 Mae ydych chi'n meddwl i'wch gael eu cyfrofiwn nhw? Mae'r adegyddwyd ddwy gynnig i weld y cyfrofiwn i'w uchydig i bau hynny i ddiweddol i weld i ddim yn ein rhan o'r unrhyw bryd. Mae'r adegyddwyd i ddim yn ei bod yn llei, a mor bod yn ychydig i ddim wedi gydig ei bod yn y cyfrifol. Rwyf wedyn, rydyn ei wneud i'n meddwl i wneud mi, yma gydig eich four o bwysischol. Pan yda cy shoech hynny yw'r regysnig mynd i chi mor eich ysgrifau ar y ddweud nem o dy leisure. Rydyn ni uwi'n oed ynghyd o bobl попrwydd? Dyn nhw'n rai wneud oedd yllyfodd yma. Rydyn ni'n rai oedd oedd y bobl. Rydyn ni'n rai oedd y bobl ffwygaradau samodau mewn. Rydyn ni'n eu gwahyd o'r tyn nhw. Rydyn ni'n rai oedd eu phygl-wygaradau samodau am y bobl. Rydyn ni'n rai oedd eu bobl ffwygaradau samodau mewn, ond ond ond ond ond ond hysï. Rydyn ni'n rai oedd eu bwysigio ffyrddwch ar y dy leisure. Generalism and Generalism – well done. Good. The particularist believe that there are no unbreakable rules that, you have got to look at each particular situation, good and the generalist believes the opposite, that there are moral rules – good. Then, we looked at whether moral beliefs are true or false. If you remember, we did not look at the idea that they were not true or false, that they are neither true or false, which is moral scepticism. ..eithas ein byddwch am y ddweud o'r cyfrannuYp sydd wedi gwneud yr ydych chi'n rhaid. Ond nid yw'n gweld y ffaith y tro ffaith y morol gweithio ddweud continuadol... ...o ddefnyddio arweithio'r info ffaithau yng nghymru... ...y'r cyfrannu arweithio'r llai, dwi fawr? Ac rwyf wedi hollod y morol gwriad o'r tro ffaith... ..y'r bod ni'n mynd yn ymwyntности iddyn nhw. Rwyf wedi hi'n credu tyfn diwyd d butterfodol Vorol yw ymwynt yn amlwg... Dyna dwi'n'n credu hynny? Three different types of moral absolutism. O, she's good, isn't she? Absolutely, you're right. Higher order absolutism, lower order absolutism and token absolutism. That's right. Higher order absolutism – can anyone give me an example of a higher order rule that some might think would be a moral absolut? You're doing very well, so don't worry if you can't. Can you think – go on. Could you go to the great detail on that? We should promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number rather than the greatest good. But you are absolutely right. Can anyone give me an example of a lower order moral rule that some people might believe is always and everywhere true for everyone? We should always drink gin and tonic at 3 in the afternoon. We should always drink gin and tonic at 3 in the afternoon? I think you should've said 2 actually. Yes, okay, fine. And what's a token absolutist? No, that's a good try, but not quite. What does the token absolutist believe? This is actually quite a sophisticated one, so don't worry if you can't remember this one. A lie, in certain circumstances you must not tell that lie, even if you believe you should not tell lies. But in some circumstances, yes, it would be okay to tell that lie. You're so close, but not quite there, very close. It could be worried to tell that lie. That's right, absolutely, exactly. Much less complicated than your first answer. The idea is that the only moral absolutes are token moral statements, so telling that lie would be right when the Nazis are at the door saying, are there any Jews here? You look at that situation and you see, yes, in this situation telling that lie would be the right thing to do. And what's more, if that's true, it's true absolutely, okay? Well done, very good. We looked at four different theories about what moral facts might be, if you remember. I won't ask you to remember those because we looked at them very briefly and we're going to be looking at them in some depth in the weeks to follow. So, good, well done. That's well remembered for last week. Let's look at what we're going to look at today. Okay, we're going to do all these things. I'll let you read those because you can read as well as I can. Okay, so let's move on and start doing it. Okay, for a person to be legally and or morally responsible for his behaviour, he's got to satisfy two conditions. The first one is that the behaviour has got to be freely chosen and the second one is that he's got to know the difference between right and wrong. Okay, and we're going to start today by looking at each of these conditions in that order. So, let's start with looking at the condition that you've got to be acting freely before you can be morally or even legally responsible for your behaviour. Okay, we usually think of ourselves as having freely chosen our behaviour when the behaviour was intentional. Now, the idea of an intentional behaviour is actually a bit of a complicated one, but you expected that, didn't you? Okay, so what is it to act intentionally? Okay, we act intentionally when we want something, we have a desire of some kind, and we believe that we're going to achieve whatever that thing is by performing this particular action. So, thinking now about the various things I could do right at this minute, I could leap off the stage and go and shake Erika's hand, or I could leap off the stage and go to the back and run away or something like that. Why would I do that action? Why would I perform that action intentionally? Well, there's got to be something I want, a desire of mine, to escape you all perhaps. You're all asking me too many questions. I'm off, and I believe that by running away, I'm going to achieve that end. I'm going to escape you all. Okay, so there are two elements to an intentional action, a desire and a belief, and the belief is about the behaviour, namely that performing that behaviour will achieve that end. Okay, none of this should be new to you because you actually, in understanding the word intention, you understand all that, but you don't usually see it laid out explicitly in the way I'm laying it out. Okay, so we perform an action intending to achieve an end, something that we desire. So one who trips over a carpet isn't acting intentionally. Okay, something has happened to him, but one who pretends to trip over a carpet is acting intentionally because pretends, if you think of the concept of pretence, you can't pretend to do something except intentionally, can you? There must be a reason why you're pretending to do it. There must be something you want and something that you believe you will get by pretending to do whatever it is that you pretend to do. So actually, let me just ask, I mean, can you think of any intentions with which somebody might trip over a carpet? They wanted to show that the carpet's unsafe. Yes, okay, they might have complained about it before, but nobody's acted, so they're trying to show that it's unsafe. Yep. They might be trying to make people laugh. Yep, absolutely. They might have decided they wanted to sue somebody. Yes, absolutely. Okay, good. So imagine that Tom in reaching for his pen knocks over his mum's mug, so I reach out for my pen and knock over this glass, something similar. I would defend myself by saying I didn't do it intentionally, and so's Tom going to say that. But that makes it sound as if there are actions, things that we choose to do that are not intentional somehow. And this is a complication that we solve in this way. Okay, his action was intentional, but only under a certain description, under the description, he was trying to get the pen. Okay, that's what he was doing, wasn't he? He was trying to get the pen. He wanted to get the pen and he believed that by reaching out in that way he would get the pen. The very action that was the reaching out to get the pen was also the action that caused the spilling of mum's coffee, the knocking over of mum's mug, but it wasn't intentional under that description. Do you see the difference? So any action, any token action, so if you just take this as a token action, it's going to be describable in all sorts of different ways. So each one of these lines that I've drawn here could have a description attached to it. So this is Marianne writing on a flip chart. It's an action of Marianne's. It's at 10 minutes past two. Do you see what I mean? Each different description is a description of one in the same action, and it need only be intentional under one of those descriptions for it to be an intentional action, and therefore for me to be responsible for