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LECTURE 7: MAN'S NATURAL VIRTUE, MAN'S NATURAL VICE

BEING GOOD AND BEING EVIL: IS MANKIND NATURALLY GOOD?
Machiavelli was a revolution. He lowered the standards and rejected
tradition. So who would follow him? His successors accepted some of
his principles. They mitigated him and made him more acceptable,
respectable, by using some of his stuff and adding their own.

Thomas Hobbes agreed with M that virtue was NOT the telos of human
society, but instead of glory and military conquest, Hobbes
substituted self-preservation against the threat of violent death. He
devised 'natural rights' too, and was also an athiest and materialist.
He was still to radical to become popular.

John Locke soon after, dropped atheism and materialism, but he too
rejected virtue as the social greatest good... and traditional
morality as the social basis for society, but this time substituted
something that COULD be accepted popularly... property. The desire for
property (and wealth) was a new, respectable substitute for virtue,
that used to be a private vice: Greed. But now, it is a public good-
under the new capitalist economy, this desire for property became the
profit motive, which drove society to become richer, and the more
greedy people are, the more rich society gets through a trickle-down
effect. The WORK ETHIC replaces ETHIC as the foundation for the good
society. They used to say that the best society is one in which it is
easy to be good, and now say that the best is one in which it is not
necessary to be good. Just rich. The aim is not being good but 'doing
well.' He he he.

So is man intrinsically good or evil? Hobbes and Rousseau disagree.

Hobbes says no. M is right, man is selfish! But, his main desire is
one we can identify with: he wants to live. No death, leave me alone!
Society is artificial, and not based on natural law. So, we must
construct the Leviathan. Man created civil society in order to protect
him from a violent, nasty, solitary, brutish and short life.
Pessimist. Society makes natural mean man good.

Rousseau says yes, man is good. He is a noble savage, and taught to
act badly by society. In the state of nature before the invention of
civil society by the social contract, he is good. A nice cavaman.
Society is artificial though, like Hobbes said. SN is not like civil
society. Its an artifice. "You don't bash me and I won't bash you, and
we'll give up our rights to some cops to make sure we don't bash each
other even though we agreed not too." The origin of this idea, so
accepted today, is found first way back in the Republic. Civil society
was created and separates us from nature, as we think, but none of the
ancients but the Sophists believed this. Plato disagreed with
Thrucimicus the Sophist, saying that society is natural, not
artificial. Social justice is natural. Society is like a body, with
natural intrinsic rules for its health and happiness. Thrucimicus,
Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau all REJECT the natural law theory, in
favor of the artificial social contract theory.

Thrucimicus, M, Hobbes all think man is evil, Rousseau thinks man is
naturally good. Ethics depends on this answer a lot, because what is
man? Good or evil? Optimist or Pessimist in athropology? An optimist
says that "The best government is that which governs least! Freedom
maximised." A pessimist would say no way, we need more government for
more structure and order. Education? Optimist is permissive, treating
the child like a flower, letting it unfold itself in the sun.
Pessimist would emphasize structure and training and breaking the
child's rebellious will. Marriage? Optimist likes natural romance,
while pessimist doesn't mind arranged marriages. Obviously we live in
a Rousseauian, optimist society. But which is right?

Two kinds of good and evil:

Ontological goodness: the goodness in your nature apart from your
deeds / lifestyles
Moral goodness: the virtues of your deeds, virtuous acts, will, what
you behave like.

Ontological evil: misery, suffering, death (what we are, what happens to us)
Moral evil: the bad things we do by our free choices

Spoiled genius Hitler has more ontological goodness than Harry the
Nice Hamster. But the sweet little hamster has more moral goodness.

2+2=4 Possible Anthropologies

Traditional: ontologically (originally) good, morally (environmentally) bad
Hobbes: ontologically bad, morally bad
Rousseau: ontologically good, morally good
Sartre: ontologically bad, morally good

1. Traditional Classical View: Man is ontologically very good and
valuable. In Judeo-Christianity, its because he is created in God's
image. For the Greco-Romans, its cause he's a little god himself
(master morality). For modern secularists, its cause he has rights. If
an old man and a billion dollars of paintings are burning in a museum,
which do you save? The old man. The old man has more ontological
value. Yet, man is not morally perfect and acts in contradiction to
his innate ontological goodness. So, there is need for repentance. If
he was ontologically evil, there would be no need for repentence- we
wouldn't be doing anything unnatural. The king's kid acting like an
ape. Made in the image of King God, acting more like king kong. We are
too proud of what we do, not proud enough about what we are. Of
course, there is a little bad in the best of us, and a little good in
the worst of us :)

