Ethics Beyond the West — Ethics 5 (C1)

ETHICS · LESSON 5

Ethics Beyond the West

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Your verdict

Task Write P, N or D for each act.

P = permissible · N = not permissible · D = it depends

1. Taking a job abroad when your parents are getting old and live alone.

2. Moving an elderly parent into a good care home rather than looking after them yourself.

3. Refusing to tell the police that your father has committed a small theft.

4. Hiring your cousin rather than a slightly better-qualified stranger.

5. Paying for a friend's operation with money that could save more lives through a charity.

READING

The fourth lens

The three lenses so far are, in different ways, impartial. Consequences counts everyone's wellbeing equally; Duty asks for rules that would hold for anyone; even Character mostly describes virtues that anyone should have. Relational ethics starts somewhere else. It holds that many obligations arise from particular relationships: we owe

things to parents, children, friends and neighbours because of who we are to them, not only because they are people. On this view, partiality is not always a bias to correct. It can be part of being good. Today's four traditions all give relationships real moral weight, in different ways and degrees.

The fourth lens

Consequences

Duty

Character

Relationships

What will happen?

What rule applies?

What would a good person do?

Who am I to them?

Act 1: the job abroad

A

TEXT A

Confucian ethics

Task Read Text A. Prepare a 2-minute teach-back for the other groups: one key idea and one example of it in everyday life. Everyone in the group should be able to give it.

Confucius (Kong Qiu, traditionally 551–479 BCE) taught in an age of political disorder. In his sayings, collected by followers in the Analects, morality is less about obeying principles than about becoming fully human among others. The central virtue is ren, "humaneness" or "benevolence"; asked what it is, Confucius answers: caring for others (12.22). Ren is trained through li, ritual propriety: the forms of respectful conduct that shape feeling as well as behaviour.

Ren begins at home. Filial piety (xiao), the reverence and care owed to parents, is called the root of humaneness (1.2).

Feeding parents is not enough, Confucius says: we feed dogs and horses too (2.7). Nor is it blind obedience: a child may correct a parent, gently (4.18). When a duke boasts of a man who reported his own father for stealing a sheep, Confucius replies that uprightness lies in father and son covering for each other (13.18).

Later, Mencius named five role relationships: ruler and minister, parent and child, husband and wife, elder and younger sibling, friend and friend. Most are unequal, but obligations run both ways, and Mencius urged people to extend the care they feel for their own elders to the elders of others.

B

TEXT B

Ubuntu

Task Read Text B. Prepare a 2-minute teach-back for the other groups: one key idea and one example of it in everyday life. Everyone in the group should be able to give it.

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, moral thought lives less in written treatises than in proverbs, customs and community life. One saying, in its Zulu and Xhosa form umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, is usually translated "a person is a person through other persons". Ubuntu, from the same root, means humanness. Personhood, on this view, is not simply given at birth. It is achieved, and achieved with and through others. To say that someone has ubuntu is to praise their generosity, hospitality and compassion; to say they lack it is a serious criticism.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation

Commission after apartheid, drew on ubuntu to explain why many victims chose reconciliation over revenge: what dehumanises one person diminishes everyone, including the oppressor.

The South African philosopher Thaddeus Metz has restated ubuntu as a moral theory to rival utilitarianism and Kant. On his reading, an act is right insofar as it honours relationships of harmony, in which people share a way of life and care for one another's good, and wrong insofar as it divides people or treats them in unfriendly ways. Other African philosophers question whether a living practice can be captured in a single principle.

C

TEXT C

Buddhist ethics

Task Read Text C. Prepare a 2-minute teach-back for the other groups: one key idea and one example of it in everyday life. Everyone in the group should be able to give it.

Buddhist ethics grows from the teaching of the Buddha, who lived in northern India around the fifth century BCE: suffering arises from craving, and it can end. Moral conduct is part of the path. At its centre is karma, understood as intentional action. "Intention, I tell you, is kamma," the Buddha says in one discourse (Anguttara Nikaya 6.63). What shapes a person and their future is cetana, the intention behind what they do, say and think. The same gift given from vanity or from kindness is morally different.

