Transcription
I'm a professor of philosophy at this university. I'm going to take my entire introduction to ethics course, which usually takes a whole semester, and condense it down into one video. I'm going to edit this video fast.
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Jeremy Bentham looked like this. He was born in London in 1748, and he introduced a moral theory, an ethical theory, called utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says, roughly, we are morally required to do whatever produces the greatest total of pleasure minus pain. A theory like this, any theory like this, is very ambitious. It is purporting to tell you, in any circumstance whatsoever, in any situation, what the morally right thing to do is. And the first specific thing to notice about this theory is that it's a theory about the results of your actions, what your actions produce. Because utilitarianism says that what matters for the moral value, the moral goodness of an action, is its consequences or the outcomes that result. Because of that, utilitarianism is a version of a broader type of moral theory called consequentialism.
In a few minutes, and during the normal semester-long version of this course, I would say in a few weeks, we will get to Immanuel Kant's moral theory, which competes with utilitarianism. Kant's theory, as we'll see, is not a form of consequentialism. So this whole bit about focusing on the consequences becomes very important very soon.
But for now, the other thing to notice about utilitarianism is that it focuses on pleasure and pain. Those are the things that, according to this theory, matter ultimately for whether an action is morally good or morally bad. In a work called *The Rationale of Reward*, published in 1825, Bentham says, "Prejudice apart, the game of pushpin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of pushpin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either." Pushpin is a simple child's game. I actually have no idea how it works or what the game is like, but the idea is it's supposed to be a simple game, like tic-tac-toe or something like that. The point is this: Bentham thinks that it doesn't matter how fancy the pleasure is. Does it come from a simple game like pushpin? Does it come from something fancy like music or poetry? Doesn't matter. All pleasure counts the same. The only thing that matters to the moral worth of an action is the degree or the amount, not the type, but the amount of pleasure that results from it for you and for everybody else.
This is the arithmetic theory of morality. On this theory, everyone's pleasure and everyone's pain counts equally. But maybe there's a problem with this theory. The problem seems to come from the underlying assumption that pleasure and pain are the things that matter. The 20th-century philosopher Robert Nozick attempted to bring out this problem with what's called a thought experiment. Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time, you would be floating in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life's experiences?
What does this example show? Well, Nozick thinks that most people would not agree to be plugged into a machine like this for their entire life. They wouldn't want to do it, and they would be rational to not to want to do it. There must be something that matters to us, something that's good for a human being, other than pleasure. Because, of course, the experience machine will give you the experience indistinguishable from real life, the experience of a very pleasant life. You'll get way more pleasure from being in the experience machine than you would from actually living your own life. And if it is rational to not opt to be plugged into the experience machine, then it must be that there's a whole bunch of things that are good for people that matter other than just pleasure.
Here are some of those things: Controlling your life. If you're in the experience machine, you'll get plenty of pleasure, but you won't be in control. And maybe it's important for people, maybe it's good for people to be in control. We want that, and maybe we're right to want that. Friendship. The experience machine would give you the experience of friendship, but of course, there wouldn't be any actual friends. And so maybe actually being friends with people is important, and that's part of the reason why they wouldn't opt into the experience machine. Doing things. You know, actually doing things as opposed to having the experience as if you were doing them. You know, like, I don't know, building a house or going skydiving or whatever. There's a difference between having the experience as if you had done those things and actually doing them. And maybe we want to do them. Being a kind person, or being any type of person. It seems like we want to be a good person. We want to be a good friend. We don't just want to think we're a good person or think we're a good friend or whatever.
If Nozick is right, then utilitarianism is built on a kind of mistake: the idea that the main things that matter morally to human beings are pleasure and pain. That underlying mistake is typically called hedonism.
