PROFESSOR: OK, so what I want
to do today is to finish up the lecture that we were engaged
with last week about utilitarianism and then to move
on to what is perhaps the most dead-guy-on-Tuesday lecture
of the semester, that is, an explanation of the
philosophy of Immanuel Kant. So in order to make up for the
fact that the second part of the lecture is fairly dry, we'll
have a couple of clicker questions in the first
part of the lecture. OK, so as you recall from our
lecture last class, John Stuart Mill, in the selections
from Utilitarianism that we read, says two extraordinarily
famous things that serve in some ways as the heart of
the utilitarian view. The first thing that he says is
that he articulates what's known as the greatest
happiness principle. This is a principle that's
supposed to tell you what it is for an act to be
morally right. And what Mill says is, there's
a proportionality between the rightness of the act and
something that it produces. In particular, a proportionality
between the rightness of the act and the
amount of happiness it produces, regardless of how that
happiness is distributed. In particular he says "actions
are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness,
they're wrong as they tend to promote the reverse
of happiness," and the happiness with which we're
concerned is not the agent's own happiness but "the happiness
of all concerned." The second extraordinarily
famous saying that he says in the opening passages of
Utilitarianism is that the motive with which an act is
performed is irrelevant to the act's moral worth. He says the motive has nothing
to do with the morality of the action. "He who saves another creature
from drowning does what is morally right, whether his
motive be duty or the hope of being paid for it." So we might summarize what
these principles say, as saying that the first one tells
us that what matters for the morality of an act is the
aggregate amount of happiness that it produces. And what we're concerned with
here are aggregates, not individuals. We're interested in how much
good is done overall, not where those pieces of good
might happen to fall. And what the second principle
tells us is that what the utilitarian, who is after all
a consequentialist, is concerned with are
consequences. They're interested in the
outcome of the act, not the process by which that outcome
was achieved. So the first reading that we
did for last class was a selection from Mill's
Utilitarianism where he articulated these principles. And it's important to recognize
that these get something profoundly right
about what we're thinking about, I think, when we try to
articulate what lies behind our moral judgment. It does seem right that what
we're interested in is what the world is like after a
particular action is taken, and to the extent that we're
interested in what the world is like, our primary interest
is not in how that state of affairs came about, but what
that state of affairs is. And our primary concern, if
we're taking a moral stance, is not in how much we ourselves
have, but rather in how much good there is
in the world overall. That said, there have been,
since utilitarianism was articulated, a classic set of
objections which are raised to the view, some of which we'll
talk more about today, and some of which we encountered in
the selection from Bernard Williams that we read
last class. Now you will all recall that
Williams' discussion begins with a story of a gentleman that
he calls Jim, who finds himself in a South American
village that's run by a rather unsavory cowboy. And some of the citizens of
that village have been protesting the unsavory
cowboy's leadership. And so what the unsavory cowboy
has done is he has rounded up twenty of those
villagers, and he's planning--simply to show the
others that he's in charge--to kill those twenty villagers. When Jim arrives, Pedro the
cowboy tells him that, if Jim is willing to shoot one of the
villagers, the other nineteen will be set free. So that's the Jim case. Jim shows up in a town. The sheriff of the town has
selected twenty people at random to be shot, but if Jim is
willing to kill one of them the other 19 will be
set free, so-- clickers out-- Question: In the Jim
case, what is Jim morally obliged to do? Is the moral thing for Jim to
do in this case to shoot the one man, thereby liberating the
other nineteen, or is the right thing for him to do to
refuse to shoot the one, thereby letting all
twenty die? OK, so let's see how the
numbers came out. So almost 3/4 of you, actually
more than 3/4 of you, think that what the morally right
thing for Jim to do in this case is to shoot one
man, thereby liberating the other nineteen. We'll have a chance next week
to talk a lot in about these sorts of questions. Our reading for Thursday is a
series of moral dilemmas with this structure. But what I want to ask those
77% of you, who answered "yes," to do now is to think
about whether you take what Williams says is the natural
utilitarian next step. Williams argues that if you are
a committed utilitarian, and you think that the morally
right thing for Jim to do is to shoot the one and release the
other nineteen, then you ought to feel no moral
compunction about doing so. There's a clear right