it, having chosen to do it. Sorry, what's an error in belief? Well, he believed that by reaching out here he would pick up the pen. And he believed that that was a reasonable thing to do. He believed that it was going to have other consequences. Well, let me just see if I answer the question in the next one. So we might hold Tom responsible for carelessness if, for example, it should have been obvious to him that in reaching out like that he would have knocked over his mum's mug. So he'd say, I didn't mean to do that. And his mum would say, oh, for goodness sake, you must have seen that you were going to do that. So he's responsible for carelessness, but he still didn't intentionally knock over his. So it was an intentional action of his that resulted in the mugs being knocked over. So it was intentional. He had an intention in reaching out. Because it was his intentional action, he is responsible for knocking over the mug, but he may have knocked it over intentionally. And then the question is, was he careless or not? Could he have foreseen if he had thought about his action? So, okay, he didn't act with the intention of achieving that end. So actions are intentional only under or only relative to, to use the vocabulary we were using last week, certain descriptions. And we're morally and legally responsible for the action only under the description in which we acted intentionally. So someone's guilty of manslaughter if an intentional action of theirs caused the death of someone, but they didn't intend the action to have that consequence. Do you see how in law you've got to have intended someone's death in order to be guilty of murder? If you didn't intend their death, you can be guilty only of manslaughter or various other things like cult, negligence, and so on. Well, no. Because a lot of the things that we do are unconscious. So, for example, I often don't realise when I'm lifting up this glass to have a drink. But so there is an unconscious desire to have a drink and an unconscious intention. But of course, actually, nevertheless, the intention was there. This is something I do so often and so regularly that I don't need to be conscious of it in order to do it. But if you said to me, why are you picking up the glass? I would be able to answer that question. So it may be below the level of consciousness, but it can be brought to consciousness fairly easily. We usually know why we act, not always actually, which is interesting. Sorry, there are lots of questions now. I'm going to take one and then go on, because otherwise I'm… Would it make a difference if you argued that you were genetically programmed towards something like you were genetically programmed towards violence? How would that influence your intention of what happened? OK, so if I had the MA01 gene, I think it is, I'm not sure, which seems to correlate with extreme violence, could I use that in a court of law to say, yes, I did it, but I didn't do it intentionally? That would be the argument there. You say, could you ask that? Well, of course, that's a very big question, isn't it? Because we would usually say that somebody who can be clinically shown to be a kleptomaniac shouldn't be done for stealing. Well, if somebody has this gene and it does correlate, I suppose a lot of questions would be asked about how well it correlated, etc, etc. But yes, your question shows that you've understood what's going on here. It's intentional only if you are acting on the intention to achieve some end, some desire of yours. OK, so there are behaviours that are not intentional under any description, such as tripping over a carpet, and there are actions that are intentional under some description pretending to trip over the carpet, and only the latter are believed by us to be freely chosen. OK, so of the behaviours that are intentional under some description, they're all going to be describable, yes, in many different ways. Actually, that's the point I made earlier. So here's a token action. Here are lots of different descriptions of this action. It's intentional under this description, let's say, but not under any of the others. So that's the description under which it was intentional. OK, but some people deny that even our intentional actions are freely chosen. Some people believe that all our behaviours are causally determined by the laws of nature, the situation in which we find ourselves, and our upbringing. So, I think probably most people in this room remember the early 70s. If you don't, I apologise. But in the early 70s it became very fashionable to say that everything was conditioned, didn't it? That when you did things, you did it, not because you chose them freely, but because you had been conditioned to do them. Well, what they were talking about there was our upbringing. Your mention of genetic determinism, the idea that somebody with a specific gene might be given to extreme violence, not because he intended to cause any damage, but simply because he was genetically programmed, I think it was the word you used, to cause that damage. And of course, actually, there's always going to be a trigger. So the laws of nature are such and such. So it says that anyone with this gene is going to engage in extreme violence. Well, that doesn't mean he's going to engage in extreme violence all the time. It means probably that he's easily triggered. So whereas something that somebody else would shrug off, he goes ballistic, punches somebody and so on and so forth. So a combination of his genetic nature, if you like, the situation in which he's found himself, and in this case, I'm not sure his upbringing would necessarily have anything to do with it, but can you see a combination of these things? If all these things determine us to do things, the question is, are we free to make any choices at all? Do we ever really choose to act at all? Now, anyone who believes that we don't choose to act, or I'm sorry, let me rephrase that. Anyone who believes that we are causally determined, that all our behaviour is causally determined, is called a determinist. And they come in two varieties. There are the hard ones and the soft ones. So hard determinists believe that all our behaviours are causally determined, that none of them is free, nothing we ever do, do we freely choose to do. And the idea that we have free will to a hard determinist is simply an illusion. So free will and determinism are incompatible, logically incompatible, think the determinists. And therefore, as each one of our behaviours is causally determined, none of them is free, nothing we do was freely chosen by us. That's a hard determinist. But a soft determinist believes that even if all our behaviours are causally determined, it's still the case that they can be freely chosen. So whereas the hard determinist thinks that determinism is inconsistent with free will, the soft determinist believes that determinism is consistent with free will. So some of our behaviours are both causally determined and freely chosen by us. So for example, a philosopher called Donald Davidson would say that the things that cause us to act are our own beliefs and our own desires. And if that's what causes us to act, then surely we've got as much free will as we could possibly want, he says. That's a compatibilist. And they're called compatibilists, as well as soft determinists, for the rather obvious reason that they believe free will and determinism are compatible. OK, libertarians, on the other hand, believe some of our actions are freely chosen and that these actions are not causally determined. OK, so they go along with the hard determinist in thinking that free will and causal determinism are incompatible, but they believe that it's not the case that all our behaviours are determined. Are you with me? So just to summarise that, nobody believes that all our behaviours are freely chosen because we all recognise that when we trip over a carpet, we didn't choose to do that. OK, that was a causally determined behaviour. We can all accept that. But we like to think that some of our behaviours are freely chosen. The hard determinist thinks we're wrong because all our behaviours are causally determined and that's inconsistent with being free, so none of our behaviours are free. The compatibilist or soft determinist believes that some of our behaviours are freely chosen but that