Moral Arguments

hi there in this lecture video I'm going to be talking about some of the difficulties and hiccups that might present themselves when we end up making arguments or having discussions where there are differences of opinion between various parties about moral issues hopefully the need for this is fairly obvious we have just seen a moral argument in the last lecture video on analogical induction or arguments by analogy one of the arguments by analogy that was given in fact the main one that was given at the beginning of that video lecture was in fact a moral argument so here's hoping some of the stuff that's addressed in this lecture video helps with parsing arguments about moral issues because they can be a little bit confusing let's start by making a couple of distinctions first of which amongst these is noting that moral arguments are attempting to support some sort of conclusion that is in fact a moral conclusion and that's a different sort of a claim then a lot of ordinary claims are oftentimes will say that a moral argument is trying to support some sort of prescriptive conclusion or perhaps an evaluative conclusion and those kinds of statements are a little bit different than ordinary descriptive statements ordinary descriptive statements tell us how the world is sometimes slightly more exotic ones might tell us how the world was in the past or they might describe how the world is going to be in the future they'll make a prediction so but predictions retro addictions and kind of like present present time descriptions are all talking about how the world is was or will be pre descriptive statements on the other hand tell how the world should be or how it ought to be and that's a different sort of a claim and a lot of moral statements sure look like they're prescriptive statements they're statements about how people ought to act or how people should act you shouldn't murder you should tell the truth or you should be honest right so claims about how you should or ought to be acting around anybody should or ought to be acting or how the world should or ought to be seem like they have a moral component to them and they're just talking about something different than ordinary descriptive claims do sometimes moral claims seem like they are making some sort of descriptive claim but it's a special kind of descriptive claim maybe it's describing the you that's inherent in something so instead of saying that this should be done or should not be done something like that instead of making a moral claim any prescriptive way sometimes I might make it in a value t'v way where I say murder is bad or murder is wrong or you know calling your mother on a regular basis is a good thing to do right in that case what I'm seem to be doing is I'm making a description of something but I'm describing the value that it has rather than describing I don't know some sort of state of affairs like it's red or it's blue or it's tall or it's short or it's over on the table or it's in my pocket right so those seem like different kinds of statements as well I personally find it a little easier to think of moral claims as prescriptive statements than a valued of statements but in the spirit of charity right in the spirit of being able to listen to and understand other people we should be aware of the various kinds of ways that people can make claims the various kinds of statements that folks can make now immediately we might imagine that there might be some objectors to the very idea of some sort of moral statement or moral proposition after all as we establish very early in this class a statement or a proposition has a truth value and then sometimes it seems like folks think that prescriptive or a valued of claims are moral claims just aren't the sorts of things that can be true or false at all perhaps we can kind of roll this into the this whole notion of like a difference between facts and opinions where facts can are the sorts of things that can be true or false but opinions just can't be true or false and perhaps all moral claims are mere opinions and nothing more maybe this is part of what people mean when they suggest that prescriptive prescriptive or a valued of claims aren't the sorts of things that can be true or false and therefore aren't statements in the proper sense or aren't normal propositions now we've addressed this idea before and I've suggested that I don't think it's a very useful sort of distinction because it seems like there are plenty of opinions that can be true or false opinions but let's take another look at this perhaps we think that moral claims can't really be statements or propositions they can't be the sorts of things that are true or false because they can't be proven with evidence and descriptive claims can totally be proven with evidence for example if I'm wondering whether the earth is round or flat I can appeal to evidence to supposedly I don't know maybe to prove one way or the other that the earth is round or flat so is this true can moral claims not be proven with evidence well we should probably note that they can't be proven or supported whatever we might mean by proven there they can't be supported by evidence the same way that descriptive claims are and we wouldn't expect them to be supported in that way after all descriptions are talking about how the world is so if we're looking for some sort of evidence to back up our opinions about how the world is we'll go to the world will point to various places in the world if I'm wondering whether the statement the cat is on the mat is true I go to the mat and I look and I see if the cat is there if I'm wondering on the other hand though if the cat should be on the mat well looking at the way that the world is isn't necessarily going to tell me the way that the world ought to be or the way that the world should be sadly the way that the world should be in the way that the world is aren't exactly the same thing so if we're trying to hold prescriptive claims or evaluative claims to the same kind of standard as ordinary descriptive claims it seems like that's just not fair perhaps it's the case that moral claims can be supported in another way besides descriptive evidence of how the world is and seems like they would have to be and we want to make sure that we're not falling prey to