 from a. The four theories so if you remember the first two weeks we looked at ideas and conceptions that were fundamental to thinking about ethics so he looked at things like free will and contractualism and things like that. And then after two weeks of that we started at four different ethical theories and the last one we looked at was consequentialism and in particular we looked at a particular type of consequentialism I'm sure you can tell me which one it was particular utilitarianism yes there's a bit of a clue on the board here okay so we learned about consequentialism so okay what what's the hallmark of a consequentialist ethical theory no no no no no it's the outcomes or the consequences that's right it's the consequences of an action in terms of which we evaluate it morally and there are different sorts of consequentialism we looked at utilitarianism but can anyone name another sort of consequentialism you said libertarianism but I'm not sure what that is okay so libertarianism looks at the consequences of an action in terms of freedom instead of in terms of happiness that's libertarianism so for example Rawls is arguably a libertarian because his first principle of justice is that each should have as much liberty as possible consistent with equal liberty for all so you're looking at actions in terms of the outcome for liberty rather than for happiness but we'd be looking at utilitarianism and that looks at the consequences of actions in terms of what happiness but it's not just happiness is it it's the greatest happiness of the greatest number absolutely it's not my happiness I mean if it were I'd be looking at actions according to whether the consequences were good for me or not that's not a very ethical theory is it but utilitarianism is looking at the consequences of actions for the greatest happiness of the greatest number good okay we asked whether there are any counter examples to utilitarianism and in order to quickly look at this if you've got a claim that says acts are right if and only if this I double F is if and only if acts the same acts produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number a counter example will be an act that's right but that doesn't produce the greatest happiness the greatest number or an act that's not right and that does produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number do you see what I mean by a counter example and we looked at a particular one can anyone remember what it was no we didn't look at Hiroshima we looked at a particular situation as a potential counter example to utilitarianism it's the sheriff exactly so can you tell me which of those that is is that an act that's right but the doesn't produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number or an act that's not right but that it's the last one that's right so the idea is that if the sheriff hangs the innocent trump that's an action that intuitively we want to say is not right so it's not right we're negating that one but that does produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number now if that action really is of that kind then it's a counter example to utilitarianism and any action you can find that's either right and doesn't produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number or wrong and does produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number is going to be a counter example to the utilitarian claim do you see why good okay we also looked at the many different interpretations of utilitarianism so if I if you remember I told you it was multiply ambiguous can anyone tell me anything about any of these ambiguities of the of the greatest happiness principle the claim that the right action is the action that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number why is that ambiguous because it might mean happiness now or average happiness it might mean total happiness or average happiness that's right and there's a big difference between if I can create the average happiness of the people in this room or if I if I'm not concerned about the average but I'm looking only at totals and John here is someone I can make very happy in very easily and the rest of you are miserable sods and it's going to take me ages to make you happy then maybe I'll concentrate on him okay what other ambiguities are there okay that's not that's really an epistemological problem rather than a problem of interpretation isn't it um but we might say what is happiness um and different accounts of what happiness is will generate different sorts of utilitarianism weren't they so if happiness is to have your desires satisfied that's one form of utilitarianism if happiness is Aristotelian eudaimonia that's a different sort of utilitarianism any other ambiguities there what about in the greatest number we looked at whether Hitler might have been a good utilitarian it's just that he didn't count Jews so if we won't say well the greatest number the greatest number of what humans animals including human animals sentient beings etc etc it starts to become quite difficult mill meant humans but Bentham thought it was all animals okay and then we reflected on whether there are different qualities of happiness do you remember mill thinks there are different qualities and that in making the utilitarian calculus we've got to count the different qualities of happiness as well as the different quantities whereas Bentham thought it was just quantities not qualities okay and what did we look at when we looked at there we looked at a particular charge against mill which was that he might be an elitist yes when he's what's he mean by quality of happiness is he suggesting that superior forms of happiness are things like going to philosophy lectures and inferior forms of happiness are going to things like bingo if he does mean that then it looks as if it's very difficult for him to avoid the charge of elitism well that's a different question that we'll put on one side for a minute and I suggested that another way to understand it might be to think of the difference between a superior form of happiness being the sort of happiness that a rational animal can achieve by forming a goal for themselves setting out a strategy by which to achieve that goal and then achieving it and that as we all know brings a happiness that you know can we compare it to the happiness we get for a meeting a good meal or drinking a good glass of wine maybe that's what he meant by superior forms of happiness with the inferior being the sort of things that just come from satisfying bodily needs or desires because I thought you know I'm reading a book by Hume or something and actually I have to say I'm pretty sorry about that so I prefer the meal. Right okay fair enough and it's certainly the case that all of us are going to sometimes prefer the good meal aren't we we can't always be doing philosophy lectures making that I'm listening to them or giving them indeed so yes there's meal claims that there are different qualities of happiness and these need to be brought into account but you might prefer to go with Bentham thinking that actually even if there are different qualities of happiness the qualities don't count it's only the quantities so poetry might be better than pushpin but that's only because poetry is likely to make many more people happy or make make for much more happiness than a single game of pushpin. Okay then finally we reflected on the distinction between act and rule utilitarian where act utilitarian is, ism is, that's right yes so you're looking at the token act in order to see whether it produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number as opposed to looking at the whether a type of action produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number and if you look at that it generates a rule and then you look at the token action against the rule that would be rule utilitarianism so act utilitarianism is a one-step procedure where you check every action against the greatest happiness of the greatest number, rule utilitarian is a two-step procedure where you check types of action against the greatest happiness but then you