 Okay, so we're finishing up day on time, and we've spent about a week and a half on Kant, sort of classic figure in the anthology. And now we've got this guy W.D. Ross. We're just doing one class session on him, in part because his theory isn't as complicated. We're not reading as much of him as we did at Kant. You wrote a book called The Right of the Good. We're only reading one chapter from it. We're reading the chapter that tends to get the most attention and probably has the most interesting ideas. I'm not going to tell you too much about this guy. He lives sort of a typical professor's life, 20th century, early 20th century thinker. He wrote his dissertation on Kant, so he really took Kant seriously. But he's also known, if you go any further into philosophy stuff, he's known as being an aristocrat scholar. And I think that's kind of revealing because what you see going on here, this will make more sense later in the semester when we look at Aristotle, Ross is effectively taking Kant and Aristotle, so day ontology and virtue ethics, and he's trying to put them together and come up with the best parts of each. What he's doing is actually a bit more day ontology than virtue ethics, which is why we're doing it here. But some of the themes that are coming up are things you've seen already and you're going to see again with Aristotle. He's also reacting against some of the moral theories that were really prevalent at his time. You guys have seen this a few times in the semester too. Bentham tackled different moral theories, Mill did that as well. In the last class we talked about different moral theories that Kant was criticizing. So it's not just putting forth one's own moral theory, one also has to engage other moral theories and say, here's where they go wrong. The ones that he's doing that with the most are some of the ones that we've already looked at in the semester. Egoism, hedonism, utilitarianism, and then one that it's a variety of utilitarianism that we didn't look at G. Moore's ideal utilitarianism. Why is Ross concerned about these? Two main reasons. One is these were very prevalent in his time, and they're also very prevalent in moral theory in our time. If you open up a business ethics textbook, for example, you will definitely see egoism discussed and you will definitely see utilitarianism. And those will probably get the most attention. And then you'll see some discussions about deontology, and you'll maybe see some stuff about virtue ethics or ethics of care. If you're in a Catholic school, you'll see something on natural law. If you're in some other schools, you might see something about other religious ideas and ethics. But for the most part it's going to be egoism, utilitarianism, and then a nod to deontology and virtue ethics. That's because egoism and utilitarianism are two of the most common approaches. Not only in our time, but also in Ross's time. And Ross thinks that there's something mistaken about them. So that's a good place for us to start. This is something that he also thinks Kant got a little bit wrong too. So let's think for a minute about these different theories that are all a little bit closely connected. Egoism, hedonism, utilitarianism. What does egoism say you ought to do? What's the right thing to do if you're an egoist? Self-interest, in what sense? You should pick the action that does what for self-interest. That fits your self-interest, or what were you saying? Fulfills your self-interest. If you have two different options, and they both satisfy your interests to some degree, how do you decide between them? Greatest happiness, right? Greatest good. You would look at which one satisfies your interests the most, right? So if I'm a real jerk professor, and I really like humiliating students, I get a charge out of that. And yet I also will make me a really bad guy. I also want to squeeze that student for a bribe. And humiliating them is going to interfere with getting that bribe. Which do I want more? Which satisfies my interests more? There's a moral dilemma faced by bad people. Well, it would be the one that's whichever one I find satisfies my self-interest the most, right? So what I'm doing is I'm maximizing something. And if on the other hand you really enjoy helping people and you've got two different charities you could contribute to, which one would actually make you happier to contribute to? That would be the egoist thing as well. You pick what maximizes your happiness. And if going fishing, rather than doing the reading satisfies my interests, but if going fishing is the right thing to do, right? What's that adding into the mix, or what's that narrowing things to? Pleasure, right? And even as if it's about maximizing your pleasure too, isn't it? It's not just about pleasure. It does say pleasure's good. It's saying the right action to pursue is the one which will maximize your pleasure. So let's think about friendships now. You have some friends that are less fun to deal with than others, right? We admit to that? Well, what does evenism say you ought to do? You ought to spend more time with the friends who are more fun, and less time with the friends who are less fun. And if they quit being fun altogether, maybe edge them out of your circles. That would even maximize your pleasure. That doesn't mean you have to be completely selfish. I mean, if making you feel good makes me feel good, or making you feel good makes you more likely to do things that are going to make me feel good, that's the rational thing to do. But it's all about maximizing something for the self, right? How does utilitarianism change that? It's about pleasure, right? Pleasure and pain, yeah. It's maximizing for the greatest good for the most people? Yeah. That's a big jump there. Instead of just caring about myself, I care about everybody, and I treat myself as just one person among others, and I try to do things that are going to maximize pleasure for the greatest amount of people, right? Now, in each case, what am I doing? I'm maximizing something. Moore had a version of utilitarianism where he didn't just confine it to pleasure. He said, we'll talk about goods and generation maximizing good outcomes for people. But that's not really that different. And Ross says, is that the way that we actually think about moral decisions and what we ought to do? Do we actually say whatever is going to maximize something is the right thing to do? We do that in some cases, don't we? We do that in certain things. Do we do that across the board? Is that the way we generally make our moral judgments? Right often, we're not even thinking about maximizing things. Like, when you make a promise to somebody, do you say to yourself, this is going to conform to the greatest happiness principle? I'm going to maximize utility all around. Have any of you ever done that? Have you started doing that now that you've studied death in the middle? Well, how are you going to know if it's right if you don't apply it? We don't actually do things that way, do we? And Bentham and Mill weren't saying you should do that in every similar case. They were saying this is the way that you can decide what's right and what's wrong. How about the greatest, not the greatest happiness principle, the categorical imperative? Now, I know it's kind of new to you guys, but if you started working with it and every time you get into a situation you say, I should only act on the maxim, I can will at the same time to be a universal law of nature. What's my maxim? What do you think this out of? Okay, I've got the maxim. Can I will it to be a universal law of nature? Maybe it could be universalized, could I actually will it? Do you internalize that process yet? Any of you thorough going conscience? I don't think I actually... I think if I make an adjustment to that, I usually try to say it's not if everybody were else to do this, I say if I were to do this to everybody else, to every other person, instead of treating others. That's interesting. So universalize it not in the sense that everybody should put that out and treat everybody in the same way. You know, that's a good