2. Hobbes denies, like Machiavelli ontological goodness. Man is not a
child of God but a shivering naked beast that is afraid of violent
death. Morally selfish and competitive-Hobbes is a materialist. Love
is just refined animal lust. Matter is in essence competitive. One
body must push the other out. Material goods must be taken to survive.
So man is not good morally or ontologically. If there are two people
and food for one, one must die. Our anthropology dictates selfishness.

3. Rousseau was the super optimist: ontologically and morally good.
There is no such thing as sin. Human nature can be trusted, and the
only thing to judge is judgementalism, the only evil is belief in
evil. The only thing to be intolerant of is intolerance. We are all
brothers.

4. Sartre said there is no such thing as intrinsic human dignity or
worth, and also no such thing as sin or evil. Man is ontologically
worthless but morally good. Because man and human life is meaningless
and absurd, and cause there is no god to design us and give us value,
there is no such thing as ontological value. Yet we have moral
goodness because since we invent morality as we go, without a god to
tell us right and wrong, so we cannot be evil because we invent what
evil is, and that is totally subjective. Our will creates morality.

The latter denies both the original assumptions of the ancients.

We've already looked at what could be called optimistic or pessimistic
anthropologies. Recall that Plato's Theory of Education in the Meno
was optimistic, as was his Theory of the Teaching of Virtue in the
Republic. Meno asked, "can virtue be taught, or does it come by
practice, or is it in our nature, or does it come in another way that
is against nature?"

pessimism says that it comes against nature because our nature is evil
optimism says it comes by nature
Plato's view: it comes by teaching- enlighten the mind and the will will follow
Aristotle's view: the middle view: both virtue and vice come by
training- repeated practice and development of habits. By nature we
only have the potential for virtue or vice. To actualize these, takes
habits.

Americans used to be closer to 4. Aristotle, and today they are more
like 2., which is the opinion of Rousseau. The innate tendancy to sin
(original selfishness) is very unpopular today. But babies are
selfish! We have to socialize them and train them morally. And we
don't succeed most of the time: just think of the adults being
selfish. Those people are those kids grown up.

So whose right? Rousseau or Hobbes? Innate goodness or innate evil? We
can find out not through emotion, but by reason: to find out what is
in man, let it come out. Give man Freedom and Power and see what
happens.  Its like a chemistry experiment where you need a catylist to
see what the chemicals do. Freedom and power can be used equally for
good or evil. Its not the opposite of good or evil, but constraint.
So, modern democratic society has given us more freedom than we ever
had before, and science and tech has given us more power.

So, are we better? more moral? wiser? less prone to family and social
breakdown? Do we call our times "happy days?" No. Compare: suicide
rate, cowardess, lust, addiction, violence etc. Compare lyrics of
popular songs of the past with those today. Compare movies on screen:
now with the power to do anything onscreen: is the morality better,
the wisdom better, even the themes? characterizations?

It looks like Lord Acton was right: absolute power corrupts. So
knowledge, power and freedom unlock evil. Now, decrease the power and
freedom. Think of a power outage, a hurricane, a great depression.
What happens? people chip in, they help much more than before, they
act like neighbors! they sometimes even act like saints! There is both
surprising good and surprising evil in human nature. Which seem to be
more evil when we are given all we want. This good / evil in human
nature refutes Rousseau.

A syllogism: Power corrupts us, put us and power together and you get
trouble, but power is neutral, not evil, so the evil must come from
us. That's the bad news. Is there any good news?

Another syllogism: Suffering ennobles, but suffering is not good in
itself... so the good must come from us! Too much suffering we can't
take, but we do act more saintly under moderate poverty.

So, it seems human goodness comes out best when there is not too much,
nor too little power, money and freedom. In other words; Middle Class
Virtue! A class and a virtue that is resented bitterly by the right
and the left: by the rich and the poor, by the overeducated snobs and
the undereducated slobs. But bourgeois is the best condition for
fostering moral virtue. Bourgeois is the best! Yet, there ain't no
word more despised by the intelletuals. But the two heros of the
greatest book of the 20th C are bourgois. Frodo and Sam. Two creature
comfort loving hobbits who become heroes. Like the English in WWII.