When Bentham developed utilitarianism in the late 1700s, it led him to some surprising conclusions. There's an essay that wasn't published until after he died called *Offences Against Oneself*. As far as we can tell, this essay was the first time anyone ever wrote in the English language that gay sex should not be punished by death. "I have been tormenting myself for years to find, if possible, a sufficient ground for treating irregularities of the venereal appetite with the severity with which they are treated at this time of day by all European nations. But upon the principle of utility, I can find none." When Bentham says "principle of utility," he just means utilitarianism, the basic idea that what makes an action good or bad is how much pleasure it produces and how little pain it produces. But in this essay, Bentham is just sort of working out the results of this theory on a type of behavior that at his time was universally condemned. It was treated very severely. It just sort of falls out of this theory that consensual homosexual sex amongst adults is not bad because, as long as it's consensual, it produces pleasure. It's the thing that people want to do. That's why they agree to do it. It just doesn't make sense. Bentham seemed to realize in 1785 for us to hang people that do this thing that doesn't cause pain.
That's one specific application of this general moral theory. But there seems to be a problem that was pointed out by H.J. McCloskey for the theory in general. This is a famous example involving a sheriff. The story goes like this: There's a mob of people. They're angry about some crime that was committed. They think they know who committed the crime, but they're wrong. The sheriff knows who really committed the crime, but the sheriff also knows if he or she doesn't appease the mob, if he or she doesn't frame an innocent person that the mob thinks is guilty, then the mob is going to go wild, and hundreds, hundreds of innocent people will die in a riot. According to utilitarianism, what is the sheriff supposed to do? It's pretty simple. The sheriff is supposed to do the math. This is the arithmetic theory of morality. You just add up all the pleasure and pain, and it seems obvious that the right thing for the sheriff to do, according to utilitarianism, is to frame the innocent person in order to avoid the riot.
But McCloskey thinks that this isn't right. Like, it's just obvious that it's wrong for the sheriff to frame an innocent person. If that's true, then utilitarianism gets the wrong result when it comes to this. This example and this case turns out to be a counter-example. A counter-example is one type of objection to a philosophical theory. And I have another video where I explain what counter-examples are and how they work, and I'll link to it somewhere, or maybe you've already seen it, or I don't know.
Okay, so this course starts off with some stuff about utilitarianism. Then we go on to Kant's theory. That's in like 30 seconds. Then it's Aristotle, Nietzsche, and then we come to the question of like, is there even such a thing as objective moral facts or objective moral law? Are there really moral rules that exist independent of what we happen to think about them, our moral feelings, or our moral opinions? Are there real, true moral facts that govern our behavior? That's the third and final unit of this course, which in the semester comes in the, you know, last few weeks of the semester. But in this case, comes in like four minutes from now.
But before that, let's talk about what is almost definitely the most famous paper in applied ethics that has ever been written. It's by Peter Singer and it was published in 1972. Peter Singer looks like this. I once got to have dinner with him after an academic talk. The paper is called "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." And in this paper, Singer makes a very radical claim: everyone that you've ever met is a morally bad person. The circumstance that we find ourselves in today, in our relatively wealthy societies, is such that we must, we're morally obliged to give the money that we would otherwise spend on luxuries, like clothes that we don't really need, or food from a restaurant that we don't really need, because we could cook the food at home. We need to spend that extra luxury money giving it away to people who need that money in order to survive. He's talking about giving money to organizations like Oxfam or UNICEF. These are organizations that very efficiently take your money and transport it across the world and use it to literally save people's lives. People who very well might die of famine. Famine, there's not enough food. They would die of famine within the next few days or weeks, but instead, they get to live.
Singer writes, "Because giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is not thought that there is anything wrong with not giving. The charitable man may be praised, but the man who is not charitable is not condemned. People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them." This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. He thinks that it's not okay to buy coffee at a coffee shop because buying coffee at a coffee shop is a luxury. You could make that coffee at home. He thinks that that extra money must be given to famine relief because these famines are going on, and if you don't give to famine relief, you're doing something evil every day. Okay, that's like a kind of radical moral claim.
What is his argument for that? Part of his argument comes from a famous shallow pond example. "If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing." If someone came to your house and said, "Hey, on my way here, I saw this little child drowning to death in a shallow pond. I could have stepped into the pond and saved the child's life, but it would have cost me something. I would have gotten my pants wet. And so I just let the child die." If someone said that to you, you would think that they're evil and you would ask them to leave your home immediately. Saving the child in the shallow pond is not some extra nice thing. No, no, no, no. Saving the child in the shallow pond is the bare minimum, morally speaking.
