 So, in this chapter, Rachel's is investigating or is wondering what is morality. He wants to give a minimum conception of morality. Now, to be clear, he's not trying to define, you know, or trying to give you the moral theory right at the beginning and then, you know, kind of leave everything else at that. Now, he wants to ask the question of what would be kind of like the bare minimum that's required for a moral theory. Now, you know, if you're taking notes and you should be taking notes, immediately you ought to go to your notes and write down, for the purpose, Rachel's is trying to provide a minimum conception of morality and you should especially go to your terms and write down minimum conception of morality. And if you've been skimming after this point, you would already know what that is and so you should write down, write that down too. Now, Rachel's doesn't give us a definition of it right off the back. However, he does give kind of a working definition of morality. Now, needless to say, this definition is a little vague. In fact, you might think that this definition is so vague that it's really pointless to ask the question about morality, ask anything about what morality is. Well, guess what? You already have a moral theory. In fact, well, I mean, I know this because you have goals. You have values. There are things that you're working for. So you already have a conception of morality. The question is, how well have you thought it through? Well, to illustrate what Rachel's thinks is this minimum conception of morality, he uses several cases. Now, I am absolutely certain that you are not going to agree with all the conclusions that Rachel's reaches and that's fine. I'm not in the business of trying to tell you what to believe. However, if you're going to reject one of the conclusions, you have to show where the error and reasoning is. You have to provide an argument. And we'll see what that involves as we proceed through the semester. So the first case that Rachel's looks at is this baby Teresa case. Now, I'm not going to recount the case here. You can read the case as very clearly explained. But he's going to compare and contrast arguments for and against transplanting all of Teresa's organs for other children. Well, Rachel's provides an argument with a conclusion that we should transplant Teresa's organs for other children. The argument has, it's pretty simple, it's two premises and one conclusion. Now, premise is a reason or piece of evidence, a belief or an idea that is going to be used to justify the conclusion. And the conclusion is what is inferred from the premises, okay? I have provided this argument in numbered premise form. And the reason why I did that, or numbered proposition form, the reason why I did that is for ease of reference. So the first premise is pretty straightforward. In fact, to disagree with this premise is at best confusing. At least on its surface, we tend to use this premise all the time. Now, we might question it later on during the course of the semester. But for the moment, it seems pretty straightforward. Now, the second premise is probably more contentious. It's not contentious that the other children would benefit from Teresa's organs. That doesn't seem to be a very open question. But the second part of this premise is very much open for contentious. At least the thing that Rachel thinks people will argue against. And then finally, we have the conclusion that we should transplant Teresa's organs. Now, as I said, this argument is given in numbered proposition form. And it's also a deductively valid argument. And deductively valid means that if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. Now, what this means is that you have the conclusion, and I'm betting at least half of you disagree with the conclusion. You disagree with the conclusion, that's fine. Like I said, I'm not here to tell you what to believe. Now, since it's deductively valid, you have to show which of these premises is false. You have to show which of these premises is false. So it's in deductively valid form, and I want you to look real quickly at the parenthetical notation at the end of the conclusion. Now, the parenthetical notation will tell you from which premises that conclusion is from. In this case, premises one and two. And it will also tell you which inference rule is used. In this case, the MP stands for modus ponens. Now, modus ponens is probably the most widespread use argument in history ever. You've used it yourself, although you've never called it modus ponens, I bet. Now, modus ponens is really simple. Modus ponens has a conditional. And conditional is a proposition. If we're using P and Q to represent propositions, a conditional is if P, then Q. So if Rex is a dog, then Rex is a mammal. And the first part of the conditional is sufficient for the second. Meaning that if the first part is true, then the second part must be true. The first part is called the antecedent. The second part is called the consequent. So in this case, we have the conditional, if P, then Q. We have the assertion and the antecedent. So we have the conclusion of transplanting Teresa's organs. Now, like I said, I bet about at least half of you are going to disagree with Rachel's conclusion that we can simply just transplant Teresa's organs. And to do this, you have to reject one of the premises that are used to infer the conclusion. And the first premise, like I said, is pretty solid. I mean, to doubt that if an action benefits somebody without hurting anybody else, then we ought to perform that action. What that means is, since it's a condition, you have to say an action would benefit somebody else, would benefit people, not hurt anybody else. And yet we shouldn't do it. That seems strange. That seems strange. So the first premise probably isn't the one you're going to go after. It's probably going to be the second one. And usually the way that most people try to disagree with Rachel, as they anticipate this, and wisely so, is to say that, well, death, somebody is harmed in transplanting Teresa's organs, namely Teresa, because she's going to die. So she's going to die. So the rejection of the second premise usually is something like, well, Teresa, in