 seem to have a few too many choices here. I mean I could go to the left or I could go to the right. I guess you can go back the way I came. I wish I wish there was a way I could make a decision here. You know it'd be really great if I knew where each of the paths went and you know I should probably figure out what I want. You know what where do I want to go with these paths. I mean I know where it was down there but I don't really know if that's down there is what I really want and I'm not even really sure what happens either way. So you know making decisions ethically speaking can be a lot like this. You know I was fond of saying you know people complain about philosophy. They say that well philosophy and ethical theory in particular it doesn't have any answers. Well no it's not true. It's got lots of answers. It's just not all of them can be true together. In fact it seems like you kind of have to make a choice. What are you going to do? Morally speaking. Well what Rawls is proposing is a decision procedure for ethical theories and the idea is to put together a series of finite steps that can be executed such that we'd be able to figure out well what we should do. And that's what he's trying to do in this situation. He's trying to say hey is there a decision procedure a set of finite steps that results in you know one and only one decision or at least a set of compatible decisions or you know maybe one is just as good as another in order to figure out how to live our lives. And he thinks there's an answer. Well let's see what I can do with this. Well the first thing we need for this decision paper is we need the right people for this decision procedure is we need the right people involved. We need competent moral judges. Well you know what's going to be involved in this now for Rawls a moral judge isn't necessarily going to be somebody who already has virtues in touch. First he's starting out with you know what we might call the intellectual virtues of this person. What kind of qualities in terms of intelligence does this competent moral judge need. And the first thing it needs this competent moral judge needs normal intelligence. So the point of this is you don't have to be Stephen Hawking in order to figure out how you ought to live your life or figure out what the right course of action is. I mean it's not bad to be Stephen Hawking to figure that but you don't need to be Stephen Hawking. You need to have at least normal intelligence. The second thing is you know this person not only is reasonably intelligent but also sufficiently well informed. So this person has to have a pretty good idea of how the world is and what are the consequences of actions. Or even just the consequences of events. What's the causal network of things. How do people interact. What would be the result if you said a certain thing in a certain situation. That sort of thing. The third thing is that this competent moral judge has to be a reasonable person and there's several traits involved for a reasonable person. The first is that this person a reasonable person is going to be pretty well versed in inductive logic. Now inductive logic is the logical probability. So what's most likely to be the case given certain evidence. This is opposed to deductive logic which is a logic of necessity. So what must be the case given certain evidence. Alright. In addition to being able to use inductive logic a person a reasonable person is going to imagine not just reasons to perform an action but also reasons to not perform it. So a reasonable person is going to consider both sides of the issue. Why something should be done and why something shouldn't be done. Another way of thinking about this is that a reasonable person is going to consider all viewpoints. So inductive logic as a use of inductive logic and being able to consider all these different viewpoints. In addition to considering all the different viewpoints such a reasonable person has to be open minded. Now this doesn't mean that the reasonable person is just flighty and changes his or her mind all the time. No what he means is it doesn't even mean that a reasonable person can't reach a conclusion. Of course you have to be able to reach a conclusion in order to have this decision procedure. However you know it's perfectly fine for a reasonable person to reach a conclusion and to draw an inference but if new new evidence comes to light or maybe even a new way of reasoning about the evidence then a reasonable person has to be able to consider that and perhaps even consider changing the judgment based upon the new evidence or the new way of looking at the evidence and what we might call being open minded. In addition to that a reasonable person has to be pretty self-aware. I mean we all have our emotional reactions to things. We all have our preferences our own values and that's not that these are bad but a reasonable person is gonna do his or her best to be aware of when those personal psychological characteristics might influence the decision and influence the decision in a way that the emotional psychological characteristics will be irrelevant with regard to this decision. So we've got normal intelligence pretty well informed and reasonable and such a person doesn't necessarily hold on to any particular view mind you but possesses these qualities. This sort of person is going to be a competent moral judge. I forgot one characteristic for a competent moral judge. After not only normal intelligence, pretty well informed what the world is like, being reasonable, a competent moral judge also has to be sympathetic. Now for sympathetic there's a couple of different ways a person can be sympathetic. The idea behind sympathy is being able to understand what interests are like, what's good for people and what people want and how they're trying