Singer thinks that your situation in which you can give to famine relief is morally identical with the situation in which a person walks past the shallow pond in which a child is drowning. Well, there must be some differences. Well, Singer considers some potential differences between the circumstance that you find yourself in and this circumstance. One is proximity. The person who walks past the shallow pond is very physically close to this child drowning, whereas you are physically distant from people who are dying of famine on the other side of the planet. But is proximity morally relevant? Well, one way that proximity can be morally relevant is that sometimes proximity indicates whether you have the power to help or not. If you are mere feet away from the pond, then you can help because you're close by. And normally, you can't save a person on the other side of the planet because you can't get there in time. But Singer points out that because of the existence of these relief agencies, you can help them. So because of their existence, proximity is not a, is not a morally relevant difference between these two cases.
Another potential difference is that there's other people. In the case of famine relief, there are other people who could help, and they're not helping. Does that make a moral difference? Singer thinks that it doesn't. You could modify the shallow pond example by supposing that there's a whole bunch of other people who can see this child drowning. Suppose that they're not helping. The fact that they don't help doesn't seem to mean that you don't have to either. If someone showed up at your house and said, "I passed by this child. I didn't want to help him, but there were all these other people. They didn't help either, so I'm good, right?" No, you're not good. You're a monster. Get out of my house. The fact that there's other people who could help but who don't just doesn't seem relevant.
But the main thing to take away about this paper is that the conclusion is radical. Everyone who reads it thinks there's got to be something wrong with this argument, but no one can figure out what the problem is.
Okay, next up is Kant, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, and then the question of whether there are any objective moral facts at all. Here we go.
Immanuel Kant was a philosopher who lived his entire life in the town of Königsberg from 1724 to 1804. His moral theory is often called deontology. You don't have to know what that word means. You can just think of it as Kant's theory. The theory is very complicated, so usually I have my students read a summary of part of Kant's moral theory or ethical theory by a philosopher, a very well-known, still-living philosopher named Onora O'Neill. And so this is my summary of O'Neill's summary of Kant.
Kant's theory is built around the idea of a maxim. A maxim is a kind of intention when you intend to act, except for with certain specific details removed. So, for example, if I intend to promise you that I'm going to go to your recital or whatever, well, that's my intention. The maxim that I'm operating under might be something like, "Promise to do something in the future." "Promise to do something in the future" is less specific than "Promise to go to your recital." Kant's theory goes like this: When determining whether an action is right or wrong, you figure out what the maxim is that that action is based on. We already know that this theory is dramatically different from utilitarianism because utilitarianism was about the results or the consequences of an action. But Kant's theory focuses entirely, or almost entirely, on the maxim, the intentions, what you have in mind when you act. These are two totally different things: the results of your action and your intention, or your, your thoughts, your purposes.
Okay, so for Kant, it's the intentions or the maxim that matters. You look at the maxim that the action is based on and you ask the following question: Is this maxim something that everyone involved in the action could potentially agree to? If the answer is yes, then that action is morally permissible. If the answer is no, then that action is morally impermissible, not allowed, bad, evil, no good.
O'Neill writes, "For example, one person may make a promise to another with every intention of breaking it. If the promise is accepted, then the person to whom it was given must be ignorant of what the promiser's intention or maxim really is, and since the person who is deceived doesn't know that real maxim, he or she can't, in principle, consent to his or her part in the proposed scheme of action."
Notice that Kant's theory gets a very different result on that sheriff example than utilitarianism did. Think of the maxim that the sheriff would be acting on were he or she to frame an innocent person. The maxim would be something like, "Try to avoid some terrible thing by doing some other terrible thing, framing someone who didn't commit a crime." Well, there's someone involved who could never, would never consent, would never agree to this way of acting, and that's the person who'd be framed. And so, unlike utilitarianism, Kant's moral theory says that the sheriff should not frame the innocent person in order to prevent the riot.