point. That would actually, I think, that would bring in the second formulation a bit more. Here's how I imagine you would use something like that. Correct me if I'm wrong. So you feel like being a jerk to somebody. Because they'd been treating you bad. So you feel like saying, you know, I'm pulling at you for the use of jerks. You get the idea, right? And then you think to yourself, would I talk to my own parents that way? Or would I talk to my wife or a girlfriend or whatever it that way? If I wouldn't talk to them that way, then maybe I shouldn't talk to this person that way. Is that the sort of thing you're doing? I think that's an interesting suggestion. As far as I know, it doesn't talk about things like that. But I think that would be a good use that could make Kant's framework. That's an interesting advance. You know, we capture something like that when somebody is cursing somebody out and saying, Exactly, yeah. Now, what that gets us to is something that Ross is about. Moral intuitions are sort of basic, ordinary, what the marketer was calling plain person view of things. We often do it in terms of these proverbs or these, what do we call them? Insane, right? Ross asks about promises. When we make a promise, do we think we're maximizing utility or pleasure or something like that? We don't think anything like that usually. Maybe in a few cases we do, but not usually. And if somebody were to make promises just on that basis, you'd think they were kind of a freak, wouldn't you? You'd look at them and say, There's something about making promises with you that doesn't add up. Ross is perfectly fine with when you're asked, Why should I keep my promises that I've made? You say, because I've made promises. Ross thinks that there's some sort of moral bedrock, intuitions. That's a term that he uses. So it's sometimes called ethical intuitionism. That ordinary, decent person is going to more or less get. They're not going to be very articulate in explaining this. But if you ask them, why should I keep this promise? Or why should I follow the rules of the game? They'll look at you and say, Because that's what you're supposed to do. That's what one does. Now, could there be some cases where keeping a promise would be the wrong thing to do? Probably think of some cases like that. If I say, I want to tell you something, but you have to promise that you're going to keep it to yourself. I'm really excited about this news. Then you say, yeah, okay. And I say, it planted a bomb, and it's going to go along in a couple of hours. And I've never done this sort of thing before. I'm so excited about it. First, you'd say, well, being excited about it, you're doing something really wrong with you. You don't realize what you're doing. But how many of you would say, oh, I made a promise. I'm not going to say anything. That would be the right thing to do in that case. That's what you tell a person. Well, I think that would be prudent that you don't make a case of saying, this is definitely one of those cases that Ross told me about. I'm a good utilitarian. I won't keep this promise because it will result in greater harm. You'd want to keep that to yourself when you're dealing with that person, but then you'd get on the phone right away, wouldn't you? As soon as you get to about a year shot, that would be doing the right thing, Ross would say. There are certain cases where we should break the promise. But those are the exceptions, aren't they? Now, in those cases where we should break the promise, would you say you have a duty to the other people? Is that why you're breaking that duty to keep the promise? Because you have another duty saying not to harm other people, not to allow them to be harmed? Does that make sense? Is that the way you feel about it? If you do, then Ross says, okay, that's good. That's a good starting point. If you don't have any of those sort of feelings, you're a psychopath, or nowadays we say sociopath, and that's a problem, right? That is, by the way, one problem for moral intuition, isn't that? Not everybody does, in fact, have these intuitions. But would you say that in a functional society, most people do see things that way? They may not be really expressive with it, but you can rely on other people usually to do the right thing because they feel like they should do the right thing. So if that's the case, then utilitarianism doesn't really make that much sense, does it? Except for certain cases, certain types of decisions that we have to make. Does even Kant's theory make that much sense? Do you actually apply the categorical imperative each time you get into those things? Or do we have a bunch of, like Ross says, we have a bunch of different duties, and they don't all boil down to the same thing. This would be an example of what we call pluralist approaches to it, where you recognize a bunch of different values or a bunch of different duties, and there may be some problems coming up with that. They make it flicker with each other, but you can at least say these aren't all the same thing, and you have to be a good person to do the right thing. You should recognize all of these, and that's what Ross is doing. The other thing that I want to point out before we actually look at each one of these duties, is that Ross says that the utilitarian, and I think this applies to the Kantian, too, of that, they're looking at how you ought to place yourself in relation to other people. And we do have some very general duties, right? I think before I actually came into this classroom, and I was just walking around on Marist campus, and you didn't realize that I was your professor for this semester, because we were crossing paths, you would probably still feel that you had certain duties towards me, just as a human being, wouldn't you? None of you came up to me and gave me a good puncher, you know, took my wallet, and if you were tempted to do so, you would probably say, I shouldn't do that sort of thing. Quit thinking about that, right? If I said hello to you, even though you didn't know me, most likely on this campus, you probably said hello back, that's part of the social expectations. It makes it a nicer place, too, by the way, rather than somebody saying hello and then looking at you and going, who the hell are you? That's not quite so nice. Once you're actually in relationships with people, you have certain duties that come from those relationships, though, don't you? You were born into some, some that you could probably never escape from, right, being a child to somebody. When you fulfill your duties to your parents, are you maximizing utility or something like that? I mean, you know, if you think about it, Ross says duties are actually very personal. We have some impersonal duties to everybody, right? But most of our duties that we feel in our ordinary life are very personal. They're my duty to this person, and it's in a relationship that's developed over time, or, you know, could go different ways depending on what we do at this point. So each one of you is my students, right? And I have a, it's not a very deep personal relationship, but I have a personal relationship with each one of you. I have certain duties towards you. And likewise, you have several different professors, right? Maybe if you get really lucky one day, you can just find the one professor you like and only take classes with them, but that's not usually how it works. You have duties towards each other, I think. If one of your classmates is sick and asks you if you'll take notes for them, would you do it? Or are you saying, every person for themselves, screw you. Bless you. But after you say, yes, I'll take notes for you, you have kind of a personal obligation. It's not just, well, I said to somebody that I would take notes for them. I said to this person, I owe them something. And he talks about a bunch of different relationships. Promisee to promiser, creditor to debiter, wife to husband, child to parent, friend to friend, fellow countryman to fellow countryman. And different duties arise from these, he says. And these are part of what make us who we are. So if you think