this mistake where we think that just because something is difficult to settle that means that it's impossible to settle just because nobody knows the answer to whether or not a particular moral claim is true or false with any sort of certainty doesn't mean that there isn't an answer at all it just means that if there was we're not aware of it yet I mean after all it seems like there are scientific disputes that are difficult to settle but we typically don't think of them as impossible to settle just because they haven't been settled yet scientific disputes sometimes do get settled and sometimes they get settled satisfactorily and sometimes they remain open and the same thing seems to go for moral issues as well right moral disputes some of them get settled I don't think that it's very controversial to say that murder is wrong I don't think that it's particularly controversial to say that slavery is wrong these seem like moral disputes that have been more or less settled although they weren't necessarily made by appeal to descriptions of how the world is they were made by appeals to how the world ought to be so let's not think that just because there are some open moral questions that remain unsettled that means that no moral issues can be settled ever and there is no such thing as true or truth or falsity when it comes to moral claims some moral issues are hard to discern some are a little bit easier to discern just like some scientific questions and let's not fall prey to a mistake where we think that the mere fact of disagreement between people or groups of people tells us anything at all about who's right in that dispute or if they're really if anybody's right in that dispute the mere fact of disagreement doesn't really tell us anything there except that there is a disagreement after all it could be possible that there's a disagreement because somebody has an opinion that's correct that's true and another person has an opinion that's false this approach might be a little bit familiar we may have seen it before it seems like perhaps moral claims bring this kind of everybody's entitled to their own opinion idea roaring back into the conversation but hopefully we can think back to what it was that we said we can go back to that video on whether or not everyone's entitled their own opinion and identify that a lot of the things that maybe might bring us to the notion that moral claims are just a matter of opinion and there is no truth or falsity to these two to moral matters that perhaps we might be falling prey to some of the laziness and cowardice that sometimes encourages people to bail out of a difficult dispute by kind of saying like yeah everybody's on top of their own opinion moral issues are hard to adjudicate ah there must not be any truth to the matter about this right so like yeah so we want to be careful that we're not falling prey to that on the other hand there are some very interesting meta ethical debates that can be had about whether or not moral claims actually do have truth values and some of those in fact a lot of the really interesting ones get at this notion that perhaps moral claims can't be interpreted literally I almost said that they they ought not be interpreted literally but clearly that can't be interpreted literally right because if it ought not be interpreted literally that's making a moral claim so was it claims can't be interpreted literally so what do we mean by this well one approach to this might be to say when people say murder is wrong perhaps it looks like they're making an evaluative claim or when they're saying you shouldn't murder people it looks like they're making a prescriptive claim but all anybody's ever really doing there is they're describing their own psychological State maybe all they're really doing they're saying I don't like murder now if that's true we might be able to avoid some serious headaches and heartaches we might recognize that when it seems like there's a moral dispute there isn't really a moral dispute it just looks like people are disagreeing but what's really going on is everybody's just describing their own feelings if for example I think that abortion should be legal and you think that abortion shouldn't be legal well what we really mean there is I do like abortions and you don't like abortions maybe that's what that means I'm not sure if that's really an accurate description of like people's positions on this matter but let's kind of follow along and say like maybe all we mean there is like I like abortions with the availability that they have now and somebody else doesn't like that well there's no real dispute there I'm just describing my psychological state they're describing their psychological state we're not even talking about the same thing I'm talking about my mind in my psyche they're talking about their mind and their psyche so there's no real dispute if we're not actually talking about the same thing our claims can't conflict and as long as we're not lying each of us is telling the truth we're truthfully reporting on our psychological state but it seems like that's not really accurately capturing what's at stake in a moral debate it's not just people expressing their feelings if you were trying to murder me and I said murder is wrong don't you know like you shouldn't murder me and you said ah you just mean you don't like it I might say something like well I don't like it when people try to murder me but that's not all that I'm saying I'm trying to say something more so it seems like it's just not sufficient to say that all moral claims are really just descriptions of sentiment just descriptions of our feelings that are true as long as they're made earnestly and honestly and with full knowledge of what my actual psychological state is it seems like there's maybe more on the line here and that actual moral disputes are sorts of things that you could just wave your hand away and say like God you like this one thing you like this other thing that's all that's at stake somewhat cleverer approach to this might say no no it's not that moral claims are really descriptions of your psychological state in disguise what they really are as non statements altogether they're not the sorts of things that can be true or false because they are expressions of sentiment or perhaps their