Lay Buddhists undertake five precepts: to abstain from killing living beings, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from false

speech, and from intoxicants that cloud the mind. They are training rules, taken on voluntarily.

The positive side is the cultivation of four "immeasurable" attitudes towards all beings: loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), joy in others' happiness (mudita) and equanimity (upekkha). Relationships matter too. Advising a young layman, Sigala, the Buddha sets out duties that run both ways: children support the parents who supported them and honour them after death, while parents guide their children and train them for a living. Yet compassion is not meant to stop at the family.

D

TEXT D

Islamic ethics

Task Read Text D. Prepare a 2-minute teach-back for the other groups: one key idea and one example of it in everyday life. Everyone in the group should be able to give it.

In Islam, ethics is rooted in the Qur'an and in the example (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad. The Arabic word akhlaq means character: the settled dispositions from which good or bad actions flow. A widely quoted saying, recorded in Malik's Muwatta, has the Prophet say that he was sent to perfect good character. Muslim philosophers built on this. Miskawayh's Refinement of Character, written around the year 1000, drew on Aristotle as well as on Islamic sources.

Duties to others are concrete. The Qur'an places kindness to parents directly beside the worship of God alone, and when parents grow

old it forbids even a sound of irritation towards them (17:23–24). In a well-known hadith, a man asks who most deserves his good company. The answer is "your mother" three times, and then "your father".

Jurists also asked what the law is for. Al-Ghazali (died 1111) argued that the objectives of sharia (maqasid al-sharia) are to protect five essentials of human wellbeing: religion, life, intellect, lineage and property. Al-Shatibi, in the fourteenth century, developed the idea, and some scholars today propose adding others, such as dignity.

Four traditions: teach-back

Task Each group: 2 minutes, one key idea and one example. Listeners: for each tradition, note its key idea and one question you would like to ask someone who lives by it.

Tradition

Key idea

Example

My question

A

Confucian ethics

B

Ubuntu

C

Buddhist ethics

D

Islamic ethics

The offer

Amira Novak, 36, is a structural engineer and an only child. Her father, Pavel, 74, was widowed two years ago and has early Parkinson's disease. He lives alone two streets from Amira and still manages, slowly. Amira has been offered her dream job: leading a bridge project in Singapore for three years, at twice her salary. Pavel tells her, "Go. I'll be fine." His neighbour quietly tells Amira that he fell on the stairs last month.

A. Take the job and use the extra salary to pay for a carer.

B. Turn the job down and stay.

C. Take the job and ask Pavel to move to Singapore with her.

D. Ask the company to delay the start by a year, and decide then.

One dilemma, four traditions

Task Answer as your group's tradition would. Which option would it favour (A to D, or another)? Which relationship, virtue or principle decides it? What does your tradition notice that a simple cost-benefit calculation might miss? Prepare a 1-minute answer.

A

Confucian ethics

B

Ubuntu

C

Buddhist ethics

D

Islamic ethics

READING

Not East versus West

Two warnings. First, none of these traditions is a single view. Confucians have argued for over two thousand years about human nature and ritual; Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists stress different ideals; Sunni and Shia scholars reason differently about ethics and law; ubuntu is lived across many languages and cultures. Calling any of them "the Asian view" or "the African view" flattens it.

Second, relational ethics is not foreign to the West. Aristotle gave two books of the Nicomachean Ethics to friendship. In 1982 the psychologist

Carol Gilligan argued, in In a Different Voice, that theories of moral development had missed a voice of care and responsibility; the philosopher Nel Noddings built an ethics of care in Caring (1984).

Critics of every relational view share one worry: partiality can slide into favouritism, nepotism, or the silencing of those lower in a hierarchy. Defenders reply that impartial theories forget why morality matters to people at all.

Proverbs of obligation

Task Share a proverb or saying about duty to family or community from your own culture or language. Translate it, explain what it means and when people say it. Then decide together: which of today's four traditions does it sound closest to? Or does it sound more like Consequences, Duty or Character? A saying you disagree with is welcome too.