back to that McIntyre piece that we read at the beginning of the semester, your narrative is in part a story about how well you did, or how poorly you did, or the mix of both, in recognizing the duties that you had to other people and fulfilling those duties. And also, the other way, how well they recognize their duties to you and fulfill those duties to you. That's part of what makes you who you are. You probably never thought about it that way. But that's an important part of what makes you that person who you are, somebody who's not replaceable by somebody else. That story that you're still unfolding. So now after waxing quite a bit like that, let's look at some of these duties. He calls these prima facia duties. Are you familiar with this term, prima facia? Anybody in here familiar with it? What do you think it means? You believe in the first thing to do, the first to do. Yeah, you think they'll be coming from the Latin facia, right? Or maybe you took Italian or French or something like that that's got something similar. Say again? First right duty thing? Well, it's something more like at first blush or at first glance. He's not saying that these are absolute duties. He's saying that these are the things that we, without thinking that much about it, recognize as types of duties. That generally we have these things as duties. If you talk about a prima facia case, you mean a case that is made without going into everything in total depth and detail, but just looking at the surface. Fascia, the fascia of your skin is coming from the same term. So he says, well, we can distinguish a bunch of these. And let's go through each one. He says, you have duties of fidelity. That's another Latin word. Ross is a classic scholar, so he uses a lot of things of that. When we talk about fidelity, the paradigm is making a promise. When you make a promise to another person, you may not have thought of it in terms of being faithful, which the fidelity is coming from. But when you make a promise, you need that promise, right? And that once you've fulfilled your promise, something has been lifted from you. Something has been done that ought to be done. Is that how you feel about promises? Or do you feel that they don't mean anything? Words are wind, as they say. Or as Cattella says in one of his poems, my woman swears to me she'd have me above Joe if he saw her. Write women's words in love to men on wind and running water. You can reverse it very easily for a men to women, couldn't you? The idea there is that somehow fidelity doesn't matter. The promises don't mean anything. But is that how you feel about it? If somebody makes a promise to you and then they don't keep the promise, what do you feel? Sad? All of you feel sad? I don't really feel sad. Depending on what the promise is and the person is, sometimes I get angry. Yeah, that's what I feel. And the sad is probably better. I set up stuff. I mean, same thing, pretty much. It makes us emotional. What if you see somebody making a promise to somebody else? You don't even know that other person. And then they don't fulfill that promise. Yeah. I know that in terms of fidelity, I know that in terms of fidelity that gets me mad. Like when somebody makes a promise to somebody to be with them and be faithful and stuff like that and they don't come through there being from somebody that is the opposite of what they would do. Yeah, there's a sort of sense of righteous indignation when we see somebody making a promise in other words if I see somebody cheating I get really upset. Yeah, cheating I think falls under this as well. You're thinking in terms of like relationship, right? You can also think about games. Ross says that when you make a promise or when you enter into a situation in which there's an implicit promise or you engage in an action in which there's an implicit promise then you're bound by some duty of fidelity. You know, if you started playing Scrabble with somebody all of you have played Scrabble before, right? How many of you like playing Scrabble? Kind of a fun game, right? What are some of the rules? You probably didn't actually like look at the set of rules, right? You started playing Scrabble first and then somebody would break the rules and then somebody else would column on it. What are some of the rules? Yeah, you can't just make stuff up. You can't just put the Q here because that's the triple letter score and then build everything around it. Yeah. You can't look up over it. That's true. You can look it up after to make sure it's a word but you can't use the dictionary to make a word. Also, the only time was funny because I unfortunately take advantages. Only if somebody else challenges your word does your word be fun. There's rules about how the process works and procedures. You can reach into the bag and flip letters until you get the ones you want. There's supposed to be an element of chance to it. If you sit down at the Scrabble board and you get out that little tray and you start loading it up with those seven letters you're not actually looking across the board and saying to the person, I promise to you I will follow all the rules. I promise to you as well. You're making an implicit promise though, right? If you don't follow the rules they're going to call you on it. Let's say you don't follow the rules about how to follow the rules. Somebody challenges you and turns out your word isn't really a word. Q and X and F and P put together and you say, we're going to stick with it this time. That would be breaking a kind of implicit contract or a promise, right? Ross has this great example of if you're going to write a book and you're going to say that it's non-fiction you need to make sure that the facts in it are actually true. If I were to write a book about the president of the college and who I don't know all I know is he's been here for a very long time and he's considered to be a good guy and he's done lots to improve the college. Let's say I write a book about it and I say the history of Dennis Murray. Dennis Murray was born in 1856 from a mermaid off the coast of Spain. Sounds pretty good, right? It's a nice story. But if I'm going to pass that off, it's true. I'm breaking an implicit promise to the reader. I tell you. So there's a lot of different duties of fidelity. When you enter into a relationship with a person this is where a lot of fights come up because it's easy to say you have wedding vows and they comprise exactly this. But then how far did they extend? We've looked at that example before. Do you have a duty to disclose information about previous partners that you may still be interacting with? That might fall under this. If your spouse or significant other gets mad at you because you didn't say that your old boyfriend or girlfriend happens to be in the same workplace as you they are probably angry with you on this ground. You feel that something has not been done that should be done that you had undertaken to do. The next one is really interesting. Reparation. I've mentioned this before a couple of times during the semester. Ethics is not just about what you want to do but how to set up your life just right so that you realize you're good. It's about figuring out what to do after you've already screwed it up. Because by the time that you come into this classroom and certainly by the time that you're my age and you start thinking about these things you've made some bad decisions. You've hurt some people. You've gone off the track at some times and hopefully come back. But maybe not entirely. There are certain actions that we do that hurt other people and those impose on us a duty of reparation. It's about making it right. What would be some examples of that? What are some of those actions? What would be some things that... Think about your experience. Either you've done or you've seen somebody do or somebody did to you. You felt somebody should make something right. We don't just like go out on Mark's idea of the whole fidelity and cheating. I've seen one of my friends cheat. I know his golf. And she'll ask me and I don't want to get in their business like I sit