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0:02
Hi, welcome to a course on an introduction to ethics. I'm Allan Di Donato. I'm going to be your instructor for the semester and what I'm doing with these videos is I'm going to try to walk you guys through some of the PowerPoints, the lectures that you normally get in a traditional class, I'm going to do them in video format so that you'll be able to follow along a little bit better. I know that reading through the powerpoints that I've provided to you is
0:29
sometimes difficult a lot of them are rather lengthy and sometimes they get rather complicated or confusing at certain points so I'm going to attempt to bring you through them at a decent pace. I'm not gonna rush but I'm also not going to go very very slowly and hopefully by having this little discussion I'll be able to explain some of the things that I'm trying to communicate in written form in the
0:54
PowerPoint. Today I'm going to bring you through just an introduction to philosophy, and an introduction to moral philosophy specifically. So it's quite a lengthy PowerPoint, and in the course of doing this and in the course of the semester I'm gonna be off and on dealing with things that we might call thought experiments. I will give you some scenarios to think about, and what I'd like you to do at the times when I bring
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these up is pause the video, think about how you would deal with the issue at hand, what you would do if the scenario asking you what you would do in this particular situation, but more than that I want you to think about the reasoning process that brought you to that decision. For instance if you decide to do X, I want you to think "why would I do that?" "what are the reasons for doing that?", and hopefully come up with certain principles in the reasoning process, you
1:51
know, "what are the principles upon which I base my decisions?", and over the course of the semester I'll kind of lay out the way the course is dealt with as we go through this particular PowerPoint. So I'm actually going to jump in right now. And in my traditional class I usually begin with a little bit of a video. I'm not going to show you the video because of the format of this actual session, but how many of you are familiar with the movie The Dark Knight? It's one of my
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favorites. I'm a huge Batman fan. You'll probably get that over the course of the semester because I use a lot of references to Batman now and again, and there's a scene in the movie The Dark Knight where the Joker has planted bombs on two boats that are leaving Gotham. One boat is filled with convicts from the local prison, the other boat is filled with civilians, and each boat is given a detonator to the bomb on the opposite boat. And the dilemma which
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is presented to both sides is - if you blow up the other boat, killing hundreds if not thousands of people, I don't know how big the boats were, you'll be able to live. However, if you don't blow up the other boat there's a chance that they're going to blow you up, (most people tend to be very interested in their own self-preservation) so there's a good chance that might happen. But of course if both boats decide not to use the detonator, then both boats are gonna be
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blown up after a certain interval of time. The question is, if you are on one of those boats what would you do in that situation? And if you've seen the movie you've probably already thought about this a little bit, but it's a pretty tense and interesting scene. So think about that for a second, like I said, pause the video, and think about what you would do, and think about why you would do it. Now, this is what we call a moral dilemma. In life, hopefully, you're not
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going to encounter any kind of moral dilemma as intense as this one, but we come to decisions that we have to make on a daily basis, and when we talk about moral dilemmas we're talking about choices that we have to make about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what is the best course of action, and what makes it the best course of action. So to let you see . . . there's some polling software that I've got when I use the traditional class, so
4:08
I'm going to go past a few of these little polls, since it's difficult to do that with the video format. Let me talk a little bit about what a moral dilemma is. The logical structure of a moral dilemma, if you've never taken a logic class, I'm going to go through a few logical things now and again, I would definitely recommend that you take a course in logic, it's probably better to have a course in logic prior to taking ethics than after, but
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nonetheless, you'll be presented over the course of this semester with various arguments, and I'd like for you to be able to follow along how an argument works. In a really rough and basic way it works from presenting premises or propositions that we assume to be true that should lead you to a conclusion, something that I'm trying to persuade you to the truth of, okay. On the screen you can see the logic of a dilemma. It is pretty much set up this way - if X then Y,
5:01
and if not X then Z. So in the situation we just looked at - if you blow up the other boat then you live. If you don't blow up the other boat then chances are you may be killed. Okay, actually you will be killed. Okay, now it's either going to be X or non-X right? In that situation you're either going to blow up the boat or you're not. So it's a pretty tight dilemma, and therefore you're going to end up with either Y or Z depending on which of the two you choose. Okay. And
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that follows necessarily. So that's how the logical structure works. Now what I'm going to do, and I love to do this in my classes because it really brings out some really interesting conversation in the very beginning of the semester, harder like I said to do it in a video format, but let's look at a thought experiment. It's a very famous ethical thought experiment. It's called the trolley example. I've changed it slightly and modified a few things with some pictures.
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We're going to use a train initially. And this is the scenario that you're presented with . . . you are the conductor of a train, you're driving the train, going down the tracks at a good clip, and you do not have the ability to apply the brakes in the situation I'm about to give you. On the track ahead of you there's a number of people, they're not supposed to be on the track, they're fooling around perhaps they're drunk maybe a few of them are passed out. And
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even though you blow the horn you're not going to be able to get these people to move out of the way, and you can't stop in time to save their lives. Luckily there is a switch that you can hit which will change the track from the one that you're on, and the one you're supposed to be on, to another track which is off to the side. The track that you can switch to, however, has an individual who is working on that track. This is a railroad worker. He has every
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right to be there, he has no idea that his life might be in danger because his track is supposed to be inactive. Perhaps he has headphones on and perhaps he's facing away from you. Perhaps he doesn't have the sensation where he could feel trembling in the earth to warn him. And if you switch the track he will be killed. Okay, so for the purpose of the scenario you've got to kind of play with the assumptions or assume just go with the assumptions. Okay, so what do you do?
