaches diverge on a solution, this weakens their moral validity. A third meta-test tells us to avoid framing all ethical problems as dilemmas (=forced choices between undesirable alternatives) or what Carolyn Whitbeck calls "multiple-choice" problems. You will soon learn that effective moral problem solving requires moral imagination and moral creativity. We do not "find" solutions "out there" ready made but design them to harmonize and realize ethical and practical values.