Here's an argument against pessimism and for innate goodness in human
nature: if we didn't have innate goodness, we wouldn't 'know it' and
therefore would not use it to judge evil by, yet we do it, and that
proves we are partly good. Because we recognize what evil is and
condemn it. We are good stuff gone partly good.

So man is ontologically both good and evil. We all know that murder,
torture rape and cruelty morally bad- but why? if man is not
ontologically good, why is harming him so morally bad?

So, what makes him ontologically good? Just cause we say so and we
love mankind? Just cause we love man and that makes him good?
Therefore he IS good? If its just our desires or choice, that can be
changed. We can change that. But we can't. So, if he is objectively
good, where does this goodness come from? What is the origin of his
goodness? Because he was created in the image of God? Or cause we
evolved from animals who can't do anything like that? Are we little
gods fallen or great apes risen? Or both?

So if we are so good ontologically, why so bad morally? How is it that
we are corrupted? Animals can't be as bad or as good as we. Children
are not as bad or good as adults. "Lilies that fester smell far worse
than weeds", we just disdain adults who are bad, because unlike
children or animals, they choose.

Most of us cannot be as morally bad as Hitler because we are not as
strong willed and clever as he. What a saint he would have been, had
he been one.

So what's the origin of our evil?
we just don't know
we are not evil, its just an illusion.
society is to blame, pass the buck to them- really just other people.
this line says then that you are to blame for other people's doings
heridety is to blame, as we are just risen apes
eve's excuse: the devil made me do it
adam's excuse: the woman made me do it
the most uncomfortable: look in the mirror, its our own freewill

Its 7. But why did God or nature give us freewill if he or she knew
that we would misuse it badly? Well, because we cannot be morally good
without free choice either. Anymore than we can be morally evil. So
this raises a question about free choice: do we have it? It is real or
an illusion?

Ancients and moderns conceived freedom differently. Freedom and
freewill, are they the same thing? Ancients say we are rightly praised
for making good choices and embodying virtues. And rightly blamed for
embodying vices and ill character- BECAUSE we are morally free to make
the choice and be that person.

FREEWILL VS DETERMINISM
"Moral Judgmentalism" much despised by moderns, presupposed that some
choices are really morally right or wrong, objectively. It also
supposes that we are responsible for our choices- that we have
freewill. The ancients knew about the freedom to choose- freewill.
Many moderns deny it- they say that everything is determinism. Actions
are determined (caused) by necessary forces: heridity plus
environment. Freedom to ancients meant freedom of choice, freewill,
that makes us morally responsible. That is inherent in human nature,
and is not present in animals. You don't appeal to a dog's conscience
not to urinate on the rug, you hit the dog. Animals never have
freewill, while humans always do. Even if you are captured and in
prison, you can choose to agree or disagree with your captors. You can
hate or forgive them, hope or despair. Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky
wrote how some people only discover their true freedom in prison.

Modern thinkers think freedom is autonomy. Freedom to make laws, or
even break laws.  No responsibility to choose judged under a moral
law, but freedom to make those laws. We see laws as limiting, ancients
thought law defines freedom. Autonomy is something we strive for,
freewill is inborn.

So, if freewill is right, how is it compatible with other things, like
the fact we are conditioned by heridetary and environment, and how
does it relate to predestination, diving providence, fate, destiny...

Moderns excuse bad moral behavior because they believe it was caused
by society (the environment), or chemistry and hormones (heridetary).
Well, the ancients believed in fate and destiny, and YET, humans STILL
had responsibility for their moral behavior! That's even more
determined than chemistry and society! Usually, we believe in a
combination of freewill and a destiny or divine plan. All our stories
have both of these in it. Plot (plan) and actors with an uncertain
future, who use their agency to make something happen!

Ancients believed in both working in tandem. Moderns deny one or the
other, or both! This has huge consequences for ethics, if you deny
freewill, you cannot blame or respect anyone. And if you deny destiny,
there is only randomness, its a play without right or wrong lines to
speak. And so there is no objective right and wrong.

Aquinas said: man has freewill, otherwise all praising, blaming,
rewarding, punishing, counsuling and commanding would be meaningless.