So at this point, we're like six weeks into the semester, and we've been talking about the question of which actions are morally good and which actions are morally bad. But even if we can answer that question, even if we can agree on which actions are morally good and which actions are morally bad, there's the question of why be moral? Why be moral? Here are two very famous philosophers who have answers to this sort of question. Aristotle's answer, as we will see in about 20 seconds, is because it will make you happy. Nietzsche's answer, which we will see in maybe 40 or 50 seconds, is don't. Why be moral? Don't. Morality is for losers.
Aristotle thought that all things that exist have a nature or an essence, not just people, but rocks and mountains and animals. Everyone has a purpose that they are striving towards, and the degree to which you achieve this purpose or this goal that is built into you in nature is the degree to which you are fulfilled. And Aristotle's word for this is eudaimonia. At the beginning of his famous work of moral philosophy, *Nicomachean Ethics*, which was named for his son Nico, Aristotle discusses what eudaimonia, what happiness or flourishing or success for a creature, for a human being, what that is. Is it pleasure? Is that the goal of a human being? No, he just sort of says that this is suitable for beasts. Is it honor? Is that the thing that allows a human being to flourish? No, Aristotle says, because honor depends too much on other people. Whatever it is that is the good for a human being is something that other people can't just decide to take away from you whenever they want to take it away. But that's exactly what they can do with honor. Is it wealth? A lot of people pursue wealth as if that's the thing that is fulfillment for a human being. No, it's not wealth because wealth is only something that you want because it leads to something else. The only purpose of money is to spend that money, either today or tomorrow or years from now. Having money isn't good. Money is only good for other things. And so, whatever the good for a human being is, it's not, you know, something that's just wanted for something else. So wealth is out.
Okay, final option. Is it the possession of virtue? Having a good character? Possessing virtue? Is that what it is for a human being to flourish? Aristotle says, actually, no. No, it's not. Because merely having virtues, like being a courageous person or being a good person or whatever, merely having these virtues is compatible with being asleep your whole life. You could be asleep your whole life and have these characteristics, but you never get to act on them. That wouldn't be a good life. That wouldn't be successful. That wouldn't be an example of a human being flourishing.
Okay, Aristotle, fine. Then just tell us, what is the good for a human being? To figure out the answer, Aristotle thinks he has to figure out what the function or purpose of a human being is. Today, we don't think of people as having a function or a purpose in the same way that Aristotle did. But okay, he thinks that if he can figure out what the function or purpose of a human being is, then that will tell him what will satisfy a human, what will allow them to succeed in their life. The first option he considers is nutrition and growth. Is that the function or purpose of a human being? No, because that's not unique to human beings. That's also something that plants do. What about perception? Is the purpose or function of a human being to know the world around it, to perceive it, maybe even move within it? No, that's also not unique to human beings because animals do that. The purpose or function of a human being has to be something that involves this thing that is distinctive of humans, Aristotle thinks, and that is rationality. Okay, well, what is the activity that centrally involves rationality? Aristotle thinks that it is exercising the virtues. By exercising, he means actually doing it. Actually living a courageous life. Actually doing good things. He thinks that if you do that, then you'll be fulfilled.
Well, let's just flip this around. Why be moral? Or why be virtuous, is another way to put it. Why be virtuous? Well, because it will make you happy, or as Aristotle would put it, fulfilled, flourishing, successful.
You know what? This was too hard. I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can summarize my whole ethics course in one video. I haven't even gotten through Nietzsche. We're like halfway through the semester, and I'm exhausted. So I think I'm going to have to make this video two parts. This will be the first part, and the next part, we'll start up with Nietzsche. We'll get his answer to why be moral, which is, "Don't be moral. Morality's for losers." We'll start with that, and then we will go on to the question, which will occupy us for several minutes, and during the normal semester, several weeks, of whether there are objective moral facts that apply to everyone everywhere. And to do that, we're gonna have to talk about Plato and John Locke and David Hume and a whole bunch of other things. You.