 Welcome to another Dr. Sadler Chalk and Talk, this one, a little bit different than some of the other ones where I've been answering questions that came up on BU or on YouTube or posted through emails. This is actually coming from one of my online classes where I'm teaching ethics. We are in the first week and one of the things that I did was I solicited questions from the students. I always want to know where the students actually are. Sometimes it's hard to get a handle on that, especially the older that you get, the more distant that you are from students and in your occupation and age and that. So I always ask them something along the lines of what are some issues that you find confusing, questionable, concerning, bothersome, etc., etc., with ethics. And this time I got a particularly rich crop. So I don't just have one question that I'm dealing with. I'm dealing with common concerns about ethics that come up at the very beginning of trying to study it in a coherent, systematic, academic way. And it's interesting because part of what these reflect, I'm going to read actually some of the excerpts from things that students are writing, is the fact that we live in a society which is almost, in many ways, as a society schizophrenic about ethics. And by that I mean that it has very incoherent notions about it and they're all thrown in there and all jumbled up together and they're used. This is in fact something that many different philosophers have identified as a key feature of late modern culture and of liberal democracies in general, so not a big surprise. But every generation finds a troubling and every generation of students winds up having to grapple with these problems because you can't get away from right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, even noble and base or however else you want to put it. These are perennial human concerns and the fact that you happen to be in a society where these things are not dealt with in very coherent manners for the most part. And there is a lot of moral talk and a lot of ethics talk in our society. A lot of use of moral concepts and language, a lot of procedures, a lot of rules. But often times it's not very well explained or very well thought out and that confuses people. That raises problems for them. Problems that are not just mental confusions where they feel like they want to think this out a little bit further. But even on an emotional level and you can sense it in some of the things that they're saying. Before I actually go into this, I want to read, before I talk about the things on the board I want to read something for my students anyway. So one of them said, since there's so many different perceptions of what constitutes right and wrong it becomes challenging to judge when an action is actually misguided. For instance serial killers and some criminals don't actually see anything wrong with the crimes they commit. Yet the majority of society is appalled by their behavior. Also it's unacceptable to kill someone, yet some people who believe a criminal takes a human life deserves a death penalty, thus we are in turn killing them. When I was younger it seemed like the difference between behaving and misbehaving was concrete. Yet now it seems like every action can be manipulated and viewed from both angles. So my question is how do you draw the line between right and wrong actions and is it even possible to do so? Now that last part, is it even possible to do so? That's not an abstract, academic, you know, idle question. That is a genuine existential worry that a lot of people have. And I'm finding more and more students in my classes over the last ten years who come to me and they actually are deeply concerned about this. And you know this goes back to one of the other Dr. Salah Chalkin talks where I said yeah we should actually be teaching ethics and teaching it in a fairly systematic way that gives students something that they can actually sink their teeth into and wrap their heads around and take home with them, not just character development or be nice to each other or if you do this there's these consequences. But real actual moral theory, we ought to be putting that in the classroom because what's happening is we're getting students who are coming to us and they're in an ethics class and they're already worried about it. Is this all BS? Is this all just personal opinion? Is this all just fluff that I have to learn a little bit of so I can talk the language when I need to? Because that's what a lot of other people seem to be telling them. So there's a real worry there. Here's another one, similar line. The better question there might actually be Human nature offers so much diversity that it seems hard to even fathom a uniform sort of moral code. So again the challenge is can we actually provide some sort of coherent ethical theory, some sort of coherent practice? Another one says, I believe that good and bad are based on individual perspective rather than circumstance depending on how you're raised or taught about the values of right or wrong and good and bad determines how you will act and your actions may not conform to another's interpretation of these same ideas. Some people believe that what they're doing is right even when the majority of society thinks that it's wrong. There is no real way to draw a definitive line marking the difference between the two terms. Now notice that's a dogmatic assertion. There is no way to draw a definitive line marking the difference between the two terms. That's reflective of a lot of people's attitudes when they come into an ethics class. Here's a different type of question. My question is what happens when you need to do something for the right reasons but might be unethical or vice versa? Where is the line where something is bad enough to be considered unethical but still needs to be done? And when thinking in the other direction where is the line where doing something ethical is still a bad thing? Sometimes situations come up and it's difficult to decide what to do because the ethics involved that. The very moral language often ends up being confusing. And I think that while I'll get to the wife of that moment let me continue with this. Great question. I know what you mean sometimes there are situations which are bound to present with an unethical element. This concept leads me to ponder the idea that perhaps we're facing the issue of how much unethical behavior and what level of unethical behavior we're willing to tolerate. Here's another. Telling another person what is