back and I look at it and I'm like you need to do something about this like you can't be doing this to be like supposedly welcome. That one is an interesting one. We'll come back to that one because I think that was the time of some of these other duties as well. When you see when you see somebody cheating you think they are some of the things they ought to do. They ought to knock it off, right? Is that enough though? I'm not going to do it anymore. Take me back. It'll never happen again. Yeah. I don't think so. But it's interesting because it's like preparation and it kind of came up in one application assignment where the other person is in the L like your girlfriend is in the L. So what are you repairing by telling her that you messed up? Because nothing is wrong other than what you're doing. I don't know how to describe it. Speaking empathetically. Speaking empathetically. The other person doesn't know so they're not upset and they're not farmed yet. But they will be once you tell them. The question becomes what do you do? Yeah, I think that would probably be one of the duties of fidelity. Once you've actually told them now, let's say your best friend comes to you with advice. They've just screwed up their marriage either they told their spouse because they finally felt guilty enough that they had to or they got caught and now they had to fess up to it. What should they do? They should obviously say it's not going to happen again. But is that enough? What other sorts of things should they do? They're going to have to rebuild the whole idea of trust because once you hurt someone is so bad in that idea you lose that person trusting you. Especially if that person is not by you telling them for seven your girlfriend or boyfriend is not at school with you. You cheat on them. How do they know you're not going to do it again? So you say Actions to rebuild lost trust will fall under that sort of duty. I was going to even say if you even get the chance to repay them they might just end it. That's true too. That brings up an interesting idea. Do you have a duty to go further and make sure their relationship continues even if they don't want it to get in so you can try to make it right? Boston said that would interfere with one of the other duties. So there may be some cases where you just can't repair it. But you could try to be extra attentive but in flowers that's a small gesture. If they were to just like drop you and there's no chance of getting them back I mean you fight for them first and then you realize that there's nothing there. I think you might have a duty to delay let them know that you're a bad example. You're not the only one. Other people aren't like you kind of thing. Well it's unlikely I think practically speaking that somebody in that situation would actually do that. That's actually a great suggestion. A lot of people they have bad experiences and then afterwards they treat everybody in that way. They put up a guard. Yeah that's a good idea. It's almost like coming to them and wearing the sign around your neck saying I'm the exception. Don't distrust all other men or women. Yeah that's a good one. There's a lot of different kinds of harm that we can play. Some of them are not quite so deep as that. If I wreck your car I should replace your car. Right? Maybe if you need to get somewhere I should drive you around until you have a new car. Some of the discussions about criminal justice talking about restorative justice and I think that would fit in with this restorative justice which I'm not that big actually because I think it tends to I think the discussions about it tend to mute other kinds of justice. Is this idea that the best thing to do with crimes is not just to punish people and things like that but to try to restore their relationship between the offender and the people that they've offended against or society and sometimes this leads to things like murderers actually meeting the people who are related to the person that they murdered and saying that they're sorry and it brings about some sort of closure. Again I had my reservations about these sort of activities but I think that could fit into what Ross is talking about is duties of reparation. What about when other people do good things to us they engage in actions that benefit us. Ross says we have duties of gratitude. He's not talking about the feeling too by the way he's not talking about feeling actually doing the things that display gratitude. First off, not screwing over the person who just benefited you certainly taking advantage of them in any way if they've made themselves open to you by helping you would definitely go against that duty but there's some positive things as well. What should we do with people? If they get into a situation where we can benefit them should we give them a sort of preference and benefit them? So long as it doesn't interfere with St. Justice we're not talking about I bribed you the next time around you bribed me but if you take me out to dinner do we feel like I now have an obligation to take you out to dinner sometime? Do you guys feel that way? How do you feel about somebody who just, you know, rides along for all the dinners and never picks up the tab? What's that? Yeah, what? They're a freeloader. A freeloader is somebody who's not grateful for what they're getting at. Is like showing them gratitude for something they did for you could that be considered reparation? No, reparation is when you've done something wrong. Now if it could come in, let's say they did something wrong and they apologized to you and you say thank you for finally apologizing to me, I suppose that would be your attitude but Ross has something more in mind or somebody has done something good for you. Is that referring to somebody who's doing something good for you out of their duty to do something good for you or they're doing it just because they wanted to? It could be either one. Parents are a good example of this. There's like, let's say we take two complete extremes. Parents who actually do what they're supposed to do. So we leave out the bad parents. There's some parents who are so thrilled with their kids all the time and the kids are so amazing and affection all constantly and they do what they're supposed to do. Go to the soccer game and show up to the Boy Scout, Girl Scout meetings paint the room the color the kid wants. And then there's the sort of mother extreme of I can't stand my kids but I can't believe that they came from me because look how different they are but I'm going to do the right thing by them. That's a kind of good parent. Maybe not as good as the parent who actually likes their kids. But it's better to do what you're supposed to do than not to do it. Then there's the parents who say screw my kids, I'm going to do what I want. You're there for me. You're here to do chores or to make me look good or something like that. That's not a good parent. But let's say we're talking about good parents. So yours probably fit in somewhere on that continuum. And actually once you become parents you'll realize that it's very difficult to have the feeling of affection for your kids all the time. We talk like we do but you'll realize that there won't be times when they drive you nuts and you think there's something wrong with this kid but you still have to behave loving towards them. They say love is a choice. Your parents have done stuff like that for you. You have a duty of gratitude. Ross would say. It's hard duty to satisfy too. They'll be doing stuff for you a long long time and they'll be doing stuff for you for a while more I'm guessing. And when will you start reciprocating on the level that they've done for you? You may not even be able to do that. Yeah. I was just about to say I don't think you really can. I feel like the only way... They may not even let you too by the way. I feel like the only way... I mean there's going to be problems with what I say but by doing the same thing for the kids that you have but then what about people that don't have kids? But I feel like the only way I can repay my parents is to be just as good as the