LECTURE 1: ETHICS
The eternal questions since the beginning
what is Good
what
is bad
why is justice important
why is it better to be Good and just
rather than bad and unjust
most people have the faculties to make judgement
over what is just and unjust
we have a history as ethical beings
we have
many philosophical dilemmas: are ethics universal and unchanging?
or, are
they culturally relative?
how can the creation of an ethical system for
societies be done?
BIG QUESTIONS
Big questions are a few, little
questions are many. Usually in classes
today, people apply the big principles
to answering the little
questions: 'is cloning a Good idea' 'who is in the
right, the police
or the suspect?' 'is homosexual marriage ok?','was this war
a just
one?', is abortion ok?' 'is it ok for the developer to pave this?'
But
all these questions are answered from principles elucidated from
the
answers we give to the FEW big questions: does life have a purpose
or
design? is there a God? is there life after death? are Good and
evil
real? are we free or determined? Using these answers to argue for
a
case study is 'arguing forward' from principles to applications.
Lets
for a moment 'argue backward,' and explore the foundations for
our
principles.
Few people defend injustice, cruelty, stupidity,
slavery, murder,
selfishness, arbitrariness, cowardliness, addiction,
despair, hatred.
Few people deride justice, kindness, wisdom, freedom,
peace, courage,
unselfish love, reason, respect for life, self control,
hope.
Disagreements come when we 1) apply these principles in situations
and
2) when we try to justify or explain them by exploring
their
foundations. In the first, you don't need to necessarily look
at
history. But for the 2nd, you must look at it.
BRING OUT THE
BEST
What if you could take Solomon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Acquinas,
Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Neitszsche, Buddha, Kirkgaard,
and
bring them into our lives to see what they would do? We can, at
least,
to their ghosts. They wrote great books which give a kind of
afterlife
to their thoughts. We can insert them into our conversation
by
inserting us into theirs. They talked to each other in their books,
and
we are here to talk back. They are not entertainers, they
are
thought-stimulators.
We live in what seems a Brave New World. We
seem to have so many new
problems: scandals in government, cloning, genetic
engineering,
radically new ideas about the family, terrorism, wmd's... but
in
practice they are not wholly new, there have always been
scandals,
because we have always found it hard to practice our principles.
But
especially in theory, there is not much new, because there can be
no
new ethical principles. Are there any new ethical principles out
there?
Only new applications of old ones. Imagine a society dedicated
to
selfishness, cowardess, dishonesty and injustice as moral Goods! We
can't
imagine it. We can imagine a personal preference for rape or
torture may
exist, but we cannot experience a moral obligation to do
this. In all
history, no one has ever discovered a new moral value.
Any more than a new
color.
MORAL VALUES: ARE THEY REAL?
Where do the moral values come
from then? Do we create them like the
rules of a game like an art, or do we
discover them like science? The
first is subjective, the second objective.
The answer every pre-modern
society said they were objective. Most
intellectuals in the West today
say they are not. They criticize the old
view, that there are
unchanging, objective, universal moral values as narrow
minded and
dogmatic.
Traditionalists say that the subjective view is
culturally relative
and changing and manmade and bad. Well, if they are
objective and we
do discover them, and not invent them, where are they? In
nature?
Somewhere else beyond nature? If in nature, it must be in that
part
that we call human nature. Is human nature unchanging then? If you
say
no, then moral values cannot be unchanging. So, where do they
come
from?
PHILOSOPHY IS ESPECIALLY ABOUT THIS BIG QUESTION
The
first philosopher was confronted with this very problem, moral
objectivism
vs. moral subjectivism. He agreed that there were such
objective values, but
that they were not secure, obvious and easy to
find, so he offended both the
dogmatists and skeptics. If you are a
dogmatist and know all the answers, you
do NOT philosophize and ask
questions. If you are a skeptic and do not think
there is an objective
truth to know, you do NOT ask questions either.
Philosophers think
there is a truth to be found, and want to get at it. There
may be some
truth to be found, what do you think?
When you are
thinking, when you feel exhausted after an hour. You get
exited, adrenaline,
you see how precious the truth is when you touch
it... you see how long the
road to get to it is... and how easy it is
to forget. Don't! You sometimes
lose your way. You get confused. That
means you are trying to enter the great
conversation.
