One of the most entertaining parts
of philosophy is its thought experiments. There are several thought experiments,
especially ones that pose moral problems that are considered pop philosophy
because they're so well known. I put out a poll asking you all which of these four thought experiments
you wanted to hear about most. So by popular demand. Here is the baby problem. There is a murderer on the loose out
to kill your entire family. You and your family
are hiding in an underground cellar. But you can't control if
or when your baby makes a sound. If your baby coughs or cries,
the murderer will find all of you. Do you kill your baby? I think a lot of people thought
I was going to do a deep analysis of this moral dilemma, calculate the good and bad points
of each possible choice, and tell you what I think the correct course of action is. That would be applied ethics, applying ethical theories to a certain scenario
and determining how one ought to act. But this video is going to be about meta
ethics, analyzing the ethical theories themselves. Where do we get our ideas of
right and wrong from? Are they right or wrong
ideas of right and wrong? So a lot of people, when presented with
a moral dilemma like the baby problem, will argue for one of two positions
kill the baby or don't kill the baby. I'd breastfeed it to keep it quiet. Almost every baby shuts up like that. dylanresavy8474 has already given us a criteria by which each scenario
should be evaluated on. The baby problem depends on chance. The lifeboat is about longevity,
but the more context you add to the baby problem, the answer may change
and become more complicated. Use baby as a bait and jump the murderer together Works pretty well if you got a large family. What if he is a kung fu master? I think it's important
to specify the conditions. Like whatever you pick. Society and the law will not judge you poorly. The meme variations of the trolley problem just show how important context is to a moral dilemma. Each time
the trolley problems context is changed or expanded on our evaluation
changes as well. And so it seems like context
is crucial to moral evaluations. There are
probably people watching this like, Wow, congrats philosophy girl,
you figured out what context is. It seems obvious to say that
ethics should consider the particularities of each specific situation,
but does this context dependent, particularist way of ethical decision
making work on a broader scale? When everyone has different
subjective beliefs and experiences It will lead you and you and you
to have a different intuition about what's right or wrong
in, say, the baby problem compared to me. So to ensure that people can function
without constant disagreement, most societies have decided to structure themselves
around general moral principles. Kids are taught that lying is bad,
sharing is good. Punching little Tommy in the park is bad. Laws work like this, too. Yes, a person stealing food
because they live in poverty and can't afford to feed
their family is much different from a billionaire stealing food
because they love the thrill of it. But the law generalizes. The law says in
principle, stealing is illegal and judges refer to this set principle in their decision making. And we will be getting into
how the Internet is very principled and its moral judgment. This scientific or systematic
type of ethics is useful, no doubt. But there's a difference between
utility and truth. Do general principles
actually reflect how ethics is? You might think that one problem
is that systematic ethics excludes imagination and emotion
as valid ways of making moral judgments. While imagination and emotions can make ethical reasoning less precise and maybe more difficult, if that's how ethics truly is,
then why stray away from it? One of my professors gave us this analogy: If we keep adding rocks to a hill, when
does it definitively become a mountain? Is it the 50th rock we add? The 76th? If there is no clear rule, then why use
rules? To get away from systematic ethics, a type of ethics called
particularism has emerged which tries to focus on the particular people
involved in a particular circumstance, in a particular environment, with
a particular history, on and on and on. Now, I do worry that this video
is going to be too long or too dry
because we got a lot of theory to cover. So to make it up to you,
allow me to bake you some dessert. I'm breaking -- [jumbled confusion] I'm not breaking brookies.