look at the token action in accordance with that rule and what is well we looked at the distinction between act and rule utilitarian is why would anyone think that rule utilitarianism is preferable to act utilitarianism why would anyone think rule utilitarianism is preferable to act utilitarianism because it gives you a basis to decide without having to calculate the final consequences um you might think it's easier because we only have to look at an act and think is it a lie um and if it's a lie then we shouldn't do it presuming that one of our rules is yes that that's true it could be easier um another reason is that it's intuitively acceptable to us in a way because it fits in with the idea that there are moral rules um we all think that roughly speaking we shouldn't lie shouldn't kill should keep promises etc and rule utilitarianism generates those very rules um so it's quite intuitively acceptable to us okay so that that's what we did last week um and we've now finished our rump through the different moral theories that we're going to look at all four of them um and this week we're going to compare and contrast them and you're going to decide which you like best we're going to do a poll at the end not not that the poll necessarily has any um basis in which is the right theory of course it might be just which one do you like best or which one have I taught best or all sorts things but we'll have a look at which one comes out top in this class okay so let's have a quick run through all of them just to refresh our memory about what they all are so Aristotle um we're looking at his virtue theory or rather the theory he initiated because modern day virtue theories are often not terribly Aristotelian but he got them all started and basically Aristotle argues that the right action is that which is performed by a virtuous person and do you remember when I said that to you all went you know that that's not very helpful um okay but we have to know what a virtuous person is and for Aristotle a virtuous person is a person who knows what is right does what is right and then does what is right for the right reason do you remember that so we looked at the moral dilemma that I brought up in the first week the one that says what happens when your mum comes home and says you know do you like my hair and you think yuck and you can't be both kind and honest so you've got a bit of a problem here and um so the rules that you've been given as children are not going to help you here you've got to engage in what Aristotle calls right reason um and what Aristotle says is that if you're a virtuous person you know what you should do in this situation now notice that you're in a particular situation now with all the particularities of that situation so for example if I say your mum's been depressed for six months and this is the first time you've seen a smile okay does that push you towards being kind rather than being honest or and other thing if your mum has a bit of a habit of coming back with the most terrible hairstyles and then three weeks later thinks you know oh my god you know how could you have let me go out like that which which does that push you towards okay so do you see the more you know about the context the easier it is perhaps to make the moral decision but the the fact is if you've been if you're a person who has encouraged yourself in the habits of virtue to be courageous to be honest to be kind all those things then you will know in that situation what it is to do the right thing if you don't know what should you do ask someone you do believe to be a virtuous person that's right you ask for advice from someone you think of as virtuous okay but let's say you know in that situation you've then got to do it and we all know that actually knowing what the right thing is to do or believing what the right thing is to do does not mean necessarily that you're going to do it we can all be weak we can all be um well we can can't we so but if you're a virtuous person you're not going to be weak you're going to not only know what the right action is you're going to perform it and finally you're going to perform it for the right reason and this draws an interesting distinction between what the right action is and the morality so the morality of the action itself and the morality of the agent performing the action because you can perform an action that is the one required by morality but without actually being moral yourself in doing it so let's say that the right action in this situation is being honest okay so um you know that being honest is the right thing to do and you you what's more you are honest but you're honest because you're feeling a bit spiteful do you see at the moment you tell your mum her hair looks horrible you're not doing it because you want to save her from looking horrible dida dida you're doing it because you you feel a bit mean at that moment we've all had that sort of feeling haven't we and the other possibility is is that you can be kind not because you think that being kind is the right thing to do but because you lack moral courage you you believe that you should tell the truth but you quail at the last minute okay so in each of those cases you might be doing the right thing but you're not doing it for the right reason and Aristotle would say you're not for that very reason being a virtuous person at that moment and probably not a virtuous person will stop because you haven't got yourself into the right habits okay so that's Aristotle um now would anyone like to ask questions about Aristotle before we go on to Hume or or shall I go through them all and then we'll go through them all put your hands up if you think I should go through them all okay you're just making me work that's what it is okay that's Aristotle this is Hume Hume argued that the right action is that for which a true judge okay one who adopts a stable and general perspective on the world is going to feel approbation so do you remember he feels a positive a pro attitude towards an action that's right because he adopts a stable and general perspective on the world and do you remember why Hume said that can anyone remind me why Hume took this particular view he made a very important distinction which rather undermined Aristotle's point of view that's right it's about passion and reason that's right what Hume believed is that um Aristotle rather assumes that that's what motivates a moral action is reason and what Hume comes in and says well no if you look at what reason is and what passion is you'll see that reason can never motivate an action it can never motivate nor suppress an action because of course the suppression of an action is itself an action um all action has got to be passion driven driven by our desires or pro attitudes and and there's got to be something in that because we think okay let's say that I can work out now that the best way to get a cup of coffee is to go to the common room or perhaps given the fact it's the wrong time I'd actually have to go to the shop down the road and buy a cup of coffee but I can reason about that as much as I like and I won't actually do anything unless I want a cup of coffee and what's more want a cup of coffee more than I want to finish this lecture so it's our passions that move us according to Hume not our reasons so somehow we've got to generate an account of morality that's based in in our passions in what we want and there's a problem with that surely because we think of morality as altruistic we think of it as other regarding but if every action you perform has to be performed in order to satisfy a desire of yours then how can there be any moral actions it looks a bit difficult to to say that all action including moral action is passion driven because maybe you end up saying that there aren't any moral actions at all so Hume was required to come up with his own account of what moral action is based on the idea that all actions are driven by passions and what he came up with is the idea that passions may drive actions but reasons guide our actions to the end and what reason can do is tell us what the perspectives of everybody will be on this