to live their life. So a sympathetic person ideally should be able to experience these interests. These interests broadly considered are what's good for people, what people want. Ideally a sympathetic moral judge should have experienced all these interests. Now it's just not going to happen. Nobody's committed to experience all of these all these interests but you know all hope is not lost because you know luckily we have a very vivid imagination. If you haven't actually experienced these interests then this person, this competent moral judge must be able to imagine what it's like to have that interest. I mean just as a really far-fetched, I'm not far-fetched but one example, I've had a rather comfortable life as far as food and shelters concerned. I haven't really been without either one but that doesn't mean I can't imagine what it's like to be without either one of those. I probably can't get it in full detail. I haven't experienced it completely to be without food or shelter. One night I was locked out of my car downtown and I had to wait until where I worked opened back up against until I could get my car keys. So I actually wound up like walking around the streets of downtown for a night and it wasn't particularly, it was a little cool that night but it wasn't so bad but that was a smidgen of an experience of what it's like to be without shelter, having no place to go. Very very small. I'm not saying I understand completely what it's like to be without a home but you know that helps in the imagination. You know I've skipped a meal or two so I know a little bit of what it's like to be hungry. A smidgen. Now given that I'm able to imagine what it's like to have that severe interest to something of an idea of what it's like to be hungry for days. That desperation that probably creeps in. Same thing with not being able to go home. I know it's like to be lost on the streets. I mean I know where I am but I've got nowhere to go. Okay so if you can't so to be able to experience this interest if you can experience this interest then be able to imagine what these interests are like and finally this sympathetic person has to consider that one's own interests are not the most important or the only important interest. That other people's interests are also important. In other words the sympathetic person has to well consider that you know he or she is not alone in the world and not the only one that matters. A feral is in contrast to a competent world judge is you know who we might call the ideologue right. The ideologue is a person that adheres to an ideology and as well as Rawls defines this his ideology is the claim that you know a person or a group of people have an unconditional claim to the truth simply in virtue of membership to a certain group or a class right. You know it could be raised could be believed could be social class this sort of thing. Now to the extent that membership in this class excludes any of the qualities of a competent moral judge and it looks like they kind of all do you know the ideologue is not a competent moral judge. So you think about it you know what do we say is required for competent moral judge you need to be reasonably intelligent let's grant that that's the case you know you can be an ideologue have to be and have normal intelligence you might even be sufficiently informed about the world maybe right sometimes that's not gonna be the case sometimes the way the world is is colored by our worldview right and you know it's even warped by our worldview so you know maybe the second condition there it fails but the third condition definitely fails with the ideologue I mean the ideologue is not going to be open to a new evidence right all that matters to the truth is membership in the class that's that's all you need not going to probably not necessarily going to be schooled in inductive logic I mean be weird to be schooled in inductive logic and to adhere to the truth simply because of membership of class that those two don't really seem to fit ideologues probably aren't going to guess that are all sides of the issue either all it really matters is what the group says or what what the membership of the class says so an ideologue is going to fail as a competent moral judge primarily because it's going to fail these conditions for being reasonable so we've got you know our first main component is a competent moral judge for our decision procedure we're also going to leave out ideologues as competent moral judges so what do we have left well we gotta I mean these judges are going to be making decisions are going to be making judgments so what would be required of these of these considered moral judgments they are the ones that we're going to take a look at well these considered world judgments you know can't just be anything that the competent world judge says I mean it might be competent but it's not just like anything goes these judgments have to meet certain conditions themselves and first of all the judge can neither be harmed nor benefit from the decision so I think what Russell's getting at here is this is a way to maximize or guarantee impartiality in the decision the judge can't be harmed by can't suffer any backlash or can't you know be negatively or harmfully impacted by the decision similarly the judge can't benefit from it either so this coveted moral judge can either be harmed or benefit from the action it can't be involved in it at all the thirdly I mean so next this decision whatever it is has to evolve actual interests so I think what I'll Ross is getting out here is we're not going to deal with hypothetical cases we got to deal with what's in front of us right these judges might react differently or judge differently if we're just doing what hypotheticals but we've got to deal with what's actually in front of us