 Hello everyone, welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown and today we're talking about two ethicists in the analytic tradition, John Rawls and Judith Jarvis Thompson. I want to take these two as exemplars of how the approach to ethics, moral, and political philosophy changed in the latter part of the 20th century in philosophy, especially in analytic philosophy. But first let me tell you a little bit about these two philosophers. John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921. He died in 2002. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1950 and eventually was hired at Harvard in 1962, becoming a colleague of, among others, Willar Van Orman, Quine, and Morton White. Two of the most commonly cited features of Rawls's biography tend towards the tragic. So the first of these is as a child two of Rawls's younger brothers contracted diseases from him and subsequently died. So the second is that although as an undergraduate student at Princeton, Rawls was intensely religious and interested in theology after he served in the infantry in the Pacific Theater of World War II and witnessed the violence of combat and sort of the horrific aftermath of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. And also finding out about the Holocaust in Europe, John Rawls lost his faith and he became an atheist for the rest of his life. So that was another profound and in some sense tragic set of circumstances that had an impact on him. One can speculate that this sort of what he learned about the capriciousness of fate and the horrors of conflict were influential on Rawls's philosophy. After all, he emphasizes a notion of justice as fairness and he tries to ground moral and political principles in consensus, right, rather than, you know, the other way around taking the principles first. And you can see that maybe as extensions of some of these things he learned through these tragic events. Rawls became known for his reinvigoration of normative political philosophy through his theory of justice published in 1971. Though we're focusing on a rather earlier essay outline of a decision procedure for ethics in 1951, I believe his first publication. Judith Jarvis Thompson was born in New York City in 1929 and she died just this past November at the age of 91. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1959 and taught for most of her long career at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thompson worked widely in ethics and metaphysics. She's particularly known for a couple of different works in ethics in particular. Of course, the transformative essay we read for today, a defense of abortion from 1971, had a big impact on those discussions. Thompson's also known for revising and kind of making central to the debate or popularizing within philosophy the notion of the trolley problem, which was originally posed by another philosopher, Philippa Foote. But Thompson really revised it to be in the current form that we're familiar with and made it central to late 20th century discussions in ethics. I'll link to, in the description of the video and on Discord, I'll link to a quick explainer of the trolley problem if you're not familiar with it, but by this point it's such a meme that you've probably encountered it in one way or another. Now, I want to look at Thompson and Rawls as part of a late 20th century shift in the analytic tradition, in particular in thinking about how ethics is going to play a role. If you think about what we've said already about Karnap and Quine, they're representative of a fairly common stream in early and mid 20th century analytic philosophy holding that more or less logic philosophy of science, perhaps philosophy of language. This is really enough. This is the core of what philosophy should be doing. Karnap thought that ethical statements have no cognitive meaning, right? And that there was no role in philosophy for answering sort of first-order ethical questions or giving sort of first-order evaluations, ethical evaluations of actions or states of affairs. Quine also, as Morton White pointed out, seems to leave no place for normative ethics or normative epistemology in his philosophical naturalism, even though White thought he should. Quine seems to kind of leave those aside. What work in ethics was being done at mid-century within the analytic tradition seems mostly to have focused on sort of meta and foundational issues. A lot of work on the analysis of ethical language, re reinterpretation or re-description of ethical language and concepts. Also, a lot of the work focused on the ontology and epistemology of ethical claims largely in a kind of debunking mode, showing that they're not really, again, as Karnap said, cognitively meaningful. So Rawls asks us to kind of shift gears away from these kinds of meta-level questions, back to sort of more first-order normative questions about ethical actions and ethical principles. There's a sense, according to Rawls, in which we can be perfectly objective about ethics if we can just identify a reasonable procedure for deciding ethical questions. He argues this on the basis of an analogy with science. There, we don't need some foundational certainty. We don't need some access to prior metaphysical truth in order to ground scientific belief in order to consider science objectively. We just need a procedure of inductive logic that can reasonably tell us when we have a certain basis of evidence. When can we make certain kinds of inferences? We need statistics and we need logic that can tell us when we're justified in doing that. And so it is too for ethics, according to Rawls. So for Rawls, the focus of ethics is to identify principles that can justify our actions. And those principles, they don't come from some kind of transcendental realm. They're posited and grounded in the consensus of considered judgments of competent judges under certain conditions. Now there's a lot packed into that sentence. What is a competent judge? What is a considered judgment? What are the additional conditions that might be required? And those are aspects of Rawls' arguments that we can get into in our discussion. And he gives us sort of as an example almost seven such principles, rather messier theory by the way than the one he would be known for 20 years later. But what interests me not so much is not so much the principles, the structure of principles that he proposes, but the approach to saying how we can kind of come up with a procedure for deciding. Rawls focuses on our everyday need to make moral judgments and evaluations in order to act and react and deal with the issues that come up, right? So this is something that we all do, right? We all make moral judgments every day, right? Sometimes we do this in a kind of biased and self-interested way. But sometimes we do it in a more conscientious and fair-minded way. And Rawls thinks we can identify the difference and rely on this latter kind of judgment in thinking about ethical principles, right? So insofar as there is agreement or even reasonable disagreement that can be identified, we can