action and they can also so if you're thinking about an issue like for example should there be a no fly zone over Libya or something like that or should we build nuclear power stations in order to secure our energy supply you might initially have a very strong attitude of disapprobation against one of these things you know no of course we shouldn't have a no fly zone over Libya of course we shouldn't build power stations but you've got to stand back from that initial sense of disapprobation and ask well okay I've got I want to adopt a general perspective on this a stable perspective and you look at the the thing from different angles until you reach a point where you feel you have looked at them from all perspectives if you see what I mean and you have stabilised in your view instead of going on one hand this and on one hand that and on da da da um so we might come out to something a bit more Aristotelian when we do take into account how reason is also involved in the production of action albeit not as a motivator of action but as a guide of action okay so that that's Hume then we went on to Kant and if you remember Kant completely disagrees with Hume on moral action only so Kant allows that Hume is right for every other sort of action except moral action you have to have a passion to motivate your action unless the belief that you're entertaining at the moment the reason that you're entertaining at the moment is one either this action is right or this action is wrong and those two concepts right and wrong according to Kant are intrinsically action guiding to just recognise that an action is right is entails the belief that you should do it all by itself you don't need a passion you don't need a desire to perform the right action because if you really understood what the right action is you you couldn't possibly have a desire to perform it because you wouldn't have a desire not to perform it the idea that you might desire to not do the right thing is shows you haven't understood right according to Kant so there are two beliefs doing a is right and doing a is wrong that will themselves entail an imperative and because they're these imperatives are entailed without the need for an inclination or passion they are categorical imperatives they're not conditional upon your having any particular desire instead they come purely from reason and that's why says Kant the the right action is the action that's performed out of reverence for the law and if you remember we looked at a particular example of this Fred and Joan coming from different ends of brazed nose lane and there's the beggar sitting in the middle and Fred now I've forgotten which way is which so don't pick me up on this but they both give him a pound but Fred gives him a pound because he wants to impress Joan and Joan gives him a pound because he believes it's she believes it's the right thing to do which one has acted rightly well if you think it's Joan who's acted rightly because she did it because it was the right thing to do then you're with Kant on this so if you think that Fred in giving the pounds because he wanted to impress Joan was not performing a moral action but a self seeking action he was looking to satisfy a desire of his own then then you're siding with Kant on that particular issue at least because Joan but not Fred was acting on a moral imperative I've got that the wrong way around haven't I Fred but not Joan was acting on a categorical imperative so that's that's Kant then finally we looked at Mill who argues that the right action is that which produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number now notice that that this again has a sort of universalising feel to it well actually it isn't a sort of universalising feel it is a universalising feel the idea is that when you look at an action and ask whether you should do it or not you should consider the consequences of that action in terms of the happiness of everyone that action might affect okay it's not just you and yours it's in terms of everybody so just as Kant wants you to ask yourself whether the action would be universal law or you could will the action to be universal law what if everyone were to do this um Mills asking you to consider the impact of this action on everyone so they're alike in that both of them ask you to universalise your the maxims with which you act the intentions with which you act um and well we've already looked at utilitarianism earlier on today so so um what i'm going to ask you to do now is to compare and contrast and either tell me things or ask me things so i'm in your hands from now on let's have a few questions moral facts it's always a good start well i think for me it's all when you look at things like true judges and virtuous people and all that i sort of think well you know fine that's useful but really do these people really know the moral facts if you could say you know grew them and say well yes i've got moral facts it's ab and c and they can prove their true judges uh or virtuous person whatever so i think uh you mentioned that most philosophers think there are but i am actually stumbled across any right okay so let's ask what is a moral fact and for me you know a moral it could be a fact to the extent that we think you know the moon is a fact which we you know might be an illusion well the moon isn't a fact is it the moon is an object no but the fact that the moon is there the fact the moon is exists maybe a fact but i mean it may not be there maybe it's not but it's yeah that's good enough for me right but it is it's rather important that it's not the moon that's a fact a fact you you see that okay okay is this to do with this but by moral fact do you mean something well hang on that i haven't even answered that question yet so let me can i try and answer it and then then you can come back to me okay so what john's asking is what is a moral fact oh i'm sorry i'm always confused you see you've even split up so you're not sitting next to each other so i won't confuse you but i'm still getting your names wrong okay um if we think of a fact as um a state of affairs that makes true or false i mean that's uh a moral belief um does that help you at all no it helps me but i guess the problem is that um i haven't come across any examples well here's an example okay um a utilitarium would think that uh what makes the statement dropping the bomb on the Hiroshima is the right thing to do true was that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima led to the greatest happens to the greatest number you can put false in there if you prefer do you see what i mean so the fact that makes true the belief dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was right is the fact that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima produced the greatest happens to the greatest number if it did i understand that but i suppose there's a moral fact no because there's a stumbling block for me in that you can't prove that it's true and therefore how do you know it's a fact but that's an epistemological question and you you were asking me a metaphysical question i there's a no there's a did he ask me a metaphysical question or an epistemological question i did not say oh no i see what i mean ah that's so unfair that's so unfair i just said if you don't prefer if you don't think dropping the bomb on Hiroshima is the right thing to do you can put false in where i put true um but the the fact is um no let's distinguish whether the fact exists and whether we can know it exists those are two different things and you asked me what a moral fact was not how do we know whether moral facts exist okay so so actually you're not worried about so i'm not no no no my question really was how do we know how do we ever know yeah i don't know so i can agree that they may or may not be moral facts and in fact that's a real example but you could say yes there is a moral fact but i suppose i don't find it useful if you can't prove one way or the other and tell me what do you mean my prove here well i suppose i'm an engineer yes that's exactly what i was going to say yeah um to the extent if you have a model which