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You've got two choices: 1) switch the track or 2) don't switch the track. If you don't switch the track, six/ seven people are going to be killed. If you do switch the track, one person is going to be killed. What I want you to think about is, not only - do you turn the track? . . . why did you turn the track? What are the things, that are what we call principles, by which you make this decision? So stop again and think about that for a second. Now most of the
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students in my classes look at that example, and I've had people that have gone both ways. Some people say I'm gonna run the people over because they're not supposed to be there, and it's their own fault if they get hit. Some people say no, I would switch the track, because it's better to save more lives given the option - one person dying verses six or seven people dying - it's better for one to die so that six may survive. Those are both options, and both ways that you
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can reason through this. And I like to mix up the scenario a little bit as we go here. So, let's say you are the person that decides to switch the track, and let's assume the reason you decide to switch the track is based on the greater good principle, meaning you want to save the more lives, and therefore you're going to be willing to kill that one person. Would it make a difference to you if that one person happened to be of a particular race? Does that change your
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calculations in any way? Again, stop after I ask these questions and think about it. Now most people that I've dealt with would say no, it really doesn't matter, and they are unknowingly embracing a principle, that we will look at later on in the PowerPoint, called the consistency principle which basically states that in any two situations if there are no substantial differences then you should handle both situations the same way. And
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most people realize that human beings, or at least have the intuition that human beings, are equal, and things like skin color or race are not substantial differences by which you should treat one person different than another. Now of course that's an assumption, and not everybody agrees to that, right? And, you know, 100 years ago or more, actually more than a hundred years ago, when slavery was legal in this country, there was a very different attitude, and
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unfortunately that attitude lasted even after the end of slavery, where some people thought the race does matter. So again, how do you make these judgments? Anyways let's move away from that for a second. Let's change the scenario again slightly. So, if you're saying it is a matter of preserving more lives, would the number of people matter? Does it have to be six or seven that you're saving before you take one life? But if it's only three people, would you still switch
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the track? Again, if you're going to be consistent you're going to say yes, it's still more people that you're saving and one person may be a legitimate trade-off. Again, you've got to consider that for yourself. Let's modify it slightly. Okay. So let's just stick with that principle right now. If I change the track fewer people will be hurt. Would it matter to you if this was the scenario? If you're consistent, and you're employing the same principle,
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then you say yes it's still fewer people on the other track. But does it make a difference to you now that you see those two people are little children? Does the innocence have any factor to play? Now some people get maybe a little bit more uncomfortable making the decision there. Two versus three, all things being equal, two should die over the three, but because of who the two are maybe it doesn't work that way. Okay, you can see how complicated this
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can get. Let's change it again slightly. What about animals? Are animals of equal value to people, ethically or morally speaking? There are some people that will say yes, and there's some people that will say no. Again, it depends on the assumptions that you have, or the presuppositions according to which you operate and make your decisions. But again, this is something that you need to think about. And if animals are not of equal value as human beings, why are they
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not of equal value, being sentient creatures, able to feel pain, etc. etc.? Okay, things to consider. Modifying the example again . . . what if it is the assumption that they are sentient beings, would you trade, you know, one life for two animals? Ok so again, you can see how you can modify this in a number of different ways. Let's modify it again slightly. Ok, instead of moving with a train let's go back to a trolley, only for the reason that a trolley might be a little bit easier to
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stop. So here's the scenario . . . There's no sidetrack. There is a trolley coming down the road, and somebody, actually the same group of people, are laying in front of the trolley for no good reason whatsoever. You can't stop the trolley in time applying the brakes, because you're no longer driving the trolley. The trolley cannot switch tracks, and if nothing happens to intervene these people are going to be hit by the trolley, and at least a few of them will
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probably be killed. However, above the track there is a bridge, and on the bridge there's just a bystander who's standing there smoking a cigarette, and you happen to be walking along the bridge passing behind this individual and realize, if they push this individual over the edge and he falls on the track before the trolley gets to the other people, then that one person will probably be killed, but it'll stop the trolley and the other
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people will be saved. Do you push the man over? And if so, why? Now the intuition here may be a little bit different. Some people that say I would switch the track in the other scenario, they don't feel comfortable pushing somebody over the edge. He's smart enough to be out of the way, who/ what gives me the right to push him. But again if you're simply operating from the principle that one life for many lives, then is it really a different
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moral calculation? Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't. Okay, but you get the idea. We could play with these scenarios in a bunch of different ways. I'm going to skip past this since we're not dealing with the polling software, like I said. What I want to do with the rest of this presentation, and like I said it's lengthy, I'm gonna want, I want to cover an introduction to philosophy. If you've never taken a philosophy class, if this is your first
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semester taking philosophy, I want to ask the question "what is it?". What is philosophy? And from there we're gonna look at specifically moral philosophy, "what is moral philosophy?". And then we'll look into some basic terms that I think you should know, or at least be comfortable with. I want to raise some problems that we can get into when talking about moral categories, and bring you through a little bit of moral reasoning. I'm not going to go through
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every single part of this PowerPoint. The PowerPoint is available for you, and I want you to be able to look through that on your own. So there's always more to these than I'm gonna have time to go over, and it's the same way that I do it in class. You've got the ability to go back and review these things. So, let's ask the question "what's philosophy?". Now if you've never taken it, or again you come from just the average American citizen, you probably think "I'm not
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really sure exactly what philosophy is". "You know, I've got certain assumptions about what I think it might be, and I think it might be really difficult." That seems to be a normal approach. So, maybe it's something that we assume is for the intellectual elite, deals with all these big abstract ideas, it's hard to wrap your mind around it. Maybe it's a mixture of some really weird things like astrology and theology and stuff like that. But it's
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definitely at least difficult. Now, some of these, again like I said, are misconceptions. The aspect that it could be difficult . . . that could be true. From my own experience I found philosophy classes when I first started out to be very very challenging, very frustrating at times, to the point where I actually thought maybe I shouldn't be doing this. "You know I don't seem to be grasping the ideas as the instructor is teaching, and he lost me in the first 10
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minutes, and then we've gone on for the next three hours and it didn't get any better." But I want to encourage you guys to stick with it when you do find it difficult, because what I did was stick with it, and usually by the end of the semester ideas start to fit together, okay, and the more you endure through that the more sense you're gonna be able to make from the material, and you'll go on hopefully to take other classes and enjoy it. Because it actually should be
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somewhat enjoyable. Now what we could say for sure is that it's definitely unlike other subjects that you may have taken. You've probably taken math and history, maybe biology, chemistry, things like that. All of those types of subjects deal with a particular aspect of reality, right. Biology for instance is gonna study human, not just human, it's gonna study life in general, you know living systems. If you study economics you're gonna be dealing with markets, all right, and finances,
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things like that. When you do something like sociology you'll be talking about societies, and cultures, and individual interactions within those types of systems. So, they're all restricted to one aspect of reality. Philosophy doesn't seem to be like that. You know real . . . in a very real way, philosophy deals with more general aspects of reality. Here's a quote from Joseph Piper that's kind of interesting, he kind of indicates that philosophy deals with the whole of reality rather
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than a sliver of reality, he says "to philosophize means . . . to concentrate our gaze upon the totality of encounter phenomenon and methodically to investigate the coherency of them all and the ultimate meaning of the whole: to examine what "something real" actually is, what man himself is, . . . the complete total of things." Sounds pretty broad, and again it depends on the particular school of philosophy you adhere to, but some philosophers have really attempted to do
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something that's all encompassing and broad. Philosophers tend to talk about "things in themselves" so where I just used the example of biology, which studies living things, you know the biologists as far as studying man, would be interested in man and as a living thing. The economists would study man as a consumer or a producer, and so on. But philosophy, when it comes to study something like man, is interested in not one aspect of man, but man as man, okay.