parents they were. That's an interesting idea that maybe some of the duties of gratitude could be met by doing something good for another person. What about like a lot of our parents that help us pay for our education so like being successful in the workplace would be like giving back to them because it's like doing good that would be nice. Yeah, I think that's plausible. It's interesting too because some parents will say I want you to be successful some of them will say things like I just want you to be happy. Pick this major that is probably not going to be financially lucrative but I want you to study it because knowledge is good I have a sort of interesting example that came up recently that showed me how different my sentiments about gratitude are from my wife. I don't usually write thank you notes. I'll say thank you to the person in person or call them up and I do that usually at the time. I don't come from a family that sends thank you notes. My mom tried to get us to do that when we were kids but it didn't really stick in part because she didn't really do it and we certainly didn't do it you know we'd do it every once in a while for you know but it kind of went against the grain for me because I felt like my duty of gratitude was satisfied by my actually saying thank you let's see if I can do the person a good turn on my own. My wife feels guilty if we don't send a thank you note because she was raised in a family where you actually do send thank you notes and I guess that's really the right thing to do because when I've got a thank you note to myself I feel kind of happy about it how do you guys feel? Have you guys gotten thank you notes? Do you like getting thank you notes? Does it make you feel like the person's done what they ought to do? Do any of you feel upset when somebody doesn't send you a thank you note? Would there be some situations where if a person didn't send you a thank you note you would feel upset? I think so especially when you go above and beyond for that certain situation I don't find myself say it was a family member and I went above and beyond and like my sister just started it at first she wasn't sending thank you notes for certain things but like time value and certain things like I'd rather thank you for something that I'm putting time into rather than money That makes sense I agree with Ashley with like I've seen her do it many times but I feel like there are some things that aren't really necessary for a thank you like my sister and my brother-in-law sent me a thank you card for like being at their wedding and being in the party but I realized it's not good because it's my sister you know I was going to be there either way That's true I mean I was thinking actually when I was asking about that about you sent a gift at a wedding it's protocol that they should send a thank you note but yeah I guess maybe if it's your family you don't need to Of course they might get more angry with you for not doing it I don't necessarily think like a note is necessary but the manner in which the person says thank you to you does it sound genuine or is there really some gratitude there or are they just saying hey thank you do this again for me next time you know that has an effect on it I think you're right In our case I can tell how important thank you notes were for my wife because she felt guilty about not getting them done right away I can't do it all off I'm not interested in thank you notes and we did the sort of typical thing where she wrote out the whole thing and then said here sign this because I have no idea what to even write in half of these I read hers and I'm like wow this is really great sentiments here I would have just written thanks for the whatever see you later but that's me I'm not very good with that I don't fulfill these duties of gratitude as well as she does I also think nowadays a lot of people someone passes away and you go to the family and you say thank you for attending I guess that's just being there but I don't like my grandpa passed away and my mom wrote them all out and then handed a bunch to my dad who was here for the people who know I remember going through something like that when my mom died big stacks of those things over a thousand people showed up to her because she was unfortunately the secretary of a club in Milwaukee so they all showed up luckily they didn't all sign the book though okay let's move on now when we think about Justice Ross oftentimes we think of what we owe to other people and so some of that's already comprised of fidelity if you make a promise or contract that's fidelity reparation that's also if you screw things up if you have a strong sense of justice you will try to fix things but what else includes what else included in justice fairness apportioning things as he says equally or according to the merit so if I order pizzas for the class and I would say okay everybody in the front row gets three slices and then we're going to work our way back second row, two slices third row, one slice everybody in the back row, no slice how would you feel? I'd feel very good you'd feel good even knowing that they were just messing what would be the difference between a purely egoist perspective and somebody who has that sort of prima facie I'd probably get on the slides since I have three you would be acting out of justice can that be like a social experiment to see which of us is unhappily which of us would share which of us would work we could do that but you know what if I was going to do something like that and do an experiment and write about it here at the Marist I would actually have to get the IRB the institutional review board to okay that because it involves human subjects that's like doing what is that? no, no, no that I know you're talking about it's supposed to replicate world conditions and I know of my housemate the past two years and she goes with the basketball team and every year she gets three and the coaches end up getting and she's sitting there like you share your piece of chicken with me are you familiar with what she's talking about? there are these dinners they've been going out for a while there's three options you pay in live box or time box it's like first world countries second world countries so you go from chicken to chicken and rice to a big barbeque rice and meat and my mom used to do these all the time and the idea behind it is it's supposed to give you a sense of how things are actually proportion so it would inform your sense of justice if you realize that that's what it's like in the world then maybe it's like wow there's something wrong with this I don't like being on the almost everybody gets the two or three so I don't like being on the beans and rice or just rice and maybe I should do something to fix this yeah you had given pizza to everybody but everybody in the back row and I heard that maybe Vince was really hungry and I stole a piece of pizza well you might be satisfying you might be trying to sort of you know set things right as far as fairness from Ross would say that's a good question let me put that one off for you so when it comes to justice it has to do with how we distribute things it doesn't always have to be equal if if one of you makes a cake I don't expect that I should get exactly the same amount of that cake as you did because you put the work into it but if you bring the cake to the classroom you would say well you should have enough for everybody if I later on in the semester bring bring cookies and I say okay everybody except for you get a cookie I think not only you would be bothered by that I think all the rest of you would be bothered right you would say that justice has been in some way violent then there's beneficence and this is where we go beyond justice beneficence is a set of duties that we have towards other beings by the sheer fact that we can benefit them and Ross thinks about benefits in three main ways he thinks about pleasure it's possible for us to do things that make other people happy we do it all the time right that's beneficence you know we would say if I can help other people I probably