 Hi, I'm J. Joachim and welcome to Philosophy at What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Our topic for today is ethics and law. Now ethics tells us what's good and what we morally want to do. On the other hand, law tells us what's legal and what we legally want to do. But what's the relationship between the two? Now, here's to discuss this question is Professor Garrett Coletti, Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. So welcome, Professor Garrett. Thank you very much. It's great to be on your show. Thank you. Okay, so before we get into answering the question, let's get into your philosophical background first. So how did you get into philosophy? Are they getting started in philosophy? Yeah, so I was an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia. And I was one of these people who couldn't really make up his mind what I wanted to specialize in. So in my first year of university, I did philosophy, French, English, and maths. And then as I went through, I narrowed things down and I ended up doing a joint honours degree in philosophy and English literature. I think I progressively just discovered that the questions I was most interested in were the philosophical ones. And then went on from there to do some postgraduate study at Oxford in the UK, where I did a thesis on an ethics topic and discovered that that's really what makes me tick and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Yeah, so why did you end up specializing in ethics and political philosophy? I suppose it was because the questions that it asks seemed to me really important ones. I mean, they're ones that engage most of us in some way. And philosophy just offered a way of thinking about these with rigor and clarity and depth as well. It's a subject where you keep asking the questions until you get to a point where you think you've really reached a foundation from which you can answer them. Okay, so who influenced you to pursue a career in academic philosophy? You know, I think that probably the most influential people were my PhD supervisors. So I had three of those. One was Jonathan Glover, there was James Griffin as well, and Derek Parfit. And these three people all really impressed me, both with their intellect, the intellectual seriousness, the quality of their own work, and just the way in which they were able to convey this sense of the importance of philosophy and the possibility of progress as well. And I suppose the support they gave me was really quite influential in convincing me that I could go on with this as a professional philosopher. Yeah, it's interesting. So your supervisor was Derek Parfit, one of your supervisors. How was he as a supervisor? Yeah, so he was one of my supervisors. Well, he was a very impressive man. So you kind of got the impression with him that there wasn't really a limit to the amount of philosophy that he could absorb. And I suppose the way in which you would engage with your work as well was always looking for where it was headed, and he was able to really offer an overview of the structure of your work and the directions in which you might take it. So, yeah, it was a great privilege really to work with someone who's so intellectually gifted. And I suppose I had a fair amount of interaction with him after I'd finished my study as well, reading and commenting on his own work. Yeah, so Derek Parfit was one of the best, one of the best moral philosophers that we have. But let's get into that. So how do we define moral philosophy or ethics? Yeah, so I think words like morality and ethics get used with slightly different meanings. And I tend to think of there being four different sorts of ideas that get attached to ethics and morality. So one of these is just this very general question, how should I live? A second somewhat narrow question is, what's the right way to interact with others? What are the appropriate forms of regard for others? A third kind of topic, which some would say is a topic which is part of our culture, but not part of all ethical cultures is the topic of accountability to others. So responsibility being held to standards for which you can be blamed if you don't don't meet them. And which give rise to attitudes such as guilt, resentment, indignation, also their positive counterparts and attributions of obligation. And some people see this as quite a culturally specific phenomenon, which they reserve the term morality for. And then the fourth thing is connected to the standards of behavior that we should publicly advocate and abide by. And when you hear people talking about professional ethics, they're typically talking about the fourth thing. And I think one way of thinking of moral philosophy is it's the topic that deals with all of those things. I myself like to keep things simple. So I tend to think of morality in the second of those ways. So morality concerns the other regarding how we should treat others and the constraints on our own behavior that are properly regard for others places on us. And then it's the business of moral philosophy to say what they are and why. Okay, so what are the dominant ethical theories in this regard? Yeah, so I think you can see them as belonging to four main families. And the first of them is probably the most familiar. So what moral theories typically try to do is to find one foundation for ethics or morality. And perhaps the most popular one is a foundation in welfare in concern for the welfare of interests of others. And the most famous philosophical theory of morality utilitarianism is a theory of that kind that says your welfare is your happiness. And the right thing to do is to take into account not just your happiness, but everyone's happiness or the happiness of every person or non human animal that has happiness or welfare. And to