right and wrong is no doubt an imposition of one person's belief. The government perpetually does this with the laws and regulations and courses this and the following. People should never grow complacent with government as government is not a thing rather a force driven by those who care. Actually it's showing some interest and sophistication in understanding how a government works. Ethical questions are present throughout all of this and it's people's ethical beliefs that drive them. People often have an interesting desire to impose their ethical beliefs on others. Is that not what government essentially is? A big collaborative force of imposition. Here's another one. My question concerning ethics is who is the one to determine what is truly right and wrong. One individual may think that what they're doing is completely fine while the individual next to them may think it goes against everything they believe. Since it's based on personal beliefs I don't understand how many authority can put a label on what people can or can't do. Finally, I've seen there's been a lot of discussion about what's right versus wrong and I question this topic a lot when it comes to workplace situations. I've always struggled to wrap my head around some of the situations because it often seems like all solutions to the issue could be right in some sort of way. I question right versus wrong when you're in the office. Should or does, authoritative expectations and desires always make things right when you're in the working world? There's a lot of right area for me and I can't say I fully understand and sometimes I doubt anyone being able to give me the correct answer. So what do we have here if we put these together as a sort of composite picture? We have a picture of a few different stances you might say. For one thing, ethics and morals are seen as being ultimately something that's contested, something about which there's no general agreement, but also something about which people generally everybody has some sort of view and interestingly there's this worry because these are views about what's right and wrong and what's good and bad that maybe all of the views are wrong or all of the views are right. Views, let me say that one more time. There's a worry that maybe views in ethics because they're about right and wrong and are individual or happen to be of collectives that those themselves are just all right or all wrong. There's a kind of, not necessarily despair but a sense of resourcelessness. Where do we turn for this? Seems like everybody else has got some sort of answer but these answers don't appear to be all that satisfying because of the situation that we find ourselves in. This is a real problem. This is a genuine situation that a lot of people, not just students at Marist College but all over the world are finding themselves in. And so I wanted to say a few things about this. I'm actually going to be using this not just as a doctor said or chalk and talk but for my class as a set of responses. So I want to put, first of all, identify some of the key worries and concerns and then talk about each one in turn. Because a lot of times if you look at all these without differentiating them, they seem kind of overwhelming. They each lead to each other naturally because these are actually all connected with each other. But I would counsel actually treating them one at a time in isolation and not expecting too much. Not expecting somebody to provide you with an answer that will be immediately convincing and settle everything. Rather, this is the sort of thing where we have to model through it and puzzle it out and bits of it start to become more clear as we go on. That's why you can't just, you know, learn ethics by just getting a textbook. You have to actually think your way through it, work your way through it, do some practice, do some reflection. Anyway, let's go to the Excel. Figuring out what really is right or wrong or good or bad. This is the key concern that keeps coming up. Different people have different views. Okay, that's granted. Is there any difference today that it was in Plato's time? If we read Platonic dialogues, we actually see that a lot of people do have different views. Not only does it vary from culture to culture, you know, Plato's time to the Greeks versus the Barbarians, or even between different Greeks, the Athenians versus the Spartans, it also varied, you know, classes saw things differently, upper class saw things differently, the merchant class saw things differently, the lower classes saw things differently than the slaves. Individuals see things differently than each other, and most importantly, people can change their minds. People can leave one perspective and go to another because they think that other perspective is actually a better perspective. Different people have different views. Yes, indeed. Different people do have different views about ethical issues. Is that by itself a problem? It's only a problem if you assume that somehow the fact that they have different views is actually relevant to whether their views are true or false, or whether we can arrive at a better view. Not necessarily the one single view that is absolutely correct across the board, but certainly a better view than some other view. Do you want to say that the serial killer is on the same level with a contract killer for that matter? You know, in certain ways it's even worse. On the same level as the ordinary citizen when it comes to the morality of killing. I don't think you do. But being able to articulate why that's the case, that's the challenge. And if you don't have that available that's a reason why to study ethics. That's a reason why to think about these things. Why to seek out answers. Yes, different people do have different views but that doesn't mean that everything is up for grabs. There are people out there who will tell you that well, because everybody's got different views we can all do as we choose or none of it matters or anything like that. Most people are generally there to try to either manipulate you or they feel bad about themselves or they say that sort of thing. The mere fact that different people have different views does not constitute an obstacle to ethics or mean that we can't count the right and correct moral judgments. As a matter of fact, any good moral theory includes within itself as one component an explanation for why it is that different people have different views. So if you replay it, if you read Aristotle, if you read John Stuart Mill, if you read Kant, you