should help other people are there other ways we can help them are there other goods we can provide them beyond or things that give us pleasure like wealth what do you think he'd give people love he doesn't talk about that interestingly enough yeah I suppose loving them making them know that they're valued and loved I think that would actually be a pretty important good Ross doesn't talk about that security he also doesn't talk about that either but yeah I think that's a good one too nurturing might actually be not just a matter of love but also providing shelter protection all sorts of things do you think maybe he thinks those fall under pleasure because they would feel bit to that person because if you didn't get that you'd feel pain maybe I don't know I think he really is still at the bottom of what we're kind of conscient and Kant is not into love to put it very blunt Ross talks about two other goods virtue and knowledge by making them smarter making them better informed that's different than pleasure right oftentimes the process of learning is not particularly pleasurable then afterwards you've acquired something I think all of you have classes where you took the class you didn't enjoy the class at the time you came out of it and then a semester later you found yourself using stuff from it and you're like man that was really useful for me to go through that class I really got a lot out of it I wish I'd actually put more into it so I would have gotten more out of it making somebody a better person helping them towards being integrated having the virtues being able to settle their moral the levels that are going to come up that's helping them isn't it again is that necessarily particularly pleasurable sometimes that means actually giving people displeasure if you're a friend or somebody who you admire says to you hey you're screwing up you'd better knock that off does that make you happy when they say stuff like that to you not unless you're a masochist you know but they may be benefiting you as a result can you think of people who have over the course of your life set you straight painfully and later on you recognized that person was there I didn't have to send my parents they'd knock it off and then as I grew older I was younger that was the reason why my parents were saying it because they kind of did the same things I did when I was younger and they learned and my parents always said the whole thing is when I was in high school I hated having such a particular curve for you everyone had a curve and my parents were allowed out for a certain reason and then again I grew older as my parents they had me on a curve for a reason yeah I think that's a great classic example so they benefited you didn't they and they also by making you stick to a curfew they instilled in you a purpose and to think about consequences really before class we were talking about is it better to give your kids an irrational overly strict moral code to live by or just to say whatever you like live and not live in some ways it's better to give them some crazy strict may screw them up a bit moral code that you can react against first off not this sort of namby-pandy who knows what anything means kind of relativism but you also instill in them certain habits if there's some sort of moral code in place and it's a crazy moral code you at least get the kids used to the idea of having to give some sort of justification for what they want to do the example that I gave is imagine some household I'm not knocking the bible with this I'm just knocking the use that some people make of it imagine a household where they say this is a biblical household we're going to do exactly what the bible says and nothing else the kids they get this big document which is like a whole bunch of different types not just books but different types of literature and they're supposed to live according to this well if you have that sort of thing going on you'll get pretty good like looking through it and finding the verses that conform to what it is if you think you want to do or what should happen in the situation which by itself is not necessarily a good thing although reading is good and then you'll also get really good at making a case why should this particular principle apply here? and if they've done that that's actually benefited you you probably don't want to just stick with whatever you can do in the bible you probably want to have some moral principles that are not just whatever happens to be on page 86 or page 516 but there wouldn't be a good habit to have that habit of being able to make a case wouldn't that? that would be benefiting you whereas if they say do whatever you like is that benefiting you? how do kids like that turn out in your experience? you ever had any friends like that? it was really fun going over to their house because there weren't any rules are those friends doing as well now? in your experience? maybe not self-improvement is really interesting it's tied to business if you ought to be good to other people you also ought to be good to yourself because you're a person too and do you need to really pay close attention to give yourself pleasure to make your life better that way? probably not do you have to work to make yourself a better person morally or intellectually? yeah, that takes some more doing if you feel like you're not doing what you ought to do with respect to your moral life or with respect to your intellectual life you are running into this duty of self-improvement we don't have to tell ourselves we don't have a good time we already know how to do that we already have a natural drive for that but to improve ourselves to make our condition better with respect to our moral life like for instance let's say you have decided that you have a character flaw that now is bothering you and you want to work on it to do that would be fulfilling this duty of self-improvement or if you look at your relationships that you're in you said, man all my friends are dummies I shouldn't hang around with people like that I should find some smart people who will actually lead me into doing other things than say just sitting around talking about whatever and playing Xbox I need somebody to actually get a challenge you would be carrying out a process of self-improvement wouldn't you I may actually have some duties with respect to that with health and weight and things like that then we come to the last one non-malificence which is kind of a mouthful basically that means just not doing harm to people not hurting them that's different than benefiting them you also feel that you have a duty not to harm people right when you do harm people do you feel bad you not only feel that you want to try to make up for it but you also feel you shouldn't have done it in the first place is that conformed to your experience yeah I think he actually did somebody's already heard me man somebody I can't go back right yeah and that might be a case where one of the other virtues one of the other duties would supersede that you also have a responsibility to keep yourself from being harmed so if we're talking about self-defense you know you can think for example though of cases where you find yourself having to do something in self-defense could be verbal or could be physical and you find yourself afterwards feeling kind of bad about it even though you knew that you had to protect yourself so I wish I didn't have to hurt that person that would be recognizing this this duty there so all of these are our duties that we feel they don't all reduce to one thing they don't all boil down to one single principle for Ross let's say some kid gets bullied and the teacher doesn't intervene imagine it's like a K through 12 classroom maybe elementary school all the kids are picking on this one kid and you know maybe you've got 35 kids in your classroom can you imagine that? that's what your model is it's pandemonium and you're not allowed to discipline kids too by the way you can't even say certain things that you have to write an out to the principal so it's kind of tough to handle bullying stuff and you know how