take all those potential, sorry, we can take all those particular judgments and propose principles that if we held those principles and we deduced are what we ought to do and how we ought to evaluate things from those principles, they would justify the particular judgments that we do make, right? And then we might, if we also find the principles then particularly compelling, might actually on the margins revise some of our individual judgments. So Rawls is grounding his ethics in this everyday activity that we cannot avoid and in a way he's just untroubled by its status as we are when we make everyday judgments of what to do and when we make everyday inferences about what to believe. Rawls would later refine this method into what he would call reflective equilibrium, specifically modeling his work after Nelson Goodman's work on the justification of inductive logic. So that's Rawls. Now Thompson, at least in a defense of abortion, is less concerned with finding principles that can justify our actions and evaluations. Rather, she's interested in a specific and pretty socially intractable quandary of ethics. In other works, she might be more interested in principles. Her work on the trolley problem, for example, is a little bit more focused on principles, although there's still pretty specific principles. Now Thompson does not appeal in a defense of abortion, as Rawls would have it, to everyday common sorts of judgments. Rather, she uses quite imaginative thought experiments. These thought experiments are meant to have two features. One, they make more clear the important features of the ethical questions at issue. And two, we seem to have more obvious intuitive judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad in the thought experiment than in the original case, right? So insofar as we have a lot of disagreement about the primaries issue that we care about, abortion, the permissibility of abortion, in the thought experiments, we're supposed to have less disagreement, right? That's how the argument is supposed to work. So Thompson, in other words, depends on a kind of argument by analogy. If we accept, as the anti-abortion advocate argues, that the fetus is a person, then the question of abortion is analogous in the relevant ways, for example, to the violinist case. Since it is clear, according to Thompson, that we are not obliged to support the violinist, that's an intuitive judgment that can be justified with some other, you know, thoughts at that level. So since it's clear that we're not obliged to support the violinist, a woman is likewise not obliged to carry a fetus to term. So abortion is thus permissible. That's the general structure of all of the arguments in a defensive abortion, that kind of argument by analogy. This method is similar to Rawls's in that it seeks to ground a decision in agreement about ordinary judgments about specific cases. It's different from Rawls in that it doesn't sort of do so in relation to principles that are explicated from those judgments. And it is different from Rawls also in that it looks at different judgments about different kinds of cases. So we can ask a number of questions at this stage. What sort of intuitive judgments are more reliable, the kinds we make regularly regularly every day, as Rawls emphasizes, or judgments about extreme or unusual cases of the type that appear in Thompson's essay? Another question we might ask is, can we really reason about these ethical questions without getting into principles of one form or another? Or on the other hand, are general principles more dubious and thus reasoning by analogy more reliable? So there's lots of different views about exactly how this should go and some healthy discussion to be had about methodology within ethics. But although the range of topics has changed over time, a lot of work in ethics today works in similar ways to what Rawls is describing and Thompson is really practicing. The overall, the debunking focus of analytic philosophy has waned, especially since the end of the 20th century, as traditional topics concerning ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and other areas of philosophy have kind of returned to focus. It's now pretty rare to see philosophers using techniques of metallogic, as Karnap would have at our conceptual analysis, to try to reduce such questions to a matter of language or to eliminate their consideration entirely. Instead, it seems like analytic philosophers mostly try to talk about philosophical questions on their own terms, to take them seriously, to get clear about the issues, the concepts, the theories that are at stake, and try to articulate the strongest possible arguments in favor of this or that position on the issue. In other words, I think a lot of convergence of analytic philosophy with traditionalist philosophy. Although there are still some differences, analytic philosophy still proceeds rather more piecemeal, whereas traditionalist philosophy is a bit more systematic. Analytic philosophy still uses some of the tools like logic and the analysis of language to try to get some purchase on these questions, as since Quine, at least, also making reference to science and bringing in the relevant science has been a big strategy for analytic philosophers. But the kinds of questions, you know, they're the classic basic philosophical questions in the new forms that seem relevant today. And sort of the, you know, the bad sort of stereotypes of analytic philosophy being narrow and focus has kind of, is no longer justified, let's say. You know, we could point to other sort of distinguishing features of analytic philosophy, but they tend to be kind of qualitative and matters of degree, right? We might talk about clarity. Clarity is a bit of an obscure concept itself. So that's, but clear writing, you know, a certain kind of conceptual conservatism staying a little bit closer to the concepts used in science and everyday common sense, rather than being a little bit more conceptually adventurous as some other approaches to philosophy are. So I think, in other words, what I'm trying to say is I think that although they're focused on ethics, the kind of work we see here in Rawls and Thompson is sort of emblematic of the broadening out of analytic philosophy and the return to more traditional sorts of philosophical questions as analytic philosophy has kind of grown and become more diffuse. So that's our topic for today. And it's our last topic for the course on 19th and 20th century philosophy. This go around I may publish a short video end of this week or beginning of next week, trying to kind of wrap everything up. The big takeaways what we've learned about philosophy from looking at the history from the early 19th into the late 20th century. So that's a matter of whether I can find the time to do it. But I look forward to talking about these things with you in class and hearing what you think. And you can get in touch by discord by leaving a comment on the video or speaking up in class. Otherwise, it's been a great semester and I look forward to seeing you again in the future. Bye.