all our behaviours are causally determined. And the libertarian believes that some of our behaviours really are freely chosen that not everything is causally determined. So here are the options and have a quick look at that and see where they all fit. OK, I did just say all that a minute ago. So where do you stand on this? So let's discuss this for a few minutes because this is a big question, isn't it? OK, so who's a hard determinist? Come on, who's the hard-nosed one amongst us? Yes, a hard determinist is one who believes that all our behaviours are causally determined and that means that none of our behaviours are free. OK, who's a hard determinist? Anyone? No, OK, or at least nobody's prepared to admit to being a hard determinist. We might come back to that in a minute. OK, who's a libertarian? Somebody who believes that it's not the case that all our behaviours are causally determined, so some of them are free. OK, quite a few libertarians, oh, quite a few libertarians. OK, and who's a compatabilist or a soft determinist? This is someone who believes that all our behaviours are causally determined, but that's consistent or compatible with some of them being free. OK, right, quite a few. OK, usually there are more people who want to be a compatabilist than this. It's always tempting, I think, to be a soft determinist or a compatabilist, and the reason is that that enables us to be scientifically respectable because we can admit that everything is causally determined. Actually, no scientist believes everything is causally determined these days, but so we've got to loosen that up a bit, but let me leave that in there just for the sake of arguments at the moment. So we can be scientific realists, we think, by being a compatabilist, and we can also maintain our belief in free will. Well, you know, what's not like? These are two things we both want to do. Let's do them. And unfortunately, anyone who came to my critical reasoning course last year will know that wanting it to be the case that P is a lousy reason for believing that it is the case that P. OK, we might want to be compatabilists, but actually it's really quite difficult because the reason that Libertarians and hard determinists aren't compatabilists is because they believe that actually it's logically inconsistent compatabilism because how can an action, a token action, one and the same action be both causally determined and free? That's the question. OK, so if we don't have free will, then the question of whether we're morally responsible for any of our actions becomes a very big question. I mean, lots of people, the question about the extreme violent person who's genetically determined to be extremely violent. Lots of people think these days that genetic determinism is true. Well, if it is true, then are any of us morally responsible for our behaviours? If we can't do anything other than what we actually do, then in what sense are we morally responsible for our behaviour? Surely it's just not very useful to end up with a situation which says no one's morally responsible because society relies on rules of some sort which we make up to control ourselves and it sort of leads you down the road of saying, well, if no one's morally responsible, we won't have any rules. Absolutely. This is why this is such a big question because we absolutely can't run as a society, can we, without at least the law of the land? I mean, if there are no moral facts, which is one of the things we considered last week, we know there to be legal facts and we absolutely need these laws and therefore we need some concept of legal responsibility and I suggest we need some concept of moral responsibility too, but the question becomes, if this is true, is what is that concept? How are we to motivate the concept of legal and moral responsibility if we accept determinism? So that's the question. Just one more question and then I'll move on. Now it's just thought it was interesting you saying that no scientists believe that... Yes, I'd like to know why. Caution in the term, because I would have said in a way I wasn't hard, whatever it is called. Determinist. Determinist, but it's not useful to be one. Because I mean, scientific, I don't know, but I would have thought scientifically that was more likely... Well, the reason, I mean, people think there are not deterministic laws. One reason would be quantum mechanics, which suggests that there are things that are undetermined. But of course, actually, you wouldn't want to motivate free will by the idea of things happening at random either, would you? Because our intentional behaviour doesn't appear to be something that's undetermined. I mean, when we act, we choose to act for reasons. Our reasons seem to cause us to act, so there are causes for our actions, but they don't appear to be deterministic causes in the way that physical causes seem to be at least more to the deterministic end of the spectrum. Could they not be like genetics where there is randomness and basically the stuff that works tend to float to the top? As I said, I was only going to take that one question. I think we'll have to leave that on one side. There might be some room left at the end for questions. We'll have to come back and look at this. But you can see, can't you, what a huge question this is. Free will is absolutely central to our notion of morality, to our notion of moral responsibility and indeed legal responsibility. And if it's correct that we don't have free will, somehow we've got to motivate the idea of moral responsibility but without free will. And that's quite a big question. And obviously there's a whole industry of people doing this. I mean, this keeps philosophers in jobs for life, so we like big questions. Okay, let's move on. So that was the first condition for being morally responsible that we act freely, that we choose our actions. I mean, one of the reasons we don't think of dogs and cats, for example, as morally responsible is we don't think of them as choosing their actions. They seem to be causally determined, let's say. But the other one is the idea that we're only morally and legally responsible if we can distinguish between right and wrong. So if you think back to your genesis where Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and then they became like gods understanding good and evil. Until that point, they couldn't do anything wrong or right, could they? Because they didn't have any concept of the distinction between right and wrong. And actually, this is where Genesis is interestingly contradictory here, isn't it? Can anyone see the contradiction immediately? Because, of course, there was a wrong action, wasn't there? The very eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Yeah, okay, but if you think of that sort of thing, until you do something knowing that you're doing the wrong thing, the thought goes you're not morally responsible for it, which is why young children are not morally responsible for their actions, very young ones. As they grow up, they become morally responsible because they start to learn the difference between right and wrong. Okay, so we're morally culpable for an action, only if we choose to perform it, knowing that we're doing something wrong, okay? So we do wrong knowingly. Actually, Socrates claimed that we never do wrong knowingly, because if we do something that's against a rule, we do it because at the moment, we don't believe in that rule. So, and let's put this in a non-moral context for a moment. I don't want to eat cream cakes because I'm getting fat and therefore I want to lose weight, so I don't want to eat cream cakes. So how come I'm eating this cream cake right now? Answer, at the moment that I reached the cream cake, I didn't want to be on the diet. I wanted the cream cake more than I wanted to be slim. So I never act against my beliefs about what the best action is. And in the same way, when you do something, you don't do it believing it to be wrong. At the moment you do it, says Socrates, you believe it to be right. We never act knowingly to do the wrong thing. But let's put Socrates on one side. Usually, we think we need to know that an action is wrong in order to be morally responsible. So we don't start life as moral agents because we don't start life with the ability to distinguish right and wrong. In order to become