I'm baking. And the thing about baking
is that it's a science. So let's bring out some.... Where is it? I don't know why I went in the fridge. I'm too short for this. I have to follow the measurements and
the ingredients as closely as possible. Or else I will get something that's
too runny or too sweet or too chewy. So one third cup of cocoa powder, half a cup of white sugar wow half a cup of brown sugar. And then mix that up. We have these metrics or standards
such as millimeters, cups, ounces to measure
how good of a baker we're being. In fact, we can measure all baked goods
based on these standards. That's how we have recipes
where I just follow the exact formula. We can have baking competitions
where judges can reliably compare the value of different desserts
against each other. And since the standards and measurements
are the same for any dessert, any baking project, then what
we really care about is the end product. Sugar or cocoa powder
isn't inherently good or bad. We can only judge it to be good or bad
based on how well it helps me to achieve the perfect Brookie. The best baker, then, is someone who can
make as many good desserts as possible. Now I'm going to finish
making this Brookie. You guys get back to listening
about metaethics and whatever I know what you really came here
for, though, so stay tuned for a picture
of the Brookie. People commonly think that ethics
is scientific, like baking. We can measure the goodness of all actions
and we can compare any set of actions against each other by using the same
measurements. Like with any other science. The assumption is that complex phenomena is best explained by general principles. Is flirting If flirting with your best friend's romantic partner worse than punching a stranger's baby? Maybe you'll ask for more information
Like is your best friend's partner loyal or a sleaze?
How hard am I punching this baby? But we still assume that these two actions
can be better or worse in the same way. This is what's called value monism. All values can be measured
by the same standard. Value monism traces all the way back to Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher who argued that all values existed
under the single value of good itself. Value Monism is understandably appealing because it allows us to explain rational choices via a simple weighing
and comparing of options. It allows us to say there is an objective
answer to moral situations so long as you follow
the objectively correct formula. Just like how there's an objective
answer to two plus two, so long as you follow the objectively correct
formula of addition. So when people inevitably
have different intuitions about right and wrong,
we can defend our choices to each other based on these publicly available
principles. It's supposed to solve the problem
of different subjective beliefs. Benjamin Franklin
was all for these general moral formulas. In one of his letters to a librarian,
he proposed that moral solutions can be found through,
"Prudential algebra." "Divide half a sheet of paper
by a line into two columns writing over the one pro
and over the other con. Then, during three or four days consideration,
I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives
that at different times occur to me for or against the measure. When I have thus got them all together,
in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights and where I find two, one on each side that seemed equal, I striked them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to some
two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons
con equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five, and thus proceeding
I find at length where the balance lies." What this scientific systematic
picture of ethics is concerned with then is establishing the correct universal standards
or principles to evaluate ethics by. If I know the rules of algebra,
which are always true, I can apply them to any particular
algebra problem. If I see this pool of water freeze
at zero degrees and then see the same thing happen to this pool of water
and this pool of water, then I generalize to the scientific theory
that all water freezes at zero degrees. Similarly, if I know the rules of ethics,
I don't need to start from scratch in every particular situation. I just need to follow the universal principles like Benjamin
Franklin's pros and cons evaluation. People tend to like this picture
of universal morality because it makes right and wrong,
concrete and accessible. It's 'bias free', it's 'objective.' All you have to do to know
what is definitively right is to reason properly;
to use the correct formula. But many philosophers
have since criticized this technical, scientific approach
to ethics. For example, in his famous *book*
"Principia Ethica", George Edward Moore says that ethics is totally different
from natural sciences. We can verify scientific theories
by looking at the empirical world. I can say This book is rectangular just by looking at it. Is water, two hydrogen molecules
and one oxygen molecule? Let's examine
water through a microscope to find out. But is 'good' equivalent
to pleasure or utility? I can't attach a property to good
just by using my senses the way I can attach the property
of rectangularness to this book. So treating ethics
as similar to science is a false analogy. It can lead us to not so good
