Ethics: Deontology Versus Consequentialism - Lesson 1 Kant

disaster ahead you're on a bridge underneath of the bridge is a train track it appears there's a train barreling ahead and in front of the train is disaster if the Train continues on its current course there are five workers who cannot see or hear the train approaching it appears for whatever reason they are unable to get out of the way of the Train they will most certainly die if something does not happen you have access to a lever and if you pull that lever you have the ability to move the Train from instead of going straight ahead to make a veer to the left and if it veers to the left there is one worker on that portion of the track and one person will die so if you pull the lever one person dies if you don't pull the lever and do nothing five people die what should you do this is an introduction to ethics today it's deontology versus consequentialism whenever we get into ethics we're going to ask what is ethics it's the moral principles that govern a person or groups behavior that's the dictionary definition what it really means is moral being concerned with the principles of right and wrong the things great people over the last several millennia have asked P Blanche in ancient Greece and of course certainly something our religions tackle as well what we're going to be doing is a more secular non-religious ethical questions today begin by asking ourselves how should we behave what should we do in certain circumstances and what criteria should we use to make those decisions on your right you'll see a gentleman by the name of Immanuel Kant and on the Left you'll see a gentleman by the name of Joe Stuart Mill both of these individuals had very different answers to these questions the big debate is of course deontology versus consequentialism you're going to need to take notes because there is going to be some very heady weighty issues and some definitions and some language that may be slightly confusing fortunately we'll try and keep it as simple as possible and when we tackle something like deontology we're going to examine first the meaning which is from the greek which is the nature of duty and obligation simplify an ethical system based on adhering to rules whether or not something is right or wrong depends on if it follows or breaks a certain rule so when we ask ourselves is stealing wrong deontology will say if there is a rule that says you should not steal then it is wrong if there is no rule against it then it's okay there's certainly more complex nuanced understandings of this and that's where we come into Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant is typically the person people reference or philosophers reference when we're talking about deontology he was born in Germany from the period 1724 to 1804 I came up with a lot of very important philosophical ideas specifically when we talk about Immanuel Kant we're talking about the categorical imperative so when we say does something break a rule is that is there an injunction against us doing something that makes it immoral or moral we have a general idea here a general prescription that then tells us basically all of the possible things that we can or cannot do just judging by a simple quote Immanuel Kant wrote this in groundwork of the metaphysics of morals the quote is act only according to that Maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction now certainly that sounds very complicated and it is if you simplify it it becomes quite a bit easier by just looking at three words the first word is Maxim when we're talking about a maxim we're talking about a short roll for conduct how we should behave and Immanuel Kant is essentially saying you can figure out all of the natural universal laws or rules about whether something is a proper thing to do or an improper thing to do immoral or moral simply based upon asking yourself could I make this a universal law would it be acceptable so you need to behave as though you are constantly asking yourself would it be acceptable for everyone to behave as I am would it be acceptable for me to steal if everyone was allowed to steal would it be acceptable for X Y or Z it's a general prescription that then allows us to create every natural rule that we can think of Kant is telling us constantly if we were in a certain situation the situation does not change whether or not it's an immoral duty or a moral duty to behave a certain way something is either right or wrong or it is not and that goes from the outset we could call this normative ethics something being precisely good or precisely bad and whether or not there has been a natural disaster whether or not the natural disaster threatens our lives whether or not the natural disaster has put a store in our nearby neighborhood and that store has food that could potentially save people's lives that doesn't matter in this prescription we're simply asking ourselves in a theoretical world when we do something could we reverse that something we're doing and make it a universal law so is looting acceptable well it wouldn't be acceptable to make a universal law that says looting is permissible would it be permissible to steal something no because if we're allowed to steal something then when Conn says it is a needs to be universal it would therefore be OK for anyone to take all of my belongings all of my capital etc and the end result would of course be a anarchist Society anarchist Society and we would have really very little constructive going on so he says from the outset there are all these rules and if we just simply apply this prescription that we can find out the answer to basically any question we want to know that's ethical right or wrong simply follow this prescription and we know there are natural rules and Kant says don't break them whatever you do don't break them because that would be an immoral action and this leads us to a problem and this is where philosophy gets interesting is that it leads us to engaging debates interesting discussions and the first problem we have is a moral absolutism problem that is even if you think you have a good reason to break the rule like I said there could be a circumstance that makes it in your opinion or in your judgment a good thing under that circumstance to lie or steal under this condition that Immanuel Immanuel Kant gives us it's still wrong to do so it's always wrong no matter the circumstances so decision time manual con standing there beside us were on the bridge can we pull the lever and volitionally kill one person because we pull that lever we are essentially killing someone it present course we can do nothing and people will die if we pull the lever we've essentially made a decision to kill a person which of course is we know is it is a very terrible thing so what do we do now I'm not going to make the decision for you and that's why philosophy is so important but get off of the trolley for a second get off of the bridge and start asking yourself real questions many philosophers attack the categorical imperative because of its absolutism you can think of an obvious natural rule something like thou shalt not lie then you can construct a situational argument it would be permissible to break that rule and violate what Kant acontece telling us now don't use the trolley problem it's already out there people have already debated there's been books written on it there's been countless thousands of hours spent debating that particular problem try using something more realistic historical in what historical circumstances would it be acceptable to break Kant's categorical imperative and do something that we from the outset think is an impermissible thing or an immoral thing or an unethical thing in what circumstance would it be okay to live in what circumstances would it be okay to steal certainly we don't think these are permissible things but perhaps in a certain situation obviously Wars happen in war things are different in genocide situations things are different in what circumstances would it be acceptable to violate the categorical imperative construct an argument against the categorical imperative describe why's situationally things change in Y in certain circumstances certain outcomes are more preferable than others it's certainly preferable that a lie occurs then a death occurs we would rather lying happen than people die so that's a really heavy weighty task it would make a great paper something that could take up several pages and could really cause you to think you can get more information on the categorical imperative deontology all of this simply by utilizing Google and it will point you to most universities philosophy department webpages and they'll have a lot more to say than certainly I do at this point and of course most of these texts are open-source because they're not copyrighted anymore and they're available all over the web now if you want a translation that will be relatively inexpensive and you can find those quite freely in the next lesson we'll look at someone who specifically tackled the arguments against deontology who said that in fact if we were in the trolly situation perhaps the moral thing to do would be to pull the lever volitionally actively killing one individual in saving four lives so we'll tackle that in lesson two but for now think about this task and really give it some weight and also think about the other normative moral codes that are similar to Conte that perhaps would break down in certain circumstances hope you enjoyed this lesson thank you

Channel: James Goldstein

Views: 32,582

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Keywords: Ethics, Kant, Deontology

Id: 8Da0EtI3b4I

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2013