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The "what does it mean to be human?" and everything that that entails. And that might be something that's beyond actual possibility. Some people think that kind of goal is too broad and too ambitious, but again we'll talk about different takes on that. Well philosophy definitely does, it involves examining our presuppositions, things that we believe to be true. Presuppositions are often beliefs that we hold even subconsciously, unconsciously, that lie behind our normal
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everyday thinking. Also, it involves an examination of ends, especially an ethics class. When we talk about "ends", I'm gonna use that word quite a bit this semester, and what I mean by an end is a goal towards which something is directed, okay. So, we talk about human life, "what is the goal towards which I'm directing my life?", "what are the things that I'm pursuing?", and there are lots of different answers philosophers have come up with over the years. Okay, so, like I said, I'm going to
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skim through some of these slides. What's required to do philosophy? You definitely have to have an inquiring mind I think. I think you have to be interested in asking big questions, and I think it's a really authentic human pursuit, basically because you don't see other animals engaging in philosophy the way we do. Going through life without asking the big questions is, in a way, to live a less than human or authentic life. A couple quotes that I have at the
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bottom of this slide, one from Socrates who is probably already well known to you, at least the name I'm sure you have all heard. And he says "the unexamined life is not worth living." What does that mean? It means the life that we have is not a value unless we actually take the time to understand it, to investigate it, to analyze it, to ask these types of questions, because when we don't do that we're living a life that's substantially not very
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different than an animal who can't ask those questions. John Stuart Mill, quote underneath . . . "it's better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." This pigs may have all they need; slop, mud, you know, their basic needs met, but they're not contemplating life. Yet a human being something more perhaps to what it means to be human, different quality of life, Mill will talk about. We'll study Mill later on this semester when we study utilitarianism, okay. So moving
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on, let's talk about defining philosophy. What's a good definition for it, if there is a good definition for it? And you're gonna see that there's a lot of disagreement as to how you might define philosophy. Starting with the etymology, we could talk about this as being sort of a definition. So the etymology, if you're not familiar, comes from two Greek words, the word "philos" and "sophia", one meaning, "philos" love, and "sophia" wisdom. So you could talk about philosophy being
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"the love of wisdom". In particular, the ancient Greeks had a very strong emphasis on wisdom in their philosophy, the idea of being able to apply our knowledge in the right way, so that we could live a right type of life. So knowledge was important but also this emphasis on "what is the 'good' that we should be striving to attain?", "what is the end towards which we ought to be directing ourselves?" Now most philosophers in the ancient
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world, even since, have believed the ultimate goal, the ultimate end of human life, is happiness, and the Greeks were really concerned with living an authentically happy life. Of course what does that mean, "to be happy"? There's a debate. We'll see that later this semester, okay. Moderns they say here, that they tend to turn away from ethical pursuits. It's not strictly true. There are plenty of modern philosophers, and the modern period kind of begins with Descartes and moves forward,
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there are lots of discussions on ethics, but maybe not to the same extent that the ancient Greeks . . . I emphasize this idea of ethical pursuit and wisdom for that end. Anyways, another attempt to give a definition, I like taking an Aristotelian approach. I'm a very big fan of Aristotle, and as we go through this semester you're going to see over and over again us coming to Aristotle, referring him off and on, and even studying directly his virtue ethical
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theory at the end of the semester. It's one of the last ethical theories that we're going to discuss. Now when Aristotle talks about any particular thing, understanding any particular thing, or defining any particular thing, he says you can't understand it completely unless you know the causes of that thing. And for Aristotle there were four causes that he could talk about, which I've got listed here. Now every elementary school, or elementary student of Aristotle,
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should be familiar with the four causes. They're called the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final cause of a thing. And to give you an example of what I mean by these things, I'll first define them and then use an example, maybe an artificial example, something like this desk, okay. So the material cause of a thing is that out of which the thing emerges or comes. So when I talk about the desk that I'm sitting at, it's clearly made of wood, okay. So you can say
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the material cause of this desk is the wood, the laminate, different things like that, you know the screws, or whatever holds it together, the pieces of metal on the drawer handles, etc. That's the material cause of this desk. The formal cause, which is the second one, this is one of the abstract concepts, but the formal cause, and this may make sense if we use something like a human being, but I'll just talk about the desk to be consistent here. The formal cause is that
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according to which a thing is what it is. We could say it's the pattern according to which something is a type of thing. So when I talk about this desk I would say the formal cause might be something like . . . I'll just use the word "deskness". Bizarre word, but "deskness", it means, you know, the characteristics of being a desk. What is it to be a desk? There's got to be some kind of concept laying behind it before I go ahead and put the wood together to make one, okay. A little bit
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abstract but hopefully later on we'll make more sense of that actual term. The third cause is called the efficient cause, and that's the source or power that actually brings it about. So as far as the desk again is concerned the efficient cause of the desk might be the carpenter that actually takes the time to take the materials and hammer the thing together, screw the thing together, and put it together, okay, and actually bring it into being as a desk,
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okay. And then the final cause which is the last of the four causes is that for which a thing exists, and it's going to be hard to avoid final causes as we go through this course in ethics. Final causes have to do again with purposes, ends, what we might call, with a Greek word, a "telos". All right, teleology, you can hear these words scattered throughout the semester. But what's the final cost of this desk? Well that's the purpose of the
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desk, to place a computer, to be able to write on it, okay. If there was no purpose, then the carpenter probably wouldn't have come along and taken the wood and put it together as a desk. They did that for a reason, and that is the goal of the object itself. So those are Aristotle's Four Causes. Now you can actually take those four causes and say, okay, how do we understand philosophy according to the four causes? And we could actually come up with something like
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this, which is really an Aristotelian style definition, and we can say philosophy is the body of questions and answers (that's the material cause) in the form of a rational logical argument or arguments (which is the formal cause - the structure of the thing) driven by human inquiry and wonder (that's the efficient cause) which brings it about, in order to bring about wisdom (which is our ultimate goal or final cause). And liking Aristotle, I kind of like that way of handling it - a
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body of questions and answers in the form of a rational logical argument, driven by human inquiry and wonder, with the goal of attaining wisdom. Of course not everybody agrees with Aristotle's way of doing things, or maybe wouldn't even agree with his definition, but it's a good starting point. What I want to go through now is kind of this difficulty in actually coming out with a precise definition for philosophy. And there's different ways people will try
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to do this. Perhaps we want to take the tactic where you're going to try to figure out what are the necessary conditions. If you study logic you're going to spend a lot of time, hopefully, if it's a good logic class, understanding what it means to be necessary, a necessary condition versus a sufficient condition, and the relationship between them in logical statements. But a necessary condition, for the most part, is simply a condition that has to be there for
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something to be what it is, okay. So what are the conditions that must obtain for something to be called philosophy? What characteristics are necessary? Now, . . . perhaps, if you look at the bottom of that slide, we could talk about rational cognitive activity. Is that a necessary condition for philosophy? Can one say what is necessary for X to be called philosophy in a way that would distinguish philosophy from other intellectual activities? All right, what
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distinguishes philosophy from maybe doing physics? Well it seems that rational cognitive activity is necessary to do philosophy, I don't know that you necessarily can do philosophy without it, but it doesn't seem to be a distinguishing factor for philosophy, because there are other things that are not philosophy that are also rational cognitive activities. Okay, so where it may be necessary it's not a distinguishing factor that we can point
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to and say "well it's a rational cognitive activity therefore it's philosophy", right? It could be physics. It could be mathematics. Okay. Those all involve the same types of thing. What about a sufficient condition? The sufficient condition is going to be a condition that guarantees that something is whatever it is. Okay. It's a condition which suffices for something to be called philosophy. Can I point to a particular sufficient condition that if
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that's there I'm guaranteed to be dealing with philosophy? It seems to be difficult to come up with these things, okay. If you're gonna have a good definition perhaps you need to take both into consideration, right, the necessary and sufficient conditions. As you do this, kind of a conceptual analysis approach. If you go for more of a classical terminology, in classical philosophy, they might talk about a genus and a specific difference. And I can give
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an example on the slide there. Let's look at a square for an example. If I'm gonna define the word "square", right, I could just define it, or try to define it, as a closed figure. Well being a closed figure, we could say, is a necessary condition for being a square, but it doesn't seem to be sufficient, right. Because there are other geometrical figures that are closed figures that are not squares, such as triangles, or rectangles, or even circles, . . . heck an
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octagon. Anyways, what if we add a few things to that, like equilateral closed figure with at least three right angles? That seems to be necessary to be a square, it also seems to be sufficient. Now, I've defined it in a good enough way that I know now what I'm dealing with. Okay, so that's kind of what we want to attempt to do with philosophy, and I'm not going to do this for you, but you know you could be considering "what do I need, what does it have to
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include for it to be philosophy, and how much of that is going to guarantee that I'm dealing with philosophy?" And perhaps there's no possible way to do that. Maybe philosophy is an open concept. Wittgenstein talks about family resemblances.