commands these are called emotivist or imperative asti's to this to this idea respectively so the emotivist will emote a sort of emotion when we say murder is wrong the emotive vistas can say all you really mean there is boom murder and for an imperative this they might say that when somebody says murder is wrong what they really mean is don't murder and that's interesting because boom murder and don't murder are both the sorts of things that can't be true or false because they're just not statements one of them is just an expression of emotion the other one's a command so grammatically moral claims might not be the sorts of things that can be true or false that is if we believe these folks who are saying that moral claims can't be interpreted literally as making evaluative or prescriptive claims for the second approach if I say boo murder and you say yay murder it does kind of seem like maybe we have conflicting attitudes where at cross-purposes if I say boo Spartans and you say yay Spartans all right like it because I want the Spartans to lose and you want the Spartans to win we can't both get what we want so it seems like there's a real conflict there or if I say don't murder and you say no do murder it looks like we can't both accomplish the goals of our utterances we're trying to make a change in the world we're trying to express how we feel about what's going on and it seems like there is some sort of conflict there but maybe it's a conflict in the absence of truth or a conflict in the absence of better or worse positions on the issue and this I think is kind of the downfall of this approach it suggests that there really is nothing other than people trying to enforce their will on the world on the world with with utterances like boo murder or don't murder and there really is no truth of the matter about whether you should murder or shouldn't matter murder and there really is no better or in the sorts of things that I'm trying to bring about in the world and perhaps there really isn't any better and worse ways of trying to make your will come about in the world I could say don't murder and I could then go on to give an argument for why I don't think you should murder and that argument could be full of lies I could try to get you to not murder me by murdering you first there are all kinds of ways that I could bring about my will and it seems like some of them are better and worse than others and in fact if we think that people should be respectful of other people then somehow bringing them reasons for why we think that they shouldn't murder why we're telling them not to murder is is at the very least a polite sort of thing to do or at the very least it captures what's going on when it seems like there's some sort of moral conflict between parties at this point we're on the verge of kind of like diving really deep into a really interesting and complicated meta ethical issue and this conversation probably belongs in like an intro to ethics course where we can kind of like stretch out and devote a lot of time to that particular question like what is up with moral claims and are they the sorts of things that can be true or false for the sake of our class for the sake of a critical thinking context I think we can probably identify that it sure seems like we have real disagreements about moral issues with people sometimes we might be lazy and we just don't care but if you were trying to murder me I think we would probably have a real disagreement about a moral issue when like it came down to this question of like should you or should you not try to murder me and I think that there are better and worse ways there are clearly better and worse ways of resolving these real moral disagreements that we have historically we've said a love a lot of moral disagreements by just kind of exterminating the other side right just just kill all the people that disagree with you I think we can do better than that I think there are in fact better and worse ways of resolving moral issues and why not try this strategy that we've been using for the whole semester so far let's see if maybe arguments rational arguments can help us shed some light on adjudicating moral disagreements ok so leaving behind like really nasty meta ethical questions like can there be true moral claims or for even false moral claims let's say that it seems like when people make moral claims they're doing so in such a way where it seems like they're trying to make some sort of like proposition that has a truth value let's make some more distinctions let's make some more categories when I'm identifying the moral status of some particular action I have some options at my disposal I can say that a particular moral action is morally obligatory and when I say that's morally obligatory what I mean is that that action ought to be done and that failing to perform that action would be wrong I would be blameworthy for not doing something that is an obligation something that is morally obligatory opposed to moral obligations we might think about things that are morally prohibited moral prohibitions moral prohibitions are actions that ought not be done and in fact to do them would be wrong you would be blameworthy for doing something that is morally prohibited and just like when we saw that there was like this third option between belief and disbelief that there was this third kind of suspended option of non belief we have a third option here with respect to the moral status of an action in addition to moral obligations and moral prohibitions we have actions that are morally permissible when I say that something is morally permissible what I mean is that it's okay if you do it and it's okay if you don't do it there's not going to be any moral blame whether you do it or not do it sometimes actions might be morally permissible because they're amoral they just have nothing to do with morality or they have so little to do with morality that it's kind of like well we don't really care I don't know if there's any kind of a whole lot of moral content to the decision about whether I should use a blue pen or a black pen but I still might try to figure out like should I use a blue pen or a black pen maybe I'll think that either of them is permissible because it's not really an action that like has any sort of moral content