WHY STUDY THE HISTORY THEN?
Thinking about if moral
values are objective or subjective, is
difficult. If they are not real, but
manmade, the best way to study
them would be by studying history to see how
different philos have
made these values... and if they are real and not
artificial, history
tells us how they were discovered. Created or discovered?
Are they
manmade or in the nature of things? Lucretius tried to figure it
out
too.
We've all been there: a kid at the dinner party overhearing
an adult
conversation that's been going on for a long time. Listening, you
feel
a mixture of confusion and fascination. That is the experience
of
someone beginning to study history and ethics and philosophy. You
enter
the great conversation, but that takes time. You need to know
some history
first, and what the adults are talking about. What has
the conversation been
about so far?
Reading the great books can do it time and again. If you
let Plato
talk to you in the Republic, and you talk back, literally with
your
tongue, you will find your great book coming alive. It is like
a
ghost, a ghost of its author. Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book
can
teach you how to do it.
INTRO TO ETHICS
What is ethics about?
The Good.
Ethics and morality are the same thing. Some people think morals
are
spontaneous unthought values, and ethics are carefully considered.
Not
so. Its only a matter of degree. Other people think morals are
private
values while ethics are public values for everyone in society.
Well,
in that sense people think morals are usually sexual morals,
while
ethics is about justice. Not so. Both are important and need to
work
well. Sex is something you do with someone else, even if only in
your
fantasies, and so is not merely private. Justice is 'social'
but
something only an individual can practice. To call a whole
society
Good or bad, you really mean that there are Good or bad individuals
in
society. Or, you mean the laws and institutions which make those
people
better or worse. All are one. There is no way of keeping a
moral value in the
private sector alone, or in the public sector
alone.
-it is about the
Good, the Good life, Good and evil, right and wrong
-it is NOT a 'check
up,' like a veto power- which is a negative thing,
but thats wrong. It
Good! It is about the Good life, not about 'not
doing something'
so
it is not a list of rules, it is an investigation into the
substantive: what
is the
its about the Good life. telling a joke is ethical, it helps
with the
Good life. Jokes
hurt or heal, they can weaken a foolish
attachment to a demagogue through
satire, or weaken our attachment to
something Good through unfair ridicule.
-it is not a set of mores. mores
facts, morals are values. Mores are
patterns of behavior, common to man and
beast, morals are unique to
man only.
We can't say animals because
we are animals, rational ones. Beast is an animal
without human
reason. Morals are principles of behavior and are in man only.
Shame,
meanwhile, is the frustration over being accepted. Shame comes from
others. Guilt comes from yourself. When dog pisses on carpet, it
feels
shame. Not guilt. When your ass falls down in public, you feel
shame but
not guilt. You didn't freely choose it. In guilt, your
'self' is divided into
two. One is the judge which tells that you have
been bad, the other is the
self being judged, that hears it. This is
not consciousness, but
self-consciousness. That is why only man has
ethics.
Humans have
three gifts beasts don't have: 1) power of free choice and
ability to
make moral judgement. For example, an amimal might stop
hitting you on the
head cause it hurts bad, but they would not
understand that it is wrong to
hit you on the head. 2) religion, the
ability to worship something like God.
3) aesthetic beauty
appreciation (not for sexual purposes) but for its own
sake.
How about curiousity? Well, higher animals have this somehow...
but
we have a power they don't in this respect. We have abstract
minds
they do not, we know men are mortal, and we have words for
concrete
and abstract things.
3-it is not like psychology, about how
you feel about yourself, in
relation to Good and
evil, as in, guilt
feelings about yourself. Psychology may take away our guilt
feelings,
but it cannot take away our guilt. For that we need the
blood of Christ.
In psychology you say "I feel that.." in essays. Not in philosophy.
You
"think or
believe" but you do not "feel". You must state a
truth-claim. A
feeling is not a
claim. Philosophy is not like
religion either, because philosophy does not
claim to remove guilt,
but can argue about it. Religion claims to remove guilt.
4-it is not
Ideology, either left or right. Ideology is manmade,
whereas Ethics seeks the
real truth about Good and evil which does not
change from time and place.
