Intro To Philosophy Writing: Ethics

10/21:

  • The Grounding Question:

    • What are the principles governing placement on the list?

    • What is it that makes an actions right/wrong, permissible or not?

    • What is it in virtue of which an action has the moral status it does?

    • What, if anything, grounds moral status?

  • Our ethics unit in the course

    • 4 answers to the grounding question

      • Divine command theory

      • Cultural relativism

      • Utilitarianism (2 flavors)

      • Kantian ethics

    • One issue arising that will propel us towards the final unit on death & meaning

      • How far do our moral duties go?

Divine Command Theory (DCT)

  • The morally obligatory, permissible, and impermissible acts are those God says are obligatory, permissible, or impermissible (etc.).

  • The moral status of an action is settled by what God commands and forbids-what rules they lay down.

  • Obvious issues to set aside

    • DCT requires that God exists in the same way that the free will solution to the problem of evil obviously requires us to have free will

    • It also raises epistemological questions about whether and how we can be sure about the content of God’s commands

    • But there are other objections, more interesting ones. So let’s “grant for the sake of argument” that God exists and that we know what they command on at least some Big Issues

  • The Euthyphro Dilemma

    • From Plato’s Euthyphro, roughly 400 BCE, about the gods

    • Are the good/obligatory actions good/obligatory because God commands them? Or does he command them because they are good, and vice versa?

  • Horn 1: God commands the actions he commands because they are morally good/obligatory

    • God has full knowledge of rightness and goodness, which drives his choice of commands.

    • On this horn, the moral facts come first

    • But then it doesn’t answer the questions.

    • The horn doesn’t say that certain actions are right or wrong or obligatory or whatever because God commands or forbids them

  • Horn 2: good actions are good because God commands them

    • This is the horn the DC theorist really wants: God is the source of morality, not just a reliable detector of it!

    • OK, now we have an answer to the question.

    • Problems: arbitrariness

      • Couldn’t he have commanded something else?

      • Couldn’t he command just anything whatsoever?

    • “But God is good-he wouldn’t do that!”

      • This doesn’t rescue Horn 2. On this horn, anything God commands is good. That’s what makes anything that is good be good. That’s what goodness is.

      • A bonus corollary: ‘God is good’ becomes trivially true, and empty

  • Euthyphro problem w/o dilemma

    • Saying that God merely recognizes morality doesn’t answer the grounding question at all

    • Saying that God is the source of morality seems to make morality arbitrary

Answer 2: Cultural Relativism

  • What makes an action OPI (Obligatory, permissible, or impermissible) in a particular culture is what that culture says about it

  • The OPI acts (around here) are the ones that are considered OPI (around here)

  • Spelling CR out more

    • A relativistic view

      • While this version does say that there are moral truths, they are all time-and-place stamped. There are no universal moral truths

    • What’s morally right here might be morally wrong somewhere/sometime else

    • No deep or objective fact of the matter. It’s just what your culture happens to have chosen, like table etiquette

  • Compare and Contrast with DCT

    • Similarity in form or structure

      • Both views say: what’s right is what X says it right

    • Crucial differences:

      • Different values of X

        • DCT: God and CR: local culture/norms

      • CR says that the value of X varies, whereas implementations of DCT are pegged to a particular divine X

        • In the Euthyphro, Plato is actually addressing a Greek Pantheon DCT

        • Contemporary versions usually appeal to the God of the Western monotheistic traditions

      • That’s why CR, unlike DCT, is a form of relativism: moral truth is relative to culture, and varies with it

    • CR embraces the second horn of the Euthyphro dilemma

      • CR embraces the “it seems arbitrary” horn in a way DCT cannot. The view is explicitly deflationary/skeptical about morality

      • There’s just nothing more to it than code

    • Bad argument #1: the CR argument

      • Different cultures have very different moral codes

      • Therefore, none of those codes is correct at the expense of the others. What is permissible and impermissible varies from culture to culture, and there’s no universal/objective answer

      • Why’s this bad?

        • It goes straight from what people believe to be true-from t

10/28:

Answers to “what is morality? In what does the rightness or wrongness of an action consist? What makes a wrong act wrong?