our kids are like I think we've all been on the good end and probably also on the bad end of the situation so some kid is bullied and it starts affecting their ability to concentrate to do all the tests and the grade is based on largely on their tests at the end of the semester that wouldn't be a good way to sort of a class are any of you have majors in here? you know at the end of the semester test not the way to sort of a class no grading in the last two weeks of the class because that's bad pedagogy let's say this teacher is doing that so this kid flunks the test this kid is being bullied you know we have a requirement to treat everybody fairly maybe that kid should flunk the class but this other duty of reparation could impinge on that the teacher didn't do what he or she was supposed to do could thrive in the classroom like the other kids maybe they have a duty then to make it up to the kid by cutting them some slack is that something plausible to you? because but also I think it goes back to justice because we have to take into account what that child is doing here and so it actually might be fair you know and just for that to be able to take tests over again or something because they have that added level of stress yeah I think that makes sense go for you yeah well I got stuff on the test I mean how do you don't learn from that you can get it wrong it's like it's really bad if somebody's telling you that looks good I'm not being constructive I see yeah so they get to go on and do that right like all those kids who get passed on through these systems that we have they get out of school and they can't effectively read that's true that's worth thinking about as well you notice the way that it works for Ross is we sort of throw things on the table and we start thinking well what about this what about this this is the way that Ross thinks we actually do handle moral issues I mean shouldn't it though is that by letting the kids go again I feel like that we're kind of off on the use oh yeah I mean you definitely have a I would say that I've been biased to justice to begin right because you're allowing somebody to sing a lot of treating badly but also that non-molificence I feel like if you were to let that happen for so long you know at the end to just kind of let it go yeah well it's certainly not the best solution but you know this reparation always has to be done when we already screwed it up we didn't find the best solution to begin with I'm not saying the little kids shouldn't get the second chance but if you do that for the sake that he's been bullied then what if there's other things that other students have had problems with that they never came you know it's just there's always going to be others so they might say about me I'm dyslexic or my parents are divorcing shouldn't I get that well yeah then it just sets precedent for if you have a special it's kind of like the application thing that you said like they were having family issues so do you let them you knew that she cheated on the test so yeah she had family issues but what if a student was having family issues and didn't say anything it's always like everyone has something that they could what was interesting about that particular assignment was that some of you had some pretty good suggestions for how the professor handled that like they they said well he could cut her some slack but only so much slack and figuring out where to draw the line but that does seem to be a matter of of justice like some of you suggested giving the student a C for the semester having the student come in and talking with the student about using it as an opportunity to talk about what's going on with you you know the personal stuff you know why cheating is wrong you know trying to improve the moral character of the student I thought that was a really smart set of suggestions some people say just stay with the how the need student flunks or just let it slide but a lot of you found some sort of use of the middle ground and you know if we were using rosses with exactly what we would do notice another thing too about this we've probably heard from about six students I'd say on this particular example isn't it better to have a lot of different voices at the table maybe one person speaking up for fidelity another person speaking up for justice because we often if we're on our own we don't realize all the different factors or duties that could be involved how do we deal with conflicts that arise because that's going to be a problem you know what if one duty seems to contradict another he says well there's no hard and fast rules for that you have to look at the actual individual situation and then you have to sort of figure out which one is more appropriate or which ones are more appropriate rosses a couple different things I'll go through very quickly he says that outside of determinate situations you're not going to be able to figure out necessarily how a duty ought to be acted on how far you ought to go with reparations or gratitude it's not possible to provide cover all rules for that he also says that anyone of these could be overridden by another duty so maybe let's say we take the example of the promise again the promise with the bomb there's a duty to prevent harm to other people that supersedes the duty to keep your promise in that case does that mean that this always supersedes that it doesn't mean that it means you actually have to judge in that situation you have to think it through the other thing that he says is we can't say that some of these duties are a bit more predominant and this one is probably the most important of the duties so before you have to decide whether to do justice or to benefit people you should at least make sure that you're not hurting other people so if I can make you happy by taking stuff away from her making you happy would be beneficence but I shouldn't take stuff away from her so there are certain kinds of beneficence that I shouldn't do he says that fidelity reparation and gratitude these three right here have a certain greater stringency that's the word he uses or you might say strictness than the others but again it doesn't completely supersede them but in general he would say look if you made a promise to somebody that comes before other things so in order to break my promise I do so because it'll benefit you I shouldn't do that even though it's going to benefit you or making up for wrong things showing gratitude that shouldn't be me I shouldn't sacrifice those to beneficence either but again these don't have an absolute one single way of figuring it out what's his view on justice and how that takes what's his view on justice and the predominance of that or the other things well it's hard to say it sounds from some of the things that he says as if justice certainly takes priority over beneficence like if I you could think of it this way with respect to justice and beneficence first you set things up fairly and then if you've got leftover things now you can make other people happy with that but you can think about it not just like money but maybe time and affection so justice is all about appropriation of things all about appropriation like apportioning apportionment, yeah how you spread them out so it could extend to a lot of things it has to do with how we distribute benefits and costs in society how we treat each other in a workplace how we treat each other in terms of friends or families all those could be matters of the reason why I mentioned it is if you've kept the promise like how you mentioned earlier and you have to bring it because the idea of the greater good then better injustice overtake fidelity yeah there could be some cases where to keep a promise that's been made previously would would bring about injustice and actually I want to read something that Ross says he says he says these seem to be a principle all the ways in which prima facia duties arise in actual experience they're compounded together in highly complex ways so they can be more than one duty in play at a time so he says that the duty of obeying laws of one's country arises partly