morally responsible, we've actually got to acquire an understanding of when an action is right and when an action is wrong. And that's why children are not usually deemed responsible under the law until in this country it's 12. Sorry, it used to be 12, it's now 10, I think. Do you remember when those two young boys recently, I've forgotten their names, but... Well, Thompson and Venables, yes. But just recently there was another case, wasn't there, when again the boys were 10 and there was a big thing about whether they could be tried at all for this act. Because were they of an age of legal responsibility or not, they were right on the borderline of it. And that's what's going on there. Okay, you might think that this is a requirement too far. Can we really claim to have moral knowledge at all? Okay, do you remember last week we were thinking about whether or not there are moral facts. And of course the question of whether we can know that there are moral facts is a completely different question. There might be moral facts but we can't know what there are or there might not be moral facts at all, okay? So this is a difference between metaphysics and epistemology. And anyone who's done philosophy before, well I'm sure, have come across this distinction. It's a very important distinction. When you're talking about metaphysics, I think I might have done this. Yes, okay. Moral epistemology is concerned with how we justify beliefs about right and wrong and whether they count as knowledge. So what can we know about right and wrong? How can we justify claims to this knowledge and so on? And moral metaphysics is concerned with the nature of moral values and whether they exist at all. So again, to take it out of a moral context, there's the world that we picture, okay? And there's our pictures of that world. Are you with me? So there's the chair about which I have a belief. And here, I don't think it's in my head actually but let's say it is, here is the belief about that chair. So we've got to distinguish between those two things. And putting it in that sort of way, the world that we picture is metaphysics and our picture of the world is epistemology. Our beliefs, our knowledge of that world. It doesn't quite work that way because of course there's the metaphysics of knowledge. When we're asking about the nature of beliefs and whether beliefs exist, do you see what I mean? Then we're doing metaphysics of beliefs. So it's not the case that if it's immediately to do with belief, it's to do with epistemology because we might be doing the metaphysics of epistemology. If you like, just to confuse everything. Okay, here's a little quiz for you. Okay, I'm going to let you have a minute or two to sort those. Don't yell out, just do it in your head and then we'll do them together. Okay, I think that's enough time. Okay, which is an epistemological question and which is a metaphysical one? How do we know that whether an action is right or wrong? Epistemology or metaphysics? Well done, it's epistemology. That's right. What justifies us in believing that lying is wrong? Hand up if you think it's epistemology. Okay, hand up if you think it's metaphysics. Oh dear. Justification? What's that? I'm looking at number two. I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you said. Esprismology. It is epistemology. Yup, that's right. So just look back at the definitions very quickly. Epistemology is concerned with how we justify beliefs and whether they count as knowledge, whether our beliefs count as knowledge. Okay, what about number three? Are moral judgments right or wrong? Actually true or false, I should have put there. Okay, metaphysics? Hands up. Okay, epistemology. Oops, it's the metaphysics ones. Have it on that one. That's metaphysics. Can we ever be certain about the truth of a moral claim? Epistemology? Okay, metaphysics? Okay, it's epistemology, that one. Okay, if moral values really exist, what is their nature? Metaphysics? Metaphysics, good. Okay, I think you all got that one. How can we be sure that it is always and everywhere wrong to kill? How can we be sure? Is that epistemology or metaphysics? Epistemology, hands up. Good, well done. And do moral values really exist? Metaphysics, good, well done. Okay, like last week, as we got to the end of it, you were beginning to get it right even if you started off getting it a bit wrong. Don't worry about it because it's going to come up throughout the lectures and every time it does, I'll point to the fact that this is either metaphysics or epistemology, and if one of us gets confused, including me, I'll then try and sort out the confusion. But you need to be aware of that distinction. Can we ever be certain about the truth of a moral claim? That one's epistemology and what gives it away is the word certain because certainty is to do with knowledge rather than to do with truth. I mean, we've got to be a bit careful there because, of course, knowledge involves truth, but knowledge goes further than truth, doesn't it? There's got to be something else there. One more question. When one's doing science, epistemology is very important and can be conversed about. Once you usually, when one gets onto metaphysical questions, once you usually shoot into a corner and say, don't go there, it's too hard. Is this the same thing that happened in ethics? No, because both metaphysics and epistemology are difficult. And if we were going to shy away from difficult questions, we could all pack up and go home now. And I'm shocked to hear the scientists. They're not trained in metaphysics. Yes, quite. Actually, I'm just writing a lecture at the moment on metaphysics for scientists, which I'm having the most terrible trouble writing because, well, never mind. You don't need to know that, but I am having the most terrible trouble writing it. It's very interesting. OK, so think back to last week and our discussion of particularism and generalism. To which one do you think does the idea of moral knowledge come more easily? It's a difficult question, this one. And if you have trouble with it, that's perfectly reasonable. Generalism, I think you're right. Why? Because knowledge implies knowledge is something that exists. And if you're a particularist, then you're saying that you don't have these rules, absolute moral facts. You can't learn. No, you could still have moral facts, but then they're going to be token facts, not rules. But I think you're right to mention rules. The fact is, actually, if there are moral rules and if there are lower order rules, like don't lie, keep promises, et cetera, moral knowledge comes very easily, doesn't it? All you have to do is see that an action has a certain property, the property of being a lie or the property of keeping a promise or something like that, and you see at the same time that it's the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. So moral knowledge comes very easily if you subscribe to lower order absolutism. But actually it doesn't quite work like that because we don't always know what falls under a rule. I mean, for example, we looked at the dilemma. We could see which rules applied there be kind and be honest, but we couldn't see which one we ought to act on, could we? Not at all obvious which one we ought to act on, so they come into conflict. And if we consider the higher order rules, produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, well, do you remember, did I mention Hiroshima? I'm not sure, but dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, there is a fact of the matter of whether that led to the greatest happiness or didn't lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. There can be a lot of disagreement about which was the fact in that case, wasn't it? So actually having rules doesn't always lead to an easier form of moral knowledge. And of course with the other thing is that particularists might not know in advance whether an action is going to be right or wrong because they need to know the whole situation, for example. But given a token action, we sometimes, actually, we often feel certain we know what's right or wrong. So the reason I use the example of the Nazis and the Jews is because I am absolutely sure that everybody in this room is going to have the strong intuition that in that situation the right thing to do is to tell a lie. And there