thing to do. The right thing is to
kill the one, so it's to save the nineteen. You may feel moral
disapprobation--indeed you should feel moral
disapprobation--towards Pedro who put Jim in this situation. But you ought to feel no moral
disapprobation towards Jim, and even more importantly
according to Williams, Jim himself ought to feel no
moral compunction. So among the 77% of you who
answered that Jim did the right thing in killing the one
and saving the nineteen, do you think that in shooting the
one man, Jim ought to think of any hesitation that he feels
as mere squeamishness, something that ought
to be overcome? Or do you think that Jim ought
to think of the hesitation that he feels in doing what the
utilitarian and in what you yourself said was the right
thing, do you think he ought to think of his hesitation
as being indicative of something morally relevant? So there's roughly seventy
of you who should be answering this. Let's see how the numbers
come out. OK, so most of you take
on only part of the consequentialist picture here,
at least in the way that Williams understands it. Most of you think that, although
the right thing for Jim to do in that case is to
kill the one to save the nineteen, it's not the case that
he ought wholeheartedly to endorse that as the
right thing to do. In a minute, I'm going to
present to you Williams' analogy to the case of residual
racism to try to help you see why someone who really
has taken on board the consequentialist outlook thinks
that the combination of views which most of you present,
where you think the right thing to do is to kill the
one to save the nineteen, but you also think the right
thing to do is to feel bad about that in some way, have not
fully appreciated what the utilitarian stance provides
you with as a way of understanding morality. So Williams, as you know,
presents us with two cases. The first is the case that I've
just given you, the case of Jim and the captive
Indians. The second is the case in high
'70's fashion of a man who is needing to go back to work
because it's difficult to have his wife working outside
of the home. I leave that to you
as a period piece. But the work which George is
provided in Williams' example is work in a bioweapons lab,
something to which George feels moral opposition. But if George doesn't take the
job in the bioweapons lab a much more gung-ho person,
somebody who's likely to advocate the use of bioweapons
in all sorts of contexts, will get the job instead. So the two cases that Williams
presents us with there have a common structure. And a common structure which
we're going to see again and again in moral dilemmas. There's one act that the person
can do that leads to a particular outcome, another
act that the person can do that leads to a different
outcome, where the first act is worse on its surface
than the second. So Jim has the possibility of
shooting one person, or shooting no people. Those are the choices
that Jim faces. If Jim does the first act,
shooting one person, then nineteen people will go free;
if Jim does the second act, which is not to shoot anybody
at all, to refuse Pedro's bargain, then all twenty
people will be shot. Likewise, George faces a choice
between doing one thing, taking the job in-- sorry, George faces the choice
between taking the job in the bio lab and not taking the
job in the bio lab. If George takes the job in the
bio lab, then the gung-ho biological weapons fellow
won't [will] get the job, and the outcome
will be better [worse]. If George doesn't take the
job, then the gung-ho biological weapons person won't
get the job and the outcome will be better. So, in both cases we have an
act killing the one versus killing none, taking the job
versus not taking the job, which is worse than another, but
the outcomes of those acts are inverted. The consequentialist tells us
not to look at the act side of the equation, but
to look at the outcome side of the equation. The only things, says the
consequentialist, that we need to take into consideration, is
how many people are saved or how much bio-weapons
research is done. According to the
consequentialist, what we do is we look and we see, outcome
one is better than outcome two, and then reading back from
that, we decide which thing we ought to do. We ought to do act one because
it's the thing that produces the better outcome. The deontologist or virtue
ethicist says, not so fast. Don't jump straight to the
consequence, look also at what it is that is needed to be
done by the individual to bring about that consequence. And recognizing that act one
is worse than act two, the deontologist or virtue ethicist
says, it's at least important to take seriously as
a possibility that the right thing to do in this situation is
the second act, even if the outcome that it leads
to is worse. Now what Williams points out is
that if one takes seriously the first of these stances,
the one where what we're looking at is the outcome and
not the process which gave rise to that outcome, then any
hesitation we feel towards bringing about that outcome as
the result of that particular act is due to what we might
call a certain kind of squeamishness. The utilitarian says, and we
started with the quotes from Mill for this reason, that