will find out they will say, yeah, other people do have different views. Here's why. Here's why there are other views that are actually not as good as this view over here. So that by itself is not an obstacle, but I understand why it does seem that way. A case can be made for each view. That's an interesting thing to point out. That's a real worry, a real concern. And it's one that actually is sometimes made worse by what we do in ethics classes, including my own ethics class. Because one of the things that I'm going to have my students do every semester is take situations and then explain to me how would you look at it if you were a virtue ethicist? How would you look at it if you were a deontologist? How would you look at it as an egoist? And there's this, you know, there are a lot of things that from this perspective they seem wrong, from this perspective they seem okay, from this perspective they seem like the thing to do. And that can lend itself very easily to this view that there's just a bunch of different theories out there and everybody can find some theory to latch onto in any given case and make a case for themselves and why what they're doing is right. That can lead to a kind of pessimism as well. The thing to keep in mind is not all perspectives are equal. The mere fact that somebody can make an argument for their position doesn't mean their argument is good. Doesn't mean that it's right for them to make that argument that their premises are actually true that their line of reasoning doesn't have flaws in it. But you have to actually look at those things. And again this isn't one of those things that you can resolve right off the bat. You have to develop some experience with that. But that is also that's a real legitimate concern. There seem to be inconsistencies sometimes too, you know. This is a real live issue. One reason that people give for saying that capital punishment is wrong is it's just another form of killing and killing another, if you're killing a person because they killed somebody else you're just replicating the bad action. Now if that was, you know, so easy and open and shut there wouldn't be anybody, you know, engaging in capital punishment because back, you know, a thousand years ago I said, oh, that's a pretty simple argument that convinces me I guess that settles the issue. So there's got to be more to it than that, right? But figuring out what that more to it is, that requires making distinctions and that requires some practice and that requires using some moral theories. That requires, you know, some thinking, some reflection, some apparatus and discussing things with other people. And there's a lot of seeming inconsistencies. Here's the take away I would like you to have here. When you run into an inconsistency there are several things, different things you can do. One is you can say oh, inconsistent therefore can't be true. That's not a smart thing to do because there's a lot of things that seem inconsistent at first glance. But then when you look at them more carefully and you make the right distinctions and you bring in the right concepts turns out there actually isn't that that inconsistency there. It actually does make sense. So you don't want to have that knee-jerk inconsistency undone reaction. Another possibility is you can kind of despair about it. It's always imperfect. Nothing is ever good. We can't do ethics. Well, that's not warranted. It could be that everything is imperfect. But you can still distinguish between is this more perfect? Is this less perfect? Has this got less inconsistency than this over here? Does this make more sense than this? And if that's the case, take this. That's what makes sense. The other thing is you can do is you can actually investigate it, look at it, and figure out what there really is inconsistent. Higher order differences in moral uppergains, codes, authorities, situations. One of the real worries that is out there, and you see this expressed by these students, is you know, not only do we have different views about what's right and wrong, why do we have those different views? Well, because different people have taught us those views. So if we go to those who teach what's right and wrong, we don't find them in agreement either. So it's not just a matter of us poor schleps down here who haven't been like studying the stuff, saying, hey, I don't agree with you and I don't agree with you. When we turn to authority figures, the same authority figure, hey, we're okay. But there's a whole bunch of them out there and they don't agree with each other either. So it's not a high level, isn't it? That's a real problem. I can understand. I can relate to that. I know what it feels like to not know what to turn to. And I also know when it's like to turn to the wrong person and get their code or this is what you need to do and then it turns out to be the wrong thing and you trust the wrong person. But I notice can you ask yourself is there a right person, is there a wrong person? Are there some people you just shouldn't trust with? Are there some moral codes that you look at? Yeah, I know people may follow that but that can't possibly be the right way to go. Yeah. And the mere fact that some people do follow it that's just this problem up here, right? Different people have different views. Not all views are equal. Not all views are on the same level. So the same thing is going to come into this. You want to critically assess the different views, see what there is in favor of them, see if they can justify their position, see if they can explain themselves in relation to other positions. Here's why my position is right and those people over there say something different but here's why their position is wrong and their position can actually do that. And be fair to that other position and provide good reasons for that. You probably should take that position. That's probably making an advance. Sometimes we have competing values and we're stuck in ethical dilemmas. Yeah, that's true. That's not a reason for us not to be able to do ethics. That's a reason why we should do ethics. That's a reason why we should actually explore moral theories and think our way through them. Because if there are genuine dilemmas out there, there's a whole literature about it. I think of dilemmas, whether they exist or don't exist. They do exist, I think. When they exist, that's a sign that something has gone wrong and you've got to retrace your steps and figure out how do we actually get here in the first place. And that as well is what