you can show works you know to a certain point but i think you're um it we can know now that um morality isn't an empirical science okay an empirical science is one in which any claim that you make should be at least in principle such that we can show that it's either true or false and we can show it we can either observe it in the world uh or we can um conduct some sort of experiment to show that it's true for some philosophers say that we know my experience don't we have the same you know my rules well um utilitarianism believes it uh claims to be an inductive um morality in the sense that how do we know that um lying is wrong is true well we observe that lying often doesn't need to the greatest happiness to the greatest number but of course that doesn't mean that when when we're wondering what to do in the next case we can observe that this lie won't produce the greatest happiness i mean observation just doesn't seem to hack it when we're talking about morality and neither does experiment i mean it's very interesting that people are getting quite excited about all these opinion polls about morality you know so um you can go to onto quite a few websites at the moment and uh take part in a poll which says what are your intuitions on the trolley problem for example have any of you done this or there's a very good website called philosophy bites um and um i think it's called philosophy bites but and and you go on to it and there's the discussion of the trolley where you're on a trolley no you're not hang on let's get this right you're on a trolley the trolley is going to kill five people on this line or you could pull a switch and it'll go off onto the other line and it'll kill only one person okay now if you stay on the trolley and don't pull the lever you won't have killed the five will you um but the the trolley would have done if you go off your you'll have killed the one because you'll have pulled the what should you do and then there are variations on the theme um so you might think well there's a bridge over the line and there's a fat person sitting on the bridge and you're next to the fat person and if you push the fat person off and he lands in front of the trolley it'll stop the trolley and save the five but kill the one so lots of people think that they would pull the lever and kill the one on the branch line but they wouldn't push the fat man off do you see and you've got a bit of a problem here because in each case you're killing one to save five why is it okay in one case and not okay in another but what's interesting is this this sort of pseudo inductivism which um asks so many people what their intuitions are and I'm wondering what what's intended to come from that does that show us that the actions right or wrong no I don't think so all it does is is play with our intuitions which is very useful and very interesting but I don't think it shows us anything about morality um and if if you think if if particularism is right um I mean I think this is a very interesting point if particularism is right the idea is that what makes an action right is something about the very situation in which that action is going to be performed now that means that if you ever get another situation exactly the same then you're going to so if you think the first was right you're going to think the second was right do you see what I mean so so if you like moral facts supervenon other facts descriptive facts if you get the facts absolutely right the morality sorry exactly the same the morality will also stay the same um so we could say that actually morality has rules over possible worlds rather than over the actual world so in this world you might say doing that action is right okay um but you're saying over every what that means is though over every possible world in every world in which that action is performed it will be right do you see what I mean so the only rule is a rule over possible worlds rather than the actual world because each rule will be instantiated only once in this world does wanting a moral fact make you a moral absolutist no because it might be that I mean the fact that makes it true that sardines are tasty for me um is that it's my personal preference I like sardines that's the fact that makes it true for me that sardines are tasty but sardines are tasty is true only relative to individuals isn't it no but no but if you're an individual relativist and you believe that moral statements are true only relative to individuals you still think that there are moral facts that make true these statements it's just their facts about personal preferences now you missed that by asking me the question in the middle so I'm going to repeat that because I think I might have misled you there or rather you misled so if you have the statement sardines are tasty okay is that true or false I think it's true for me it's true the truth of sardines are tasty is relative to each individual do you like sardines that's unfortunate who doesn't like sardines no you don't like sardines okay remind me of your name sible okay so sardines are tasty is true for me but false for sible there's a fact that makes it true that sardines are not tasty for sible and there's a fact that makes it true for me that sardines are tasty and the fact is to do with sible in the first case and to do with me in the second case so if moral statements like mugging elderly ladies is okay is true only relative to individuals it's still made true by facts but the facts are facts about individuals yes so you and the absolutism relativism and the question of moral facts are completely separate questions yes I just carrying this argument on a little bit I've come to the conclusion rightly or wrongly I'm sure you'll argue with me that morality is cultural and because when you take facts that killing is wrong this is something you said last week you seem to suggest that we have an innate aversion to killing and I forget the the exact examples you gave but everyone seemed to agree we have an innate aversion to killing and seem to be wrong I don't I don't the Greeks left disabled children on mountainside and their old people the red Indians abandoned their old as they got weak and decrepit they left them to the vagues of nature they didn't agonise about it or think this is wrong this is uh you know a moral fact it's wrong to do that wrong to abandon each other in our hour of need because that was their culture um they they didn't you know suffer guilt or so so what you're saying is that different cultures have different moral beliefs and therefore morality is relative to culture okay can anyone to say where there's a link missing in that argument can anyone tell me what the missing link is in that argument there are two two ways you might respond to that actually come on we did this in week two you should you should know this very well no okay can we go just straight from a and b believe different things to therefore a and b both have true beliefs no why not they just have beliefs yes all all we're doing is describing the fact that okay so so um where's my black pen I need two black pens well let's just um have a look at it so um culture one and culture two culture one believes p and culture one believes not p so p might be killing is wrong for us and this is us okay and this is uh killing is okay uh and these are the ancient Greeks okay so you're saying that that is evidence for moral relativism yeah okay well i'm saying you can't go just from that to moral relativism because one possibility is that one or other of us has it wrong I mean it could be that but uh the Greeks were wrong to think that killing is acceptable in other words they believed it but the belief they had was false or we could be wrong I mean maybe we're wrong not to to kill disabled children I mean there was very interesting discussion actually in the paper last week about premature babies wasn't there you know maybe we are wrong to think that we should keep alive premature babies and and very elderly people etc um so the fact that different people have different beliefs do you remember the logical blunder I talked about let's do it again because it's