to it but there are some other special cases of moral permission or moral permissibility that do clearly have some moral content an interesting subset of this includes actions that we call supererogatory supererogatory action is one that is recognized as clearly to do it is clearly better than to not do it but it's not an obligation you don't have a duty to do it so it's okay if you don't do it but it's extra nice if you do there's a famous essay by a philosopher named Peter Singer called famine affluence and morality where he argues that a lot of people seem to think that giving charitably is supererogatory but he makes the argument that it's not that we have a duty to give charitably so these three concepts instantly can clarify a moral dispute when you're making moral arguments when you're trying to think about like what are the arguments that I'm making what are the moral claims what are the possible positions that can be taken be very clear whether you're talking about whether something is morally obligatory prohibited or permissible if you can get more specific than that if you can say beyond permissible I can say that it's also super Moraga Tory which is to say it's okay to do it it's okay not to do it but we think that it's better to do it and not do it you'll want to be as specific as possible right because then you'll you'll be communicating clearly and the same goes for trying to interpret your interlocutors you want to try to get them to be as specific as possible you want to try to interpret them and as accurate weight away as possible again this means being attentive to find distinctions between different kinds of moral statuses so if we've got that pinned down and we bought into the idea that people at least seem to be making prescriptive or evaluative statements that they try to support with an argument that like we have these prescriptive or evaluative claims in our conclusion I want to offer some sort of reasoned justification for why that's a good thing to believe well recognize that in order to get to some sort of prescriptive conclusion or in order to get to any value of conclusion I need to have at least one prescriptive or evaluative premise in my argument this harkens back to something that was just said a little bit earlier which is that no amount of talking about how the world is is ever going to give you any sort of reliable information about how the world ought to be so if I have an argument with only descriptive premises and I try to jump to a prescriptive conclusion in that argument I've failed to back up that kind of that prescriptive jump that's that's being made there oftentimes people will talk about this in terms of respecting and is on distinction and oftentimes that key moral premise in a moral argument that premise that has an evaluative or a prescriptive component to it that allows me to draw an evaluate over a prescriptive conclusion is some sort of articulation of a moral theory what we mean by a moral theory here is the most general account that we could possibly give of what the difference between how one should act and how one shouldn't act or how an ought to act or how an attacked or if we're talking in a valued of terms the most general account of what the difference between good and bad things are now moral theories are incredibly useful when we're engaging in moral arguments but they're not absolutely necessary it's entirely possible to make a moral argument without any appeal to a moral theory in fact we've seen one such argument already in cases where I don't have a clear sense of what moral theory to use may be this is a conversation with somebody that I've never met before and I don't know what their moral theories are right what kinds of like deep down theoretical commitments they have about morality or I suspect that they have different sorts of theoretical moral commitments than I do or when perhaps there are competing moral theories that all seem pretty good but they're disagreeing about what ought to be done in those sorts of cases I can move forward by arguing by analogy and the way that I do that is we start with some relatively uncontroversial case that everybody involved in the conversation seems to be able to agree about what the moral status of that case is so for example we might say something like stomping on kitten heads just because I like the way that it sounds right if this is the sort of thing that we think everybody can get on board with by kind of identifying that as a morally prohibited action then I've got an anchor right that's going to act as my moral premise and I can get to my moral conclusion by arguing by analogy that like the case in question the the case that I'm drawing my conclusion about is relevantly similar to that first analog case that I've established that everybody supposedly agrees with but we should be careful here because these arguments by analogy can sometimes break down on us they can sometimes backfire on us and it's very easy to challenge a moral argument that's made by analogy one very easy way that you can do it is you can offer a counter analogy that compares the case in question not to the thing that that the person who's making the first argument is saying like it's relevantly similar to this case we can say like no I think it's maybe more relevantly similar to this other case so then we'd have competing in our and the second one might be better than the first and you know in retrospect we might say like how that first one wasn't really that strong so for example in a dispute about the morality of abortion one side of that dispute might say something like abortion is relevantly similar to infanticide and if we all can agree that infanticide is wrong we should all agree that abortion is wrong the other side of that dispute might say something like well not allowing somebody to have an abortion forcing somebody to bring a pregnancy to term is perhaps relevantly similar to forced organ donation to forcing somebody to use their body in order to keep somebody else alive philosopher named Ruth Jarvis Thompson has made an excellent argument by analogy like this a counter analogy to the prevailing analogies in the abortion debate where she says know what's really going on here is that if this is an issue of bodily autonomy and basic liberty that you