AN EXAMPLE FROM ENGLISH

"Blood is thicker than water": ties of family come before other loyalties.

Confucian ethics

Ubuntu

Buddhist ethics

Islamic ethics

Consequences

Duty

Character

Who comes first?

Task Choose three or four questions. Spend most of your time on the one your group disagrees about.

1. Do adult children owe their parents care, or is care a gift freely given?

2. Is favouring your own family a virtue, or a bias we should correct?

3. Where you live, is choosing a care home for a parent seen as a failure?

4. Can a community built on ubuntu or ren also protect someone who wants to leave it?

5. Should judges, doctors or teachers ever let relationships shape their decisions?

6. Do we owe more to people near us than to strangers far away?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of someone you know, or a character from a book or film, torn between family duty and their own plans. Which pull won, and was it right?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Which of today's four traditions would you most like to learn more about, and what would you ask first?

Back to your verdict

Task Look again at your letters for acts 1 and 4 on the verdict slide. Would you change either of them now?

P = permissible · N = not permissible · D = it depends

1

Taking a job abroad when your parents are getting old and live alone.

4

Hiring your cousin rather than a slightly better-qualified stranger.

Before Lesson 6

This week, ask someone from an older generation what children owe their parents, and what parents owe their children.

Consequences

Duty

Note one way their answer matches, or differs from, one of today's four traditions. Sharing it next week is optional.

Character

Next lesson: Justice: What Do We Owe Each Other? From the people close to us to strangers: how should a society share what it has?

Relationships

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

FOUR TRADITIONS: TEACH-BACK suggested key ideas; groups may well choose others

• Text A, Confucian ethics: ren (caring for others) is learned through li and begins with xiao. Examples: greeting elders properly; visiting parents out of respect, not only duty; 13.18 as the hard case where family loyalty outranks reporting a crime.

• Text B, Ubuntu: a person becomes a person through other persons; right action builds harmony (shared life and mutual care). Examples: hospitality to strangers; reconciliation after conflict, as in Tutu's account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

• Text C, Buddhist ethics: intention (cetana) is what makes an act good or bad; the five precepts and the four immeasurables. Examples: the same gift given from vanity or kindness; the Sigala discourse's two-way duties between parents and children.

• Text D, Islamic ethics: akhlaq (good character), concrete duties of kindness to parents, and the maqasid as the purposes the law serves. Examples: patience with ageing parents (17:23–24); the hadith naming the mother three times.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

ONE DILEMMA, FOUR TRADITIONS points groups may raise; every option is arguable within each tradition

• Confucian: xiao weighs heavily. Analects 4.19 (Legge): "While his parents are alive, the son may not go abroad to a distance. If he does go abroad, he must have a fixed place to which he goes." Note it is not an absolute ban: the point is that parents should not be left without care or knowledge of their child. Gentle remonstrance (4.18) also suggests Amira should talk honestly with Pavel, not simply accept "I'll be fine". Options B, C or D.

• Ubuntu: the decision is not Amira's alone; it should be made with Pavel, wider family and neighbours, and should keep the relationship whole. The neighbour's warning matters. Options C or D, or A with a strong local network around Pavel.

• Buddhist: what is Amira's intention: ambition, service, escape? Compassion is owed to Pavel and to herself; the Sigala discourse's "support those who supported you" points towards care, but not to one fixed option. Any option done with care and honesty can be defended; A done to avoid him would not be.

• Islamic: kindness to parents in old age is a weighty duty (17:23–24), and preserving life (one of the maqasid) makes Pavel's fall relevant. Many would look for a way to keep serving him: C, D, or A with close involvement. Real Muslim scholars and families would weigh the details differently.

• Comparison point: all four traditions treat Pavel's "Go, I'll be fine" as something to look at carefully, not simply accept. A Consequences answer might favour A (more money, professional care); a Duty answer would ask what Amira has promised or what rule she would accept for everyone.