worth looking at again um Chris no I know what your problem can I just do this and then we can come back to it okay is it Chris oh god I do apologize no no no don't change it now okay Mike believes Marianne is wearing red right okay uh there's an embedding belief and an embedded belief remember um could they both be true yeah I mean probably they both are true it's both true that you believe I'm wearing red and it's true that I'm wearing red okay could they both be false yeah so you might have formed no belief at all about my skirt maybe you didn't come today uh and maybe I'm not wearing red okay so they could both be false or that one could be true and that one could be false couldn't it maybe he's colorblind or or having a little funny turn or something like that or it could be the other way around that could be false and that could be true and the point about this is is that the um truth value of a belief that somebody had sorry of the the truth of someone's believing something and the truth of the beliefs they have are quite separate what makes this belief true is something about Mike what makes that belief true is something about me and if we put that into the moral field Fred believes mugging elderly ladies is okay you find that the truth values of those two can vary completely separately again so it might be true that Fred believes that mugging elderly ladies is okay but it's not true that mugging elderly ladies is okay you know Fred has a false belief so in exactly the same way um I'm looking for culture one it might be true that culture two believes that it's not the fact that killing is wrong and yet they're wrong or it might be the fact that culture one believes that killing is okay and yet they're wrong so the mere fact that people have different beliefs doesn't show that moral relativism cultural relativism is true another way to respond to that is this one I'll just say this quickly and then you can come back to me when you get two plants that look very different this doesn't mean that they're not genetically identical um if you get two genetically identical seeds and put one in john in his number three seed compost and the other in ghastly garden earth that the builders have been throwing rubble into for three weeks I'm having my roof done at the moment since it's on the top of my head um and you put that one in the airing cupboard and water it just very occasionally enough to keep it alive but the other one you keep on the windowsill and nurture and to talk to us and so on they're going to look very very different in five weeks time aren't they but it doesn't mean that they aren't genetically identical nature and nurture go together into the making of a plant and in exactly the same way you might say um well the thing that's in common with the ancient Greeks and ourselves is that we valued human life um or we valued human lives that had a certain quality but whereas we think life is sufficient to have quality of life they didn't they said they think that actually you've got to have a a good better quality of life than we think you've got to have in order to be for life to be worth living do you see what I mean so there may be a common value between us and the ancient Greeks that in our different societies leads to different behaviour so it's not that absolutism isn't true um but it's that that absolute belief in two different contexts leads to two apparently different beliefs apparently inconsistent beliefs or it might be that moral relative cultural relativism is true yeah I mean that's but I just I you absolutely cannot go to cultural relativism just from the recognition that the different cultures believe different things that's what you can't do okay do you want to come back well good arguments you know um well thank you um but it's not decisive you know I said or you could be a relativist yeah but you can't be a relativist on the basis of the argument you gave a moral fact you know we're no nearer uh we weren't talking about moral facts we were talking about moral relativism there you if you want to be a moral relativist a cultural relativist you need a better argument than the one you gave me because the one you gave me can become back on in the two ways that I came back on it yeah okay uh now I'm not saying you can't come back on it I think you probably can um well I probably can't but at the end of the day uh like Chris my sorry I've started it now this is it's it's a moral fact that would be very useful you know and sorry what's a fact that would be very useful that something is wrong or right you know like killing you know it would be very nice to have a proof and I can't that killing is wrong or that it's right you know I'm not fussed well I absolutely completely disbelieve you when you say you're not fussed I absolutely do not believe you yeah but you but you're telling me that it might be all right yes I'm sure that killing might now okay let me let me press you a bit further here um are you saying that this might be right um right okay um there are two sorts here's a claim about a token action that killing is wrong now that's killing is going to be a killing of ffred um you know age 27 on January the 16th 2011 da da da so that's a particular killing and and the claim is that that killing is wrong or killing is wrong is a claim about you know here's a type of action these are all killings and you're saying of all of these actions that they're wrong whereas here you're picking out one of them and saying of it that it's wrong now um I've said earlier you're not going to get any proof if you're talking about empirical proof that either of these claims is true but I think you can get um if you look at a particular when we say killing is wrong is that true or false well we can all think of counter examples to that very very quickly can't we um you're yearning for a rule like that and I think you're not going to get one because anything of that kind they they're going to be so many different things in this in the class of actions there that the idea that not a single one of them would be right or or at least not wrong is is a bit for lawn whereas this one um you might well have something um you wouldn't call this a proof it certainly isn't an empirical proof but every person who looked at that action might think no actually that killing is right I mean I'll try and put an example to you and and everyone will be able to to knock this knock holes in this but let's say we've got a situation where somebody has been so badly injured in an accident that um it's not that they've lost all consciousness or anything on the contrary they are in pain and such terrible terrible pain and it can't be um alleviated in any way and they're begging us to kill them would that killing be wrong okay so so lots of people think here because we have very strong intuitions that in this case this may be the right thing to do uh and we may have equally strong intuitions in other particular cases that a particular killing is wrong you know well we can immediately think of lots of those I should think every time we open the paper we see um lots of cases of those so so when you when you're yearning for for a moral truth ask yourself exactly what you're yearning for because if you're yearning for something like that a rule like that you're probably not going to get it if you're yearning for something like that I'm not sure you don't have it already and here's another thing you might have um produce the greatest happiness the greatest number that's that's another rule isn't it and maybe that's also something you think intuitively is right lots of people have done so in this yearning for different moral rules you need to um identify different types of moral rules or moral claims um and ask yourself whether it's realistic you're going to get a truth here um or a proof here it just seems that to depend at the end of the day on intuition makes all the arguments a bit spurious you know I mean we all got intuition you know it sounds so flaky okay so tell me I intuit why do you think that two plus two equals four is true well because I've been told ah well okay but you don't believe