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So, you may talk about, in different parts or areas of philosophy, or different types of inquiry that we consider philosophical. Family resemblances might be this network of overlapping characteristics, kind of criss-crossing and stuff like that, similarities. Or maybe not every single thing in that group has any one feature in common. Maybe it's a collection of features that's kind of, like I said, overlap. Maybe that's the best we can do with
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philosophy. So descriptions are going to vary widely. Again, there has been historically the definition - not definition - but description of philosophy as the "queen of the sciences". That's a very old way of referring to philosophy. Other people say philosophy is not a science at all. So maybe we need to understand what we mean by "science". And then of course you're going to have to define that. Kind of . . . "science" we tend to think kind of the
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modern physical sciences, natural sciences, and so on. And, one of the aspects that a lot of people associate with philosophy is this idea of being speculative. If we're gonna distinguish philosophy from science perhaps we'll say philosophy is speculative and science is empirical, where we rely on our senses and gathering data. But does that always work? Is that a distinguishing feature between the two? Unfortunately it doesn't seem to
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be, because we could look at things like quantum mechanics and string theory. Just use string theory as an example, it's not an empirical pursuit. It does tend to be very speculative in nature, yet we don't classify it as philosophy so much as science. Ok, so again, maybe it's going to be difficult. Is speculation necessary, or is it sufficient, or is it neither one? It doesn't seem to be necessary because there are actually branches that we do consider
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philosophy that are not about speculation, for instance logic, right? Logic is about working out relationships between various concepts and statements. It's a lot like math in a certain way, so it's not speculative at all. Maybe it's not sufficient, like I said with string theory, it doesn't seem to be sufficient because string theory is speculative, but not philosophy. So, hopefully you're getting a feel for the disagreement, maybe a feel for the complexity of even
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asking the question. Let me skip past this slide. And again, talking about the general and abstract nature of philosophy, I'll let you look at that later. I'm going to touch very briefly right now on what we might call the difference between analytic and the speculative approach to philosophy. We could talk about there being kind of two schools of thought historically speaking, breaking them down 1) the analytic approach to philosophy and 2) the
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speculative approach to philosophy. There are lots of different ways that you could break down schools of thought and philosophy. You've got the empiricist/ rationalist divide. You could talk about analytic philosophy versus continental, or even classical philosophy or existential philosophy There's lots of different ways to categorize different schools. I'm just gonna give a very general one for analytic versus speculative and what we
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might mean by those terms. And it's maybe an oversimplification, but nonetheless let's take a look at it. An analytic approach to philosophy, you might call it, you know the process of conceptual analysis. The analytic philosopher might think that the central concern of philosophy is in clarification of terms, clarification, clarity in meaning for instance. We want to clarify ideas in language. It may be designed to investigate the
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presuppositions that other people tend to use uncritically. Perhaps you're a scientist. There are certain presuppositions that you hold to that you may have never analyzed or critiqued. So a scientist, for instance, would be uncritical and accepting of a principle like the principle of causality. You really can't do science without a principle of causality. But the philosopher will often come along and then ask questions about "are we
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justified in assuming there is such a thing as causality?" "Are we justified in assuming that we would be able to identify causes in any particular situation?" David Hume was a famous critic of, you know, how far we can go in talking about causes. But again, that's kind of beyond the talk that we're doing right now. There are some objections to this analytic approach. Some people that are not in the analytic camp think that the analytic philosopher overemphasizes
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questions of meaning and under emphasizes maybe questions of what's true and what's real and what's valuable. The verification principle, I'll actually talk about that in a later presentation, particularly when we talk about logical positivism. It's more of a historical problem, not so much today as maybe in the middle of the 20th century, so let me move past that as well and talk a little bit about the speculative approach. Speculative philosophy has a long
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history. I mean, you could talk about the whole classical tradition from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages and even into the modern era, and even into, the you know, contemporary era you've got people that could classify themselves as more speculative philosophers, and not so much analytic. And the speculative philosopher/ the classical philosopher has this concern of synthesizing results of inquiry in various areas to kind of come together and form some kind of comprehensive view
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of all reality, or come by a system to explain everything. Plato was a great example. Plato was probably the world's first great speculative and systematic philosopher, because he's coming up with theories to explain reality, to explain our knowledge, epistemological theories, ethics, politics, and all of these things in his system fit together in a certain way, and overlap, and touch upon one another. It ends up being a rather tight system. Aristotle was the same way.
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Okay, so the goal, a lot of times, was to systematically explain the ultimate constituents of the world, to define maybe man's place in the world, and it goes beyond descriptions of things, to actually prescriptions. And you should be familiar with those terms. "Descriptive" has to do with what is the case, where a "prescriptive" discussion has to do with what ought to be the case. So it's very different. And how those two connect is going to be a
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discussion that we'll have. So, there's lots of kinds of questions that they might ask, and we could talk about those. But again there's also objections to that approach. Again since we're talking about such a big goal, of synthesizing all this stuff into some kind of coherent whole, some people think that's not possible. The integration of all knowledge and values just doesn't . . . isn't something that a finite human mind could possibly ever do.