consequences. I think it's a universal high school
experience where in 10th grade history class, the teacher makes you debate
the most controversial topics ever, like, "Hey class, let's discuss
whether slavery can ever be justified!" And a classic, of course, is. All right, everyone,
let's get in our discussion circle. Today, we're going to be debating
whether it's right or wrong to drop atomic bombs
on innocent civilians in Japan. And yes, I'm going to mention Oppenheimer
because it gets clicks. But also, hey, that's how we get the edgy
double advocate dudes to listen. So it's for the greater good. So people -- and by people,
I mean, high school history teachers -- commonly frame the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb droppings as a binary choice. We can either bomb Japan and guarantee
the end of the war, or we can spare
the lives of innocent people in Japan. But the war will rage on. We have no choice. But why should we accept such limited
possibilities? Why do so many people just accept
this binary framework of choice interview: "And the ending of the war by this means was not undertaken lightly, but I am not confident
that a better course was then open." Whenever we make ethical decisions,
we have to first decide the range of possible actions
that will be considered. Philosophers sometimes set this range
by deciding what the best possible world looks like and what the worst
possible world looks like. To do this, we need our imagination. Franz Hinkelammert I really hope I'm pronouncing that
not too badly. Wrote about two kinds of imagination. Conceptual imagination concerns thoughts
about the limits of possibilities within a particular sociopolitical system. Since this type of imagination presumes
the existence of a particular sociopolitical system,
then a non-negotiable or a fixed goal is preserving what is considered
to be the best possible system. And in America,
that system is neoliberal capitalism. American peace educations
about nuclear power insists that we need nuclear weapons
to maintain peace. It assumes that the best possible world
is governed by a logic of deterrence because the only possible choices
they will consider are the ones that will allow the system
of neoliberal capitalism to continue. "On the one hand,
it identifies the best possible world with freedom of the marketplace. On the other hand, the guiding idea
of the worst possible society to be avoided at all costs is what Hinkelammert
refers to as chaos-as-socialism, the antithesis of the capitalist idea. "It's communism that now threatens our survival." Now, political thought will always employ
conceptual imagination, so it's not inherently bad. But if ethics is treated
as a technical science, then ethics only uses
conceptual imagination. And that's not good. If conceptual imagination's goal
is to preserve a socio political system, then everything else, including people, are instrumental
for the good of that system. "Thus, for instance,
the exercise of mere conceptual imagination would quite willingly allow
the expenditure of billions of dollars for defense of a system
within which billions of humans starve. Hmm. I wonder where that happens. In the 1980s, America's
League of Women Voters published Peace Education about the arms race. It included guiding questions
such as who is ahead in the arms race, the Soviets or the Americans. What are the crucial criteria for judging
which superpower is ahead? How many potential deaths and how much threatened industrial damage
are sufficient to deter nuclear attack? Should defense measures assume that a nuclear war would be over
in a matter of hours or days? These questions are very scientific. They view ethics as a numbers
game, as a zero sum game, as a game with principled rules. And these rules operate
under the assumption that deterrence and national sovereignty
are the best possible outcome. And war is just a necessary evil
to achieve those goals. I'm not saying it's wrong
to ask these types of questions, but to only consider ethics
in this limited framework is the problem. The American writer Jonathan Schell
noticed that even though every superpower having nuclear weapons was an extremely
risky method of keeping peace, I mean, people were on edge about
being blown into pieces all the time. Politicians still always called
this arrangement "moderate" and "respectful." "...and hardly less marvelous
has been the capacity of industry to design and have labor
to operate their machines and methods to do things never done before. What has been done
is the greatest achievement of organized science in history." Anyone who opposed nuclear weapons
or proposed some 'socialist bullshit' were called "extreme" or "radical",
even if it would keep us farther
from literally destroying ourselves. I'm not saying you have to believe
that so-and-so is the right answer to the atomic bomb problem, but
what I am saying is that it's important to analyze any assumptions we make about
what is possible to begin with. If we just blindly accept
the range of possibilities that are status quo, we decontextualize
the systems and norms that are in place. We accept them as natural, when in reality
our institutions are deeply historical. I personally love this quote
from Michel Foucault, which made me think about how limiting
our knowledge to the Western scientific method is a way of justifying