thinking about who does an act is morally irrelevant, just as
thinking about who gets the goods is morally irrelevant. What matters, says the greatest
happiness principle, is how much aggregate happiness
is produced; what matters not, except in so far
as it affects the amount of happiness, is who produces that
happiness or where that happiness goes. So there is room on the
consequentialist picture for second-order thinking about the distributions of happiness. If gross inequities in the
amount of happiness across a society produces itself less
happiness, then we can take that into consideration
in our calculus. If performing a particular kind
of act produces in an individual less happiness,
we can take that into consideration in our calculus. But ultimately the only things
that go into the equation in determining whether an act is
morally right is the amount of happiness and not where that
happiness is distributed. Now, as Epictetus pointed out,
some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. And when Jim arrives in Pedro's
village, one of the things that is not up to him
is the fact that he faces a forced choice of the structure
that Pedro has presented him with. It goes without saying that
what Pedro has done is outrageous, but the structure
of the situation that Jim confronts is a very
simple one. Either Pedro will kill twenty
people or Jim will kill one person and the other nineteen
will not die. That's what's there for
Jim to be deciding on. Nonetheless, 75% of the 75% of
you who thought that Jim did the right thing in that
situation think that Jim ought to feel some squeamishness about
carrying out that act. What Williams points out is that
if one takes seriously the consequentialist picture,
then perhaps the morally right thing to do is to try to
cultivate in oneself moral sentiments that accord with
one's moral judgments. If through rational
argumentation and reflection you come to realize of yourself
that--although you are committed to racial
equality, although you are committed to gender equality,
although you are committed to equality regardless of gender
identification, you're committed to not being ageist,
you're committed to not being discriminatory on the basis of
physical disability--you might, as a result of having
lived in a society largely structured in ways that encode
a kind of residual racism and sexism and homophobia, you might
find in yourself certain sentiments that lead you
instantaneously to respond in ways that run contrary to what
your moral commitments tell you you ought to do. In those cases, I take it you
think that there's some moral mandate upon you to
try to get rid of those instinctive responses. If you're really committed to
anti-racism, then you want to the extent possible to have a
harmonious soul when engaging in interracial encounters. If your reason tells you that
you're committed to anti-racism, you want your
spirit and appetite to be in line in that way. So there are instances where
morality on reflection tells us that something is right, and
the consequence of that for our behavior towards
ourselves is that we ought to try to cultivate in ourselves
instincts that correspond to that. Williams says the utilitarian
should say that in cases like the Jim case, Jim is like the
residual racist. He knows what the right thing to do is, but he
has a residual tendency to be pulled in the morally
wrong direction. If you don't think that it's
true that Jim ought to change his attitudes in that case,
and you do think that the residual implicit racist ought
to try to change her attitude, it would be useful to try to
think about what holds those two cases apart. OK, so that's what I want to
say in closing about the utilitarianism and
it's critics. And we'll return as I said to
those issues twice more, once on Thursday when we read Judy
Thomson's trolley problem paper and once next Tuesday when
we look at some empirical work on that question, which
suggests a naturalistic explanation for why it
is that Jim feels the hesitation that he does. What I want to do now is to
introduce you to the third of all the main moral outlooks that
we're going to consider this semester. So last lecture we looked very
carefully at consequentialist moral theories in the form of
John Stuart Mill, and those are theories which locate the
moral value of an act in its consequences. In the first part of the class
we spent a lot of time looking at Aristotle's virtue theory,
which located the moral worth of an act in the actor. Remember we looked at acts
having more worth only if they're done as the result
of a sort of constancy of character. What we're going to look at
today is the third piece of this story, of a moral view
that says the morality attached to an action is not the
result of what the actor is like, it's not the result of
what the consequences are like, rather it is about
the act itself. In particular, we're going to
look at the deontological theory of Immanuel Kant. So, Immanuel Kant was an 18th
century German philosopher who, like Plato and Aristotle,
provided a comprehensive and systematic philosophical theory
that to this day is taken seriously as one of the
ways one might make sense of the world as a whole. Kant has theories of