are loads of examples that I'm going to bring up because I know exactly which intuitions they're going to stimulate from you because once I give you the situation and let's think about your friend again who comes home and says what do you think of my hair and you think yuck. Okay, what if this is the first time you've seen me smile for six months? Okay, I've been really miserable for six months. This is the first time you've seen me smile. Are you going to be honest about not liking my hair or is that going to tip you towards being kind? So do you see by filling in just a little more of the backgrounds a little more of the situation I can shift your intuitions this way and that way because actually you have very strong particularist intuitions about what's right and what's wrong. So actually moral knowledge is a big thing. Do we have it at all? And if we do have it what is it? Is it a matter of applying a rule? And if so is it lower order rules or higher order rules? And if it isn't a matter of applying a rule is it a matter of a sort of moral sense a moral intuition that we just somehow know just in the same way we can see blue can we see that an action is right or wrong although seeing wouldn't be a sense perception in this case. Do you see what I mean? The question of moral knowledge is another very big one. Here are some different justifications we might have. We might say as I've just suggested that we have a moral sense so Kant believed that we could see right and wrong for example. We might say that we know inductively which behaviours are likely to be or you could put a bracket around those right and wrong. So utilitarians are inductivists. They believe that it's by seeing that an action doesn't produce the happiness over time that you form the rule that this action is wrong this type of action is wrong or you might say and we're going to look at this in a bit more depth in a minute that we have a tacit agreement in other words we know because we know from the agreements we have which actions are right or wrong so you'd be tending towards a cultural account of morality there. But the questions of whether we have moral knowledge and how we have moral knowledge are two huge questions that I'm going to leave you to ponder. So that's three questions you've got at the moment you've got do we have free will or you could include in that is determinism true in any form and now these two I'm going to leave you with those and remember that we're going to be coming back to these questions throughout the four weeks that we're looking at the different moral theories. So this is not your last chance to think about this this is just introducing you to the background. Okay the moral law and the law of the land differ when it comes to knowledge. Okay big question about possession of moral knowledge but the law of the land necessarily is made explicit. You cannot have well in fact there's something very badly wrong there are places where the laws are not written down you can fall foul of the law without realising you are but we we tend to think of those societies as there's something wrong with them because we believe that the law of the land should be made public and that ignorance of it isn't a defence because it's made public in such a way that that you can't really defend yourself by saying that you didn't know such and such was a law. I thought about I didn't know I couldn't park here to gov. Okay that the moral law differs from the law of the land is absolutely clear I hope. Can you think of an action that's immoral but not illegal? What? Hundreds. Hundreds? Would you like to give me one? Infidelity yes absolutely that's maybe immoral but it's certainly not illegal. Okay telling your mum she looks great when you don't think she does that's not illegal but arguably it's immoral etc. There are lots of actions that are immoral but not illegal. What about an action that's illegal but not immoral? This is slightly more difficult because the very fact that it's illegal might make you think that doing it makes it immoral but if we put that complication on one side for a minute can you think of an action that's illegal but not immoral? Certain medical interventions near death. That's interesting okay helping someone to die assisting someone to commit suicide. That's certainly illegal in this country but is it immoral? Very big question. It's not illegal everywhere is it? No but it is in this country. Okay did you have one? Like I said parking on a WLO line. Parking on a WLO line there's nothing intrinsically immoral about that is there? I'm sure. Oh is there? If there is anything immoral about it it's only that it's against the law I assume. This is outside your house in which case it would be very annoying. It could be very annoying okay. Yes yes it's certainly parking dangerously is probably immoral. Okay we sometimes think laws are unjust but how can a law be unjust? How can it be that a law ought to be made or that a law ought to be scrapped? If there isn't some idea of ought that's over and above the idea of the law of the land itself. Do you see what I mean? If the law if there's nothing more than the law of the land then no law of the land could be unjust could it? You must be using an idea of unjust here or not fair or something like that that's something in addition to the law of the land. So the moral law and in using the moral law here I'm not necessarily talking about rules I'm talking about the way it has seems to have authority over us when we see that something's right we see that we ought to do it. The moral law and the law of the land are two quite different things and if they're quite different things it becomes very interesting to ask well what's the relation between them? How is the moral law related to the law of the land and vice versa? Okay John Locke I think you've probably all heard of John Locke famous English philosopher he actually had a hand in writing the American constitution so if I were teaching loads of Americans here they would be very interested to hear that on his book Two Treaties of Government their constitution rests. Okay he believed that the law of the land must be firmly based on the moral law that if it wasn't there was something wrong. Okay there's his argument for that is that he believed in the state of nature okay and the state of nature is the state we were in before we became a nation-state or a society so presumably there was a time when we all just lived as sort of loose tribes or loose families or that sort of thing there was no law there was no state that could call us to order and a lot of philosophers often appeal to the state of nature in thinking about moral and political philosophy because of course you want to know what came along with the state and what was already there before and Locke believed that in the state of nature so before there were any laws of the land the moral law already existed he called it the law of nature but actually by the law of nature he meant God's law so and he claimed it as preserved as much as possible so even in the state of nature we were required to preserve as much as possible so to go wantonly chopping down trees wouldn't have been would have been a violation of God's law of the law of nature to go chopping down people would be even more of a violation of God's law he believed that the idea of a law without a sanction is incoherent if you've got a law there's got to be some sort of downside of breaking it otherwise what makes us a law at all so he also believed that in the state of nature each of us held the executive power of the law of nature the right to punish violations of it so if I'm in my cave and Erica is beside me and I'm looking after her and you come along and beat her up you know I've got the right to beat you up in return because if she's my property or if she's a dependent on me and you violate that then I have the executive power of the law of nature and I have the right to self-defence and to defend my property and okay I want you to think about this let's imagine now that we're in the state of nature and this is what the situation is so there is a law of nature there is a moral law that says that we can't go around destroying things and we each have the executive power of the law of nature we can also all wield this sanction if we see a violation of the