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Of course people can disagree. And so on. Now the interesting thing is the analytic and speculative approach are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The speculative philosopher often has to do a lot of the analytic stuff as well, you know, defining terms, understanding concepts, and putting those things together. And what I want to do is just give you just a rough suggested definition for philosophy dealing with kind of elements of both of those
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approaches. So drawing from both schools of thought here's a decent alternative definition of philosophy - we might call it "the critical analysis of fundamental concepts of human inquiry, and the normative discussion of how human thought and action ought to function, as well as the description of the nature of reality. Okay, so there's a second definition that you guys can use. The test that you guys will probably be taking in this course
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if you are taking the course and not just watching these videos for fun, will ask questions about the definition of philosophy, and I'm going to give those in multiple choice format. So I've already given you several definitions including an etymology, and I may ask a question like "which of the following is not a definition philosophy?" But nonetheless you don't have to memorize any particular definition, just so long as you are familiar with possible attempts,
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and can recognize a possible attempt when you see it. Okay. So, let me move on. I don't usually cover this in class but I might just go through these eight characteristics kind of quickly. Eight characteristics of philosophical inquiry. Just-just, I think good to know. There's disputes in philosophy. People disagree. People have debates, ethical debates, metaphysical, there'll be all kinds of different issues that come up. Now one thing that you want to know about a philosophical
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dispute is, number one, that they're not caused by a lack of facts. Okay, conflicts occur even when the facts are agreed upon. That's important to realize. When two people are debating they may have the exact same facts in front of them and still be in dispute as to the issue they're discussing. Number two, philosophical problems are rarely solved by appealing to those facts. A lot of times facts are ambiguous. Some people have used the phrase "facts speak for
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themselves" or "let the facts speak for themselves". But the truth is facts don't speak. There's always an interpretation of facts, and that's usually where the real disagreement comes, in how we interpret what has occurred. Okay, and the same facts can actually often support differing sides in a debate or argument. That's important to realize. A lot of the disagreement comes down to certain presuppositions we hold, and how we
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interpret those facts, and how we see the world, that helps us to put those facts into our worldview. Number three, philosophy is often more concerned with method than content. So it's not always about a body of knowledge that we're trying to accumulate, though you will learn, kind of historically you know, what did Epicurus think and Aristotle and John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, etc. etc., in the course of this semester. So you'll be responsible for some knowledge, but
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philosophy is often about the method, certain skills we develop in thinking through things. Number four, one of philosophy's chief goals is clarification. We already saw that with the analytic approach, but even like I said, the speculative philosopher. You want to have clear concepts in mind. This helps you think more effectively if you're not, you know, vague and confused. Number five, philosophy is concerned with critical reflection on justification and
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evidence. Philosophy is done through argumentation. We have presumptions and presuppositions that we employ, and we want to be able to say what's true and what's not true in the course of our pursuit. Number six, philosophical inquiry centers on a quest for truth about crucial issues that are perennially discussed by thoughtful individuals. So we'll be looking at, you know, big things, you know, like freedom, equality, you know, the value of human life. Those
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are fundamental issues, I would say. Ex. the issue of justice. There are major concepts that come in. Number seven, philosophical analysis and explanation involves an appeal to systems of principles, which is why even in a thought experiment I said think about why you made the decision that you made. What are the principles that you're employing? And are they good principles? Because we want to question our principles. Number eight, some philosophy is concerned with
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the nature of being and reality. Maybe talking about broader aspects of philosophy, such as metaphysics, I'm going to talk about that a little bit later, what metaphysics is. But you'll see that we're gonna have to do a little bit of metaphysics when we do ethics this semester. Moving on! The value of philosophy. Why should we study it? Americans tend to be really pragmatic. As a student you're probably often asking yourself why do I have to take this
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class? Why is it required that I take a humanities class? Why do I have to take a math class when I'm not going to be dealing with any kind of career that's going to deal with math? Ok, so we're often concerned with the practicality of things. You know, what's the use, what's the benefit, what is this gonna do for me? Now the classical philosopher, kind of from the Aristotelian, Platonic tradition, they might say, "I really can't answer that." "I'm not going to give you a practical
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answer of the usefulness of philosophy." "If you don't get it, it's simply because you haven't done philosophy, and you're ignorant." "What you need to do is not get an answer from me as to why you should do it, you just need to do it, and then you'll understand the value of philosophy." Not a bad approach. Of course I will give you a few reasons why you should study philosophy nonetheless. You really may not see the value in it until you've done it, and started to get a hang
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of why you're doing it. Anyways . . . Number one, help to understand society. The society that we live in is built on the concepts that have come down through great philosophical thinkers, right. We live in a particular political system in this country and it's the great political philosophers of the past that have come up with, you know, what is the best form of government? How do you make sure that there are, you know, rights of the people that are protected?
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A lot of careful thinking. So, a lot about our lives here has to do with the great philosophical thinking of the past. Concepts like human rights, ok, that's a philosophical concept. Freedom, equality, those types of things. Anyways, it helps us be liberated from prejudice. We do tend to have prejudices that we pick up over the years. We tend to be narrowly focused on certain aspects our own lives and world, and lose the bigger picture. So a critical evaluation
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of these things it's going to help us maybe be more objective, to maybe be able to set aside biases that we have when we start to critique our own presuppositions, and ask ourselves "why do I believe what I believe?". We become less emotionally attached to those beliefs, and then objectivity should follow along. And it's of course of practical value, especially in an ethics class were we're talking about, you know, the goal of human life, why I should live the
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way I live, and the decisions that I make. And the wisdom that you're gonna pick up is going to hopefully be of very practical value. Now, I want to shift over to the disciplines within philosophy, because there are a lot of them. And the course, being ethics, ethics is one of the four main branches, I would say, of philosophy. So, let's go through, first, the four main branches, then we'll just overview a few of the others. Logic is one of the main branches of
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philosophy. And like I said before, it's something you should take. To tell you the truth before and after I took a course in logic there was a huge difference in my abilities . . . in writing papers, and presenting arguments, and thinking through material. Before I took logic, you know, I thought I knew what I was talking about in a lot of my papers. I thought I knew a good argument when I heard one. And after I took logic I, and again it had to be a good logic class, because I did take
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an atrocious logic class as an undergraduate that gave me very little preparation for thinking well. In grad school I actually took a very good introduction of logic, and then on to more complicated forms of logic, but anyways . . . after I took that logic class I immediately began to identify things I thought were good arguments, and realize for the first time that those are atrocious arguments. I need to clean up the way I think. I need to organize the
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way I think. And I need to be able to do this in the papers I produced. After that were a night and day difference. I was a much better student after I took logic. Now I'm not gonna say everybody comes away with that radical change in how they think. Some people, it takes a while for them to really understand the benefits of logic, but logic is there to help you think clearly and organize your thoughts. So I would recommend taking it. It's, again, one of the four
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principle branches of philosophy, and it's a tool, that's exactly what it is. Logic, Aristotle calls the Organon, it's a tool for doing other things. And there are different types of logic. I'll just lay a few of them out. There's informal logic, which deals with analysis and errors in ordinary discourse. In a good logic class you're going to be dealing with maybe things that we would call informal fallacies, you know, the mistake perhaps of attacking the speaker rather than the
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speaker's argument, kind of an ad hominem approach. That would be a poor logical tactic, it was a fallacious logical tactic. Formal logic is another branch where you're dealing with the structure or arguments themselves, analysis of the relationships between terms or propositions in an argument. There's different types in what's called formal or deductive reasoning, such as categorical, propositional, or even predicate logic. In the class that I
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teach we spend a lot of time on categorical and propositional logic, even before we talk about any of the informal stuff. There's also modal logic, doxastic logic, deontic logic, and all those deal with different types of terms. For instance, modal logic deals with what we call modalities, or possible worlds, what is impossibility, and possibility, and contingency, and necessity, and what do those mean. Deontic logic is a
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particular form of logic that tries to grapple with ethical terms, such as "oughts" and obligations, what's obligatory, what is non-obligatory, what's permissible or impermissible, and such. Okay, let me just give you a quick comparison between, maybe, a deontic argument and a formal logical argument. On this screen you'll see the formal argument. The first two, one and two, we'll call those premises, they come before three, which is the conclusion, I've got that labeled. Premise
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one is "I want to get to school on time". Premise two, "to get to school on time I must catch the 12 o'clock bus". Now if those two things are true, that I want to get to school on time, and in order to do that I must catch the 12 o'clock bus, my conclusion is "I must catch the 12 o'clock bus". And the conclusion follows from the premises because of the formal relationship of those statements. A deontic argument, which deals again with ethical terms, might be something like this: "it's
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wrong to steal" - one premise - and the conclusion, "I must not steal". It's like the wrongness of the activity includes already the concepts of "I must not", "I'm obligated in this way", or "that way", "it's good" or "bad", etc., etc. So it's a very different type of logic. We'll talk about Immanuel Kant a little bit later. He, for instance, would have thought that, you know, the idea that it's wrong to steal, you know, clearly implies that you shouldn't do it. Anyways . . .