dominant knowledge. "What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify
when you say that you are a science? What theoretico-political vanguard
are you trying to put on the throne in order to detach it from all the massive,
circulating, and discontinuous forms that knowledge can take?" To avoid such a limited imagination, Hinkelammert says that what we need,
in addition to conceptual imagination, is transcendental imagination: thought that extends beyond
the normal accepted limits of possibility. Instead of the goal being to preserve
the system, transcendental imagination has human beings as its central goal. After all, a necessary precondition of attaining
any goal is the actual existence of a human agent. Under transcendental imagination, the best possible world is one in which
everyone has the basic necessities needed to exist,
and the worst possible world is one in which living becomes
impossible for people, whether that be because they can't afford health
care, food, a place to live, etc.. This may seem painfully obvious,
but clearly most policy makers don't actually use
this framework of possibility. "A result:
your standard of living is going down." This also may seem utopian. "We can never have a world
in which there is zero injustice." And at least right now
I agree that that's true. There are situations
in which moral failure is unavoidable, especially when oppressed groups are caught in
what Frye famously called a double bind. No matter what they do,
it will result poorly for them. If Muslim women don't wear head coverings,
they're at risk of getting ostracized and maybe even murdered. But if they do wear head coverings,
they're criticized by liberal Westerners who shame them for not meeting
our ideals of feminist defiance. These are all important to keep in mind,
but overall, I think it's very important to be able to imagine beyond what we deem possible. Aristotle said that just because a choice is unavailable
does not make it irrelevant. The world has many ways of making it hard
to act morally despite our best efforts. But that means it's important
to be aware of what causes these moral difficulties, such
that we can expand our possible choices. Being able to imagine
the impossible is also practically useful. If you're an indecisive person like me
and someone asks you what you want to eat for dinner. It's the most difficult decision
I could ever make in my life. There are so many options
and I'm not particularly picky. So I could go for Chinese,
I could go for Italian. Or what about that shawarma place down the road? The way to deal with
people like me is to first decide what is completely off the table. What food do I have
no chance of being interested in? Once that's figured out, it becomes a lot easier to know
what my possible dinner choices are. I think a lot of decisions are made
in this backwards manner where you first decide what is impossible
before being able to figure out your range of possibilities. "Whoever is incapable of conceiving
the impossible can never discover what is possible. The possible results from the submission of the impossible
to the criterion of feasibility." squidward be like "Are you trying to say I have no imagination?" Knock, knock.
Why don't giraffes like drinking coffee? Because by the time it reaches
their belly, it's cold. I've told this joke over 30 times
now, and only one person got it right. Shout out to you by the way. Philosopher Nomy Arpaly says that people
can't think of the answer to this joke because there's a kind of detail about
giraffe necks that is not salient to us, and so we don't even consider it
in our thought process. For a philosopher, Arpaly, this means our imagination can never be as insightful
as good old first hand experience. She says we can be pretty bad
at accurately imagining the experiences of others
or our own future selves. When we try to understand
what it's like to be another person. We run a mental simulation. We might try to psychoanalyze them. We try to predict
how and why they will act. But sometimes people develop a theory
very quickly and believe it to be 100% true,
even when it's not. For example, seeing your coworker
eat salad and theorizing, oh, it's because they have body image issues or seeing your crush laugh at someone else's joke and assuming
that they must be in love with each other. We can become overconfident
in the wrong mental simulation and we end up shaping facts
to fit our assumptions instead of letting facts
inform our imagination. I frequently see this overconfidence
in mental simulations online where people believe
they know the values and feelings others have just by one comment
and maybe their profile picture. But there are tons of facts about other people's lives
that we could be completely unaware of. For example, can we accurately imagine
what it's like to live in poverty if we've never experienced
poverty ourselves? How many people are aware that some women in poverty
use old clothes as pads for their period because they cannot afford
feminine hygiene? Or that children in poverty
can fail kindergarten because their parents can't afford
crayons? These facts make sense once you hear them. It's not like it's hard to understand, but if you've never had
firsthand experience of poverty, Arpaly says that chances are these