metaphysics, that is, what kind of stuff there is. He has theories of epistemology,
that is, how we know about what kind
of stuff there is. He has theories of ethics, what
the right thing to do is. And he has theories of
aesthetics, that is, what gives things aesthetic value. Famously, Kant articulated his
views about the three major domains of philosophy three
enormous and dense books: the first, The Critique of Pure
Reason, which told you about what the world is like and how
we know it to be that way, which he wrote first in 1781 and
then revised; the second, The Critique of Practical
Reason, which is an account of the nature of morality; and
the third, The Critique of Judgment, which is an account
of the nature of aesthetic value. But in addition to those dense
works Kant also wrote what he took to be more popular
presentations of his view. In the case of metaphysics,
he wrote a book called The Prolegomena to any Future
Metaphysics. And in the case of ethics, he
wrote something that he calls the Grounding for the
Metaphysics of Morals, which is of course the work
from which we read excerpts for today. So I give you this context
because I want you to know that, as hard as the reading
that we did from Kant was, I chose for you perhaps the
easiest part of the easiest book that he wrote. So, what should you take home
from Kant if you take home nothing else? If you take home nothing else
from our reading of Kant, I want you to take home Kant's
idea of the categorical imperative. And my goal in the remainder of
lecture today is to bring you, by reading through with you
the text of Kant that we had today, to a point where you
will be well positioned to understand what Kant means by
the categorical imperative. And depending on how the next
twenty minutes go, we'll get to that either right at the
end of today's lecture or right at the beginning
of Thursday's. OK, so Kant's text, the
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals begins with a very
famous passage where Kant says, "nothing can be regarded
as good without qualification except the good will." This
claim should be familiar to you, O readers of Book II
of Plato's The Republic. This is the classic distinction
between things that have intrinsic value and
things that are merely of instrumental worth. And indeed much in the way that
Plato's Socrates does, Kant goes on to enumerate some
things which fall into the other category, the category
of things that are of mere instrumental utility. Among the things that cannot
be regarded as good without qualification, says Kant, are
talents of the mind like intelligence and wit, qualities
of temperament like courage and perseverance, gifts
of fortune like power and riches and honor
and health. And he says, taking a direct
gibe at Aristotle, and noting as such that he's so doing,
neither can the ancient virtues--(oh, my goodness,
how do I close that email?)--neither can the ancient
virtues of moderation and self control be considered
as good in themselves. Why? Because though being
intelligent, or brave, or rich, or controlled, will help
you to achieve the goals that you have, they don't determine
what those goals might be. They magnify your effectiveness
as an agent, but they don't determine
the valence, the value of your agency. So, says Kant, a witty,
persevering, rich, healthy, moderate thief will be an
outstanding thief--but that doesn't make his
thiefdom good. Each of the virtues that has
traditionally been extolled as a virtue, says Kant, gains its
value only in so far as the good will is part of it. Now a good will, says Kant, is
good not because of what it affects or accomplishes,
it's good in itself. When I say that Kant is a critic
of consequentialism I am not exaggerating. Kant doesn't think that
the outcome of the act is what matters. And in an extraordinarily famous
passage, famous in part because of the rather shocking
translation which has come down to us of it, Kant says,
"the good will would remain good, even if by the niggardly
provision of step-motherly nature it wholly lacked the
power to accomplish its purpose." By which he means,
even if you with your good will were frustrated in all of
the goals that you set out to achieve, your actions would
still have moral worth. And somewhat more poetically and
a bit less vocabulary that is challenging to the modern
ear, Kant says, even if it didn't achieve its outcome "it
would like a jewel still shine by its own light as something
which has full value in itself. Its usefulness or fruitlessness
can neither augment nor its value." Now the question is this:
How could anybody come to have this view? How could anybody have a view
of morality that says, what matters for an act to be moral
is not the outcome that it produces, but rather the
description under which the act is done? What I want to try to do right
now is to put you inside the Kantian picture so that you
get a sense of what that worldview looks like. So in the passages that we read
for today, Kant makes three particular claims. He says
that an action must be done from duty in order
to have moral worth. The first notion that I want to
try to explicate for you is the Kantian notion of something being done from duty. An action done from duty,