  1. DCT

    1. An action’s requiredness or wrongness or permissibility consists in God’s commanding, forbidding, or allowing that kind of action

  2. CR

    1. An action’s [moral status] consists in the relevant culture’s commanding, forbidding, or allowing that kind of action

  3. Utilitarianism/consequentialism

    1. An action’s [moral status] consists in the net value of the pains and pleasures it causes overall

    2. 2 versions: act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism

  4. Kantian ethics


Answer 3: Utilitarianism/Consequentialism

  • The moral status of an action—permissible, obligatory, etc.—depends only on its consequences

  • An act is right insofar as it “maximizes the good,” or provides “the greatest good for the greatest number”—i.e., only if the net good (good consequences minus bad) is greater than that of the alternatives

  • Permissible: the good and bad consequences come out roughly equal

  • Immediate questions:

    • Isn’t this circular? How’s it gonna explain where moral value, rightness, etc. comes from if it appeals to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the definition?

    • How are we supposed to do the math?


Act utilitarianism:

  • We are in fact, driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain

  • But pleasure and pain also settle what it is right to do. It’s just that it’s not only our pain and pleasure that matters

  • The utilitarian takes 2 things as rock-bottom undefended principles:

    • Pleasure has positive value and pain has negative value

    • Nobody’s pleasure or pain is worth more than anybody else’s


How do you do the math?

  • Consequentialists fight about this. Bentham’s recipe (end of the reading): intensity, duration, certainty, proximity…

  • Carritt: you don’t need a precise number. We generally know at least what’s worse than what


3 views on the table, differing in 2 ways:

  • They say different things about what makes an action right or wrong

  • And therefore also say different things about which actions are right or wrong

  • Actions that might be right according to utilitarianism, but wrong according to DCT or CR


What’s good about utilitarianism/consequentialism:

  • Like CR, a relatively tidy account of how morality gets into the world: pleasure good, pain bad.

  • A seemingly clear-headed, objective way to decide what to do: everyone’s interests count for one, and one only. A god’s-eye view of the overall distribution of pleasures and pains

  • Something deeply intuitive about it. Utilitarianism is a big thread of our ordinary moral reasoning


Utilitarian aspects of ordinary moral reasoning #1:

  • Consider the question “Is it always wrong to cause pain to another person?”

  • Nah: Surgery, Dentists, etc.

  • Our views about harder cases will similarly follow utilitarian lines


Utilitarian aspects of ordinary moral reasoning #2:

  • We think Case 2 (dog) is much worse than Case 1 (plants)

  • Reason’s obvious


Objection 2: we can’t foresee all the consequences

  • Path the view?

  • Maybe shift to what the agent foresees. Or can be reasonably expected to foresee or something

  • Lurking issue: how much do intentions matter? Traditionally, the consequentialist doesn’t care

  • “The road to hell is paved with good intentions is a pretty consequentialist saying


Objection 3: Utilitarianism sometimes delivers unintuitive verdicts about what the right thing to do is.

  • Various cases that intuitively seem to involve some kind of wrongness the utilitarian cannot account for:

    • Arctic Explorers

    • Scapegoat

    • Slaves

    • Transplant

11/2

Objections to utilitarianism

  • Difficulties foreseeing the consequences of our actions - and it’s not totally obvious how to patch the view

  • Cases where utilitarianism seems to reach intuitively incorrect verdicts

    • Slaves you borrow like a lime scooter

    • transplant

    • utility monster

Two-not-very-promising replies to these

  • a) “No such cases are possible. There will be other bad consequences such that the utilitarian judgment will always agree with common sense judgments about autonomy, etc.”

  • B) “No utilitarian would say that. Utilitarians really only think consequences are king when no one’s rights are violated.”

Two better possibilities

  • Bite the Bullet

  • Move to Rules: Stop evaluating consequences case by case, but invoke rules prohibiting certain kinds of action

  • Where might such general rules come from?

    • Consequentialist grounds → rule utilitarianism

    • A different way → Kant

Rule Utilitarianism (second version of util)

  • Smart’s “extreme” = act and “restricted” rule

  • Act Utilitarianism: the principle of utility—maximize overall consequences—is applied directly to the particular action

    • Judge this act by its consequences. Case by Case

  • Rule Utilitarianism: the principle of utility is instead applied to the adoption of general rules governing kinds of actions