every you don't you don't believe everything you're told is true do you it is a question I actually asked as a child well I'm asking you it now what would you say is is it because every time you've looked at two apples and two apples there've been four apples um as long as you leave stable the meaning of two two plus equals and four we know don't we that in every possible world two plus two is four that there is no possible world so actually we're quite capable of surveying different possible worlds and knowing what happens in those worlds now let me ask you a question here's this killing again the killing of the person who's in terrible pain is there a possible world in which that killing would be wrong if you think it's wrong in this world you might think it's wrong in every world but if you think it's right in this world you might think that it would be right in every other world as well in other words it might be that the sort of reasoning that we go in for when we reason morally is a priori reasoning of exactly the kind we go in for when we go in for mathematical reasoning do you see what I mean it's it's it's not empirical it's not a matter of observation and experiment instead it's a matter of consulting our reason and observing the different possible worlds not observing the actual world but surveying the different possible worlds in our reason and we do do that all the time let me ask you a question do you think if the Germans had won the war would be speaking German not necessarily okay so you can see you believe that there are some possible worlds in which the Germans won the war and we would be speaking German and some possible worlds in which the Germans won the war and we wouldn't be speaking German and I bet you could describe a little bit about each of those worlds so we're quite capable and this is what it is to be rational this is what it is to well I was going to say be human but if there are other rational animals they could do the same thing we can survey possible worlds as well as actual as the actual world and morality our ability to understand morality may be part of that ability to survey possible worlds when Kant asks should we make false promises what he wants us to answer is well if we if we try and universalise the maxim on which we'd make a false promise so okay everybody should make false promises in order to gain advantage when we do that we look at the possible world in which everyone is making false promises we see that in that world there is no institution of promise keeping and that would be a world that's less advantageous less good for us than the world in which there is an institution of promise keeping so Kant says that we therefore see that we shouldn't make false promises because if we did so we would lose out because everybody would lose out so all I'm saying there are different ways of finding out things there's a priori reasoning there's empirical reasoning there's testimony there's all sorts of things and what where we certainly would make a mistake is if we can play moral reasoning with empirical reasoning actually I say we'd certainly make a mistake and the utilitarians do claim that uh theirs is an inductive morality let's move on there are other questions you're going back to week one um when we when we we're talking about moral facts are we arguing between moral generalism and moral particularism well moral generalism uh holds that there are moral rules so moral rules are true and you've got to ask do they mean that sort of rule or that sort of rule but the sort of facts that makes that rule true would be a different sort of fact from what makes that rule true and dancy of course believes that no rule of that kind is true so and and both of the facts that make true those things would be different from the fact that makes true that one are you saying that producing the greatest happiness the greatest number is in fact moral generalism it's a form it's a form of moral generalism um dancy actually doesn't mention higher order rules at all um but insofar as a general claim is a moral rule then um I assume that's some form of moral generalism yes yeah I assume so I may be wrong because as I say he doesn't mention higher order rules I think we've got to understand partly what we mean by intuition here um I mean there are these sort of intuitions we have which are gut feelings so oh god that's wrong that's terrible um that's absolutely not what cant means when he talks about intuitions um I the idea I mean there are some American ethicists who say that we shouldn't try and be logical when we look at moral thinking um we should go from the gut now that's sort of using a a humian idea but in a way that human I think wouldn't have liked it at all um they think if you if you actually apply logic you might go wrong because actually in morality we should be looking at our feelings um and so that they say things like well cloning is is very obviously wrong because we all sense it's wrong it's it's in the gut and you think well hang on no um this isn't right there's a sense there's a sense in which we have to go on intuition and there's a sense in which you're going on intuition right now because as I'm speaking you're thinking to yourself that sounds right and or that doesn't sound right I don't think I go with that or do you see what I mean you're having intuitions and actually intuition is the rock bottom basic for a for a rational animal because what you're thinking is is it true is it false should I believe this should I not believe this etc and your first thought is what we tend to mean by intuition in in our language you know just intuition tells me it's wrong but actually as a philosopher and indeed as a scientist or um or anyone who cares about truth you have an intuition but you've then got to try and pin that intuition down say okay what does it mean it sounds wrong why does it sound wrong what is it that's wrong about it okay is it wrong can I give an argument for it being wrong do you see what I mean and when you've pinned down your intuition and you can actually say what it is that's wrong about something now you have reasons to be wrong so there's no reason without intuition um you absolutely cannot have reason without intuition but if you leave it at intuition in our sense i.e. just a gut feeling without any pressing of that gut feeling you're almost certainly going to go wrong because what you're doing is you're you're going with your feelings of approbation and disapprobation without bothering to to adopt a stable and general perspective does that make sense so so intuitions are very important but their importance is a first step not as the final word do you see what I mean you you we've got to have intuitions that say no there's something wrong with that there's something right with that but if we leave it there I think we're we're neglecting something it is in a way yes because I mean one of the one of the things when I used to teach undergraduates um you could you would find people whose intuitions were were in good order um but they were lazy perhaps so they had they had their intuitions but they left them there they they didn't bother to cash them out in any way um but actually what you really want as a philosopher is somebody whose intuitions are good and who is prepared to then work on them so so they get a strong sense that there's something wrong with an argument but they don't leave it there they say okay what can be wrong with an argument what makes a good argument it's got to have true premises and and it's got to be valid uh or inductively strong um so what are the premises of this argument what is the conclusion of this argument are the premises true does the conclusion follow um ah here's why I was having the intuition I can now say what it is about the argument that's wrong with it so so you have an intuition then you pin it down if all you do is have the intuition the intuition might be right but you don't know it is we do tend to go on gut feeling sometimes and I I think there are times when it's a good thing if you're walking home late at night and there's somebody behind you and your gut tells