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[music] What is ethics? I'm Timothy and I'm here with Tim and We're going to talk about the question of ethics. So on day one, Tim, how do you usually introduce the question of what ethics is? Well, I usually like to ask first just if people think there is such a thing as ethics. So I kind of turn the question back on them and I go, "Do you think ethics is real and if so what does that mean?" And that sort of gets the discussion
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started. Would you say that on day one you're gonna dive right into meta ethics? Now maybe we should take a moment to define that. Very often ethics will be divided into three categories: metaethics— you take a step back and you're asking these broad deep philosophical questions about what ethics is— normative ethic—straightforward questions of what's right, what's wrong— and what might be called applied ethics— when you take the answers to these questions and apply them to questions
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about eating meat or abortion or foreign policy—this sort of thing. So is that division something that you would go into in an introductory day on day one in a classroom? I wouldn't say go into it on day one although I do get into it maybe in the first week or two. But part of that day one discussion does bring up that distinction between metaethics and normative ethics, but really what I'm trying to do is get buy-in. If I'm asking them, "Is it real
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and what is it all about?" I want them to bring up issues that they actually care about. Someone might bring up, like, racial justice or something like that where they go, "Here's an issue I care about and this seems real," and then we start to unpack that, well what is, you know, what is racial justice or injustice and then I'm really trying to get them to realize this is not an abstract out there thing, this is something we deal with on a daily basis.
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Another way to get that sort of buy-in is to tell them, "I could just flunk you all because you're ugly!" Right? That would be unfair and that seems very real—that's not a bias or a cultural inclination—we seem to recognize that's not the proper role of a teacher to give out grades based on looks, or something like that. All right, so so I'll define ethics as "the philosophical study of morality." Why don't I ask you: is that a definition
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that you can live with? Can you repeat the definition for me again? The philosophical study of morality. Yeah, I think that's a definition I like. I like very broad all-encompassing definitions because I think if we define it too narrowly we exclude too much and so one of my definitions of philosophy in general is thinking hard about stuff. So I think ethics is, you know philosophical thinking about morality. I think that's exactly right—anything under the umbrella of morality
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and doing it in a particular way, a sort of critical analytical way is what I would consider the study of ethics. It's the method that makes ethics a philosophical study rather than something else. I think that's exactly right but I would add— and I'm a little reluctant to add this— but I think it's important— there's a sense in which it's the method that sets it apart, but there's also an interesting way in which philosophy in general and and philosophical ethics— there's a sense
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in which the individual is— not the arbiter of what's true or what's... but it is the sort of final judge about what we should accept or not accept because there's a sense in which we're not appealing to anyone's authority. We're not even appealing to philosophers' authority even though I wish we would because I would like people to listen to me more, but we're trying to empower the individual to think through and go, okay ,given all these sources,
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sort of, you have the final say in what you think, you should accept as true or not and you need to be able to think through why should you accept this or that as true or not, and so I think that's a kind of method, that or... that's a kind of method that you don't see in other disciplines as much because there is a kind of appeal to authority in certain cases where, well, if it's in a scientific journal and enough scientists accept it you'd be pretty remiss to
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reject it whereas if it's in a philosophical journal and a bunch of philosophers accept it, there's sort of more room for you to push back, if you have good reason, if you can think of good reason to push back on it. So now we've circled back to where we started: "Is ethics real? Is morality real?" Because if even the experts aren't sure— and you just got done saying that an undergraduate taking an introduction to ethics class has every right to push
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back against an expert— that raises the specter of this question: maybe ethics isn't real, in the end it's a bunch of biases or cultural inclinations... Who's to say what's right and wrong? This is a question that every philosophy professor has to answer at some point. Does this come up on day one for you? And if it does, what's your answer? Yeah it does come up in day one and, I mean, it's a hard question to answer. "Who's to say?" In some sense I just said, well,
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each of us individually is to say and that one reason I said I was reluctant to say that is I don't want to make it sound like it's this... well, everyone's opinion is equally good and that's all that matters... But what I want to do is empower the individual to evaluate whether we have good reasons for thinking something's true or not, and so you and I can disagree about ethics on a particular issue, and you might be smarter than me, but if I can identify good reasons
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to reject what you're claiming then I need to be empowered to be able to say, well, here are my reasons for supporting my disagreement. That's what I want to empower the students with and so when they do disagree on day one and they go, well, "Who's to say?" I like to say, well, the person with the best reasons, with the best argument— they're to say. Now hopefully that's you— but that's not always going to be you— and if that doesn't work, I always just move to everyone's
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favorite punching bag: Hitler. And I say, okay, well who's to say, yeah, who's to say what hitler did was wrong, you know, maybe it was okay to kill millions of jews, then they start to go, you know, well not that —that's not what I mean, like okay— well, now we're starting to realize you were at least in a position to say what hitler did was wrong. Okay that's some more... that's a starting point. So now we've sort of rejected this idea of "Who's to say?" now we realize it's just sort of
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"Who's to say?" on the sort of *harder* issues. I like to make an analogy with other forms of knowledge that we have: Who's to say whether there's ketchup in the fridge? Well everybody can take a look, or think through, or try to remember whether they finished the ketchup last night, and maybe family members may disagree; there might be a spat between brother and sister, whether there's any ketchup left but maybe they should just go check,