Legacy of Rousseau and Hobbes: not satisfying thinkers, but powerful,
and both questioned something traditional: Hobbes questioned innate
human goodness, Rousseau questioned innate human badness, and they
opened up more options, still unsresolved. More confusing now even!
Many moderns deny freewill because of science often times. Scientists
find causes, and are usually determinists. This all started with the
book that is the origin of all modern philosophy in science: Descartes
Discourse on Method.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: CAN MORALITY BE A SCIENCE?
Can ethics be a science? Do they match or repel? Some have tried to
use science to find ethics:

Three attemped to do ethics scientifically:

17th C Rene Descartes   Rationalism
18th C David Hume               Empiricism
19th C John S. Mill             Utilitarianism

19th C Immanual Kant    Purely Rational Scientific Ethics- Single most
important modern ethical philosopher: to discuss him, we must know
what he knew, the first three, and that means knowing the great
conversation.

We start in late Renaissance, when modern culture begins. Divided into
earlier artistic renaissance in the 16th and the scientific
renaissance in 17th. If anything can be said to be something we can be
proud of, its science. It is the one thing that totally distinguishes
us from every premodern culture. We may not be wiser, happier or more
moral, but we are more scientific. Pure science has given us more
factual knowledge, and its spinoff, technology (applied science) than
any culture of the past ever had or imagined having. If you took
anyone from there to here... in a time machine, he would think he died
and went to heaven or hell. Skycrapers came from cathedrals? what are
those hand held things with demons in them! How could chunks of matter
do that? Those flying things, they are angels or gods. And when he
found out that men made those things, just by understanding matter...
he would think men were now like gods. How did he do all this!?!

What caused this unbelievable scientific explosion? In a word, method.
When it was used, the method acted like a skeleton key opening the
doors to all the sciences. Its not because interest arose for the
first time, don't believe that medieval man was only concerned with
the next world because it was the 'age of faith'. Medieval man WAS
interested in nature, but like children. They did not have a clear
notion of the scientific method, they did science that was religious
and poetic, but not scientific.

So what about this new science method and ethics? It works so well
everywhere else, so why not ethics (a kind of science- it seeks
rational knowledge of good and evil through causes and explanations.
Its not a physical science, and it asks something that other sciences
don't, namely what is and OUGHT to be. Its rational and argues for its
conclusions though. And it is a discovery.

Machiavelli was first to do this: he used human HISTORY to find data
that would apply to his prince. The Romans were the most successful in
history, why? He tried to find the causes for Roman success, and
sought to replicate that successful stuff. Purely factual. The only
morality he had was an anti-morality- he found that moral people are
martyrs. Morality does not work, high ideals conflict with the fact
that mankind is not ideal. All of this was too shocking of course,
traditional morality was still in place. But M's method was
accelerated by Descartes. The new science was like a rocket ship, the
old a paper airplane.

Descartes was father of modern scientific philosophy. Medieval
philosophy ended with nominalism (name-ism, as it, nothing is real,
just a name) and the resulting skepticism. Montaigne, D's
contemporary, was a skeptic. So philosophy was in a rut. Science was
going forward. Why??? What was the secret of modern science and how
could philosophy imitate it? Descartes did not look back, but forward.
He abandoned tradition. He borrowed nothing from his predecessors. He
is the first philosopher since Socrates to not cite any previous
philosopher. To answer a skeptic, begin as a skeptic. If you begin
with certainties, you end in doubts. If you begin with doubts, you may
get to a certainty.

So, the secret of science's success? Its method! Lets apply it to
ethics, which will give ethics the same clean slate and new start
everyone else gets, in his great book, "A Discourse of Method." He
says, "the ancient philosophies are like magnificient temples which
laud the virtues and make them more beautiful than anything else. But
they are built on mud and sand. They give no criteria for good and
evil. No tightly logical proofs for these criteria. On the other hand,
the scientific method IS just such a strong foundation, but on this
strong foundation, we have erected not temples but only little
technical workshops." Francis Bacon's summum bonum says the purpose of
man and man's nature is the conquest of nature! Its great! But ethics
is important too. So the great project is to join the new scientific
method with the old ethics. Lets move the new foundation under the old
temple. Or, the old ethical temples onto the new scientific
foundation.

