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Minimum Conception of Morality · Acedra
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Minimum Conception of Morality
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0:14
So in this chapter
0:16
Rachels is ah investigating or wondering what is morality? He wants to give a minimum conception of morality. Now to be clear he is not trying to
0:28
trying to give you the moral theory right at the beginning and then leave everything else He wants to ask the question of what would be the bare minimum that is required for a moral theory
0:43
Now um,
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if you are taking notes and you should be taking notes immediately you ought to go to your notes and write down for the purpose Rachels is trying to provide a minimum conception of morality and you should especially go to your terms and write down minimum conception of morality If you would skim it up to this point you would already know what that is. You should write down write that down too. Rachels does not give us a definition of it right off the bat. However he does give
1:13
kind of a working definition of morality.
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Now, needless to say this definition is a little vague. In fact you might think that this definition is so vague that it is really pointless that it asks the question about ask anything about what morality is Well guess what you already have a moral theory
1:35
in fact I know this because you have goals you have values there are things you are working for so you already have a conception of moraltiy the question is how well have you thought it through?
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Well to illustrate what Rachels thinks is the minimum conception of morality
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he uses several cases now
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I am absolutely certain that you are not going to agree with all the conclusions that Rachels reaches and that is fine I'm not in the business of trying to tell you what to believe however if your going to reject one of the conclusions you have to show where the error in reasoning is you have to have an argument We will see what that involves as we proceed through the semester
2:26
So the first case that Rachels looks at is this Baby Theresa case now I'm not going to recount the case
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here you can read the case it is very clearly explained
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he is going to compare and contrast arguments for and against
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transplanting all of Theresa's organs for other children
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Well, uh Rachels provides an argument with the conclusion that we should transplant Theresa's organs for other children The argument has its pretty simple it is two premise and one conclusion now a premise is a reason or piece of evidence of a belief or an idea that is going to be used to justify the conclusion and the conclusion what is inferred from the premises.
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I have provided this argument in numbered premise form the reason why I did that
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is for ease of reference
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The first premise is pretty straight forward
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in fact to disagree with this premise is at best confusing at least on the surface we tend to use this premise all the time now we might question it later on in the semester for the moment it is pretty straight forward
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Now the second premise is probably more contentious You know it is not contentious that the other children would benefit from Theresa's organs that does not seem to be a very open question But the second part of the premise is very much open for contention at least the
4:17
thing that Rachels thinks people will argue against and then finally we have the conclusion that we should transplant Theresa's organs Now as I said this argument is given numbered proposition form and is also a deductively valued argument and deductively valid means that if the premises are true than the conclusion must be true
4:41
now what this means is that you have to conclusion and I'm betting at least half of you disagree with the conclusion you disagree with the conclusion and that is fine like I said I'm not here to tell you what to believe now Since it is deductively valid you have to show which of this premises is false you have to show which of these premises is false
5:06
ok so it is inductively valid form I want a I want you to look real quickly at the parenthetical notation at the end of the conclusion now the parenthetical notation
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will tell you from which premises that conclusion is from
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now this case premises one and two and it will also tell you which inference rule is used and this case the "MP" stands for motus ponens now motus ponens is probably one of the the most widely spread used argument in history ever you have used it yourself although you have never called it modus ponens Uh, modus ponens is really simple modus ponens has a conditional and conditional is a proposition if we are using "P" and "Q" to represent preposition the conditional is if "P" then "Q"
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so if Rex is a dog than Rex is a mammal the first part of the conditional is sufficient
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for the second meaning that if the the first part is true then the second part must be true the first part is called the antecedent and the second part is called the consequent so in this case
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we have the conditional if "P" then "Q" we have the antecedent so we have the conclusion of transplanting Theresa's organs
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Like I said I bet about at least half of you that are going to disagree with Rachels conclusion that we can simply just transplant Theresa's organs
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To do this you have to reject one of the premises that are used for the conclusion and the first premise like I said is pretty pretty solid
6:47
to doubt to doubt that if an action benefits somebody without hurting anybody else than we ought to perform that action what that means it is a condition you have to say the action would benefit somebody else would benefit people and not hurt anybody else and yet we should not do it that seems strange that seems strange so the first premises probably isn't the one you are going to go after it is probably going to be the second one and usually the way most people try to disagree with Rachels
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and anticipate this
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wisely so is to say that well death somebody is harmed in transplanting Theresa's organs and mainly Theresa because she is going to die right so she is going to die
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so the rejection of this second premise usually is something like well Theresa in fact will be harmed because she will die Now Rachels thinks this
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isn't necessarily the case he wants you to consider this
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he wonders he asks the question what does it mean to benefit from life so all that Theresa could do is well nothing right? she, her heart beats and her lungs breath blood flows through her body but she really doesn't have a brain to have anything like thoughts beliefs
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uh feelings she can't relate to other people Rachels wants