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The second discipline, or major discipline, within philosophy is what we call metaphysics. This is probably the most abstract of the branches of philosophy. It's the study of being, or the nature of reality. So, it's got some very lofty goals. And its name does sound complicated, but it actually comes very simply from the writings of Aristotle that were compiled by his students. Aristotle wrote on the physical world, called the Physics, and then his students grouped
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number of other writings after the Physics, and they were simply called Meta- Physics, those that followed after the Physics. But again, the branch of metaphysics today is going to deal with questions like, "what are the ultimate objective constituents of reality?", "what's the nature of space and time?", "must every event have a cause?", "are there universals?", "is there anything which remains constant?", "the nature and end of man", things like that. As a matter of fact, that last one,
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which is a metaphysical question, is going to have a lot of implications for ethics. So, according to the way we're going to pursue this semester, you're going to see that we can't avoid doing some metaphysics now and again. We're going to look at, you know, "what is man?" and various answers to these questions. Okay. Hopefully the microphone isn't picking that up, I can hear my son crying downstairs. The third major branch of philosophy is what we call epistemology.
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It's the investigation of the origin and nature of knowledge, one of the four principle branches. It's gonna deal with questions like the ones that I have at the bottom of the screen here. You know, "how do we know something?", "what does it mean to know something?", "can I justify something as knowledge, as opposed to just belief?", and "is it possibly to be certain?", and "do I have to have certainty if I'm going to count something as knowledge?" There are lots of big
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questions, and it's actually kind of fascinating to think about these things. So, for instance, you believe certain things, but you tend to sometimes overestimate your knowledge. You've got a lot of beliefs, but not all of those beliefs count as something you "know". As a matter of fact, I think very few of the beliefs you hold translate into knowledge. All right. Again, what is your definition of knowledge is going to be very
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important. For the most part, most things that you believe you've not learned by direct experience, and really can't justify that particular belief. You're taking it on other people's word. I just think of the news. When you turn on the news and watch an account of what's going on here or there you're taking somebody's word for it. You weren't there to watch it, even if you're seeing video footage. You don't know if that video footage is authentic, if it's actually
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taken from the same place that it's supposed to be taken at. You're taking somebody's word for it. So, you believe what you see on the news, sometimes you probably don't even do that, but you can't call it something you "know". All right. So, epistemology is very important. And then the fourth of the four major branches is ethics, also called moral philosophy. And this is the way we're going to define it - as "an inquiry into the nature of the good life, ultimate worth, human
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action, and the course of human life." And hopefully this is going to be fairly practical, because it is about making choices and decisions and such. Okay. Moving on . . . Those are some of the questions we'll be looking at in a minute, but I'll, you know, talk about moral philosophy in a little. I know this is a rather lengthy video presentation, but bear with me. Other disciplines - I'll just read through these, I'm not gonna define all
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of them. But there's political philosophy, and aesthetics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, as well as philosophy of history, which sounds really weird, but those are different things - (you can look back at the PowerPoints if you want to get a little bit of an idea what the differences are) - philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, action theory, and you can probably add a whole bunch of other things to this category.
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But I just want you to know the four main branches of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. And I'm sure there's gonna be a question on the test about those. Moving along, I want to give you some basic terms, and some of these are actually going to lead into our discussion of some of the initial problems in moral philosophy. So, first, I want you to grasp this idea of "judgment". You could use word "judgment" as interchangeable with the word "opinion" or
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"belief". It's merely an idea that we hold about something, right, when our beliefs are, you know, ideas that we hold about particular matters. Like, I believe the Earth revolves around the Sun. I believe it's sunny outside, but the Sun is actually beginning to set. Okay, those are beliefs. But I could just as well call them my opinions. It's my opinion that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Or it's my judgment that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Don't assume that because
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it's my opinion, therefore it's something that's merely subjective. Okay? It's my belief, that's all opinion, and belief, and judgment mean. They're all interchangeable. The next term is a "proposition". Now a proposition is the sentence, or the statement, claim, or assertion, that I use to communicate my belief, opinion, or judgment. Okay? So, it's the thing said, or maybe written down, that conveys the actual belief, because the belief is not something I can touch.