can't force me to use my body to keep somebody else alive so moral disputes that bring kind of like competing analogies to the issue are in fact fighting over what the relevant features of the phenomenon and question are and sometimes we can get tangled up in that and this will create an impasse it's difficult to find our way forward just through analogies on that issue and these are the sorts of scenarios where analogical reasoning has kind of not broken down so much but kind of like ground to an impasse we're making appeals to theoretical principles might be a little bit more productive it might it might reveal another way through the dispute for us so let's look at a couple of examples of some moral theories we're going to look at two of them that are relatively popular but incredibly problematic and I'll outline some of the ways much they're problematic and hopefully we can avoid those sorts of things even though they are popular now I'll talk about two other moral theories that are also fairly popular and a lot more plausible than the first two that I talked about the first two these problematic moral theories are ethical relativism which is really more than one theory there are like a couple of possible theories buried in that ethical relativism is the first that will look at ethical egoism is the second let's take a look at ethical relativism first broadly speaking relativistic moral theories make claims like there's no objectively right or wrong when it comes to any sort of action because morality is nothing more than I don't know something that's relative something that won't stand put something that can't be tied to some sort of objective standard sometimes people will say that morality is relative to what an individual thinks is right or wrong this would be a subjectivist approach to ethical relativism sometimes folks will say that it's not what an individual thinks is right or wrong but it's what a culture approves or what a culture disapproves of that establishes this standard for whether or not something is right or wrong but only does so locally and because those standards change from place to place there's no objective right or wrong my sense is that as I'm describing this it sounds fairly familiar you've at least heard this from other people perhaps this sounds appealing to you yourself but as I mentioned before this is a very problematic sort of a moral theory and we can start to get a sense of just how and why by pinning somebody down on exactly what morality is supposedly relative to is it relative to what an individual thinks is right or wrong or is it supposedly relative to what a given culture approves or disapproves of if we think that it's what the individual thinks is right or wrong then this means that no individual can ever actually be wrong about any moral matter that's just impossible every individual whatever they believe that's going to be what's right for them and hopefully this is maybe familiar territory we will notice that epoch already ism has an awful lot of territory overlapping with this kind of everybody's entitled to their own opinion attitude I think it's incredibly dangerous to think that no individual can ever be morally wrong as long as they're doing what they actually believe there are plenty of people that earnestly believe that what they're doing is right but what they're doing is terrible right so hopefully we don't need to go into lots of gory details but you know somebody who thinks that it's a fun thing to go stomp on kitten heads they might think that that but that doesn't set an individual moral standard for them necessarily somebody might think that it's okay to kidnap children and torture them in their basement and the sort of ethical relativist that says whatever an individual thinks is right wrong is what's right or wrong for them makes it so that we can't ever criticize that kind of behavior no matter how bad any one particular individuals behavior might be we run into the same kind of problem if we think that morality is somehow contingent on what some culture approves of or disapproves of if this were true then no culturally approved practice would ever be wrong and there are plenty of culturally approved practices that I think are uncontroversially wrong slavery for example is a practice that has been approved by many cultures throughout time and while it might be I guess a little bit tempting to say for them slavery was okay or it was permissible but for us slavery is not permissible again we'll come back to this idea of like wait are we attending to this distinction between what seems right to us versus what is right for us or we may be conflating two different issues one is that people used to think that slavery was okay with slavery actually was okay when people thought so another weird thing that this cultural relativism runs into is that anybody who ever goes against their culture is automatically wrong according to the cultural relativist the cultural relativist says what's right or wrong in some particular culture is determined by what that culture approves up or disapproves of so I guess that means that I didn't susan b anthony gandhi Malcolm X Rosa Parks all of these people were going against the prevailing cultural attitudes of their day and therefore they were wrong all of the people that we think of as like perhaps heroes for moral progress are instantly now villains and this seems like it's a really big problem to ultimately while I think that there might be some more philosophically interesting forms of ethical relativism the popularity of ethical relativism I think is perhaps attributed to a little bit of a laziness and thought or maybe a little bit of that kind of like everyone's entitled their own opinion instinct that we have to shut conversations down just as they're starting to get interesting and difficult another moral theory that seems popular at least on the basis of how many people act if not what they'll explicitly say when pushed for reasons is called ethical egoism ethical egoism is not a form of relative moral relativism or ethical relativism says there is no universal moral rule that applies for everybody because it changes with respect to individual opinion or culture the ethical ego has like no there totally is a moral rule it has to do with maximizing