law of nature okay do you like this or not? you don't like it okay sorry what did you say? is it not contrary to if what was referring back to God's law is there a sort of a tip for tap thing not contrary to God's law? no because if you violate God's law if anyone is is entitled so if I come and attack you that's a violation of God's law you have the right to defend yourself against me we're not talking about the christian god here necessarily maybe we are but but if you perceive my attacking you as a violation of the law of nature you have the right to defend yourself according to lock according to lock yep yep well it's it's lock we're discussing here yes I mean there are different people have different views about the state of nature yeah I just think the sort of you know hitting someone back is not well but I think you're we're actually talking about what you're asking about here because what I want to ask now is what what what do you think of this you don't like it lots of people said why not in what way in other words if I just tap her on the shoulder and and she she annihilates me that that's wrong okay good yes I think that's probably right any other reasons for thinking it's wrong chopping down trees to create fields to grow food might be a reason for chopping down the trees some people might be against chopping down the trees because they need the trees think they want the berries from the trees or firewood or whatever so there's there are in a conflicts in okay so there's no way to police conflicts or different beliefs about what the law of nature states okay did you have your hand up good yeah that would be another thing so so if somebody goes and beats up this lady here whose name I've forgotten Margaret and somebody goes and beats up where's a nice strong man here John'll do okay somebody goes and beats up John there might there's going to be a different response isn't there because it perhaps John is better able to defend himself than Margaret is I don't know you may be a jiu jit so champion for all I know but yeah okay so there are lots of drawbacks sorry there's one more here I was going to say wouldn't this turn towards anarchy well if anarchy is the definition of without law then yes indeed it is anarchy but of course there's nothing wrong with that because we tend to think of anarchy as wrong because it means that the dissolution of the rule of law but here there is no rule of law all there is is the law of nature or God's law so there is no state to impose the rule of law okay Locke believed that there would be serious inconveniences he called them rather sweetly in the state of nature and you've you've got them actually all of them there's no impartial judgment so if I'm very hot-tempered and somebody comes and taps me on the knee and I oh actually it was you who was hot-tempered wasn't it I tap you on the knee and you annihilate me okay there's no impartial judgment there's also no standard punishment as you said that punishment isn't necessarily consonant with the crime and also force wouldn't necessarily be on the side of the right if I can defend myself very well but I tend to be hot-tempered a violation of my property rights for example might be punished very differently from a violation of somebody else's property rights so all sorts of major inconveniences here and Locke proposed to solve this in this way he thinks it would be rational for us and actually it would wouldn't it I mean if we were in that situation and we started to get worried about this we probably would all want to come together and form a few agreements about what the law should be interpreted as and how it would be punished and who would punish it and so on and this is exactly what Locke thought he thought that we would transfer our individual executive power into the hands of the community and then accept majority opinion on who should wield this power so we all come together and we say okay I won't take the law into my own hands as we think of it and the law will be in the hands of the law the executive but we would have to then elect an executive wouldn't we we'd have to elect a government to wield the executive power of the law of nature so we this is a two-step process for Locke firstly we contract with each other to accept majority rule and to relinquish our individual executive power so we no longer punish violations of the law of nature ourselves and secondly we consent to the executive as decided by the majority so we get together we say okay we're not going to take the law into our own hands but who's going to look after it who's going to be responsible for it and we elect those five there to wield our executive power and so next time you come and beat me up instead of beating you up back or getting John to do it for me I go to this slot and I say oy look look look what she's just done to me will you punish this and you've got your book of rules and you go down you see okay that that sort of violation this sort of punishment and you can see how our rule of law would be generated by that sort of process and ingeniously the two-step process generates the conditions of justified rebellion and this mattered to Locke a great deal Locke went to Westminster school and he was there aged 14 when the only act of registered in this country was committed within his hearing he certainly would have heard the bang of the crowds and so on when Charles the first was the first wasn't it well I have to get that right was executed and the question of when it was right to rebel against the government properly elected government or in this case a king with a divine right was a big question for him so this two-step process does that because he thinks that when the government fails to execute the law of nature when for example I'm sorry I've gotten your name too when Helen beats me up and I go and complain to you and you say oh we like Helen we don't like you therefore we're not going to do anything about it you're failing to execute the law of nature and I'm going to start thinking oh hang on you know why did I give up my executive power for that lot to do it that they're not doing their job and that's the sort of thing that makes you want to take the law into your own hands doesn't it it's exactly the sort of thing that leads to the setting up of vigilantes etc or when the government goes further than the law of nature permits and says okay let's say they get a bit big for their boots they look as if they're going to get a bit big for their boots don't they and they start telling us what to do here and what to do here and what time to go to bed and they start they become a nanny state perhaps at that point we might start thinking well hang on I don't like this I wouldn't have agreed to this if I realized that's what we were getting into so under these two conditions thinks Locke you're actually going to back off and you're going to the government is going to lose your consent so the government loses the attitudinal consent of the people and according to Locke I've seen your question I'll come back in a minute it should now resign okay so when yes cynical laughter is it okay it should now resign and if it doesn't rebellion is justified okay so actually this is happening right now isn't it in a very big and very interesting way in Egypt and indeed it happened in Tunisia rather more smoothly but that's exactly what's happening the Egyptian government has lost the attitudinal consent of the body politic it should resign it's not going to and things are actually really getting very uncomfortable aren't they very very um because rebellion lots of people do think rebellion is justified I mean one of the difficulties actually of Locke's theories he thinks that it's only when the majority lose the attitudinal consent that there's the right to rebel and of course the question of when the majority does becomes an empirical question have we got sort of question numbers isn't it so but it's a very ingenious theory you've both got oh sorry I just need to say this we never return to the state of nature we only ever return to the body politic it never becomes the case that you take the executive power of the law of nature back into your own hands it's never the case that the individual has again the right to wields the executive power we return only to this body politic where we've got