Philosophy 101

9/15/26- Philosophy lecture 

Instrumental value: the value that a thing or activity has to something else  

  •  Money 

  • Good grades 

 

Health and friendship are both instrumentally and intrinsically valuable 

Intrinsic value the value that a thing or activity has, not as a means to something else but for its own sake 

A moral theory asks what are morally obligated, permitted, or forbidden, what kind of lives should we live, what kind of people we should be, and how should we resolve value conflicts? 

Bentham states that the only intrinsic value is happiness.  

Utilitarianism- we are morally obligated to do whatever will lead to the most happiness in the world. A bit of unhappiness could be justified if it leads to more happiness later.  

  • How do we count happiness? 

  • What is happiness? 

  • Whose happiness?   

Higher and lower pleasures 

  • Some pleasures are more important than others  

 

Preference satisfaction 

  • Happiness is getting what you want 

  

Human Flourishing 

  • True happiness requires rich forms of growth and self-cultivation  

 

Descriptive comments are about how the world is 

Normative questions and claims are about how the world should or ought to be 

Happiness and satisfaction aren't always in sync with each other 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9/17/26 

Utilitarianism 

We are morally obligated to do whatever will lead to the most happiness in the world 

  • Those who follow this mindset tries to give money any way they could 

  • We should follow actions based on their consequences. 

People want their experiences to be real, even if they have a machine that “gives them experiences” 

Autonomy 

The capacity to be one’s own person, to live one’s life according to reasons and motives that are taken as one’s own and not the product of manipulative or distorting external forces, to be in this way independent.  

  • The experience machine takes away a person's autonomy 

The Categorical Imperative 

 Act only on the maxim through which you can at the same time that it should become a universal law. 

  • A bad maxims includes not concerning for others 

  • Making promises that won't be kept 

Act in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means. 

  • Justice - don't treat other people as a mere means to some end 

  • Don't act deceptively 

  • Don't act coercively 

  • Beneficence - treat people as ends in themselves 

9/22/26 

Kantianism is Alienating 

  • It makes us act purely out of duty instead of out of true emotions. It states that acting out of emotions is selfish, and it makes it less morally valuable.  

 

Partial: inclined to favor one party more than the other (biased) 

Impartial: not partial or biased; treating or affecting all equally 

Filial Piety: reverence for parents considered in Chinese ethics the prime virtue and the basis of all right human relations 

Care Ethics 

  • Care is inherently valuable, not just instrumentally valuable as a way of maximalizing utility or doing one's duty 

  • It is part of human nature to be dependent on others, and to have them depend on us 

  • Wholly impartial values would be cold and inhuman (although wholly partial values could also lead to injustice) 

  • Emotions (e.g. sympathy of ranger) are important for moral guidance 

  • (It may not be possible to reduce these nuances values to a simple rule or formula about what we ought to do) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9/24/26  

Per Capita GDP: Nominal gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is the total value of a country's finished goods and services (gross domestic product) divided by its total population (per capita) 

 

Problems with GDP per capita 

  • Hides inequality by averaging over the population. A rich country can include many poor people 

  • Seems to correlate only loosely with other ways of measuring wellbeing 

  • Wealth is not an intrinsic good, it is a means to an end. We should try to directly measure what is valuable in itself. 

 

Capabilities and happiness 

Instead of pleasure without pain, we should focus on a richer notion of happiness, in which the possibility of a fulfilling life is weighed more heavily than the sum of our moment-to-moment subjective experiences. 

Negative vs. Positive Freedom 

Negative Freedom is freedom from external constraints 

  • Nobody is stopping you from doing these things 

Positive freedom is the actual, practical ability to do something, which requires living in circumstances and possessing resources to actually do it. 

  • Ex: I have negative freedom to go to Mars, but not positive freedom. 

 

9/29/26 

In ancient Greece, philosophers stated that writing "destroyed memory" 

Karl Marx states that jobs help you discover your own capabilities and human nature through others who also worked 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10/1/26- Philosophy lecture  

The U.S. has one of the biggest wealth inequalities in the world  

New York is the state with the largest wealth inequality  

NYC has more wealth inequality than New York itself  

A lot of developed countries also have a gender and race welath gap  

Some countries do far more to reduce income inequality than others  

Progressive taxation, publicly subsidized education, healthcare, housing food, etc.  

  

The United States does less to redistribute income than it used to.  

Question: Is any of this unjust?  

Justice is a standard that institutions must be held to  

Is the current taxation system just?  

Social cooperation gives advantages to everybody.  

The constitution, economy, and social arrangements, freedom, liberty, competitive markets, and private property are all major social institutions.  

Society favors certain starting places over others, which are deep inequalities.   

It's difficult to go from a low-income family to become a large income earner. Inequalities that happen at birth are the inequalities that we should look out for and watch out for.  

 

Justice  

What makes a society just?  

What basic rights should any just society protect?  

How should income and wealth be distributed in a society (distributive justice)  

The Liberty Principle: requires equality in the assignment of basic rights as duties  

The Difference Principle: holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and author, are just only if they result in compensation benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10/6/26  

Frye’s first definition:  

“The term “sexist” in its core and perhaps most fundamental meaning is a term which characterizes anything whatever which creates, constitutes, promotes or exploits any irrelevant or impertinent marking of the distinction between the sexes”  

  

Second definition:  

“The term “sexist” characterizes cultural and economic structures which create and enforce the elaborate and rigid patterns of sex-marking and sex-announcing which divide the species, along lines of sex, into dominators and subordinates”   

  

Two problems with sexism, according to Frye:  

An epistemic problem: sexism causes systematic confusion about what is natural and what is s mere social convention. Sexism is a form of ignorance.  

A moral problem: in creating difference where there needn’t be any, sexism, tends to systematically disadvantage women as compared to men. Sexism is unfair  

Another moral problem: In enforcing rigidly defined gender roles, sexism limits the freedom of both men and women. 

 

 

 

 

10/8/26 

Redskins -> Commanders. The slants were all cases in which names were considered offensive 

  • The Paradox of Protection: A central tenet of US free speech jurisprudence is that the law protects speech even when that speech is considered hateful or demeaning based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, or disability. 

Laws vs. Other social institutions 

  • Conventionalized speech taboos 

  • Media practices 

  • Universities 

  • Social media 

  • Corporate codes of conduct 

 

Communication Enforcement 

  • The workplace has HR and corporate rules 

  • The internet has positive and negative freedoms 

 

John Stuart Mill: Everything needs to be said!! 

Four Arguments: 

  1. If there is an opinion by the minority, if vocalized, it can be true 

  1. If there is an opinion by the minority, if vocalized, it can be mostly wrong, but have some truth to it 

  1. If there is an opinion by the minority, if vocalized, it can be completely wrong, but it can be debated to learn some truth, to foster change in society, and to be understood. 

  1. If there is an opinion by the minority, if NOT vocalized, there will be no change in society, truths will be in society without anyone knowing WHY 

 

 

Jeremy Waldron: Some things should NOT be said 

Moral claim: it can be just to regulate hate speech 

Legal point: That stricter hate-speech laws could be compatible with the U.S. first amendment 

His legal strategy is to argue that hate speech amounts to a kind of “group defamation”, and more specifically “group libel”