are we going to do in this present situation. Sometimes you actually can't maximize the good. You can't only minimize the amount of harm or evil that's done. That doesn't mean that's not doing a good thing. Or that that wouldn't be the right thing to do. So all of these are genuine worries, genuine concerns, but they're not reasons not to study ethics, not to make progress into it or to despair or to be cynical. They're actually reasons why you want to thoroughly throw yourself into studying ethics. The last thing I want to say is to do with making a couple important decisions. And again, this goes to some aspects of our culture particularly in academia but also in other areas where I think that things have gotten kind of modeled through our art. Our generations have not done a very good job in presenting coherent, clear messages. Making moral judgments. You want to do this and you want to do it well because you cannot be an ethical person, you cannot be a moral person without making judgments. Saying this is good, this is bad, this is better, this is worse. It's not a question of whether you make judgments, it's a question about whether you make them coherently, whether you make them correctly, whether you make them reasonably, whether you make them well, whether you check them against other people's judgments, whether you, you know, try to resolve discrepancies, whether you're fair with them, that's the real question. Not whether you should make moral judgments at all and anybody who tells you that you should not make moral judgments watch out for that person, don't trust them because there's something wrong there. Either it's a, you know, a weakness on their part that they can't take other people making moral judgments or they're trying to manipulate you in any way they're not doing any good for you. So you have to be able to make moral judgments. Is that the same thing as being judgmental? No. They can overlap. I mean, you can be judgmental by making moral judgments. Being judgmental means on the one hand perhaps making moral judgments but making them on bad grounds, you know, I like this person so they're a good person. That's not a reasonable way to make moral judgments. You can like all sorts of people turn out to be bad people and you can dislike all sorts of people who turn out to be good people. If you dislike people and then you, you know, you find reasons moral judgment based reasons to dislike them yeah, you're probably being judgmental. The other thing would come in how you actually express the judgment, how you form the judgment. Do you go up to the person that you think is doing the wrong thing and say, hey look, I think you're doing the wrong thing and talk about them behind their back and say they're an awful person. I think that's being judgmental. We can talk more about this. I want to go on to the others. Imposing morality at others. This is a real worry that my students have. Is it okay for us to impose our morality at others? There's some that you better impose your morality out over somebody else that better do it otherwise those people are going to be a danger to us and to those that we care about. You know, in Syria for example there's plenty of others as well and they are right to point out that when we have governments or we have organizations or social connections or cultures those are collective ways of imposing some sort of morality at others. It's not whether we impose morality on others again it's whether it's actually done in the right way. Imposing could mean an awful lot of things ranging from reasonably trying to convince a person to put in all sorts of force and coercion to bear on them those are not exactly the same thing. One is different one is coercive the other one is reasonable. We do have to impose some degree of morality at others and others have done it with us and the question is whether we're doing it right whether we actually have things right that we're imposing on other people whether we do it in a fair way whether we do it in a thoughtful way whether we do it even sometimes in a loving way. But I want to say one other thing making moral judgments is not the same thing as imposing one's morality on others. If I say to you what you're doing is wrong I am not imposing my morality on you unless you want to stretch the meaning of imposing so far there's just about anything. If I actually say you're doing the wrong thing if you keep on doing the wrong thing I'm going to kill you. Now I'm clearly imposing my morality or if I say in an ethics class I'm a virtue ethicist and if you're not a virtue ethicist you're flunking my class then I would be imposing my morality but merely making moral judgments is not the same thing as imposing one's morality on other people so those of you who are worried about that were afraid of people calling you judgmental of imposing your morality on others when they do that just tell them hey I'm making moral judgments I'm entitled to do so I'm a human being this is what human beings do this is part of what makes us what we are two other things that are different than just making moral judgments that I want to also distinguish from them and say these are good things what is providing reasons or justification for it it's one thing to say this is wrong it's another thing to say this is wrong that's important you want to be able to give some sort of reasons and maybe you have to work these reasons out as you go the reasons will get better and better as you go on for why you think things are wrong or right good or bad also you should be reflecting on the moral judgments that you make and when they need to be revised you should be revising them that's also what it means to be a committedly ethical person it doesn't mean that you have to say I'm not going to make any judgments until I've got everything completely right no, you're going to make some mistakes the question I've said this many many times in my ethics classes a lot of ethics is not doing the right thing the first time it's actually figuring out how to fix things after you screwed it up the first time and figuring out what the right thing to do is in that situation and our reflection really profits from those kinds of things and we only have to revise things if we got them wrong in the first place that's part of the process so if I had to sum all of this up in one phrase I would say have courage have the courage to actually take stands to say I think some things are right some things are wrong here's why I think so but I'm going to say it have courage