the beneficial consequences of one's action and the the benefits that I'm looking for or perhaps I'm talking about avoiding painful consequences of my actions the benefits and pains that I'm talking to you are the benefits and harms that are being weighed for an ethical egoist are the benefits and harms to myself so the ethical egos will say everybody's moral responsibilities are in line with whatever satisfies their best interests anything that works against your own best interest is wrong you shouldn't do it anything that works in favor of your best interests is right you should do it that's ethical egoism if you're thinking to yourself this sounds like an incredibly selfish moral theory it's hard to see how you could possibly be wrong about that this is totally a selfish moral theory and those who are proponents of it would perhaps though question whether or not selfishness is the bad thing they'll suggest that we're begging the question as to whether or not selfish is a bad thing if we say ethical egoism is no good because it's a selfish moral theory I do think however that like the fact that it seems so selfish the fact that a lot of people are alerted to the selfishness of this moral theory maybe speaks to some misgivings that we might have about ethical egoism and perhaps it shouldn't be as popular as it actually is mostly just because people aren't thinking very carefully they are acting according to self-interest but only because they're not thinking very hard about what their moral responsibilities might be a lot of folks might be acting in pursuit of self-interest mostly just because it's whatever they feel like doing at the time right and it's not it doesn't require a whole lot of careful thought to determine what you feel like doing it takes a whole lot more considered deliberation to figure out what you ought to be doing regardless of how you feel and similar to the way that we might try to raise objections to moral relativism by bringing up cases that would supposedly be approved of by a moral relativist but seem like they should not be approved of at all like somebody who kidnaps and tortures children or Nazis or female genital cutting or slavery like various kinds of like cultural or individual practices or sets of beliefs that are clearly wrong we can raise objections to ethical ego is in a similar way we can say here's something that ethical egoism would clearly approve of but also wouldn't we all agree that this is clearly not morally acceptable so for example the ethical egoism like they would have to admit that if I was offered $5 to murder you and I was assured that I would get away with it and that I wouldn't have to suffer any kind of like punishment or penalties for doing it and I don't know you and I don't really care whether you live or die but there's five dollars in it for me when I weigh the beneficial and harmful consequences of this decision for myself only it seems like the right thing for me to do is to murder you for the five dollars and that at the very least clearly seems morally suspicious if not just kind of like outright objectionable now some might kind of counter here and say like yeah but you might feel incredibly guilty if you murder the person that wouldn't be good for you you'd be filled with sadness and guilt but ma'am what if I'm not what if I'm just the kind of person that like has gotten past all that I don't feel guilty at all about it because I know that what I did was the right thing to do according to ethical egoism again now we would be saying that it's it's wrong for somebody with a conscience to murder somebody for five dollars but if you don't have those kinds of pangs of conscience then yeah not only is it okay but you should like you're morally obligated to murder that person for five dollars if you leave the five dollars on the table you've failed to secure your own best interests and therefore you've done something wrong and that really seems a bit absurd and this is why egoism in addition to various forms of like other individual relativism or cultural relativism while popular seem like really problematic sorts of moral theories so here are two more fairly popular moral theories at least in terms of like how they tend to pop up in ordinary conversations about moral disputes and these are way more plausible than the first two moral theories that we looked at the first one is kind of like ethical egoism and that's a form of consequentialism it's concerned with maximizing beneficial consequences and minimizing harmful consequences of our actions so it shares that with ethical egoism but while the ethical egoist will say that we should do whatever maximizes my own best interests this first theory which is known as utilitarianism says that we ought to do whatever maximizes beneficial consequences or minimizes harmful consequences for everybody who's affected this is what's usually referred to as an egalitarian form of consequentialism whereas ethical egoism is clearly it's a selfish form of consequentialism this style of moral reasoning has been around as long as people have been engaged in moral reasoning but it gets a very clear articulation by two figures in the 1800's to English philosophers one is Jeremy Bentham and the other is his godson John Stuart Mill you can check those folks out for for two very interesting and overlapping accounts of utilitarianism but there are also some interesting disputes between them now there are a couple of things that we need to pay close attention to if we're going to use form of consequentialism like utilitarianism in our moral arguments the first is we got to make sure that we're accounting for all of the beneficial consequences and all of the harmful consequences for everybody that's affected so like we've got a we've got to really make sure that at the very least we capture all of them relevantly significant harmful and beneficial consequences of some particular action and that's a really hard thing to do so we need to be as thorough and complete as possible this also raises the question of who's worthy of consideration when we're thinking about beneficial and harmful consequences clearly more than just myself clearly the benefits and harms that come to other people who are affected by my actions also ought to be considered I should be weighing the