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and that's the difference with morality, yes?—is that we can't just go check the answers in the back of the book...there are no answers in the back of the book. But that doesn't mean necessarily that there are no answers. It just means that we have to go very slowly and very carefully. What do you think of something like that? Well I like the the ketchup analogy because I often won't mention something like that about well if there's disagreement
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about other issues we don't just throw up our hands and go i guess there's no fact of the matter no there's a fact we can go check right one of us is right and one of us is wrong about whether there's ketchup in the fridge if we disagree but the pushback i get and i think rightfully so is well it's pretty easy to go check the fridge and see whether the ketchup's there now let's move to ethics and like you said it's importantly different where
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if we're just we disagree about an issue what can we do what's the sort of checking the fridge in this case to figure out which one of us is right and which one of us is wrong it's not so simple now i think there's something to be said there about what the method actually is and who has a sort of better position or who's closer to truth or who's more right or more wrong but it's just a little more complicated than some of the other cases of disagreement we have
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so maybe what we should do is go back and talk about morality we've talked about philosophy we've talked how ethics is the philosophical study of morality we've talked about that method a bit how the method does not lead to answers that we can check it often leads to a lot of disagreement and yet you and i have signaled that we think there probably are answers there that ethics is worth doing that we probably can come to some conclusions
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that are at least well supported but what is morality what is this thing that we're investigating philosophically i'll get us started i very often throw out three pairs and i say that these three pairs don't conclusively define morality but they you know so it's a cluster of concepts that can get us going good versus bad or if you want to be dramatic good versus evil right and wrong and virtue and vice i find that those three pairs pretty
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much cover just about everything yeah i i like those three pairs um i would just add should and should not although i also then have to go into the difference between should and should not morally speaking or should and should not legally speaking or should and should not you know pragmatically speaking but i think i try and get people understand anytime you're talking about something you should or shouldn't do that's a very
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different kind of language you're using to use the technical term it's normative language so that's the other pair of terms i like to throw in there for some people the very word morality sounds stuffy or old-fashioned or comes with a negative connotation so what i like to do is i like to define morality on that day one and i divide it into three personal morality where i might say oh you know your morality is very different than mine and really i'm just talking about your
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moral beliefs versus my moral beliefs and i think that's a perfectly legitimate use of the word moral in english and sometimes we might say something like victorian english morality was very different than 21st century american morality again that's perfectly legitimate a fine use of the word i call that conventional morality and then there's this third category which doesn't have a nice title something like rational morality or if you want to be provocative genuine morality or true morality
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where it's not just what you believe it's not just what a society believes it's what is actually true about good versus bad right versus wrong virtue versus vice and it's that third category that ethics is about ethics is not about personal morality or conventional morality that is to say it's not about beliefs about right and wrong it's about right and wrong itself or it's not about what people believe about good and bad but it's about good and bad itself
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i think that's a great way to define it um i i like to talk about conventional morality being what sort of sociologists or psychologists might study you go out in the world you ask people do you think this is right do you think this is wrong and then you just record their answers right and you get a feel for what do actual people actually believe about this stuff but then we can take a step back and go are they right you know should they be believing this um or should they believe
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something different once we're doing that i think we're engaged in philosophical ethics philosophical morality and it is sort of hard to put a label on it i i like to just call it real morality we're trying to get at the truth now you know the philosophers uh who listen to this might think i'm oversimplifying a bit because there's a sense in which morality might be real but not be true and it gets really messy but i think for simplicity's sake we can just say look either there are truths about
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morality what hitler did was wrong either that sentence is true or it's false and that's what we're trying to get at in philosophical ethics we're trying to get at what is the answer how do we know what the answer is and what does that tell us about morality in general those sorts of questions that i think is what real morality and philosophical morality is about yeah this is good we keep tossing out these threes i have another three for you
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any good moral theory should answer three questions the metaphysical question what is right and wrong or what is goodness and badness it's kind of the foundational question of what is this stuff that's the metaphysical question the epistemological question how would we know what's right and wrong or how do we come to have knowledge about good and bad call that the epistemological question and then thirdly the motivational question why should i care okay you've told me what the good is
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you've told me what right action is why should i bother doing that if i can get ahead in life by stepping on others sure i know it's wrong i don't care right so any good moral theory should also give us motivation for why we should invest in becoming a good person yeah i think that's right um and i though i think it's easy for me to sort of push aside the two questions about how do we know and why should i care and i tend to over emphasize or focus
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too much on the you know what is right what's the sort of ultimate rule or what makes something right or wrong in some sense because i think i'm just more interested in it but in other sense i think it's a little easier uh my personal opinion is that's an easier question to answer because once you sort of take for granted that morality is real you can start theorizing and thinking about cases and thinking about principles and sort of testing them