Not unlike Socrates. His moral teaching was not new, but what was new
was his method. So new that his contemporaries were afraid of his
constant questioning of commonly held beliefs. Descartes is like a new
Socrates! First thing he does is to redefine reason. Reason is =
scientific reason. He narrowed it.

The method? Descartes begins with universal methodical doubt. Its
false until proven true. The first rule of the method. An idea or
hypothesis is always treated skeptically. Guilty until proven
innocent. Except, nothing is true until proven true with certainty.
Descartes began with universal doubt and went to prove his own
existence: I think, therefore I am. Then he proved that he is a mind /
soul / spirit. Then the existence of a God, from the concept of a
perfect being in his mind. The concept of total perfection must
include the perfection of existing, outside of our mind. Statement
"God lacks existence" is self-contradictory. What about the validity
of the material world and the validity of our sense perceptions of it?
The premise he used is that if the sense perception we have use of are
illusary or deceptive, and they were given to us by God, a perfect
being, than God is not perfect and that is not true. So, our faculties
are good indicators of truth in nature.

Most today believe Descartes is a genius and did a good thing, but few
think Descartes succeeded in his proofs on these things above: proving
he exists, he is a mind / soul, existence of God, existence of the
world etc. He claimed to prove these. He didn't apply the new method
to ethics. In Part III of the Discourse on Method, he gives us a
pragmatic ethic, to live with safely and comfortably until he got a
better ethic done, but he died young. No book.

His successors, however, did. David Hume. Hume used his Method to
generate empiricism. "In front of your face-ism". Emperically, science
is the only reliable source. "Human knowledge has two tools: the mind
and the senses. Descartes and his rationalism said the mind was the
revealer of knowledge. Hume and his empiricism said no, it is the
senses. Contrasted with D. Rationalist says only the Mind can be
trusted, and the senses must be judged by the mind. Empricist says the
senses must judge the mind, they should be trusted, because they alone
give you the DATA in the surrounding world. This is epistemology.
Reason and sensation are the two poles of human knowledge, Descartes
put forth rationalism. Locke and Hume were empiricists. Hume: "Ideas
are just less vivid copies of sense impressions, and there was nothing
in the mind besides what the senses put there." But what about
Ethics?!?

There's the NEW trouble for ethics: uh oh, there is no place for it in
the new order! What? By the time we get to Hume in 18th Century,
ethics is in crisis. The problem is that it cannot be measured by
science. Good and evil have no shape or color or size or mass or other
scientific qualities, they cannot be reduced to sense data or said to
be founded on sense data. So, there can be no knowledge of good and
evil in this epistemology. So how did Hume account for our ethical
ideas? Oh... well, they are Feelings. Emotive Theory of Values. When
we see a mugger kill an old lady, we think we have seen something
evil. But Hume says we did not see evil. He says we saw a series of
sense impressions: a arm, knife, slash, cry, fall, pool of blood. We
call it evil, but where is the evil? It is not seen outside, it has no
size or color, but felt inside. Its inside our feelings. Well,
feelings are not objective, and do not reveal anything in the world
outside of us. But we think they do! When we see the old lady
murdered, we feel bad and mad and angry, and we project those feelings
out at the murder and the murderer. Hume says the objective ACT cannot
be good or bad, its just physical, not moral. Morality comes from
inside, it is a quality of our feelings. Ethics, therefore, cannot be
objectively good bad, and it can never become a science because there
can be no certainty about it. Arguing about ethics is useless. Many
philosophers are happy with this reduction of ethics to a feeling. But
none were happy with what followed.

THE LIMITS OF RADICAL EMPIRICISM
With the eliminating of a basis for understanding good and evil,
radical empiricism also must deny certain other things in life,
because we cannot sense them: it denies the nature of causality (like
the causal connection between the bird and the egg, or the bat hitting
the ball into the outfield- we sense only the two events. So it must
be feeling or mental habit that makes us connect them) since we don't
sense that essences in nature exist (example is a table. we don't
sense the tableness, only the brownness, hardness etc.) And most
disturbingly, we don't sense ourselves. We look within and find only a
bunch of feelings, desires, thoughts etc., but not the self that we
think thinks the thoughts! Or senses things! There is no YOU! You are
just a temporary motel where the atoms you call you have an affair for
70 years. These are not ethical conclusions, but they have
consequences for ethics. If there is no substantial 'self', there is
no locus of responsibility for things. We cannot know that the bat
cause the ball to move, we cannot know that we caused the vicious or
virtuous act, because there is NO REAL ME.