maximize that impartially. So that's one kind of view. The second kind of moral theory focuses on respect for autonomy. And the Kantian tradition tends to emphasize that so that's less about me providing others with things that benefit them, but me providing the space for others to lead their own lives to make their own decisions about themselves. And I think restrictions on paternalism on forcing people to do things for their own good appeal to that second kind of source. So that's that's two ideas. A third one is connected to cooperating together towards the common good. And so called contractualist theories of morality tend to emphasize that third idea. And I suppose in the descriptive sciences look at trying to explain where morality comes from and how it has evolved its way into us and emphasis on dispositions to cooperate in groups tend to be prominent. And then the fourth idea which is very ancient one connects ethics or morality to achieving perfect excellence as a human being. So this sort of relies on the idea that there are capacities that we have as humans and then goodness in a human being involves developing those capacities to the highest extent. I think it's useful to see certainly moral philosophy in the Western tradition as developing those four ideas in often in competition with each other and then there are some theories to try to combine them in some way. So interesting. So these are the four government theories you have utilitarianism, the Kantian, Judy based. You have the social authoritarian stuff like law clubs. And of course, that's right. Yeah, your virtue ethics as well. I wonder. Yeah. Yeah, because in your work you're emphasizing these things as well. But what do you think is, I am right. Yeah. Right. Good. So, so I think a view of any of those four kinds so the welfare is the respect based the contractualist or the perfectionist kind of view are typically developed as what I would call a monistic kind of theory so they ultimately aim to identify one master principle for the whole of morality which is based around one of those four ideas. And in my view so I'm a pluralist. And I think it's helpful to think of morality that's to say the other regarding part of how we ought to live as fundamentally based around the first three of those ideas. So I think of concern for others welfare, respect for their autonomy, and then a willingness to join in with worthwhile collective activities as three independently important parts of treating other people well and relating to other people well so I think if I tell someone, say I tell a young child, not to be selfish. If they're a little philosopher in the making they might come back to me and say well what exactly do you mean by selfishness what selfishness and what's unselfishness. And I think actually that it's three different things so one way of being selfish is not to take other people's welfare into account and other is to be domineering and push them around, make them do things, even for their own good. And a third one is just not to be prepared to join in when you see something worthwhile that's been done or something that's been done to produce some public benefit, and you take the benefit you're not not prepared to pitch in towards paying the cost. And then the way I think the fourth tradition works is that one form of excellence in a in a human life or one way of being good is to respond to those first three sorts of moral reasons so to be unselfish in those those three different ways. So that's the way I want to kind of put together the insights from those different traditions. Perhaps another way of putting it so we want to be excellent individuals we want to be good individuals and because of that we need to look out for the welfare waters, respect your economy and cooperate with them in some cases. Yeah, I think so. And I think one of the ideas that the ancient philosophers had was that some that's actually a way of benefiting yourself. So it's a way of achieving what's good for you is to be excellent in various ways. And I think while perhaps it's overly optimistic to think that that's always true. So sometimes being morally good can can be self sacrificing. I think for most of us in most circumstances it actually is true that it's actually a way of flourishing yourself and achieving what's good for you is to relate to other people. Well, and there are different ways of doing that. And those those three ways I think of as the three basic forms of moral goodness in relation to others. That's a good way of doing it. So you're a pluralist about the foundations of morality, there's no one foundation of morality. But I wonder how it reflects your other focus of your work with which are issues in political philosophy issues concerning rights, equality and citizenship, but you tell us something about what you're doing in this area of philosophy. Yeah, so I think a first point to make, which again seems to be illuminating about this this way of thinking about the foundational ethical ideas is I think you can find different political cultures, which emphasize one of those three ideas more strongly so you've got the, what I suppose I would think of maybe this is a bit of a caricature the Scandinavian welfareist kind of political ideology where you have high taxation and you think of the central political value as being looking after people's welfare. A more American idea emphasizes the second of these sorts of thoughts that's personal liberty, creating a state and regulating a state in a way that maximizes individual freedom and autonomy. And then the third kind of idea, which I suppose I think is most strongly emphasized in some of the Asian political cultures is the idea of contribution towards a collective enterprise or activity so so the the central political caricature is