says Kant in his second proposition, has its moral worth
not in the purpose that is to be attained by it, but
in the maxim according to which the action
is determined. So the way that an action done
from duty has more worth is not by looking to see what
outcome you're expecting from it, but rather by looking
to see under what characterization did you
perform the act. And again, I'll spell out what
each of those terms mean. Finally, says Kant, duty, which
lies at the heart of deontological moral theory,
"duty is the necessity of an action done out of the respect
for the law." Kant believes that it is only when you subject
your will to a law which you have made for
yourself--that is, the moral law whose binding force upon you
you have recognized--it is only in that circumstance
that you are truly free. So Kant says, "duty is the
necessity of an action done out of the respect for the law,"
and when you perform an action out of respect for the
moral law, says Kant, then and only then do you act
autonomously. OK, so three, incredibly
complicated, subtle claims from Kant. Let's try getting to the bottom
of what they mean. So let's start with the first
claim, the claim that an act has moral worth only when
it is done from duty. So Kant points out that
there's three kinds of motivation that we might have
in performing an act. We might do an act out of duty,
we might do it out of inclination, or we might do it
out of self-interest. Only cases of the first kind, in fact
only pure cases of the first kind, have moral worth. Actions that are done merely in
keeping with, but not from moral duty, have no moral
worth according to Kant. So if you obey the law but you
do so only out of self interest, your obedience, says
Kant, has no moral worth. if you rescue the drowning child
from the pond but you do so only because there's a sign
on the tree that says, "Rescue Drowning Children: $1 Million
Reward," your act has no moral worth. So we can think about what
Kant's claim amounts to and how it differs from the other
ones that we've been looking at by thinking of the
question space in terms of a flow chart. So we're trying to decide
whether a particular action has moral worth, and the first
thing we want to ask ourselves is: "Does the action
accord with duty? If the answer to that is no,
that is, if you've done something like lied, or stolen
something, or murdered somebody, or allowed something
terrible to happen in front of you that you could have
easily, at no cost to yourself, prevented, all of the
authors that we've read, not surprisingly, say that the
act has no moral worth-- Oh so, did that just disappear
that was supposed to be in red on black? Is it completely invisible
from the back? Oh, that's a pity-- OK, so what that says in red
is no lying and stealing-- but it's in red. I can't change it in the middle
of the slides, but I'll remind you what those
things say. OK-- The second question that we
ask, having eliminated now from the realm of morally worthy
acts those that don't accord with duty, is: What
motive the act was done with? So perhaps you act in a morally
worthy way out of self-interest without immediate
inclinations. So you pay your taxes because
if you don't pay your taxes you're going to have
to pay more taxes. You obey the speed limit but
only because you were afraid you might get caught
otherwise. Mill says those acts
have moral worth. Kant says no, they don't-- And again, that's supposed
to be in red but it's now invisible-- Suppose that you do an act in
such a way that you have an inclination that's in
keeping with duty. So Kant thinks you have a duty
not to commit suicide, and he considers a case where you fail
to commit suicide because you're happy. Kant thinks you need to be loyal
to your life partner, but he says that there's no
moral worth to remaining loyal to your life partner while
you are in love. There's no moral worth, says
Kant, to acting kindly towards somebody when you feel sympathy
towards them. Because in those cases, though
your act is in keeping with what morality demands, it's
not done because it is the right thing to do. You are doing it because your
inclination happens to line up with what morality
demands of you. Now Aristotle, of course, took
this situation to be the one in which moral worth is
paradigmatically expressed. But Kant thinks in such cases
you can not tell that an act was done from the moral law. All you can see is that it was
done in keeping with the moral law, it corresponds to what the
moral law demands, but we can't see from that that
the motive was duty. It's only in the third case,
the case where you act from duty without any inclination and
without any self-interest, that Kant thinks the
moral worth of an action can be seen. If you preserve your life when
you feel the inclination to do otherwise, if you act kindly in
situations where there's no reward for you and you feel no
sympathy, in those cases, says Kant, we can see that the act
was done, not merely in keeping with, but from
the moral law. This isn't to say that Kant
doesn't think a life lived in the way that Aristotle suggested
life is lived is a badly [well] lived life. Cases where your inclination
happens to line up with duty hopefully keep you out of this