No one feels comfortable about this, yet the two follow from the same
empirical premises. Hume has many followers. 20th C logical
positivists were. They said "the only cognitive meaningful sentences
are those that can be verified or falsified. If not, it is not
meaningful. There are only two ways to verify and falsify: by formal
logic, and sense. 2+2=4 is verifiable by mathematical logic. The shoe
is red is verifiable by sense. Sky is blue is verifiable, spiders have
10 legs is false." What follows? All ethical statements are strictly
meaningless. Ought and ought not is not verifiable. Non logical
tautologies are unprovable as true or false. Murder is bad. That is an
expression of you, not empirically verifiable scientifically.
Personal, private, subjective feelings, not intellectual claims. This
is widespread in our culture now: "Different strokes for different
folks," "get your values away from me!" "don't impose your values on
me!" As if values were a subjective personal preference like a
preference for football to ballet, or red to blue ice cream. We call
them 'lifestyles' today, as if the difference between terrorism and
heroism or adultery and fidelity were the same kind of thing as the
difference between top hats and baseball caps, or an english vs. a
brooklyn accent. Matters of 'style' not content. Not truth, not
goodness.

Obviously, there is something wrong with this philosophy. Even though
its called logical positivism, or logical empiricism, it is utterly
illogical. Why? It says, "all meaningful propositions are either
logical tautologies or empirically verifiable," it itself is neither
one. It is so narrow that it eliminates itself! It commits suicide.

Very few philosophers defend it today. People empirically do argue
quiet soundly about right and wrong, and meaningfully. The theory does
not explain the empirical data. Also, people argue about subjective
facts, and what should have happened. In an accident, what should the
person have done is as important as what happened! He should have hit
the brakes... so there IS some relationship between 'ought' and facts.
It can't be known by the scientific method. We don't argue about your
dream vs mine, those are subjective. I feel pain, you pleasure, and we
don't argue about that. But we do argue about good and evil. "Is this
a just war?" "Is abortion always wrong"? We are looking for the
OBJECTIVE TRUTH HERE, the objective moral fact, not a 'feeling!' And
we argue about what those facts are. Skeptics say that we argue about
it in vain, and they are just unprovable opinions and feelings. Are
they? Or is the emotive theory wrong?

Skeptics say these are unscientific feelings. AND yes, ethics cannot
be they cannot be science, otherwise it WOULD be science. And if it is
just a 'feeling', no. But if 'subjective moral feelings' are indeed
related somehow to objective moral fact, then the question opens up:
what kind of science can ethics be? Can it be something like the
modern scientific method? That would be a great way to 'answer' the
subjectivist.

Descartes never found one. Hume never did. But English philosopher
John Stewart Mill did. It is utilitarianism. He says, "There is a
scientific criterion for good and evil. IF science uses 1. empirical
observation and 2. mathematical measurement. Now, empirically,
everyone desires happiness, it is an observed fact. And, our choices
affect other people in society: make them more or less happy. And
given: happiness can be measured. So, ethics can be scientific because
all you have here is observation. So! The criterion for good and evil:
whatever causes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of
people is the greatest good. Good and bad are measured by how much
good and bad they produce. They are multiplied by two things: the
intensity or quality of happiness, and how many people are affected.
Quality? Hmm... well his predesessor Jeremy Bentham said "push pin is
as good as poetry, if it makes you happy." Mill said that was too
simplistic: its better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied. There are higher and lower pleasures.

Both agreed that an act is good if it makes people happy. Only
happiness is good in itself, and other goods are means to this end of
being happy. There are no intrinsically good or evil acts. If I was a
sadist and you a masocist, its totally good if you are tortured by me.
There are no moral principles. The consequences are more important
than the principles, consequentialism vs. principalism. An act is good
not because it obeys a prior universal abstract principle, or good law
based on one, but the concrete consequences of the act (the happiness
caused by the torture). We can see why this makes utilitarianism
scientific- the consequences can be calculated whereas the principles
cannot.

American pragmatism in William James is related to this, though much
more humane than the raw utilitarianism of Mill. What's wrong with
Mill's utilitarianism? It sounds nice but breaks down in real
situations.