you there's something wrong I think you should act on it um I you know you don't always sit in the now could I be wrong about this what's the um so there are times when I think going on intuition is you want to buy some holly oh honey yes good I think that's a very good question because you're you've given me a concrete decision that you need to make and okay you're saying that you can see how utilitarianism helps you you you would lead a huge amount of information um because it what it does is it tells you you should act on whichever will produce the greatest happiness the greatest number okay what do you think Aristotle would say a virtuous person rather than a happy person yeah he would say you should choose whichever honey the virtuous person would choose okay well you think that's not useful but but ask yourself well okay what is a virtuous person I mean the virtuous person is somebody who's who cares about other people so I mean the fair trade perhaps comes in here you know he wants to be fair he wants to be just um he also wants to care for the environment he wants to conserve the environment so he might go for yeah um he wants to be courageous um maybe he should just go straight for the local one I I mean I'm making it up here as I go along but you see what I mean if you if you know what the virtues are and what it is to be virtuous you'd still need to have a lot of information but I don't really see that Aristotle's answer isn't as as useful as the utilitarian answer actually when you when you push it and find out about it and then if you ask a Hume okay he wants you to adopt a stable and general perspective on the buying of honey so he wants you to consider the fact that if you buy fair trade honey you're buying at a the price it actually costs rather than undercutting people who really can't afford to be undercut if you buy local honey you're supporting your local area da da da and he's waiting for you to see where your desires go on the basis of all this information until you reach a stable point again you need to have a lot of information before you can make the decision but I don't see he isn't giving you a way of making it do you see what I mean and Kant's going to say well okay you should perform whichever on whichever maxim is going to sorry whichever maxim you're buying the honey on you need to be able to universalise it so do you think that everyone should buy fair trade honey do you think that everyone in your situation should buy the local honey do you think everyone should buy and you're going to have reasons for why you think this again do you see it it's a matter of thinking yourself into the mindset of each of these philosophers and you'll see that each of them is requiring a lot of information about the world and about yourself and about other people in order to make moral decisions but we know that this is why young children don't make moral decisions they haven't got the experience they can't they haven't got the understanding of of the world and human nature in which to make these moral decisions sorry just let me ask does that help you oh really how are you going to do that tell me how are you going to do that advantage you'll be very very difficult but it'll be even more difficult to to use other perspectives because you could justify any answer by saying yes this is virtuous this is the same view and still conflict well no hang on um I don't think you could justify any answer I mean there are some actions that are clearly not virtuous I mean shooting mic for example is rather obvious in an act that isn't I mean you can't just come up with anything the what these philosophers are asking you to do is not something you can learn to do right now I mean actually Aristotle says that nobody can teach anyone else to be virtuous in order to be virtuous you've got to put in hard graft to find out what courage is and to know enough about yourself to know whether um in order to be courageous you've got to move away from being rash or to move away from being cowardly because if you're a cowardly sort of person then being brave is going to be rather different from if you're a rash sort of person so you need to know yourself as much as you need to know the virtue and you need to know what the situation demands of a courageous person um but it actually if you think a lot about these things if you ask yourself what courage is what kindness is what prudence is etc um and you ask yourself sincerely not not as a sort of academic exercise but in in the sincere desire to know the answer you will be able to answer that question just as easily through Aristotle as you would through mill I mean I think that the idea that utilitarianism provides us with a a good decision procedure is actually it's just misleading it looks easier to us than the others do but that's because we've been brought up in a utilitarian world um you know utilitarianism is the moral theory of our generation if you like yes I wonder in this case of the high divine locally of a great wouldn't there be many right answers for this it's not only one is right and the other is wrong because there are many good reasons in both sides uh it might be that that there's more than one right answer um I think that doesn't mean there isn't there aren't wrong answers um and also of course it might be that there's a right answer in this situation but not in this situation sorry but the that answer would not be right in this situation um so the fact that there's more than one right answer doesn't mean there isn't I mean take the dilemma with your mum again if we describe that just you know she says what do you think and you think yuck we can see that either being kind or being honest both of them can be justified can't they um probably that's only because we've only got this very sketchy outline of what's happening but both of them can be justified but the fact that there are two right answers two possible right answers doesn't mean that there isn't a wrong answer you know you could kick your mum and that would be you know that's something you shouldn't do in that situation whatever it is that you should do um you were first and then I suppose it's a somewhat similar question to the one behind me but and I've spent my professional career working within a code of professional ethics so I suppose you could say I'm a day anthropologist because I've been working with rooms but they're they're not absolute rooms they have to interpret it in different situations but you might also be able to tell but sometimes you find that one you're actively guiding principles more than words you sometimes find that one is another or indeed if you stick to the guiding principles you might find yourself in conflict conflict with the law of the land so again I can see how utilitarianism can help with this situation but I'm not so sure about some of the other okay well your homework is to work out how the others will because actually um I mean surely Aristotle would help you very well here because and he's in the business of saying when rules conflict you've got to engage in right reason you've got to look directly to the virtues and ask yourself what virtue requires of you and that's what you do do when you're faced with a one of these situations and you might take a different tack you might actually say well okay um what's going to produce the greatest happiness the greatest number here you could ask that but I bet actually you engage in right reason more than you do um utilitarian thinking it really is I cannot tell you how to do these things oh you can only you can work it out for yourself by reading Aristotle reading reading Kant and um I mean I would say waiting to be moved by them because your rational animals they're giving you rational arguments when you start to see why what they say makes sense then you're starting to understand them and you will start to apply their ideas um I mean I realise that's a you know you've probably got a job you haven't got all the time but it really is if you do have time to to actually get into these philosophers and think about what they're saying they will move you because you are rational