the agreements that we'll we're a community and then we need to decide on a new government okay question Locke's argument can surely only ever be true for a democracy if there is a dictatorship or some other different form of government and I can't see how Locke's argument can possibly hold well Locke relies on but never justifies his belief that it's going to be majority decision making what what we could do of course having given up our executive power we could all decide to elect you as a dictator you and your your progeny yes add in for an item you know it would just be always you and your progeny we could do that couldn't we I think Locke thinks that that would be such an obviously stupid move that he didn't even consider it I'm sorry not that wasn't an insult I'm sure you and your progeny are very nice but the idea of giving up our executive power so it would go into the hands of one person and his his it was Egypt that triggered me to think about this because I would perhaps argue that Egypt is not a democracy in the way that we might see it as such well no it's not and the question is is that what they're trying to get but you're you're absolutely right that Locke just assumes that that would go for majority rule Locke has given the conditions under which we would move on he's explained why we would move from the state of nature he's assumed that we'd accept majority rule but what the important thing I wanted to get across is the idea that this is a two-step process and that the two steps allow for a theory of justified rebellion so what Locke has done ingeniously and I do recommend reading two treaties of government because it's very easy to read and very interesting he shows us gives us an account of political obligation of why we should obey the law and an account of when we shouldn't obey the law of when we're justified in rebelling against the law so according to Locke our obligation to obey the law rests on the notion of consent together with our pre-existing obligation to obey the moral law which is an obligation to God and you might think this is actually rather a shaky resting place the idea of consent is a very difficult one did any of you consent to obey the law or any of you naturalised citizens no okay so there's nobody in there are any of you American no okay so there's nobody in this room who has consented to obey the law in America in schools they do consent to obey the law every day they swear allegiance to the flag every morning yes that's a very good question they're very young when they do it so of course you've then got another question they do consent but is it real consent if you ask them to consent at that sort of age and of course under those conditions where everyone's expected to do it and etc etc are they really consenting I think most of us would probably say no if one of our ancestors coming out of the state of nature consented well why does that bind us I mean I don't take myself to be bound by something that my great great great great grandfather said um we might say well it's tacit consent of some kind I mean if if we all went to the pub afterwards and that's rather a lot of assistance isn't it I'll take the executive to the pub come on you five we'll go down to the pub they'll buy me a drink can I say thanks everyone I'm off now they might think yes hang on she got five drinks there and then disappeared before buying hers by agreeing to a round system you tacitly consent don't you to buying your own round I mean there are people who escape this I mean there was a time when women weren't expected to to play this game and certainly if somebody is very young if you've got 16 year old with you on the whole you don't expect them to to join in so there are exceptions to this but on the whole you tacitly consent to something when you know that you're taking on an obligation by your actions well we've all if we've all been educated in England England has paid for or Britain I should say Britain has paid for our education even if we went to independent school there was still an amount of money that was sitting there waiting for us and we use the national health service probably if we've ever been taken to hospital by ambulance or something like that does our gratitude to the state confer on us an obligation to obey the law do we somehow consent to the law at least tacitly by staying in the country and using its services no why not who said that you said that yeah no it doesn't feel right for first nothing wrong with intuitions then you don't want them to be at the end of argument but but you need them to start it no we don't carry on that then okay you don't it's certainly true isn't it if somebody came and gave me a birthday present that I hadn't looked for I would be obliged to say thank you but it's not obvious I'd be obliged to do anything else could you say that the people of Egypt have given their passive consent up until now by living quietly for the last 30 years well that would be this sort of argument yes what do we think about this have they would you say the international community also give it a passive consent to what to the Egyptian government yes absolutely that's right by by interacting with the Egyptian government the international community has given its tacit consent perhaps but you you might ask again well actually why were they living quietly because anyone who was noisy was cut well I actually don't know anything about the Egyptian society so I'm just assuming this but I assume that I would live quietly if the alternative was being casted off to prison and beaten on the souls of my feet or something like that I would live very quietly I was just by voting where tacitly consenting yes that's a good one isn't it by voting are we not we're actually actively engaging in the situation but actually here's an interesting question if I voted Labour in the last government and I did say if I voted Labour I'm not telling you what I voted if I voted in Labour in the last government am I required to obey the laws of this government yes you've given your tacit consent to the you think so do you okay a lot of people would say that by but does that mean that if I didn't vote at all in the last election that I'm thereby free to to disobey the law because I I didn't tacitly consent you had the ability to vote you opted not to vote but I opted not to vote because I didn't want to obey the law is there any way that I could opt out of the obligation to obey the law it looks as if there isn't actually isn't there even if I moved I'd be under some law somewhere wouldn't I so actually the fact I can't do anything to opt out suggests that maybe I'm not bound by the fact that I stay what else can I do anyway we don't need to go into this anymore but what I'm doing is this consent theory is really a very shaky foundation for the idea of the obligation to obey the law and of course there's also this pre-existing moral obligation and Locke believes that in the state of nature we're already bound to obey God's law the law of nature the moral law well where does that come from actually I mean is there you know is there just a natural obligation to obey the moral law to do the right thing maybe there is but it it's not obvious that this is a brute fact is it so okay that's Locke's theory so and here's another question for you to ponder do you agree with Locke that the law of the land must rest on the moral law and if so you might like to ponder on where the moral law comes from in the first place and he thought it came from God if you don't accept that you need to find and you do accept that there was some sort of moral law you need to find some source of that moral law in recent years though state of nature theory has been revolutionised by this chap here John Rawls and he argued that both moral and political obligation rest on a hypothetical agreement okay not on an actual agreement not known by whom etc according to Rawls you're obliged to obey the laws that are imposed on you by a government and you're obliged to obey the moral laws of your society if and only if these laws are fair and that might trigger a question for you there but let's move on well let's move on a huge question for Rawls becomes when is the law fair, moral law or the law of the land Rawls answer is that a law is fair if that law would have been chosen by