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suggests that Theresa in fact can not benefit from life And what he also does he is not explicit about this what he also does is suggest that if something can't benefit from life than it can't be harmed that it can't be harmed
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so the ideas is basically well Theresa um can't be harmed why? because she has no benefits there is nothing that is going to be good about her living
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so uh the way Rachels counters here is to say ya he suggests that Theresa can't be harmed but would this definition of of benefit and saying benefit of life is having thoughts and beliefs relationships with other people
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the burden is for you to say well Rachels you are missing something so there is a benefit of life that Theresa has she would lose if she transplants organs but that is kind of hard to put together
9:15
Well the next
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worry uh Rachels is going to look at is using people right somebody objecting to the conclusion that Theresas organs should be transplanted would suggest or say something like this they would say well look if we are moving Theresa's organs than we are using one person for the sake of another and this you know is wrong and this idea is really prevalent in our culture
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we really don't like the idea of using anybody else we especially don't like the idea of anybody using us so we have lots of laws that try to prevent using other people
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and we generally tend
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to stay away from or express disgust for people who are obviously users being called a user is an insult so this idea is appealing in our culture
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now what is something Rachels suggest is that we in fact are not
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using baby Theresa at all
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So we want to be really careful here in understanding what Rachels is trying to say Rachels is not suggesting that it is OK use people Rachels agrees that it is not a moral thing to use other people and what he is suggesting is
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Theresa would not be used at all so the way that Rachels goes about doing this is he tries to understand what it means to use somebody else now in most of the cases we talk about using other people would talk about cases of manipulation we talk about
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cases of
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people performing acts to meet our ends and our goals and our needs and specifically though those times that the people that were using do not benefit from it
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so you know if somebody had a gambling addiction
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right? and you know they have a gambling addiction but yet you play cards with him anyway in cards, right, that would be knowing how to win or beat them using somebody to line your pocket so what Rachels points to here is that the idea of using another person is closely tied to the idea that that other person has autonomy Autonomy is the ability to make decisions for yourself to take those courses of actions that fulfill your desires and values or to do what you want to do
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is kind of the simplest way of saying that so Rachels constructs an argument and in the first premise he says
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if one person uses another
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then that means that the second person, the person being used has autonomy
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and the idea is that if somebody doesn't have autonomy you can't use them and you take a look at these plants out here these plants they don't have free will they don't make decisions
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so there is no way that I can really use the plants and in a way that violates autonomy, not in the way that I use persons I might use those plants for food but that is part of the function of a plant
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I can I am not myself prone to do this but if somebody wanted to get a tan they could lay out in the sun and so they could benefit from the sun rays but that does not use the sun because the sun does not have autonomy
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so if you are using a person right That person has autonomy well the second premise is that Theresa doesn't have any
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autonomy Her brain - simply because she lacks the hardware
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She can't have free will because she doesn't have enough of her brain to do that, in fact in the case said she dies in 9 days something like this so she never developed no t only did she not have the time to develop autonomy but ah she in the way that her brain was formed it
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could not develop autonomy so the idea is that Rachels is suggesting
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is that Theresa never had nor could have autonomy well the conclusion that followed
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is that you that Theresa simply can't be used and this is kind of an extreme conclusion mostly because it doesn't really matter what you are doing to Theresa she can't be used and you might wonder about that
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you might take a look at it because some really scary scenarios start coming to mind really quickly
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so here is Rachels claim is that Theresa can't be used because she doesn't have autonomy and again, take a look at the argument take a look at the parenthetical notation this comes from the first and second premise now this time we are using an inference we will call modus tollens modus tollens and modus tollens is a little different than modus ponens modus ponens is if "P" than "Q" given "P" we conclude "Q" modus tollens kind of goes the other way you say if "P" than
14:26
"Q" we know not "Q"
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therefore we know not "P" right? and an example of this is something like if an animal is a dog than the animal is warm blooded
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jaws the shark
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is not warm blooded therefore jaws is not a dog
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so this is an argument that Rachels provides about autonomy and his point is that baby Theresa does not have autonomy so she can't be used
15:06
The last things that Rachels
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considers is just the pretty straight forward prohibition against killing in general
15:16
you know we generally say that it is just wrong to kill now usually when we say things like that we are thinking about ordinary circumstances like you know, you can't walk down the street and just kill somebody but Rachels is quick to point out that Theresa's case is not a usual case
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he says there have already been
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every day exceptions to the prohibition against killing and unless you are some variety of a pacifist you think so too
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right now, probably if somebody were threatening your life and you had the means to