pros and cons in terms of like harms to myself and everybody else who's affected on the con side and benefits to myself and everybody who's affected on the other side but who counts as like worthy of consideration for being affected for example should non-human animals count in terms of worthy of consideration for how they're being affected by our and if what we're thinking about in terms of benefits and harms is something like pleasure and pain then clearly it seems like animals are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain they're capable of suffering and if we want to act in such a way that minimizes suffering and maximizes pleasure we also have to take into account not just ourselves not just all of the other humans that are affected but all of the sentient creatures that are affected by our actions now consequentialist approaches like utilitarianism can work really well when we have a clear sense of how it is that we're valuing the various possible outcomes of our actions so like for example if we can measure them in dollar amounts if we can make this into an economic problem of value then we can use utilitarianism in a pretty clear and transparent sort of a way but if we're getting into territory where it's hard to kind of quantify and compare the benefits and harms that are at stake like if we're trying to figure out like how much is a human life worth in terms of dollars or perhaps how many old and sickly people's lives are worth saving like one young healthy child or something like that these are sorts of difficult things to weigh the benefits and harms against one another so some sort of creativity or establishing a common language for how it is that we set these values and compare them to one another is a really big part of making a utilitarian moral theory work in practice and moral arguments but even in cases where we have trouble applying utilitarianism we might suspect that utilitarianism could be correct just difficult to put into practice right that if we could successfully and accurately set some sort of quantity of value for like every benefit and every harm that's a consequence of our actions presumably we'd be able to reliably come up with what the correct course of action is the one that maximizes benefits and minimizes harms however some folks might argue that no maximizing benefits and minimizing harms while frequently a good thing to do is not always the right thing to do there are perhaps certain universal moral rules that ought never be broken no matter what the consequences of doing so might be this gets into a different sort of moral theory that's frequently referred to as deontology that comes from the Greek word Dion toss which means duty so it's a kind of a duty based ethic sometimes this is referred to as content ethics because the figure who basically pioneered this style of thinking about moral issues is the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant so we might think for instance about this kind of like weighing benefits and harms a kind of an ends justify the means approach like utilitarianism that might say something like well sure it's harmful to somebody to enslave them and perhaps in most cases where I enslave somebody I do more harm to the person who's enslaved than I do good to the people who benefit from that that form of slavery but there's got to be some way of arranging a form of slavery where the amount of harm that's done to the person who's harmed is outweighed by the amount of benefit that comes to everybody else so you know if you asked utilitarian it's slavery always wrong they would say something like well whenever slavery fails to maximize benefits it's wrong but in any case where slavery did maximize the beneficial consequences and minimize harmful consequences then that form of slavery would be the right thing to do deontologists or content types would say something like no no no no no that slavery thing is non-negotiable no matter what the consequences might be and these usually involve some sort of appeal to principles of universal human rights so if I said something like slavery violates a fundamental inalienable right to Liberty and is never okay no matter what the consequences might be or if I might say something like in a scenario one wondering can I can I kill somebody and harvest their organs so that I can save the lives of many other people let's say I can I can rescue six lives by killing one person and taking their organs without their permission well it looks like I'm maximizing benefits there we might again say something like no this is an unacceptable violation of somebody's Liberty which is an inalienable right and violating that rate is always wrong no matter what the consequences might be so parsing these sorts of moral concerns in terms of inalienable rights or principles of justice and fairness that ought never be violated perhaps in terms of duties and that's that that's where the dion toss comes from and deontology duties that ought to be fulfilled no matter what this is a contine approach and the trick in that approach is trying to establish exactly what duties there are exactly what sorts of things count as inalienable rights and what sorts of things are just claims to rights that don't have any real deontological backing now getting into the details of how exactly we establish what sorts of universal moral principles have good deal onto logical backing is something that goes beyond the scope of this lesson and belongs in an intro to ethics class that's looking at these moral theories in a very closer and more rigorous sort of a way but a one frequent debate that popped up with Conte at least was this question of whether it's okay to lie out of some sort of aim to bring about beneficial consequences to life or humanitarian concerns perhaps to lie in order to save somebody's life and because Conte had already established that lying was always wrong that like that being honest was something that you have to always do and that lying is never something that's right this is always a violation of some some unwavering moral principle as far as the content is concerned this means that like yeah even doing it for humanitarian concerns is the sort of thing that's not allowed you'd have to find some other way to bring about those humanitarian concerns