fact, will be harmed because she will die. Now, Rachel thinks this isn't necessarily the case. And he just wants you to consider this. He wonders, so he asks the question, what does it mean to benefit from life? So what all that Teresa could do is, well, nothing. Her heart beats and her lungs breathe. Blood flows through her body, but she really doesn't have a brain to have anything like thoughts, beliefs, feelings. She can't relate to other people. Rachel suggests that Teresa, in fact, cannot benefit from life. And what he also does, he's not explicit about this, but what he also does is he suggests that, if something can't benefit from life, then it can't be harmed. Then it can't be harmed. So the idea basically is, well, Teresa can't be harmed. Why? Because she has no benefits. There's nothing that is going to be good about her living. So Rachel's counters here is to say, yeah, you suggest that Teresa can't be harmed, but with this definition of benefit and saying that it really benefits life and having thoughts and beliefs and relationships with other people, the burden is for you to say, well, Rachel, you're missing something such that there is a benefit of life that Teresa has that she would lose transplant of the organs. But that's kind of hard to put together. Well, the next worry that Rachel's is going to look at is using people. So somebody objecting to the conclusion that Teresa's order should be transplanted suggests to say something like this and say, well, look, if we're removing Teresa's organs, then we're using one person for the sake of another. And that's wrong. And this idea is really prevalent in our culture. We really don't like the idea of using anybody else or we especially don't like the idea of anybody using us. So we have lots of laws that try to prevent using other people. And we generally tend to stay away from or express disgust for people who are obviously users. Even being called a user is an insult. So this idea is appealing in our culture. Now, what something Rachel's suggests is that we in fact are not using baby Teresa at all. So we want to be really careful here in understanding what Rachel's is trying to say. Rachel's is not suggesting that it's okay to use people. No, Rachel's agrees that it's not a moral thing to use other people. Now, what he's suggesting is that Teresa would not be used at all. So the way that Rachel's goes about doing this is he tries to understand what it means to use somebody else. Now, in most of the cases we talk about using other people, we talk about cases of manipulation. We talk about cases of people performing an act to meet our ends and our goals and our needs. And specifically, though, those times that the people that we're using do not benefit from it. So, you know, if somebody had a gambling addiction, right, and you know they have a gambling addiction, yet you play cards with them anyway knowing how to win or how to beat them in cards, that would be using somebody to line your pocket. So what Rachel's points to here is that the idea of using another person is closely tied to the idea that that other person has autonomy. And autonomy is the ability to make decisions for yourself to take those courses of actions that fulfill your desires and values or to do what you want to do. It's kind of the simplest way of saying that. So Rachel's constructs an argument. This first premise he says, if one person uses another, then that means that the second person, the person being used, has autonomy. Has autonomy. And the idea is that if somebody doesn't have autonomy, you can't use them. You take a look at these plants out here. These plants don't have autonomy. They don't have free will. They don't make decisions. So there's no way that I can really use the plants in a way that violates their autonomy. It's not in the way that I use persons. I might use the plants for food, but that's part of the function of a plant. I am not myself prone to do this, but if somebody wanted to get a tan, they could lay out in the sun and so they could benefit from the sun's rays. But that doesn't use the sun because the sun doesn't have autonomy. So if you're using a person, then that person has autonomy. Well, the second premise is that Teresa doesn't have any autonomy. Simply because she lacks the hardware. She can't have free will because she doesn't have enough of her brain to do that. In fact, in the case, she died in nine days, something like this. So she not only did she not have the time to develop autonomy, but the way that her brain was formed is that she could not develop autonomy. So the idea is that Rachel is suggesting is that Teresa never had, nor could have autonomy. Well, the conclusion that follows then that Teresa simply can't be used. Now, this is kind of an extreme conclusion. Mostly because it doesn't really matter what you're doing with Teresa, but you might wonder about that. You might take a look at it because some really scary scenarios start coming to mind rather quickly. So here's Rachel's claim is that Teresa can't be used because she doesn't have autonomy. And again, take a look at the argument, look at the parenthetical notation. This comes from the first and second premise. Now, this time we're using an inference rule called modus tollens. Modus tollens is a little different than modus ponens. Modus ponens is if P then Q, given P, we conclude Q. Modus tollens kind of goes the other way. Say, if P then Q, we know not Q, therefore we know not P. And an example of this is something like if an animal is a dog, then the animal is warm-blooded. Jaws the shark is not warm-blooded. Therefore, jaws is not a dog. So this is an argument that Rachel provides about autonomy. And his point is that baby Teresa does not have autonomy, so she can't be used. The last things that Rachel considers is just the pretty straightforward prohibition against killing in general. We generally say that it was just wrong to kill. Now, usually when we say things like that we're just thinking about ordinary circumstances, like you can't walk down the street and just kill somebody. But Rachel's quick to point out that Teresa's case is not a usual case. He says that there have already been everyday exceptions