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Okay? Belief is not something I can see, but I can see the proposition, I can hear a proposition, and for it to be considered a proposition the statement being made, or the sentence being uttered, has to be either true or false. If there is no truth-value, meaning it's either true or false, if there's no truth-value, then statement is not typically a statement or proposition. Okay? A proposition, strictly speaking logically, is the meaning of any
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declarative statement or sentence. And of course there are sentences that are not propositions, like a question. "What time is it?" True! Now I can't do that right, I can't say that that question is true or false, that is not a proposition. Okay. Now there are two types of propositions, or two types of claims, that we can go further and discuss; objective claims, and subjective claims. An objective claim we might call factual, and a subjective claim you may call
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non-factual. A lot of people get confused when we use these terms, so again, I want you to learn the terms and be comfortable with them. These will become very important, especially when we talk about, later, moral relativism. And I'll talk about that a little bit today as well. So, an objective claim's a statement that's either true or false, that's independent of your personal views. Okay? Something that is true or false that has nothing to do with you. So, when I say I believe that the
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Earth revolves around the Sun, that's an objective claim, or opinion, about the situation in reality. Well, I have nothing to do with how the Earth revolves, where it revolves, where it goes, that is an objective factual claim. Okay. A subjective claim, or non factual claim, is a claim that is either true or false based on me, all right, is dependent on personal opinion. So, if I talk about something like the taste of a meal that I had, and I said it tastes
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really, really good, all right, that's true, but it's true because it's my opinion. And you may taste the same meal and have a very different opinion of it. You may say it tastes terrible, and that would also be true, because that claim is true or false based on who's making it. That is what we would call a subjective claim. all right so object of claims are discoverable by us and subjective claims are really created by us again a clarification on fact versus opinion don't assume when I say
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something is an opinion that it is not factual right fact has to do with objective opinion is simply a belief that we have which could be either objective or subjective and we don't know okay so opinions are not necessarily subjective and opinions may be objective or subjective depends on what types of things we're talking about okay so again when I say that's just your opinion I kind of say that may be a derogatory way implying that it's probably false or that's just a
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subjective way of looking at things but that's really not legitimate use of the word opinion talking about a couple of different types of facts we could talk about natural versus conventional facts a natural fact might be something that would be true or state the situation in the world even in the absence of human beings not being there to express the proposition about that truth so for instance hot air rises just a natural fact right even if there are no human
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beings it would still be true the planets of the solar system orbit around the Sun in the elliptical trajectory there's all kinds of statements we can make about the natural world that we would call natural facts versus conventional facts and a conventional fact is only the case in the context of human beings in human society these would be things that we come up with as human beings so when I make a statement like susan is married to John
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of course that would make no sense if there are no people it would also make no sense if there's no institution of something like marriage when I say that Babe Ruth struck out you know that only makes sense in the context of the rules of the game of baseball which again is a human convention and a made-up thing now first potential problem in what we call grounding of ethics this is going to be what we're going to spend a lot of time on on the second and third powerpoints
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this semester we're gonna be dealing with different problems in grounding an ethical system which means having a foundation upon which we can build an ethical system and the idea is can you build a foundation on facts about the world for instance if a moral tradition bases its ethical ethical claims on natural facts people will say you've committed a fallacy known as the naturalistic fallacy all right that such-and-such is good for
1:00:09
whatever natural reason and we'll see that this could be a problem okay so trying to ground things in natural facts we could end up with a naturalistic fallacy if you try to ground things and conventional facts then you will dissolve into possibly relativism and idea that different societies have different customs and therefore each custom is right for that society and we'll talk a lot about relativism and even give arguments for and against it coming up down the road okay now another
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term that I want to know is the term truth because I've already used it when I talk about propositions having that having truth value it's a good thing to understand what we mean by truth and there'll be a problem that follows from the definition I'm going to give you but the traditional classical definition of truth is known as the correspondence view of truth which says that a claim or proposition is true so long or even a judgement truth so long as it
1:01:05
corresponds with reality with facts or objects or states of affairs so if I was to say that it's raining outside that statement is true just so long as there's actual case or a bit raining outside okay and it's kind of a common sensical view of truth I think that's normally what you think of when so if you say something is true and of course false is the opposite now when we consider the nature of moral claims Lyanna sometimes asked is the moral
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claim true now here's a problem what with what must the moral claim correspond in order for it to be counted as true can it correspond with effect we'll look in the next session with what's called the fact value distinction or there is a problem and some people will say well moral claims do not correspond to facts at all and if that's the case then maybe moral claims cannot be true later on we'll look at how maybe an athenian philosopher might respond and say no there are things that moral
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claims correspond to they may not be facts in a certain sense but there are things that can correspond to a look at that later as well so for instance what with what did the following claims correspond the life of contemplation accompanied by virtuous action is the best life for a human being that was Aristotle what does that correspond to lying is always amoral we should act always act in such a way as to promote the greatest amount of happiness for the
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greatest number of people these are moral claims and it's hard to see what object or reality they point to or correspond with so there's a problem right there for ethics is kin moral claims be true given our definition of what truth is all right this is probably the last section that I'm going to go through with you guys moral philosophy moral theory and moral reason them so let's focus in just on moral philosophy for a little while I'll
1:03:12
give you the two terms moral and ethics and give you the idea that they're interchangeable for our purposes some people make this subtle distinctions between the two but moral simply comes from the Latin word most which is mean the manner custom tradition our way and ethics comes from the Greek word FDK which means the same exact thing custom disposition manner etc so we can think of morals and ethics as interchangeable so we could talk about this as a course
1:03:41
in ethics or of course even in moral philosophy so I'll use that this is the same definition I gave you when we talked about ethics as a major branch the inquiry into the nature of the good life ultimate worth human action in the course of human life now what I'm going to do is give you a subdivision of the branches of moral philosophy and this how I'm going to organize this course this semester we've got the branch known as meta ethics which is going to ask
1:04:06
certain questions it does not ask if an action is right or wrong or if a person's character is good or bad but it does take a step back to look at more fundamental foundational questions such as the meaning and logical structure of moral beliefs and claim are they subjective are they objective what do we mean by certain terms like good bad right wrong obligation thought and things like that so they're going to be much more abstract in a certain way
1:04:37
and I think meta ethics can be kind of difficult but this semester is going to begin with those big difficult questions to lay a foundation for what comes later so probably powerpoints two three four and five are going to deal with medical issues and I'll give up through five big questions or problems and how we might respond to them from different perspectives philosophically okay so that's meta fix the second branch is normative ethics and the middle part of
1:05:05
this course is going to be dealing with normative ethics basically the material for tests two and three are going to be normative ethics and here we're dealing with the study of principles rules and theories about human action and judgments you know how do you formulate acceptable principles of behavior what are the rules that a good system is going to employ and what are some of those systems so look at things like egoism hedonism divine command fear utilitarianism they ontological ethics
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virtue ethics natural law there's a bunch of theories they're going to fall in this section and then the last section is applied ethics and I'm not going to be doing videos on applied ethics by the way this course is designed you guys are going to be debating in applied ethics section of the class the very last section and that means you can be taking what you learned and beginning part of the semester and employing that knowledge when dealing
1:05:59
with issues which is why we call it applied ethics we're applying ethical theory to specific issues we may talk about you know medical ethics journalistic ethics be dealing with maybe issues like abortion euthanasia torture all kinds of different possible debate topics and we could discuss those later what those are going to be okay I'm going to skip the videos those don't really work in our format nature of moral claims let's talk about this
1:06:29