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end this threat by ending the threats life you would probably do so if not for yourself, for a loved one so the idea its wrong to kill except in cases of self defense either for yourself or for a loved one
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we a lot of people argue not everybody , right? but a lot of people argue that killing in a time of war
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is permissible its not necessarily desirable but it is permissible not any kind of killing obviously but at least some kinds of killing are permissible if you think that capital pumishment is something that a state can do than you think that there are exceptions to killing so immediately Rachels suggest that well we already have exceptions to killing people so just in of itslf that isn't going to fly so the question is whether or not killing Theresa
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by removing her organs is going to be permissible
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so one of the things that he suggests he says look our conceptions of what it means to die have changed through time right now it is
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a person can in a sense clinically die meaning that their heart stops beating but be resuscitated that their brain keeps on living so that they can be in a sense brought back to life
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it used to be death was considered to happen when the heart stops and we don't necessarily consider that any more these days in fact we will keep the heart beating in order to keep the brain alive so the idea that real death " real death" doesn't occur
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until the brain dies well in Theresa's case she doesn't really have a brain she, her brain was never really alive to begin with so what Rachels wants to say
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is that killing the prohibition against killing really doesn't apply in Theresa's case since she really isn't alive to begin with
17:57
Rachels considers two of the cases and remember when he is looking at these cases what he is trying to do is to lay down some ground rules for what it means to have this minimum conception of a moral theory What I want you to do is to read the cases and to try to reconstruct the arguments pay special attention to the terms that are being used make sure to identify those terms that is going to be really important in understanding this whole process of reasoning
18:27
What we are going to look at next we are going to look at what Rachels considers to be this minimum conception of morality
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so now we come
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to Rachels minimum conception of morality now again this isn't trying to provide the end all be all of moral theory more like what conditions need to be in place in order to have a good moral theory
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What he proposes is good moral reasoning
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and impartiality so immediatly you gotta go to your notes and write down good moral reasoning and impartiality trying to figure out what Rachels means by these
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so looking at good moral reasoning first, Rachels tries to contrast
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good moral reasoning verses what it is not and the first thing he suggests is that good moral reasoning
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is not merely feeling or even sometimes just it ought not to be influenced by feelings at all
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and there is a lot to what he says feelings are not a guarantee of truth
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we feel many things and based upon we want to act on those feelings but it doesn't mean our feelings are always justified so for instance one of the biggest examples is hatred hatred is a huge motivator for all of us we hate people every day and sometimes that hate motivates us to do any where from mean and annoying things to down right violence. that doesn't mean that our actions are justified by those feelings it is hatred it is not a moral principal so hatred isn't really going to do it
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by the way since feelings are not necessarily good moral reasons for actions and hatred is a feeling well it also follows that love is not necessarily a good reason for moral action so that is a little bit scary isn't it?
20:45
You know the thing that Rachels
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contrasts good moral reasoning to
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are wants desires tastes or preferences you know just simple things that we just want
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and this doesn't always justify
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moral action for instance, I
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love espresso espresso to me is the reason why I get up in the morning
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espresso I politely and accurately call it the black blood of life
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so I love I love like espresso it doesn't mean that I or anybody else for that matter are obligated to drink espresso
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um quite a few people out there who I think would agree with me simply after the first time they try espresso
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you think so too you have lots of tastes of preferences and you try to justify these actions by just the things that you like and I'm not saying that you can't do those things that you like I just think they are not necessarily good reasons you know, for instance suppose I had the weird preference to randomly assign readings in the history of pencils in this course don't worry, I'm not going to do that in fact I have no interest in the history of pencils but suppose I did
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um it would still not be a morally justified act to give you assignments in the history of pencils
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so simply a taste or preference is not necessarily a good reason and by the way as I said before feelings aren't simply a good moral reason its not to say they are completely irrelevant
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but they are certainly not the the determining factor and they may not even be the top factor depending on what your moral theory is
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At this point you might wonder what does count as a good moral reason That is a great question. if you can answer that question you can write your own text book in an introduction to ethics course actually it would be the definitive textbook to introduction to ethics course and what counts as a good reason it is difficult to say however we already think that there are some good reasons and you do too, right we have values and principles that we consider to be good ones liberty equality justice
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if something threatens those than we tend to think that there is something wrong happening we certainly have the option to defend ourselves in those occasions
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so ya, we already have good moral principles that we think are good it is an interesting question as to what justifies those, ok that is an interesting question and hopefully through the course of this semester like that we can look at reasons to justify principles
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There is one thing however it is an additional thing however that is required of good moral reasoning and that is logical consistency and logical consistency just means