to the prohibition against killing. And unless you're some variety of a pacifist, you think so too. Right now probably, if somebody were threatening your life and you had the means to end this threat by ending the threat's life, you would probably do so, either for yourself or for a loved one. So the idea is that it's wrong to kill you accepting cases of self-defense either for yourself or for a loved one. A lot of people argue, not everybody, but a lot of people argue that killing during time of war is permissible. It's not necessarily desirable, but it is permissible. Not any kind of killing, obviously, but at least some kinds of killing are permissible. If you think that capital punishment is something that a state can do, then you think that there are exceptions to killing. So immediately Rachel's suggests that well, we already have exceptions to killing people. So just in and of itself that isn't going to fly. So the question is whether or not killing Teresa by removing her organs is going to be permissible. So one of the things that he suggests is say, look, our conceptions of what it means to die have changed through time. Right now it's, a person can in a sense clinically die meaning that their heart stops beating but be resuscitated that their brain keeps on living so that they can be in a sense brought back to life. Used to be death was considered to happen when the heart stops. We don't necessarily consider that anymore. These days, in fact, we'll keep the heart beating in order to keep the brain alive. So the idea is that real death, quote unquote real death, doesn't occur until the brain dies. Well, in Teresa's case she doesn't really have a brain. She, her brain was never really alive to begin with. So what Rachel wants to say is that killing the prohibition he gets killing really doesn't apply to Teresa's case since she really isn't alive to begin with. Rachel considers two of the cases. And remember, when he's looking at these cases, what he's trying to do is to lay down some ground rules for what it means to have this minimum conception of a moral theory. What I want you to do is to read the cases and to try to reconstruct the arguments. Pay special attention to the terms that are being used. Make sure you identify those terms. That's going to be really important in understanding this whole process of reasoning. And what we're going to look at next we're going to look at what Rachel considers to be this minimum conception of morality. So now we come to Rachel's minimum conception of morality. Now again, he isn't trying to provide the end-all-be-all moral theory. What conditions need to be in place in order to have a good moral theory. And the two that he proposes is good moral reasoning and impartiality. So immediately you ought to go to your notes and write down good moral reasoning and impartiality trying to figure out what Rachel's means by these. So looking at good moral reasoning first, Rachel's tries to contrast good moral reasoning versus what it does not. And the first thing he suggests is that good moral reasoning is not merely feeling or he even sometimes suggests that it ought not to be influenced by feelings at all. And there's a lot to what he says of feelings are not a guarantee of truth. We feel many things and based upon that we want to act on those feelings but that doesn't mean our feelings are always justified. So for instance one of the biggest examples is hatred. It is a huge motivator for all of us. We hate people every day. And sometimes that hatred motivates us to do anywhere from mean and annoying things to downright violence. That doesn't mean that our actions are justified by those feelings. It's hatred. It's not a moral principle. So hatred isn't really going to do it. And by the way since feelings aren't necessarily good moral reasons for action and hatred is a feeling while it also follows that love isn't necessarily a good reason for moral action. So that's a little bit scary, isn't it? The other thing that Rachel contrasts good moral reasoning to are wants, desires, tastes or preferences. Simple things that we just want. And this doesn't always justify moral action. For instance I love espresso. Espresso to me is the reason why I get up in the morning. Espresso I politely and accurately call it the black blood of life. So I love, I like espresso. It doesn't mean that I or anybody else for that matter are obligated to drink espresso. Quite a few people out there who I think would agree with me simply after the first time they tried espresso. You think so too. You have lots of tastes and preferences and you try to justify these actions by just the things that you like. And I'm not saying that you can't do the things that you like. I'm just saying they're not necessarily good reasons. For instance suppose I had the weird preference to randomly assign readings in the history of pencils in this course. Don't worry, I'm not going to do that. In fact I have no interest in the history of pencils. But suppose I did. It would still not be a morally justified act to give you assignments in the history of pencils. So simply a taste or a preference is not necessarily good moral reason. And by the way as I said before feelings are simply a good moral reason. That's not to say they're completely irrelevant. But there's certainly not the determining factor and there may not even be the top factor depending on what your moral theory is. Well at this point you might wonder what does count as a good moral reason. That's a great question. If you can answer that question you can write your own textbook in an introduction to ethics course. Actually it would be the definitive textbook in the introduction to ethics course. Now what counts as a good reason is difficult to say. However we already think that there are some good reasons and you do too. We have values and principles that are considered to be good ones. Liberty, equality, justice. If something threatens those then we tend to think that there's something wrong happening and we certainly have an option to defend ourselves in those cases. So yeah, we already have good moral principles that we think are good. It's an interesting question as to what justify those. Okay, that's an interesting question. And hopefully through the course of the semester we can look at reasons to justify principles like that. There is one thing however, there's an additional thing however that is required of good moral reasoning. And that's logical consistency. Now logical consistency just means that your theory produces true conclusion well not even so much true conclusions as conclusions or actions that are not absurd or not self contradictory or they don't generate contradictions. You might wonder why this is so important. It's like well if your theory generates contradictions then it's going to say such things as an act is both moral and immoral. So suppose my moral theory says that it's moral to kill somebody in self defense and it's not moral to kill somebody in self defense. Well it doesn't provide a guide for action. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do. So logical consistency is going to be another big thing with moral theories. Now here's just kind of a forewarning. It's a common practice in ethics and ethical reasoning to find counter examples to moral reasoning. And the idea is is that a moral principle whether the person realizes or not is going to infer that some course of action is a moral when in fact it's not moral. So if my moral theory says that it's permissible to randomly kill every six person on the street well then there's something wrong with that theory. How to reject that theory. It's really really hard. It's a statistical impossibility for your theory to be perfectly consistent. There's always going to be some problem that comes up against. There's always going to be some issue that's going to come up against. And it could be anything from conclusions that are really difficult to accept. We just don't want to accept them to direct contradictions to absurdities. So through the course of this semester your convictions are going to come up against these problems. I promise you. Now I am not here to tell you whether you're a good person or a bad person. This is a course in ethical theory and not a course in who's good and bad. I'm not interested in that project to begin with and no ethical theory course can do that. So if it happens that your theory, your favorite theory of moral beliefs comes up against these problems learn to handle them with grace. Accept that it's a problem and try to move on from there or try to figure out a solution to it. The really ineffective way of dealing with that is yelling and anger that just doesn't help. First of all it doesn't help figure out where there might be a problem. So good moral reasoning what exactly counts as a really interesting question but one thing that we're really certain is true is that logical consistency is going to be a big requirement for good moral reasoning. So one condition for this minimum conception of morality is good moral reasoning. The other condition is impartiality. Now what impartiality basically means is that everybody's interests are considered equally and here we have the definition. Now stating this definition and providing a definition is one thing applying it as another because just as a matter of fact people's interests are going to conflict. People's interests are going to conflict. It's kind of the hallmark of what is this idea. The perfectly harmonious society is one in which everybody has the same interests but that just doesn't happen. People have different sets of interests. So interests are going to conflict and since they conflict at most one person's interests are going to win out or one group of interests are going to win out and it's possible that none of them do. And trying to provide a solution is nobody gets what they want. A friend of mine used to say this when he was talking about going to a meeting and here was this definition of compromise. Here's one good idea and here's another good idea. What's a compromise? Let's do neither of them. So interests are going to conflict and somebody is going to win out and somebody is not. And trying to figure out who is going to win out is going to win out. It's a very, very hard question. Those solutions that are such that everybody can win out great but they're really, really rare. Really rare. So as an exercise to really kind of drive this point home, I want you to write down your interests. Do you even know what they are? Think about what your interests are. Write them down. And to further drive the point home, write down other people's interests that conflict with yours. What do you want? What's going to make your life better? And what do other people want? What's going to make their life better? These are going to be conflicting interests and a really difficult question is who's going to win out? Why should they win out? So we have Rachel's minimum conception of justice and that's his minimum conception. Minimum conception requires good moral reasoning which includes logical consistency and impartiality which is treating everybody's interests equally or considering everybody's interests equally. Now an interesting question is whether Rachel's cases actually meet this minimum conception. Remember what I said? It's kind of a statistical impossibility that any given moral theory is going to be without any problems. If that were a case, if no moral theory had any problems whatsoever excuse me, if there was some moral theory that had no problems, well that would probably be the theory that we would teach in the course instead of a whole lot of possibilities. So you might ask yourself regarding the cases that Rachel provides how might those cases run into problems? Do they run into problems? And here's my hint, yes they do. They already run into issues that people have with regard to some moral judgments about the life and death of a human being. So I want you to think about that. Think about these cases where we talk about life and death of a human being and think about how that might run into problems. You might again also consider how logical consistency and impartiality bumps heads with your own moral theory. This is just good practice to start thinking about this. It helps you become a better person. So think about these issues and we'll start discussing these in class.