so these are actually these are real debates that go on between kind of utilitarian sensibilities and deontological sensibilities about how it is not just that we not just like what sorts of conclusions we come to not just like is it okay to lie in this instance but in terms of how it is that we even come to these issues how it is that we're thinking about them what sort of a moral model or what sort of like theoretical intuitions we're using to frame an issue such that we can think clearly about it now there are criticisms and objections to be made about these two theories just like there are objections and criticisms to be made about the two problematic theories that I talked about before but the objections and criticisms that are brought to utilitarianism and deontology tend to be a little less obvious than the objections to say relativism moral relativism and ethical egoism and they tend to be the sorts of things that utilitarian and deontologists can try to find ways to accommodate they can kind of subtly tweak their theory in order to deal with that criticism in order to kind of like accommodate an objection that gets made and of course this isn't intended to be comprehensive we've only looked at for possible moral theories here two problematic ones to considerably more plausible ones there are way more moral theories that are not being discussed here and that belong in you know a class about moral theories an intro to ethics class so there are virtue theories there are care based theories there are there are all Tara tea theories of morality and all of them are interesting and if you're interested in diving into that sort of thing then cool you totally should you should take an intro to ethics course but in the meantime we should get some sense of like when it is that somebody's making a moral argument oftentimes we can get some sense of what kinds of intuitions they're bringing to the table what sort of moral principle seems to be grounding often times it's going to be unstated it's going to be an enthymeme and we have to help them figure out what that moral principle that they're arguing from is and if it's a relativistic principle then there are some obvious ways that we can kind of criticize that position if it's an egoistic principle then there are some obvious ways we can criticize that if your interlocutor is using some other sort of moral theory trying to figure out what that is right what principle this moral argument seems to be proceeding from is a really big part of understanding where your interlocutor is coming from and we can't begin to really analyze these arguments until we've made them clear hopefully that's the sort of thing that's obvious at this point in the course and we should be really keenly aware that when a moral principle gets used in a moral argument some kind of key premise that makes a theoretical commitment to what the difference between right and wrong actions is we need to make sure that everybody involved in the conversation is prepared to commit ourselves to all of that all that that premise is going to entail so for example if we have an argument like killing a human being is always wrong abortion kills a human being therefore abortion is wrong that looks like a pretty straight forward syllogistic argument the key premise that seems to be doing an awful lot of the work in that argument is killing a human being is always wrong some people might say that a lot of work is being done by abortion kills a human being they might say something like a fetus doesn't really count as a human being just yet but let's leave that question aside and just ask this question about that first premise is killing a human being always wrong are there some counter examples to this moral principle what about self-defense I can kill another human being in self-defense is that always going to be wrong perhaps that's true perhaps it's not true we would want to get straight on that if we're engaged in some sort of moral deliberation together in a conversation what about a mercy killing same sort of thing right as a mercy killing the sort of thing that's always wrong if not then killing a human being is always wrong is just not a true premise it's not going to apply to all cases and now we have some sort of serious misgiving as to whether or not it's going to apply to the case in question so if there are indeed exceptions to a moral principle and it's going to be difficult to find moral principles that work in all cases with no exceptions whatsoever at the best we might be able to say most of the time act in such a way as to maximize beneficial consequences but not in cases where that involves violation of Rights right or most of the time you shouldn't lie but in certain cases what's on the line is like so dire that like a little white lie to save somebody's life might not be such a bad thing so if we're kind of anxious about those kinds of like all type statements that are going to enable us to argue deductively from a moral principle to some sort of moral conclusion then we need to be aware and sensitive of these exceptional cases that don't fit the moral principle that I'm putting forward if there are going to be exceptions to some moral principle I need to articulate what the difference between the cases that fit the rule and the cases that break the rule is and I need to make sure that the case in question that we're arguing about is a case that fits the rule rather than breaks the rule so again not an exhaustive discussion of moral arguments not an exhaustive discussion of meta epical principles not a exhaustive discussion of moral theories but hopefully enough to make the prospect of engaging in moral arguments less of a daunting task the sort of thing where we have some signposts and concepts here that we can put to work they're going to clarify moral disagreements and enable us to kind of move forward through them by giving reasons that support the sorts of conclusions that were entertaining that's all for this session I look forward to seeing you in the next one take care

Channel: Adam Rosenfeld

Views: 664

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Critical Thinking, Moral Claims, Moral Arguments, Moral Theories

Id: 76m3959NIas

Length: 46min 56sec (2816 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2018