seen as contributing towards the activities of the group. Now, that's that's a bit of an exaggeration, and I think many of us would think that a really good political community is organized in some way around each of those values. I suppose that the other thing that is prominent in my approach towards political philosophy is to think of the kinds of foundations that might be found for thinking of democracy as an important way of organizing a political community is via principally the application of this third sort of source that's to say there are things the group, a group can ask of from me just by way of participating in a worthwhile collective activity and one application of this is to decision making itself in a group. So if there's a group of us who are given a task to decide on, and we have to decide on it together. Then, one worthwhile activity I can be asked to play my part in will do my share towards is conducting reasonable collective decision making together, and that involves being bound by the decisions that we've reached and abiding by them even if I didn't agree with what the majority is decided on. And I think accepting the umpire's decision as it were, is actually an important part of being a reasonable participant in what a group does together. This is like a coordination and cooperation game. Yeah, so that there are elements of that. But I think one one way in which we resolve problems we would otherwise have with coordination problems or problems of cooperation is that we recognize that one basic form of decency is to pitch in and contribute towards what we're doing together. And I think empirical work shows that there is quite a natural and widespread disposition that most of us have towards at least conditionally cooperating with others, saying, Look, I'll play fair with you as long as you play fair with me. And that comes quite naturally to most of us. Yeah, so this brings us to our main question. So moral philosophers, political philosophers are talking about things that we ought to do. Not considerations we must have in well treating each other. But how does that idea connect with law or legal matters. Yeah, so I suppose it principally does so. And I see it in the following way. So one question we face together is, how are we going to formally regulate ourselves as a community. And the laws we come up with our answer to that. It seems to me that there are then connections between ethics and law that go in two directions. So one is the direction of laws dependence on ethics. And one way in which there is a dependence is when we ask, how does law get its authority over us, where by authority, we mean more than just that it may be wise for me or prudent not to break the law because if I get caught and punished that's going to be bad for me. But this thought that there's a demand that the law can rightly make of me and that the rest of the community can make of me to comply with the law. And I think there are really two ways in which the law gets its authority and both of them appeal to a moral underpinning. One is just if we appeal to the idea that we're sustaining the good of public order, law is important because it secures for us social order, which would be terrible for each of us to be without. Then one basic form of contributing to the common good is to be abiding by laws that secure this good for us the good of public order. So that again seems to me to appeal to the third of these forms of unselfishness that's to say a willingness to play my part or do my share towards our all together sustaining some public good. And then the second way in which I think law gets its authority is through this thing I was mentioning just a short while ago, respect for democratic decision making. So if there are fair and impartial procedures for deciding what we're going to do together and this includes regulating ourselves by agreeing on laws. Then respect for the process of democratic decision making, which itself is better than for each of us than a complete free for all does require that I accept the decisions that the group as a whole has reached through some fair procedure. So I think in those two ways law gets its authority from morality. And then sometimes the point of the law is to enforce morality where there are really important parts of interpersonal standards of behavior, such as not assaulting people and fundamentally violating their own. If they don't follow me and their own rights, then it's reasonable for us as a community to say, we're going to provide strong incentives people not to do that, we're going to protect them against being mistreated. And we as a community are going to insist that these standards are abided by. And that's, that's where legislation comes in. About authority and the legal force, sorry, affirmative force of laws. I wonder how you would react to a legal positivist would say that well loss and morality are separate things. So you can't ground one to the other. Yeah, so I think in practice. We do. When we're giving reasons for instituting a law. We do appeal to moral reasons and it's hard to see how there's anything problematic without doing so. I suppose where I would part company from positivist most fundamentally is over the question what it takes for something, not just to be a standard that's going to disincentivize behavior. But a standard that really can claim to have authority over us. And I think there has to be. We have to resort to background moral principles in order to answer that question. So a positivist picture of law where where you say, look, if you're giving an account of what law is. That is just completely exhausted by facts about legislative processes, the instant institution of certain regulations and then the existence of certain consequences for breaking them. That's that's