because this could be kind of tricky and they're too big perspectives on how we class if I moral claims so one of the issues moral philosophy investigates is the nature of moral language how do we classify these things so let's look at a moral claim and what we mean by that a moral claim expresses what we call a moral value of judgment and a lot of times you'll pick up an ethics book maybe not you but people have picked up
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ethics books and they will find that people describe a moral value judgment as a non factual claim right so here's a general classification that you see on this create a claim right which is a proposition or a statement it could be either factual or non factual right we say objective or subjective and I highlighted in red where the classification we're going to follow okay so it's a claim that's non factual in nature go down non factual claims
1:07:24
could be subdivided between those that are value judgments and those that are not for instance if I say the book is funny sorry about that the value judgment in that is not a value judgment the book is funny is an example of something that's not a value judgment but it's a non factual claim and then those that are value judgments may be subdivided as a moral value judgment versus a non moral value judgment or we could say this book was
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good would be a moral value judgment I'm sorry non moral value judgment we're replacing a value on it but it's not a moral value okay so under the claim non factual and moral value judgment falls under the value judgments so that's kind of how this the structure works the problem is classifying the moral value judgments as non factual claims in the beginning of the classification is going to beg the question in favor of what we call
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relativism in the debate that we're going to look at later which is between relativism and absolutism so if you classify it that way then of course ethics does become relative but that is not the way all philosophers would classify moral value judgments so look at the next slide in the midday optical debate between absolutism and relativism each side would classify things differently and I gave you the breakdown of so look on the right you see relativism classifies moral value judgments
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underneath the subjective branch non-factual so all more valued isms are subjective but the absolute test classifies your moral value judgments under the objective branch possibly in this way so again I'm simply saying there are waves these are often defined not everybody agrees there's two big sides on this debate the absolutist and the relativist avait and they would describe them differently okay so that's one issue we'll look at later and then
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of course there's another medical debate between what we call cognitivism and non cognitive ism which has to do with whether moral claims are making any kind of meaningful truth claims at all so the two perspectives are cognitivism and non cognitive ism and the cognitivist would say that moral claims are making truth claims and underneath cognitivism you'd have people that we may call moral realists that would say at least some of the claims we make are true some of the
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claims we make our false both absolutist and relativists fall under their because they do believe that claims are true they're just true based on different things whether objective or subjective and then of course error theory falls under there probably as well the other branch is non cognitive ethics or the non cognitive approach which believes that moral discourse is not making truth claims at all okay I'd say what we might call a motive approach this simply says
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moral claims are simply expressions of our emotions you know when you say murder is wrong you're simply saying I don't like it or prescriptivism we're we're saying that moral claims are just imperatives or commands there's no truth value to a command it simply don't or do so when I said it murder is bad I'm not making a truth claim I'm simply saying don't murder okay so those are the two other branches what's the meaning are they true and so on skip that little
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video moral reasoning I'm going to skim through this really quick and what kind of speed up to get this over with but um as we are introduced in the second part of the semester to nab the various theories of ethics I'm gonna introduce some of these theories what we call six questions of the moral theorists which we call the moral psych you question the content question the justification question the motivation question the ontological source question
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and the moral education question I'm going to use those questions to kind of answer all the big concerns for the moral philosophers and as we apply these questions or ask these questions of various theories it'll be a good way to review or like preview the theory and get the the nuts and bolts of it before we dive deeper so you'll notice the powerpoints are set up that way with the questions first and then an in-depth investigation into these things
1:11:34
last thing moral reasoning this is kind of a primer not reasoning through moral things moral arguments really and it does talk a little bit about arguments as to how a person should do something I want to look at for instance some of the the clue words they're gonna come up with so this slide basically moves read through it kind of quickly moral decisions tend to be with difficult and important moral issues arise when we wonder what we should do or whether a
1:12:03
situation is right or fair so for instance you could say should I call for an ambulance about that man has asleep on the sidewalk should my boss criticize us in front of each other and stuff like there so we've got these types of questions and it's going to include arguments for why you should do certain things and lots of things that we're going to consider to come to these reasons it's come to our conclusions more reasoning tries to arrive at what
1:12:28
we call a moral value judgment so again going back to that idea of a moral value judgment again it says claim a factual non-class factual again depending on how we classify it but we do want to talk a little bit about what the nature of a moral value judgment is in the course of making an argument so we have value judgments where we're asserting what value something has what merit desirability praise worthiness something has and not all value judgments like we
1:12:57
said our moral value judgments oh here's some examples of non moral value judgments where I might be talking about the goodness or badness of a bowl of chili the chili tasted good or the movie was bad or the book has a wonderful description of two mystic metaphysics those are value judgments but they're not moral in nature moral value judgments which tend to be normative or prescriptive kind of laying out the author rules and stuff like that
1:13:24
it's wrong to lie one ought not to cheat on their income taxes abortion is good or bad right those are moral value judgments again and value judgment that has to do with morality clarification on the term moral and non morals also kind of important when I talk about something being more all their different ways they use the term so in the first definition it's simply the opposite of non moral non-moral means it doesn't have anything to do with morality and moral simply
1:13:54
means as something to do with morality rights and wrongs okay the other definition is kind of the normal definition when I say it's moral I say it's the opposite of immoral not non-moral but in moral meaning in morals wrong and moral is right okay so there are different subtle uses of those terms so I want to be careful how you use the term clue words I'll let you read through this things that you're gonna look for to pick up whether they're
1:14:21
dealing with a moral value judgment and those don't always work you know we see should ought wrong right etc but there are again those words that could be used in classic cases where you're not dealing with a moral value judgment such as the taxi should be here any minute that's not an a moral value judgment as opposed to doctors should not administer poison to their patients that is immoral by your judgement the word should shows up in both sentences but be careful
1:14:47
whether you just mean not to assume that something is a moral value judgment two principles I mentioned this earlier I do want you to know this because it'll be really practical and how you personally reason consistency principle your state's of separate cases are not different in any relevant way than they should be treated in the same way if separate cases are treated in the same way they should not be different in any relevant way and by the way I know I'm
1:15:12
going quickly but these are principles of moral reasoning as opposed to what we'd call moral principles which I'll show you next so these are principles that we use to reason correctly through moral issues so number one is the consistency principle number two is just a procedural principle this as if somebody appears to be violating rule number one then they have the burden of proof to show that they're not violating the principle okay now moral
1:15:41
principles as opposed to principle as a moral reason a moral principle is a value judgment that is general in nature okay so this is important we'll see this a lot so when I talk about a moral principle this would be a general principle that you start with in our moral reasoning so here's example of a value judgment and a moral principle is wrong to harm Terence is a moral value judgment but it's not a moral principle because it's not general it's talking
1:16:13
about Terence so it's a particular statement that's a moral value judgment whereas a moral principle would be something that's general or universal in nature such like it's wrong to harm people okay one of those is something we start with and then we reason towards the other so if you look at the argument here we begin with our principles general moral value judgments and get to our specific moral value judgments through a
1:16:41
reasoning process or through a deductive syllogism so here's an example it's wrong the harm people moral principle number two is a factual statement Terence is a person that's not a value judgment that's simply a factual claim and then my conclusion is therefore it's wrong to harm Terence that's the moral value judgment that I've arrived at the right way through my principal and through my facts and that's how we're going to reason now the rest of the
1:17:10
PowerPoint I'm going to let you guys kind of work through on your own I spent a lot of time this is probably the longest video for an introduction that you've encountered bear with the class go back through this material study it take your time I want you to feel comfortable and if you don't spend the time getting used to terms getting used to concepts you may find that you're gonna get lost the quicker you pick these things up the
1:17:39
better you're gonna do in the course of the semester so thank you so much for watching and I will be back with some other videos later
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