Ideology changes from time and place.
Ideology can be judged as moral or
immoral. Right and left argue about
this. For example, is it more ethical to
give poor people welfare or
teach them to fish? Ethics argues about and
judged ideology. Today,
ethical philosophers called deconstructionists
disagree, they say that
ethics is just ideology too, wearing a mask and
camoflaged. Power
putting on the mask of justice. Just might makes right,
like
Machiavelli said. This is what the sophists said too.
5-it is not
meta ethics. ethics is thinking about Good and evil. meta
ethics is thinking
about ethics.much of contemporary ethics research
is meta ethics. "How are
moral statements linguistically meaningful,"
"how moral reasoning differs
from reasoning about facts." These are
secondary. First you have to make a
moral choice, then reflect on it,
and only then can we in the 3rd place
reflect on our ethical
reflections. Ordinary people rarely ask them, and we
will focus on
first order questions directly about moral choice.
6-it
is not applied ethics. there are many new tricky situations that
call for the
application of ethical principles, social science,
biology etc. but ethics
itself does not legislate within a particular
field per se. Medical ethics it
is not, because one must know not only
ethics but medicine.
7-ethics
is not religion: one does not NEED religious faith to do
ethics, but
religious faith may help you to do ethics. They may be
marriable, but they
are as different as male and female: ethics is
based on reason and religion
is based on faith or on fear... but
religious fear is different than
practical fear: fear of god or a
spirit is not like fear of a tiger or cancer
or a bullet. Its in
something in another dimension, something unknown,
awesome. The
religious instinct is to believe in or aspire to or worship
that
transcendent mysterious something. The moral instinct is to
feel
obligated to do Good and avoid evil. Both instincts are against
the
base practical. I might put myself in danger to help someone
drowning.
But I might do it anyway because I am morally obligated. In the
West,
both religion and ethics have the same end, because that which
is
religiously worshipped is also supremely moral- but religious and
moral
instinct can be separate too- atheists reject religion but
not
morality.
WHAT ETHICS IS ABOUT
So, Ethics is not about a check
up, mores, psychology, ideology, meta
ethics, applied ethics or religion.
What IS it about? The Good life.
Ethics is about 3 terms:
1) Good-
means the thing desired. the goal, the ideal, the
fulfillment, the
telos
2) Right- the opposite of wrong as defined by some
law
Ought- personal responsibility, obligation, duty, experienced in
conscious
And Ethics has 3 main questions- relate them to a fleet of
ships at
sea, and ethics is our orders:
How to cooperate: how to avoid
bumping into each other, how to supply
each other's needs. This is SOCIAL
ETHICS.
How to have your boat stay ship-shape and afloat: that is
INDIVIDUAL
ETHICS. How to be a Good person, just as if you don't have
Good
bricks, you can't build a building.
What your mission is. This is
most important. Why are they at sea in
the first place? That corresponds to
the question of values, esp. the
highest value. The meaning of life. The
ultimate purpose and goal of
human life. If we don't know where we are going,
it doesn't matter
which road we take. In Alice in Wonderland, she asks
Chesire Cat:
"Which way should I go from here? That depends where you want to
go. I
don't care where... Then it doesn't matter where you go. Quo
Vadis:
Where are you going?
Modern philosophers ignore that question
because either they are
afraid its too religous and that arguing about
reiligion will put us
back in the time of religous wars, or they are too
skeptical to think
we can ever have an answer. They distinct facts from
values, so that
values cannot be facts, and therefore not knowable as true or
false.
Ancient philosophers do not make that distinction. They think
values
are the most important facts of all, that what ought to be is
a
dimension of what is. Their world-view (metaphysics) included
a
life-view. What is your metaphysics? Ethic depends on metaphysics,
YOUR
ETHICS DEPEND ON YOUR METAPHYSICS, so you gotta know quo vadis.
Ethics also
must depend on your anthropology: on your philosophy on
human nature, cause
you gotta know the nature of man. Also, it depends
on epistemology, the
knowledge of how you know knowledge (senses).
The contrast between
ancient and modern ethics is a huge distinction.
That is the next topic- why
and how?
READING FOR THE NEXT LECTURE