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against your intuitions and but the question of well how do you know that that's the right one i think it's just a really hard question and then for the last question why should i care i i almost i don't know i want to turn it back on you and ask what do you tell your students because i often when that comes up i don't have a good answer i just say well you're a bad person if you don't care i mean why should you care about morality you know if if a child is you know drowning in front of you
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and you do nothing to help them you say well why should i care i go you're a horrible person if you don't care i don't know what else to tell you um do you do you have anything more to offer on that well i don't know if i do but i think aristotle had a pretty good answer aristotle says it's because it's in your self-interest you'll live a better life now of course that might not be a good answer a lot of people might question now i know a lot of scoundrels who are
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living better than me right they seem to be doing pretty well and they're porsche as they drive by and you might think good guys finish last isn't that the same but i think aristotle provides at least um a direction for trying to answer this question why should we care because overall a virtuous life is one that pays i also kind of like contents or although we're getting a little off topic aren't we for day one but kant says why should you care because
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you are a rational being and to act wrongly is to be irrational and you're above that your dignity goes deeper than that something you know something like that sort of appeal to their their dignity and nobility as a rational autonomous being see i just don't listen to those old stuffy dead philosophers like you do so when we divide morality into these three parts there's personal morality that's just what an individual believes
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is right or wrong or good or bad and conventional morality move that up to the to the level of nation or society or culture and then what you were calling real morality we can actually divide these up into various meta-ethical theories can't we subjectivism we'll just say you know that individual personal morality you were talking about earlier tim well that just is true morality in other words they're the same each person's individual beliefs about morality
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is their true morality so they're gonna do this little wizardry where that third category that we were calling true morality or real morality actually equal sign just is personal morality that first division and then we can actually keep on going conventional morality which is the beliefs that a culture might have or a society might have about right and wrong that just is genuine morality or real morality because they're the same thing it really is true
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that you should not x whatever x may be because your culture disapproves of x so we actually come up with a nice framework here don't we if we investigate the english meaning of these words sometimes we mean personal morality sometimes we mean conventional morality and sometimes we mean real morality but we can put this other layer on of meta-ethical theory subjectivism personal morality cultural relativism oh there's true morality all right it just is
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conventional morality and then this third category we were calling real morality where we'd try to come up with some theories of what really is right and wrong without referring to what people believe yeah that that's a good point about there's a sense in which when i talked about real morality i was sort of making a pretty big assumption that real morality wasn't just what your culture believes or real morality wasn't just what you personally believe like somehow real morality is different than
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that but that's actually an open question and one we talk about in our class is okay we know we can have personal beliefs we know we have cultural sort of accepted beliefs then there is this question is there such a thing as real morality beyond those two things or does real morality just collapse into one of those and like you said we have names for those subjectivism cultural relativism but assuming we're right and i i don't
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try and convince students of much but i i tell them up front i'm pretty biased i think there is a real morality beyond those first two categories assuming there is a real a real morality beyond those two what might that look like well that's what we spend a good portion of the semester talking about why don't we end with a discussion of the trolley problem real quick the trolley problem is this there's a trolley that's out of control speeding downhill and is
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about to kill five people who are on the tracks you see this happening and it occurs to you that you could pull a switch and divert the trolley onto a separate track but lo and behold there's another person on the side track so what it boils down to is will you let five people die or will you put your hands on the switch and actually kill one person in order to save the five and this is a place where we often start in ethics testing intuitions i noticed that you used the phrase earlier
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intuitions right what our intuitions say about right and wrong and that's what the trolley case does i think it tests out your intuitions and now we're back to method what are the starting points of ethics what is the role of intuitions and if we can kind of weave in what we were just talking about the difference between personal beliefs versus cultural beliefs versus real reasons for thinking something is right or wrong i've never had a student say i would pull the switch and save the
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five by killing the one because that's what my culture tells me to do or something along those lines right they usually give a reason something about well there's more people on the line i could save five and they have families and they have friends and you know this sort of thing but now we're right in the business of giving reasons for defending what we think is right or wrong and i think i think that shows a lot about whether morality is real versus
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it's all just opinions in our heads yeah i think that's exactly right the the trolley problem is a a great case um i mean it's not great to think about people dying by trolley accidents but it's a great case to get people thinking about what would they do what should they do and once you give an answer you can just reflect well why that because it's not a simple it's not an obvious answer at least to me it's not in fact when i first heard it many many years
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ago i was a staunch don't throw the lever uh i said no you get you know you don't want to get your hands dirty you don't want to get involved you'll be responsible for killing someone and i have since moved over to the pull the lever camp uh and so i think it's a hard question to actually answer but it's a great way to start because you you're tempted to give one answer or another and then yeah you it's important to ask well why that
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and once you start to cite reasons for why that and not the other you're doing moral philosophy and speaking of starting points why don't we make that our endpoint tim thanks for talking ethics with me today
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