facts would have never crossed your mind. And these are just a few facts among an immense amount of facts
that shape the experience of poverty. So if people who have lived above poverty all their life couldn't
imagine these facts themselves, how reliable will they be at imagining
tons of other small details? I remember once I was upset that a man
whom I'll call Chris was friends with another man who would use
misogynistic and homophobic language. Chris said he didn't want to say anything
because, "it's hard to confront friends, and, you know,
this friend is a nice guy overall." But I told Chris, "That's the problem. Men like your friend who use misogynistic
and homophobic language certainly won't listen to women or queer
folk who voice their concerns. The degrading language indicates that he will only consider
the opinions of other cishet men, but it is cishet men who refuse to speak out
against this type of behavior. So we're stuck with no change." Now, to me,
this was obvious, but Chris was stunned. He said, "Huh... I can't believe I never realized that. It seems obvious when you tell me and
I take myself to be an empathetic person. But this just didn't cross my mind." And when I told my female friends
this story, they were stunned at how revolutionary
this news was to a man. This is a well-known fact to those who
have experienced woman and or girlhood. And it made sense to Chris
when I told him, but he would have never imagined it
himself. In the online world especially,
we know zero to little details about other people's lives. Our lives are full of particularities
that are unavailable to the World Wide Web. We don't post and share most of the things
that happen to us or how we feel. So how are people
so confident in their accusations? Does anyone remember Hannah Kim,
the influencer that was in deep shit for dating this man, Ned, who was exposed
for sexually engaging with minors? Well, it was perfectly normal Internet
etiquette to hate Hannah. To blame her
for condoning her boyfriend's acts. Until recently,
she uploaded a long explanation on her Instagram story
about how she was abused by Ned herself. She said he controlled everything
she saw online. He physically and psychologically hurt
her, gaslit her, and then suddenly loads of people
were extremely sympathetic. People were saying sorry
on behalf of those that ever blamed her. There is a complete shift in the overall
attitude of the Internet towards her. There are tons of other online cases like this
where people apply a general principle. In Hannah's case,
the principle was "you are a bad person if you stay with a partner
that sexually harasses others," but had zero acknowledgment of her particular
circumstances with her particular history as a particular person,
which they know nothing about. All the internet sees are general users
removed from any specific human being. And so the Internet applies
general moral principles. Now, it's totally fine to have theories
and try to predict what happened and why people did things. There's nothing wrong with running mental
simulations themselves, but it is a problem
when we resist opposing evidence or are overconfident about lives
which we barely know about. I see people make assumptions about me
all the time when I really don't
share 99% of myself online. We should always be open
to changing our theories if the facts reveal
that our imagination is inaccurate. Lastly, Arpaly discusses how desires
filter our experiences of the world. No doubt everyone has different desires,
so we will enjoy and suffer through different things. But more fundamentally, desires determine,
"the cognitive world of the agent. It determines to a large extent
what the agent notices, remembers, learns." Arpaly gives a pretty funny example. "I love owls. I am not a knickknack collector,
but I desire to see owls, or at least their photographs and to learn facts
about owls. Due to this desire, I notice, for example, that
the word 'knowledge' contains the word 'owl.' Most people do not,
even if they are philosophers and have seen the word 'knowledge'
in writing many times. A person who merely tries
to imagine what it is like to be an owl lover would probably fail
to see the 'owl' in 'knowledge.' Having the desire rather
than just imagining having the desire is usually required to notice such things." While the desires of an owl lover
are not too important to their perception of the world, desires
that belong to what Laurie Paul calls "transformative experiences" are crucial. Transformative experiences
change deep aspects of who you are. Examples
include going to war, romantically loving someone for the first time,
or becoming a parent. These experiences reshape core
parts of our lives and what we desire. The idea is that you have no way
of knowing how the experience will change you
before you have the experience. They are too radical of a change
to be imagined. Now, based on my YouTube demographics,
I don't think majority of my audience has raised their own child. So if we revisit the baby problem
from the very start of this video, how accurate do we think our imaginative
analysis can be? Us childless folk can say, "Aha yes,
kill the baby for the greater good." But can we accurately imagine
how deep the desire to care for your own baby is? With all these arguments
about how our moral imagination is shitty, how should we make important choices?