so it's actual cases next all the relevant information has to be gathered if we don't have enough information it's not a considered world judgment we can't you know the relevant information is you know who's gonna be impacted by it and how and when are they gonna be impacted by it and you know what are the interests involved that sort of thing next the judge must be confident in the decision without that confidence a judge in the judge's own view probably isn't making the right decision or so I mean we're relying upon the competency of these judges and if the judge says I don't know if I'm really doing it well the judge is discrediting his or her own judgment the judge must be stable now this is kind of it might not be meeting the obvious with what Ross is talking about here but they have to be stable in the sense that you know the similar judgments are gonna be made in similar circumstances if there's one variety in these judgments then it doesn't look like there's any real good reason to I mean since we're relying on these judges as the basis for the decision procedure without the stability without similar judgments in similar circumstances we're not going to be able to figure out what to do it would be arbitrary at that point unless these competent moral judges must be making these judgments off of intuitions now to understand what he means by intuitions he means intuitions as opposed to complex moral theories so we've seen a lot of moral theories over the course of the semester but a competent moral judge must be must be making decisions based upon you know these immediate judgments these ones that these immediate principles these ones that we don't reason to so if you're walking by a fountain and you see a little girl drowning right your immediate what you would you immediately think is I need to pull her out of the fountain or it's better to tell the truth than to lie or I shouldn't steal or what all things considered equal don't kill now it doesn't take a whole lot of reasoning to have these immediate principles and this is what the competent moral judge should be using should be using these principles these intuitions a competent moral judge shouldn't be using complex principles so when you have all these conditions together then you have a considered moral judgment and the idea is that you have somebody with good enough capacities with the requisite capacities using one's own intuitions to determine what's right or wrong so we've got two out of three components for our decision procedure we've got the competent moral judges and we've got the considered moral judgements the next step is explication and the idea of an explication is that these judges have been working for a while and they've amassed quite a large set of considered moral judgments and what we're going to do is take these judgments and try to figure out the principle so and this is what we do in in the physical sciences we look at all events that are correlated with each other in relevant circumstances and then we infer that the first event causes a second that sort of thing so we're doing the same thing here we're looking at different circumstances relevant facts about the world and in these different situations these are for facts about the world we've found competing interests and in these competing interests these common and moral judges have said well interests for this situation for this person should be preferred over others okay so we just we start amassing these judgments and we start correlating we start figuring out what are the circumstances in which whose preferences and which in what are the circumstances in which some particular persons or group of people's preferences are preferred over others so there are certain conditions that these explications have to meet first of all they can't require any special language or any special training to understand them they have to be pretty straightforward because again we I think we're also getting at here with in requiring normal intelligence and these you know plain language principles is that morality can't be a specialty discipline morality has to be something that anybody can do and if it's gonna be a decision procedure everybody's got to be able to do it okay so they had to be plain language and require no special training secondly these these principles involved given this explication have to tell us the facts the relevant facts have to tell us the competing interests and in this you know in the situation is relative facts competing interests then which interest are to be preferred which interests are to be given the weight here so they should prescribe an action and finally these explications ought to be comprehensive and they ought to be in some sense unified so this is related to the idea stability were similar judgments similar circumstances this they ought to be unified or comprehensive in the sense that there should be some way that they're all unified or ideally all unified under one principle or if they're not identified under one principle some reason why there's going to be difference in these principles and ideally these principles ought to in some sense support each other they can't just be you know just do this then and do that there no they ought to have some kind of reason why you know they ought to tell one principle ought to be give some kind of information of why another principle is also right so they ought to be what we might call coherent so when we have all this in place Raul says we got competent moral judges making consider moral judgments we are able to draw out to abstract out the explications and when we have these explications when we have these principles that we can follow then we have our decision procedure for actions because these principles will be able to tell us how we are to live our life