Right, Duty and Obligation/Responsibility: a Search for Ethical

Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement. Rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to legal systems, social convention, or ethical theory.

7. Kant’s ethics gives us firm standards that do not depend on results; it injects a humanistic element into moral decision making and stresses the importance of acting on principle and from a sense of duty. Critics, however, worry that (a) Kant’s view of moral worth is too restrictive, (b) the categorical imperative is not a sufficient test of right and wrong, and (c) distinguishing between treating people as means and respecting them as ends in themselves may be difficult in practice.

Immanuel Kant is known as the famous German philosopher who argued two main points in his philosophy: that the human mind creates the structure of the human experience and that reason is the source of morality. More specifically, Kant used his philosophy to argue that in order to figure out what is the right thing, we must rely on reason. Unlike several other philosophers, Kant refused to use religion as a method to know what the law was to determine right and wrong, because he believed it was all knowable based on our intellect. Kant’s key principle throughout his philosophy is to assert that the only way a person can achieve good will is by accomplishing it through duty.

In order to fully answer the question we must be able to fully define rights and discover how they relate and help democracy. Rights can be broken down into a number of sub categories and in this essay we will discuss the meaning of Civil and political rights but first and fore most “rights” are a number of civil, juridical and ethical rights of entitlement or liberty and are a set of regulating rules that allow people entitlement or to be owed to them. Rights are fundamental to many disciplines such as law and ethics. Civil and political rights are a branch of rights in which we will discuss, Civil and political rights are used to

a right is an entitlement to act or to have others act in a certain way.

Cohen defines rights as “a claim that one party may exercise against another”(339). He explains that there are many different types of rights: some moral, some legal; some held by a single person, others held by groups; all differing in what the right entitles one to. Above all this, however, Cohen stresses that rights are a concept rooted in morality. They arise out of the necessity for self-governance among a community, providing standards of conduct that beget personal protection and safety. Therefore, the argument continues that the holders of rights must only be those who are capable of comprehending such concepts as morality and duty and right against wrong. After all, standards can only be held to subjects capable of understanding and achieving them. Because humans are the only

What is a Right? Is it an inalienable individual moral or legal code, a fundamentally collective moral or legal code, or could it be, that a right is the sovereignty to act without the permission of others and, as such, doesn’t it carry the concept that by doing so you may not infringe on another’s sovereignty? These questions reflect the conflict societies; in current years, face in respects to Human Rights. This is not to say, that societies are not able to overcome these issues, and that civilisations; current and ancient, have produced documents that have defied the impression that human rights are a new entity.

In this unit of Morality and Ethics, we examine Immanuel Kant’s theory of ethics and its relationship and compatibility with several religious ethical approaches. As we learn from W.D. Ross’s book “The Right and the Good. Oxford,” Kant lived a rigid life in Konigsberg, Germany and he was a deontologist, thus rejecting the teleological position of determining to act based on consequences. Kant rejected the “theological

The Groundwork takes up a big question: What is the supreme principle of morality? (Michael J. Sandel, 2009). Besides this question, I am going to consider the following questions: What is the categorical imperative? The difference between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. What is morality from Kant’s point of view? And of course, the main question of this essay - Will the categorical imperative apply to all kinds of moral problems?

The concerns that are initiated with balancing law and justice are simply put as the law gives us rules that we must follow and justice is more of arguing and proving one’s argument. These laws can be a simple as obeying the speeding limit in a school zone and even using one’s turn signals the proper distance whenever turning on the highway. Justice can be something that one longs for after someone has broken the law and has committed a crime in which they deny what they have done. This paper will discuss the concerns of balancing the law and justice and how the two differ.

Because the resolution evaluates the justness of presuming consent, my value for this round is Justice, defined as giving each individual what they deserve. Since everyone is due natural rights, my value criterion for this debate shall be to maximize natural rights. William Wainwright of American Philosophy Quarterly writes in 1967 that natural rights include the right to life, and the right to liberty, because each person has equal moral value. Everyone deserves the right to life if they are morally equal, and everyone is due liberty since it provides meaning to life, by allowing each person to reason on his or her own.

Ethics can be defined as "the conscious reflection on our moral beliefs with the aim of improving, extending or refining those beliefs in some way." (Dodds, Lecture 2) Kantian moral theory and Utilitarianism are two theories that attempt to answer the ethical nature of human beings. This paper will attempt to explain how and why Kantian moral theory and Utilitarianism differ as well as discuss why I believe Kant's theory provides a more plausible account of ethics.

“With great power comes great responsibility”, is an infamous line from the movie Spiderman, and even though it is cliché, I’ve always found that to be very true. Power and responsibility can be explored through Phillip Zimbardo’s “The Lucifer Effect”, and how his work is related to two major financial scandals of the 21st century, which involve Enron and Bernard Madoff. In both scandals, there were people in a position of power who carried a surmounting level of responsibility, but used their power in very manipulative ways for their own personal gain. The high level executives of Enron and Bernard Madoff were on a rampant quest for money, which was the

Kant had a different ethical system which was based on reason. According to Kant reason was the fundamental authority in determining morality. All humans possess the ability to reason, and out of this ability comes two basic commands: the hypothetical imperative and the categorical imperative. In focusing on the categorical imperative, in this essay I will reveal the underlying relationship between reason and duty.

today we call them human rights" (McShea 34). The issue of whether or not to