from the duty of gratitude for the benefits one has received from it partly from fidelity implicit promise to obey which seems to be involved in permanent residence and then he also talks about how justice and reparation can be tied together you think about our society we're pretty good actually when it comes to historic injustices a lot of them that we're around are certainly not as prevalent very well addressed but let's say you've got a society in which some group of people are clearly on the short end of the stick and they've been on the short end of the stick for a long time and puts them at a disadvantage Ross would say that there's both the duty of justice to set things right to level the playing field to say everybody gets the same benefits everybody gets the same opportunities the further duty of reparation to make up for it in some way to try to fix things to try to redress the harm that's been done and this would probably be one of those cases if we're thinking about historically discriminated against groups we would be thinking about cases in which I forget who brought it up there would be this possibility of satisfying the duty for reparation not for the people who were originally harmed but for other people later on so Ross talks about how these all can interact in complex ways one other thing that I want to stress before we end so far he's just talking about what's right and Ross says you don't actually have to have a motivation for this sort of thing to do the right thing without that being morally good so for example gratitude you don't have to have the feeling of gratitude you satisfy the duty of gratitude by doing certain things or like reparation you don't actually have to feel sorry but you have to you have to do the things that somebody who is sorry would do and if you do that then you're doing the right thing that doesn't yet make your act what makes your act morally good is the motivation for instance keeping a promise because you recognize that's the right thing to do that's a right act keeping a promise because you want to be the kind of person who keeps promises that's a morally good thing to do keeping a promise because you recognize that you have a relationship with this other person and you care about that other person I suspect that Ross would say that's morally good as well so this is just sort of the starting point this tells us what our duties are it doesn't yet get us to the highest thing which is being a morally good person but at least you know somebody who's doing their duties they're good in the sense that they're doing the right thing it's much better to do your duties than not to do them what do you guys think of this I mean you guys have looked at a lot of your moral theories now I don't like it because it's admitted to it's not necessarily always being a customer to act there I like that it seems to kind of be like what he said before with the information before we'll come back to that there's a lot of stuff there well I was going to say that this one in a way offers a little more freedom of how you're choosing to do what is morally right and the other ones are very strict it is justice but it kind of puts you to things when you're in the moment you're deciding which one of these things takes precedence over the other one because it's not always the same with every situation I think the other ones try to make it that it's all about pleasure the good of the group or whatever but sometimes it's like not I feel like this one actually encompasses all the different kinds of situations you got yeah so we've got two things the flexibility of it I guess imagine well what you're saying could it be that it's attractive because we do in fact help these things they do in fact help you what are the rest of you thinking about that when you get these on the board you can kind of if you look at them you can see what ones you usually tend to go with so it's kind of interesting if you're talking about a situation I feel like people usually steer towards certain duties interesting to come up with some kind of test inventory let's say we accept that these cover which do people tend to steer towards if you knew that then you'd also know which ones are your weak points and I think it depends on your personality like anyone I think you're right the personality type I know that for me I'm much more motivated by fidelity and justice than I am by gratitude and beneficence not nice to say there might be someone who only wants to benefit other people therefore they throw away their own self-improvement that's not being just to themselves I don't know if all goes hand in hand yeah I think you're right there is one personality type to you that would be a problem for this any sort of intuition is a sociopath right because they don't feel bothered by any of these things so Ross can't account for that but I don't know if that's actually that bad of a criticism that it can't account for the people who are nuts what do the rest of you think of do you seem like good points to the theory for you or maybe are there weaknesses yeah I would say I'm more like caring about other people so I do the theory of self-improvement and then I have to like come back to it and put some of the balance for me it's like gratitude beneficence justice and then like self-improvement is like coming later maybe you could part of that test would be sort of like weighing out what are your priorities nothing that would be kind of interesting I'll leave it with this it's points to why we need other people might it not be better to actually have somebody who knows you and observes you give you that sort of assessment and say hey I think watching you you think you're really good at this but you're actually not so good at this you are however much stronger in these than you realized you were do you think that sort of thing would be useful I know I can use it myself I have to give me advice like that that's where we'll leave a lot good discussion so what do you guys think about this does this seem plausible to you you've looked at a lot of moral theories so far it's more plausible than utilitarianism on its own right no deontology on its own is what I would say the cons do the rest of you feel that way too yeah so it's more complicated than deontology you actually feel this is closer to how we ought to think about things what do the rest of you think about do you think anything has been left out I think I think it works better than cons because it's also more realistic with how we are as humans like the whole idea that we all are kind of filled with the conscience society and in that way it already kind of generalizes acts without saying you have to universalize the way once you do so I think it makes it easier and needs a little bit more reasonable does this seem more reasonable but the cop is all about reason right could it be possible to be overly rational do you think I don't mean to say you're using more reason when you're using it saying it's more reasonable to apply it for our lives it's a good distinction I think though this is something that came up when we talked about Play-Doh those three parts of the soul Play-Doh said the appetites from the show look out that's always going to be bad if the middle part runs the soul that could go bad too and he didn't say anything about the person being dominated by reason or rationality and the emotions and the passions and all that don't seem to fit in there that sounds like content doesn't it anytime that you're reacting and doing the right thing because you feel like doing that because that makes you feel good you're not actually doing the right thing I mean content overall had a lot of holes and it's like moral theory to start with it's ironic because his idea is to make it have no holes in it whatsoever so that's why I feel like adding virtue to duty kind of fills up one of those holes that was I'll end with this do you think that these should be understood as duties or would you understand these to be maybe something also like virtues and that's a combination of we'll leave off with that have a good break