rational self-interested people people like us in the original position okay so let's have a closer look at this there are four aspects to Rawls' original position to his theory of justice as he calls it you can read his book it's quite easy to read it's very thick very repetitive but it is quite easy to read okay what's the original position well it's this in the original position are people like us let's say they're rational they're also self-interested if they have a choice they're going to go for a choice that's going to pursue their own interests on the whole I mean they are altruistic sometimes but not always and also you've got to ask themselves why they're altruistic when they're altruistic the fact is they are interested in their own well-being and they're rational they're also behind the veil of perception the only thing they know the only account of good they have is the thin theory of good okay behind the veil of perception they don't know who they are what they are so they don't know whether they're male or female they don't know whether they're old or young they don't know whether they're intelligent or thick they don't know whether they're rich or poor they don't know whether they're ill or healthy okay so they know nothing about themselves so they've got the thin theory of good okay now the thin theory of good tells them what's good for human beings in general actually we're assuming they're human beings ..their ardeilio fel'r gwasanaethau. Yn gwybod yn gweld fyw, y maeswn i wneud... ..es i fynd i ei bod ffawr erbyn ei wneud. Felly, y Tynedd F iawn y gallwch yn cyfle... ..a llwyddon y cyfle, y dy rag yn diolch... ..y'r wyffordd yn gyf해�. Mae hyn yn gyfle, o'r llwyddon... ..sy'n cyfle... ..eg y llwyddon, yn licwyr dron... ..naeth y gallwch ardydd... ..a cael galw ddeithas... .. assault ac lwyddon. Felly, y fyddech chi iechyd... ac yn bwysigol, oedd meddwl i gyllidol, ffysioliol yn meddwl, a wnaeth y bydd sydd eich bydd hynny o ffridd. Felly, rydyn ni'n gweld bod they eich bydd hynny o ffridd, ond rydyn ni wnaeth felly gei hynny o ffridd. A mae'n ystafell y gwaith y'vei sy'n gwybr â'i eto ar y dyfod tan lwg. Mae'r rydyn ni'n gobeithio ar ddiwrnod overdodi lookol. Felly, roeddwn ni'n cael ei gwybod why ydy'r edrych ar gyfer y ffordd? Why did Rhôl sefydlu am y clywbeth? Why did he put people behind the veil of perception? Why did he give them a thin theory of good? And why is it that people who make choices about how society should be run from this position are such that their choices are deemed the right ones? Can anyone answer me that? Does he want them to be dispassionate? Can you cash that out a bit? He doesn't want favouritism. Good, yes, absolutely. Would anyone like to expand on that a bit? What does... You're moving as much subjectivity as possible. This has objectivity as possible. Okay, I usually ban people from using the words object and subject until they've done philosophy for at least 10 years. But yes, what he wants people to do is to not choose the position of... Sorry, the rules of justice for themselves, doesn't he? So he doesn't want them to apply self-interest. If I know... Isn't it more than that? Isn't it more than that? It may be more than that as well, but it is that. He's actually also supporting an enlightenment discourse, which is in favour of certain people. It cuts out an emotional side, and women are downgraded, and all sorts of things. But the point of doing that is so that the rules of justice are chosen from an objective point of view. They're not chosen from the point of view of... So, for example, if I don't know whether I'm male or female, I'm not going to say there should be a curfew on women. I can't see that there should be a curfew on women. On the other hand, my sin theory of good tells me nothing about men and women that makes me think that if I were a woman, I'd be happy for there to be a curfew. We're getting to much more detail now than you need to. But can you see that if I don't know whether I'm a man or a woman, I'm not going to choose any laws that are going to do women down or that are going to do men down because I might turn out to be the wrong one, if you see what I mean. If I don't know whether I'm rich or poor, am I going to bet on being rich? Be a bit of a silly thing to do, wouldn't it? I need to think, well, hang on, what if I'm poor? So, I want to arrange the laws of society in such a way that I don't come off very badly if I am poor. So, I want to do the best for myself, whatever situation I'm in, and doing the best for myself, whatever situation I'm in, means actually doing the best for everyone, doesn't it? If you're behind the veil of perception, if all you've got is the thin theory of good. Does that satisfy what you... I think it's too rational. No, well, he does. Actually, one of the big questions you've got to ask, I mean, there are all sorts of questions to ask Rawls about this. One is the rationality, the other is self-interest. I mean, actually, people have a huge tendency to be altruistic. Why is self-interest important? I think both those questions can be answered, actually. But another big question would be, well, what do we put behind the veil of perception and what do we put in the thin theory of good? So, for example, in apartheid, South Africa, if you'd suggested that the idea that blacks are stupid should go behind the veil of perception, they'd say, well, why? I mean, this is just a fact, isn't it? And you think, well, hang on. No, not according to us, it's not a fact. So, actually, how you decide what goes behind the veil of perception and what comes into the thin theory of good suggests that you're going to get out what you put in. But that's actually not the point, because we don't have to actually put anything in just here. We're just looking at the decision procedure. This is actually really a rather... If you don't know whether you're an alcoholic in Bond Square or whether you're a trust fund kid in a large house, et cetera, then asking you to choose the principles of justice from behind the veil of perception when you've got only the thin theory of good looks like a good idea, doesn't it? What Rawls would say is that this theory explains both moral and political obligation. Oh, hang on. I haven't explained why it does. Okay, how does Rawls' theory explain both moral and political obligation? Answer, if you're living in a society and you see a law that you think... You ask yourself, okay, why are you obliged to obey this law? Well, if the law is such that you can see that you would have chosen it, had you been in that situation, then you are obliged to obey it. Do you see what I mean? Actually, you can put it even better than that. If the government that you're being asked to obey is a generally just government, then even if... So, this government is such that you can see that if you had been in the original position, you would have chosen it as being an acceptable government. Then even if this particular law is unjust, maybe there's still nevertheless reason to obey it. So, we go from there being an actual agreement on which we're all going to say, no, there wasn't, or nobody asked me, gov, to a hypothetical agreement where you're asked to say, well, would you have accepted this had you been asked in this original position? If your answer to that is yes, okay, you may have come out unfairly. You would have said that because you might have been very poor. It's turned out that you're very rich and you wish you hadn't said that, but you can see that you would have said it, and that there were good reasons for saying it. This is the source of your political obligation. For Rawls, it's also the source of your moral obligation. So, if there's a moral command in your society, your obligation to obey it is again, because if you look at it and you think that you would have subscribed to it from the original position, then that's the ground of your obligation to obey it. Not any actual consent, but this hypothetical consent of, had you been in this position, you would have agreed. Okay, so, notice that there's a pre-existing notion of fairness in here as well. So, just as Locke already had the pre-existing idea of moral obligation, Rawls has got it in there as well. It looks as if it's actually very difficult to get away from a pre-existing notion of moral obligation.