The virtuous person, according to Aristotle is one who has a standing disposition to choose virtuous actions, where a virtuous action is one that cleaves the mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency. Another ethical theory that we will examine claims that the morally right actions are those that accord with the natural law or natural order as was intended by God. What we ought morally to do, then, is what reason dictates. Another famous ethical theory is utilitarianism, developed largely by two philosophers, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist moral theory, according to which the moral rightness or wrongness of an action depends on the goodness or badness of its consequences, where the standard of goodness involved is to be understood in non-moral terms.
Actions are good insofar as they produce on balance more pleasure than pain.
In sharp contrast to Mill, we will examine Kant's claim that there are universal moral duties or demands that accrue to all human beings by virtue of the kinds of creatures we are, namely rational creatures. On this account, actions that accord with these moral demands are morally right irrespective of their consequences. One way in which Kant formulates this central moral demand is as the duty to treat human persons as ends in themselves and not as mere means. In our discussion of economic justice we will look at two competing accounts of distributive justice, those of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. We will also examine the problems of population, overpopulation, and reproduction in the developing world, focusing specifically on the morality or immorality of certain kinds of population and reproduction policies.