If prior to making a choice we can't even imagine
the desires we'll have, how can we make an informed,
rational decision? The systematic ethicist would say, "See!
imagination, feelings, emotions, These are too wishy washy. It gets us nowhere. We need a precise theory with rules." Are they right? Let's give systematic ethics
another chance by considering the following scenario: we have Tim, the terrorist in custody, and we know that he knows where
the bomb is, that his group has secretly planted
somewhere in central London. And we know that if we torture him
hard enough, he will reliably tell us where it is in time for us to defuse it. And we know that there is no other way
of getting him to tell us. And we also know that if we don't defuse it, the bomb will kill thousands of innocent people. If we know that this is the situation,
what do we do? The expected answer
or the answer we're being pushed to give is that we should torture Tim. Scenarios similar to this are frequently used to support
the general moral principle that it's okay to severely torture people
if it is for the greater good. But philosopher *Sophie Grace*
Chappell says the chances of this scenario happening in real life
is extremely improbable. If not impossible. *She* gives seven reasons
why. I'll give you the shortened version, but if you want the full details, highly recommend reading this
part of the paper for yourself. 1. It is extremely difficult to know with certainty that Tim
the terrorist knows where the bomb is. He could be a really good liar. 2. It's not easy for even Tim himself
to know where the bomb is. When terrorist groups know that a member
has been captured by the security forces. It is standard practice for them
to change their plan. 3. Tim's word might not be reliable. Most torture victims will say anything
to make the torture stop. Four. It is extremely difficult to know
if Tim will speak at all if, as a terrorist,
he prefers death to failure. It's not clear how we can know that he will leak the bomb location
instead of enduring torture until he dies. Five. It is extremely difficult to know if Tim will talk in time for us
to diffuse the bomb. Some torture victims cave right away. Others stay silent for months. Six. It is very hard to know that torture
is the only technique that will work in getting Tim
to tell us where the bomb is. Truth drugs, lie detectors,
search his devices, etc. Seven It isn't even easy to know that the bomb
will kill thousands of people. There's the possibility of aborting
the plan or the bomb being a hoax. Now, of course, it's possible
for this scenario to happen in theory. Philosophy is known for wacky
thought experiments, where the purpose is to examine logic and intuitions,
not to take these scenarios literally. But if our goal of analyzing
a scenario is to reinforce practical moral principles
that we are going to use, then its level of realistic possibility
does matter. Systematic ethics. wants general principles
that can work all the time, or at least most of the time reliably,
they need to be dependable. But if that's the case, then why should we
be examining extremely rare cases such as Tim the terrorist, to determine
the correct decision making system for ordinary, far
less extreme moral scenarios, like whether to tell a white lie
or volunteer at charity? cmm5542 left a comment
pointing out the unrealistic nature of the baby problem too. "I think the definite premise the murderer will kill
your whole family is a bit far fetched. How do you know that for sure? He may be one of those weird serial killers
who only kills people who are blond or fit some other preconceived fixed obsession
that matches no one in your family." And so let it be known here
that I don't think these unrealistic moral dilemmas are actually useful or good if we are trying to figure out
how to make real life decisions. What really matters more to me
still is moral imagination. "Here then, is the first way
in which the moral imagination is a key resource in thinking about
hard cases like Tim the terrorist. A well-developed moral imagination
will enable us to think clearly and precisely about what kind of scenarios
are empirically possible or likely. You needed moral imagination
to come up with these seven points. And being able to do that matters
because it is very easy for our imaginations
to get mesmerized by certain possibilities which our own minds or cultural influences such as spy films or apologists for the Bush administration,
or indeed philosophers themselves, tend to make unduly salient
to us. What I'm hoping
to convince you of at least a little bit, is that with moral situations,
it's never a binary situation. It was never the case
that with the Hiroshima bomb, the only two options were to either
drop the bomb or not. But if our only exposure to moral
thinking is theoretical moral dilemmas like the trolley problem