It gives you no reasons to call cannibalism wrong. If you were on an
island with 99 cannibals. The most happiness that there can be on that
island is if you were cut up and served to them 1/99 for each.
Utilitarianism does not consider "what is right." No justice.

Its subjectivism is disheartening. Even happiness in ancient thought
was not subjective. It means perfection, true happiness. And it might
require some suffering.

In identifying happiness with pleasure, no one is a utilitarian who
believes that man has a metaphysical soul, or that there exists a God,
or that there is anything spiritual above and beyond the materialism
of the material world!

Utilitarianism criticizes traditional morality for "being arrogant and
claiming to know too much: universal absolute truths about good and
evil". But, isn't it utilitarianism that is more arrogant? It plays
God! It claims to know the future, to know what will bring the
greatest happiness! It will do anything for that happiness, means
regardless. The traditional view is really the humble one, like a
soldier who obeys the commander because he trusted him, thought he
does not see how it will lead to the best consequences.

Suppose some egoist asks, "why should I be concerned with other
peoples happiness? I don't care about them!" The utilitarian says
"well your happiness affects others too..." and the egoist says, "fuck
that, I'm in it for myself!" The altruism on the part of the
utilitarian is a leftover from traditional morality, and he can say
nothing back, there is no basis for convincing an egoist to be an
altruist. Neitzsche pointed that out.

How does utilitarianism account for evil? Evil is reduced to a
miscalculation, an intellectual mistake. Was the Holocaust a
miscalculation?

Utilitarianism doesn't pass the 'death test'. You can't die for it. It
doesn't help us explain death or make sense of it.

Its psychology seems too simplistic. We DON'T want JUST pleasure!
Chesterton said  "man's most pragmatic need is to be more than a
pragmatist!" Man has deeper desires than utilitarianism considers.

The better people all condemn utilitarianism! The better you are, the
less you are a utilitarian. How could moral and intellectual maturity
take you in opposite directions? That would be a distortion of the
human heart's design.

The most devastating: utilitarianism is not just weak ethics, its NO
ethics. It has no ethical dimension. There are no moral laws, no
duties, no obligations. It reduces values to facts, and is morally
colorblind.

So what is to become of figuring out ethics scientifically? Of doing
ethics on a basis of the scientific method? Next we will see the most
successful attempt. That of Immanual Kant. The greatest modern ethical
philosopher. He erects a system of ethics on pure reason, a system
WITH principles, unlike utilitarianism. He erects this system of
principles and obligations on scientific reason, not metaphysical
reason. Descartes tried, and didn't. Kant completes the circle, the
Enlightenment Project of applying scientific reason to life.

Kant's classic, "fundamental principles of the metaphysics of morals",
it and Aristotle's Ethics and Plato's Republic are the triad of ethics
book. They all end with good strong reasons for being ethical. But
they are not the same reasons!


LECTURE 11: BEING GOOD AND BEING FAIR, THE ETHICS OF KANT

Child of the scientific enlightenment, saw it as the paradigm of human
knowledge. He wanted to complete the enlightenment program of putting
all of life on a scientific business. Descartes didn't get around to
it, Hume simply gave up on it and reduced ethics to "feelings" and
Mill sacrificed the very essence of ethics (moral obligation) reducing
it to pragmatic calculation of the greatest happiness for the greatest
number.

Kant wrote 3 great books about the great human ideals from all times:
the true, the good and the beautiful (epistimology, ethics and
aestetics). Critique of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Critique of
Judgement. But we look at the best: Foundations of Metaphys of Morals.
Shorter of all them.

His metaphysics: are anti-metaphysics or else "deontological" ethics
(ontology and metaphysics is the same thing).

Can you have ethics without metaphysics? Kant wants to find out.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, he outlined his epistemology: he goes
to solve the impasse in epistemology (how you know what you know)
between rationalists like Descartes and empiricists like Hume, by
saying both were wrong cause they both assumed the same false thing
about Truth: rationalists like Descartes said we can attain truth
through pure reason, and Hume said it was through sensation, and
Aristotle said it was done by 'both.' But all three understood truth
as the mind's conformity to reality, its understanding, struggling
understanding of 'reality'. Aristotle defined Truth, "If one says of
what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, he speaks the
truth. If he says of what is that it is not, or of what it is not that
it is, he does not speak the truth. So, that's conforming to reality.