what it is for something to be a law that for short of there being a standard which has authority over us. So someone could come along and threaten to impose a penalty on me. And it might be wise or sensible for me to try to avoid it. It's a separate matter for someone to come along say here's a standard that actually is not just to an incentive that's been provided to you to act differently than you otherwise would. I think that is an expression of the community's authority to require you to do something. And I think that does require a moral background and can't be accounted for in a purely positivistic way. Yeah, so we're the picture that you're giving us is that well here's the law is grounded on morality or some principle and actually it enforces reinforces our views of morality as well. I wonder though how that picture affects how we think about real life issues like climate change, rights of strangers that you have worked on and international aid as well. Yeah, so I think it does so in a few ways so one is, we need to ask what laws should there be. And when we're confronted with these issues, either of significant international injustice in connection with the disparities between material well being around the world, or these serious problems of coordination that arise surrounding climate change, which I would think also involves a fair element of the first kind of issue of injustice as well, given that the people who are going to suffer the most from climate change are typically the people who have contributed least to producing it. Then there are questions for us in deciding what law should be which are moral questions. But I think there's also a couple of other issues that come up which are less straightforward to deal with so one would be how far do we think we can resolve global issues like this through legislation. And then in the background there's a really big picture question about the extent to which it's actually desirable to have institutions at a global level that actually do have the authority of being able to legislate for the entire global population. And I think at right now, particularly with the issues surrounding climate change, we're sort of looking for ways of finding international institutions that fall short of actually legislating for the world, but can provide us with forums in which we can form agreements with incentives to comply with them and penalties for not complying with them, which might have the function of coordinating our actions towards something that works to the benefit of everyone. And I suppose what's going on now is really a huge and very important global experiment in how far we can get in doing that. I'll just add one other thing. So I think with several of these questions in fact all of the ones that you mentioned the question concerning climate change rights of strangers international aid. There's a question for each of us that arises, given that we don't have legislation that has yet solved these problems, what any of us individually morally ought to be doing. And I suppose many of us would think at a minimum, we shouldn't ourselves be contributing to making things worse. And more than that, where we've got the capacity to kind of help with one small corner of the problem ourselves and could do so without significant cost to ourselves. We face the question of why we're not prepared to do that. And that's a moral question that applies to us independently of how we think large scale regulation should should be conducted. Okay, so on a more personal though, what's your advice for those who want to get into professional philosophy. Okay, so I think this is a lot tougher now than when I was a graduate student first coming into the profession. It's just a lot harder to establish yourself as an academic philosopher than it used to be. And I don't say this in order to put anyone off. But I think one tip that I have for someone who's considering academic philosophy and making a career in the profession is, as you set out, you do need to have a plan B. So, you know, give it a real red hot go but have some idea of what direction you might go in if it doesn't come off. But having said that, my main bit of advice would be to think of your path into the profession as having two streams to it. So one is just really to follow your intellectual interests work as deeply and rigorously on the questions that interest you the most as you can. So that that's a that's a kind of advice to in a way be be narrow develop your your own writing and your own research as deeply and rigorously as as you can. So but that's that's only one track and the other the other track is, I think, to just get involved in as many aspects of the profession as you're given an opportunity to do so. Go to lots of conferences, do lots of teaching, get involved in professional organizations. Do outreach activities just do all the all the philosophy you can and get a feel for all of the aspects of the profession and establishing yourself as a professional philosopher requires being able to juggle those two things at the same time. And I think finding finding a balance between them is something we all need to do and the earlier you start doing it, the better. So this career is worth it, or is your career worth it. Absolutely. Yeah, so I feel extremely lucky and privileged to be able to spend a lifetime thinking about important difficult questions, you know, having the ability to do that having having the opportunity to share ideas with other people and to teach. So it's, yeah, I wouldn't try it for anything else. Okay, so on that note. Thanks again Professor Garrett quality for this interview. And for you guys join me again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we discussed things that matter from a philosophical point of. Cheers.