or the baby problem, then we can be misled into thinking
that all moral questions are binary. If the media loves putting out movies
like Mission Impossible or James Bond, then the choice to violently engage
with enemies and terrorists will stand out in our imagination. Even if there are other, better choices. So yes, let's preserve moral imagination
after all. But how do we improve
our shitty imagination? Imagining is a skill, as with any skill, the inability to imagine well right now
does not mean that all hope is lost. It can definitely be improved. The philosopher Amy Kind says we just think our imagination is shitty because nobody ever spends time or effort actually improving it. And that's not really your fault. A lot of jobs and parts of school
don't really make imagination important. One method of improving our imaginative skills is what's called imaginative scaffolding. Imaginative scaffolding is where you
modify similar experiences to help you know what an experience is like
without ever actually having it. For instance, maybe being a parent
isn't as hard to imagine as some philosophers suggest. Experiencing romantic love
is obviously different from love for your child, but perhaps we can extract
features from romantic love, such as the experience of missing
someone or arranging parts of your life around someone else, and imagine how
that would be similar to parental love. That's why art is so powerful. The more stories you read, the more films
you watch about different characters with different psychologies
and different life experiences. The more possibilities
we can imagine ourselves. But it's really important
that we diversify the types of art and media that we consume. If you only read one genre
or get fixated on one trope, it creates an imaginative habit
that is hard to break. For example, if you only consume
true crime, you might have an over paranoid imagination
and run the wrong mental simulations -- as philosopher Nomy Arpaly was worried about. if you only consume American coming of age stories, you might assume that having autonomy equals
cutting off ties with your family, because that's what characters
in these Western stories tend to do. But of course, that's not the only way
to be an autonomous person. And cutting off ties with your family
is an extremely harmful choice for some people. If the term imaginative scaffolding
has been hard to understand, then you can think of improving moral
imagination as an exercise in compassion. When you learn about new experiences,
you need to want to understand them, even if they seem difficult to understand. If you approach diverse art
but you don't have an open heart, then your personal biases
and social pressures and conventions will prevent you
from entering the experiences of others. [checking pronunciation of Freire because i'm anglo af] Philosopher and critic Paulo Freire said that the most important experience to grasp are those of the poor and the oppressed,
because, "It is the poor and the oppressed -- those who stand outside the benefits
conferred by any socio political order, who possess the greatest potential freedom to critically apprehend those social structures
fetishized by their beneficiaries." For example, if we successfully imagined
the perspective of those living in poverty,
their perspective allows us to see that nuclear power is not only for deterrence,
as the state claims, but also a) makes a shit ton of money
for rich institutions. b) If socialist countries
adopt nuclear power, they can try to argue
with capitalist countries and say that they are also
a legitimate, powerful state. And c) nuclear power prevents big countries from interfering with each other's spheres of control, letting them exercise
unchecked power over oppressive regimes. So having compassion, seeing diverse art and media,
let's improve that moral imagination. I don't know how to say this without being
really cringe Like every academic paper. There are many points
I did not touch on in this video, such as the debate
between the ethical schools of generalism and particularism, or how theories
about the mind accompany ethics. I don't have time to make a two hour
long video, and I doubt most people would pay attention to that
long of a video filled with pure theory. So I'll end this video
with a quote from Daniel Callahan: "A course in ethics is nothing other
than an abstract intellectual exercise unless a student's feelings
and imagination are stimulated..." If you got to the end of this video,
congrats. Honestly, I doubt many people will. I'm not sure if this video
is even interesting to other people. Let me know your thoughts. Do you still have any burning questions
about the baby problem or Tim the terrorist? Thank you so much for watching. Let's keep talking
and I hope to hear from you soon. Bye. Thank you so much to all my patrons
for supporting this channel.