box of doing the wrong thing, but they don't allow you to test
your character and see of yourself that the motivation
that you have for doing the right thing is to conform
to what the moral law demands of you. So with that understanding of
what it is to act from duty in mind, we're now in a position to
make sense of Kant's second claim in our reading
for today. Then "an action done from duty
has its moral worth not in the purpose that's to be obtained
by it, but in the maxim according to which the action
is determined." So remember we've learned that an action
done from duty is one that you do in conformity with what
morality demands, because that is what morality demands. Not because it's in your self
interest, not because you were inclined to behave in that way,
but because that act is what morality demands of you. But in order to determine
whether an act is what morality demands of you, that
act needs to be described in a particular way to you. And the way that you describe
that act to yourself makes use of what Kant calls a maxim,
a subjective principle of volition--that is, a description
of something that is about you, the subject,
that's says what your desires towards behavior are
in that situation. A subjective principle of
volition, that is, a description under which
the act is done. So it takes the form, perhaps:
"In all engagings with all who come into my shop, I will
provide them with an honest accounting of how much their
transaction is worth, regardless of whether I could
be discovered cheating in this." Or: "In all of my
encounters with those who are weak and in need of my help, I
will provide them with the aid that I can regardless of whether
that would be of benefit to me." "Only by considering the motive
and not by considering the outcome can the action be
expressive of the good will itself." "The good will is the
only thing that is good in itself," says Kant, and it's
only by looking at the description under which an act
is done that we can determine whether the good will was
implicated in the right way in the choice to perform
that action. Third claim: "Duty is the
necessity of an action done out of the respect for the law."
So we know that an act has moral worth only if
it's done from duty. We know that in order to be done
from duty it needs to be done under a certain
description. And now we're told what it is
that this duty amounts to. In order for an act to be done
from duty, says Kant, it must have been done with explicit
recognition that what one is doing at that point is
respecting the moral law in so far as it articulates what
morality demands of you. Not in so far that it
articulates ways that you might have a well-ordered,
harmonious, happy soul. Not in so far that it
articulates ways in which lots of happiness could be spread
around to lots of people. Out of respect rather, says
Kant, for the fact that it is what morality demands of you. The moral worth of an act, says
Kant, does not lie in its effect, for the effect
could have come about in multiple ways. I can set out to release a
biological gas in a subway that's intended to kill
thousands of people, and because I'm not very good at
chemistry, the result could be that I produce an enormous
amount of joy in those thousands of people. The effect can come about
in lots of ways. Kant says Mill would have to say
that in releasing that gas I have done something
with more worth. Kant says: No--what matters is
the description under which the act is done, and in
particular that that description be that one have
respect for the law itself. So I told you I was going to
get you to the point of the categorical imperative, and I
am going to end the lecture today by bringing you right up
to that point, and then next class we'll talk about
it in more detail. So the question is
this, right? This is a pressing, exciting
question in Kant. All right, I realize that we're
in the in-Kant part of things, but this is
really exciting. "What sort of law...?",
says Kant. He even puts a "but"
to get you excited. But, he says--cliffhanger...-- "what sort of law can that be,
the thought of which must determine the will without
reference to any "intent" expected effect, so the will can
be called absolutely good without qualification?"
It's so exciting! We're finding something that's
going to make us genuinely autonomous and free and moral! Well remember: it can't be
anything particular, it can't be anything specific about the
world or it's outcomes. What can it be? It can be the will's universal
conformity of its actions to law as such! That is, what makes the law
binding is the fact that it is recognized by all rational
agents as binding. In particular, it takes the form
of what Kant calls the categorical imperative. And here's the formulation of
the categorical imperative that we got in our reading for
today: "Never act except in such a way that I can also will
that my act maxim should become a universal law." Never
do anything that you couldn't will everybody else to
do at the same time. And we'll begin next lecture
with the example that Kant uses to illustrate this, namely
the lying promise, talk a little bit more about various
formulations of the categorical imperative, and then
move to Judy Thomson's trolley problem paper. [SIDE CONVERSATION]