Kant in CPReason, suggests what he called a Copernican revolution in
philosophy: a radical redefinition of truth itself: he says reality
conforms to the mind, not vice versa. Human thought is like art not
science: it actively structures the world rather than passively
mirrors it. It creates, rather than discovers, all the order and form
and meaning in the world that it 'seems' to 'find'. So objective
truth? No, its impossible. We cannot know reality, or 'things in
themselves.' But that is not thought's business! Human thought is not
a failure but a success at its proper business- to MAKE the world. To
create the world' form and meaning. The world is cookie batter, and
the mind's catagories are like cookie cutter shapes. We make it, its
not out there. But, all minds are structured in the same way, so there
is a common world. Common forms we all impose on the batter.

Form has 3 parts:
Forms of sense perception (space and time, all there is in nature)
Catagories of abstract logical thought (like causality and relation)
The three most fundamental ideas: self, world and God.

These are all subjective not objective, they are in the mind, but they
are in all minds, universally. But we can know this but we can't know
if they are objective reality. We can only know appearances, because
we make them. We make them all the time, like if we had rose colored
glasses, and we see space-time in. We all wear glasses. Space and time
(all that we can sense), color our glasses red and blue, which make
rose.

So, if we can't know objective reality, where the hell do we get our
data? From... think Kenneth Clark here... the Light of Experience! Our
experience of moral obligation. We've seen that ethics is about 3
words: Good, Right and Ought. The ancients were worried about the
Good, moderns are concerned about rights, and Kant was concerned with
OUGHT. His fundamental piece of datum is that "We are absolutely
obligated to be moral." Question then, where do we find the grounds of
this obligation? Why? "The ground of obligation is sought not in the
nature of man, nor in man's changing sense experience, but a priori,
(prior to sense experience and not dependent on it) solely in the
concepts of pure reason. Rationalism. Sense experience lacks
universality and necessity because what senses tell people differs,
but not reason. The sky is dark for an Australian and light for a
Canadian. But 2+2=4 for everyone. Necessary and unchangable.

There are only 5 possible grounds for moral obligation:
nature of god- Aquinas
will of god- Kirkegaard and Euthyphro
nature of man- Aristotle
will of man- Moral relativists by way of a social contract
abstract, logical, pure reason- Kant

So Kant says all ethics can be based on pure reason. He outlines how
to find the supreme principle of morality. Steps:

Identifies the absolute good: good will
Identifies good will as that coming from someone doing it from a moral duty
Identifies moral duty with respect to moral law as such, from an
overarching general law, it is called the Categorical Imperative.

This is the Categorical Imperative: "There is no possibility of
thinking about anything in the world (or out of it) which can be
regarded as 'good' without qualification, except a good will.
Intelligence, wit, judgement, and others are doubtless good and
desirable, as are such qualities as temperament and courage, but these
can also become extremely bad of the will which makes use of these
gifts of nature is not good. Same for gifts of fortune, power, honor,
health, these make for pride and even arrogance unless there is a good
will."

We wish monsters like Hitler did not have all those qualities. He
misused all these by an evil will. What makes a good will then? It is
good only through its willing. It is not a means to a higher end
(opposite to utilitarianism here), and so how to find what kind of
willing makes the will good? Answer: a good motive. Just the motive.
What makes the motive good? Duty. Unfortunate today, doo doo and
German war criminals "I vas doing my duty". But that is narrow.
Misleading. Kant means duty as respect for moral law, because it is
morally right, period.

Ancients said that 3 things make something good: the deed, the act,
the circumstances. For Kant, just the motive.

Kant makes the contrast between duty and inclination. He unmodernly
point that feelings (part of inclination) have no moral worth, because
they are not under our power, not free-choice. Example: to preserve
your life is a duty, and yet everyone has an inclination anyway, so
the preservation has no moral worth. But if you life is so painful
that your inclination is to kill yourself, then your life's
preservation has moral worth. Example: To be benefiscent is a moral
duty, and besides this, there are some people who are so
sympathetically constituted that they find inner pleasure in spreading
joy to the people around them. However amiable this is, it has no true
moral worth." This all seems severe and inhuman, he is saying these
are gifts of fortune, not free-choice.

READING FOR THE NEXT LECTURE

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     Prof. N. Rensberg