and they are using rational arguments I mean a lot a lot of what you do in practice is in fact making sure that you can defend the decision that you made if you ever should have to yes well I it's interesting to ask how how you defend it actually because um whether you'd be asked for a utilitarian defence or whether you could say well actually I I thought it was just it would have been wrong for me to do this because it would have resulted in um it it would have been cowardly of me to do that you might say um if I'd done that it would have been I mean actually obeying the laws sometimes can be the coward's way out can't it um and and so here you you decide to disobey a law because that's what courage demands of you probably something other than courage also demands it because it wouldn't be just scared by putting yourself at risk of the prosecution yeah absolutely um I think what the whole of this course has pushed me towards is the fact that there are no absolutes that everything depends on the situation in which you're making a decision well that doesn't mean there aren't any absolutes though because there might be token absolutes I mean if in fact if everything depends on the situation then you probably are an absolutist but you're a token absolutist um do you remember um when I was talking about absolutes I was looking at things like um let's say produce the greatest happiness the greatest number um let's say that's our higher order absolute well that means in a particular situation whichever act it is that will produce the greatest happiness the greatest number that's the act you should do okay so that action is right becomes a moral absolute but I would even argue that even at that level there must be occasions when you even if you believed in the greatest happiness for the greatest number there would be times when you would act against that and believe that to be right but yes completely okay but but even so if you think in that situation doing that action is right then you can still be an absolutist because you're an absolutist about tokens not about types go back to look at lecture one and look at token absolutism or I might have called it situation absolutism I'm not sure um but but you I I believe that your instinct that we need to look at the situation as a whole is right I would be happy to call myself a situation list uh okay but but uh but I think you can't I think it's very difficult to be a relativist and a situationalist I think you said at one fairly early stage that Kent Pelt's views were sort of a prior right views but they didn't deserve they didn't view any disagreement until they they popped somehow out of the out of the out of the woodwork without sort of um I don't think you well never actually quite say that but um they weren't adaptive truths at all they didn't come from uh they didn't have any empirical basis they were just truing themselves how does he feel they evolved or that we could have any sort of um our epistemology could deal with that well he thinks that moral statements are synthetic a priori truths and there's a big problem with synthetic a priori synthetic means you must look to the world to determine truth uh but a priori means you can know without experience um so synthetic is usually opposed to analytic so an analytic truth is a truth um simply in virtue of the meanings of things so all bachelors are married men no unmarried men uh is an analytics truth you and you have to think of the meaning of the word bachelor and you can see that all bachelors are unmarried men is true you don't have to look to the world at all okay uh and a priori is uh compared to a posti a priori uh which means um on the basis of experience so you might think well how can there be synthetic truths that are a priori because a priori means we can just look at it look at the concepts for example um two plus two equals four is an a priori truth um because you you don't have to have experiences of twos and fours and things you only need to know the meaning of two plus two and equals to see that two plus two equals four so this seems to be both analytic and a priori and analytic and a priori go together and synthetic and a posti or i go together do you see how that works so how can there be a synthetic a priori truth and camps thinks that that's what moral truths are well okay here's my go at doing this i think um in order to universalise the maxim on which you act so okay to think about whether i should tell this should i make this false promise in order to gain advantage for myself um in order to answer that question um i've got to think about the world because i've got to think about the what promising is and what the consequences of promising promise making is and so on what the institution of promise keeping does um but i don't need experience of everyone's making false promises in order to see that if they did it would be bad are you with me do you see how you can get something that looks like you do need experience of some kind but you don't need experience of what it is you're thinking of um that's how i make sense of it to myself and so the a priori aspect is because um you're looking at possible worlds not at the actual world to go back to the um claim i was making earlier does that help yeah no i you can picture wherever it's in obviously that now yeah doesn't that mean more sympathetic towards it but what the idea that there is synthetic a priori i know but i can i can see that that's fine okay isn't it the case ken is trying to identify a necessary world to say well you need moral rules to make society work and that if people didn't tell them no he doesn't think that the um no that would be very consequentialist you've got an aim in mind making society work and what you've got to do is is act in this way um and that's not what he's trying to do he's not a consequentialist of any kind um but he does think that the moral law is a necessary law um he he does think that when you see that an action is right it's necessarily right but that's not what you meant i mean maybe i've misunderstood him i thought he was saying it's right because it's got to be this way yes that he is saying but you're saying in in relation to the logic not in relation to the yes exactly not in relation to the production of a particular end um but rather in relation to the logic yeah yeah just going to ask the people am i am i right in thinking that are you startable and you don't really take into consideration the social dimension of life um because many of the standards uh we we adopt do spring from our reference groups the ones that we belong to for instance with honey if we happen to be organic people we might well be organic honey if we were sort of um i don't know we like greek uh race and well no because the important thing is whether you're right to to be organic people no i i don't think that either human or Aristotle leave out the social dimension particularly not Aristotle who who thinks that human beings are political animals par excellence um he was suggesting though maybe i've got that wrong then because if you didn't know the answer when you're standing there and and there's poor lady with her hair you know whatever it is and you should bring a friend well that should be many friends um yes that's a difficult one i think in in that particular case you probably have to make your own mind up whether you're so it's going to be wrong for my liberal paradigm i mean what you would probably do if you were caught in that situation is next time you're with your friend in the pub you'd say then this happens what do you think i should have done but Aristotle is saying you ask other people um i mean you don't necessarily need to ask before the action i mean probably in the case of your mum you might not be able to ask before the action but you could certainly ask after the action and and put into your computation for next time what the answers were from the people you've got and we do do that don't we all the all the time okay we're going to stop there because i'm exhausted it can't do any more okay well thank you very much everyone it's um been great fun teaching you