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that your theory produces
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true conclusion not even so much true conclusions
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conclusions or actions that are not absurd or not self contradictory or they don't generate contradictions you might wonder why this is so important its like well, if you're theory generates contradictions then it is going to say such things as an act is both moral and immoral right so suppose my moral theory says that it is moral to kill somebody in self defense and its not moral to kill somebody in self defense it doesn't provide a guide for action it doesn't do what its supposed to do
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so logical consistency is going to be another big thing with moral theories now there is just kind of a forewarning its a common practice in ethics and in ethical reasoning to to find counter examples to moral reasoning and the idea is that a moral principle, whether the person realizes it or not is going to infer that some course of action
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is.....is..... moral when in fact it is not moral right? so if my moral theory says that it is permissible to uh randomly kill every sixth person on the street well then ya, there is something wrong with that theory right? I ought to reject that theory. um
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it is really really hard it is a statistical impossibility
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for your theory to be perfectly consistent. There is always going to be some problem that comes up against there is always going to be some issue that is going to come up against and it could be anything from conclusions that are really difficult to accept or just don't want to accept them to direct contradictions to absurdity right? so during the course of this semester
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your convictions are going to come up against these problems I promise you now I am not here to tell you whether you are a good person or a bad person this is a course in ethical theory not a course in who is good and bad I'm not interested in that project to begin with and no ethical theory course can do that
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so
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if it happens that your theory your favorite theory of moral beliefs comes up against these problems learn to handle them with grace right? accept that it is a problem and try to move on from there try to figure out a solution to it, right? The really ineffective way of dealing with that is yelling hahaha and anger that just doesn't help first of all it doesn't help figure out where there might be a problem
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so good moral reasoning what exactly counts as a really interesting question one thing that we are really certain is true is that logical consistence is going to be a big requirement for good moral reasoning
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So one condition for this minimum conception of morality is good moral reasoning the other condition
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is impartiality and what impartiality basically means is that everybody is interests are considered equally and here we have the definition
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now stating this definition and providing a definition is one thing applying it is another cause just as a matter of fact people's interests are going to conflict people's interests are going to conflict
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that is kind of a hallmark of his ideas the perfectly harmonious society is one in which everybody has the same interests that just doesn't happen people have different sets of interests So interests are going to conflict and since they conflict you know, at most one person's interests are going to win out or one group of interests are going to win out and it is possible none of them do right and trying to provide a solution quite often this seems to be the case and trying to find a solution
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the solution is nobody gets what they want
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right a friend of mine used to say this when he is talking about going to a meeting
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and here was his definition of compromise here is one good idea and here is another good idea what is a compromise? lets do neither of them
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um so interests are going to conflict and and somebody is going to win out and somebody is not and trying to figure out who is going to win out
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it is a very very hard question and we know solutions that can in such that everybody can win are great but they are really really rare really rare so as an exercise to really kind of drive this point home I want you to write down your interests do you even know what they are? Think about what your interests are write them down
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and to further drive the point home write down other people's interests that conflict with yours what do you want what is going to make your life better and what do other people want what is going to make their life better
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right these are going to be conflicting interests
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and a really difficult question
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is who is going to win out
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why should they win out
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so we have Rachels minimum conception of justice
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and his minimum conception requires good moral reasoning which includes logical consistency and impartiality which is treating everybody's interests equal or considering everybody's interests equally now
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an interesting question is whether Rachels cases actually meet this minimum conception
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remember what I said it is kind of a statistical impossibility that any given moral theory is going to be without any problems
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if that were the case if moral theory had any problems whatsoever excuse me if there were if there was some moral theory that had no problems well that would be the theory we would teach in the course instead of a whole lot of other possibilities
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so you might ask yourself
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regarding the cases that Rachels
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provides how might those cases run into problems do they run into problems and here is my hint Yes they do haha they already run into
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issues that people have with regard to some moral judgments about the life and death of a human being I want you to think about that think about the cases where we talk about life and death of a human being think about how that might run into problems
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you might again also consider how logical consistency and impartiality bumps heads with your own moral theory
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this is just good practice to start thinking about this it helps you become a better person
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think about these issues and we will start discussing these in class
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